Scientists have uncovered the antidepressant mechanism behind ketamine – an anesthetic, a recreational dance-party drug, and, as it turns out, an unusually fast-acting mood booster. The scientists hope that their finding will lead to the development of other, new drugs that can help patients recover from depression faster. Major depressive disorder affects some 17% of Americans, [...]
Prenatal exposure to pesticides may be delaying kids’ nervous-system development, leading to attention problems later in life, a new study finds. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley followed more than 300 California children and their mothers over several years. When the women were pregnant, the researchers took urine samples and tested them for [...]
Kids who get wine with meals are less likely to binge as adults than their neighbors who don’t drink with the family, a new study in the journal Addiction, Research and Theory suggests. American researchers interviewed 80 Italian adolescents aged 16-18 and 80 Italian young adults aged 25-30, all from the wine-producing regions of Abruzzo [...]
Contrary to accepted wisdom, kidney donations from people whose hearts have stopped beating may, in fact, be just as good as donations from brain-dead organ donors. That result — released today by the medical journal, Lancet — will come as good news to the tens of thousands of Americans who are currently wait-listed for a [...]
It’s a frequent complaint that, despite all the money poured into cancer research in the last few decades, progress has only ever seemed incremental. But perhaps nowhere is this more apparent, at least in the last 10 years, than in the field of cancer screening — in the biological indicators or “biomarkers” that promise early [...]
An egg producer in Iowa is recalling 228 million eggs, as the federal government reports a multi-state outbreak of salmonella. Infection with the bacterium salmonella enteritidis can cause fever, abdominal cramps and diarrhea. Sickness usually only lasts a few days, with no long-term consequences. But the infection can be fatal if the disease spreads from [...]
They have treadmills and exercise bikes, but astronauts do not maintain muscle mass during long space voyages — a finding that suggests big problems on manned missions to other planets.
Kids who are young for their grade level are unusually likely to be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) — a worrying sign that, for many kids, plain old immaturity has been misdiagnosed as a clinical disorder. In two separate studies — both appearing in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Health Economics — [...]
Acupuncture has been — how shall we say? — one of the less ridiculed techniques of alternative medicine, at least in recent years. A body of evidence shows that it does indeed relieve pain, for many conditions. But a study released today suggests that acupuncture probably only works because patients believe that it will — [...]
Nearly 30% of new couples now meet online. Today the Internet is the second-most common way to meet a partner, according to results from the How Couples Meet and Stay Together Survey, with web introductions ranked only behind introduction by mutual friends.
