A record number of primary school children are leaving school severely obese, according to new figures from Public Health England. Data for 2016/17 shows one in 25 10 to 11 year olds were severely obese. That's more than 22,000 children, and the highest level since records began. Levels of childhood obesity have remained fairly stable in recent years, but the new analysis shows that severe obesity has been on an upward trend over the last decade. The data from the National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) for children for the year 2016/17 has detailed the trends in severe obesity for the first time. The programme found: More deprived areas have a much higher rate of overweight and obese children, compared to the most well-off areas. This disparity is happening at a faster rate in school leavers in year 6, than in reception age. The figures did however show a downward trend of reception age boys being overweight and obese. When records began in 2006/07, one in 32 primary school leavers were severely obese. Severe obesity is BMI on or above the 99.6th percentile for a child's age and sex. Dr Alison Tedstone, chief nutritionist at Public Health England, said the trends were "extremely worrying and have been decades in the making - reversing them will not happen overnight." She said "bold measures are needed to tackle this threat to our children's health". The Department of Health recently announced the second phase of its childhood obesity plan to help halve childhood obesity by 2030. As part of that, sweets and high-fat snacks will be banned from supermarket checkouts, and there will be tighter restrictions on junk food ads on TV. © 2018 BBC

Keyword: Obesity; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25239 - Posted: 07.24.2018

By Aaron E. Carroll Promising health studies often don’t pan out in reality. The reasons are many. Research participants are usually different from general patients; their treatment doesn’t match real-world practice; researchers can devote resources not available in most physician offices. Moreover, most studies, even the gold standard of randomized controlled trials, focus squarely on causality. They are set up to see if a treatment will work in optimal conditions, what scientists call efficacy. They’re “explanatory.” Efficacy is important. But what we also need are studies that test if a treatment will work in the real world — if they have effectiveness. These different kinds of studies actually exist. They are called pragmatic trials, and a recent one might have helped serve as a brake as the opioid epidemic accelerated. Pragmatic trial design was described more than 50 years ago in the Journal of Chronic Diseases (in a paper reprinted nine years ago in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology). A pragmatic trial seeks to determine if, and how, an intervention might work in practice, where decisions are more complicated than in a strictly controlled clinical trial. Studies are almost never purely pragmatic or explanatory: They fall on a continuum. A recent tool, known as Precis-2, can help researchers devise trials to lean one way or the other. It’s scored on nine domains — eligibility criteria, recruitment, setting, organization, flexibility (delivery), flexibility (adherence), follow-up, primary outcome and primary analysis — on a scale from 1 (explanatory, or “ideal conditions”) to 5 (pragmatic, or “real world”). Why do we need all this? Let’s take chronic pain as an example. Those who suffer from it want relief, and they want it now. Because people know that opioids exist, it’s hard to get them into a trial where they might take less powerful pain medications, like acetaminophen or ibuprofen. It’s also hard to do the long-term studies we need, because patients often want to try other options if the first one doesn’t work. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25238 - Posted: 07.23.2018

Patti Neighmond If you're in the hospital or a doctor's office with a painful problem, you'll likely be asked to rate your pain on a scale of 0 to 10 – with 0 meaning no pain at all and 10 indicating the worst pain you can imagine. But many doctors and nurses say this rating system isn't working and they're trying a new approach. The numeric pain scale may just be too simplistic, says Dr. John Markman, Director of the Translational Pain Research Program at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. It can lead doctors to "treat by numbers," he says and as a result, patients may not be getting the most effective treatment for their pain. Take the case of 33-year-old Adam Rosette, who was recently hospitalized for fibrous dysplasia, a bone disorder that made it nearly impossible for him to chew or even speak. After brain surgery to remove benign tumors related to the disorder, he was definitely in pain. But he was reluctant to label the pain too high. "I don't think I ever answered higher than a '7' because an '8' would be, in my mind, like I'm missing half of my body or a limb," he recalls. On the pain scale a rating of 4 to 7 is considered moderate. Mild pain is rated 1 to 3. Over 7 is considered severe. Today, Rosette has recovered and is pain-free, but he wonders if "low balling" his pain level while in the hospital, meant he wasn't given adequate pain medication. "You realize you got less medicine and it's been eight hours and they're not allowed to give you more for a while," Rosette says. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25237 - Posted: 07.23.2018

