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A podcast by millennials, for millennials, covering health challenges unique to Gen Y. Get expert insights, practical patient advice, and inspiring survivor stories to help you make informed healthcare choices. Empower your journey with YMyHealth!
Melissa Schenkman (00:42)
Hey everyone, welcome to today's episode. It's Melissa, and I'm here to talk about something that's really near and dear to my heart, which is health, science, and medical research. It is something that I have been doing since I was a junior in college, and I ended up choosing a career path in which I've gotten to do a lot of that.
But I am really here today to help everyone, regardless of what career path you've chosen, whether or not it's been that you, the last time you were really involved academically with biology or chemistry was 20-something years ago when you took it in high school. Not to date how old some of us are these days, but or you're somebody who does this all the time in healthcare and explains things to patients, but have sometimes had trouble finding what you want for yourself or for your family. And I just want to empower all of you, whether you're in the business industry, the restaurant industry, the airline industry, any industry. If you're a fellow millennial of mine,
Let me tell you, you have the ability to go and do your own health research and find quality information, and you have a right to be able to find that. And I know it's really challenging right now, Julie and I were talking about this as we were thinking about putting this episode together, because there's a sea of misinformation out there, right? With Google, we're going to talk about that. But there's the finding, which we'll talk about a little bit, of really reliable information.
Accessing Journal Articles (02:05)
through Google and certain sources like that that are actually really dedicated to the lay public, but are written by people in public health, people in medicine. And then there's also accessing actual journal article type of research. They're the same journal articles that your doctors, your physician's assistants, your physical therapist are all accessing. And guess what? You have the ability to do that too. And even though you won't be able to understand the nitty gritty, right?
We all know that to their level, you're gonna be able to get a pretty basic understanding that you can bring these things to the table when you want to have a discussion with your healthcare provider. And that's extremely important because the reality is at some point, every single one of us is a patient. Every single one of us is looking up something that we want to know about our health with a particular symptom we're experiencing, whether it's something that is developing that's chronic or it's something that we're just going through acutely like everyone, a lot of us and as time went on even more had COVID, right? And we were just trying to learn about the different symptoms and wondering, is this what I have or do I have the flu or something else?
Also, the other really important thing to think about too, is so many of us now have found ourselves as we continue to get older in the millennial age spectrum and go into our 30s and then into our early 40s, that we have become caregivers either for young children or for our parents at different points or for other older relatives or all three. And there are times that people are experiencing different things and what do we do?
We want to go research it and help them in addition to getting them to the right healthcare provider. So, I want to make it easy for you. This is something that I love to do and it's an absolute joy to be able to share things that I've learned over the past amazingly two decades doing work here. I will tell you that when I first started out that many of you will appreciate if you've had challenges and it is challenging to find the information you're looking for and to understand some of the information.
I started out as a junior in college doing research for a research study. And at the time it was on a condition called Osgood-Schlatter, which a lot of people don't know about. has to do with pain and the growth plates as you're growing. And I couldn't have told you what was a good journal from a bad journal and a good study from a bad one. And so I know what it's like to start from that base of not knowing and be able to develop skill sets that really can give you some rules of the road.
Roadmap for Research and this Episode (04:22)
What I wanna do in this episode for each of you is kind of start with kind of a roadmap of about five or six different tools that I use when I'm determining whether or not the research I'm looking at is good or bad. It'll help you know what to look for when you're looking at different studies. Also, where in the world do even find these studies to begin with? So we're gonna start there. And then in the second half, I wanna show you a study that it's not a terrible study, but why it's not a great study.
And then two other studies that...just came out in January 2025 that I think are really interesting that you should know about and why they are both good studies. So to begin, let's start with where do even find these journal articles? So sure, you're going to look on Google, right? But particularly for actual journal articles, there are actual scientific research that haven't been written up in a lay article, like in the New York Times or even in your local newspaper, Time Magazine, things like that.
