text:
The experience I want to tell you about has to do with a quandary I have often pondered: why I can't stand to read novels written since the early 1900s. Yes, it's about that again. If you are interested in reading, and what goes on when we read (okay, when I read), read on.
As our story begins, I was getting close to the end of Dickens. I had only three novels left to read: The Pickwick Papers (not a real novel), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (only part of a novel), and A Tale of Two Cities (read as a teenager and dimly remembered). I always reach a point in my reading of any novelist where I try to draw out the last few books to prolong the experience, and I had reached the drawing-out point for Dickens.
So I went to my bookshelves and began scanning for anything fictional I hadn't already read. I came across a book I had been given (all right all right! lent) by a co-worker a dozen years ago. I knew exactly why I hadn't read it: it was written in 1969. Nearly every time I've tried reading something written recently the attempt has been a disaster and I've gone running back the the "classics" where I apparently belong. But my Dickens needed thinning, so I pulled the book off the shelf and carried it into the bathtub.
The tissue-paper famine
The book I took off the shelf was Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City. As I expected, it explored fascinating topics, raised persuasive points, developed compelling plots. As I expected, I couldn't stand reading it.
Curious about why my co-worker had so strongly recommended this book, I looked it up on Wikipedia. The book is well respected and considered important. It has many fans. Its author won the Nobel Prize in Literature, for goodness' sake. Chastened, I returned to the book, resolved to continue reading in hopes that I would discover its latent wealth. A hint that the book would become post-apocalyptic at some point also helped me keep going. (Love me my end-of-the-world plots.)
The month dragged on. My baths got shorter and shorter. In the tub, I found myself holding the book and pretending to read it while my thoughts were actually wandering far away. I even found myself avoiding the bath entirely by making randomly generated excuses (the enormity of this aberration is difficult to express).
The fact was, reading The Four-Gated City felt like stuffing tissue paper into my mouth and trying to chew it. Nevertheless, I dragged myself through the entire book. The post-apocalyptic bit at the end was disappointingly brief, but even that part, though intellectually interesting, was physically unpleasant, even painful. Normally after I finish a good book I enter into what I call a "refractory period" of a few days where I take a break from reading to respectfully reflect on the wonderful ideas bouncing through my mind. After this book I didn't have a refactory period: I had a recovery period.
The feasting table
After licking my wounds for a few days I felt it was time to return to Dickens. One evening I carried A Tale of Two Cities into the bathtub and settled down. The first few pages ("It was the best of times") were not so much fiction as establishing preamble. But at the moment when I encountered the first description of events in the book:
He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the mail, as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the least relish for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the horses had three times already come to a stop, besides once drawing the coach across the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it back to Blackheath. Reins and whip and coachman and guard, however, in combination, had read that article of war which forbade a purpose otherwise strongly in favour of the argument, that some brute animals are endued with Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned to their duty.I tell you, people, I nearly burst into tears. I found myself hugging the book (briefly: wet). I was overcome with joy and gratitude. After a month of famine I found a feasting table set before me: succulent meat, thick deep gravy, vibrant vegetables, lush fruits, strong wine.
Why, if these novels were both so well respected, did one leave me feeling as if I was in prison, while the other freed me with joy? Were these both not stories? Were these both not good stories?
Curious, I asked myself as I read: What am I feeling, exactly? The first word that came to mind was euphoric, and the second was endorphins. With this in mind I watched myself read:
The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away from the beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs, like a marine ostrich. The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs, and brought the coast down, madly. The air among the houses was of so strong a piscatory flavour that one might have supposed sick fish went up to be dipped in it, as sick people went down to be dipped in the sea.All of a sudden it dawned on me. The difference was in the metaphors. Dickens' work, and the work of many authors of his time, is pumped full of metaphors. The Four-Gated City, and nearly every other recent work, has far fewer.
The tethered reader
After this thought about metaphors I re-read the passage about Dover while watching myself again. I noticed that I was doing what the words were doing. I ran my head into a chalk cliff and felt the white chalk rub off on my face. I tumbled wildly about, becoming the beach, the stones, the sea. I thundered at the town; I felt the thunder impact my house fronts and cliff faces. I dipped myself from the land into the sea and from the sea into the land.
This was exactly what I had stopped doing while I was reading The Four-Gated City. With one book I was running around doing what it said, and with the other I was just ... reading it.
I recalled a passage in The Four-Gated City that had particularly bothered me. It went like this:
Margaret was almost smiling: she was humouring Martha.
Who now stood up, confronting Margaret. Who stood up, ready to leave. The women were furious with each other.When I read that the women "were furious with each other" I threw the book out of the bathtub in frustration. This was similar to my "Philip was sad" book-throwing event while reading The Pillars of the Earth (which I wrote about here a while back). In both cases I felt immobilized, disabled, like a dog tied to a stake with nothing to do but gnaw its own feet.
Another example of a frustrating passage in The Four-Gated City sprung to mind:
This, particularly, was the room, which had become, in the last six months, her home. The moment of greatest pleasure in every day was waking in it, beneath the window, which framed the tree whose leaves she had seen stand in solid leaf, then thin, then fall. It was a sycamore tree.That sycamore tree reappeared several times throughout the book. That sycamore tree haunted me. I could not do anything with that sycamore tree. I could not touch it or climb it or become it. It was tantalizingly close, yet frustratingly unreachable.
Scope for the sensation
There, lying in the bathtub hugging Dickens and remembering Lessing, I felt I was finally starting to get an inkling of an answer to my decades-old why-these-books question. Maybe I need metaphor-rich writing because metaphors give me something to do when I read. Maybe reading Dickens feels euphoric because the activity of running around while reading feels more ... alive, somehow. Maybe the metaphors are somehow releasing endorphins in my brain, or making it feel more energetic, or ... something that feels good or right or worth doing.
Next I did what any reasonable person would do today: I jumped out of the bathtub and rushed to the computer. I typed into Google "metaphors endorphins."
The third result in the list was an article by Gretchen Reynolds in the New York Times called "Laughter as a Form of Exercise." I clicked to read it, probably more because it was from the Times than any other reason. I skimmed down the article, and this sentence caught my eye:
But laughter is fundamentally a physical action.That's exactly how I feel about reading, I thought. It's a physical action. It's more like sensation than thought. So I went back to Google and started typing in "metaphors sense." The word "sensory" came up in the auto-suggest thing, so I chose that. (Google usually knows better than I do what I mean.)