by Caroline Wellbery Jet lag can put the brakes on the most exciting vacations. Almost everyone who has ever flown across time zones knows what it feels like. The experience ranks somewhere between eating day-old cooked oatmeal and nursing a hangover. These food and drink metaphors aren’t just a coincidence. Jet lag, it turns out, affects more than our sleep; it affects our internal organs as well. Given what is known about the importance of intestinal bacteria (called the microbiome) and their connection to immune function and well-being, it’s clear that any discussion of jet lag, and how to deal with it, needs to consider “gut lag”as well. The issues begin with the fact that air travel across time zones disrupts our circadian rhythm — the human internal clock that evolved over millennia to match Earth’s 24-hour cycle of light and dark. One feature of this cycle is that maximum sleepiness coincides with a low point in core body temperature, which is usually unrelated to external temperatures. Core body temperature goes down as you sleep and is usually lowest two to three hours before waking (which also coincides with your deepest sleep). Low core body temperature appears to be a turning point in determining how sleepy or rested you feel, depending on when in the cycle you wake up. When you fly into a new time zone, your core body temperature doesn’t recognize that change and instead continues to dip according to the schedule of the place you have left. If you are awake or wake up before the dip, you are much more likely to feel groggy or out of sorts, especially if you are exposed to light while your body temperature drops. That’s because light and temperature signals come into conflict with each other: The light tells you that you’re wide-awake; the temperature signal tells you that you’re about to enter the deepest point in your sleep. This is when you will mostly strongly feel the unpleasant symptoms of jet lag. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sleep
Link ID: 25236 - Posted: 07.23.2018

By Perri Klass, M.D. You probably remember the before and after of learning to ride a bicycle — and perhaps the joy of helping your children learn how. Riding together is a wonderful family activity — good exercise, outdoor time, and it even gets you places. But safety is a vital part of what parents should be teaching. A recent study looked at bicycle-related injuries in children treated in emergency departments in the United States over a 10-year period from the beginning of 2006 through the end of 2017. Over that time, there were more than two million such injuries in children from 5 to 17, which the researchers calculated meant more than 600 a day, or 25 an hour. “That’s a lot,” said Lara McKenzie, principal investigator in the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. Given the age of the most-injured group, 10 to 14, she said, “I feel this is a group where the parents might view the child as an experienced rider, but perhaps they’re riding in places they shouldn’t ride.” The study did not include fatalities, since it was looking only at children in the emergency room and excluded the 12 who actually died there. Of the injuries, 36 percent were to the upper extremities, 25 percent to the lower extremities, 15 percent to the face, and 15 percent to the head and neck. Many were related to falling off bikes, or crashing into something, Dr. McKenzie said, and when cars were involved, whether stationary or moving, the risk of traumatic brain injury (11 percent) and hospitalization (4 percent) increased. So safety first and foremost: wear helmets. In the new study, “helmet use at the time of injury was associated with lower risk of head and neck injury, and of hospitalization — that’s protective, we know,” Dr. McKenzie said. And it isn’t just about making your children wear helmets; when parents wear helmets, they are not only protecting themselves, but research has shown that when parents model the safe behavior, it’s more likely that children will be putting those helmets on themselves. Make sure the child is riding a bike the right size, and make sure the helmet fits correctly. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 25235 - Posted: 07.23.2018

