Pain At The Plate: Heat Increases Pitcher Retaliation

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Adrian Beltre of the Texas Rangers is hit by a pitch from the Tampa Bay Rays' James Shields on Oct. 1 at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, Texas.

Tom Pennington/Getty Images

Adrian Beltre of the Texas Rangers is hit by a pitch from the Tampa Bay Rays' James Shields on Oct. 1 at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, Texas.

Richard Larrick has been bothered by something for two decades.

"Twenty years ago, I'd done a paper with some graduate students just showing that in hotter temperatures, pitchers are more likely to hit batters with pitches," says Larrick, a professor at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.

Was it because they would sweat more, and the ball might get slippery and hard to control? Or was it something intentional?

"Laboratory research has shown that if you put people in a hotter room, they're more likely to act aggressively toward someone else," sometimes without even being aware of it, he says.

Because ballgames aren't played in a lab, Larrick looked through 50 years of baseball statistics to see if he could see the effect of temperature on aggressive behavior.

"We can look at every game and every plate appearance, and just look at what the chances are of a batter being hit," he says. As he reported in the journal Psychological Science, there was a definite pattern. Pitchers were more likely to hit a batter if earlier in the game, one of their teammates had been hit. But that's not all.

It's been known for years that when temperatures are hotter, pitchers are more likely to hit batters with pitches. A new study finds that heat also increases a pitcher's likelihood of retaliating by hitting an opposing batter when players from his team were hit earlier in the game.

The chart below shows a batter's percent chance of being hit in a plate appearance, depending on the number of players that have been hit on the pitcher's team and the gametime temperature.

"It seems to be that the main thing that changes with temperature is the desire to retaliate for my teammate being hit," says Larrick. He says that fits well with what his laboratory research shows about people in hot rooms. "The same thing that someone else does to me, that could be ambiguous, whether it was designed to hurt me or not, is more likely to be interpreted as having hostile intent, which then provokes me to want to retaliate for it."

Larrick doesn't know for sure if his theory about retaliation is correct. All he has to go on is the numbers. "I don't actually have any, any idea if this resonates with the players themselves," he says.

"I think there could be something to that," says Billy Ripken, a former major league player who is now an analyst for MLB Network. He says as a batter, you rarely know whether a pitcher has hit you on purpose. "If you may be given a choice of saying, 'Was that an accident or was it not an accident?' and you're a little bit irritable, you might say, 'You know what? I don't care. I didn't like it.' "

And there's no question that for baseball players, the dog days of summer can be annoying. "When you're playing in Baltimore, New York, Atlanta in the middle of the summer, it's 95 degrees and 95 percent humidity, it's pretty miserable," says Ripken.

But Ripken's colleague at MLB Network, Dan Plesac, has another explanation for Larrick's data. Plesac was a major league pitcher for 17 years. He says it's a mistake to think that pitchers retaliate right away. Sometimes things happen early in the season against a particular team when, for whatever reason, you'd like to retaliate but can't.

"So you kinda put that in your file of, 'OK, the next time we play them there or they come to our place ... we're not going to forget what happened in April or May,' " says Plesac. And frequently, that second meeting is in the middle of the summer.

Is Plesac right? You don't hear this too often in sports stories, but the answer probably is that more research is needed.

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Pitchers are more likely to hit opposing batters when their players were hit earlier in the game.

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Depression increases risk of stroke, study says

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Four percent of the estimated 795,000 strokes that occur in the United States each year can be attributed to depression.Depression increased the risk of ischemic strokeDepression increases the risk of heart attacks (and especially fatal ones)People who are depressed are more likely to smoke or drink heavily

(Health.com) -- People with depression are more likely to have a stroke than their mentally healthy peers, and their strokes are more likely to be fatal, according to a new analysis published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Depression is a relatively minor risk factor for stroke compared to high blood pressure (hypertension) and other health conditions and behaviors that damage blood vessels, the researchers say. Still, their analysis suggests that as many as 4% of the estimated 795,000 strokes that occur in the United States each year can be attributed to depression.

"If you have depression but no other health issues, you probably don't have to pay too much attention to stroke risk," says An Pan, Ph.D., the lead author of the analysis and a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, in Boston. "But if you are depressed and are also obese, or have hypertension or...unhealthy lifestyle factors, your risk is going to increase dramatically."

Health.com: The 10 most depressing states in the U.S.

Pan and his colleagues combined data from 28 studies dating back to the mid-1990s that included about 318,000 people overall. Roughly 2.7% of the participants had a stroke during the studies, which ranged in length from two to 29 years.

Compared to those who showed no signs of depression, people who received a depression diagnosis from a doctor or who reported feeling depressed were 45% more likely to have a stroke and 55% more likely to die from a stroke, the researchers found.

Depression increased the risk of ischemic stroke, in which a blood vessel becomes blocked and cannot send blood to the brain. But it did not measurably raise the risk of the other major type, hemorrhagic stroke, in which a blood vessel leaks or bursts open.

Health.com: 12 signs of depression in men

The new study is the latest in a long line of research linking depression to chronic disease and serious physical health problems.

"We knew that depression raises a person's risk of developing diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease," Pan says. "We also knew that depression can occur after patients suffer a stroke. We just didn't have strong enough evidence to know if the reverse was true, or what really comes first."

