Health & WellnessS


Pills

Anti-depressants 'can change personality'

Rebecca Smith
Telegraph UK
Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:23 UTC
Anti-depressants really can change someone's personality, researchers find, as patients become more extrovert and less neurotic.

A study in America found patients taking the popular antidepressant paroxetine, also called Seroxat in Britain, were more likely to see a drop in neuroticism and a rise extrovert traits than those receiving talking therapies or a dummy pill.

It had been thought that any changes in personality with the drugs was due to the patient's depression being lifted.

But now it appears the medicine, one of the drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs, can directly affect traits.
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Sherlock

Hidden Sensory System Discovered in the Skin


ScienceDaily
Tue, 08 Dec 2009 04:00 UTC
The human sensory experience is far more complex and nuanced than previously thought, according to a groundbreaking new study published in the December 15 issue of the journal Pain. In the article, researchers at Albany Medical College, the University of Liverpool and Cambridge University report that the human body has an entirely unique and separate sensory system aside from the nerves that give most of us the ability to touch and feel. Surprisingly, this sensory network is located throughout our blood vessels and sweat glands, and is for most people, largely imperceptible.

"It's almost like hearing the subtle sound of a single instrument in the midst of a symphony," said senior author Frank Rice, PhD, a Neuroscience Professor at Albany Medical College (AMC), who is a leading authority on the nerve supply to the skin. "It is only when we shift focus away from the nerve endings associated with normal skin sensation that we can appreciate the sensation hidden in the background."

The research team discovered this hidden sensory system by studying two unique patients who were diagnosed with a previously unknown abnormality by lead author David Bowsher, M.D., Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool's Pain Research Institute. These patients had an extremely rare condition called congenital insensitivity to pain, meaning that they were born with very little ability to feel pain. Other rare individuals with this condition have excessively dry skin, often mutilate themselves accidentally and usually have severe mental handicaps.
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Health

Many Parents Encourage Underage Drinking, Australian Study Finds


Science Daily
Mon, 07 Dec 2009 12:26 UTC
Half of Australian adults and 63 per cent of Australians on a higher income believe 15- to 17-year-olds should be allowed to consume alcohol under parental supervision at home, according to the latest MBF Healthwatch survey.

Bupa Australia* Chief Medical Officer, Dr Christine Bennett, said these statistics were both surprising and of concern given alcohol can have long-term implications for young adult brains that are not yet fully developed.

"Our survey suggests many Australians believe it's acceptable to buy alcohol for teenagers and allow them to drink under parental supervision at home," Dr Bennett said.

"Some parents may think this is harmless; some may see this approach as a way to teach their teenage children about socially responsible drinking. But we want parents to understand that early exposure may actually be doing them damage.

"Evidence suggests that the earlier the age that alcohol is introduced, the greater the risk of long-term alcohol related health problems.
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Info

Difficult Childhood May Increase Disease Risk In Adulthood


Medical News Today
Tue, 08 Dec 2009 12:12 UTC
Individuals who experience psychological or social adversity in childhood may have lasting emotional, immune and metabolic abnormalities that help explain why they develop more age-related diseases in adulthood, according to a report in the December issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

As the population ages, age-related conditions such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and dementia are becoming more prevalent, according to background information in the article. New ways of preventing these diseases and enhancing the quality of longer lives are needed. "Interventions targeting modifiable risk factors (e.g., smoking, inactivity and poor diet) in adult life have only limited efficacy in preventing age-related disease," the authors write. "Because of the increasing recognition that preventable risk exposures in early life may contribute to pathophysiological processes leading to age-related disease, the science of aging has turned to a life-course perspective."
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Info

Patients Deficient in Vitamin D Fare Worse in Battle with Lymphoma

Nathan Seppa
Science News
Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:00 UTC
Sunshine vitamin may play protective role against common form of the blood cancer

A shortage of vitamin D may stack the deck against people fighting a common form of lymphoma, researchers reported December 5 at a meeting of the American Society of Hematology. The new study adds this cancer to the list of malignancies suspected of being more difficult to control in patients with vitamin D deficiency common in parts of the U.S. population.

From 2002 to 2008, the researchers analyzed blood samples from 374 newly diagnosed patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, a fast-growing cancer of white blood cells called B cells. It mainly hits people over 50 and accounts for roughly 40 percent of lymphomas.