To find the actual journal article that they're featuring referring to, you want to go to PubMed, which is a humongous database from the National Library of Medicine. Every single researcher uses this and all of your doctors use this. I assure you to look up different things and see what the latest research is. There's also Google Scholar that helps you find journal articles as well. And you can type in and search for different health conditions, different things you're looking for.
Those are kind of my two go-tos to start of where I'm going to even find this research. And I will include all this in the show notes for you as well. So let's say you go into one of those, whether it be your PubMed or your Google Scholar, or just generally searching on Google and hoping for the best, right? To find these journal articles, but I would use those too as your databases. So what makes a good journal article?
What is it when you're seeing something, even if it's featured in like your time magazine and you go and you click on the link of the study. How do you know if this is a good study? So here are a couple of rules of the road. First of all, you want to look at the sample size. You'll look at the beginning of every study when you see the actual journal article, there's something called an abstract and it's basically a summary of the study that kind of gives you the Cliff Notes version, if you will. And instead of reading the whole study, of course, always, always encourage everybody to read the whole study because there's a lot more as you get further in. But…
Sample Size (06:36)
One of the things you're going to notice is there's something you'll see a letter N. And N stands for sample size. And that's the number of people that have been in the study. And so what do you really, when you're looking like what number is good versus right, what number is making it less credible?
So you really want to look for a study that has at least a hundred people in it because that provides more meaningful results. Now, that's not to say that studies of less than 100 people aren't meaningful, but the less people you have in a study, the less what we call generalizable the study results are. So that means like, let's say you have 20 people, right, versus 100 people, you're not gonna be able, whatever the results that are found in those 20 people, because it's such a small amount of people, maybe it's not a lot of like...
variety in who they are, men versus women, different ethnicities, different age groups. The results are gonna be very specific to a specific group. Whereas if you have 100 people, you're more likely to get more meaningful results, because you're gonna have more different types of people within that study, okay? And more likely that there'll be a larger amount of people who are more like you. And so the study that you're looking for, that way the results are more meaningful to you.
Also, I would make a note there, you're going to see out there and have heard about studies that are really reputable, that are sometimes reported on the news, different things that are really large studies, right? So we're talking thousands of people in a sample size. And those are really good beyond, let's say, this initial 100 that you want to see your in equal, because larger studies really provide stronger, more reliable results, provide a smaller margin of error with that many thousands of people involved, and you're going to have a greater variety.
Once we look at that number, you also wanna look at who's made up of that sample, who's in that sample. Is it women only? Is it men only? Is it both women and men? What's the percentage of people who are Caucasian versus Black versus Asian versus Hispanic? Is there a really large percentage of one group versus another? What about age group, right? Okay, we're millennials. The studies that are over 50…
Credibility and age groups in studies (08:44)
totally credible, totally important. We want to know what we're looking at in the future. But maybe you're looking for something that's more specific to young people, which I still consider all of us very young. So you would prefer maybe you notice in a study, there are people who are in their 20s versus people who are in their 40s experiencing something that you're interested in learning more about. looking at those ages is important.
genders and ethnicities, along with that sample size. The next thing is the year of publication. So when is this journal article you're reading about or CNN is cited? When was it published? Okay. It's really important to try and choose journal articles, whether you're seeing them someplace else featured, or you're actually going into PubMed or Google Scholar to find them. You wanna get them within five years. And the reason I say that, and I do that, have done that across the board in my professional work outside of Why My Health, is that you...
want to have the most up-to-date research, up-to-date research protocols. Things change over time. And so even though there are certain studies out there that are very, reliable, that go back 20 years, 30 years, that are considered like the gold standard, if you're doing research on something that is happening now, like with COVID, or you're looking for something, the latest information about
cancer, in particular with colorectal cancer. It's really helpful to have something that's been published within the last five years. It's a good range of time to go with and that's something I always look for when I'm looking at studies. Another thing is to find something that's in a peer-reviewed journal. So what is peer review? Peer review is a process by which when somebody applies to get their article published based on a scientific study, journals that are peer-reviewed have a group of scholars that are from the same background.
as the particular topic that the journal article is about and the scientists have applied for it. And so basically they take and they go through and analyze that article to make sure that it has really reliable info and that the research is of the level of quality that is needed to take before publication. So it's kind of like another step, another standard before getting published.