Researchers have already established that depression increases the risk of heart attacks (and especially fatal ones), so it makes sense that depression would have a similar association with stroke, says Norman Rosenthal, M.D., a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, in Washington, D.C.

"Strokes and heart attacks both represent blood vessels becoming blocked and blood being withheld from a vital organ, whether it's the heart or the brain," says Rosenthal, who was not involved in the new study. "They're essentially the same disease."

Health.com: Careers with high rates of depression

Depression could contribute to strokes in many ways, Pan says. For starters, people who are depressed are more likely to smoke or drink heavily, to follow an unhealthy diet, and to neglect their personal health. Most of the studies included in the analysis controlled for these and other risk factors, but the data suggests that at least some of the stroke risk in depressed people can be explained by an unhealthy lifestyle.

There are other possibilities, as well, that aren't as easily measured. Depression can increase the production of stress hormones in the body, for instance, and can trigger dangerous inflammation in the blood vessels. "Little things, like keeping up good dental hygiene or socializing with friends, all affect inflammation levels -- and these are things that a depressed person is less likely to do," says Rosenthal.

Depression may also cause people to slack on taking medications needed to control other stroke-related conditions, such as diabetes or high blood pressure. On the other hand, some medications prescribed for depression -- most notably the class of drugs known as atypical antipsychotics -- have been shown to cause weight gain and obesity, a known risk factor for stroke.

More research is needed to determine whether depression drugs contribute to stroke risk. Doctors should monitor weight gain and blood pressure levels in patients taking these drugs, but there's no reason for patients to stop taking them, Pan says. "For now, physicians should prescribe medication if they think it is necessary, or if non-drug treatments haven't worked."

Although depression isn't the most important risk factor for stroke, the researchers say it likely has a noticeable impact on the stroke rate. They estimate that depression is responsible for an additional 106 strokes per 100,000 people in the United States each year.

Copyright Health Magazine 2010

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HEALTH MANAGEMENT. Lose a baby increases risk of early death for parents, mothers in particular

Losing a child during his/her first 12 months of life can considerably raise the parents' risk of dying early, researchers from the University of York, England and Stirling University, Scotland reported in BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care.
Dr Mairi Harper and team examined 5% of UK death registrations of parents who had lost a child aged 1 year or more, as well as parents who had lost a child aged less than 12 months. They were randomly selected from data from 1971 to 2006. Stillborn babies were included in the study
The data obtained from Scotland found that parents who lost a child under 12 months of age ran twice the risk of dying early or becoming widowed compared to parents who lost no children.
The impact of child bereavement was found to be greater on mothers, although fathers had a higher risk of early death too, the authors wrote.
In England and Wales, mothers who lost a child run four times the risk of dying within 15 years of the child's death, compared to other mothers. Even 25 years after the loss of a child, the risk of early death was 1.5 higher.
Dr. Harper said that "dying of a broken heart" does not only apply to the loss of a spouse or partner, it also happens to people who lose a young child.
The investigators had not had enough data to determine what impact, if any, suicides had on the figures. They believe bereavement may have a biological effect on the parents, such as undermining their immune system.
Dr. Harper said:

"Bereaved parents may also be more likely to use maladaptive coping strategies, such as alcohol misuse."

Harper explained that alcohol misuse may raise the risk of developing alcohol-related illnesses, or accidental injuries.
The authors added that perhaps some parents whose child is stillborn or dies early may themselves have poor health.
Dr. Harper said:

"It is imperative that cause of death be further investigated in order to establish the factors leading to increased mortality in bereaved parents."

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HEALTH MANAGEMENT. Increases death risk in African-American women with obesity and waist size

According to a new study led by researchers from the Slone Epidemiology Center at the Boston University higher overweight and obesity in African-American women, will increase the risk of death. Cause of death in women, moreover, was a larger waist size with a higher risk the not obese. The relationship between body size and risk of death was strongest for deaths from cardiovascular disease.
The study, published in the New England Journal of medicine, Deborah Boggs, ScD, a researcher at the Slone led.
Researchers assessed the relationship of body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference risk of death over a period of 13 years of follow up in the black women's health study, an ongoing study of 59,000 African-American women in the United States. The Auditors focused on 33.916 women who had never smoked and were free from cardiovascular disease and cancer at the beginning of the study.
The risk of death was 18 percent, for every 5 units increase in BMI and BMI most from cardiovascular disease death was connected. The risk of death from cardiovascular disease was two times higher for obese women (BMI 25-29) and three times higher for obese women (BMI of 30 or higher) compared with women with a healthy weight (BMI below 25). The researchers also found that a larger waist size increased risk of death among women is associated with, who were not obese been classified; A waist size was over 35 inches a 55 percent higher risk of death.
Whereas BMI is one good estimate of the total body fat, waist size is a measure of the distribution of body fat, particularly abdominal fat. Previous research suggests that belly fat is more metabolically active, plays a role in the development of insulin resistance and can be especially harmful for the long-term health. In those who are not obese may be waist size a better indicator of risk for many health consequences.
Earlier results found that risk of death with higher BMI in the white population increased, but the limited data available on African-Americans out, pointed, increasing risk of death only at a very high level of BMI.
"Today's results show that increases the risk of death in black women with increasing BMI of 25 or more similar to the pattern in the white people", said Boggs, main author of the study. "Our results emphasize the importance for women of a healthy weight, and keep additional inches from the waist in order to reduce the risk of death."

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