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Tag: small study

  • Ozempic Makes You Lose More Than Fat

    Ozempic Makes You Lose More Than Fat

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    The newest and much-hyped obesity drugs are, at their core, powerful appetite suppressants. When you eat fewer calories than you burn, the body starts scavenging itself, breaking down fat, of course, but also muscle. About a quarter to a third of the weight shed is lean body mass, and most of that is muscle.

    Muscle loss is not inherently bad. As people lose fat, they need less muscle to support the weight of their body. And the muscle that goes first tends to be low quality and streaked with fat. Doctors grow concerned when people start to feel weak in everyday life—while picking up the grandkids, for example, or shoveling the driveway. Taken further, the progressive loss of muscle can make patients, especially elderly ones who already have less muscle to spare, frail and vulnerable to falls. People trying to slim down from an already healthy weight, who have less fat to spare, may also be prone to losing muscle. “You have to pull calories from somewhere,” says Robert Kushner, an obesity-medicine doctor at Northwestern University, who was also an investigator in a key trial for one of these drugs.

    Kushner worries about patients who start with low muscle mass and go on to become super responders to the drugs, losing significantly more than the average 15 to 20 percent of their body weight. The more these patients lose, the more likely their body is breaking down muscle. “I watch them very carefully,” he told me. The impacts of losing muscle may go beyond losing just strength. Muscle cells are major consumers of energy; they influence insulin sensitivity and absorb some 80 percent of the glucose flooding into blood after a meal. Extreme loss might alter these metabolic functions of muscle too.

    Exactly how all of this will affect people on Wegovy and Zepbound, which are still relatively novel obesity drugs, is too early to say. (You may have heard these same two drugs referred to as Ozempic and Mounjaro, respectively, which are their names when sold for diabetes.) These drugs cause a proportion of muscle loss higher than diet and exercise alone, though roughly on par with bariatric surgery. Lifestyle changes can blunt the loss, but pharmaceutical companies are on the hunt for new drug combinations that could build muscle while burning fat.

    The arrival of powerful weight-loss drugs has moved the field beyond simple weight loss, Melanie Haines, an endocrinologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, told me. That challenge is largely solved. Instead of fixating on the number of pounds lost, researchers, doctors, and ultimately patients can focus on where those pounds are coming from.

    Doctors currently offer two pieces of standard and unsurprising advice to protect people taking obesity drugs against muscle loss: Eat a high-protein diet, and do resistance training. These recommendations are perfectly logical, but their effectiveness against these drugs specifically is unclear, John Jakicic, a professor of physical activity and weight management at the University of Kansas Medical Center, told me. He is now surveying patients to understand their real-world behavior on these drugs.

    Fatigue, for example, is a common side effect. “When you’re tired, and you’re fatigued, do you really feel like exercising?” he said. Haines wonders the same about eating enough protein. The drugs are so good at suppressing appetite, she said, that some people might not be able to stomach enough food to get adequate protein. (Food companies have started pitching high-protein snacks and shakes to people on obesity drugs.)

    Read: The Ozempic plateau

    If patients stop taking Wegovy and Zepbound—and about half of patients do stop within a year, at least in real-world studies of people taking this class of drugs for diabetes—the weight regained comes back as fat more than muscle, says Tom Yates, a physical-activity professor at the University of Leicester. Muscle mass tends not to entirely recover. It’s “almost as if you’re better off staying where you are than going through cycles of weight loss,” he told me.

    Yet, he pointed out, the U.K. recommends Wegovy for a maximum of two years. In the U.S., patients who can’t afford the steep out-of-pocket price have been forced to stop when insurance companies abruptly cut off coverage or a manufacturer’s discount coupon expires. These policies are likely to trigger cycles of weight loss and gain that lead, ultimately, to net muscle loss.

    Meanwhile, drug companies are already thinking about the next generation of weight-loss therapies. “Wouldn’t it be great to have another mechanism that’s moving away from just appetite regulation?” Haines said. Companies are testing ways to preserve—perhaps even enhance—muscle during weight loss by combining Wegovy or Zepbound with a second muscle-boosting drug. Such a combination could, in theory, allow patients to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time.

