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Puffing through a park or panting along a highway, joggers are unquestionably helping their hearts. But are they shedding poundage as well? No, say three U.S. Air Force researchers in the A.M.A. Journal: exercise alone can't do it. A runner of medium weight who wishes to shed a pound of fat on a one-shot basis must expend 3,500 calories, which means that he must run for well over an hour.

Still, say the doctors, exercise is an important element of any weight-control program. The trio figured the actual caloric consumption for men of various weights running a jogger's common distance of 1.5 miles in times ranging from eight to 16 minutes. They found that a 170-lb. man who can cover this distance in eight minutes burns 175 calories. This may not seem like much, but the Air Force physicians note that a runner who does this regularly can lose ten pounds a year--if he does not increase his caloric intake. In fact, if a runner on a 2,600-calorie-per-day diet can burn off 200 calories a day, he can treat himself to a small piece of cake every night and still keep his weight constant.

> Large numbers of Westerners have come to accept the idea that acupuncture can help alleviate pain. But doctors have expressed doubts about another claim advanced for the ancient Oriental art: needle wielding can relieve nerve deafness, a hearing loss caused by damage to the cranial nerve that serves the ear. Their skepticism has been bolstered by two new reports.

A team of Michigan State University researchers states in the A.M.A.'s Archives of Otolaryngology (a journal for ear, nose and throat specialists) that it observed an acupuncturist with 15 years of experience administer eight treatments to a deaf World War II veteran. Testing the man's hearing before, during and after the treatments, the researchers could discern no measurable improvement.

The other report--to the American Laryngology, Rhinology and Otology Society--was presented by Dr. Samuel Rosen, a New York City otologist who learned acupuncture three years ago as one of the first American physicians to visit Communist China. Rosen studied 40 children who received acupuncture therapy for their hearing disorders and found that only two showed improvement, and that was slight.

> Doctors have long been puzzled about the cause of primary dyslexia, a common learning disorder that afflicts between 2% and 5% of all U.S. schoolchildren with average or superior intelligence, and interferes with their ability to read. Most researchers assume that the root of the problem is in the cortex, site of the brain centers involved with thinking and learning. But two New York City doctors offer a different explanation--one that could lead to earlier diagnosis of this disorder.

Drs. Jan Frank and Harold Levinson of Downstate Medical Center report in the Journal of Child Psychiatry that primary dyslexia is caused by some as yet unexplained defect in the nerve pathways that connect the inner ear, which helps control balance, with the cerebellum, the part of the brain that controls coordination. The result of this defect, they claim, is a sort of permanent motion sickness that affects a child's balance and scrambles incoming visual signals. In fact, they say, 112 out of 115 New York City children known to have primary dyslexia were tested and found to be afflicted with an inner-ear disturbance.

Frank and Levinson have devised an instrument that a school nurse can use to detect the ear disturbance. Thus, they suggest, primary dyslexia can now be diagnosed in preschool children. The two doctors are also searching for a physiological treatment for the disorder; in a small pilot program, they have begun to study the effect of cyclizine, a motion-sickness drug, on the reading ability of dyslexic children.

> Many marijuana users claim that smoking pot improves their sex lives. That widely held belief has now been challenged by the findings of a group that includes researchers from St. Louis' Reproductive Biology Research Foundation, the outfit headed by Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson. The research team, which includes Masters, reports in the New England Journal of Medicine that marijuana smoking appears not only to reduce the production of male sex hormones but also to impair both the fertility and potency of males.

The conclusion is based on a study of 20 men, age 18 to 28, who used marijuana (but no other drugs) at least four times a week for six months. At the end of that period the testosterone levels among the pot smokers were an average of 43% lower than they were in a group of nonsmoking controls. Six of the marijuana users had lowered sperm counts, and two of them reported that they had become impotent. After abstaining from marijuana for two weeks, several subjects regained normal hormone levels and sexual function. One preferred the pleasures of pot to those of the pad. Despite a potency problem, he declined to give up marijuana.

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