Study: Cholesterol Drugs May Worsen Asthma

Experts Say the Findings Contradict Some Earlier Studies on the Effects of Statin Drugs

Nov. 5, 2011 -- People with asthma may find that their breathing gets worse after they start a statin drug to lower cholesterol, a small new study shows.

Asthma experts say the finding is a surprise because some previous studies have shown that statin drugs have anti-inflammatory properties beyond their cholesterol-lowering effects that may help conditions like asthma.

So, researchers are not building a case right now for you to change your medications, but to talk to your doctor if you have asthma and high cholesterol. They also say this is a call to do more research on the topic.

The new study -- being presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology in Boston -- followed 40 asthma patients who were treated at the same California clinic for one year.

Twenty patients had just begun statin medications to lower cholesterol at the start of the study. Twenty others who were not taking statins were followed for comparison. All were nonsmokers who had been diagnosed with asthma for at least five years.

Patients were excluded from the study if an asthma attack had landed them in the hospital or emergency room in the eight months leading up to the study. Other than asthma or high cholesterol, patients in the study were free of health problems, researchers say.

Doctors checked in with patients in the study every three months. They asked about symptoms and medication use, and they tested lung function.

After one year, patients taking statins performed 35% worse in a test of lung function than they did at the start of the study. Patients who were not taking statins also saw their lung function decline, but it was about 14% worse compared to how they performed at the start of the study.

Patients on statins also reported that they had used their rescue medications [inhalers] 72% more often than they had at the start of the study. Those who weren't taking statins used rescue medications 9% more than they had before.

Patients on statins also reported getting up more frequently at night because of their asthma and said they had worse symptoms during the day.

Those findings are associations. The study wasn't able to prove that statins caused the increase in breathing problems.

An alternative explanation could be that people who were prescribed statins simply had more health problems, overall, than those who weren't taking the drugs, although researchers say they tried to balance the groups in the study to make sure that was not the case.

The findings echo a previous study that looked at the medical records of 759 asthma patients treated at the same clinic in Rochester, N.Y. In that study, 24 patients who were starting statins saw significant drops in lung function, needed more medication, had more nighttime asthma problems, and were seen in the office more frequently compared to 26 patients who were not taking those medications.

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Study: Vaccine for Breast, Ovarian Cancer Has Potential

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Study: U.S. Pays More, but Health Care Is Worse

Commonwealth Fund Report Says 'Medical Homes' Are the Key to Better Health Care

Nov. 9, 2011 -- We not only pay a lot more for health care in the U.S. than in other countries, but a new study suggests the care we get is often slower and more poorly coordinated.

That's because other industrialized countries do a better job of giving patients easy access to primary care and to "medical homes" responsible for guiding care and complex treatment, according to a study published today by the Commonwealth Fund.

A medical home is a regular place of care where health care providers are accessible, know the patients' medical history, and help to coordinate care.

The study credits medical homes with lower rates of medical errors, poor information, coordination gaps, and emergency room visits.

For example, 42% of ill American patients reported duplicate tests, gaps in care, or other problems during the last year. That was about double the rate than in the U.K. and Switzerland, where medical homes are in wider use.

"For sicker patients and patients having chronic disease, having a medical home makes a difference. It makes a difference in every country," says Cathy Schoen, MS, senior vice president at the Commonwealth Fund.

The group surveyed roughly 18,000 chronically or seriously ill patients in 11 countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K., and the U.S.

It found the rate of patient-reported medical errors to be two to three times higher among U.S. patients than among patients in the U.K. or Switzerland.

The survey also finds that U.S. patients are more likely to forgo care because of cost than are patients in any of the other countries. More than four in 10 reported not visiting a doctor, skipping care, or not filling a prescription because of out-of-pocket costs. It was more than double the rate seen in several other countries.

However, U.S. patients had the most positive experiences concerning the ease of calling to ask a question or get advice from their health care provider between visits.

The Affordable Care Act, signed in 2009, promotes the idea of medical homes as a way to better coordinate care and cut errors. Officials at the Commonwealth Fund say their study backs up the idea.

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Study: Eating Lots of Trans Fat May Lower Quality of Life

Higher Trans Fat Intake Linked to Lower Happiness, Well-Being

Nov. 4, 2011 -- Many people indulge far too often in trans-fat-heavy foods because it makes them feel good, even though they know these foods may not be good for their hearts and their waistlines.

