Clinical Research
Social rejection isn't just emotionally unsettling, it can also impact your heart in a literal sense, according to a new study which finds that being romantically rejected makes your heart rate drop for a moment. Bregtje Gunther Moor, Eveline A. Crone, and Maurits W. van der Molen of the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University in the Netherlands say research has shown that the brain processes physical and social pain in some of the same regions but they wanted to find out how social pain affects people physically.
For the study, volunteers were asked to send the researchers a…
A new study says sodium nitrate, like you get if you eat plenty of vegetables, reverses features of metabolic syndrome in mice.
Metabolic syndrome is the list of risk factors of metabolic origin that increase likelihood of getting cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.
As obesity has increased, and the number of people with metabolic syndrome right along with it, various attempts have been made to identify a common underlying molecular mechanism for metabolic syndrome. One group has pointed to a defect in endogenous synthesis and bioavailability of nitric…
If you get an injury, you might clench your hand. It turns out there is a brain-related reason for that, namely a somatosensory body one. Perception and multisensory interactions at the spinal level.
A new report in Current Biology says 'self-touch', like hand clenching, offers significant relief for acute pain under experimental conditions and they used the Thermal Grill Illusion to show it.
Unlike magic tricks, the Thermal Grill Illusion is a sensory one involving touch instead of eyesight and was first introduced by T. Thunberg in 1896 (1) and showed that heat and…
Tendons connect bones to muscles so if you want to run during a football game or fight a Trojan War, they are important. If you didn't understand the clever pun in the title, the only vulnerability of Achilles was his calcaneal tendon (tendo calcaneus), because when his mother Thetis dipped him into the magical river Styx to make him invincible, she held him by the heel.
Naturally, it was his undoing. So today that tendon of the posterior leg is called the Achilles tendon and a devastating weakness in an otherwise strong group or person is colloquially called the Achilles Heel (…
A new study in Heart says a combination of depression and heart disease is far more lethal than either one of those condition alone.
Depressed people are more likely to die from all causes so it's difficult to narrow down whether or not depressed people with heart disease are at greater risk and people who who are depressed, but otherwise healthy, have been shown to be more likely to develop coronary heart disease, irrespective of what other risk factors they might have.
Depression is clearly the common factor. The authors base their findings on just under 6,000 middle aged…
In vitro fertilization (IVF) is quite common these days, with over 4 million children born following IVF treatments worldwide and it is generally regarded as a safe technique, but some scientific reports have noted an increased rate of problems following IVF in comparison to ‘natural’ conception and birth. A review by the Chair of the international body which collects data on IVF concludes that IVF is generally safe, although he stresses that patients need to be made aware of the slight risks, and that we need to continue to monitor the results of the technique.
Karl-Gösta Nygren, associate…
Hank |
The downside to PLoS One forcing out almost 8000 articles this year will be that a lot of them won't have any legitimate peer review, despite shrill objections to my noting in even the nicest possible way that they can't be doing the same peer review as other PLoS groups, much less print magazines (though likely the same as many other pay-to-publish services, BMC, etc. included) ... they just can't.
But I am nice about it, because I like what they are trying to do and I get that they want to keep the doors open, and when you make money collecting publication fees you are going to publish a…
End-stage renal disease, or chronic kidney failure, affects more than 500,000 people per year in the United States alone and is only fully treated with a kidney transplant.
Yet there were only 17,000 donated kidneys for transplants last year and the number of patients on the transplant waiting list currently exceeds 85,000, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network.
350,000 patients are instead reliant on kidney dialysis, which comes at a tremendous cost. The Medicare system alone spends $25 billion on treatments for kidney failure, more than 6 percent of the total…
Is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) too often confused with immaturity or just young age? It may be, according to new research by a Michigan State University economist published in the Journal of Health Economics.
ADHD is the most commonly diagnosed behavioral disorder for kids in the United States, with at least 4.5 million diagnoses among children under age 18, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Often diagnoses of ADHD depend on a child's age relative to classmates and the teacher's perceptions of whether the child has symptoms, says the…
Drug trials conducted by the very pharmaceutical company with an obvious vested interest in a positive result are far more likely to yield a... positive result!
Perhaps not earth-shattering news to anybody with a gram of cynicism in their body but is still an orchestrated effort to undermine the credibility of science as anything higher than the distortion of data in the name of money.
All the double-blind protocols in the world cannot reveal whether raw data and published data have anything in common save for both being in base 10. Revealingly, both the drug companies' internal trials and…