That query drew forth a whole slew of articles like this one reporting on recent research done at Emory University in Atlanta (which turns out to be only one part of a much larger research program finding out similar things). Rather than describe the research I'll just quote a bit from the linked ScienceNOW article.
The right turn of phrase can activate the brain's sensory centers, a new study suggests. Researchers have found that textural metaphors—phrases such as "soft-hearted"—turn on a part of the brain that's important to the sense of touch.Using functional MRI, the researchers found that:
The language-processing parts of volunteers' brains became active regardless of whether the volunteers listened to the literal sentences or the metaphors. But textural metaphors also activated the parietal operculum, a region of the brain involved in feeling different textures through touch. That part of the brain didn't light up when listening to a literal sentence expressing the same meaning as the metaphor.I am generally careful when reading accounts of neurological research. For one thing, this particular study was done on a grand total of seven college students, which is hardly a representative sample of humanity. Still, the fact that this sort of cross-linking could even be possible was exciting, because the idea of other parts of the brain "lighting up" connected perfectly with my feeling of "running around" while reading metaphorically rich texts (and sitting frustratingly still otherwise).
One more discovery spoke even more directly to my Dickens-Lessing problem. At the bottom of the first page of Google results for "metaphors sensory" I found a link to an article in the New York Times by Annie Murphy Paul, called "Your Brain on Fiction." That article takes the same metaphor-to-sensation neurological results and connects them to the experience of reading novels -- all novels.
Says Ms. Paul:
The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that "runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers." Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica.I agree that some fiction produces a vivid simulation of reality, but I'm going to have to disagree that all fiction does this for all people. Not all fiction is thick with metaphor. Only the kinds I like are. For the most part, only older fiction is written in this way. This is the crux of the issue.
Yanking books off the shelves
At this point I bounced out of the computer, excited to think that I might have finally found a reasonable explanation for my extreme difficulty reading fiction written in the 20th and 21st centuries. In the writing of nearly every author from time periods before the last century, the metaphors come fast and thick. To read Dickens or Eliot or Dostoyevsky or Hardy or Gaskell is to move among jostling crowds of metaphors.
But not crowds: more like organized workers moving hand in hand. Often the same metaphors reappear many times in the same book. Sometimes they reinforce each other, building web-like structures that support recurring themes. From A Tale of Two Cities:
It was a large, dark room, furnished in a funereal manner with black horsehair, and loaded with heavy dark tables. These had been oiled and oiled, until the two tall candles on the table in the middle of the room were gloomily reflected on every leaf; as if they were buried, in deep graves of black mahogany, and no light to speak of could be expected from them until they were dug out.This is the rented room of a young lady who believes her father to be long dead. The description of the room repeats the same funereal metaphor no fewer than ten times. The effect is like a deeply resounding bell calling out the name of death, death, death. This use of metaphor (which as I said was once too common to mention) goes far beyond simple connection and is better described as complex.
Metaphors can even extend their strands across the boundaries between books. If you have read much of Dickens you will remember his demonic personifications of the thick smoggy mists of London, and how they seem to drift malevolently from one book to the next.
To test this idea, I went to my bookshelves and started plucking out books I have loved reading and books I have dragged myself painfully through. Some contrasting examples follow.
Dostoyevsky's The Idiot.
Towards the end of November, during a thaw, at nine o'clock one morning, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg railway was approaching the latter city at full speed. The morning was so damp and misty that it was only with great difficulty that the day succeeded in breaking; and it was impossible to distinguish anything more than a few yards away from the carriage windows.When I first read this, I remember spending some minutes just holding the idea in my mind that the day might "succeed in breaking" only with great difficulty. I played with that metaphor as a child would with a ball.
One True Thing by Anna Quindlen. Excellent book, powerful emotions, strong characters, deep lessons. Very hard to drag myself through.
That January, when they delivered the hospital bed, leaving the den in disarray and the living room crowded with furniture, leaving a long scratch in the oak floor of the hallway because they were careless with a metal side rail, she didn't say anything. She just got in and turned on her side so that she was looking out the window, out the window that looked out on our driveway and the side of the house next door.Years after reading that book, the one thing that stands out in my mind is that hospital bed. But I remember it in the same way I remember Lessing's sycamore tree: as something seen from a distance, behind a transparent wall. Something I wanted to touch and explore but could not.
George Eliot's Silas Marner.
The questionable sound of Silas's loom, so unlike the natural cheerful trotting of the winnowing-machine, or the simpler rhythm of the flail, had a half-fearful fascination for the Raveloe boys, who would often leave off their nutting or birds'-nesting to peep in at the window of the stone cottage, counterbalancing a certain awe at the mysterious action of the loom, by a pleasant sense of scornful superiority, drawn from the mockery of its alternating noises, along with the bent, tread-mill attitude of the weaver.The cheerful trotting of the winnowing-machine, the questionable mockery of the loom. Throughout that novel early industrial machine are given characters that make them part of the action, not just scenery.
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett.
In a broad valley, at the foot of a sloping hillside, beside a clear bubbling stream, Tom was building a house.I can't say what you see in that passage, but I see a scene on a painting, or behind a window, inaccessible. I can't go there because I have not been given any way to touch what I see. What if the excerpt went like this:
The broad, capable back of the valley stretched powerfully up to the hillside, inviting Tom to leap astride. A stream like a shining rivulet of warm sweat flowed down its back. There, where the valley could support his weight best, he would build his house.Okay, I'm no novelist, we can all see that. But I can go to that sentence. I can leap onto and into that valley. I can feel its strength and safety. That's the kind of reading that feels like reading.
Not all the books I pulled off the shelves matched up perfectly with a simplistic pattern of old-rich new-poor. I found a few cases in which my forays into contemporary fiction have gone well. However, all of them were written by people known for their strong use of metaphor.
Toni Morrison's Beloved.
Out of the dimness of the room in which they sat, a white staircase climbed toward the blue-and-white wallpaper of the second floor. Paul D could see just the beginning of the paper; discreet flecks of yellow sprinkled among a blizzard of snowdrops all backed by blue. The luminous white of the railing and steps kept him glancing toward it. Every sense he had told him the air above the stairwell was charmed and very thin.I don't remember viewing that staircase from afar. I remember touching it, walking up and down it, breathing that "thin" air, climbing the wall myself as the staircase. That staircase is part of the story of Beloved (and part of my memory and experience of the story of Beloved) in a way Lessing's sycamore tree and Quindlen's hospital bed and Follett's valley are not.
