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  • May 23, 2013
  • 01:00 PM
  • 2 views

Microbial Misadventures: Exploits in Botulism & Pruno In Our Prison Population

by Rebecca Kreston in BODY HORRORS

Drinking pruno is a risky endeavor, both in terms of its offense to culinary sensibilities and to one's health. However, turned stomachs are not the only hazard here; you may add a desire to avoid botulism to your list of reasons to shy away from you'r mates latest batch of prison hooch. The soil-dwelling bacterium Clostridium botulinum can contaminate fruits and veggies, and, in warm, oxygen-deprived conditions, produces the neuroparalytic toxin botulinum. Even more wholesome DIY ende........ Read more »

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2013) Notes from the field: botulism from drinking prison-made illicit alcohol - Arizona, 2012. MMWR. Morbidity and mortality weekly report, 62(5), 88. PMID: 23388552  

  • May 23, 2013
  • 09:14 AM
  • 18 views

New Reliable Blood Test Can Detect Depression

by Pieter Carriere in United Academics

Depression or Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) has multiple genetic and environmental causes. Genetic factors are hard to find and the discovered factors usually are also associated with other mood disorders. Furthermore, twin studies reveal that genetics can predict 37% of the depressions, which is a much lower heritability than in bipolar disorder, a comparable mood disorder (reviewed in Belmaker et al., 2008). ... Read more »

  • May 23, 2013
  • 07:34 AM
  • 11 views

Smelling Lemons Might Better Treat Autism

by Andrew Porterfield in United Academics

classical music and intense sensory exercises produced improvements in autism symptoms in children after just six months, scientists have found.... Read more »

  • May 23, 2013
  • 04:33 AM
  • 15 views

Big data for autism and the promise of newborn bloodspots

by Paul Whiteley in Questioning Answers

An episode of the BBC program Horizon on 'Big Data' recently caught my attention. The content was a fascinating insight into how we are living in a data-rich age and how trawling/mining/dredging such data has the ability to advance medicine, predict crime and even make someone a few quid/dollars/euros on the stock market.Gone (data) fishing @ Wikipedia  I'm a big believer in big data. In particular how, with the right sources, technology, techniques and people, big data might be able t........ Read more »

Mizejewski GJ, Lindau-Shepard B, & Pass KA. (2013) Newborn screening for autism: in search of candidate biomarkers. Biomarkers in medicine, 7(2), 247-60. PMID: 23547820  

  • May 22, 2013
  • 02:01 PM
  • 53 views

Marijuana and Diabetes: Does Pot Make You Thin?

by Dirk Hanson in Addiction Inbox


Teasing out the insulin effect.



On the face of it, the study seems to come out of left field: A group of researchers claimed that marijuana smokers showed 16 per cent lower fasting insulin levels than non-smokers. The study, called “The Impact of Marijuana Use on Glucose, Insulin, and Insulin Resistance among US Adults,”  is in press for The American Journal of Medicine. The authors are a diverse group of medical researchers from Harvard, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and t........ Read more »

  • May 22, 2013
  • 09:32 AM
  • 24 views

Video Tip of the Week: Canary Database for sentinels of human health

by Mary in OpenHelix

Recently we attended the Medical Library Association conference (#MLAnet13). Librarians are working so hard to wrangle information into usable forms, and to generate new connections among data types to reveal new information and leads for further studies. I ♥ librarians. In one of the sessions I attended on Medical Informatics, I heard several great talks. One [...]... Read more »

  • May 22, 2013
  • 08:45 AM
  • 14 views

CrossFit Regionals Competitions: Ice Baths and Deep Massage. Do they help?

by AB Kirk in Stff Competition

CrossFit Regionals Competitions s are almost here.  Athletes should arrive well rested and hopefully injury free.  CrossFit Regionals competitions are very intense.  Athletes will have to complete several WODs aThe post CrossFit Regionals Competitions: Ice Baths and Deep Massage. Do they help? appeared first on WODMasters Stiff Competition.... Read more »

