By Billy Baker In a lab at Brandeis University, Don Katz is trying to recreate spring break in rats. Or at least a particular spring break experience that, being March and all, is playing out at this very moment: college kid goes to warmer climate and drinks too much tequila; college kid gets very sick; when college kid tries to drink tequila again, his or her brain triggers a bad emotional response. This stuff, the brain says, tastes awful. Katz, an assistant professor who studies the neurobiology of taste, thinks his rats may be a little better at listening to their brain than some college kids. He'll let the rats gorge on all the sugar water they can drink, then make them feel sick to their stomach by spinning them on a turntable. When presented with sugar water again, the rats pass because they associate the taste with a bad emotion. College kids - well, they're college kids. Katz arrived in the relatively new field of taste research because he believes the way most neuroscientists study the brain is flawed. He thinks focusing on a particular part of the brain and ascribing some role to it - such as disgust - is wrong because it ignores the input of other regions of the brain. "The whole purpose of the sensory system is to interact with its environment," he said, which is why, unlike most of his peers, he chooses to study animals while they are awake and alert. "Taste is incredible in that regard. Even the simplest taste means something. It forces a reaction. You can't put something in your mouth without having an emotional response." © Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Emotions
Link ID: 11464 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jennifer Barrett and Karen Springen Snorers have always been the butt of jokes. In cartoons, their nasal roar lifts the roof off houses. In sitcoms, there's the wife who rolls her eyes at her snoring bedmate. But in reality, it's not all that funny. In fact, snoring can be a nightmare for snorers and their beleaguered partners, who may wake up several times a night to poke, prod and maybe hoist loved ones onto their sides for a little relief. It's no wonder that bleary spouses can wake up grumpy and resentful. But the nightly racket is more than a potential relationship strain. According to the latest research, an increasingly older and heavier population may make this condition an even greater a health risk than we previously thought. For Maggie Moss-Tucker, successful treatment for a longtime snoring problem came almost by accident. One fall morning in 2005, she saw a sign at her local gym seeking snorers as volunteers for a study at Boston's Brigham & Women's Hospital. Moss-Tucker, now 56, was intrigued. She had started snoring nearly a decade earlier. "I'd tried everything to stop," she says, from sleeping upright to using nose strips or a mouth guard. But to her and her husband's dismay, nothing worked. When she signed up for the study and spent a night at a suburban Boston sleep lab, she found out why. After reviewing her sleep patterns and oxygen levels, researchers told her that her snoring was actually an indication of something worse. She suffered from sleep apnea, a condition in which patients stop breathing repeatedly as they sleep and can wake up as many as 100 times a night—often without remembering it. That kind of revelation has led to doctors re-evaluating a condition once treated as little more than a nuisance. "In the past, snoring has been treated like a joking matter; you never talked about it with your doctor," says Dr. David Rapoport, medical director of the Sleep Disorders Center at New York University Medical Center. "But when it becomes very prominent or such that it wakes you up or interferes with breathing, it can be a problem." © 2008 Newsweek, Inc.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 11463 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Hyperactive young girls are more likely to have "serious" problems in adulthood, research suggests. A study of more than 800 girls up to the age of 21 found hyperactivity was linked to poor job prospects, abusive relationships and teenage pregnancy. Previous research on the lasting impact of childhood hyperactivity has focused on boys, who are more likely to be diagnosed and treated. The Canadian and UK study is reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Young girls with high levels of hyperactivity should be targeted early in life to help them achieve better at school, the researchers concluded. The study, which assessed girls yearly between the age of six and 12, looked for signs of restlessness, jumping up and down, not keeping still, and being fidgety. Researchers also assessed physical aggression such as fighting, bullying, kicking, biting or hitting. One in 10 showed high levels of hyperactive behaviour, while another one in 10 showed both high levels of hyperactive and physically aggressive behaviour. Those who were the most hyperactive or aggressive were more than twice as likely to be addicted to smoking, fall into mentally abusive relationships and four times more likely to do poorly at school. However, only girls with both hyperactivity and physical aggression were found to report later problems of physical as well as psychological aggression towards their partner, along with early pregnancy and dependency on welfare. A quarter of girls with hyperactivity had no problems in adulthood. (C)BBC

