Clinical Research
Alcohol is among the most commonly abused substances and men are almost twice as likely as women to develop alcoholism but there have been no clear reasons for this difference.
A new study in Biological Psychiatry says that it may be biological and that dopamine is an important factor. Dopamine is a catecholamine, molecules that serve as hormones and neurotransmitters, and is a precursor of adrenaline. Dopamine has multiple functions in the brain but the researchers considered it important in their research on a biology of alcoholism because of its pleasurable effects when it is released by rewarding experiences, such as sex or drugs.
In 1978, Louise Joy Brown was the first child to be Born through In vitro Fertilization (IVF). In 2010, Dr. Robert G. Edwards was awarded Nobel Prize in Physiology or medicine for his ground breaking work in the development of IVF.
The Problem: 10% of the couples worldwide have problems conceiving.
The Ground work: Dr. Robert G. Edwards did extensive research on the Hormones that induce the maturation of oocytes and their ovulation.
This is a story of Drugs, its HisStory.
Drug discovery is a result of humans seeking a solution for life threatening diseases that existed in the 19th century. Drug Discovery started as an offset of chemistry and has now become an interdisciplinary science.
Ultrasound can speed the healing of fractures, according to results of a randomized, controlled trial published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders.
The researchers found that the use of low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS) in patients with tibial fractures which showed inadequate progress toward healing resulted in 34% greater bone mineral density (BMD) in the fracture area after 16 weeks than use of a sham device.
Jon E. Block, Ph.D. worked with a team of researchers from University Hospital Marburg and the University of Ulm, Germany, to test LIPUS in 51 patients and 50 controls.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2010 was awarded to Robert G. Edwards "for the development of in vitro fertilization".
Their reasoning seemed to be partly cultural - that Edwards battled societal and establishment resistance to his development of the in vitro fertilization procedure, which has so far led to the birth of around 4 million people.
Edwards, now 85 and professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, began working on IVF in the 1950s and developed the technique with British gynecologist Patrick Steptoe, who died in 1988 - posthumous prizes are not allowed. In IVF, egg cells are removed from the mother and fertilized outside her body and then implanted into the womb.
Social rejection isn't just emotionally unsettling, it can also impact your heart in a literal sense, according to a new study which finds that being romantically rejected makes your heart rate drop for a moment.
Bregtje Gunther Moor, Eveline A. Crone, and Maurits W. van der Molen of the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University in the Netherlands say research has shown that the brain processes physical and social pain in some of the same regions but they wanted to find out how social pain affects people physically.
A new study says sodium nitrate, like you get if you eat plenty of vegetables, reverses features of metabolic syndrome in mice.
Metabolic syndrome is the list of risk factors of metabolic origin that increase likelihood of getting cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.
As obesity has increased, and the number of people with metabolic syndrome right along with it, various attempts have been made to identify a common underlying molecular mechanism for metabolic syndrome. One group has pointed to a defect in endogenous synthesis and bioavailability of nitric oxide (NO) and their new study says one contributing issue in metabolic syndrome is a decrease in the amount of nitric oxide from endothelial NO synthase (eNOS).
If you get an injury, you might clench your hand. It turns out there is a brain-related reason for that, namely a somatosensory body one. Perception and multisensory interactions at the spinal level.
A new report in Current Biology says 'self-touch', like hand clenching, offers significant relief for acute pain under experimental conditions and they used the Thermal Grill Illusion to show it.
Tendons connect bones to muscles so if you want to run during a football game or fight a Trojan War, they are important. If you didn't understand the clever pun in the title, the only vulnerability of Achilles was his calcaneal tendon (tendo calcaneus), because when his mother Thetis dipped him into the magical river Styx to make him invincible, she held him by the heel.
Naturally, it was his undoing. So today that tendon of the posterior leg is called the Achilles tendon and a devastating weakness in an otherwise strong group or person is colloquially called the Achilles Heel (see Death Star - should we close that 2 meter port that leads to the fusion core?)
A new study in Heart says a combination of depression and heart disease is far more lethal than either one of those condition alone.
Depressed people are more likely to die from all causes so it's difficult to narrow down whether or not depressed people with heart disease are at greater risk and people who who are depressed, but otherwise healthy, have been shown to be more likely to develop coronary heart disease, irrespective of what other risk factors they might have.