  • May 21, 2013
  • 03:39 PM
  • 27 views

How Pain Works, Part III – Nociception

by Tony Ingram in BBoy Science

There is actually no such thing as a "pain sensor" or "pain fiber" - but there is the fascinating system of nociception! An important concept in understanding pain.... Read more »

Basbaum AI, Bautista DM, Scherrer G, & Julius D. (2009) Cellular and molecular mechanisms of pain. Cell, 139(2), 267-84. PMID: 19837031  

  • May 21, 2013
  • 01:35 PM
  • 18 views

CrossFit Woman: How Hormone Replacement Therapy May Protect You From Depression.

by AB Kirk in Stff Competition

CrossFit Woman, Depression, Female Hormones and Anti-Depressants A CrossFit woman usually take good care of herself.  We do CrossFit.  We lift weights.  Eat well.  Get lots of exercise.  All theseThe post CrossFit Woman: How Hormone Replacement Therapy May Protect You From Depression. appeared first on WODMasters Stiff Competition.... Read more »

  • May 21, 2013
  • 08:53 AM
  • 50 views

Bright Lights, Cold Bodies - The Near-Death Experience Explained

by Anouk Vleugels in United Academics

Last February, Dr. Sam Parnia, an intensive care physician who has been researching near-death experiences for the past 15 years, published his new book ‘Erasing death: The Science That is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death’. Following the release of that book, Dr. Parnia was interviewed on National Public Radio in the US. It wasn’t so much this interview that sparked my interest, as much as the comments that followed. “It’s hard to believe that this gu........ Read more »

  • May 20, 2013
  • 01:23 PM
  • 24 views

Epilepsy Service Organization in Countries with Limited Resources

by Vivek Misra in Beautiful Mind

tumblr: bellapaige88On average, 9.5/1000 population has epilepsy in Low and Middle Income Countries (LAMIC). A research which has resulted in the global campaign against epilepsy has shown, the gap between treatment need and the treatment provision worldwide is approximately 70% [1]. This large ‘treatment gap’, i.e., lack of appropriate treatment for a large number of patients with epilepsy, due to a number of causes including inability to identify cases, inability to deliver adequate treatm........ Read more »

  • May 20, 2013
  • 01:10 PM
  • 28 views

Sugary Drinks May Increase Risk of Kidney Stones

by Shawn Radcliffe in Branáin

Staying hydrated is good advice for men who’ve had kidney stones before, but sugar-sweetened sodas and fruit punch may not be the best choice of fluids.... Read more »

Ferraro, P., Taylor, E., Gambaro, G., & Curhan, G. (2013) Soda and Other Beverages and the Risk of Kidney Stones. Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. DOI: 10.2215/​CJN.11661112  

  • May 20, 2013
  • 12:25 PM
  • 32 views

Cancer increases the chances of bankruptcy - a new study on Americans

by Usman Paracha in SayPeople

Main Points:

Researchers have found that the cancer patients in America are more than two times more likely to go bankrupt than the healthy people. I think this is the case not only in America but everywhere in the world.

Published in:

Health Affairs

Study Further:

Researchers collected data in Washington State from about 400,000 adults and found that the patients of cancer have more chances of bankruptcy, i.e. 2.65 times more chances, even if they have the health insurance as the........ Read more »

  • May 20, 2013
  • 11:55 AM
  • 28 views

Epidemiology of Childhood Brain Disorders: ADHD and Autism

by William Yates, M.D. in Brain Posts

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has published a comprehensive summary of the epidemiology of childhood brain disorders in the most recent Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.This report produced some sensationalized headlines that up to 20% of children suffer from a mental disorder.  However, I was more interested in looking at the prevalence estimates for some of the individual disorders from the report.The report collates data collected from a variety of surveys and data sets inclu........ Read more »

Perou R, Bitsko RH, Blumberg SJ, Pastor P, Ghandour RM, Gfroerer JC, Hedden SL, Crosby AE, Visser SN, Schieve LA.... (2013) Mental health surveillance among children - United States, 2005-2011. Morbidity and mortality weekly report. Surveillance summaries (Washington, D.C. : 2002), 62(2), 1-35. PMID: 23677130  