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 11462 - Posted: 03.24.2008

By Lori Aratani As New Age music fills the room, 19 men and women settle into four rows of plastic chairs. They swab their ears with alcohol towelettes and sit quietly. Slowly, another man and a woman move among the rows. With quiet precision, they insert five sharp needles into each of the people's ears. Nobody flinches when the needles hit the flesh. In fact, some of the men and women have tiny grins on their faces. This is addiction treatment, Montgomery County style. These people are participating in a pilot program that uses acupuncture, an ancient Chinese medical practice, to help treat addiction. More than a dozen people a day are volunteering to be stuck with needles as part of the county's acudetox program, which began last month and is one of a handful in the Washington region. Karlys Wright, 37, was one of the first to arrive for the early morning acudetox session. She said she almost didn't give acupuncture a try because she doesn't like needles. But in a brief time, she has become a fan of the New Age treatment. "I feel rejuvenated," the former administrative assistant from Rockville said. "I don't know how to explain it." In the fall, Montgomery County Council member Duchy Trachtenberg (D-At Large) persuaded her colleagues to spend $20,000 on a pilot program that would incorporate acupuncture into treatments for drug addiction. Acupuncture is used as a strategy to calm and relax patients before they take part in other treatments, such as group therapy. © 2008 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11461 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By MARCUS WOHLSEN SAN DIEGO -- Dr. John Kelsoe has spent his career trying to identify the biological roots of bipolar disorder. In December, he announced he had discovered several gene mutations closely tied to the disease, also known as manic depression. Then Kelsoe, a prominent psychiatric geneticist at the University of California, San Diego, did something provocative for the buttoned-down world of academic medical research: He began selling bipolar genetic tests straight to the public over the Internet last month for $399. His company, La Jolla-based Psynomics, joins a legion of startups racing to exploit the boom in research connecting genetic variations to a host of health conditions. More than 1,000 at-home gene tests have burst onto the market in the past few years. The proliferation of these tests troubles many public health officials, medical ethicists and doctors. The tests receive almost no government oversight, even though many of them are being sold as tools for making serious medical decisions. Health experts worry that many of these products are built on thin data and are preying on individuals' deepest anxieties. © 2008 The Associated Press

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 11460 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Peter Aldhous Therapeutic cloning works – in mice, at least. An international team has restored mice with a condition similar to Parkinson's disease back to health, using neurons grown in the lab that were made from their own cloned skin cells. This is the first time that a disease has been successfully treated using cloned cells that had been derived from the recipient animals. "It is the proof of concept," says Lorenz Studer of the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York, US, who led the research. But he warns that is too early to say whether the technique can be developed into a practical therapy for human patients. Studer's team first gave mice a drug to kill neurons that make the neurotransmitter dopamine. This caused movement problems similar to those seen in people with Parkinson's disease. Then the researchers took biopsies from the tails of these mice and shipped them to Teruhiko Wakayama, a specialist in cloning at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan. Wakayama's team transferred the nuclei from skin cells taken from these biopsies into mouse eggs stripped of their chromosomes, to create embryos. The Japanese researchers extracted embryonic stem (ES) cells from these cloned embryos, creating a total 187 ES cell lines from 24 mice. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 11459 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Gayle Greene The first thing to go is your sense of humor. Then goes the desire to do the things you used to do, then the desire to do anything at all. Parts of your body ache that you don’t even know the names of, and your eyes forget how to focus. Words you once knew aren’t there anymore, and there’s less and less to say. People you once cared about fall by the way and you let them go, too. Gayle Greene, dozing off. (Hannah Graves)Insomnia is a problem most insomniacs don’t want to talk about. In fact, it’s a problem many of us don’t know how to talk about. “Oh, you know, a bad night,’’ I say to a colleague’s “What’s wrong?” on one of my walking-into-walls day. “Why, Gayle, what do you have to lose sleep about? You’ve got no problems,” says my colleague, eyebrows raised. If I’d been up with a bad tooth or a sick child, that’s something he would understand. If I just plain can’t sleep, that’s weird. Anyhow, chronic insomnia is not just ”a bad night.” Chronic insomnia is a bad night that goes on and on. Look on the Web, read what insomniacs say on Sleepnet.com and Talkaboutsleep.com, and you’ll find stories of lives wrecked by this affliction, marriages ruined, educations abandoned, jobs lost, careers destroyed. We reach for metaphors, analogies, figures of speech to say what it’s like. “It’s like someone opened a tap at the bottom of your body and just tapped out all the blood, and it’s just gone, there’s nothing left.” “It’s like I’m wasting away, slipping away, losin’ it.’’ Insomnia has been with us as long as we’ve had language. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs record a lament for “three living hells,’’ one of which is “to be in bed and sleep not.’’ Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 11458 - Posted: 06.24.2010

