Period #10: Grumpfest, then period inflammation
Well, the newsletter has made it to double digits! I had to skip last week’s newsletter because it was a whole big catch-up week. This week was too, and worse because my youngest had no school Thursday or Friday… and Monday is off too. I brought her to class Thursday and she watched Octonauts on a tablet while my students and I discussed how power differentials are crucial to understanding research misconduct… and why most acts of misconduct go unreported.
Those of you with old enough kids know, but one of the many things that makes working outside the home hard when you have kids is that while many daycares tend to stay open on most business days save the major holidays, schools are closed a lot. Do I want workers to have more time off, especially those workers who are caring for my children? You betcha. I just want that extended to my work schedule too. But the university doesn’t take off any of the same days as either of the main public school systems its employees’ kids attend.
Hence, Octonauts on a tablet in a classroom with a bunch of twenty year olds.
But you don’t need to know that I know all the words to The Octonauts and The Great Barrier Reef (it’s a musical!). Let’s read some stuff together.
Some good links
The New York Times has been drawing ire – and doing real harm to trans communities – with their coverage of trans issues, gender, and more. I’ve grown increasingly uneasy as a subscriber to the NYT as their much of their opinions page and their supposedly journalistic coverage of trans issues has been absolute crap for some time. Now, writers have spoken up and directly addressed the Standards Editor about their concerns. It’s a fantastic letter and you can also read more coverage about the issue here. Even if you aren’t a journalist, you can sign the letter as a subscriber or reader, as I did.
A whole bunch of hazardous materials spewed over part of Ohio recently because of a train derailment. Have you heard about it? Do you know why it happened? If rail companies hadn’t lobbied to reduce safety, hadn’t reduced their workforce, and hadn’t increased the size of their trains this might never have happened. Because of the non-hazardous materials also on that train, the Norfolk Southern Corp rail company was able to sidestep rules about the hazardous materials that WERE on those trains. The story I linked points not only to how lobbying efforts made Obama-era safety measures toothless, but then these measures were repealed in the Trump era anyway. USA! USA!
In higher education, our most important resource is our people… and not just faculty and students. The staff at universities, colleges, and more are the ones with institutional memory, networks across departments and units, and deep knowledge of how organizations work. Yet they are grossly underpaid, and often mistreated as well. Nowhere is this more apparent than when it comes to the work of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – work that is often thankless, often obstructed by the very people who hire you, and always, ALWAYS, massively under-resourced. I’ve been doing DEI-adjacent work for over a decade and there are never enough staff, there is never enough money, and every senior administrator wants only to hear what “low hanging fruit” there are, or “fast fixes” to improve the racial and gender climate. I’ve written on this problem as it relates to sexual harassment with colleagues and NASEM report co-authors Lilia Cortina and Anna Kirkland. But I want to draw special attention to this more recent Inside Higher Ed article that connects the DEI exodus to a number of current issues: the hiring but lack of support for DEI staff after George Floyd’s murder; the defunding and near-criminalizing of DEI work in Florida; the ways that so few universities have stood up to attacks on students of color, trans students, and more.
My biggest “invested critique” of higher education is that the majority of institutions are short-sighted when it comes to risk because of their overly conservative interpretation of legal compliance. For instance, some schools are breaking HIPAA and immediately complying with DeSantis’s request for medical information about trans students. If they played the long game when it came to reputation – not to mention, I don’t know, were moral and ethical organizations – they would have refused. But universities are great at burying stories, or insisting that the way to achieve due process for a problem is to keep all conversations behind closed doors, or complying with problematic guidelines in advance of their even being instituted.
My biggest “hot take” – not a hot take at all as most professors I know also hold it – is that the university is in fact a very conservative institution, unlike the evil liberal institution so often caricatured on the right. Like most conservatives they are big chickens hiding under bravado.
Sorry – this newsletter is a big of a grumpfest. Let’s find something funny to talk about vis-à-vis periods!
Weird period fact
One of the reasons I started studying immune function as it relates to menstrual cycles is that so much of what happens throughout them is some kind of tissue remodeling – and tissue remodeling is inflammatory. Yadda yadda, you’ve heard me say this before.
The variation in inflammatory factors that happens through the menstrual cycle doesn’t just affect the ovaries and uterus. Just like They Might Be Giants and Magic School Bus have taught us, the bloodmobile carries chemical messengers all over the body… including all the way up to the mouth. There have been a few studies on this, but the clearest one to me is a study of 45 people whose inflammatory factors and gums were measured around menstruation, ovulation, and the premenstrual phase. They found that TNF-alpha and IL-6 (two inflammatory cytokines) were highest in the premenstrual, then ovulatory, then menstrual phases. And they found the gingival index and gum bleeding on probing were worse in the menstrual versus ovulatory phase. Perhaps the higher inflammation of the premenstrual/menstrual period (our own lab has documented higher inflammation at menses) is what leads to some temporary gym changes around menses. Guess your uterus isn’t the only thing that bleeds at menses!
This also suggests that your cycle might impact how your dental hygienist interprets the state of your gums. Either way, keep brushing and flossing!
Source on gums: Sahin Aydınyurt, Hacer, Yusuf Ziya Yuncu, Yasin Tekin, and Abdullah Seckin Ertugrul. “IL-6, TNF-α Levels and Periodontal Status Changes during the Menstrual Cycle.” Oral Diseases 24, no. 8 (November 2018): 1599–1605. https://doi.org/10.1111/odi.12917.
Our papers on C-reactive protein at menses: Clancy, K. B. H., A. R. Baerwald, and R. A. Pierson. “Systemic Inflammation Is Associated with Ovarian Follicular Dynamics during the Human Menstrual Cycle.” PloS One 8, no. 5 (2013): e64807. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0064807.
Clancy, Kathryn B.H., Angela R. Baerwald, and Roger A. Pierson. “Cycle-Phase Dependent Associations between CRP, Leptin, and Reproductive Hormones in an Urban, Canadian Sample: SYSTEMIC INFLAMMATION AND MENSTRUAL CYCLE PHASES.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 160, no. 3 (July 2016): 389–96. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.22976.