Lookabetter

A faint waft of men’s cologne in a shopping mall. The smell of a neighbor’s barbecue. A flash of a face on TV: small unexpected sensory cues can trigger extreme reactions in people who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), about one quarter of all people who have lived through a traumatic event like rape, assault, war or terror attack.
New research by Israeli scientists from Ben Gurion University Read more…

Are genes destiny? Alternatively, are we simply the products of our environment? There is a growing sense that neither of these two possibilities fully captures the essence of the risk for psychiatric disorders. New light is being shed on the complex interaction of genetic and environmental factors as the result of growth in the field of epigenetics. While genetics is the study of how variation in gene sequence or "genotype" influences traits or Read more…

An expert has written an article on bmj.com
that suggests a link between heart attacks and erectile
dysfunction. Dr Geoffrey Hackett (Good Hope Hospital,
Birmingham, UK) says that erectile dysfunction gives a two to three
year early warning of a heart attack, but Read more…

Researchers at the Farber Institute for Neurosciences at Thomas Jefferson University and the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University were recently awarded a $3.7 million grant from The National Eye Institute to study depression in patients diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Barry W. Rovner, M.D., director of Clinical Alzheimer’s Read more…

Women who smoke are at greater risk of developing major depressive disorder, according to new research published in the October issue Read more…

Materialistic people tend to form strong connections to particular product brands when their level of anxiety about death is high, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
Authors Aric Rindfleisch (University of Wisconsin-Madison and Korea University), James E. Burroughs (University of Virginia), and Nancy Wong (University of Wisconsin-Madison) examined levels of materialism and insecurity in Read more…

Cuts in Funding for Physician Training May Mean Fewer Physicians to Staff Community Health Centers
Federal efforts to improve access to health care for underserved populations by expanding community health center capacity may be futile without continued federal support of Title Read more…

One of the few studies to look at the effects of religious participation on the mental health of minorities suggests that for some of them, religion may actually be contributing to adolescent depression.
Previous research has shown that teens who are active in religious services are depressed less often because it provides these adolescents with social support and a sense of belonging.
But new research has found that Read more…

Results of a new study call into question recent clinical guidelines issued by leading cardiovascular groups, including the American Heart Association, which recommend patients with cardiovascular disease be screened for signs of depression and treated accordingly. The study, published in the November 12 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association and conducted by an international Read more…

Dr. Leonel Fernandez Liriano, Professor of Medicine at Pontifical Catholic University School of Medicine (PCUSM), announced nine month follow up results for the first patient treated with engineered stem cells in a clinical study of primary pulmonary hypertension. The stem cells are extracted from patients’ own blood and trained to become new blood vessels.
Zannos Grekos, M.D., Assistant Clinical Professor Read more…

Forty percent of men with prostate cancer may not even know they have it, according to a new research study by the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Chicago.
The study revealed the standard office biopsy procedure often isn’t enough to properly detect prostate cancer. This new research will be published in an upcoming issue of Urology, a national medical journal.
Researchers used an advanced biopsy technique called stereotactic transperineal Read more…

Barriers to managing asthma include access to appropriate care, patient adherence, distrust of the medical profession, delayed asthma diagnosis, culture, lifestyle choices and genetic discrepancies according to experts at the annual meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI) in Seattle.
"Lack of access to high quality care contributes to disparities in asthma care, especially for vulnerable populations," Read more…

"Unintended Effects of Emphasizing Disparities in Cancer Communication to African-Americans," Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention: For the study, researcher Robert Nicholson, an assistant professor in the Department of Neurology and Psychiatry at the St. Louis University School of Public Health, and colleagues surveyed 300 black adults who were asked to state their likelihood Read more…

Two new national health studies show that more adults in the US are living with hypertension than ever before; while this is bad news in that the
proportion of the population with high blood pressure has gone up, it is also good news in that more people are living with rather than dying from high blood Read more…

Researchers looking at different genetic factors which may be at play in people with asthma are looking for volunteers to help with their research at Queensland University of Technology.
Matthew Hadaway, a PhD student in the School of Life Sciences, said the research group he is working with is looking at the genetic make-up of cells and proteins in asthmatics.
"We are researching the biology of asthma, and want to find Read more…

In a large group of Medicare beneficiaries with diabetes, depression was associated with a higher death rate from all causes during a two-year study period. The findings are published in the October 2008 Journal of General Internal Medicine.
Lead author Dr. Wayne Katon, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington (UW), Read more…

The Genes, Environment and Health Initiative (GEI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have awarded grants, estimated to be up to $5.5 million over two years for six studies aimed at finding genetic factors that influence the risks for stroke, glaucoma, high blood pressure, prostate cancer and other common disorders.
The grantees will use a genome-wide association study to rapidly scan markers across the complete sets of DNA, or genomes, of large Read more…

Long suspected by the 5 million recreational bike riders and sexual medicine experts, bicycle seat design-shorter noseless seats versus the standard protruding nose extended seat-can directly affect a man’s sexual function, based on the nation’s first prospective study of healthy policemen riding bikes on the job. The study is published in the current issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine.
Dr. Read more…

Why do many Canadians get the winter blues? In the first study of its kind in the living human brain, Dr. Jeffrey Meyer and colleagues at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) have discovered greater levels of serotonin transporter in the brain in winter than in summer. These findings have important implications for understanding seasonal mood change Read more…

The estimated rate of anaphylaxis in young women after human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination was significantly higher - 5 to 20 fold - than that identified in comparable school-based vaccination programs, according to a study published in CMAJ However, the overall rates of anaphylaxis were low with no associated serious lasting effects.
In a study of 114,000 women, a team of Australian Read more…

A new study has found that the more a teenager is exposed to television and other electronic media the higher are his/her chances of developing depression symptoms in young adulthood - this is especially the case for young men, says a study published in Archives of General Psychiatry, a JAMA/Archives journal.
The authors explain that depression is the leading cause of non-fatal disability worldwide. It tends to start during adolescence Read more…

1. New ACP Guideline Looks at Effectiveness of Drugs Used to Treat Depressive Disorders
Second generation treatments for depression are all equally effective according to a new clinical practice guideline from the American College of Physicians (ACP). The guideline is published today Read more…

AtCor Medical (ASX: ACG),
the developer and marketer of the SphygmoCor(R) system, which
measures central blood pressures and arterial stiffness
noninvasively, today announced that a new study* funded by the
National Institutes of Health (NIH) found that when patients’ central
pulse pressures exceeded 50 mm of mercury, there was a significant
increase in cardiovascular events. The 2,405 patient Read more…

Buy acomplia without prescription Hay fever sufferers and people with asthma; beware - peak pollen season is now until late November, according to the latest asthma alert issued by the National Asthma Council Australia.
"There is so much Read more…

The brains of individuals with major depressive disorder appear to react more strongly when anticipating pain and also display altered functioning of the neural network that modifies pain sensitivity, according to a report in the November issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
"Chronic pain and depression are common and often overlapping syndromes," Read more…