JoNel Aleccia Babbett Peterson thought there was nothing less sexy than her husband’s snoring — until he brought home the cure. The 47-year-old Trabuco Canyon, Calif., woman took one look at the plastic face mask, the long tubing and the whirring motor that ran all night and decided there were worse things than a few snuffles and snorts. As far as she was concerned, the Continuous Positive Airway Pressure machine — known as a CPAP — was a threat to her 22-year marriage. “Things were great in the bedroom,” Peterson said. “Then there was this thing strapped to his head.” Peterson and her husband, Chris, a 47-year-old engineer, are among growing numbers of couples whose romantic lives have been derailed by sleep problems — or their solutions. Bedtime troubles send three in 10 couples to separate rooms, according to a poll by the National Sleep Foundation, a nonprofit agency. About a quarter of people with partners and 10 percent of singles said sleep problems left them too tired for sex. © 2008 MSNBC Interactive

Keyword: Sleep; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11457 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Larry Greenemeier The ability to see requires healthy eyes, but it also requires that signals can get from the eyes to the parts of the brain involved in vision. A Boston neuroscientist hopes to deliver a ray of hope to the blind by bypassing eyes and optic nerves damaged by illness or head trauma and sending image information directly to the regions of the brain that process them. The prosthesis proposed by John Pezaris, an assistant in neuroscience at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston—at least as it's envisioned at this early stage—would be worn like a pair of eyeglasses, with digital cameras over a person's eyes that connect to an array of electrodes implanted in the brain. Although this doesn't promise to restore normal vision, "a remarkable amount of information can be conveyed in a relatively small number of pixels," he says, that would allow people to perhaps identify simple objects and even recognize faces. The technology still has a lot of obstacles to overcome—the need for digital imaging that can adequately substitute for normal vision and the risk of infection resulting from brain surgery, to name two—but success could have a life-altering impact on the tens of millions of people worldwide suffering from impaired vision. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 11456 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas -- The squirrel world has its own Kevin Bacon -- a socially well-connected individual dubbed Mercedes by the scientist who studies him. The major difference between human and squirrel social networks is that people, as the conventional wisdom goes, appear to be "separated" by five or six degrees. For squirrels, it takes only three connections for one member of a population to get to any other. "It's the same thing," said Theodore Manno, a biologist at Auburn University in Alabama. "Squirrels with many connections tend to befriend squirrels that are like them; squirrels without many connections tend to befriend squirrels like them as well." "Isn't that the same as the popular crowd going to each other's Facebooks and the skater kids doing the same?" he asked. The discovery that squirrels have social networks not only illustrates the complexities of animal behavior, but also says something about the properties shared by all networks. Manno pursued the idea after F. Stephen Dobson, also at Auburn University, suggested that network theory could be applied to social interactions within a squirrel colony. © 2008 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 11455 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Phil Berardelli Researchers have developed a computer algorithm that can identify some plant species according to their unique sonar echoes. The experiments were meant to help biologists understand how bats find their favorite fruits or insects, but the research might also help engineers design high-speed systems to identify everything from widgets on conveyor belts to faces in crowds. Bats might be legally blind, but they can fly straight to a desired fruit tree, even one growing amid dense foliage. They do so using a process called echolocation, in which they send out a series of chirps and then listen very carefully to the returning echoes. Inspired by this ability, researchers in Tübingen, Germany, decided to see if they could invent an artificial system that would perform the same task. First, the team developed data sets called spectrograms by bouncing sonar signals off five kinds of plants, including spruce trees and black thorn bushes. The researchers then characterized the echo response time and frequency of the resulting sound reflection patterns, which varied according to the number and size of the branches and leaves on each plant. The resulting computer program, says biophysicist and lead researcher Yossi Yovel of the University of Tübingen, could distinguish similar plants with "surprisingly high accuracy." Eventually, the team was able to achieve near-100% success in identifying all five plant species used in the tests, as reported today in PLoS Computational Biology. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 11454 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Davide Castelvecchi For love, some would twist the laws of physics. Short of doing that, mantis shrimp communicate with the other sex by spinning light waves, biologists find. The feat seems to be unique to this animal. Light is made of electromagnetic waves. These are electric and magnetic fields that wiggle perpendicular to each other and to a light ray's direction. Many invertebrates have sophisticated eyes that can detect wavelengths of light invisible to humans. Some, including bees, can also distinguish linearly polarized light. That's when a light ray's electric field wiggles not in varying directions, but rather in one precise direction that forms a right angle to the ray. Researchers now show that mantis shrimp—which actually look more like small lobsters—can tell when light is circularly, rather than linearly, polarized. That means that the electric field twists like a corkscrew as the light ray moves. The corkscrew can twist right or left—or, in biological terms, be right- or left-handed. Roy Caldwell of the University of California, Berkeley, suspected that one species of mantis shrimp, Odontodactylus cultrifer, might be able to distinguish circular polarizations. Animals in this species, especially adult males, are rare. But 2 years ago, thanks to a tip from a crustacean enthusiast, Caldwell obtained a 4 inch-long adult male originally from Indonesia. ©2008 Society for Science & the Public.

