Health & WellnessS


Syringe

Italian rush for vaccines after meningitis deaths


EuroNews
Sun, 23 Dec 2007 12:59 UTC
Worried residents in northern Italy are flooding vaccination centres after three deaths from bacterial meningitis.

Health authorities in the town of Treviso have already given vaccines to a thousand people and have enough to treat up to 18,000 more.
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Info

Losing Your Hearing? Here's How to Restore Your Hearing Naturally


Mercola.com
Sun, 23 Dec 2007 05:52 UTC


©n/a

If you have trouble hearing, or notice that your hearing is not as good as it used to be, listen up.

Age-related hearing loss may be retrievable, according to Dr. Jonathan Wright, MD, medical director of the Tahoma Clinic in Washington.

By supplementing three patients with the bioidentical hormone aldosterone, all of the men -- who were either losing their hearing or who had lost a lot of their hearing -- were able to regain much of what had been lost.
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Health

Surgery without stitches

Dan Gaffney
University of New South Wales
Thu, 20 Dec 2007 01:16 UTC
A thin polymer bio-film that seals surgical wounds could make sutures a relic of medical history.

Measuring just 50 microns thick, the film is placed on a surgical wound and exposed to an infrared laser, which heats the film just enough to meld it and the tissue, thus perfectly sealing the wound.
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Newspaper

New Science Study Shows Institutionalized Children Fare Best in Foster Care

David Ottalini
University of Maryland
Fri, 21 Dec 2007 01:09 UTC
Newly published research in the journal Science confirms that institutionalized orphans placed into foster care have much better intellectual development than those who remain behind. The authors say the results have implications for countries "grappling with how best to care for abandoned, orphaned and maltreated young children."
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Smiley

Revealed: The seven great "medical myths"

Peter Griffiths
Reuters
Sat, 22 Dec 2007 00:52 UTC


©REUTERS/Yonathan Weitzman
A lone traveller reads a newspaper in Ben-Gurion international airport near Tel Aviv March 21, 2007. Reading in dim light won't damage your eyes and is a well-worn theory among seven "medical myths" exposed in a paper published on Friday in the British Medical Journal, which traditionally carries light-hearted features in its Christmas edition.

Reading in dim light won't damage your eyes, you don't need eight glasses of water a day to stay healthy and shaving your legs won't make the hair grow back faster.
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Attention

Beef from Safeway may have had salmonella: USDA


Reuters
Fri, 21 Dec 2007 00:56 UTC
The Agriculture Department said fresh ground beef products contaminated with multi-drug resistant Salmonella may have been ground and later sold at Safeway Inc stores in five states.

USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service said the products were sold at supermarket chain Safeway Inc in Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada and New Mexico between September 19 and November 5, 2007.
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Bulb

Scientists Identify Brain Abnormalities Underlying Key Element of Borderline Personality Disorder


Weill Cornell Medical College
Fri, 21 Dec 2007 13:55 UTC
Innovative Brain Imaging Brings Into View Centers Linking Poor Impulse Control with Negative Emotion, NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Team Reports

Accompanying AJP Commentary Commends Study's Unique Systematic Approach.

Using new approaches, an interdisciplinary team of scientists at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City has gained a view of activity in key brain areas associated with a core difficulty in patients with borderline personality disorder - shedding new light on this serious psychiatric condition.

"It's early days yet, but the work is pinpointing functional differences in the neurobiology of healthy people versus individuals with the disorder as they attempt to control their behavior in a negative emotional context. Such initial insights can help provide a foundation for better, more targeted therapies down the line," explains lead researcher Dr. David A. Silbersweig, the Stephen P. Tobin and Dr. Arnold M. Cooper Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Neurology at Weill Cornell Medical College, and attending psychiatrist and neurologist at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

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Heart

Study Quantifies Orphanage Link to I.Q.

Benedict Carey
The New York Times
Fri, 21 Dec 2007 05:41 UTC
Psychologists have long believed that growing up in an institution like an orphanage stunts children's mental development but have never had direct evidence to back it up.

Now they do, from an extraordinary years-long experiment in Romania that compared the effects of foster care with those of institutional child-rearing.
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Ladybug

Teen Sexual Behaviour Linked To Sex Education, US Study

Catharine Paddock
Medical News Today
Fri, 21 Dec 2007 05:35 UTC
A new US study found that the sexual behaviour of teenagers is linked to whether or not they have had formal school sex education.

The study is available as an early online issue of the January 2008 imprint of the Journal of Adolescent Health, and was conducted by lead author and epidemiologist Trisha Mueller and colleagues, from the Division of Reproductive Health at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), based in Atlanta, Georgia.
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Red Flag

Premenstrual symptoms getting on your nerves?


BioMed Central
Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:24 UTC
For some women premenstrual syndrome (PMS) is a minor monthly annoyance, but for others, more severe symptoms seriously disrupt their lives. However despite the number of women affected, science has yet to offer a full explanation or universal treatment. Now intriguing new findings published in the online open access journal BioPsychoSocial Medicine suggest not only that PMS is tied to decreased nerve activity each month, but also that those with extreme symptoms may have a permanently depressed nervous system.

A team of Japanese researchers led by Tamaki Matsumoto from the International Buddhist University in Osaka investigated whether the activity of the autonomic nervous system, which plays a vital role in equilibrium within the human body, changed during the menstrual cycle. The team measured heart rate variability and hormone levels and used questionnaires to evaluate physical, emotional and behavioural symptoms accompanying 62 women's menstrual cycles.
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