Ursula K. Le Guin is a contemporary author whose every written word I have read. From The Dispossessed:
The large, calm room was shadowy and silent, darkening. Shevek looked around it, the perfect double arches of the windows, the faintly gleaming edges of the parquet floor, the strong, dim curve of the stone chimney, the paneled walls, admirable in their proportion. It was a beautiful and humane room. It was a very old room. ... I have been here a long time, the room said to Shevek, and I am still here. What are you doing here?I can do something with this kind of writing. Not only can I see and feel this room, I can speak to it, and I can become it. I can run around holding it.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
During that interminable night ... Colonel Aureliano Buendia scratched for many hours trying to break the hard shell of his solitude.Can you feel that shell? Looking at this makes me wonder if this is why I enjoy surrealistic writing so much (Borges, Calvino, Kundera, Kafka). If the whole story sits inside a metaphor the experience is even more physical: not just things to run around with, but also to run around in.
A question: Do you send yourself messages in song lyrics? Do you ever find yourself singing a song not because you heard it recently but because you are trying to tell yourself something? (Just say you do so we can move on.) The morning after all this happened -- the bath, the chalk in my face, the googling, the frantic book-yanking -- I was making coffee, and I realized I was singing the great Captain and Tennille song "Do That To Me One More Time."
A detailed examination of plausible causes
At this point in my explorations a burning question entered my mind: Why on earth did Doris Lessing win the Nobel Prize for Literature? This fact can only mean one of two things: (a) I am the only human being who knows what good writing is, or (b) people read in a variety of ways, and some of them are not how I read. The first of these we can discard out of hand.
This leaves us with the next question: Why do so many people today, unlike myself, find relatively metaphor-poor fiction readable, even enjoyable -- dare I say it, even preferable?
Rather then actually try to answer that question, I'll just pull out my trusty pocket nature-nurture. It's a bit worn but still quite serviceable. Hold on, this latch is tricky to open ...
Perhaps there is natural genetic variation in the extent to which reading metaphors activates sensory parts of the brain. The study I mentioned above only included seven people. Probably there is much larger variation to be found in larger samples. Maybe I happen to be on the tail end of the distribution where metaphorical-sensory activation is so strong that reading metaphor-poor writing becomes painful. If this is true, many more people should inhabit the middle of the distribution, and some will be found on the other side, where metaphors are words and nothing more. Maybe to the majority of people, Lessing's sycamore tree is not blocked off because Dickens' tumbling rocks don't tumble. A thing can only be blocked if there is some reason to want to go to it.
Or, perhaps the activation of sensory perception in response to metaphorical exposure is an acquired condition. I do read more than most people I know, obsessively so, and I started this bad habit at an early age. (Fond memory: the careful provision, on a winter's day, of the couch nearest the fireplace with a pile of books, a bag of pretzels or peanuts, and a jug of water, so that I need not budge from the spot for the entire day.)
My memory of childhood reading is insufficiently detailed to reveal whether I "ran around" while reading back then, so I can't say whether my preference for metaphor increased with time. But I do remember two things: that around the age of twelve I went through a Greek and Roman period in which I read all the ancient stories I could find (more on that later); and that for a long time my favorite author was Ray Bradbury. Here's a quote I just found from an interview with that great man:
"I have an ant farm in my head," he says. "Metaphors and ideas crawling all over each other."
"I was born a collector of metaphors," he says. "Metaphors are the center of life."So that answers that.
By the nurture explanation, what I read defined for me what reading ought to feel like, which defined what I would enjoy reading, which defined what I read. In other words, maybe I "run around" while reading fiction because I have spent so much time doing that. Maybe people who have not spent as much time reading run-around types of fiction don't miss it when it doesn't happen.
Where have all the metaphors gone?
How would each of these two positions explain the general decrease in metaphorical density between classic and contemporary novels? I don't think it's necessary to prove that there has been a decrease; anybody can find this out for themselves given five minutes in a library. With exceptions, of course, the overall trend has been monotonically downward.
The genetic-variation explanation provides the simpler story. By this interpretation, when Dickens wrote novels far fewer people read or wrote than today. Maybe at that time a small subset of writers wrote for a small subset of readers, and they all shared similar cognitive proclivities, because paying attention to prose was self-selecting. It was sort of like the early internet: because it was bare-bones technical, only the technical got involved with it. But today the reading and writing of novels has spread out to encompass the entire spectrum of cognitive styles. People with all ranges of natural tendency to connect metaphor with sensation (or not) are involved in both the reading and the writing. So a book that leaves someone like me trapped in sensory deprivation can still thrive in the marketplace of ideas.
If true, this can only be a good thing. In the same way that the internet more closely resembles humanity than it did in its early years, novels today more closely resemble the diversity of human reading styles than they did in their early years. I like this explanation because it does not mean anybody's reading apparatus is broken, yours or mine; it just means we are all different. And we already knew that.
The acquired-condition explanation provides its own story of the sea change in metaphorical density. This interpretation points out that the very first novel-length stories were not told by novelists. They were told by bards who kept their stories in their heads. It is reasonable to assume that this faculty depended in part on the use of sensory metaphors as mnemonic devices. So maybe the first novels carried the heavy use of metaphor over from ancient oral traditions.
Certainly if you read anything written "by" Homer you can see how strongly metaphor was used in those times. Here is a bit from the Oddysey in which I count anywhere from four to six sensory metaphors:
No sooner had I reach'd my ship besideIf metaphors in fiction are a historical remnant, it would make sense that the further we get from orality the less fiction will carry metaphors with it as a matter of necessity. At some point metaphorical density becomes a matter of style, not of utility. This seems to match the variety of forms we see in today's writing.
The ocean, and we all had supp'd, than night
From heav'n fell on us, and, at ease reposed
Along the margin of the sea, we slept.
But when Aurora, daughter of the dawn,
Look'd rosy forth, drawing our galleys down
Into the sacred Deep, we rear'd again
The mast, unfurl'd the sail, and to our seats
On board returning, thresh'd the foamy flood.
Concrete actions for the betterment of society
If people vary genetically in how strongly metaphors activate sensory regions of their brains, and if nothing can be done to change this, a certain set of actions and expectations will be called for in the fictional future (all futures are fictional, as are all pasts). The issue will become a matter of deep and abiding respect for metaphorical diversity.