The study participants averaged 62 years of age. The blood tests revealed that half were deficient in vitamin D at the start of treatment, having less than 25 nanograms per milliliter of blood.
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Info

Facebook (and Systems Biologists) Take Note: Network Analysis Reveals True Connections

Megan Fellman
Northwestern University
Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:38 UTC
New method tackles social networks, biological systems, air transportation and more

Facebook figures out that you know Holly, although you haven't seen her in 10 years, because you have four mutual friends -- a good predictor of direct friendship. But sometimes Facebook gets it wrong. "Hey, I don't know Harry!"

Roger Guimera and Marta Sales-Pardo, a husband-wife research team at Northwestern University, have developed a universal method that can accurately analyze a range of complex networks -- including social networks, protein-protein interactions and air transportation networks. Although the datasets they used were much smaller than Facebook's, the researchers demonstrated the great potential of their method.
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Family

Study: Parents' Sex Talks With Kids Happening Too Late

Alice Park
Time
Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:00 UTC
The sex talk is never easy. It's not comfortable for anyone involved - parents are afraid of it, children are mortified by it - which is probably why the "Talk" so often comes after the fact. In the latest study on parent-child talks about sex and sexuality, researchers found that more than 40% of adolescents had had intercourse before talking to their parents about safe sex, birth control or sexually transmitted diseases.

That trend is troublesome, say experts, since teens who talk to their parents about sex are more likely to delay their first sexual encounter and to practice safe sex when they do become sexually active. And, ironically, despite their apparent dread, kids really want to learn about sex from their parents, according to study after study on the topic.

"The results didn't surprise me," says Dr. Mark Schuster, one of the authors of the new study, published in Pediatrics, and chief of general pediatrics at Children's Hospital Boston. "But there's something about having actual data that serves as a wake-up call to parents who are not talking to their kids about very important issues until later than we think would be best."
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Toys

A Theory for Toddlers' Turbo-charged Learning Style

Melissa Healy
Los Angeles Times
Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:11 UTC
Image
The lack of a fully formed prefrontal cortex -- the section of the brain that keeps an adult 'on task' -- may help young kids accumulate knowledge rapidly, a study suggests.

Anyone who's seen a toddler "at work" can tell that her learning style is a study in chaos. She moves from banging pots to tormenting the cat to demanding food to bursting into tears when she can't open the back door and hurdle off the deck -- all in the span of minutes.

But when it comes to the daunting task of mastering language, that same child is a turbo-charged learning machine.
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Pills

Drugmakers, FDA to Curb Painkiller Abuse

Matthew Perrone
TIME
Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:55 UTC
Pharmaceutical executives laid out plans Friday to prevent the misuse of prescription painkillers, under pressure from regulators trying to stop hundreds of fatal overdoses each year.

But Food and Drug Administration officials said industry's proposals were short on specifics and that more work is needed before any measures are put in place.

Johnson & Johnson, King Pharmaceuticals and other drugmakers proposed using patient medication guides, letters to doctors and additional physician training to curb inappropriate use and prescribing of painkillers.
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Info

Why Fermentation Is the Key to Local Foods and Good Health

Makenna Goodman
Alternet
Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:58 UTC
Authors Sandor Katz reveals the secrets of fermentation and the growing underground food movement.

The day I first made dilly beans, everything changed. And all because of Sandor Katz.

Sandor Katz is a self-taught fermentation experimentalist. To him (and his devoted following--ahem, which includes me and half the people in the room I'm sitting in), live fermented foods are a critically important staple to sustainable human health...not to mention delicious. Ever had sauerkraut? Pickles? Yogurt? Sourdough? Sounds familiar, doesn't it. Well, what about Ethiopian honey wine? Root kimchi? Elderberry wine? Persimmon cider mead? Ginger champagne? Kombucha? If you're dribbling at the mouth, or even a little but intrigued, prepare to enter the world of Sandorkraut.

Sandor Katz's "fermentation fervor" grew out of his overlapping interests in cooking, nutrition and gardening. (He's also an herbalist, activist, writer, builder, craftsperson and bicyclist.) He's written two books: Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods and The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements. A native of New York City, a graduate of Brown University and--as he calls it--"a retired policy wonk", Sandor Katz moved from New York and now lives at Short Mountain Sanctuary, an intentional community in Tennessee. I talked to Sandor about fermentation fetishism, underground food movements, and the benefits of fermented foods.
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