    Years ago, scientists first became interested in potential muscle-enhancing drugs that mimic mutations found in certain breeds of almost comically ripped dogs and cattle. At the time, they hoped to treat muscle-wasting diseases. The drugs never quite worked for that purpose, but the trial for one such drug, an antibody called bimagrumab, found that patients also lost fat in addition to gaining lean mass. A start-up acquired the drug and began testing it for weight loss in combination with semaglutide, the active ingredient in Wegovy, or Ozempic. And last year, Eli Lilly, the maker of Zepbound, snapped up that company for up to $1.9 billion—in hopes of making its own combination therapy.

    Read: Are you sure you want an Ozempic pill?

    Pairing bimagrumab with an existing obesity drug could potentially maximize the weight loss from both. Losing weight tends to get harder over time; as you lose muscle, your body burns fewer calories. A drug that minimizes that muscle loss—or even flips it into muscle gain—could help patients boost the amount of energy their body expends, while Wegovy or Zepbound suppresses calories consumed. The mechanisms of how this might actually work in the body still need to be understood, though. Previous studies of bimagrumab found that patients grew more muscle, but they didn’t necessarily become faster or stronger. Haines, who is planning a small study of her own with bimagrumab, is most interested in how the combination affects not the structural but the metabolic functions of muscle.

    Bimagrumab is the furthest along of several drugs that tinker with the same pathway for muscle growth. The biotech company Regeneron recently published promising data on two of its muscle-enhancing antibodies paired with semaglutide in primates; a trial in humans is due to begin later this year. The start-up Scholar Rock is testing another antibody called apitegromab. Other companies are interested in combining the obesity drugs with different potential muscle boosters that work by mimicking certain hormones such as apelin or testosterone. If they succeed, the next generation of drugs could help sculpt a more muscular body, not just a smaller one. Eating less can only do so much to better your health.

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    Sarah Zhang

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  • Beware Noodle Soup

    Beware Noodle Soup

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    When the weather turns frigid, there is only one thing to do: make a pot of chicken-noodle soup. On the first cold afternoon in early December, I simmered a whole rotisserie chicken with fennel, dill, and orzo, then ladled it into bowls for a cozy family meal. Just as I thought we’d reached peak hygge, my five-month-old son suddenly grabbed my steaming bowl and tipped the soup all over himself. Piercing screams and a frenzied taxi ride to the pediatric emergency room ensued.

    My husband and I waited in the ER with our pantsless, crying child, racked with guilt. But when we told doctors and nurses what had happened, they seemed unperturbed. As they bandaged my son’s blistering skin, they explained that children get burned by soup—especially noodle soup—all the time. “Welcome to parenthood,” a nurse said, as we boarded an ambulance that transferred us to a nearby burn unit.

    That children are frequently scalded by hot liquids makes perfect sense. But soup? Indeed, soup burns “are very common,” James Gallagher, the director of the Burn Center at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork–Presbyterian, where I’d brought my son, told me. After hot tap water, soup is a leading cause of burn-related visits to the hospital among young children in the United States. An estimated 100,000 American children are scalded by spilled food and beverages each year—and in many cases, soup is the culprit. Pediatric soup injuries happen so frequently that an astonishing amount of scientific literature is dedicated to it, generating terms such as meal-time morbidity, starch scalds,  and the cooling curve of broth.

    Anyone can get burned by soup, yet kids can’t help but knock things over. Infants have minimal control over their grabby little hands, and older children still lack balance and coordination. Give them a bowl of soup, or even put one near them, and you have a recipe for disaster. Consider instant noodle soup—the kind prepared by pouring boiling water into a Styrofoam container with dried noodles, or filling it with water and microwaving it. In one small study from 2020, 21 children ages 4 to 12 carried foam cups of blue paint—meant to mimic containers of instant noodles—from a microwave toward a table. Blue splashes on their white shirts revealed that nearly one in five children spilled the “soup,” most commonly on their arms.

    Part of the danger is the nature of soup itself. Boiling water is hot enough to scald skin. But salt, oil, and other ingredients raise water’s boiling point, meaning that soup can reach a much higher temperature and cause greater injury, Gallagher said. Soup also stays hotter for longer, prolonging the potential for harm: A 2007 study found that certain soups took more time to cool than tap water after being boiled. Even when slightly cooled, to about 150 degrees Fahrenheit, it can cause “a significant scald burn,” one commentary noted.

