'Once I was travelling from Baroda to Madras in AC-2 Tier and my companions were an young Gujerati mother, with a boy aged about 8 and a girl aged about 6. After sometime, I had a bout of sneezing and the children who were playing stopped their activities and started counting 'three, four, five....'. After eight sneezes, I stopped and they looked at me accusingly as if I had robbed them of their fun. This was the most embarassing moment in my life'
So when I read this article in the net, I thought I must share it. The only question was whether to put it in humour or not. Though it is a scientific article, I have finally put it in Humour as it raised a smile in me, as I am sure it will to you.
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To: Hannah Holmes From: Tracy Mascolo Subject: Tweeze and Sneeze
Dear Hannah,"I happen to be an eyebrow tweezer, and I don't sneeze. I've not heard of that," comes a bold confession of ignorance from Roberta Pagon, sneeze expert. Pagon was among a flock of docs who, while sitting around a cafeteria table at a pediatrics conference some years back, fell into a discussion of their sternutatory habits. Four of the 10, they discovered, sneezed when exposed to bright light. Being scientists, they wrote up their discovery for publication. Being scientists, they gave the syndrome a really bad acronym. How they figured that "Autosomal Dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst Syndrome" adds up to ACHOO, instead of ADCHOOS, is beyond me. ("Helio" refers to the sun; "Opthalmic" to the eyes.) |
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Nonetheless it describes a real syndrome. In fact you probably know someone with ACHOO: Twenty to 30 percent of the population suffers this amusing abnormality. . |
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The absence of a firm estimate reflects geneticists' low esteem for the subject and a tragic lack of
scholarship.
In a nutshell when a person with ACHOO steps outdoors into sunlight, he or she suffers "nearly uncontrollable paroxysms of sneezing provoked in a reflex fashion," Pagon and her collaborators wrote. The probing practitioners noted that not only does ACHOO syndrome run in families (it's a dominant trait), but genetics also determines the number of sneezes. "In my family it's three sneezes," says Pagon, a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine, "but someone else's family had eight." If that's starting to sound a little less amusing, consider that one of the subjects reported an ACHOO attack involving 43 outbursts. ACHOO, however, isn't the only syndrome that can bring on an outburst. Sneezing, it turns out, can be inspired by a bewildering range of nonsensical stimuli. |
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Sneezing fits can be triggered by combing hair, tweezing eyebrows, rubbing the inner corner of the eye, and even by eating too much. . |
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Yes, eating too much. Eleven years after ACHOO got its name, another scientific paper chronicled the
sad fate of a man, his three brothers, one of his two sisters, his grandfather, his father, an uncle
and the uncle's son. All must harass their hankies after a big meal, and the number of sneezes for
each family member runs from three to 15. Imagine Thanksgiving at their house.
Naturally another scientist proposed another truly awful acronym, SNATIATION, which is a combination of "sneeze" and "satiation" and an acronym for "Sneezing Noncontrollably at a Time of Indulgence of the Appetite -- a Trait Inherited and Ordained to Be Named." |
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But even if it's clear when some people have this sneezing reflex, why they do remains a mystery. . |
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"If 20 percent of people do it, you'd think there must be some advantage to it," says Pagon,
but she won't even venture a guess as to what that advantage might be.
Reflexes are bodily functions that require no input from the brain. When you touch a hot stove, for instance, an "ouch" telegram travels up the nerves to the spinal cord, and the spinal cord replies with a directive to retract your hand. Genetic quirks involving reflexes are unusual -- and therefore intriguing -- even though they don't cause death and disease, Pagon says. "Genetics is the study of human variation," Pagon says. "Sneezing is like blood groups and skin color. Because it doesn't make a difference [to your health], studying sneezing might be considered frivolous. But to know the location of one more gene that's part of the nervous system is a good thing." I have a name ready for the sneeze gene when they find it: Gene Responsible for Outbursts and Acronymic Nausea, or GROAN. Vocabulary Sternutation, n. A sneeze. It's lifted directly from Latin. The root bears a resemblance to the Latin word sternere (to cast down), and to sternum, which still refers to the central chest bone. BACK to the Main Page |
