According the Associated Press, patients, particularly arthritis patients, are "fretting" over reduced access to acetaminophen, a drug that's known to cause liver damage. One patient claims the lack of access to this known poison might encourage those in pain to turn to street drugs for relief. While no one wants to be in pain, the real shame is that it's not common knowledge that arthritis is often simply a build up of toxic matter in the joints - toxic matter that can be removed by deeply cleansing the body internally. The inflammation of the surrounding tissues occurs as a result of the proximity to these acidic toxins hidden in the joints.
The root cause of arthritis is something you might want to know because one in five adults have been diagnosed with arthritis, and three out of five of those are under 65. These days one in 250 children have also developed what used to be an older person's disease.
The reasons for this penetration into younger individuals are obvious when you understand how toxicity accumulates in the body, and when you understand just how toxic common diets and lifestyles have become. Combined with the fact that relatively few people make a concerted effort to remove the effects of "normal" diets and lifestyles, we're seeing exactly what you'd expect to see.
According to a recent paper entitled "Laughter Differs in Children with Autism: An Acoustic Analysis of Laughter Produced by Children with and without the Disorder" in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, children diagnosed with autism produce different laughs than their nonautistic peers.
"We revealed that children with autism produce very engaging laughs that we call 'voiced' laughs," said William Hudenko, the lead author on the paper and assistant professor of psychology at Ithaca College.
The study recorded laughter during a series of playful interactions with an examiner. The results showed that children with autism exhibited only one type of laughter, compared to two types of laughter for nonautistic children. There was no difference in laugh duration, frequency, change in or number of laughs per interaction.
A stroll down your grocery store's aisles can be a tempting experience. Rows and rows of delicious food all wrapped up in colorful packages, encouraging you to give it a try with catchy names and creative graphics.
Good food, delicious food that's appealing to the eye, and convenient to boot. Anything that yummy has to be nourishing, right?
A key gene mutation that more than doubles the risk of asthma, hay fever and eczema has been identified by scientists.
The filaggrin gene helps skin produce a protective barrier against the foreign bodies that trigger allergies.
An analysis of 24 previous studies has shown people with defects in this gene are much more likely to develop unwelcome reactions such as sneezing and itchy eyes, severe dermatitis, asthma, hay fever and eczema.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis is arguably the world's most successful infectious agent because it knows how to avoid elimination by slowing its own growth to a crawl. Now, a report in the July 10 issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication, offers new insight into the bugs' talent for meager living.
"Tuberculosis can resist the host immune system and remain latent for decades," said Michael Glickman of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. To do so, the mycobacterium responsible must resist an arsenal of DNA-damaging mutagens produced within the macrophage, the immune cell in which it lives. "It's incompletely understood how it can do that. We've identified one such mechanism."
The discovery could lead to new drugs that might eliminate strains of TB that have grown resistant to those that are currently available.
Although the fact that we generate new brain cells throughout life is no longer disputed, their purpose has been the topic of much debate. Now, an international collaboration of researchers made a big leap forward in understanding what all these newborn neurons might actually do. Their study, published in the July 10, 2009, issue of the journal Science, illustrates how these young cells improve our ability to navigate our environment.
"We believe that new brain cells help us to distinguish between memories that are closely related in space," says senior author Fred H. Gage, Ph.D., a professor in the Laboratory for Genetics at the Salk Institute and the Vi and John Adler Chair for Research on Age-Related Neurodegenerative Diseases, who co-directed the study with Timothy J. Bussey, Ph.D., a senior lecturer in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Roger A. Barker, PhD., honorary consultant in Neurology at Addenbrookes Hospital and Lecturer at the University of Cambridge.
When the first clues emerged that adult human brains continually sprout new neurons, one of the central tenets of neuroscience - we are born with all the brain cells we'll ever have - was about to be overturned. Although it is never easy to shift a paradigm, a decade later the question is no longer whether neurogenesis exists but rather what all these new cells are actually good for.
Stressing out can cause people to gain weight, according to a study appearing in the July 15 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology. This new study is believed to be one of the first of its kind to look at the relationship between weight gain and multiple types of stress - job-related demands, difficulty paying bills, strained family relationships, depression or anxiety disorder - in the U.S. population.
"Today's economy is stressing people out, and stress has been linked to a number of illnesses - such as heart disease, high blood pressure and increased risk for cancer. This study shows that stress is also linked to weight gain,'' according to Jason Block, M.D., M.P.H., who conducted the research as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar® at Harvard University. Block practices internal medicine at Brigham & Women's Hospital and is on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School/Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.
The U.S. government is about to unleash a sweeping new vaccination program that claims to protect people from swine flu. The vaccines, which are of course completely useless against any mutated strain of the H1N1 influenza virus, are nevertheless quite useful at suppressing the immune function of those who receive them. Well-designed medical studies conducted over the years have consistently shown that the
people who catch the flu (influenza) with the greatest frequency are precisely those who get the most flu shots.
To those who know anything about the immune system, vaccines and influenza, it may seem shocking to learn that the U.S. influenza vaccine program will first target those with the weakest immune systems to begin with: Toddlers as young as six months old, pregnant women and adults with degenerative disease. This is precisely what Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius
announced today.
One in three breast cancer patients identified in public screening programs may be treated unnecessarily, a new study says. Karsten Jorgensen and Peter Gotzsche of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen analyzed breast cancer trends at least seven years before and after government-run screening programs for breast cancer started in parts of Australia, Britain, Canada, Norway and Sweden.
The research was published Friday in the BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal. Jorgensen and Gotzsche did not cite any funding for their study.
© Wikimedia CommonsFound in many salad dressings, pickles, and other foods, vinegar could help prevent accumulation of body fat and weight gain, scientists report.
Researchers in Japan are reporting new evidence that the ordinary vinegar - a staple in oil-and-vinegar salad dressings, pickles, and other foods - may live up to its age-old reputation in folk medicine as a health promoter. They are reporting new evidence that vinegar can help prevent accumulation of body fat and weight gain.