To begin with, all locations on the Fictional Metaphoric-Sensory Activation Spectrum (FMSAS) will be treated with respect and equal rights before society. As a start, any official fiction prize award committee, or faculty of a literature or creative writing department, or literature curriculum, will be populated with verifiable, accountable diversity on the FMSAS.
Laws will be passed prohibiting discrimination against readers or writers of any persuasion, no matter how many or how few metaphors they prefer. The era of mistaken-yet-well-meant creative-writing advice such as "use metaphors sparingly" will end, though probably only as the prejudiced generations pass away. The mixing of metaphors will most likely continue to be seen as anathema for some time, but even this practice may someday find acceptance in a more enlightened society. Metaphor lovers may someday feel perfectly free to admit their proclivities in public without fear of blame or isolation.
Finally, both readers and writers will someday be encouraged not to beat their heads against the walls of their disinclinations but to follow their bliss(es?), metaphorically speaking. I foresee a world abounding with FMSAS tests, both self-administered and, for the more serious or encumbered with excess cash, fMRI based. People will test their dates; parents will have their children evaluated; workgroups will participate in combined Myers-Briggs-FMSAS workshops to improve collective productivity. The age of respect for metaphorical diversity will arrive in bounteous waves of mutual admiration (or, if you are at the other end of the FMSAS, in bounteous mutual admiration without the waves).
On the other hand, if the linking of metaphor with sensory activation is an acquired characteristic dependent on activity, everything can and should and will be done to shape the reading experience so as to expose all citizens to the widest range of metaphorical experience.
Someday, no intellectual thinker will be able to hold up their large, brain-filled head if they cannot demonstrate a superior facility at leaping nimbly from one end of the FMSAS to the other, and to all points in between. As we now speak of singers with perfect pitch, someday we will count among our heroes those with perfect metaphorical-sensory activation control. Prize award committees, faculties and curricula will be populated with the activities of these gifted individuals.
Training in the understanding and appreciation of literature, and in the writing of creative works, will include extensive exposure to varieties of metaphorical density. Flexibility immersion courses will be popular. In these, participants will be voluntarily confined in successive rooms filled with alternating courses of metaphor-rich and metaphor-free prose. Sophisticated medical devices will record stress levels, and participants will refuse to leave their "spectrum rooms" until they have succeeded in attaining their target equanimity matrices. For those less willing to undergo such rigors, metaphorical density coaches are likely to appear, aiding the stumbling as they advance their neglected skills.
There is a role for government in this scenario as well. No opportunity to educate the public in metaphorical flexibility will be ignored. All public signs and announcements will be posted in metaphorical and "plain speaking" forms. Even candidates, parties and referenda on voting ballots will be described both metaphorically ("Should roads be paved by the angels of solitude?") and directly ("Should road crews be composed of at least two members?"). All of this important and necessary work will contribute to the creation of an educated citizenry able to converse in all forms of prose.
It must be noted, if reluctantly, that in the first generation of this reform movement, some poor souls whose early years were spent squandering their potential in reading only one style of writing will need the help of a safety net. We can expect them to rely on remedial aid in the form of government vouchers for private counseling. Sadly, we suspect that few scholars will be willing to help these people, since the early damage to their potential flexibility may be irreparable (though everyone will be at pains to avoid stating the obvious). It goes without saying that those quixotic individuals who do attempt to help the metaphorically inflexible will be ridiculed as windmill-tilters (though their pupils may or may not follow the allusion).
However, leaving the relatively few misfits aside, the greater population in years to come will experience heights of reading enjoyment new to literary history. Never again will any middle-aged woman lie in her bathtub suffering at the hands of an award-winning yet frustratingly unreadable book. No, no. All books will be readable! All readers will be capable! In short, every free human being will enjoy every book ever written and ever to be written. This is the future we can foresee. This is the future we can create.
Or, the situation may have arisen from a combination of nature and nurture intertwined and inseparable. In which case we should just ignore the whole thing and go about our business.
That's what I plan to do.


text:
PET effectively detects dementia, decade of research shows
- Date:
- January 9, 2012
- Source:
- Society of Nuclear Medicine
- Summary:
- Scientists find that a method of positron emission tomography safely and accurately detects dementia, including the most common and devastating form among the elderly, Alzheimer's disease.
- Share:
In a new review of imaging studies spanning more than ten years, scientists find that a method of positron emission tomography (PET)safely and accurately detects dementia, including the most common and devastating form among the elderly, Alzheimer's disease. This research is featured in the January issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine.
Researchers reviewed numerous PET studies to evaluate a molecular imaging technique that combines PET, which provides functional images of biological processes, with an injected biomarker called 18F-FDG to pinpoint key areas of metabolic decline in the brain indicating dementia. Having physiological evidence of neurodegenerative disease by imaging patients with PET could give clinicians the information they need to make more accurate diagnoses earlier than ever before.
"The new data support the role of 18F-FDG PET as an effective addition to other diagnostic methods used to assess patients with symptoms of dementia," says Nicolaas Bohnen, MD, PhD, lead author of the study and professor of radiology and neurology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich. "The review also identified new literature showing the benefit of this imaging technique for not only helping to diagnose dementia but also for improving physician confidence when diagnosing a patient with dementia. This process can be difficult for physicians, especially when evaluating younger patients or those who have subtle signs of disease."
Dementia is not a specific illness but a pattern of symptoms characterized by a loss of cognitive ability. These disorders can be caused by injury or progressive disease affecting areas of the brain that control attention, memory, language and mobility. While Alzheimer's is most commonly associated with progressive memory impairment, dementia with Lewy bodies, another form of the disease, can be associated with symptoms of Parkinson's and prominent hallucinations, while another disorder, called frontotemporal dementia, can be seen in patients showing uncharacteristic personality changes and difficulties in relating and communicating. Physicians can use FDG-PET with high accuracy to not only help diagnose dementia but also differentiate between the individual disorders. The role molecular imaging plays in the diagnosis of dementia has expanded enough that the official criteria physicians use to diagnose patients now includes evidence from molecular imaging studies.
"For the first time, imaging biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease are included in the newly revised clinical diagnostic criteria for the disease," says Bohnen. "This is a major shift in disease definition, as previously an Alzheimer's diagnosis was based mainly on a process of evaluating patients to exclude possible trauma, hemorrhage, tumor or metabolic disorder. Now it is becoming a process of inclusion based on biomarker evidence from molecular imaging."