    Not all soups are created equal. As the authors of the 2007 study found, noodles “may adhere to the skin” and cause a deep burn, calling to mind the stinging tentacles of a jellyfish. They may also stay hot longer than expected. “Noodles do seem to be particularly problematic,” Wendalyn Little, a professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at Emory University School of Medicine who studies soup burns, told me. Hearty soups are generally more hazardous than brothy ones: Engineers who studied two kinds of canned soup—chunky (chicken noodle) versus runny (tomato)—concluded that the former can lead to more severe burns because its solid constituents prevent it from flowing off the skin. “A runny soup seems a lot like water, but what if it’s a New England clam chowder? That’s real thick and stays in place,” Gallagher said. The chicken soup I’d made for my family was on the brothy side, but the orzo made it particularly viscous. (Thank goodness I hadn’t made gloopy congee that day.)

    For these reasons, perhaps the most dangerous soup of all is instant noodle soup. Nearly 2,000 American kids get burned by it annually, according to one estimate; in an analysis published earlier this year, this kind of soup caused 31 percent of pediatric scalds in a Chicago hospital over a decade. These products are dangerous for reasons beyond their contents. They tend to be packaged in tall, flimsy containers that are perilously easy to topple. Microwaveable versions can be dangerous for kids who haven’t yet fully grasped that a room-temperature product, heated for several minutes in a microwave, can come out piping hot. “Fluids like that can be superheated such that when you touch them, there’s almost like a mini explosion,” splashing boiling liquid onto skin, Gallagher explained.

    Soup burns can be quite serious. In a few cases, the burns can be so severe that they require tube feeding or intravenous narcotics. The 2007 study of children scalded by instant noodle soup noted that all of them had “at least second-degree burns,” which damage the first two layers of skin and usually erupt into blisters. The children who were burned on their upper body—mostly young kids, who tend to reach toward objects on elevated surfaces—stayed in the hospital for an average of 11 days.

    In most cases, however, burns from soup are painful but not life-threatening. Scarring, if it occurs at all, is worst in childhood, then fades away, Gallagher said. If burns do happen, he told me, immediately remove any clothes or diapers soaked with hot liquid, then run cool water over the injury for 20 minutes and call your doctor. Avoid applying ice to the injured area, he added, because doing so can damage tissue.

    Kids move on quickly. It’s the parents who deal with long-term consequences. “There’s a special kind of guilt when your baby is burned,” Gallagher said. A week after the incident, my family returned to the burn unit for a follow-up visit. Parents with small children filled the waiting room; we exchanged knowing glances. A nurse removed a thick bandage from my son’s thigh. Fortunately, unlike his parents, he emerged without a scar.

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    Yasmin Tayag

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  • Hypnosis Could Work Wonders on IBS

    Hypnosis Could Work Wonders on IBS

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    The change in Zack Rogers was sudden. In the middle of his 12th birthday party, his stomach started hurting. He went to bed early that night, missing much of his own slumber party, and then stayed home from school the whole next week. The stomach pain was excruciating, and he couldn’t keep any food down. He lost 40 pounds in just a few weeks.

    Zack spent the next three years in and out of hospitals and trying medicines that didn’t seem to work. His doctors eventually told the family that they had only one option: surgery to remove large parts of his damaged colon. But Zack’s mom, Angela Rogers, wasn’t on board. She had lost faith in his medical team and feared such an invasive step, so she asked another gastroenterologist for a second opinion. The new doctor suggested that Zack try one last treatment before surgery: hypnotherapy, in which a clinical professional helps a patient become deeply focused and relaxed in order to change their patterns of thinking.

    This time, the change was gradual, but no less dramatic. In the evening after his first hypnotherapy session, Zack felt nauseated but kept his dinner down. Over the next few weeks, he stopped throwing up in school and regained the stamina to play basketball and go for bike rides. Today, Zack is a freshman in college, living away from home—something he wouldn’t have thought was possible before he was hypnotized. “If I never did hypnosis,” he told me, “I would be a complete mess. I genuinely don’t know where I would be.”

    As far-fetched as it may seem, science supports the idea that digestive disorders can be treated with psychological interventions, including hypnosis. Research dating back to the 1980s suggests that, at least in the short term, hypnotherapy can be an effective treatment for irritable bowel syndrome, a gut disorder characterized by painful gastrointestinal symptoms but no visible damage to the gut. Now scientists are investigating whether it might also bring relief to patients with inflammatory bowel disease, who, like Zack, have observable damage to their digestive tract.

