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Redheads Need More Anesthesia than Others
Natural redheads need 20% more anesthesia than other people report scientists. "Redheads are likely to experience more pain from a given stimulus and therefore require more anesthesia to alleviate that pain." said Dr. Edwin Liem of the University of Louisville in Kentucky. Anesthesiology is still very much a mystery to scientists, and picking the right dosage that keeps someone out without killing them is still very much an art. Studies like this will help them determine how anesthesics work and why.
Sybiant
thanks google
My mother used to work as a nurse in the delivery wards and every time they had a red-headed woman coming to deliver, they would put a hemorrhage watch on her. Seems that red-headed ladies were far likely to bleed during birth than ladies with other color hair. Anecdotal evidence, but useful still.
FYI she worked at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia.
yellowcat ^_^ ??
Ireland is not where most of the redheads are. In fact, Scotland has far more per-capita redheads, and IIRC even Belgium has more. It's just a stereotype in the USA, because here, most of the redheads really are of Irish descent. But that's only because Ireland has sent so many more immigrants to the US than the countries more densely populated with redheads. (Irish-Americans far outnumber the entire population of Ireland!)
That's strange.. about 10 years ago my optometrist told me that blue-eyed blondes are somewhat more sensitive to pain, especially related to the eyes. He said he has more trouble fitting blue-eyed blondes for contacts (especially hard lenses), and that they tended to experience worse night vision and painfully poor tolerance for high light-levels, expecially with contacts in.
Then again, he could have just been trying to make me feel better when I wimped out on hard lenses (I could only open my eyes in darkened rooms when I had them in, even after two weeks of "getting used to them"). I'm fine with soft lenses, though!
Moderation totals that amuse me for one of my posts: Flamebait=1, Insightful=2, Funny=2, Overrated=1, Underrated=1
Your understanding of heredity is a little bit off. The examples you give are perfectly consistent with red hair being recessive, black hair dominant. Here's a simplification of how it works: imagine we have a gene with two alleles, let's call one 'R' for red, the other 'B' for black. Each person has two copies, so the redheaded parent has RR, the black-haired parent has BR. If you look at all the combinations the children could have, 1/2 would be BR (and have black hair), and 1/2 would be RR (and have red hair). For more information, draw a Punnett square, which should spell it out more clearly.
Note, however, that in real life, things are not quite that simple. Hair color is determined by the interaction of a number of genes. Thus, people don't have either pure black, pure blond, or pure red hair. There are many subtle variations.
Also, the other poster, troll or not, was completely wrong about redhead genes fading out because they are recessive. Genes do not change frequency within a population because they are recessive or dominant. If you read up on Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium why this is true should be clear. Note that in very small populations (under say, 10,000), genetic drift and other random changes in the gene pool could wipe out some variants, but redheads number in the millions worldwide; their genes are not in danger of vanishing any time soon.
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
--Henry David Thoreau
A good correlation between two parameters does *not* prove that they are connected!
:)
It prooves they are correlated.
I'd consider that a connection. I assume you meant to say it doesn't prove causation.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
And no - I am not about to say some racist thing.
I just recall in my days of competitive running that I was taught at the OTC that people with genes from one side of Africa have certain body makeups and are mostly fast twitch fibers, and people from the other side are mostly slow twitch.
What does that have to do with any of this? The odd thing that they also noted was that natural red heads had nearly identical makeups to the fast twitch section of people that they studied in Africa.
This meant that if you were at a track race and were looking at the top runners winning a sprinting race - the odds were going to indicate it more likely that the people of African decent (aren't we all if we go back far enough?) would most likely be genetically from the same area, and the white people would most likely have red hair.
And once I started looking for it, I was impressed that it actually rang true - lots of fast Irish guys.
I've never seen much mention of anything pointing out red heads since that study until now - usually hair color isn't thought to mean much in the grand scheme of things (aside from my preferring blondes).
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I agree with you, kind of. The problem here is that they are trying to assign causation: redheads need more anethetic because they feel more pain. There's nothing here that supports that. Instead, taking a needle and pricking people with verious hair colours would determine a hair-color/pain senstitivity link. There are just too many other factors, most notably how redheads process the anethesic. Maybe they need more because they have a higher tolerance for outside chemical changes.
But it does show that redheads need more anethetic on average, that's what correlation is.
-no broken link
The active ingredient in hot peppers, capsaicin, is a nerve toxin. Large doses (as in a lot of hot food) damage the nerves in the tounge and throat. The net result is that you are less sensitive to hot food, and need more "hot" to produce the same sensation as that first jalapeno on your virgin tounge.
What were you expecting?
The 'Aryan' people who moved into India and provide the genetic background for a lot of Northern Indians were from Persia, not Europe. And while some of these Persians did continue to migrate into Europe later on, I don't think they made it as far as Scandinavia, where the red-headed gene has its genesis (red-heads in Ireland and other parts of Europe are largely a product of intermixing with Vikings). There aren't many red-headed Iranians that I know of, so it seems unlikely that Indian red-heads come from Persian stock.
On the other hand, there were a lot of European genes that moved through Asia Minor, India, and into Central Asia and China along the Silk Road. They've found ethnically Caucasian mummies in China that are a result of this migration and mixing. Unless the Kashmiri red-heads are a product of a local mutation that was concentrated in the population, it seems more likely that these genes were brought from Northern Europe much later than the Aryan immigration from Persia. The Vikings got around, so it seems reasonable that they might have sent some genetic material into the near-east and the subcontinent one way or another.
Long term exposure to Capsaicin such as extreme hot sauce may cause pain receptors to become "desensitized".
However, pain receptors are completely different from taste receptors. In fact, Capsaicin fakes out the pain receptors as it simulates real damage. This tricks the brain into producing endorphins, which promote a pleasant sense of well-being or even an alterted state of consciousness. The endorphin high can make spicy foods mildly addictive (and for some, such as myself, a complete obsession).
At the risk of being off-topic, I also wanted to say that people like you can be safely anesthetized without triggering an MH episode. I just had a patient like you last week with a similar family history. At our hospital, we have a special vapor-free anesthesia machine, which supplies only oxygen and Nitrous Oxide (N2O), which are both safe. We use muscle relaxants that are known to be safe (succinlycholine is NOT safe) and in my case last week I ran infusions of propofol and alfentanil for the six-hour lumbar spinal fusion (patient in prone position). The young man (37 y/o) did fine and woke up with no memory of the surgery and relatively little post-op pain. The patient had an epidural catheter for post-op pain control, using morphine by continuous drip.
Marcus