March 2012
39 posts
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Many Heart Attacks Don’t Cause Chest Pain
Sudden chest pain is the hallmark symptom of a heart attack. But a large new study shows that many people who are taken to hospitals for heart attacks never have chest pain and, as a result, are less likely to be treated aggressively.
The consequences may be especially deadly for younger and middle-aged women.
Women were also more likely to die after a heart attack; the mortality rate for women...
February 2012
42 posts
The Claim: An Ice Bath Can Soothe Sore Muscles
For most people, the only time jumping into ice might sound like a great idea is after a grueling workout. Athletes have used so-called cold therapy for years, saying it reduces inflammation, speeds recovery and prevents muscle soreness.
According to research, ice baths can be helpful — at least in comparison to doing nothing. In a new report in The Cochrane Library, researchers at the...
How Exercise Fuels the Brain
Moving the body demands a lot from the brain. Exercise activates countless neurons, which generate, receive and interpret repeated, rapid-fire messages from the nervous system, coordinating muscle contractions, vision, balance, organ function and all of the complex interactions of bodily systems that allow you to take one step, then another.
For many years, scientists had believed that the brain,...
Neuroscience: Memory Formation Triggered by Stem... →
February 23rd, 2012
Researchers at the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics have discovered an answer to the long-standing mystery of how brain cells can both remember new memories while also maintaining older ones.
They found that specific neurons in a brain region called the dentate…
NOOSPHE.RE: Enriched with Information →
inthenoosphere:
(via ScienceNews)
New theory doesn’t limit consciousness to the brain As a scientist, Giulio Tononi’s goal is as lofty as it gets: He wants to understand how the brain generates consciousness. In his hunt, he and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin–Madison routinely use…
“Lo que siento por ti es tan clandestino que ni a mí mismo puedo confesármelo,...”
– Xavier Velasco, Puedo explicarlo todo
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How Massage Heals Sore Muscles
A massage after vigorous exercise unquestionably feels good, and it seems to reduce pain and help muscles recover. Many people — both athletes and health professionals – have long contended it eases inflammation, improves blood flow and reduces muscle tightness. But until now no one has understood why massage has this apparently beneficial effect.
Now researchers have found what happens to...
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How Exercise May Keep Alzheimer’s at Bay
Alzheimer’s disease, with its inexorable loss of memory and self, understandably alarms most of us. This is especially so since, at the moment, there are no cures for the condition and few promising drug treatments. But a cautiously encouraging new study from The Archives of Neurology suggests that for some people, a daily walk or jog could alter the risk of developing Alzheimer’s or change the...
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Tai Chi Benefits Patients With Parkinson’s
Tai chi, an ancient martial art characterized by slow, flowing movement and meditation, helps improve balance and movement control for people with Parkinson’s disease.
The finding, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, is the latest study to show the benefits of tai chi for people with chronic health problems. Past studies have shown that tai chi reduces falls and depression among the...
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"No seriously, I’m dead." - Cotard's Syndrome and... →
jtotheizzoe:
What if you woke up tomorrow and you believed you were dead? Like really believed it? That’s Cotard’s Syndrome.
It’s almost a Camus-level existential mindwarp. Believing that you do not, in fact, exist. James Byrne writes about its history and recent work to uncover its cause at Scientific American:
The first described patient was presented in a lecture in Paris in 1880 by Jules...
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A Randomized Trial of Tai Chi for Fibromyalgia
We conducted a single-blind, randomized trial of classic Yang-style tai chi as compared with a control intervention consisting of wellness education and stretching for the treatment of fibromyalgia (defined by American College of Rheumatology 1990 criteria). Sessions lasted 60 minutes each and took place twice a week for 12 weeks for each of the study groups.
The conclusion: Tai chi may be a...
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Scientists reaching consensus on how brain...
Neuroscientists feel they are much closer to an accepted unified theory about how the brain processes speech and language, according to a scientist at Georgetown University Medical Center who first laid the concepts a decade ago and who has now published a review article confirming the theory. In the June issue of Nature Neuroscience, the investigator, Josef Rauschecker, PhD, and his co-author,...
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In the Brain, Signs of Autism as Early as 6 Months...
Measuring brain activity in infants as young as six months may help to predict the future development of autism symptoms.
The study is only a first step toward earlier diagnosis, but our findings demonstrate for the first time that direct measures of brain functioning during the first year of life associate with a later diagnosis of autism — well before the emergence of behavioural...
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Very Young Found To Process Fear Memories In...
Very young brains process memories of fear differently than more mature ones, new research indicates. The work significantly advances scientific understanding of when and how fear is stored and unlearned, and introduces new thinking on the implications of fear experience early in life.
The researchers concluded that the age at which the initial extinction training occurred was critical to...
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The Amygdala and Fear Are Not the Same Thing
In a 2007 episode of the television show Boston Legal, a character claimed to have figured out that a cop was racist because his amygdala activated — displaying fear, when they showed him pictures of black people. This link between the amygdala and fear — especially a fear of others unlike us, has gone too far, not only in pop culture, but also in psychological science, say the authors...
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The Claim: Listening to Music Can Relieve Pain
A growing number of doctors have been using music in clinical settings, believing that it might have analgesic effects on patients — or at least take their minds off an otherwise painful procedure.
In the most recent study, published in December in The Journal of Pain, 153 people were subjected to increasingly painful shocks on their hands as they listened to music. All the while, they were...
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Exercise More During the Day, and You Will Sleep...
One extensive study published this year looked for answers by having healthy children wear actigraphs — devices that measure movement — and then seeing whether more movement and activity during the day meant improved sleep at night. The results should be particularly enlightening to parents.
The study found that sleep onset latency — the time it takes to fall asleep once in bed — ranged from as...
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Really? The Claim: Grief Can Cause a Heart Attack
The so-called broken-heart syndrome is real. The study, published on Monday in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, found that a person’s heart attack risk is 21 times higher than normal the day after a loved one dies.
Over time the risk of an attack declines, but it remains elevated within that first month. In the first week after a loved one’s death, for example, the risk...
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Caffeine Alters Estrogen Levels in Younger Women
Your daily dose of caffeine may tinker with more than just your energy levels.
A new study of women ages 18 to 44 found that drinking coffee and other caffeinated beverages can alter levels of estrogen. But the impact varies by race. In white women, for example, coffee appears to lower estrogen, while in Asian women it has the reverse effect, raising levels of the hormone.
The effects of...
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How Tanning Changes the Brain
People who frequently use tanning beds experience changes in brain activity during their tanning sessions that mimic the patterns of drug addiction, new research shows.
“What this shows is that the brain is in fact responding to UV light, and it responds in areas that are associated with reward,” said Dr. Bryon Adinoff, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern...
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How Doctors Die →
USC medical school professor Dr. Ken Murray has an interesting article titled ‘How Doctors Die’ outlining the difference between how most people die and how doctors die. As he says, “It’s not like the rest of us, but it should be.”
We as physicians are deeply familiar with how people usually…
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