Health & WellnessS


Evil Rays

Magnetic pulses to brain can treat depression: study

Stimulating the brain with rapid bursts of magnetic energy is a safe and effectively treatment for major depression, a new large-scale study has found.

The finding offers a ray of hope to the 20 to 40 percent of patients who do not respond to antidepressants and psychotherapy and to those who do not wish to treat their illness with drugs.

"This study provides new support for the efficacy of TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) as a 'stand alone' treatment for depression," said John Krystal, editor of Biological Psychiatry which will publish the study on December 1.

"This finding could be particularly important for patients who do not tolerate antidepressant medications, for whom they are not safe, or who have not benefited from other alternative treatments."

Magic Wand

Flashback The therapeutic role of melatonin in cancer worthy of study

The role of melatonin for the treatment of cancer is looking compelling, according to a new study published in the Journal of Pineal Research. Researchers say that the results are so compelling that cancer funding agencies should be eager to support clinical trials to evaluate its therapeutic role in a variety of cancers.

Melatonin is a hormone naturally found in humans. Its association with cancer has been shown in many studies assessing links between shift work and cancer rates, and shown a consistent relationship. The association between melatonin levels and cancer progression has suggested to some that melatonin may be a modifier of cancer progression. In this latest study, researchers examined all clinical trials assessing the role of melatonin as a therapy for solid tumor cancers. They used a methodology called meta-analysis, a technique of analyzing multiple studies.

The authors reviewed 10 randomized clinical trials that included a total of 643 cancer patients with a variety of different solid tumor cancers. The types of cancers involved included lung, brain, skin, renal and breast cancer. "In this analysis, the effects appeared to be consistent across studies" say the authors. The researchers examined the effect of large doses of melatonin (10-40mg/day) on survival rates at one year. Melatonin reduced the risk of death at one year by 34%. "Effects this large certainly warrant further clinical trials" say the authors. The study also showed that melatonin was predominantly safe and had a beneficial effect on sleep patterns of patients.

Health

Sinus problems are treated well with safe, inexpensive treatment

An inexpensive, safe and easy treatment is an effective method for treating chronic nasal and sinus symptoms - more effective, in fact, than commonly used saline sprays, according to a new study from University of Michigan Health System researchers.

The study is the first of its kind to show greater efficacy of saline irrigation treatments versus saline spray for providing short-term relief of chronic nasal symptoms, the authors report. Participants in the study who were treated with irrigation experienced a much greater benefit than those who were treated with saline spray, in terms of both the severity and frequency of their symptoms.

"The irrigation group achieved a clinically significant improvement in quality of life in terms of the severity of their symptoms, whereas the spray group did not," says lead author Melissa A. Pynnonen, M.D., clinical assistant professor in the U-M Department of Otolaryngology. "Strikingly, they also experienced 50 percent lower odds of frequent nasal symptoms compared with the spray group."

Health

People with rare type of memory loss still sensitive to others, study shows

People with a devastating brain injury that has wiped out many of their personal memories may still be able to understand other people's feelings and intentions, according to a joint study by the Rotman Research Institute at the Baycrest Centre for Aging and the Brain, and York University's Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health.

Attention

Disturbing! FDA staff urge psych warnings for two flu drugs

U.S. Food and Drug Administration staffers are recommending new warnings about psychiatric events observed in some patients taking Roche Holding AG's Tamiflu and GlaxoSmithKline Plc's Relenza, according to documents released on Friday.

An FDA advisory panel will review the recommendations for the anti-viral influenza drugs at a meeting next week.

The FDA held a similar meeting two years ago in response to reports of a dozen deaths of children in Japan who had been taking Tamiflu.

Health

Health watchdog warns of UK sexual health crisis

The UK has one of the highest rates of HIV infection in Europe largely due to a growing epidemic of the disease in the black African community and among gay men, the Health Protection Agency (HPA) warned today.

The sexual health crisis is also worsening due to rising rates of other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among young adults, the government health watchdog also warned.

Attention

Additives 'a risk to children's health'



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Additives harm the 'psychological health' of children (Posed by model)

Parents have been warned to remove food additives linked to hyperactive behaviour from children's diets by the EU's leading expert on the issue. Dr John Larsen, who heads the European Food Safety Authority's panel on additives, said the measure would be "prudent" to protect youngsters' health.

Heart

DVT kills 11,000 in seven months and is a 'public health emergency'

Nearly 11,000 patients have died during the past seven months because of a failure by NHS hospitals to prevent them developing blood clots, a report claims.

Guidelines introduced in April mean every patient at risk should be assessed for treatment to cut the toll of deep vein thrombosis, or DVT.

But only one in three trusts is taking action, according to the damning report from the All Party Parliamentary Thrombosis Group.

It estimates that the failure to implement the guidance has cost 10,700 lives from DVT in the past seven months - nearly three times the number of deaths from the MRSA superbug and C Difficile infections.

The death toll in a year is greater than that from breast cancer, Aids and traffic accidents combined.

Comment: Although not to be trivialised, DVT may be considerably less of a public health emergency than this, which will receive no mass media coverage whatsoever.


Bulb

How Do We Make Sense of What We See?

M.C. Escher's ambiguous drawings transfix us: Are those black birds flying against a white sky or white birds soaring out of a black sky?

©M.C. Escher

Crusader

Penn researchers use brain imaging to demonstrate how men and women cope differently under stress

According to a study that appears in the current issue of SCAN (Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience), researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine discuss how men and women differ in their neural responses to psychological stress.

"We found that different parts of the brain activate with different spatial and temporal profiles for men and women when they are faced with performance-related stress," says J.J. Wang, PhD, Assistant Professor or Radiology and Neurology, and lead author of the study.

These findings suggest that stress responses may be fundamentally different in each gender, sometimes characterized as "fight-or-flight" in men and "tend-and-befriend" in women. Evolutionarily, males may have had to confront a stressor either by overcoming or fleeing it, while women may have instead responded by nurturing offspring and affiliating with social groups that maximize the survival of the species in times of adversity. The "fight-or-flight" response is associated with the main stress hormone system that produces cortisol in the human body - the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.