While applauding the First Lady’s efforts to combat childhood obesity through the Let’s Move initiative, researchers from the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco say that the campaign’s efforts focused primarily on behavioral and nutritional intervention—in school or at home—will yield “limited
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The uninsured and those whose primary health insurance is through Medicaid are far more likely to receive poor migraine treatment, compared with people who have private health insurance, according to a study published in the journal Neurology. Analyzing data from two large national surveys of patient visits to hospitals and doctor’s
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Antipsychotic drugs, which are often prescribed to treat aggression in patients with dementia, may significantly increase risk for potentially fatal pneumonia in the elderly, according to a new study highlighted by the BBC from researchers at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands. The study, published in the Annals of
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Adding to their previous research examining the impact of social contagion on everything from smoking to generosity, Harvard sociologist Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis and University of California, San Diego, political scientist …
Physical therapy may offer some new mothers protection against postpartum depression, a small study from researchers at the University of Melbourne’s Physiotherapy Department suggests. The study included 161 women who had recently given birth and had no previous history of depression. Roughly half of participants were assigned to an …
How soon your performance will be rated may influence how well you do, according to a new study published in the journal Psychological Science. In the study, researchers Keri L. Kettle and Gerald Häubl from the University of Alberta set out to determine whether the timing of feedback—how soon you learn of your grade, or get your
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Adding to a growing understanding of the underlying brain functions involved in moral decision-making, a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University—including neuroscientist Marc Hauser, author of the 2006 book Moral Minds— found that manipulating activity in a certain brain region
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Previous research has found that people who generally have more positive emotions tend to experience a broad range of benefits—more stable marriages, better social skills and just greater happiness overall—compared with those who are more dominated by negative emotions. One measurement that researchers use when assessing emotions is
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For middle-aged women who aren’t counting calories, how much exercise does it take to keep off extra weight? According to a new study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, roughly an hour per day. Though current recommendations from the Department of Health and Human Services suggest that a weekly 150
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A large scale study of children between the ages of 2 to 19 finds that a growing number of young children are extremely obese—or have a body mass index greater than 35 kg/m. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), children who are in the 85th up to 95th percentile (or have a BMI higher than 25 kg/m,
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A recent clinical trial conducted by neurologists at Stanford University School of Medicine suggests that deep brain stimulation using implanted electrodes may help reduce seizures in epileptic patients. The results of the clinical trial, published online this week in the journal Epilepsia, showed that, patients whose brains were
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Why is it that most of us can remember our precise surroundings the moment that we first learned of JFK’s assassination, the Challenger explosion or the fall of the Twin Towers, but not say, what grocery aisle we were standing in when the phone call came to remind us to pick up milk? What is it about the timing—or more specifically,
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An overactive dopamine reward system in the brain may help explain why psychopaths pursue rewards without regard for consequences, according to new research published this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Previous research has found that individuals who suffer from antisocial personality disorder—often referred to as …
