By Diane Mapes

While many men and women have strong opinions about the size of breasts, most would agree the number of their breasts — two— is  fine.

Unfortunately, for those with polymastia, that's not always the case. 

Sometimes referred to as accessory breasts, polymastia is the presence of supernumerary (extra) breasts on the human body. The extra breast tissue can appear in many forms, everything from a third nipple (the most common condition, referred to as polythelia) to a fully-formed — and  fully-functional breast — in some unusual location on the body. It can also present itself as a breast with a nipple but no areola, a breast with an areola but no nipple, or just a small lump of breast tissue with neither nipple nor areola.

It's not as rare as you might think, according to a recent article in The American Surgeon. Up to 6 percent of the general population has accessory breast tissue, although it is commonly misdiagnosed, usually as lipoma, a benign tumor composed of fat cells. In a few cases, supernumerary breasts can be diagnosed with breast cancer. Women report a much higher rate of polymastia and polythelia than men, but there have been several reported cases of men with accessory breast tissue. Extra nipples are more common.

Actor Mark Wahlberg has a third nipple, which he considered removing but eventually decided to keep. According to the blog, thesuperfluousnipple.blogspot.com (where "three is a magic number!"), other triple nippler guys include Jackson Browne, Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones, Frank Langella, and the fictional characters Krusty the Clown ("The Simpsons") and Chandler Bing of "Friends" (Chandler had his superfluous nipple surgically removed).

Much less common (and less celebrated, perhaps) are the cases of men with fully-formed accessory breasts. In 1980, the Journal of American Academic Dermatology reported the highly unusual case of a 74-year-old man with a normal female breast on the back of his left thigh. According to the article, he told researchers he'd had the "fatty tumor" almost all his life and it had "never caused a problem." He also refused to have his accessory breast removed.

In women, supernumerary breasts and nipples are usually found on the embryonic mammary or "milk line," i.e., the ridge that extends from the armpit to the groin. Famous female supernumeraries include the Greek goddess Artemis. More recently, Tilda Swinton, Lily Allen and comedienne Moms Mabley have owned up to sporting a spare nip.

According to Dr. Anne Burdick, professor of dermatology at the University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine, the most common location for accessory breast tissue is in the axilla (or armpit).

"The extra breast tissue is usually in one armpit or the other, but it can exist in other areas, as well, including the mid-chest, the sternum, the back, or even in the genital area," she says.

Indeed, cases of aberrant breast tissue have been reported on the back of the neck, the buttock, the vulva, the hip, the shoulder, the perineum (the region between the anus and the genitals) and the mid-back. A 1997 article in the Journal of Pediatric Surgery describes an incident of supernumerary breast tissue on the face (it was removed for cosmetic reasons). A 2006 case study in the Dermatology Online Journal describes "the first report of supernumerary breast tissue on the foot." 

While in many cases, it's a matter of one extra breast or nipple, there are instances of four, five, six or seven supernumerary breasts and/or nipples. In 1886, a doctor reported a woman with eight extra breasts — 10 in all. There was no word on how many children she nursed.

Interestingly, many women with polymastia are unaware of the condition until the tissue begins to respond to hormonal fluctuations brought on by menstruation, pregnancy or lactation, as the extra tissue gets bigger and more tender just like the normal breast.

"A patient will come in for acne and I'll do a full body exam and notice it," says Dr. Burdick. "When I ask them questions, it will turn out that it gets bigger with their period and is uncomfortable."

Accessory breasts have also been known to lactate. One of the most famous cases in history is that of Therese Ventre of Marseilles, France, who had an extra breast on the outside of her left thigh. According to the 1827 report, the extra breast enlarged during puberty and produced milk when she became pregnant; a woodcut from the era shows her nursing children both at her breast and her thigh. 

As is often the case with odd body phenomenon, men and women with supernumerary breasts and nipples were tortured and killed during the European witch hunts. Extra nipples were thought of as "witch's teats," used to nurse a familiar (a witch's helper). Even Anne Boleyn, the unpopular second wife of Henry VIII, was said to have either an extra breast or extra nipple (along with an extra finger), although this may have just been bad press.

These days, polymastia and the more common polythelia are hardly considered a mark of the devil, but a stigma does remain for some, especially men.

"It can be very disturbing to a man to discover that he has accessory nipples, even more so, accessory breasts," says Dr. Hema Sundaram, a Washington, D.C., dermatologist who has performed liposuction on accessory breast tissue with good results. "It can damage his feelings of masculinity and profoundly impact his self-esteem."

