More men than women develop Parkinson’s disease and new work presented at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies says that it is do to sex differences in how brain cells change. Parkinson’s disease affects about 9 million people and becomes increasingly prevalent with age.
Many viruses face a choice after they have infected their hosts: to replicate quickly, killing the cell in the process, or to become dormant and lie in wait. HIV, herpes, and a number of other human viruses behave this way and, in fact, even the viruses that attack bacteria – phages – face similar decisions when invading a cell. What causes a virus to choose dormancy over immediate gratification? Prof. Rotem Sorek and his group in the Weizmann Institute’s Department of Molecular Genetics have now discovered that, during infection, viruses secrete small molecules into their environment that other viruses can pick up and “read.” In this way, they can actually coordinate their attack, turning simple messages into a fairly sophisticated strategy.
Chemicals found in the blood, biomarkers, can be combined to produce patterns that signify how well a person is aging and his or risk for future aging-related diseases, according to a new study.
To be science, there must be a theoretical foundation. What does psychology lack? A theoretical foundation. In fact, the only true theoretical foundation of psychology is widely derided by psychologists and psychiatrists alike, yet much of the world can only name one person in the field - and that person is Dr. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis.
Though opiods are getting all of the government attention, and the substitute fentanyl all of the attention in media, they are not the only substances putting people at risk. Kratom has gotten some media attention, but among users, psilocybin-containing 'magic mushrooms' are a bigger worry, with more than 10 percent in a recent survey believing their worst 'bad trip' had put themselves or others in harm's way, and a substantial majority called their most distressing episode one of the top 10 biggest challenges of their lives.
One-third of science is not published in the common language of science, English, and that prevents uptake of the results and citations for the researchers, according to a new analysis.Language barriers mean science missed at international level and practitioners struggling to access new knowledge, because all major scientific journals publish in English. What science needs is true globalization, but the authors at Cambridge instead argue for more fragmentation, a warmed over version of cultural relativism. They even posit that funding bodies need to encourage translations as part of their 'outreach' evaluation criteria, funding the long tail of communication rather than science itself.
Everyone has heard of the hangover, it is that sluggish feeling after drinking too much alcohol- A group of psychologists now contend that emotional experiences can induce physiological and internal brain states that persist for long periods of time after the emotional events have ended.In other words, your emotions can cause a hangover.
If you are sick and need to be readmitted to the hospital after already spending time there, your chances of being allowed back in have dropped since the weight of federal law has imposed penalties on readmissions under the Affordable Care Act, in an effort to contain costs that have ballooned out of control with almost 11 million new people on Medicaid rather than in private exchanges.The authors of the analysis are cheering this as policy efforts that motivate health care providers to improve performance but they didn't actually analyze successful medical treatment, they simply used the metric of readmission.
Ineffective drugs are generally a bad idea - natural medicine, osteopathy and homeopathy are not considered medicine because they can't demonstrate efficacy, and chemotherapy drugs are expensive so the standard is higher.But when it comes to the devastating brain tumor called glioblastoma multiforme, some patients have benefited from treatment with a class of chemotherapy drugs that two previous large clinical trials indicated was ineffective against the disease. The chemotherapy drugs block the growth of new blood vessels in the tumor and the patients lived an average of about one year longer than those who were given other classes of chemotherapy drugs.
Modern diet fads, like paleo, farm-to-fork, the weird Food Babe's if-she-can't-spell-it-you-shouldn't-eat-it beliefs, harken back to a simpler time when people lived off the land, and nothing had preservatives and it was all Whole Grain.In reality, ancient people could not work hard enough or fast enough to create food science that would prevent booms and busts of starvation and rationing. They wanted their food processed, to turn unpalatable or even toxic foodstuffs into something that could be consumed, and they even made progress doing it 10,000 year ago. First was the use of fires or pits and the invention of ceramic cooking vessels, and those led to an expansion of food preparation techniques.
A paper in Sexually Transmitted Infections details a cheap way to kill off gonorrhea in the mouth - alcohol-containing mouthwash. Gonorrhea is caused by bacteria and curb the growth of the bacteria responsible. Gonorrhea of the mouth has become more common among primarily gay men as fear of AIDS has declined. That disease is quite treatable today and so fear of it has declined, meaning a decline in condom use. Gonorrhea is also treatable, with antibiotics, but those heighten the risk of the emergence of antibiotic resistant strains of Neisseria gonnorheae, the bacteria responsible for the infection, so concern is high. If gay men won't use condoms, maybe they'll use mouthwash
A new analysis has found that if you are on Medicare, it's better to get a female internist than a male. Female internists have lower rates of 30-day mortality and hospital readmission than those patients treated by men.Obviously it could be a variety of other factors - modern medicine, and its government control, has created a "teach to the protocol environment", and women are more likely to adhere to guidelines -but the authors postulate that female physicians more likely to adhere to clinical guidelines and provide preventive care more often, meaning that even if their careers are interrupted by child-bearing they should be paid more than men.
There remain a lack of safeguards built into the health-care system for fitness trackers.Personal health wearable devices that are used to monitor heart rates, sleep patterns, calories, and even stress levels have led to new privacy and security risks. Though watches, fitness bands, and so-called "smart" clothing are part of a growing "connected-health" system in the U.S., promising to provide people with more efficient ways to manage their own health, it isn't a Utopia if you aren't a fan of weak and fragmented health-privacy regulatory system.
