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Psychological treatments build on the benefits of drug therapy for severe migraine sufferers, according to a new study by Elizabeth Seng and Dr. Kenneth Holroyd from Ohio University in the US. Their comparison of the effects of various treatment combinations for severe migraine – drug therapy with or without behavioral management – shows that those patients receiving the behavioral management program alongside drug therapy are significantly more confident in their ability to use behavioral skills to effectively self-manage migraines.
Results of a study reported in the September issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society suggest that Veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have a greater risk for dementia than Veterans without PTSD, even those who suffered traumatic injuries during combat. Exposure to life threatening events, like war, can cause PTSD, and there are high rates among veterans. PSTD includes symptoms such as avoiding things or people that remind a person of the trauma, nightmares, difficulty with sleep, and mood problems.
Scientists have long thought that social networks, which features many distant connections, or “long ties,” produces large-scale changes most quickly. But in a new study, Damon Centola, an assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has reached a different conclusion: Individuals are more likely to acquire new health practices while living in networks with dense clusters of connections – that is, when in close contact with people they already know well. Included in this report is a video interview with researcher, Damon Centola.
Empathy is unusual in the animal kingdom. So empathy must have had some major survival benefits for it to have evolved. What might those benefits have been? Empathy seems to have evolved in three major steps. First, among vertebrates, birds and mammals developed ways of rearing their young, plus forms of pair bonding – sometimes for life.
In Alzheimer’s disease, the problem is amyloid-β, a protein that accumulates in the brain and causes nerve cells to weaken and die. Drugs designed to eliminate plaques made of amyloid-β have a fatal problem: they need to enter the brain and remove the plaques without attacking healthy brain cells. A new breakthrough from the laboratory of Nobel Prize winner Paul Greengard, however, suggests that treatments modeled on the blockbuster cancer drug Gleevec could be the solution. The findings are reported in the September 2 issue of the journal Nature.
Insomnia and other sleep disorders are very common, yet are not generally well understood by doctors and other health care professionals. Now the British Association for Psychopharmacology (BAP) has released up-to-the-minute guidelines in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, published by SAGE, to guide psychiatrists and physicians caring for those with sleep problems.
A majority of adults in California are obese or overweight, and more than 2 million have been diagnosed with diabetes, according to a new study from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. Both conditions – which are related to each other as well as to heart disease – increased significantly in just six years, with the prevalence of diabetes alone jumping nearly 26 percent between 2001 and 2007.
‘Mindfulness’, the process of learning to become more aware of our ongoing experiences, increases well-being in adolescent boys, a new study reports. Researchers from the University of Cambridge analyzed 155 boys from two independent UK schools, Tonbridge and Hampton, before and after a four-week crash course in mindfulness.
Young adults who get fewer than eight hours of sleep per night have greater risks of psychological distress, a combination of high levels of depressive and anxious symptoms, according to a study in the Sept. 1 issue of the journal SLEEP. Using an average self-reported nightly sleep duration of eight to nine hours as a reference, the study found a linear association between sleep durations of less than eight hours and psychological distress in young adults between 17 and 24 years of age.
Although the whole population can benefit from a physically active lifestyle, in part through reduced obesity risk, a new study shows that individuals with a genetic predisposition to obesity can benefit even more. The research, carried out by Dr. Ruth Loos from the Medical Research Council Epidemiology Unit in Cambridge, United Kingdom, and colleagues, published in this week’s PLoS Medicine suggests that the genetic predisposition to obesity can be reduced by an average of 40% through increased physical activity. Check the end of the report to download the freely available open-access study.
People want to be informed and asked for consent before deciding whether to let researchers share their genetic information in a federal database. This is according to a team of investigators at Group Health Research Institute and the University of Washington (UW). The team’s report, called “Glad You Asked,” is in the September 2010 Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics.
Clinical trials using patients’ own immune cells to target tumors have yielded promising results. However, this approach usually works only if the patients also receive large doses of drugs designed to help immune cells multiply rapidly, and those drugs have life-threatening side effects. Now a team of MIT engineers has devised a way to deliver the necessary drugs by smuggling them on the backs of the cells sent in to fight the tumor.
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