Random Thought: Football Injuries, bowls, BCS and layoff

Except to the most fervent Alabama fan, the injury to Colt McCoy was a serious blow. I had expected Alabama to be the better team and once the most important player for Texas was knocked out the game, I figured the chances for a good game dropped precipitously. Even though there was some excitement in the second half, this was the case.

As chemical engineer, a couple thoughts came to my mind. The first was did the 30+ day layoff contribute to this particular injury? One of the arguments against a playoff is that the longer season will cause more wear and tear on players and this, along with more exposure, will lead to more injuries (for a small subset of teams). This might be true, but the long layoff between games probably also contributes to injuries -- for quite a few teams. It would be interesting to see some quantitative (statistical) analysis of these questions. If both of these factors contribute, then one could certainly pose an optimization problem for bowl and play-off scheduling that reduces injuries for a given level of revenue (##!!) -- which (of course) must be considered if any changes are to be made.

The injury analysis would be two fold. To get an idea of injuries caused by layoffs, the bowl data would provide a rich source of comparison, say, to a similar temperature profile in the early to middle part of the season. Likewise, wear and tear could be determined, with some weather corrections, by watching the injuries week by week and taking note of byes. In contrast to some of my previous posts, where I note the need for determinism in the analysis, this can be best done simply statistically. Even for the case of a very specific collision involving two or more particular players, slight variations in the turf could mean the difference between a slight strain and complete rupture of a knee ligament.

If such analysis is done, with the follow-on revenue optimization, perhaps we could then decide on logical and scientifically valid grounds if a playoff is a good idea. (If yes, then maybe we could stop using FBS and FCS as sub-designations!)

As a historical note, while I often watch the post Jan 1 bowls, the current system is just not as exciting as the pre-BCS days. In the days when all of the major bowls were on Jan 1 and the AP was going to vote for a champ at the end of the day, all of the bowls mattered. This was because owing to conference alignments, #1 seldom played #2. If your team was ranked 3rd, 4th or maybe even 5th, you were seriously cheering against certain teams either earlier in the day or at the end of the day after your team had won. Often the #1 team did not win and someone else won the title. This was good for Joe Montana's Notre Dame team, but did not work out for our 1993 team -- which I though was one of the all time great College teams. Yes, there were controversies, but it was still more fun than the present!

Random Thoughts: Exercise, aging, systems biology, medical systems engineering

The Wall Street Journal published an interesting and informative article today (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704350304574638331243027174.html?mod=WSJ_hps_MIDDLEThirdNews) extolling and explaining (to some extent), the benefits of moderate exercise on health and particularly on reducing the effects of aging. This is, of course, good news to people of my age! As a chemical engineer, there were a couple of interesting issues that generalize beyond this particular article.

First is that an obviously systemic activity (it is hard for just the cells lining your aorta to go for a walk) can be linked to specific molecular consequences, e.g., the lengthening of telomeres -- the strands of DNA at the tips of chromosomes. While I think that there is still some speculation occurring, it is good to see that science can determine the molecular processes that affect important aspects of human health. A second example in the article was reduction in sickness in people who exercise -- presumably by some enhancement of the immune system that occurs due the the elevated blood flow, respiration and physical stresses of exercise. These examples show how both Systems Biology and Molecular biology will be important in the future of human health. To these I see "systems engineering" as a field that can also make significant contributions as I will describe below. (Note that there are researchers working on this strategy right now so I am not claiming originality of these thoughts.)

The second point of interest for me was the complete lack of quantification of effects -- not just that (moderate exercise is walking for some number of minutes, some number of times per week) as compared to more vigorous exercise -- but that results are given statistically as a "X %" reduction in the chances of being stricken with a specific disease. In aggregate, I don't doubt that the statistics are superficially true (well maybe I doubt these a bit), but presenting the results this way makes it appear that the mechanisms and processes involved in both exercise and its effect on disease are stochastic with the outcome a random process with a certain probabilistic value. If I might speculate, I would think that in some cases, there is nothing random at all. A specific deterministic event has to occur for either the disease to take hold or for the prevention mechanism to be effective. Thus certain people are almost certainly going to receive the full value of preventions and others are almost certainly not. Resolving both the correctness of my assertion and producing a useful prediction tool may not occur soon, but is at the crux of what only engineers can bring to health care.