Others, however, choose to celebrate their supernumerary self. 

"I've come to embrace it," Mark Wahlberg told Rolling Stone magazine in 2005 when asked about his third nipple. "That thing's my prized possession."

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By Brian Alexander

It may seem counterintuitive to those males among us who spent more time in high school reading Dickens or studying calculus than we did making out with Stephanie the cheerleader, but a group of researchers has issued a study finding that higher IQ men have better sperm.

Take that, Mr. Quarterback.

But before the pocket protector set starts strutting in their Radiohead T-shirts, hang on a minute. As interesting and possibly important to a certain subgroup of scientists as the study may be, it says much more about our obsession with grading our masculinity than it does about brains and sperm.

The point of the study was to test a theory about "fitness factor," explained lead author Rosalind Arden of King's College, London. Fitness factor, according to the researchers, involves the clues, such as waist-to-hip ratios, that signal we have good genes in general and will produce tip-top babies.

"I chose to analyze the relationship between sperm and intelligence because I thought that if we were serious about the fitness factor idea, then even two [apparently] unrelated traits might be correlated," she said. In other words, they didn't set out to prove that smart men have better sperm.

"The bigger idea of the fitness factor," Arden explained, "is that beauty, health, intelligence, personality - may all exist in a giant web - traced out by the spider of evolutionary fitness." In other words, one gene or big set of genes that may bestow some fitness traits, like body symmetry, may also confer less obvious ones, like good sperm.

Conveniently for the researchers, in 1985 the U.S. government conducted something called the Vietnam Experience Study, in which war veterans underwent a battery of tests, including intelligence and various physiological measures. Some of the men supplied semen samples. Arden and colleagues examined the data to correlate IQ with semen. It turned out that there was a small link between higher IQ and better semen.

So, smarter guys tend to have higher quality sperm, they found. But the reality is, there is no intellectual push-up a man can do to give himself better— that is, more fit or more aggressive sperm.

"If you're going to be a Go Master," Arden said, making a pun of a movie about a genius of the Chinese board game, "do it for the love of the stones - not to improve your sperm quality."

We'd make our sperm happier just by wearing boxers rather than tighty whities and letting those boys breathe.

While the researchers judged quality based on number, density and swimming ability, sperm experts — also known as andrologists — consider other factors to be equally important to fertility, like how the sperm interacts with an egg. The shape, structure and health of the sperm are also important. A normal sperm has a long tail and an oval-shaped head that whips it forward to the egg.

To get healthy sperm, it's recommend that men take a daily multivitamin with selenium, zinc and folic acid, nutrients that are important for sperm function, according to the Mayo Clinic. Guys should also exercise regularly and maintain a healthy weight. Smoking tobacco, pot or drinking too much alcohol can wreak havoc on sperm. Same for stress and steroids.

So, practically speaking, while possibly important to science, the study doesn't mean much for the average guy. It is, Arden said, "akin to one tiny piece in one of those god-awful humungous jigsaws given by well-meaning aunts as 'improving' Christmas gifts to small boys."

But the study did reveal a lot about human psychology. To read some of the breathless press coverage, it was a eugenicist's dream come true. "There are few better ways of upsetting a certain sort of politically correct person than to suggest that intelligence (or, rather, the variation in intelligence between individuals) is under genetic control," The Economist gleefully noted.

Yet cause-and-effect is not nearly so clear cut. Genes do influence intelligence and a number of studies have linked higher intelligence with better health, according to Douglas Detterman, a professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University and editor of the journal Intelligence, in which Arden's paper appeared. For example, higher IQ men have been shown to have less risk of dying of coronary heart disease. Such findings have spawned a new field called "cognitive epidemiology." But nobody knows why it occurs.

"There is a lot of speculation," said Detterman. "It could be that people with lower IQs receive inadequate treatment. Perhaps they require more instruction on how to follow doctors' orders."

It might also be that people with lower IQs aren't inherently less fit; they just make less money and cannot afford top quality care. "Disentangling all these factors is complicated," he said.

So it looks like smart boys are going to have to stick with bait like Shakespeare's sonnets and Ferraris bought with proceeds from inventing high-tech gadgets to attract the women with whom we'd like to share those sperm. 

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By JoNel Aleccia

Before she got so sick with a Clostridium difficile infection, Vicki Doriott would have been as disgusted as anyone at the idea of a fecal transplant.