The PET biomarker 18F-FDG comprises a radionuclide combined with fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG), which mimics glucose in the body. Cells metabolize FDG as fuel, and the variation in this uptake by cells throughout the body can then be imaged to detect a range of abnormalities. In the case of dementia, marked reductions in the metabolism of different lobes of the cerebral cortex can confirm a patient's disorder. Physicians can tell Alzheimer's disease apart from other dementias, depending on the specific cortices affected.
This review presents the most up-to-date and salient evidence of FDG-PET's usefulness for the evaluation of patients with suspected dementia. The objective of the study was to replace prior retrospective reviews that were performed as the technique was just emerging and that suggested methodological improvements. The new review includes studies with better methodology, including confirmation of diagnoses with autopsy, more expansive recruitment of subjects and use of multi-center studies. After reviewing 11 studies that occurred since the year 2000 and that met more stringent study review standards, researchers conclude that 18F-FDG is highly effective for detecting the presence and type of dementia.
"Using 18F-FDG PET in the evaluation of patients with dementia can improve diagnostic accuracy and lead to earlier treatment and better patient care," says Bohnen. "The earlier we make a diagnosis, the more we can alleviate uncertainty and suffering for patients and their families."
The biomarker 18F-FDG is among a variety of imaging agents being investigated for its efficacy in Alzheimer's imaging. As treatments for dementia become available for clinical use, PET will no doubt play an important role in not only the diagnosis of these diseases, but also the assessment and monitoring of future therapies.
According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 18 million people worldwide are currently living with Alzheimer disease. That number is projected to almost double by 2025.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Society of Nuclear Medicine. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
- N. I. Bohnen, D. S. W. Djang, K. Herholz, Y. Anzai, S. Minoshima. Effectiveness and Safety of 18F-FDG PET in the Evaluation of Dementia: A Review of the Recent Literature. Journal of Nuclear Medicine, 2011; 53 (1): 59 DOI: 10.2967/jnumed.111.096578
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
Despite Tests, High Blood Pressure Hard to Recognize in Children
A Johns Hopkins Children's Center study of 2,500 patient records suggests that medical staff fails to check a child's blood pressure a fifth of the time, and is not recognizing what constitutes an abnormal reading in those whose blood pressure they do check.
Researchers at Hopkins Children's say the consequences are that pediatricians and nurses may be missing the development of hypertension and its serious consequences, even when they do take blood pressure measurements.
The American Academy of Pediatrics' (AAP) guidelines call for regular blood pressure checks in children 3 years and older to screen for elevated blood pressure, and say elevated blood pressure on three consecutive medical visits qualifies as hypertension. Even a single episode of high blood pressure can indicate hypertension and should trigger repeat measurements during the visit and subsequent doctor visits, the AAP says.
The problem is that measuring a child's blood pressure is far more complicated than it is in adults and requires interpreting each individual measure against a reference table for age, gender and height, says lead investigator Tammy Brady, M.D., M.H.S., a nephrologist at Hopkins Children's.
The researchers analyzed 2,500 records of visits to the pediatrician's office. Medical staff did not check blood pressure in 500 of the cases.
Elevated blood pressure scores were recorded in 726 cases of the 2,000 measurements taken, but the implications went unrecognized and unremarked upon in 87 percent of them, the study found.
The findings, to be published in June's Pediatrics and appearing online May 3, underscore the need for better recognition and aggressive monitoring of all children to prevent both the short-term and long-term complications of hypertension, the investigators say.
The study found that medical staff was more likely to miss elevated blood pressures in children of normal weight and in those without a family history of cardiovascular disease. The same was true for those children whose blood pressure was at or below 120/80, a score considered ideal in adults, but one that may portend trouble in a child, depending on height, gender and age.
Blood pressure parameters in adults are clearly defined, but the complicated arithmetic involved in children's blood pressure may be one of the greatest barriers to recognizing a child's elevated pressure, the investigators say.
Brady says more education and automated systems that alert the medical staff if a child's blood pressure is out of range can help. Hopkins Children's is currently testing one such alert system and will soon publish data on its effectiveness.
Hypertension, defined as persistently elevated blood pressure, can cause kidney, eye and heart damage, but while some complications take years and decades to develop, certain ones evolve quickly, the researchers say. A dangerous thickening of the heart muscle called left-ventricular hypertrophy can develop in a matter of months in children with untreated hypertension, but is reversible with early treatment.
Because high blood pressure rarely causes symptoms, medical staff may overlook a child who has no traditional risk factors, such as obesity or family history, the researchers say. Half of the children in the study with elevated blood pressure were normal weight.
"Nurses and doctors may be so falsely reassured by a child's lack of symptoms and risk factors that they either miss milder elevations or may chalk them up to measurement error and never follow up on them," Brady says.
In the study, covering children ages 3 to 20 visiting a primary care pediatric clinic at Johns Hopkins, high blood pressure was discovered in six percent of healthy-weight children and in 20 percent of overweight and obese children. Even though medical staff was more attentive to elevated blood pressure among overweight and obese children, high blood pressure was still missed in four out five of them. Children with scores below 120/80 were nearly eight times more likely to have their high blood pressure missed than children with blood pressure above 120/80. Children without a family history of cardiovascular disease were twice as likely to have their high blood pressure unrecognized as those with family history.
The research was funded by the American Kidney Fund, the National Kidney Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
Co-investigators include Barry Solomon, M.D., M.P.H., Alicia Neu, M.D., George Siberry, M.D., M.P.H., and Rulan Parekh, M.D., M.S., of the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto.
Founded in 1912 as the children's hospital of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, the Johns Hopkins Children's Center offers one of the most comprehensive pediatric medical programs in the country, treating more than 90,000 children each year. Hopkins Children's is consistently ranked among the top children's hospitals in the nation. Hopkins Children's is Maryland's largest children's hospital and the only state-designated Trauma Service and Burn Unit for pediatric patients. It has recognized Centers of Excellence in 20 pediatric subspecialties, including allergy, cardiology, transplant, neurology, neurosurgery, cystic fibrosis, pulmonary, nephrology, gastroenterology and oncology.