But while that double cheeseburger or glazed doughnut might temporarily improve your mood, research from Spain suggests the feeling won’t last.

In a study published earlier this year, the Spanish research team found that people who ate the most trans fats also had the highest depression levels.

Now the researchers report that these people also had the lowest scores on tests designed to measure quality of life.

Trans fats, also known as partially hydrogenated oils, are created in the lab in a process that adds hydrogen to liquid oils to make them more solid.

The fats are most commonly found in fried fast foods and heavily processed foods, such as commercially produced pastries, cookies, and crackers.

The newly published study was designed to determine if different types of dietary fats affected quality of life -- a term that encompasses functional health, well-being, and happiness.

More than 8,400 participants in an ongoing nutrition study in Spain were included in the latest analysis.

All the study participants completed a 136-item food questionnaire when they entered the study.

Four years later they also completed a widely used health survey designed to assess quality of life.

Tran fats were the only dietary fats that showed a significant association with self-reported quality of life scores, lead researcher Christina Ruano of the University of Las Palmas de Gram Canaria in Las Palmas, Spain, tells WebMD.

Study participants whose diets contained the most trans fats were also the most likely to report characteristics associated with a poorer quality of life, including feeling tired or worn out, having a negative attitude about work and social life, and having negative beliefs about their future health.

The study was published online this week in Nutrition Journal.

The study participants were all college educated and the average daily intake of trans fats within the group was about half that of the Spanish population as a whole and one-fourth that of the average American.

“Because of this, we believe the association could be even more robust in other populations, where more trans fats are eaten,” Ruano says.

While the researchers attempted to take into account other factors that could influence quality of life, New York University professor of nutrition Marion Nestle, PhD, MPH, says it is far from clear if trans fat intake has a direct impact on well-being.

“Trans fats are a marker for poor diets with lots of junk foods,” she tells WebMD in an email. “That has to be factored in.”

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Study: BPA Exposure in Womb Linked to Kids' Behavior Problems

But Researchers Caution Study Only Shows Association, Not Cause and Effect

Oct. 24, 2011 -- Preschoolers exposed to higher levels of bisphenol A (BPA) in the womb may have more anxiety and depression and have worse self-control than those exposed to lower levels of the chemical before birth, a new study shows.

The chemical is found in a wide array of consumer products, including plastic bottles, food packaging, dental sealants, and the heat-activated paper that's used to print cash register receipts.

A spokesman for an industry group says the new study had flaws in its design, and that other studies have found BPA to be safe.

The chemical structure of BPA is similar to the hormone estrogen. That raises concerns that constant exposure could have biological effects, particularly for developing babies and young children.

Studies of animals exposed to BPA have found changes in the brain, behavior, and abnormal development of reproductive organs. So far, there has been less evidence of health effects in humans.

The new study is published in Pediatrics. It is one of the first to show that BPA exposure in the womb may be linked to behavioral effects in young children.

Researchers caution though that their study was only able to show associations between BPA and behavior. It did not prove cause and effect.

In an emailed statement, Steven G. Hentges, PhD, of the American Chemistry Council's Polycarbonate/BPA Global Group, says it is unlikely that BPA caused the behavioral effects documented in the study. "The study released in Pediatrics has significant shortcomings in study design and the conclusions are of unknown relevance to public health. Furthermore, regulators from Europe to Japan to the US have recently reviewed hundreds of studies on BPA and repeatedly supported the continued safe use of BPA."

For the study, researchers followed 244 mothers and their babies from pregnancy through age 3. They measured BPA levels in three urine samples taken from pregnant women and three samples collected from their kids at yearly study visits.

After the children's third birthday, researchers gave parents two well-regarded psychological tests to evaluate their child's behavior and their capacity for self-control. Parents were not given information about their BPA levels before they rated their child's behavior.

While there was no association between the BPA in a child's urine and their behavior, the researchers found that moms who had higher levels of BPA in their urine during pregnancy also had 3-year-olds with more anxiety, depression, and hyperactivity.

Anxiety and depression associations were almost twice as large for girls as they were for boys.

Girls had higher scores on measures of hyperactivity while boys had lower scores for hyperactive behavior.