Infuse her gut with someone else's stool? Through a tube in her nose? No, thanks.

But in June 2004, Doriott was actually relieved to show up at a Duluth, Minn., clinic, where doctors sent samples of her husband's excrement sliding into her stomach – and apparently cured the infection that threatened to ruin her life. 

"When those toxins are in your body, you kind of feel like you're close to death," said Doriott, 52, an accountant from Eau Claire, Wis., who spent nearly six months battling recurrent bouts of the nasty intestinal bug known as C. diff.  "Nothing else I tried worked."

Doriott is among a growing number of people who've undergone the seemingly gross procedure in a  last ditch effort to restore normal bowel function after severe, recurrent C. diff infection. The little-known technique gained new fame last month when an episode of "Grey's Anatomy" highlighted the quirky cure that helps 85 percent of those willing to try it.

By coincidence, the specialist who performs most of the fecal transplants in the nation, Dr. Tim Rubin of the Duluth Clinic Digestive Health Center, happened to be channel-surfing at the time. Rubin gave the TV docs a thumbs up in handling the procedure.

"They did very well," said Rubin, a gastroenterologist.

About the only thing the docs at Seattle Grace got wrong was the method of the preparing the fresh, donated stool that repopulates the gut of C. diff infection sufferers with healthy bacteria. 

"They showed a doctor stirring up a bowl of brown stuff at the bedside and that's not how it's done," said Rubin.

And he should know. As far as Rubin can tell, he and his senior colleagues are the only crew in the country who regularly perform the rare, but growing procedure, variously known as fecal transplant, stool transplant and fecal infusion. 

Since 2002, they've performed 64 poop transfers on patients with two or more incurable bouts of C. diff. It's a technique first documented in the early 1990s by researchers in Norway investigating the best way to treat C. diff infection, which typically occurs when the normal flora in the gut is disturbed, most often by antibiotic use.

Rates of C. diff are skyrocketing in the U.S., where a http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27633551/" target="_blank">recent study found 13 of every 1,000 patients in the nation's hospitals are infected or colonized with the germ.

The antibiotics destroy good bacteria in the colon, allowing the C. diff to flourish. The bug can cause illnesses ranging from severe diarrhea and colitis to blood infection, and in worst cases, death. Most patients with C. diff can control it with powerful antibiotics such as metronidazole, sold as Flagyl, or vancomycin. But in about 20 percent of the cases, even those strong drugs don't work.

That was the case for Doriott, who figures C. diff spores in her gut were activated when she had two rounds of antibiotics for a sinus infection and dental work within six months. 

"At its worst, I'd have diarrhea every 15 minutes," recalled Doriott. "I'd be going for two or three days. I'd have a 103-degree fever. I couldn't make it two steps from the couch."

After months of exhaustion and illness, Doriott became desperate enough to consider the fecal transplants she'd heard about through research. She contacted Rubin in Duluth and made an appointment for the hour-long office visit.

Typically, patients ask a close household member, usually a spouse, to produce a sample of stool, which is tested for disease and infection. In Doriott's case, her husband, Jerry, 50, a civil engineer, was on tap.

On the day of the transplant, donors provide the feces, which is blended and filtered. A tube is fed through the patient's nose into the stomach and several teaspoons of the sample are injected through it.

"I refused to look at it," said Doriott. "All I felt was a coolness. It didn't smell."

Doriott said she felt better immediately and hasn't suffered a C. diff relapse since the treatment. Other patients take a few weeks or even months to recover, Rubin said.

A 2003 case study of 18 patients who received fecal transplants found that two patients who were very ill died shortly after transplant. But of the remaining 16 patients, only one developed C. diff again, according to the study published in the Journal of Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Still, fecal transplant has yet to become a widespread treatment, Rubin said.

"You're going to go to some places and they're going to, no pun intended, pooh-pooh it," he said.

Some scientists worry about controlling infection in donor stools and about finding a good way to handle and process the material, said Jennie Mayfield, a clinical epidemiologist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mo.
And some doctors and patients are still squeamish about the procedure.

"It think it's the kind of thing in the U.S. where people are talking about it, but people don't want to go there yet," Mayfield said. "They'd have to give me Valium."

But Rubin and Doriott agreed that by the time patients are ill enough with C. diff to consider fecal transplants, neither the ick effect nor the potential for bad puns is a factor.

Dorriott, meantime, has managed to put the event behind her. "My husband doesn't joke too much," she said, "because he saw how sick I was."

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