Advances

(Advances gives a glimpse of the many significant research projects at the university. Tell us about your discoveries by e-mailing: wisweek@news.wisc.edu.)

Teen talkers postpone sex
A 10-year study performed by a Children’s Hospital pediatrician says adolescents who believe they have a healthy communicative relationship with their parents are more likely to postpone their first act of sexual intercourse.

The study was published in the January 2001 issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, which is published by the Society of Adolescent Medicine. Peter S. Karofsky, a pediatrician at the UW Health-West Clinic in Madison, and professor of Pediatrics at the UW Medical School, says the quality of teen-parent communication, as perceived by the teenager, was by far the most closely linked factor with the age of the teen’s sexual debut.

“Our study sought to identify those factors that may be associated with the time an adolescent has sexual intercourse for the first time,” Karofsky says. “These factors included the marital status of the parents, the degree of patient participation in extracurricular activities, the patient’s work status and others.”

Karofsky also notes that 60 percent of teenage girls and 10 percent of teenage boys in the study regretted the first time they had sexual intercourse. Most of the study participants were from white middle-class Dane County families.

Farm woes loom again
Is Wisconsin facing a 1980s-style farm crisis? Not this year, but dark clouds are gathering, says a university economist.

Despite the lowest milk prices in two decades, state farmers probably won’t see a repeat of the financial crisis of the mid-1980s — at least not this year, according to Bruce Jones, an economist at the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. Milk prices account for more than half the cash receipts of Wisconsin farmers, and the low prices are putting more and more farms under financial stress. Unless milk prices improve, the state’s farm economy could face big problems in coming years, he says.

Jones and other specialists review the problems facing Wisconsin’s dairy industry in “Status of Wisconsin Agriculture, 2001,” published by the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics. To download a PDF format copy of “Status of Wisconsin Agriculture, 2001,” visit: http://www.aae.wisc.edu/www/pub/.

Tomotherapy device unveiled
The Comprehensive Cancer Center recently unveiled a tomotherapy device designed by the Middleton-based firm, TomoTherapy, Inc., that could revolutionize radiotherapy treatment for cancer patients.

Tomotherapy offers faster, more precise radiation treatment. After more than 10 years of research, the Tomotherapy Research Group was officially established at UW–Madison in 1994, and in 1997 TomoTherapy Inc. was founded by two members of the research group: professor Thomas Rockwell Mackie, a leading UW medical physicist, and Paul J. Reckwerdt, an accomplished mathematician and software engineer.

“We expect that tomotherapy will offer three very significant benefits to cancer patients relative to the type of radiotherapy available today,” says Minesh Mehta, who heads the Human Oncology Department at the Comprehensive Cancer Center. “First, it will potentially reduce side effects by ensuring that the radiation is considerably more precise. Second, it will allow us to give higher doses of radiotherapy and may allow patients to complete their course of treatment in a shorter period of time. Third, we anticipate that some patients currently ineligible for radiotherapy may now be candidates for treatment because of tomotherapy’s enhanced precision.”