That was true even after researchers took into account a host of things that are known to influence a child's behavioral development, like mom's IQ and education, breastfeeding, household income, maternal depression, and exposure to tobacco smoke.

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School Discipline Study Raises Fresh Questions

When also considering less serious infractions punished by in-school suspensions, the rate climbed to nearly 60 percent, according to the study by the Council of State Governments, with one in seven students facing such disciplinary measures at least 11 times.

The study linked these disciplinary actions to lower rates of graduation and higher rates of later criminal activity and found that minority students were more likely than whites to face the more severe punishments.

“In the last 20 to 25 years, there have been dramatic increases in the number of suspensions and expulsions,” said Michael Thompson, who headed the study as director of the Justice Center at the Council of State Governments, a nonpartisan group. “This quantifies how you’re in the minority if you have not been removed from the classroom at least once. This is not just being sent to the principal’s office, and it’s not after-school detention or weekend detention or extra homework. This is in the student’s record.”

The study, which followed every incoming Texas seventh grader over three years through high school and sometimes beyond, joins a growing body of literature looking at how to balance classroom order with individual student need.

Several experts said in interviews that the data, covering nearly one million students and mapping each of their school records against any entry in the juvenile justice system, was the most comprehensive on the topic yet. The report did not identify individual districts or schools.

The findings are “very much representative of the nation as a whole,” said Russ Skiba, a professor of school psychology at Indiana University who reviewed the study along with several other prominent researchers.

Several teachers and administrators in Texas were shocked to learn of the report.

“That’s astronomical,” said Joe Erhardt, a science teacher at Kingwood Park High School in the Houston suburb of Humble, Tex. “I’m at a loss.”

Doug Otto, superintendent of the Plano Independent School District, said the data showed that “suspensions are a little too easy.”

“Once they become automatic, we’ve really hurt that child’s chances to receive a high school diploma,” he added “We’ve got to find ways to keep those kids in school. Don’t get me wrong — we have to provide safe environments for all the other kids. But you have to balance it out and cut down the suspensions and expulsions.”

Almost 15 percent of students, a vast majority of whom had extensive school disciplinary files, had at least one record in the juvenile justice system, according to the report.

Minority students facing discipline for the first time tended to be given the harsher, out-of-school suspension, rather than in-school suspension, more often than white students, the study said. (The nature of the offenses was not noted.) A disproportionate number of minority students also ended up in alternative classrooms, where some have complained that teachers are often less qualified.

“What we really need to do is go in to those districts and see if these really are choices being made,” Mr. Skiba said. “We don’t really know enough about the reasons for African-American and Latino over-representation in school discipline. We have enough data to show that it’s more than just poverty and any greater misbehavior. My guess is it’s very subtle interactional effects between some teachers and students.”

Mr. Thompson, of the Council of State Governments, said one of the study’s most important findings was how demographically similar schools disciplined students differently. Although Texas law requires suspension or expulsion for certain offenses, Mr. Thompson said that 97 percent of suspensions were discretionary, and that suspension rates might say as much about administrators’ discipline philosophy as about student behavior.

“Schools are making very different uses of school discipline,” he explained. “And they can have an impact on how often a kid repeats a grade or graduates. We need to recognize that it’s something we need to improve upon.”

While the study found links between school discipline and criminal activity, there is no way to know whether one caused the other. Educators have long complained that many students, particularly from poor families, arrive in classrooms with problems far beyond academics that they have few tools to control.

A former alternative-education teacher in Texas, Zeph Capo still remembers the eighth grader who swore at teachers, threw books and pencils, and eventually was suspended and sent into the district’s disciplinary program. Mr. Capo said he did not know whether the student straightened out or slipped further. The study made him only more concerned.

“Are suspensions the tool to improve student behavior and help them be successful? No, I don’t think that’s the case,” said Mr. Capo, now a vice president of the Houston Federation of Teachers who trains others in classroom management. “Sometimes there’s not a lot of choice left but to risk chaos and anarchy in your school. There are potential times when human beings have had it and they drop the hammer, and maybe the hammer crushes too far.”

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Training of Teachers Is Flawed, Study Says

The National Council on Teacher Quality, an advocacy group, is to issue a study on Thursday reporting that most student-teaching programs are seriously flawed. The group has already angered the nation’s schools for teachers with its plans to give them letter grades that would appear in U.S. News and World Report.

