Health & WellnessS


Question

Do ADHD Drugs Take a Toll on the Brain?

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© Photo Researchers, Inc.PASIEKA/SPL
Research hints that hidden risks might accompany long-term use of the medicines that treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder

Pills

Big Pharma Bribes Doctors to Hook Your Kids on Drugs

Americans must start to question the legitimacy of the exploitative pharmaceutical-industrial complex and the predatory people atop them.

"The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The wave of evil washes not only the financial-industrial complex, the military-industrial complex, the energy-industrial complex, and predatory executives at AIG, Citibank, Halliburton, Blackwater/Xe, Enron, and Exxon. The pharmaceutical-industrial complex has virtually annexed the mental health profession, whose all-star opportunist team is captained by Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, the high-profile doctor most responsible for the explosion of kids on psychiatric drugs, first for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and then for bipolar disorder.

Health

New Threat: Antibiotic-resistant Bacteria Causes Deadly Pneumonia

While the talking heads on TV have recently reported that thousands of people in the U.S. are now infected with the new "swine flu", or H1N1, there's another infectious disease problem brewing that has received little attention. The over-use and abuse of antibiotics has produced antibiotic-resistant bacteria. According to the National Institutes of Health, over the past forty years, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus has changed from a usually controllable nuisance into a serious public health problem.

At first, it was primarily one of the most common hospital-acquired infections. But in recent years, new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, often dubbed "super bugs", have popped up in communities and caused severe, even life-threatening infections in otherwise healthy people, involving the skin, heart, blood or bones.

Sun

Find Health and Healing Properties in Ginger

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Ginger has long been used as a natural healing agent by Asian and other cultures. Ginger, a rhizome, is especially helpful in treating digestive issues such as nausea and diarrhea. Other medicinal uses of ginger include inflammation, heart conditions, arthritis, colic, and headaches. Many studies have been conducted looking at the benefits of this spice.

Cow

US: Bill proposed to limit livestock antibiotics to prevent the rise of resistant germs

More than 50 years ago, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the addition of antibiotics to livestock feed to reduce disease that can occur from dense living conditions and high-protein diets. Yesterday, the FDA announced its aim to withdraw that approval and stop all nontherapeutic germ-fighting in chickens, pigs and cows.

The ban would cover seven classes of antibiotics that the FDA considers "highly" or "critically" important components of the human arsenal against bacteria. "Trends toward increasing numbers of infection and increasing drug resistance show no sign of abating," Joshua Sharfstein, principal deputy commissioner of the FDA explained in written testimony to the House of Representatives' Committee on Rules.

Cheeseburger

The calorie delusion: Why food labels are wrong

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© Dan Saelinger/Image BankCan you trust the calorie count of a burger?
Standing in line at the coffee shop you feel a little peckish. So what will you choose to keep you going until lunchtime? Will it be that scrumptious-looking chocolate brownie or perhaps a small, nut-based muesli bar. You check the labels: the brownie contains around 250 kilocalories (kcal), while the muesli bar contains more than 300. Surprised at the higher calorie count of what looks like the healthy option, you go for the brownie.

This is the kind of decision that people watching their weight - or even just keeping a casual eye on it - make every day. As long as we keep our calorie intake at around the recommended daily values of 2000 for women and 2500 for men, and get a good mix of nutrients, surely we can eat whatever we like?

This is broadly true; after all, maintaining a healthy weight is largely a matter of balancing calories in and calories out. Yet according to a small band of researchers, using the information on food labels to estimate calorie intake could be a very bad idea. They argue that calorie estimates on food labels are based on flawed and outdated science, and provide misleading information on how much energy your body will actually get from a food. Some food labels may over or underestimate this figure by as much as 25 per cent, enough to foil any diet, and over time even lead to obesity. As the western world's waistlines expand at an alarming rate, they argue, it is time consumers were told the true value of their food.

Einstein

How brain training makes multitasking easier

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© Punchstock
Researchers in the United States have pinpointed the region of the brain that limits our ability to carry out more than one task at the same time - and have shown how, with training, the brain gets better at multitasking.

"Our brain is lousy at handling multitasking situations," says neuroscientist René Marois of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who led the work together with Paul Dux, a cognitive scientist who is now at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Even if the tasks are very simple, such as walking and chewing gum, "as soon as either needs concentration, we can't do them both without our performance suffering", says Marois.

When we try to pay attention to multiple stimuli - a red traffic light and an SMS alert on a mobile phone, for example - the stream of information flowing from sensation to action gets clogged up. Using a suite of neuroimaging and analysis techniques, Marois, Dux and their colleagues identified a region of the brain that holds up multitasking, and discovered that training gives this region a speed boost.

Magnify

The Fancier the Cortex, the Smarter the Brain?

Why are some people smarter than others? In a new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Eduardo Mercado III from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, describes how certain aspects of brain structure and function help determine how easily we learn new things, and how learning capacity contributes to individual differences in intelligence.

Cognitive plasticity is the capacity to learn and improve cognitive skills such as solving problems and remembering events. Mercado argues that the structural basis of cognitive plasticity is the cortical module. Cortical modules are vertical columns of interconnected neuronal cells. Across different areas of the cerebral cortex, these columns vary in the number and diversity of neurons they contain. Identifying how cortical modules help us learn cognitive skills may help explain why variations in this capacity occur - that is, why people learn skills at different rates and why our ability to learn new skills changes as we age.

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Gene Regulates Immune Cells' Ability to Harm the Body

A recently identified gene allows immune cells to start the self-destructive processes thought to underlie autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS) and rheumatoid arthritis, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found.

Researchers showed that mice without the Batf gene lacked a type of inflammatory immune cell and were resistant to a procedure that normally induces an autoimmune condition similar to human MS. They plan to look for other genes and proteins influenced by Batf that could be targets for new treatments for autoimmune diseases.

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Truthfulness Requires No Act Of Will For Honest People, Neuroimaging Suggests

A new study of the cognitive processes involved with honesty suggests that truthfulness depends more on absence of temptation than active resistance to temptation.

Using neuroimaging, psychologists looked at the brain activity of people given the chance to gain money dishonestly by lying and found that honest people showed no additional neural activity when telling the truth, implying that extra cognitive processes were not necessary to choose honesty. However, those individuals who behaved dishonestly, even when telling the truth, showed additional activity in brain regions that involve control and attention.

The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and was led by Joshua Greene, assistant professor of psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, along with Joe Paxton, a graduate student in psychology.