Health & Wellness
Renee Viellaris
Courier Mail Australia
Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:23 EST
Mothers will be urged to ditch the baby bottle under a controversial and potentially divisive five-year plan to boost breast milk feeding rates.
The government-backed pro-breast-milk message will argue that babies fed on breast milk for longer may reduce risks of obesity and chronic disease.
State and federal health ministers today will endorse the plan and consider establishing a national breast milk bank.
The move will be among a raft of measures designed to monitor and persuade Australians to consider how their lifestyles affect public spending.
It will be the latest in a series of government attempts to influence mothers' choices on feeding.
Medical News Today
Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:19 EDT
A team of researchers at West Virginia University has shown that U.S. immigrants from India and Pakistan take on the habits of their adopted country, increasing their risks of prostate cancer among male immigrants and breast cancer among females.
"Breast cancer and prostate cancer develop due to many reasons, but environmental factors and lifestyle play a major role in these cancers," said Jame Abraham, M.D., medical director for WVU's Mary Babb Randolph Cancer Center and leader of the research team. "When men and women from India and Pakistan migrate to the United States, their disease profiles change, mirroring the American risk."
Gary G. Kohls, MD
The Peoples Voice
Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:06 EDT
The percentage of Americans disabled by mental illness has increased fivefold since 1955, when Thorazine - remembered today as psychiatry's first "wonder" drug - was introduced into the market.
There are now nearly 6 million Americans disabled by mental illness, and this number increases by more than 400 people each day. A review of the scientific literature reveals that it is our drug-based paradigm of care that is fueling this epidemic. The drugs increase the likelihood that a person will become chronically ill, and induce new and more severe psychiatric symptoms in a significant percentage of patients.
E. Fuller Torrey, in his 2001 book The Invisible Plague, concluded that insanity had risen to the level of an epidemic. This epidemic has unfolded in lockstep with the ever-increasing use of psychiatric drugs.
The number of disabled mentally ill has increased nearly six-fold since Thorazine was introduced.
The number of disabled mentally ill has also increased dramatically since 1987, the year Prozac was introduced.
Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience
Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:45 EST
We've all said the equivalent of, "Stop me if I've told you this before," but now scientists have figured out why we can be so unsure what tales we've told to whom.
Turns out, our brains are better at recalling the source of information than whom we give information to, and the more self-focused a person is, the worse he is at so-called destination memory.
Scientists have classified memory as short-term and long-term, but this is arguably one of the first times anyone has looked at incoming and outgoing information and how it's stored in our noggins. While remembering both types is likely important in everyday lives, this new research suggests we're not as good at some aspects of the outgoing garble.
And that could get us into trouble, say the researchers. For instance, managers need to remember to whom they told certain information or delegated responsibilities in order to monitor progress. Even liars, or perhaps particularly liars, need to keep track of what they've told people so they don't get caught telling incompatible stories.
The finding will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science.
Anil Ananthaswamy
New Scientist
Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:00 EST
A telltale signature of consciousness has been detected that takes us a step closer to
disentangling the brain activity underlying conscious and unconscious brain processes.
It turns out that there is a similar pattern of neural activity each time we become conscious of the same picture, but not if we process information from the image unconsciously. These contrasting patterns of activity can now be detected via brain scans, and could one day help determine if patients with brain damage are conscious. They might even be used to probe consciousness in animals.
"It's very exciting work," says neuroscientist Raphaël Gaillard of the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the work. "The use of a reproducibility measure to disentangle conscious and non-conscious processes is genuinely new." Gaillard has previously
shown that coordinated activity across the entire brain is one of the signatures of consciousness .
Harvard Medical School
Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:46 EST
Combination drug therapy has become a staple for treating many infections. For instance, doctors treat extensively drug resistant forms of tuberculosis with one drug that breaks down the pathogen's protective barriers and opens the door for another to deliver the deathblow.
Just as some drugs work better together, however, other pairings are counter-productive. "The question we asked was how can it be that two drugs in combination are less effective than one of them alone," said senior author and Harvard Medical School associate professor of systems biology Roy Kishony.
Kishony and his team have found that the answer lies in the way some antibiotic drugs influence a bacterial cell's gene expression levels. Combinations of these altered genetic behaviors can "put the cell in a better position for survival," said Kishony.
Charles Q. Choi
LiveScience
Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:38 EST
© dreamstime
Weighing in at an average of 2.7 pounds (1,200 grams), the human brain packs a whopping 100 billion neurons. Every minute, about three soda-cans worth of blood flow through the brain.
Evolution in humans is commonly thought to have essentially stopped in recent times. But there are plenty of examples that the human race is still evolving, including our brains, and there are even signs that our evolution may be accelerating.
Shrinking brains
Comprehensive scans of the human genome reveal that
hundreds of our genes show evidence of changes during the past 10,000 years of human evolution.
"We know the brain has been evolving in human populations quite recently," said paleoanthropologist John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Surprisingly, based on skull measurements, the human brain appears to have been shrinking over the last 5,000 or so years.
"When it comes to recent evolutionary changes, we currently maybe have the least specific details with regard the brain, but we do know from archaeological data that pretty much everywhere we can measure - Europe, China, South Africa, Australia - that brains have shrunk about 150 cubic centimeters, off a mean of about 1,350. That's roughly 10 percent," Hawks said.
University of California - Los Angeles
Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:43 EST
"The very thought of you ... the mere idea of you" - from the song "The Very Thought of You" by Ray Noble
Can the mere thought of your loved one reduce your pain?
Yes, according to a new study by UCLA psychologists that underscores the importance of social relationships and staying socially connected.
The study, which asked whether simply looking at a photograph of your significant other can reduce pain, involved 25 women, mostly UCLA students, who had boyfriends with whom they had been in a good relationship for more than six months.
The women received moderately painful heat stimuli to their forearms while they went through a number of different conditions. In one set of conditions, they viewed photographs of their boyfriend, a stranger and a chair.
Sun Media
Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:26 EST
People not already in line at two special H1N1 immunization clinics were being turned away Saturday afternoon.
The clinics were held at the University of Manitoba and the Philippine Canadian Centre of Manitoba.
A spokeswoman for the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority said there were enough people queued up at the U of M clinic at 2:30 p.m. to keep staff and volunteers busy until the 4 p.m. closing time or later, so the line was cut off. The same decision was made at the Philippine Canadian Centre at 3 p.m.
Comment: Click
here to educate yourself on the truth about recent H1N1 vaccination craze.
Kathleen Doheny
WebMD Health News
Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:00 EST
Women who drink 2 or more diet sodas daily double their risk of kidney function decline, study shows
Diet soda may help keep your calories in check, but drinking two or more diet sodas a day may double your risk of declining kidney function, a new study shows.
Women who drank two or more diet sodas a day had a 30% drop in a measure of kidney function during the lengthy study follow-up, according to research presented Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Nephrology in San Diego.
"Thirty percent is considered significant,'' says researcher Julie Lin, MD, MPH, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a staff physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. That's especially true, she says, because most study participants had well-preserved kidney function at the start of the study.
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