Olga Khazan For people with bipolar disorder, manic episodes can be euphoric, but they can also be terrifying. In the throes of mania, some people feel like they are superhuman. They start new projects and stay up all night to work on them. In the worst cases, they cease thinking coherently: They might attempt to walk into the sea or fly off the roof. Though medications can help manage the symptoms, no pill is perfect, and all of them have side effects. Bipolar disorder appears to be at least partly genetic, but environmental factors also play a role, perhaps by switching different genes on and off, which might spark manic episodes. And the thing that might be switching on some of these genes, according to a new study, is rather surprising: a category of preservatives in beef jerky called nitrates. For the study, recently published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, researchers asked people being treated for psychiatric disorders at the Sheppard Pratt Health System in Baltimore whether they had ever eaten dry cured meat, undercooked meat, or undercooked fish. Those who had eaten cured meats—which include jerky and meat sticks—were three and a half times more likely to be in the group that was hospitalized for mania compared with the control group. Meanwhile, cured meats were not significantly associated with other types of psychiatric disorders, such as major depression, and none of the other foods participants were asked about was significantly correlated with mania.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 25234 - Posted: 07.21.2018

Noise from oil and gas pumps can be a real mood-killer for a male sparrow trying to attract a mate, but a team of biologists in southern Alberta has discovered that songbirds are finding ways to cope. Their research involves high fidelity speakers, powerful microphones and many early morning hours spent on a patch of prairie near the small city of Brooks. They blast recordings of various types of oil and gas pumps through the speakers and then track and record the birds' response. The acoustic experiments are producing intriguing results. One songbird species, the Savannah sparrow, appears to be adapting its love songs with a high degree of complexity. "They're doing whatever they can to make the sound go further," said Nicola Koper, a conservation biologist from the University of Manitoba's Natural Resources Institute who is involved in the research. After all, the birds have flown all the way up from the southern U.S. on important business: to breed and raise their young. Fastest declining avian group in Canada The mixed grass prairies in southern Alberta serve as a bug buffet and a nursery for grassland birds, but their territory has shrunk. "We've converted so much of our grassland habitat to cropland, that grassland birds are declining more rapidly than birds of any other ecosystem across North America, including in Canada," said Koper. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada

Keyword: Animal Communication; Hearing
Link ID: 25233 - Posted: 07.21.2018

Paul Chisholm Dr. Elliot Tapper has treated a lot of patients, but this one stood out. "His whole body was yellow," Tapper remembers. "He could hardly move. It was difficult for him to breathe, and he wasn't eating anything." The patient was suffering from chronic liver disease. After years of alcohol use, his liver had stopped filtering his blood. Bilirubin, a yellowish waste compound, was building up in his body and changing his skin color. Disturbing to Tapper, the man was only in his mid-30s – much younger than most liver disease patients. Tapper, a liver specialist and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School, tried to get the patient to stop drinking. "We had long, tearful conversations," Tapper says, "but he continued to struggle with alcohol addiction." Since then, the young man's condition has continued to deteriorate and Tapper is not optimistic about his chances of survival. It's patient stories like this one that led Tapper to research liver disease in young people. According to a study published Wednesday in BMJ by Tapper and a colleague, fatal liver disease has risen, and young people have been hit the hardest. The study examined the number of deaths resulting from cirrhosis, or scarring of the liver, as well as liver cancer. Data came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and covered the period from 1999 to 2016. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25232 - Posted: 07.21.2018

Laurel Hamers BRAINBOW Scientists have imaged the fruit fly brain in new detail. Colors highlight the paths of nerve cells that have been mapped so far. Cells with bodies close together share the same color, but not necessarily the same function. If the secret to getting the perfect photo is taking a lot of shots, then one lucky fruit fly is the subject of a masterpiece. Using high-speed electron microscopy, scientists took 21 million nanoscale-resolution images of the brain of Drosophila melanogaster to capture every one of the 100,000 nerve cells that it contains. It’s the first time the entire fruit fly brain has been imaged in this much detail, researchers report online July 19 in Cell. Experimental neurobiologists can now use the rich dataset as a roadmap to figure out which neurons talk to each other in the fly’s brain, says study coauthor Davi Bock, a neurobiologist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Va. The rainbow image shown here captures the progress on that mapping so far. Despite the complex tangle of neural connections pictured, the mapping is far from complete, Bock says. Neurons with cell bodies close to each other are colored the same hue, to demonstrate how neurons born in the same place in the poppy seed–sized brain tend to send their spidery tendrils out in the same direction, too. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 25231 - Posted: 07.20.2018