I say regularly, "it is not engineering until we provide numbers!" Well it is also not engineering until the numbers are accurate enough to be useful! Systems biology provides the start of the calculations necessary to provide deterministically-based medical advice, but systems engineering will be necessary to really make a difference to people. The models must be "tuned" to explain medical studies and a synergism developed to suggest the need for additional medical trials.

Let's take the need a bit further. Two older (than me) men who I know well have recently had major, lower abdominal, surgeries for cancers affecting different organs. Both appear to have had all of the cancerous cells removed (along with otherwise useful organs) but unfortunately both contracted post-operative infections. One has fully recovered and I trust the other will as well. However, given the danger of the surgery per-se and the life changing consequences of the operation, a question that would really deserve an answer is if the cancers would have spread and been the ultimate cause of their death at some future date? This is too much to ask right now, but we could again speculate that while there could be some randomness to this process, it would take a very specific deterministic event to occur, for the cancer to spread. Biology, transport phenomena, chemical kinetics and perhaps thermodynamics might be needed to get this ultimate answer -- but a really useful answer it would be!

In addition to the cancer question, these two men were in the X% of surgery patients who contracted post-op infections. It is recognized (and been so since the days of Joseph Lister) that an infection is caused by specific microbes getting into vulnerable tissue. Again, while there is some randomness (say, in the air flow around an open wound or the exact placement and depth of the sutures), this is also largely a deterministic process. Thus in principle the chances of infection for a specific person could be predicted, and, better yet, prevented! Note that the infection rates at medical institutions are different and are publicly available. (e.g., http://www.dhss.delaware.gov/dph/dpc/files/hai_report_2008_final.pdf)

So where does this random thought leave us?

Chemical engineers have very useful, detailed, accurate predictive models of how their chemical processes behave. Million dollar decisions are made daily on buying a tanker of oil that could be needed to "sweeten" a stream at a particular refinery. While now these have considerable fundamental basis, this was developed only through decades of research and comparison with plant performance to verify all of the subcomponents of the computer codes. The earliest models were based on only the mass and energy balances but were still useful for operation and design because of the prudential judgement of the engineers who used them.

We could see the same pathway toward developing useful human process systems models. The fundamental science, molecular, cellular and systems biology is advancing daily. Now is the perfect time for chemical engineers to get moving to make their contributions to this important enterprise!

Random Thought: Declining Body Temp in old(er) adults

This New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/health/29real.html) article refers to a recent medical study that found that (apparently) the body temperature of older people declines with increasing age. The question of the relation between (I think oral) and real core temperature aside, the implication of the abstract of the article (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18705705 itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum&ordinalpos=3) and and one for an older study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16398904?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_SingleItemSupl.Pubmed_Discovery_RA&linkpos=2&log$=relatedarticles&logdbfrom=pubmed)

is that a "fever" would be occurring at a lower temperature and hence a physician should consider any elevation of temperature as a possible indication of an infection or other inflammatory response.

This is most likely an important observation, but the interesting chemical engineering question that arises is what about the kinetics of the multitude of chemical reactions of life? If we assume Arrhenius kinetics with a nominal activation energy of (what else) 25kcal/mole, we could find that a reaction at 310C would be about 14 slower at 309C and 30% slower at 308C!

The question is if this difference matters to the health of the individual.

If one uses the logic that "evolution" is the ultimate optimization procedure, we would expect that all biological reactions have been optimized in terms of reaction pathways (energetically) and catalytic mechanisms -- with objective function apparently a combination of capital costs -- hardware necessary to run the process -- and operating costs (energy needed to run the reaction). If this is the case, then most processes could be "transport limited" that is the physical processes of diffusion (and convection) of chemical species and heat to and from the specific site of the reaction would limit how fast the reaction occurs. (We have made this argument in our research on transport processes in bone tissue.) If the reactions are transport limited, then the 1 or so degree C temperature change is not likely to matter.

However, most people older than about 30 will tell you that they don't recover from severe physical activity or injuries as fast as when they were younger. So something is changing with age.

Could it be the sustained temperature? Note that with injuries, there is usually significant inflammation which is associated with increased blood flow, so processes may occur at elevated temperatures that do not change with age. However, the question of recovery is interesting (as is the reason muscles hurt after lack of motion) (but I doubt that this is the complete answer: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/science/22qna.html?ref=science.)

It would be interesting to see if reduced chemical reaction rates because of lower temperature is part of the reason for various declines with age! Further, if there is a way to "warm" people to help them recover!