    Although hypnosis is a powerful relaxation tool on its own, in clinical settings, it’s most often combined with other, better-studied psychotherapy techniques, such as cognitive behavioral therapy. Research suggests that CBT, which is commonly used to treat conditions such as depression and anxiety, can also be helpful in the treatment of gastrointestinal disorders.

    Read: I got hypnotized over Skype and it actually worked

    Unlike CBT, hypnosis retains a reputation for quackery, and is regularly portrayed in pop culture and stage shows as a tool for exercising control over participants—willing or otherwise. And some practitioners do use it for debunked treatments, including recovered memory therapy. But whether hypnotherapy is legitimized as a medical tool has real stakes. Hypnosis practitioners believe—and there’s some research to back this up—that the technique may amplify the effectiveness of more well-established psychological interventions and therefore has the potential to provide rare benefit to patients

    Hypnosis has a long history as a pain reliever. In the first half of the 19th century, before anesthetics were widely available, some surgeons hypnotized their patients. Even today, hypnosis proponents claim that it may be an effective alternative treatment for chronic back pain and the stress of childbirth; a growing body of research suggests that hypnosis can be a cost-effective and side-effect free analgesic for some people with chronic pain, though good clinical data are hard to come by.

    The first randomized controlled trial of hypnotherapy for IBS was published in 1984. Among the participants—a small group of mostly female patients with severe, treatment-resistant disease— those who received hypnotherapy showed greater improvements in abdominal pain, bloating, and bowel function than those who received psychotherapy plus a placebo medication. A 2014 meta-analysis found that about half of IBS patients who try hypnotherapy see at least short-term improvements in their symptoms.

    Read: The rogue theory that gravity causes IBS

    The evidence for hypnotherapy isn’t as robust in the treatment of IBD, which is really an umbrella term for ulcerative colitis (Zack’s diagnosis) and Crohn’s disease. But there’s reason to believe that hypnosis could yield similar success in addressing symptoms of those conditions. The line between IBD and IBS can be murky; more than a quarter of IBD patients in remission have IBS as well. And although the evidence is still mixed—a study published in 2021, for example, found no difference in treatment outcomes between standard medical treatments and hypnotherapy—some early evidence suggests that hypnotherapy can also reduce inflammation in patients with ulcerative colitis. One small study found that just one session of hypnotherapy reduced ulcerative-colitis patients’ blood levels of several inflammatory markers.

    Perhaps most important, a large body of research shows a strong link between cognition and digestion. Millions of neurons, collectively known as the enteric nervous system, regulate our digestion and are in constant communication with the central nervous system. This connection, called the “brain-gut axis,” may be why we feel so many emotions in our gut, whether the butterflies of anxiety or the clench of anger. It might also explain why both anxiety and depression are more common among patients with IBD compared with the general population. “Unequivocally, stress plays a major role in any digestive disease,” Gary Lichtenstein, a gastroenterology professor and the director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, told me.

    When this brain-gut axis gets out of whack, it’s known to worsen some digestive disorders. In patients with gastrointestinal issues, the tissues in the gut can become hypersensitive over time. The brain learns to interpret signals from the gut, including normal functioning, as discomfort. This faulty communication results in what experts now call disorders of gut-brain interaction (DGBIs), which include IBS, functional dyspepsia, and other digestive disorders (but not IBD). Hypnosis, proponents say, can help patients rewire the cognitive-digestive connection. In many IBS and IBD cases, “we know there’s a mind-gut connection that can only be helped by a mental-health expert,” says Mark Mattar, a gastroenterologist and director of the IBD center at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital.

    Read: When gut bacteria change brain function

    Mattar works closely with Ali Navidi, the clinical psychologist to whom Zack was referred in 2020. Navidi told me that at his practice, GI Psychology, 83 percent of patients with DGBIs who complete at least 10 hypnotherapy sessions achieve their treatment goals, which usually amount to reducing pain, bloating, and other uncomfortable symptoms enough to go about their day-to-day life. His data are unpublished but in line with other studies on IBS showing that more than 80 percent of patients who get gut-directed hypnotherapy as part of their treatment plan experience improvements in pain and other GI symptoms. Those numbers are even higher among children and adolescents.

    Such findings persuaded the American College of Gastroenterology to recommend gut-directed psychotherapies—including hypnosis and CBT—for the treatment of IBS symptoms in its 2021 guidelines. Still, even among IBS patients, they’re not commonly used. No one appears to have studied the popularity of hypnosis specifically among IBS patients, but a 2017 study found that only 15 percent of people diagnosed with IBS had ever pursued “psychological therapies” of any kind.