Source: Johns Hopkins Medicine


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DimensionsThe finished card is 5 x 8.2 x 4.2" when standing. When folded flat, it's 6.5 x
TrailerCompatibilityAny cutting machine software that allows you to import SVG files, such as Sure Cuts a Lot ("SCAL"), eCAL, Make the Cut, Silhouette Studio Designer Edition and Cricut Design Space. This Kit contains pieces that are too large for 12x6 and 8.5 x 11 mats. Alternative "solid" score lines included, as well as each project saved as a single file and all shapes "separated." Assembly TutorialPaper Collection | Supplies
Solid paper shown is all AC Cardstock by American Crafts (about 80 lb). Patterned paper shown is all 12x12 sheets from the Nightfall paper collection by Authentique Paper. For adhesive, I used Scotch Quick Dry adhesive and Scrapbook Adhesives thin foam dots for dimension. Please Choose:DownloadThis product was added to our catalog on Friday 19 October, 2018. Our Customers Also Liked... |


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Pacifika by Jan Lewis
I'm an ex-Londoner living on a beautiful island in the Hauraki Gulf off the coast of Auckland in New Zealand. I've always loved art and drawing, and have worked in many mediums before getting 'hooked on' fabric art. I started recycling used clothing to make my wallhangings many years ago, mainly because of the waste I saw with manmade fabrics being dumped in the landfill, a concern when you live on an island where we have to take care of our own waste. So I began hooking rag rugs with the backs of old denim jeans which never seem to wear out, unlike the fronts... Some people certainly do use my work as rugs, in low traffic areas, but I mainly hook them as wallhangings - acrylics, polyesters and other manmade fabrics aren't quite as resilient on floors as wool & tend to attract dirt, and each item comprises a huge mixture of different types of fabric. Although I do hook variations on similar designs, each piece is totally unique and different because it depends on the fabrics I find. I never buy new materials, the whole purpose is to use clothes which are no longer wearable. I've done many commissions and projects, sometimes using plastic bags, wire, paper and card to demonstrate how flexible the medium is, and my work is all over the globe. Somewhere in Nigeria, there's a brightly coloured nikau palm on the wall of a conservation centre... I've had a variety of 'careers' but never - ever - tire of this one. It continues to be inspiring and ever-changing and with a head full of designs yet to create, I plan to live a very long time! | |||||||||||


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Querida Sevilla mía,
You know that age-old, "It's not you, it's me"? Well, it's not me. Eres tú. We've reached the end of a nine-year relationship, one marked with uncertainty at the beginning, with as much elation as frustration in the years since we became intimate. And más pronto que tarde, I knew we'd end up here.
Te estoy dejando.
My friend Stacy maintains that the first Spaniard you fall for is never the one you stay with – it's always the second. If Spanish lovers were cities, you'd be my second great love, my second Spaniard. Two years before we got to know each other, Valladolid entered my life. Stately and daunting, but a romance that was always a little off. Castilla y León's capital never did it for me, a bit too cold and a bit too stand-offish to be anything long-term. Neither the castles nor the robust red wine could woo me, but it was a foray into what it meant to truly love a city.
You and I met on a sweltering July day in 2005, your characteristic heat baking midday as I dragged a suitcase towards Calle Gravina. Back then, the Alameda was all albero, you could drive down Constitution and around the roundabout at Puerta Jerez and there was a noticeable lack of skyscrapers, gastrobars and coffee houses. On the surface, you were beautiful, but I pined for Valladolid, not entirely convinced you were boyfriend material.
Two years later, we were thrust together again. Still sore from being flat-out rejected by Granada, I set out to try and get to know you on a Sunday evening in late September when everything was shuttered. Walking down Pagés del Coro, I craned my neck to watch the swallows dip between the balconies and around the spire of La Estrella chapel.
Swallows, golondrinas, always return to where they're from. Even at that moment, exhausted from two weeks traveling and unsure about starting my job the next morning at IES Heliche, I knew I had returned to where I was to be from. In those tender first steps in our relationship, I was smitten. I would soon fall deeply in love with you.
But today, nine years later, I ripped the band aid off, and HARD. I just up and left it seems, without time for long goodbyes at all of the places I've come to haunt in these years together, to the hundreds of caras I've come to know in the barrio. No ugly cries, just a few tears pricking my eyes as I locked up my house, rolled one suitcase to the bus stop and headed towards Santa Justa and, later, Madrid.
Like I said, it's you, not me.
I guess you could say I saw this coming, like that little ball that sits low in your stomach when you know life is going to darte un giro in a big, big way. I needed that giro because you'd simply gotten too easy. I can understand even the oldest abuelo buried deep into one of your old man bars but can no longer get lost in your tangle of streets. You are a comfortable lover, warm and welcoming, familiar and comforting.
But I'm not one to be estancada, stagnant, comfortable. Walking down La Castellana in March, the ball in my stomach dissipated as I skipped from a job interview back towards Atocha. The trees were bare, but the sky was the same bright blue that always welcomes me in Seville. As they say, de Madrid al cielo. Madrid was calling.
Sevilla, you've been more than good to me, giving me just about everything I've ever needed. You're easy on the eyes, fiery and passionate, deeply sensual and surprising. You've shown me the Spain I always wanted to find, even between castles and tintos de Ribera del Duero and my first impression of Spain. You've reignited my love for culture, for making strangers my friends, for morning beers and for living in the moment. You changed me for the better.
And you will always be that second great love, te lo prometo. Triana will always be my home.
But you've just gotten too small. My dreams and ambitions are too big for your pueblo feel, as much as I've come to love it. Your aesthetic beauty continues to enchant me as I ride my bike past the cathedral at twilight or I leave extranjería and am not even mad that my least favorite place in Seville is also one of my favorites. Your manjares are no match for the sleek pubs and international food in Madrid, which I know I'll grow tired of.
I admit that it was difficult to reach your core, to understand the way you are and learn to appreciate those nuances. At the beginning, it was all new and fun and boisterous, the out-loud way that you live each day, those directionless afternoons and long, raucous nights. Lunches that stretch into breakfast. Balmy evenings, Cruzcampo in hand. Festival after procession after traffic jam. Unforgettable sunsets. Unannounced rain showers. Biting cold and scalding heat. You are a city of extremes and mood swings, for sure, but you're at your best that way. You are as passionate as they say you are.
Still, there were frustrations with the language, that lazy way that you "forget" letters and entire syllables. Frustrations with getting around and untangling the back alleys of your deepest barrios. Frustrations navigating the choque between our two cultures and figuring out a way to make it work for nearly a decade. There was a lot of give and take, that's for sure.