The council’s report, “Student Teaching in the United States,” rated 134 student-teaching programs nationwide — about 10 percent of those preparing elementary school teachers — and found that three-quarters of them did not meet five basic standards for a high-quality student-teaching program.

When the U.S. News rankings are published, the student-teaching programs will count for one-fifth to one-third of an education school’s grade, according to Kate Walsh, president of the council.

“Many people would say student teaching is the most important piece of teacher preparation,” Ms. Walsh said. “But the field is really barren in the area of standards. The basic accrediting body doesn’t even have a standard for how long a student teacher needs to be in the classroom. And most of the institutions we reviewed do not do enough to screen the quality of the cooperating teacher the student will work with.”

Many of the nation’s 1,400 education schools have taken issue with the council’s ranking project.

“This report will generate some attention and discussion, but we don’t know how valid the analysis is,” said Sharon P. Robinson, president of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. “They ask for a lot of documents, reviewed by people we do not know, against rubrics we are not privileged to see.”

In some areas, like the length of student-teaching placement, Dr. Robinson said, the council’s standards are less rigorous than what many education schools require. In others, she said, the standards actually go against the current direction of education overhaul.

“A school can lose points for not having absolute control over the selection of the cooperation teacher,” she said. “But we think these clinical experiences should be crafted in partnership with the schools, not dictated by either the principal or the education school.”

This year, officials from 35 leading education colleges and graduate schools wrote to the editor of U.S. News, criticizing the council’s methodology, and complaining about the “implied coercion” in the initial plan to use open-records laws to get information the schools would not supply voluntarily — or, if the information was unavailable, give the schools an F.

Among the 134 schools in the report, 12 asked not to be included; the council included them anyway, using public records requests to get information about the public institutions, and indicating with an asterisk institutions for which some information was unavailable.

The ranking plan is more popular among state education officials. In 10 states, the chief education officer has specifically endorsed the council’s project.

“This is shaping up to be quite a battle royale, not just between the education schools and us, but between K-12 education and higher ed, since state school officers want this information, but education schools are fighting it,” Ms. Walsh said.

The pushback might delay the rankings, which were to be published late next year, she said.

“Our schedule was predicated on schools voluntarily complying, as they do with all other U.S. News and World projects,” Ms. Walsh said.

Because some of the standards on which the education schools were ranked are subjective, some institutions ranked “poor” said they disagreed with that rating. Ten programs, or 7 percent, were rated as having “model” design; 17 percent had “good” design, and the rest were rated “weak” or “poor.”

Fayneese Miller, dean of the College of Education and Social Services at the University of Vermont, the largest teacher-training school in the state, said she could not understand why her school got a “poor” — worse than the other two Vermont schools ranked — when hers is the only education school in the state that exceeds all state standards, the only one with national accreditation and the one with the longest student-teaching placements.

“We have no problem about being evaluated, but as you can imagine, I am not at all pleased about the way they conducted the study,” Dr. Miller said. “This has major implications for us in terms of our ability to attract and place our students.”

The council, however, said that, like many education schools, the University of Vermont’s did not meet its standards because it left principals too big a role in choosing cooperating teachers, and did not do enough to ensure that they are effective teachers who will be good mentors.

At New York University, rated “weak” — along with CUNY Lehman and SUNY Cortland, the other two New York institutions included in the report — Mary M. Brabeck, dean of the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, also took issue with council’s methodology, saying that she would grade the report “poor.”

“It relies on standards that appear arbitrary and unsupported by research, and it uses them to draw incorrect conclusions,” Dr. Brabeck said in an e-mail.

For example, she said, N.Y.U.’s elementary education students must have four different placements, and 15 weeks of student teaching, more than required to meet the council’s standards. But because of the way the placements are structured, they are counted as not meeting the standards.

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Learning With a Human Anatomy Study Guide

Whether you're taking a college anatomy study course or you're attempting to learn about the human body and anatomy for your professional life, it certainly can be a difficult task to take on. There are so many terms to remember, multiple structures, cells and processes, as well as a myriad of other issues that college students typically dread. It may seem near impossible to remember everything about the human anatomy and body if you're just getting started in a class that teaches this course. However, college anatomy study guides that can be purchased in software form provide an alternative to memorizing your instructor's entire lecture or a boring textbook for that matter.