    For many patients who follow through with hypnotherapy, the experience is not what they expect. Patients may conflate clinical hypnosis with entertainment hypnosis, where subjects quack like a duck or forget their own name. But at practices like Navidi’s, the therapist instead focuses on helping the patient enter a trance state—the same type of consciousness we all experience when we lose track of time working, scrolling Instagram, or driving and suddenly arriving at our destination. “When we’re in a trance, we have this intense, focused concentration, and that can be used in powerful ways,” Navidi said.

    Once the patient is in a trance state, therapists use guided imagery and suggestion to target specific gastrointestinal symptoms. “People get into a very relaxed state, and in that state I start to make suggestions about how the brain and the gut can work together better,” Jessica Gerson, a psychologist at NYU Langone’s Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center, told me. Gerson instructs her IBD patients to imagine the lining of their intestines healing. During his trance states, Zack was able to envision a control room for his pain in which he could dial knobs up and down. “I could turn the stomach pain down to a one or a zero, and it would go away,” Zack recalled recently, a note of surprise still in his voice.

    Read: Can you quit smoking through hypnosis?

    Many patients initially fear that during hypnosis they are ceding control of their mind and body to the hypnotherapist, Gerson told me. But patients are always “totally conscious, totally in control.” Indeed, Navidi and Gerson use this trance state to show patients exactly how much control they have over their own body. “Having a sense of agency is therapeutic,” Gerson said.

    These days, many gastroenterologists see psychotherapies like hypnosis as an important part of a holistic treatment plan—even for IBD. (IBD patients who do respond to hypnotherapy are likely to continue to need medical monitoring and interventions, Lichtenstein said.) While gut-directed hypnotherapy still hasn’t been proved to help IBD patients without co-occurring IBS symptoms, there’s not much of a downside to trying. The experts I spoke with agreed that hypnosis is relatively risk-free as long as it is administered by a clinician, patients continue to be monitored by their medical doctors, and therapists screen potential patients for severe mental illness and untreated trauma. Patients, too, need to consider whether they can afford hypnotherapy. Like many mental-health services, it’s not always covered by insurance. Zack’s sessions were $265 each out of pocket, but according to Angela, “it was worth every cent and then some.”

    Zack remembers getting stressed out a lot as a kid—over grades, making friends, basketball games, or nothing in particular. He credits Navidi with alleviating not only his stomach pain but also the relentless anxiety; he still uses the relaxation techniques he learned from Navidi when he gets worried about school or a basketball game.

    Read: Reiki can’t possibly work. So why does it?

    Zack is still on medication for his ulcerative colitis; every eight weeks he has an injection of Stelara, a medication that works by blocking inflammatory proteins. But after two years of appointments with Navidi, for the first time since his 12th birthday, his symptoms are reliably under control—and stress doesn’t make them come roaring back. He hasn’t had a flare up in about a year and a half. Most days, he doesn’t think about his diagnosis at all.

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    Kate Wheeling

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  • Your Next Mosquito Repellent Might Already Be in Your Shower

    Your Next Mosquito Repellent Might Already Be in Your Shower

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    For as long as I can remember, I have been that friend—the one who, from May to November, gets invited to every outdoor soiree. It’s not because I make the best desserts, even though I do. It’s because, with me around, the shoes can come off and the DEET can stay sheathed: No one else need fear for their blood when the mosquitoes are all busy biting me.

    Explanations abound for why people like me just can’t stop getting nipped—blood type, diet, the particular funk of the acids that emanate from our skin. Mosquitoes are nothing if not expert sniffers, evolving over millennia to detect the body’s many emissions, including the carbon dioxide we exhale and the heat we radiate.

    But to focus only on a mosquito’s hankering for flesh is to leave a whole chapter of the pests’ scent-seeking saga “largely overlooked,” Clément Vinauger, a chemical ecologist at Virginia Tech, told me. Mosquitoes are omnivores, tuned to sniff out blood and plants. And nowadays, most humans, especially those in the Western world, tend to smell a bit like both, thanks to all the floral, citrusy lotions and potions that so many of us slather atop our musky flesh.

    That medley of scents, Vinauger and his colleagues have discovered, may be an underappreciated part of what makes people like me smell so darn good to pests. The findings are from a small study with just five volunteers, four brands of soap, and one mosquito species, and still need to be confirmed outside the lab. But they’re a reminder that, as good or as bad as some of us might inherently smell to a mosquito, the insects experience us as dietarily diverse smorgasbords—not just as our animal selves.