By Ceylan Yeginsu LONDON — Dim the lights. Silence the piped-in music. Turn down the checkout beeps. For an hour on Saturdays, a British supermarket chain is introducing a weekly “quieter hour” aimed at helping people with autism have a better shopping experience by easing sensory overload. The move by the supermarket, Morrisons, which begins on Saturday and runs from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m., has been welcomed by the National Autistic Society, which says that even small changes can make a big difference in the lives of people with autism and their families. “Around 700,000 people are on the autism spectrum in the U.K.,” Tom Purser, of the National Autistic Society, said in an email. “This means they see, hear and feel the world differently to other people, often in a more intense way, which can make shopping a real struggle.” Autism is a lifelong developmental disability that affects how people communicate and relate to others and how they experience the world around them. More than 60 percent of people with autism avoid shops, and 79 percent say they feel socially isolated, according to figures published by the society. Morrisons’s effort is part of the National Autistic Society’s “Too Much Information” campaign: Last year, more than 5,000 retailers across Britain participated in “Autism Hour.” The society hopes to expand the initiative. Morrisons, the fourth-largest supermarket chain in Britain, said in a statement on its website, “Listening to customers, we found that one in five had a friend or family member with autism and many liked the idea of being able to shop in more comfort at 9-10 a.m. on a Saturday.” In the statement, Angela Gray, part of a community group that builds ties with the supermarket, is quoted as saying: “I was involved in the initial trial as my son is autistic, and we found that these changes made a real difference. The trial showed there is a need for a quieter shopping experience for some customers.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 25230 - Posted: 07.20.2018

Wade Goodwyn In hospitals around the country, anesthesiologists and other doctors are facing significant shortages of injectable opioids. These drugs, like morphine, Dilaudid and fentanyl are the mainstays of intravenous pain control and are regularly used in critical care settings like surgery, intensive care units and hospital emergency departments. The distance medical science has traveled over the last hundred years in pain management is practically miraculous. Walk into a pediatric intensive care unit at any major hospital in the country and, even though the children you'll see are critically ill from disease and surgery, you won't see any of them squirming in the bed in pain or discomfort. Though a child in this ICU may be diagnosed with an incurable disease, pediatric doctors are able to use hydromorphone, fentanyl and liquid morphine to keep the patient's suffering at a distance all the way to the end. The same is true for pain management in adults. It's not just the patient who's spared — relatives, friends, not to mention doctors, nurses and the other health care providers don't have to experience a cherished human being writhing in agony. That is why doctors across the country have grown increasingly concerned that hospitals and other medical facilities have been running low on or out of the supplies they need. Dr. Red Starks, a pediatric anesthesiologist who has been practicing for 26 years, said that for him the shortage "escalated late this spring when we didn't have any morphine." "Or one week we had morphine but we didn't have Dilaudid," he continued, "and two weeks later we'd get a little trickle of Dilaudid but we wouldn't have any morphine. And you're just thinking, 'Hello, am I in the 21st century?' " © 2018 npr