Parts of the Human Anatomy

Study guides for anatomy help you to learn and remember all the parts of the human anatomy and physiology. Most college courses start an anatomy course with an introduction to basic human physiology, which is also what a software college anatomy study guide should focus on to help students and professionals ease into the learning process. Each part of the human body should be introduced, starting from the most basic level of the physiology of cells and tissues, continuing with the musculoskeletal system and ending with the different parts and structures of the human central nervous system.

A college anatomy study guide will also help you learn everything in-between, such as about the special senses, the respiratory and urinary system, as well as the reproductive system. For the skeletal system, software study guides for anatomy can help you learn how each of the skeletal groups interacts and the proper names for each bone in the human body. As you can see, a reliable college anatomy study guide should teach you all of the things that a typical college course would.

Using the Software's Resources

Perhaps the best thing about study books for anatomy is that a study guide will help break down issues concerning the human body and physiology so that anyone can understand them with clarity. Instead of lumping the systems together, a software study guide for human anatomy presents modules or sections for each of the human body anatomical and physiological systems. Having each system and part of the body broken down into smaller modules helps you to learn at your own pace, and it also ensures that you don't get anything mixed up.

When you're looking for a college anatomy study book, the best types are those that come with detailed illustrations. Computer-learning software should contain accurate-looking graphics, pictures, diagrams, and possibly even animations of the human body. Learning with these types of resources from a software study book differs primarily from a textbook as it separates the different information first before putting it all together, which is incredibly helpful to anyone learning the human anatomy.

All things considered, a college anatomy study book provides an excellent complement to actual college courses, or can even act as a stand-alone course if you need to learn about the human body quickly for your profession. With the multiple learning modules and software resources, these study guides for anatomy are essentially detailed cheat-sheets that will save thousands of dollars compared with other options.

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Human Anatomy Study Guide - Do You Need One?

Using a human physiology study guide which can help you learn through tutorials and special learning modules may seem a bit mundane when compared with learning in a traditional classroom. However, consider the fact that the majority of students and even professionals who sign up for human anatomy courses in a typical college setting often find it difficult to keep up with the professor teaching the course. By using an alternative human physiology study guide, you can learn at your own pace in your own time without worrying about keeping pace with a classroom of other students. Since this is so, you can study human anatomy more efficiently than you could otherwise.

Why Study Human Anatomy?
There are many reasons why you may have an interest in the human anatomy. First, if you're a pre-med or full medical school student then you'll need to study human anatomy throughout your college career and understand it as thoroughly as possible. Besides college and med school students, though, many other professions use knowledge of the human anatomy. Sports therapists use it to treat muscle and joint groups of athletes and injury lawyers may need it when communicating an argument to the jury. Even if you're a stay-at-home-mom or dad then chances are you'll need to know about the different bones and systems of the body at the very least when taking care of your children.

Simply put, understanding human anatomy allows you to make better choices about your future and the kinds of activities you engage in. A human physiology study guide can not only help you to learn in-depth about the human person, but it can help you understand why this type of information may be useful for you.

Study Book Compared to Other Learning Methods
Using a human physiology study book may not be the only option to learn about and study anatomy, but it is perhaps one of the most useful. For starters, a well-written and composed anatomy self-taught course should cover not just a few of the body's systems, but all of them from the skeletal system all the way to the reproductive system. In addition, a human physiology study guide should use simple explanations to guide a student's understanding of the human body instead of complex notes and lectures that are more common for that of a college professor to use.

Characteristics of a Good Human Anatomy Study Guide
In addition to the basic workbook learning formats, the specialty software included with a physiology study guide should help you study anatomy in a more efficient way. Illustrations on CDs, three-dimensional reference guides with accurate pictures, and labeled structures of the human body are only a few of the advantages of using a thoroughly-composed human physiology study guide.

All things considered, a human physiology study guide is able to help anyone learn at a faster pace, but at your own rate during convenient times throughout the week. With specialty software guides, simple explanations, and in-depth structures of the human body to help, pretty much anyone can study human anatomy quickly and efficiently.