    Read: You have no idea how good mosquitoes are at smelling us

    Researchers have also long known that “everything we use on our skin will affect mosquitoes’ behavior or attraction toward us,” says Ali Afify, a mosquito researcher at Drexel University. That includes extracts from plants—among them, chemicals such as citronella and limonene, which have both been found to repel the bloodsucking insects in at least some contexts. Something about encountering floral and faunal cues together seems to bamboozle mosquitoes, as if they’re “seeing an organism that doesn’t exist,” says Baldwyn Torto, a chemical ecologist and mosquito expert at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology. After all, female mosquitoes, the only ones that bite, spend their lives toggling between seeking nectar and hunting for blood, but never both at the same time. That’s part of why Vinauger initially figured that soap might deter mosquitoes from flying in for a sip.

    The story ended up being a bit more complicated. The researchers, led by Morgen VanderGiessen and Anaïs Tallon, collected chemicals from their volunteers’ arms—one scrubbed with soap, the other left aromatically bare—and offered them to the mosquitoes. One body wash, a coconut-and-vanilla-scented number made by Native, seemed to make a subset of people less appetizing, probably in part, Vinauger told me, because mosquitoes and other insects are not into coconut. (Duly noted.) But two other cleansers, made by Dove and Simple Truth, bumped up the attractiveness of several of their volunteers—even though all of the soaps in the study contained plenty of limonene. (None of the manufacturers of the body washes used in the study responded to a request for comment.)

    No single product was a universal attractant or repellent, which probably says more about us than it does about body wash. A bevy of lifestyle choices and environmental influences can tweak an individual’s unique odor profile; even identical twins, Torto told me, won’t smell the same to a mosquito on the prowl. Soaped up or no, some people will remain stubbornly magnetic to mosquitoes; others will continue to disgust them. This makes it “hard to say, ‘Hey, this soap will make you really attractive’ or ‘That soap will keep mosquitoes completely away from you,’” says Seyed Mahmood Nikbakht Zadeh, a chemical ecologist and medical entomologist at CSU San Bernardino, who wasn’t involved in the study. Plus, soap is hardly the only scented product that people use: Whatever enticing ingredients your body wash might contain, Tallon told me, could easily be counteracted by the contents of your lotion or deodorant.

    Read: A pivotal mosquito experiment could not have gone better

    The point of the study isn’t to demonize or extol any particular products—especially considering how few soaps were tested and how many factors dictate each individual’s odor profile. The five volunteers in the study can’t possibly capture the entire range of human-soap interactions, though the researchers hope to expand their findings with a lot of follow-up. “I wouldn’t want the public to be alarmed about what type of soap they’re using,” Torto told me.

    But just knowing that personal-care products can alter a person’s appeal could kick-start more research. Scientists could design better baits to lure skeeters away from us, or develop a new generation of repellents using gentle, plant-based ingredients that are already found in our soaps. “DEET is really efficient, but it’s a chemical that melts plastic,” Vinauger told me. “Could we do better?”

    The researchers behind the study are already trying. After analyzing the specific chemicals in each of the soaps they tested, they blended some of the most alluring and aversive substances into two new concoctions—a flowery, fruity attractant and a nuttier repellent—and offered them to the insects. The repellent was “as strong as applying DEET on your skin,” Vinauger told me, “but it’s all coming from those soap chemicals.”

    What’s not yet clear, though, is how long those powers of repulsion last. Most people don’t manage more than a daily scrub; meanwhile, “the odors coming out of your pores are continuously coming out, so in the long run, those might win out,” says Maria Elena De Obaldia, a neurogeneticist who previously studied mosquito attraction at Rockefeller University. And it’s a lot less practical to ask someone to shower every few hours than to simply reapply bug spray.

    Read: A new way to keep mosquitoes from biting

    I’m certainly not ready to blame my mosquito magnetism on my body wash (which, for what it’s worth, contains a lot of “coconut-based cleanser”) or anything else in my hygiene repertoire. Part of the problem is undoubtedly just me—the tastiest of human meat sticks. But the next time I shop for anything scented, I’ll at least know that whatever wafts out of that product won’t just be for me. Some pest somewhere is always catching a stray whiff.

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    Katherine J. Wu

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