Impact Factor Score (11:06)
The other thing is something called the impact factor score. My last kind of roadmap tool here. This is something that is new that some people may not have heard of before. And what the impact factor score does is it really kind of gives you a sense of how credible a particular journal is.
So it gives you kind of like, like how often the average…on average, like a research article within that journal has been cited or used in other research within that year. And so this measurement of credibility that exists for journals, basically, they're numbers, and you can look up the name of the journal article and what its impact factor score is within Google and it will tell you. And a three is good, but you really want to get a 10 or greater impact factor score as a sign that
that that journal is a really reputable journal. So I also looked at impact factor score. One thing that I will say though about all of this, and I'm gonna show you this within the first study, is that when it comes to yoga and meditation and other kind of what I would say are cutting edge practices, right? They're not necessarily taking a medication, but lifestyle practices. There is not a ton of research in journals with very high impact factor scores that are super credible. And I don't think that that means those articles should be discredited. I know this is a particular area of interest to our age group, yoga, other ways of stress reduction like meditation, mindfulness, all these things, and kind of their interactions with health. I wouldn't discredit those, but I would just caution and say that because the research, a lot of it is so new and there isn't as much of it.
Yet, as there are in other things, you're not gonna tend to find those articles in these really reputable journals. So just kind of go with caution on that. And then actually one other thing to mention is the types of study. So there are lots of different types of studies and we can actually cover that if people are interested in another episode. But what I will say is the gold standard of all types of studies is something called the randomized control trial. And that's where you have people
Gold Standard of Research Studies (13:28)
in a study that are split into two different groups and one's randomly given one treatment and one's randomly not given the treatment essentially. And so that's kind of the gold standard. However, there are lots of different types of studies. There are studies that look at data from 30 years ago, different trends that are also very reputable and look to see what the outcomes were of people, know, different health conditions they got. There are things that we're going to talk about one today that's a prospective that look and predict what the future is going to look like based on health occurrences this time.
time goes on. So there are many different types, but that randomized controlled trial, if you see those words, that's the top of the line to consider.
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Melissa
Now I kind of want to take you through first a study that's like a so-so study, which happens to be on yoga using some of the criteria in the roadmap here. And then I also want to show you two super cool studies that came out in January of this year, the start of the new year. So first I want to take you with this yoga study. So this is, this is interesting. So when you look at this study,
it is called, the title is A Closer Look at Yoga Nidra Sleep Lab Protocol. So this study is basically looking at a certain type of yoga to see what its effect is on the amount of time it takes a person to fall asleep. And of course, we're all super interested in improving our sleep, goodness knows. So this would be a study that we might wanna look at. This was published in 2022, so relatively recent, but it was published in this journal called the International Journal…
Yoga Study (15:53)
of yoga therapy. Okay, sounds super legit, right? And certainly, sure it is. But I will tell you, when you look up the Impact Factor score, so remember we said Impact Factor 3 is good, greater than 10 is excellent in terms of journals credibility, the Impact Factor score for the International Journal of Yoga is a whopping .9. So put that in perspective, right? Far as things go.
But still, this is an interesting study, but that's one thing kind of knocked it. The next thing I would say is that when you look at the sample size of it, there were only 22 adults included in it. That's a pretty small sample size. And that's the kind of thing I'm talking about far as like yoga, meditation. The studies just aren't really for whatever reason, they just don't have a lot of people in them. They're not in very reputable journals. They get published and they're interesting, but how much weight those results hold and can be applied in your life?
not necessarily a ton, and something you necessarily can really 100 % go by, by any means. And so another thing in this study that is an issue is the type of study it is. So if you keep reading in the summary in the beginning, it talks about how it is actually a pilot study. Now, pilot studies are great. I conducted a couple of them in my life, but what pilot studies do is they test
protocol.