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25229 - Posted: 07.20.2018

Aimee Cunningham Painkillers crafted with a part of the wrinkle-smoothing drug Botox provide long-term pain relief in mice. Researchers added the modified Botox to molecules that target pain-messaging nerve cells. Mice given a single spinal injection of the new drugs showed signs of pain relief for the full duration of the experiments, around three weeks, researchers report online July 18 in Science Translational Medicine. Such painkillers could potentially one day be developed for humans as alternatives to more addictive drugs, such as opioids. Created by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, botulinum toxin causes the food poisoning disease botulism. Botox, which is made from the toxin, is often injected into people to iron out worry lines and has been used to treat conditions that involve overactive muscles, such as repetitive neck spasms or overactive bladder (SN: 4/5/08, p. 213). The toxin has also been used to reduce the frequency of migraines. Biochemist Bazbek Davletov of the University of Sheffield in England and colleagues focused on botulinum toxin because it can stop certain nerve cells from communicating with one another for up to five months with each injection. And “you locally inject less than a millionth of a gram, which is helpful to avoid any immune response,” he says. Davletov and colleagues created their new drugs with a process he describes as a “molecular Lego system.” Taking the part of the botulinum toxin that blocks nerve cells from sending messages, the team attached the piece to one of two molecules that target neurons that relay pain information. The researchers removed the part of the toxin, found in Botox, that binds to muscle-controlling nerve cells. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25228 - Posted: 07.19.2018

Tom Goldman CTE has been part of the national lexicon in the U.S. since the 2015 movie Concussion dramatized the discovery of this degenerative brain disease among football players. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is found among people who've had head injuries. Though not everyone with head trauma develops CTE, the group that's come to be most associated with it is football players, whose brains can be routinely jarred by hard hits. The disease has been linked to depression, dementia and even suicide among those who play the game. But the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease published a study Tuesday that helps broaden the understanding of who is potentially affected by CTE to include military personnel. And, perhaps more significantly, the study represents a step forward in developing a test for the disease in the living. Right now, accurately diagnosing CTE requires the close study of brain tissue during autopsy, to identify the telltale abnormal proteins that kill brain cells. And this is a key reason why knowledge about CTE — who gets it, how widespread it is and the development of treatments — has lagged. "You've really got to have a living diagnosis scan in order to make much headway on understanding the disease," says Dr. Julian Bailes, a neurosurgeon at the Chicago area's NorthShore University HealthSystem, and one of the study's authors. That diagnostic scan is what researchers have gotten close to in this case. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Brain imaging
Link ID: 25227 - Posted: 07.19.2018

Layal Liverpool A treatment given to thousands of people who suffer cardiac arrest in Britain every year nearly doubles the risk of permanent brain damage and only marginally improves the chances of survival, a landmark study has found. More than 30,000 people have cardiac arrests – where the heart stops beating – annually in the UK. More than half receive shots of adrenaline alongside other interventions that are designed to restart the heart. In most cases the attacks are still fatal, with fewer than 10% of patients surviving to be discharged from hospital. In a study of more than 8,000 people across Britain, doctors found that adrenaline shots increased the survival rate of patients by less than 1%, but nearly doubled the risk of serious brain damage. Nearly a third of survivors who received adrenaline ended up in a vegetative state or were unable to walk and look after themselves, compared with 18% of survivors who had a placebo instead. “What we’ve shown is that adrenaline can restart the heart but it is no good for the brain,” said study leader Gavin Perkins, a professor of critical care medicine at the University of Warwick and a consultant physician at Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust. The practice of giving adrenaline to people who suffer cardiac arrest has been the standard of care in the UK for more than half a century. Under guidelines set by the Resuscitation Council UK, adrenaline is given to people who fail to respond to cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) or defibrillation immediately following cardiac arrest. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 25226 - Posted: 07.19.2018

