© unknownCo-proxamol is linked to fatal overdoses
The controversial withdrawal of a common painkiller has dramatically cut suicides, say researchers.
A gradual phase-out of co-proxamol led to 350 fewer suicides and accidental deaths in England and Wales, a study in the British Medical Journal reports.
Regulators removed the drug's licence in 2007 after fears about the risk of overdose but the move proved unpopular with some patients and doctors.
Arthritis Care says some patients now struggle to control their pain.
The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency announced the withdrawal in 2005.
Until now, parents of children with autism who have spoken up about their fears that their child's disorder came on the heels of vaccination have been given the status of heretic. But it turns out that the increase in autism we have been witnessing over the last few decades could also be a result of the over-all increase in the body burden caused by mercury in our air and water, and by proxy the fish we eat, our vaccines and dental fillings, and now, in our high fructose corn syrup, a substance marketed and consumed most often by those most at risk: children.
It is a matter of record that our fish populations are accumulating mercury; and as the top of their food chain, we too are accumulating the toxin. The neurological effects of mercury have been widely documented. On the EPA's website, for example, it lists the primary health effect of methylmercury on fetuses, infants, and children, as being impaired neurological development.
Eighty to 85 percent of the profits in any gambling casino come from slot machines. They have sometimes been called the "crack cocaine" of the poor and uninformed. The machines are always colorful and provide visual and sound stimulation to the players
More importantly to the casino, they provide a hope or expectation that the player can win something while they are being amused by spinning wheels or flashing screens.
There is often a promise of a big jackpot, perhaps a progressive one of four-to-six figures in size, and the face of the machines are covered with all the various winning combinations available. That is because the psychology of slot machines is that they are designed to create a feeling of winning while over time the player keeps losing.
One in ten women suffer from depression, defined in medical terms as a mood disorder in which your mood takes control of your life. Beyond being sad or having the blues, depression typically causes feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness, and self-doubt. Just as there are many levels of depression and anxiety, there are many levels of treatment using antidepressants and psychotherapy. There are also lots of natural healing strategies, including dietary and herbal remedies.
The FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have launched an investigation into a potential connection between the Gardasil vaccine for the human papillomavirus (HPV) and a rare degenerative muscle disease.
Concern over a connection between Gardasil and the rare disease -- known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig's disease -- was first raised by Phil Tetlock and Barbara Mellers on their blog. Shortly after receiving the Gardasil vaccine two years ago, their daughter Jenny began to lose motor strength and control, eventually becoming completely paralyzed before dying on March 15. Doctors suspect that she suffered from a rare juvenile form of ALS, which affects one out of every two million children.
Geisinger Health System senior investigator and U.S. Army veteran Joseph Boscarino, Ph.D., is proud of his military service, yet he doesn't like to talk much about his combat experiences.
Before becoming a renowned researcher of psychological trauma, Dr. Boscarino served a tour of duty with an artillery unit in Vietnam from 1965-66, during which he witnessed heavy combat and its aftermath. To this day, he tries hard not to reflect on those battlefield memories.
New research by Dr. Boscarino and Tulane University investigator Charles Figley, Ph.D., shows that for some people exposed to traumatic events, repressing these memories may be less harmful in the long run.
"Going back to the days of Sigmund Freud, psychiatrists and mental health experts have suggested that repression of traumatic memories could lead to health problems," Dr. Boscarino said. "Yet we have found little evidence that repression had an adverse health impact on combat veterans exposed to psychological trauma many years later."
In a study that appears in the June issue of the research publication Journal of Nervous & Mental Diseases, Drs. Boscarino and Figley examined the long-term mortality rates of Vietnam veterans who were evaluated in 1985 with follow up in 2000.
Our tendency to see people and faces as individuals may explain why we are such experts at recognizing them, new research indicates. This approach can be learned and applied to other objects as well.
"This new research adds to the evidence that the brain processes faces differently because of our expertise with them. It also tells us what it is about our experience with faces that leads us to treat them holistically," Isabel Gauthier, associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University and one of the study's co-authors, said. "This knowledge may be useful in the development of training protocols for individuals with difficulties in face perception, such as individuals with autism spectrum disorders."
The research is currently in press at Psychological Science. Gauthier's co-authors are Alan Wong, who completed the study as his doctoral thesis in psychology at Vanderbilt, and Thomas Palmeri, associate professor of psychology. Wong is now an assistant professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Our brains get a first impression of people's overriding social signals after seeing their faces for only 100 milliseconds (0.1 seconds). Whether this impression is correct, however, is another question. Now an international group of experts has carried out an in-depth study into how we process emotional expressions, looking at the pattern of cerebral asymmetry in the perception of positive and negative facial signals.
The researchers worked with 80 psychology students (65 women and 15 men) to analyze the differences between their cerebral hemispheres using the "divided visual field" technique, which is based on the anatomical properties of the visual system.
"What is new about this study is that working in this way ensures that the information is focused on one cerebral hemisphere or the other", J. Antonio Aznar-Casanova, one of the authors of the study and a researcher at the University of Barcelona (UB), tells SINC.
The results, published in the latest issue of the journal Laterality, show that the right hemisphere performs better in processing emotions. "However, this advantage appears to be more evident when it comes to processing happy and surprised faces than sad or frightened ones", the researcher points out.
A recent neuroimaging study reveals that the ability to distinguish true from false in our daily lives involves two distinct processes. Previous research relied heavily on the premise that true and false statements are both processed in the left inferior frontal cortex. Carried out by researchers from the Universities of Lisbon and Vita-Salute, Milan, the June Cortex study found that we use two separate processes to determine the subtle distinctions between true and false in our daily lives. Deciding whether a statement is true involves memory; determining one is false relies on reasoning and problem-solving processes.
The study examines the impact of true and false sentences on brain activity with a feature verification task and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Participants were asked to read simple sentences composed of a concept-feature pair (e.g. 'the plane lands') and to decide whether the sentence was true or false. Importantly, true and false statements were equated in terms of ambiguity, and exactly the same concepts and features were used across the two types of sentences. False statements differentially activated the right fronto-polar cortex in areas that have been previously related to reasoning tasks. The activations related to true statements involved the left inferior parietal cortex and the caudate nucleus bilaterally. The former activation may be hypothesized to reflect continued thematic semantic analysis and a more extended memory search. The caudate activation may also reflect this search and matching processes as well as the fact that recognizing a sentence as true is in itself a positive reward for the subject, as this area is also involved in processing reward-related information.
Discovering for the first time that copy number variation or CNV, where a strip of DNA is duplicated or missing, may increase risk of developing cancer, US scientists found a link between a particular CNV and neuroblastoma, a deadly cancer that mostly affects children.
The study was led by Dr John M Maris, chief of Oncology and director of the Cancer Center at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and is published in the 18 June issue of the journal Nature. Maris is also on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and scientists from several other research centres worked on the research with him.
The discovery is particularly remarkable because it is the first to show that repeated or deleted strips of genetic code may be linked to cancer as opposed to variations in the code sequence or single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs or "snips").
Using a grammatical comparison, a CNV would be a repeated or missing word in a phrase while an SNP would be one or more words spelled incorrectly.
Maris said the finding opens the door to studying how CNVs might increase cancer risk.
