What Statistics Can and Can’t Tell Us About Ourselves Harold Eddleston, a seventy-seven-year-old from Greater Manchester, was still reeling from a cancer diagnosis he had been given that week when, on a Saturday morning in February, 1998, he received the worst possible news. He would have to face the future alone: his beloved wife had died unexpectedly, from a heart attack. Eddleston’s daughter, concerned for his health, called their family doctor, a well-respected local man named Harold Shipman. He came to the house, sat with her father, held his hand, and spoke to him tenderly. Pushed for a prognosis as he left, Shipman replied portentously, “I wouldn’t buy him any Easter eggs.” By Wednesday, Eddleston was dead; Dr. Harold Shipman was one of the most prolific serial killers in history. One person’s actions, written only in numbers, tell a profound story. In 1825, the French Ministry of Justice ordered the creation of a national collection of crime records. Or maybe not so unpredictable. A stranger hands you a coin. Peto objected.
Scientists Theorize Inflammation May Trigger Some Mental Illnesses Katherine Streeter for NPR Sometime around 1907, well before the modern randomized clinical trial was routine, American psychiatrist Henry Cotton began removing decaying teeth from his patients in hopes of curing their mental disorders. If that didn't work, he moved on to more invasive excisions: tonsils, testicles, ovaries and, in some cases, colons. Cotton was the newly appointed director of the New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane and was acting on a theory proposed by influential Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, under whom Cotton had studied, that psychiatric illness is the result of chronic infection. Meyer's idea was based on observations that patients with high fevers sometimes experience delusions and hallucinations. Cotton ran with the idea, scalpel in hand. This 1920 newspaper clipping from The Washington Herald highlights Dr. Following his death in 1933, interest in Cotton's cures waned. Symptoms Of Mental And Physical Illness Can Overlap Eye of Science/Science Source
If ‘Pain Is an Opinion,’ There Are Ways to Change Your Mind It’s not a cure all. We can’t think away all pain. For one, we don’t fully control our thoughts. Just as you can’t relax when told “to just relax,” you can’t become pain free just by telling yourself your brain is exacerbating your pain. Even the happiest, calmest optimists experience pain. “Most people with chronic pain aren’t just a little stressed, they are a lot stressed,” said Paul Ingraham, who has made a career explaining the science of chronic pain and injury rehab. This points to the importance of addressing mental health alongside physical health. Some stress reduction and promotion of feelings of safety can be achieved relatively easily. Although all these can be of some help, they won’t eliminate all pain in all people, and in many cases they can only offer short-term relief.
Networks of Genome Data Will Transform Medicine Breakthrough Technical standards that let DNA databases communicate. Why It Matters Your medical treatment could benefit from the experiences of millions of others. Key Players Global Alliance for Genomics and Health Google Personal Genome Project Noah is a six-year-old suffering from a disorder without a name. A match could make a difference. In January, programmers in Toronto began testing a system for trading genetic information with other hospitals. One of the people behind this project is David Haussler, a bioinformatics expert based at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Haussler is a founder and one of the technical leaders of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, a nonprofit organization formed in 2013 that compares itself to the W3C, the standards organization devoted to making sure the Web functions correctly. The unfolding calamity in genomics is that a great deal of life-saving information, though already collected, is inaccessible. —Antonio Regalado
What’s so fascinating about weird children’s TV shows? - BBC Future “We were watching a whole lot of SpongeBob in lab meetings, and I felt I just couldn’t get any work done afterwards,” Lillard recalls. “I thought: ‘If that happens to me after watching it, I wonder what happens to four-year-olds.’” This prompted her to start a new study, looking at the impact of television viewing on children’s executive function – a set of cognitive abilities that include focusing attention, planning, deferring gratification and managing emotions. At the time, Lillard thought it might have been the fast-paced editing that was to blame. Four years later, she published the results of a more thorough follow-up study. “Very early in life, if not innately, babies have a folk understanding of having things fall, or that if something pushes against something else, it is going to fall down,” Lillard explains. And it wasn’t just SpongeBob.
6 Dietary Factors That Powerfully Affect Your Mental Health Mental health is intrinsically linked to your diet. Studies have shown that certain nutrients and deficiencies are increasingly responsible for the health of your brain. Here are 6 dietary factors that can exert a profound influence over your mental wellness. Omega-3s. Most of us don’t get enough omega-3s in our diets. However, omega-3s are incredibly therapeutic in the brain. Love This? Vitamin D. B vitamins. Zinc. Iron. Probiotics. The nutrients in our diets are our best medicine. Related7 Often Overlooked Ways to Make Yourself Happier4 Healthy Comfort Food TweaksThe Surprising Foods That Alleviate Anxiety If this has been super-decade, why are we still so angry? Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft. © ap A "Happy New Year" hat lies on the wet ground along with other items following the celebration… There is a strong case to be made that things are getting better. Load Error In 2010, Matt Ridley made the case in "The Rational Optimist" that things were better than they appeared. But it sure doesn't feel like it, does it? Nobody knows, but lots of people are making educated guesses. No single factor explains our national dyspepsia. Economic and political dislocations caused by technological progress have been a source of unease and resentment ever since the printing press sparked the Protestant Reformation. The decline of organized religion is a perennial scapegoat, particularly on the right. Another source of national grumpiness is the plight of young people. There is a strong case to be made that things are getting better.