And that's not to say you haven't changed for the better in these nine years together.
You're more guiri-friendly, easier to get around and constantly coming up with ways to reinvent yourself without losing what makes you, tú. Even when I rolled by eyes at the Setas, I found the best views from its waffle-like towers. You always find a way to stay true to yourself, even if that means having to take the long way home when the streets are choked with a procession or if I call the Ayuntamiento and they send my call from office to office without ever getting through to an actual human.
But those same things that I once loved have become annoyances as we've gotten more comfortable with one another. Some of it is trivial, lo sé, but in the bigger scheme of things, we need time apart. Room to breathe, to try new things. I can't get everything I need from you right now, Seville, y ya está. I know the decision was quick and may have its repercussions, but it's what I have to do right now if we ever want a chance again.
Madrid presents so many new possibilities. I scoffed at the idea of living there and opening myself up to loving it, but it will never be you. In fact, I think it will be like Valladolid, a tough nut to crack and one whose true character I may never know the way that I know you.
I'll look for you in the bares de viejos, in a sevillano passing by wearing a Betis t-shirt, in the way that the Madrid gatos will laugh at my accent or look puzzled when I ask for a copistería or a cervecita. You'll probably follow me around, to be honest. You were never one to let go lightly.
This morning, as I drove over the San Telmo bridge towards Triana, the swallows returned. It was already a warm July morning, maybe even eleven years to the day since I first felt the breeze over the Guadalquivir. Eres un amor para toda la vida, Sevilla. Maybe in three or five years' time, we'll find ourselves back together, a bit more mature and ready for a new stage in our relationship. You'll have changed, I have no doubt, and so will I.
But if the golondrinas are any indication, volveré. It's the natural course.
Con todo mi cariño,
Wondering about my absence the past two months? I've been back and forth on the AVE, making trips to Madrid for job interviews, spending time alone with Sevilla and even squeezed in a ten-day trip to the US for my sister's wedding. On July 3rd, 2016 – coincidentally the same day I applied for my visa for Spain in 2007 – the Novio and I officially moved to Madrid. I'll start a job in a few weeks as an admissions counselor at a prestigious American university with a campus in the heart of La Capi. Adiós, teaching – never thought I'd see the day!!
Will I like Madrid? I'm positive I will. Will I love it? Not in the same way that I love Seville, but the Novio and I have big plans for the next few years, and Seville was simply too small for our career ambitions. I'm not entirely sure how the scope of Sunshine and Siestas, a blog that has largely been about Andalucía, will change, but you can count on my voice coming through!
I'm curious to hear your reactions to the news, which I've managed to keep surprisingly quiet! Not even sure I believe it myself!


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Why should burly bikes have all the fun? We asked that question when we released our first 27.2 dropper post. The Pine continues the tradition of bringing great, reliable dropper posts to bikes with skinnier tubes, whether it be your classic hardtail, XC bike, gravel grinder or cyclocross rig.
All-new versions of the Pine now come with the option of 90 and 110mm of travel. This accommodates more bikes and helps you win the battle against getting bucked forward by your seat on steep and techy terrain. And while extra travel is always a great perk, we think the best addition to the new models is a slick 1-piece alloy stanchion, which drops a whopping 100g of weight from the older models.
To keep descending even more distraction free, the Pine features external routing at the midcap rather than the post head, allowing you to keep your cable routing nice and tidy.
- Travel: 90mm or 110mm
- Post Diameter: 27.2mm
- Weights: 90mm - 490g, 110mm - 530g
- Infinite Adjust: So you can pick from multiple positions
- 1-piece alloy stanchion (no more press-on head)
- External cable routing with fixed cable entry at the mid cap
- Lever sold separately
- 3-year warranty!
A dropper seatpost allows you to quickly lower and raise your seat to give you an ideal riding position. Dropping your seat creates a lower center of gravity for better control and maneuverability on steep descents, while raising it puts you at normal riding height for efficient pedaling.
Construction can include either hydraulic- or cable-actuated systems and the post's travel can either be infinitely adjustable or stopped at set intervals, depending on the model.
Dropper seatposts come in standard lengths and diameters and vary by the amount of travel.
Part Numbers
Option | UPC | MPN | Store SKU |
Black / 27.2mm / 400mm / 0mm / 110mm | 850005672906 | PDP272110V3 | 210000018252 |
Black / 27.2mm / 350mm / 0mm / 90mm | 850005672913 | PDP27290V3 | 210000015434 |


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Type of care
About the offer
What's included
Medical service
- clinical history-taking
- medical records review
- physical examination
- consultation with a neurosurgeon
Laboratory tests
- complete blood count (CBC)
- biochemical analysis of blood (kidney and liver function tests, electrolytes, lipid panel)
- inflammation blood tests
- coagulation studies
- neurological examination
- CTA angiography of the head
- cost of essential materials
- nursing service
- discharge medical records
- further recommendations
AiroMedical support
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Customize this offer
If you're not seeing exactly what you need here, send your custom request. You can discuss the content, specifics, price & timeline to create a personalized plan.
How long does the offer take?
The offer is designed for 5 days.
Does the offer require you to stay in the clinic overnight?
No, Brain aneurysm diagnosis is an outpatient deal.
Where can I see the media files?
AiroMedical gallery has 1 photo related to Brain aneurysm diagnosis.


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Puppy ID: #064
Breed: Pomeranian
Sex: Female
Date of Birth: 01/02/24
Estimated Adult Size: Toy
Price: $4,495 $2,495
Status: Available
Pomeranian Puppies South Florida
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Welcome to Jigsaw +10K / +2K / +0.5K
Jisgaw +10K is a Jigsaw puzzle game for Android (Amazon Appstore), iPad, iPhone & iPod touch that breaks the 1000 pieces barrier of this kind of games, offering a challenge with more than 10000 pieces (11926 in the current version)
Jisgaw +2K is 10k's little brother, with only 2000 pieces and is available for iPhone, iPad & iPod Touch and Android (Amazon AppStore)
Jisgaw +0.5K is the free version, with ads. It includes all the functionality and over 500 pieces for each puzzle. It is available for iPhone, iPod and iPad & Android (Amazon AppStore)
The main features are:
- To help with the challenge, you can use virtual boards to separate your pieces in colors, shape or whatever criteria you decide. You can have as many as you need
- Organize your virtual boards in the layout you prefer
- Identify them by name or color
- Rotate and move pieces with simple gestures
- Move an Zoom each virtual board independently
- Move pieces in area
- Contextual menu (tap&hold) for moving, rotating & selecting pieces
- You can limit your movement so only pieces movement or board movement would be allowed
- You can view a reference image in any virtual board
- You can submit and compare your score (time to finish). The time will stop counting if no action is done
- You can have more than one instance of the jigsaw: you can try again or share it with a friend or relative.