So they test, let's say, a set of survey questions and see how it works out with a small group of people to use that as a protocol for finding different things that you're testing for. so pilot studies are interesting in that way to see how that works out, but they can't necessarily be something that is applied to large groups of people, whatever the results may be. And sometimes, like in this yoga one, they're really just looking at the actual testing the protocol itself. They're not really saying like, this NIDRA works for, yoga NIDRA works for increasing your sleep. just that's kind of as you're looking and walking through different studies, something to think about.
Now two super cool studies that came out that I definitely took note of that I think everyone should know about, they came out in January. So the first one is in nature medicine. I will tell you right off the bat, if you ask anyone in research,
First New Study (18:12)
There are certain journals that are super credible. Nature Medicine is one of them. Others are like the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Journal of the American Heart Association, Lancet. Lancet has a whole series of publications. I highly recommend they have like Lancet Gastroenterology, Lancet Public Health, so all the different areas. So there's certain big names, big players that are really good to look at. And you know, like just before you even look at that article, the level of standard that it had to take to even get
published in that journal means you're definitely in the right place. This one is called Lifetime Risk and Projected Burden of Dementia. It was published in Nature Medicine in January. The idea, essentially what the study was trying to do was to learn what the lifetime risk of getting dementia is at certain ages. The goal was to see what that is and based on that, what that means moving forward.
When you look at this study, this was a perspective study. So it was looking at people, it looking at past data, and then it was looking at moving from say 2020 to 2060 predictions of the risk of getting dementia. And so when you look at this, you have a huge sample size. Your N is, which is sample size, N equals when you see that 15,043 to a lot of people. It included both men and women included both Caucasians and African Americans. It doesn't mention any other races or ethnicities, but that's a pretty large number. what they found is that, which is very disturbing but also very important to know, that starting at age 55, that there is a 42 % lifetime risk of dementia in US adults. They found this in this 15,000 US adult. When you hit 55, between 55 and 75, the risk…
gets smaller, it's 3.9%, but then it jumps huge after 75, higher in women with a 48 % risk, okay, starting in 75, and then also a higher lifetime risk in black adults versus white adults. Why is this important? Well, they concluded that the number of US adults who will develop dementia each year as of 2020 was...
Study on Dementia (20:36)
514,000, so like half a million people. This will jump to approximately a million people by 2060. And so knowing this information is important for health policy change, making sure obviously there's health equity in who is focused on for preventive measures. But also like think about it millennials, like for our own healthcare practices, this is extremely important to know that.
the prediction, the lifetime risk as you age really increases. And that means that now in your 20s, in your 30s, in your entire set of 40s, this is the time to do those preventive measures to prevent dementia. And this is outside of family history, okay? Of any relatives who have had this or any relatives who had Alzheimer's, this is just like in the general population. So I thought this was a really important study that came out and something for us to really think about and also just an exemplary study in terms of the types of things that I look for in terms of credibility of journal, number of people in the study, variety of people in the study. Of course, we always want to see more ethnicities. We want to see more in terms of races, ages, but still you have enough to kind of, in this case, to get a real sense of what the predictions are, which are really disturbing. The second one has to do with something that's environmental, which I thought was really interesting.
So this study also came in Nature, not in Nature Medicine, but this was in just regular Nature and in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, which is a division of Nature. The title of this is Associations Between, so I'm sure a lot of you have heard about this, the PFAs, really bad substances.
for the environment that are in the environment and county level cancer incidents between 2016 and 2021. And incident cancer burden attributable to PFAs in drinking water in the United States. Okay. A lot of us are really have the environment on our radar these days. This is pretty scary. There's been a lot of talk about PFAs, where they land, making sure that they're not into our environment. And here we are.
Study on PFAS (22:56)
And so when you look at this study and you go in, it talks about how exposure to PFAS has been linked with various cancers. And so they basically went in and they looked for cancers in the surveillance epidemiology and end results, or the acronym that you should look for, SEER, S-E-E-R, program, extremely, extremely credible and reliable with cancer data, collects cancer data around the country, cancer cases.