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Benefits of Study Guides For Anatomy

When it comes to using study guides for anatomy, there are several options that will help college students and other career professionals such as injury lawyers, chiropractors, and even sports therapists. All of these careers use principles of the human anatomy to either make decisions about treatment plans, communicate your argument in a clearer way, as well as for other reasons. There's no doubt that learning about the human body and physiological principles does takes time to digest and understand.

Perhaps the major way that a majority of people learn the human body is through a full human anatomy and physiology course at a college or university. A college course is a good option and study guides for anatomy in software form can supplement courses and many other teaching aids. However, there are other reasons why you should consider using a software-type human physiology study guide to learn about the body and its systems.

The Cost

Comparing the cost of study guides for anatomy to other learning methods, using this method seems like a very affordable and economical option for most people. Consider that college courses range in the thousands of dollars to enroll and attend. Private tutoring sessions are simply like miniature lectures and are also expensive if you're using a reliable instructor.

On the other hand, a human physiology study book that can be used on your computer will typically cost less than $50 in most cases. In addition, software study guides for anatomy are a one-time cost; in contrast, tutors have to be re-paid for each session and college tuition re-paid for the course if you fail it or make a less-than-desirable grade the first time around.

The Learning Experience

When using study guides for anatomy, the learning experience that you have rivals that of an actual high school or college course on the topic. Subjects are just as in-depth and advanced; the modules that are presented cover all the parts of the human anatomy that a regular college course would as well.

Not only do you get to learn the same things, however, but the experience may take you through graphic illustrations and diagrams that are designed to help anyone see and remember the human anatomy. Study guides for anatomy that are worth their weight in salt will have all of these learning resources in addition to course guides, lesson plans, human anatomy tests as well as answer guides.

When it comes right down to it, the value that you receive by using study guides for anatomy lessons does not compare to any other method for learning the material. Since you can learn the same things as you would in a college-level course, using such a human physiology study book takes away the need for any other resources even though you may have to enroll in a college anatomy course if you actually need the college credit for your degree. On the other hand, using software study books for anatomy practically guarantees a good grade in any human anatomy and physiology college course in addition to making you smarter and more knowledgeable in your professional career.

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The Study of Man (or Males)

Frustration with the neglect of women’s accomplishments — call it phallocentrism if you like — was what led to women’s studies, which has lately morphed into gender studies on some campuses. Women’s studies also gave rise to something called men’s studies, which is essentially pro-feminist. You can’t exactly major in men’s studies, but roughly 100 universities offer courses that fall under the umbrella, and the field has produced influential thinkers like Michael Kimmel, who is a professor at Stony Brook University and author of “Manhood in America: A Cultural History.”

The academic turf devoted to sex and gender these days is so crowded, in fact, that the prospect of a newcomer, a discipline called male studies, has generated a minor controversy.

Male studies, largely the brainchild of Dr. Edward M. Stephens, a New York City psychiatrist, doesn’t actually exist anywhere yet. Last spring, there was a scholarly symposium at Wagner College on Staten Island, intended to raise the movement’s profile and attract funds for a department with a tenured chair on some campus. A number of prominent scholars attended, including Lionel Tiger, an emeritus anthropology professor at Rutgers, who invented the term “male bonding,” and Paul Nathanson, a religious studies scholar at McGill University, who specializes in the study of misandry, the flip side of misogyny. Both are on the advisory board of the Foundation for Male Studies, which Dr. Stephens founded last year.

There will be a second conference in April at the New York Academy of Medicine — right on the heels, as it happens, of the annual conference of the American Men’s Studies Association — and the two groups have already begun jousting.

Robert Heasley, a sociology professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and president of the association, has accused the new movement of “inventing something that I think already exists.” And at the Wagner College conference, Rocco Capraro, a history professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, said much the same thing. Men’s studies had been around for 30 years, he pointed out, and was “an emerging interdisciplinary field concerned with men’s identity and experience in the present, over time, across space.”

His definition was sufficiently vague, in other words, that it seemed to cover just about everything male-related, and he suggested that the differences between men’s studies and male studies were mostly ones of emphasis.

Actually, the differences are a good deal deeper than that. One argument that male studies advocates make is that men’s studies has essentially been co-opted. According to Professor Tiger, the trouble with men’s studies is that it’s “a wholly owned branch of women’s studies.”

There is also a political dimension to the split. “I’d like to get away from this terminology but it’s true,” Professor Heasley said in a recent interview. “It’s left wing/right wing.”