- Localized in Chinese, English, French, Korean, Japanese and Spanish
- Fourteen images available in 10k, twenty-one in 2k, twenty-two in 0.5K.
- 8 sets of 10 images available for 0.5k versions as in app purchases
- You can add custom photos
- 10k includes 2k and 05k sets. 2K includes 5K set
- Upload progress on Facebook & Twitter
- Different levels (can select a lower number of pieces)
Recommended as one of the Underrated IOS Games To Play


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I would like to make something clear: monoracial people of color are just as valid as multiracial people of color. Therefore, this piece is not to pit one group of people against another group of people.
Another fantastic thing to love about Mixed Remixed is how inclusive they are to various facets of identity, and, yes, that means people who identify as one race are just as welcome to the dialogue often presented.
This piece is to simply let you in on a perspective on content that you haven't thought of before.
So, without further ado:
I have been blessed to write on platforms such as Mixed Remixed and The Tempest about my identity, and the many parts of my identity. Because I have that freedom, I have written about pieces where I mostly identified as mixed, and where I mostly identified as black.
There is one particular piece that made me realize about how more people are willing to give their readership to topics on monoracial identity rather than multiracial identity.
I wrote a piece about depression, the black community, and how, as a black person, it shouldn't be taboo for me to talk about my experiences with anxiety and depression anymore. As a black person, I am allowed to view therapy just as valid as prayer and other spiritual practices.
There have been experiences where my mixed race identity played a role in my depression, such as seeking the best friendship groups for me without being deemed as betraying specific racial groups by doing so, or trying to figure out whether or not it was even okay for a generationally mixed person to identify as mixed.
However, white family members have been more open to talk about depression, although there have been times where it was popular to use euphemisms for depression such as "tired" or "sick," more so than my black family members.
I didn't have the courage to talk about my depression with my black family members growing up, because a lot of my black family members didn't believe mental health issues were real, and they didn't believe mental health professionals could be trusted.
It made sense for me to put that particular piece in a context about my blackness and the black community.
And I'm glad that I was placed in a position to publish that piece where I knew people would read it, and that enough people read it so that more conversations about people of color, mental health, and religion, can be had.
This piece crashed The Tempest's site three times, I have received dozens of tweets and messages of great feedback about it, and an editor from The Huffington Post even reached out to me.
However, I can't help but think that if it were a piece that focused mostly on mixed race identity and depression, people wouldn't have been as receptive.
This piece, and my piece on being black in a predominantly white missions culture, has more page views than any of my other pieces on mixed race identity combined. I had even mentioned being mixed race and being depressed in other pieces.
When I pitched a piece about mixed race identity to The Huffington Post, the same people who reached out to me about my piece about being black and having depression, before reaching out to The Tempest, they never got back to me.
I am very proud of myself for writing and publishing my piece about depression. It needed to be written, and it needed to be read. It's just interesting to me that certain things about it haven't been acknowledged.
With more and more people identifying as multiracial, more experiences will be documented, more people will be willing to speak up, and more topics will come to the surface when it comes to multiracial experiences. It's just going to take forever to get to that point, and as hard as I try, patience is still not one of my strongest virtues when it comes to things like that.
Nevertheless, I'm not just going to write on one topic about myself, and I'm not going to try to force certain topics about myself out of myself either. It doesn't make my writing genuine, and it doesn't make my writing as great as it can be.
And I still want to question and analyze why certain topics have more readership and attention than others. I still want to know what people are willing and unwilling to talk about.
I'm certain the piece I have mentioned one too many times won't be the last piece where I wonder about where people are.
Maya Williams, Mixed Remixed Blogger


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Pork industry says don't worry about a possible bacon shortage
Published 9:07 am Thursday, February 2, 2017
DES MOINES, Iowa — An insatiable demand for bacon depleted frozen pork belly supplies in the U.S. to a record low level for December, but the pork industry is confident it can keep up with demand and avoid any serious shortages.
Bottom line: A pound of bacon may cost a little more as winter wears on, but prices should stabilize by summer.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported last week that pork bellies in cold storage fell to 17.7 million pounds last month, the lowest December inventory since records began in 1957. In comparison, more than 52.3 million pounds of pork bellies — the cut of the hog from which bacon is derived — remained in storage in December 2015.
"Veterans of the industry say clearly this is record-breaking stuff," said Russell Barton, a market reporter for protein analyst firm Urner Barry. "December is the lowest on record. They really haven't ever seen a situation like this before."
Pork bellies are usually stockpiled in freezers at the end of the year and the first few months of the next year to get through the summer peak months when bacon consumption is highest, Barton said. This season, bacon demand was high enough that fresh pork bellies were used as quickly as they were produced, leaving significantly less meat to store.
Prices at the wholesale level already are showing an increase. Tuesday's pork belly prices were at $1.71 a pound, about 37 percent higher than this time last year, Barton said. Retail bacon prices haven't jumped significantly but could climb as the industry works to catch up.
"What this says is there was excellent product movement in the fourth quarter of 2016," said Steve Meyer, a pork industry economist for Express Markets Inc., which tracks industry trends for retailers and foodservice companies.
Meyer isn't concerned about the short-term stockpile shortage because he expects pork production to increase about 3 percent this year.
The popularity of bacon has increased as the pork industry has figured out new ways to sell the product. To keep pace with increased pork demand, the industry is building at least four new processing plants in Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri and Michigan in the next few years.
The variety of bacon treats has soared in recent years to include delicacies such as jalapeno bacon, bacon apple pie, doughnuts with bacon and chocolate chocolate-covered slices, said Brooks Reynolds, an Iowa commercial insurance agent who created the Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival, which attracts more than 10,000 bacon enthusiasts to Des Moines on Feb. 18.
"People will pay what it costs to buy bacon because they love it," he said.
Demand also has increased as bacon has become an ingredient in menu options at restaurants including Subway and Bruegger's Bagels, and as McDonald's started selling breakfast all day.