And so they basically compared this data and then looked at PFA levels in public drinking water systems. And let me tell you, they looked at them in a lot of drinking water systems, because I wondered as I started looking at this article and I said, okay, well, what did they look at, like one or two drinking water systems? no, they looked at, first of all, they had 22 cancer registries, okay, so which amounted…
for half the US population. So just wanna, as I'm seeing this, as I'm scrolling down here back at the study, 22 cancer registries in SERE. So that means they had data from people, cases of cancer in Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, New Mexico, Seattle, Utah. They mentioned Atlanta, Alaska natives, the rest of the state of Georgia, guess, California, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, Idaho, New York, and Texas.
That's a lot of places in the United States to have cancer data from and then to have pulled the water systems, which I want to get to here. And so it talked about looking at monitoring unregulated contaminants in the water system. And they looked at water systems that were serving more than 10,000 people in 800 representative areas. That's a lot of areas, right? And so you've got...
all this cancer data from half the country, you've got all this water system data, and they compared and what did they find. And so what they found, which is very important to know and obviously very concerning for us, know cancer is on the rise of millennials and it is very much on why my health's radar, my personal radar, and I know a lot of y'all's radar. So what this showed is that these PFAs,
Study on PFAS (25:1)
Okay, being in the drinking water, that they were associated with cancers in the oral cavity and pharynx, the lung, digestive system, the brain, the urinary system, soft tissue, and thyroid. But in this particular case, they were also noticing differences.
and gender in the associations between the PFAs and the cancer risk. And this particular study is the first ecological study that actually examined PFAs exposure in drinking water and various cancers, which is pretty incredible because it's 2025. But I think this is particularly important for us going forward. And as we move into 2025, knowing what we know and seeing how many cancers
cases continue to rise in millennials. So some interesting studies to think about. I hope that having some roles as you're trying to do your own research out there. So remember, just to recap, you want if you're looking at you're experiencing a particular symptom, family member has a particular health concern, you want to do your own research right before you go to the doctor so you can have a great educated discussion, make informed decisions for yourself, for your family member. Where do you start?
You want to go to PubMed or Google Scholar. You want to see in there, you can actually adjust in PubMed, also in Google Scholar, what years you want to look at. If you want to keep studies to United States only, which I highly recommend too, you want to keep it within five years. You want to look for journals that have high impact factor scores. You want to look at studies that when you're reading in that first paragraph, you see that there's at least a hundred people that were studied in that study. And then you want to see who was in that study, women, men.
what races, what ethnicities, and what age groups as you look at the results and see how they might apply to you. So I really appreciate everybody tuning in. I know research can sometimes not be quite as exciting, but I think it's a lot more exciting when you have the rules of the road of how to find quality information in today's crazy sea of misinformation. I will also say in terms of health media literacy here, there are also a lot of really awesome, credible
Lay Person Health Resources(27:38)
lay resources is what I call them, lay health resources. So outside the journals themselves, you don't want to get information that is in chat rooms, right? Or if you look a lot of times on Google, there's really unreliable type of stuff. instead, what you want to do is I would stick with places if you're looking for health information, including some patient stories, other than definitely going to the YMI Health website for sure. Do your research in Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, great places.
Any type of university-based place, so, Johns Hopkins, NYU, Great Health System, the Moffitt Cancer Center is great one, MD Anderson, of course, fires cancer. Those are places, and we have a few more on our website that I'll put in the show notes. That's where you want to use fires lay resources when you're Googling. If it comes up from Mayo, go with it, are the things that I'm saying. But when you want to actually look at those journal articles that your physicians are looking at, your physician's assistants, your nurses, your physical therapist, dentist, you gotta go to PubMed, you gotta go to Google Scholar, and you gotta use some of these rules to really help you sift through. It'll make it so much easier on you and it'll help you find what you're looking for. So I encourage everyone to do that.
And if you have any questions, we're gonna be having an episode totally dedicated to answering questions that our listeners have had since the start of the podcast. We'll be doing it at the end of March. And I would love to hear your questions about research. You can email us at ymyhealthpodcast@gmail.com. No question is too big or too small.