Common Medications Linked To Brain Disease When most people think of brain disease, they probably think of genetics, traumatic brain injury and other causes. But, there is a silent brain disease culprit that few people know about: prescription and over-the-counter drugs. Multiple studies even link some medications to dementia—a loss of mental ability severe enough to interfere with normal activities of daily living, lasting more than six months, not present since birth and not associated with a loss or alteration of consciousness. A new study published in the medical journal JAMA Neurology (Journal of the American Medical Association Neurology) found that a class of drugs known as anticholinergics are linked to an increased risk of dementia as well as brain shrinkage and dysfunction. Love This? Thanks for subscribing! The study, led by Shannon Risacher, PhD, Assistant Research Professor of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Indiana University’s School of Medicine, examined 451 people averaging 73 years of age. Dr.
Neurocapitalism: Facebook and Neuralink are building brain-reading tech “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.” That’s from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, published in 1949. The comment is meant to highlight what a repressive surveillance state the characters live in, but looked at another way, it shows how lucky they are: At least their brains are still private. Over the past few weeks, Facebook and Elon Musk’s Neuralink have announced that they’re building tech to read your mind — literally. Mark Zuckerberg’s company is funding research on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that can pick up thoughts directly from your neurons and translate them into words. And Musk’s company has created flexible “threads” that can be implanted into a brain and could one day allow you to control your smartphone or computer with just your thoughts. Other companies such as Kernel, Emotiv, and Neurosky are also working on brain tech. This might sound like science fiction, but it’s already begun to change people’s lives. 1. 2. 3. 4. 1.
Hispanic, Black Students Less Likely To Receive Help For Mental Health Problems : HEALTH : Tech Times Black and Hispanic students are less likely to get proper mental health treatment than their white counterparts despite having similar rates of mental health problems, a new study shows. Led by Dr. Lyndonna Marrast, of the Harvard Medical School, researchers examined data involving youngsters under 18 years old and young adults aged 18 to 34 years old. The report discovered that minorities received less of all kinds of mental health care, such as visits to social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists, as well as counseling for mental health and substance abuse. Marrast and her colleagues also found the following: • Black young adults and children are about 50 percent as likely to receive mental health care compared to their white counterparts. • Latino and black kids made 49 percent and 37 percent less visits to psychiatrists, respectively; and 58 percent and 47 percent fewer visits to any mental health professional than their white counterparts. Dr.
Many Genes Influence Same-Sex Sexuality, Not a Single ‘Gay Gene’ The researchers also looked at answers to other questions in the 23andMe survey, including people’s sexual identity and what gender they fantasized about. There, they found considerable genetic overlap between those results and whether people ever engaged in same-sex sex, suggesting that these aspects of sexual orientation share common genetics, they said. Dean Hamer, a former National Institutes of Health scientist who led the first high-profile study identifying a genetic link to being gay in 1993, said he was happy to see such a large research effort. “Having said that, I’d like to emphasize that it’s not a gay gene study — it’s a study of what makes people have a single same-sex experience or more,” said Dr. Hamer, now an author and filmmaker. The gene he identified was on the X chromosome, one of the sex chromosomes, a location the new study did not flag as being significant for same-sex sexual behavior. “Of course they didn’t find a gay gene — they weren’t looking for one,” Dr.
Lily Bailey on living with OCD: 'My brain was filled with weird, uncomfortable thoughts' | Society Your extremely compelling book, Because We Are Bad, details your life with obsessive compulsive disorder. You are 23 now and your book gives the impression it has always been with you. But was there any starting point as such, and if so, what was it? OCD differs from person to person – how did yours manifest? My earliest memories of OCD centre around having an innate feeling that something bad was going to happen and that I was a bad person. Tell us about the moment your interior world (what was going on in your brain) collided with your exterior world.By age 16, my list making had gotten out of hand. What’s the most useful help you have received in dealing with your disorder? In OCD, it involves exposure therapy, where you feel the obsession come in, and rather than doing a compulsion like you normally would, you basically “sit with” that obsession. What is the most misunderstood thing about OCD? What has OCD taught you about human nature? Your book is deeply personal.
Panicking About Your Kids’ Phones? New Research Says Don’t SAN FRANCISCO — It has become common wisdom that too much time spent on smartphones and social media is responsible for a recent spike in anxiety, depression and other mental health problems, especially among teenagers. But a growing number of academic researchers have produced studies that suggest the common wisdom is wrong. The latest research, published on Friday by two psychology professors, combs through about 40 studies that have examined the link between social media use and both depression and anxiety among adolescents. That link, according to the professors, is small and inconsistent. “There doesn’t seem to be an evidence base that would explain the level of panic and consternation around these issues,” said Candice L. Odgers, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and the lead author of the paper, which was published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. But some researchers question whether those fears are justified. The new article by Ms. Mr. Dr. Ms.