But ultimately the differences have to do with radically different notions of what it means to be a man in the first place.

The people in men’s studies, like those in women’s studies, take a mostly sociological perspective and believe that masculinity is essentially a cultural construct and that gender differences in general are fluid and variable. To Professor Kimmel, we live in a world that is increasingly gender-neutral and gender integrated and that this is a good thing for men and women both. “That ship has sailed — it’s a done deal,” he said recently, dismissing the idea that men and women are as different as Martians and Venutians.

The male studies people, on the other had, are what their critics call “essentialists” and believe that male behavior is in large part biologically determined. Men think and act differently from how women think and act because that’s how evolution shaped them. In the most extreme formulations of essentialism, men are basically still Neanderthals: violent, clannish, sexually voracious and in need of female domestication.

Professor Tiger, who has a somewhat more benign view of men than that, nevertheless worries that the changes that have allowed women to control their own reproductive process have unnaturally and disastrously altered the balance of power between the sexes.

But the biology vs. culture argument has been going on for years, and the male studies movement is less an expansion of that debate than a response to a specific crisis, the nature of which both sides agree on: academically at least, young men are in trouble.

Charles McGrath is a writer at large for The Times.

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Study Finds Family Connections Give Big Advantage in College Admissions

A new study of admissions at 30 highly selective colleges found that legacy applicants get a big advantage over those with no family connections to the institution — but the benefit is far greater for those with a parent who earned an undergraduate degree at the college than for those with other family connections.

According to the study, by Michael Hurwitz, a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, applicants to a parent’s alma mater had, on average, seven times the odds of admission of nonlegacy applicants. Those whose parents did graduate work there or who had a grandparent, sibling, uncle or aunt who attended the college were, by comparison, only twice as likely to be admitted.

Legacy admissions have become an increasingly touchy issue for colleges. Admissions officers mostly play down the impact of legacy status. But a growing body of research shows that family connections count for a lot — and Mr. Hurwitz’s study found a larger impact than previous studies.

And at a time when admission to elite colleges has become increasingly competitive, critics say the legacy admissions advantage stands as an undemocratic obstacle to social mobility.

“It’s fundamentally unfair because it’s a preference that advantages the already advantaged,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a nonprofit research organization. “It has nothing to do with the individual merit of the applicant.”

Mr. Kahlenberg, the author of “Affirmative Action for the Rich: Legacy Preferences in College Admissions,” said a legal challenge to legacy preferences is becoming likely. Public university preferences could be attacked as unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, he said, while private universities might be vulnerable under an 1866 civil rights statute prohibiting discrimination based on “ancestry.”

Mr. Hurwitz’s study, published in “Economics of Education Review,” looked at data from 133,236 applicants for 2007 college admission, and analyzed the outcomes of the 61,962 who applied to more than one of the elite colleges. That allowed him to compare how much more likely they were to be offered admission where they had family connections.

“I was able to take into account all the applicant’s characteristics,” Mr. Hurwitz said, “because they were the same at every school they applied to. About the only thing that would be different was their legacy status.”

Family donations were not included in the data.

On average, Mr. Hurwitz’s study found, legacy applicants had slightly higher SAT scores than others. Education researchers point out that students whose parents attended elite colleges are also more likely to have advantages like family wealth and private school education.

Thomas P. Espenshade, a Princeton sociologist who has studied legacy admissions, said Mr. Hurwitz’s study was the first to compare the advantage to students applying to a parent’s alma mater with that of students with other family ties.

Mr. Espenshade pointed out that legacy status is just one of many possible advantages.

“We did a paper that found that if you are an athlete, you have 4.2 times the likelihood of admission as a nonathlete,” he said. “The advantages for underrepresented minorities are pretty big, too.”

Mr. Hurwitz said applicants with the highest SATs got the biggest legacy benefits.

Among the 30 colleges, the legacy advantage varied enormously: one college was more than 15 times as likely to accept legacy applicants, while at another, the effect was insignificant.

As a condition of access to the data, Mr. Hurwitz said, he agreed not to identify the colleges.

Given a table showing characteristics like high endowments and SAT scores and low acceptance rates, it seemed apparent that they are the members of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, a group made up of the Ivy Leagues and two dozen other private research universities and liberal arts colleges.

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