  • May 20, 2013
  • 11:24 AM
  • 29 views

CrossFit Nutrition: Saturated Fat May Speed Cell Demise

by AB Kirk in Stff Competition

CrossFit Nutrition: Cell Health and Telomeres. CrossFit Nutrition: you can only be as healthy as your cells.  One marker of cell health is telomere length.  Telomeres cap the ends ofThe post CrossFit Nutrition: Saturated Fat and Cell Health appeared first on WODMasters Stiff Competition.... Read more »

  • May 20, 2013
  • 09:24 AM
  • 26 views

Do We Really Want To Eat Mexican Food?

by Katja Keuchenius in United Academics

FIFA discoverd that a lot of Mexican meat contains clenbuterol. A drug used to fatten cattle, enhance sportsperfomance, treat people with breathing disorders ánd to lose weight. So watch it with those tacos.... Read more »

  • May 20, 2013
  • 03:59 AM
  • 23 views

Autism, plasma cytokines and siblings

by Paul Whiteley in Questioning Answers

I'm gonna try and be fairly brief in this post on the paper by Valerio Napolioni and colleagues* (open-access) looking at plasma cytokine profiles in cases of autism and their asymptomatic siblings. Brief because (a) the paper is open-access and (b) the participant groups (autism: n=25; sibling controls n=25) were relatively small so one has to be quite careful in extrapolating the findings with any large degree of confidence.Siblings by Paul Klee @ WikiPaintings  Just in case you are ........ Read more »

Napolioni V, Ober-Reynolds B, Szelinger S, Corneveaux JJ, Pawlowski T, Ober-Reynolds S, Kirwan J, Persico AM, Melmed RD, Craig DW.... (2013) Plasma cytokine profiling in sibling pairs discordant for autism spectrum disorder. Journal of neuroinflammation, 38. PMID: 23497090  

  • May 19, 2013
  • 12:10 PM
  • 105 views

Shrinking Alligator Penises: Using Wildlife Models to Study How Chemical Contaminants May Affect Human Reproductive Systems (Guest Post)

by David Steen in Living Alongside Wildlife








Erin on the side of a river somewhere in western NC, hard at work study obviously.


Erin Abernethy is a Master’s student in the Odum
School of Ecology at the University of Georgia, where she is studying
scavenging ecology in Hawaii. Before coming to Athens, Erin lived in North
Carolina earning her BS in Biology at Appalachian State. For that degree,... Read more »

  • May 18, 2013
  • 05:33 AM
  • 33 views

Darth DSM-5 and autism

by Paul Whiteley in Questioning Answers

Blue Harvest @ Wikipedia @ Family GuyI need to create a suitable atmosphere for this post, so try this music for size and think Blue Harvest...Right. The wait is over. The discussions / arguments / objections / agreements are all confined to history. Drum roll, spotlight centre-stage... enter DSM-5 and into unknown territory we all go, particularly with autism, sorry.. autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) in mind.As you can see from the link above to the new diagnostic guidelines from the Ameri........ Read more »

Lai M-C, Lombardo MV, Chakrabarti B, & Baron-Cohen S. (2013) Subgrouping the Autism “Spectrum": Reflections on DSM-5. PLoS Biology. info:/

  • May 17, 2013
  • 12:13 PM
  • 51 views

Transitioning from Adolescent to Adult Eating Disorder Treatment Programs: What Are The Challenges?

by Andrea in Science of Eating Disorders


Navigating health service systems can seem daunting, to say the least. Making phone calls, getting doctor appointments and referrals, attending intake appointments, and preparing oneself for treatment can be both mentally and physically draining. When children and adolescents develop eating disorders, their parents become the main navigators in this scenario, making decisions and arrangements for their under-18-year-olds. But what happens when these adolescents reach the age of 18, and sti........ Read more »

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