By Sara Chodosh Think back to your earliest memory. What age were you in it? If its under two, you're not alone. In a recent survey, 40 percent of people say they remember events earlier than age two. But here's the problem: Most memory researchers argue that its essentially impossible to remember anything before those terrible twos. So what gives? Understanding how and why our brains form memories in the first place might convince you that if you're in that 40 percent, perhaps your memory is a fictional one after all. That number comes courtesy of a recent study out this week in the journal Psychological Science, which sought to understand when most people have their first memories and what they’re about. . The researchers asked 6,641 U.K. residents to describe in writing their first recollection and the age they were in that memory. They then used that data to figure out how many of these first impressions were real. Aside from interviewing friends and family (who might also have false memories), it’s difficult to determine whether a memory is real or not. Instead, the psychologists operated on the assumption—albeit an assumption backed by a lot of research—that people can’t remember anything before about age two. Based on that cutoff, 38.6 percent of the first memories in this dataset were fictional. Most of those were dated to somewhere between ages one and two, but 893 people claimed they could remember being less than one year old. Why are researchers so quick to dismiss those first couple years of life thoughts? There’s a lot of research that suggests it’s all made up. It might seem dismissive to assume that these memories are false, but memory researchers have good reason to conclude that people aren’t truly remembering being a baby. Research on infantile amnesia, the official term for the phenomenon in which we forget things that happened to us as babies and young children, has shown that it’s close to impossible to retain declarative memories at that young age. Babies can obviously remember other, nondeclarative things because they learn how to walk and talk—both of those are reliant on retaining some kind of information—but a declarative memory happens in a separate part of the brain. Copyright © 2018 Popular Science.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25225 - Posted: 07.19.2018

by Kate Furby Deaths from liver disease have increased sharply in recent years in the United States, according to a study published in the British Medical Journal. Cirrhosis-related deaths increased by 65 percent from 1999 to 2016, and deaths from liver cancer doubled, the study said. The rise in death rates was driven predominantly by alcohol-induced disease, the report said. Over the past decade, people ages 25 to 34 had the highest increase in cirrhosis deaths — an average of 10.5 percent per year — of the demographic groups examined, researchers reported. The study suggests that a new generation of Americans is being afflicted "by alcohol misuse and its complications,” said lead author Elliot Tapper, a liver specialist at the University of Michigan. Tapper said people are at risk of life-threatening cirrhosis if they drink several drinks a night or have multiple nights of binge drinking — more than four or five drinks per sitting — per week. Women tend to be less tolerant of alcohol and their livers more sensitive to damage. The liver cleans blood as it exits the gut. The more toxins, sugars and fats consumed, the harder it has to work. If the liver gets overloaded, its plumbing can get blocked up, causing scarring that can reduce liver function. "Dying from cirrhosis, you never wish this on anybody," Tapper said. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25224 - Posted: 07.19.2018

By Matthew Hutson Bird populations are plummeting, thanks to logging, agriculture, and climate change. Scientists keep track of species by recording their calls, but even the best computer programs can’t reliably distinguish bird calls from other sounds. Now, thanks to a bit of crowdsourcing and a lot of artificial intelligence (AI), researchers say they have something to crow about. AI algorithms can be as finicky as finches, often requiring manual calibration and retraining for each new location or species. So an interdisciplinary group of researchers launched the Bird Audio Detection challenge, which released hours of audio from environmental monitoring stations around Chernobyl, Ukraine, which they happened to have access to, as well as crowdsourced recordings, some of which came from an app called Warblr. Humans labeled each 10-second clip as containing a bird call or not. Using so-called machine learning, in which computers learn from data, 30 teams trained their AIs on a set of the recordings for which labels were provided and then tested them on recordings for which they were not. Most relied on neural networks, a type of AI inspired by the brain that connects many small computing elements akin to neurons. At the end of the monthlong contest, the best algorithm scored 89 out of 100 on a statistical measure of performance called AUC. A higher number, in this case, indicates the algorithm managed to avoid labeling nonbird sounds as bird sounds (humans, insects, or rain often threw them off) and avoid missing real bird sounds (usually because of faint recordings), the organizers report in a paper uploaded to the preprint server arXiv. The best previous algorithm they tested had an AUC score of 79. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Scienc

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Animal Communication
Link ID: 25223 - Posted: 07.19.2018

By Donald G. McNeil Jr. GETA, Nepal — Fifteen years ago, Shiva Lal Rana walked 20 miles to Geta Eye Hospital to ask doctors to pluck out all his eyelashes. Trachoma, a bacterial infection, had swollen and inverted his eyelids. With every blink, his lashes raked his corneas. “The scratching hurt my eyes so much I could barely go out in the sun to plow,” he said. “I was always rubbing them.” Worse, he feared the fate that others with the infection had suffered. The tiny scratches could accumulate and ultimately blind him. Instead, doctors performed what was then a new operation: They sliced open his eyelids, rolled them back and sutured them with the lashes facing outward again. And they gave him antibiotics to clear up the infection. “My vision is much better now,” said Mr. Rana, a tiny, lively man who guessed he was about 65. “I can recognize people. I can work.” His personal triumph parallels his nation’s. In May, the World Health Organization declared that Nepal had eliminated trachoma as a public health problem, making it the sixth country to do so. In June, Ghana became the seventh. Quietly, in the shadow of fights against better-known diseases like Ebola, AIDS and malaria, the 20-year battle against trachoma is chalking up impressive victories. Those successes, experts say, show the wisdom of advocating and enforcing basic public health practices, rather than waiting for a miracle cure or a new vaccine. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 25222 - Posted: 07.18.2018

By Rick Strassman The resumption of clinical research with psychedelics is producing preliminary evidence of benefit for a variety of conditions. These include depression, substance abuse and palliative care. Some research also indicates efficacy in attaining quasi-clinical goals such as “mystical-type experiences.” With proper safeguards in place, the frequency and severity of adverse effects are acceptable. These safeguards include careful screening and preparation of subjects, close supervision of drug sessions with specially trained therapists, and careful follow-up. We are now hearing calls to increase psychedelics’ clinical availability; i.e., “legalizing psychedelics.” Michael Pollan’s popular book How to Change Your Mind encapsulates many of the arguments for loosening current regulatory burdens that restrict the drugs’ use to the research setting. But there are some risks as well, and as John Horgan reminds us in his recent blog post in Scientific American, we need to exercise due caution. Psychedelics currently live in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, which is reserved for drugs with high abuse potential; no accepted medical use; and lack of safety even under medical supervision. The lower schedules, II–V, are for drugs with greater safety and for which medical uses exist, but they’re still highly abusable; they include oxycodone and amphetamine, for example. Schedule III drugs, including low-dose opiates/painkillers such as Vicodin or Tylenol with codeine, and certain cough syrups, are less so. Advocates of rescheduling psychedelics usually recommend placement into Schedule III. © 2018 Scientific American,

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25221 - Posted: 07.18.2018

Rhitu Chatterjee Most teens today own a smartphone and go online every day, and about a quarter of them use the internet "almost constantly," according to a 2015 report by the Pew Research Center. Now a study published Tuesday in JAMA suggests that such frequent use of digital media by adolescents might increase their odds of developing symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. "It's one of the first studies to look at modern digital media and ADHD risk," says psychologist Adam Leventhal, an associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California and an author of the study. When considered with previous research showing that greater social media use is associated with depression in teens, the new study suggests that "excessive digital media use doesn't seem to be great for [their] mental health," he adds. Previous research has shown that watching television or playing video games on a console put teenagers at a slightly higher risk of developing ADHD behaviors. But less is known about the impact of computers, tablets and smartphones. Because these tools have evolved very rapidly, there's been little research into the impact of these new technologies on us, says Jenny Radesky, a pediatrician at the University of Michigan, who wrote an editorial about the new study for JAMA. Each new platform reaches millions of people worldwide in a matter of days or weeks, she says. "Angry Birds reached 50 million users within 35 days. Pokémon Go reached the same number in 19 days." © 2018 npr

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 25220 - Posted: 07.18.2018