Keyword: Vision; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11453 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Nicholas Humphrey No one doubts that our experience of phenomenal consciousness—the felt redness of fire, the felt sweetness of a peach, the felt pain of a bee sting—arises from the activity of our brains. Yet the problem of explaining how this can be so seems to many theorists to be staggeringly hard. How can the wine of consciousness, the weird, ineffable, immaterial qualia that give such richness to subjective experience, conceivably arise from the water of the brain? As the philosopher Colin McGinn has put it, it's like trying to explain how you can get "numbers from biscuits, or ethics from rhubarb." The philosopher Jerry Fodor recently claimed, "The revisions of our concepts and theories that imagining a solution will eventually require are likely to be very deep and very unsettling." If you smell theoretical panic, you're right. But are the scientific answers really so far out of reach? Have people been beguiled by the marvelous properties of consciousness into asking for the moon, while what is at issue is really much more down to earth? Everybody says they are waiting for the Big Idea. But perhaps the big idea should be that consciousness, which is of such significance to us subjectively, is scientifically not such a big deal. It all depends on asking the right questions at the outset. I can show what I mean with the example of a well-known visual illusion. Consider what you might want to explain about the experience of looking at the object in the picture to the left (Fig. 1), a solid wooden version of the so-called impossible triangle. Since it is at first sight so surprising and impressive, any of us might very well innocently ask the (bad) question: "How can we explain the existence of this triangle as we perceive it?" Only later—indeed only once we have seen the object from a different viewpoint (Fig. 2), and realized that the "triangle as we perceive it" is an illusion—will it occur to us to ask the (good) question: "How can we explain the fact we have been tricked into perceiving it this way?" © Copyright 2005-2008 Seed Media Group, LLC

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 11452 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NEW YORK - An extended-release version of the anti-addiction medicine naltrexone reduces drinking in alcohol-dependent patients within two days of being injected, according to a new study. Naltrexone blocks opioid receptors and is approved for use in alcohol-dependent patients. To improve adherence, "an intramuscular, injectable, extended-release formulation of naltrexone has been developed," Dr. Domenic A. Ciraulo, of Boston University School of Medicine, and colleagues explain in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. The researchers tested injectable naltrexone XR in some 600 actively drinking, alcohol-dependent men and women who were given one of two doses of the drug or an inactive placebo every 4 weeks for 24 weeks. The participants also received 12 sessions of standardized, low-intensity psychosocial therapy. Compared with the placebo patients, those given the higher dose of naltrexone had a significant reduction in the average daily number of drinks consumed by the second day. By the third day, fewer naltrexone patients reported heavy drinking compared with those on placebo (20 percent versus 35 percent, respectively). This reduction was maintained throughout the study. While patients treated with the lower dose of naltrexone XR experienced reductions in these measures, the differences compared with placebo were not statistically significant. Copyright 2008 Reuters.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11451 - Posted: 03.21.2008

By DOUGLAS MARTIN Dr. Frank J. Ayd Jr., a psychiatrist who by studying his patients’ responses to early antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs helped give birth to and nurture the field of psychopharmacology, died Monday in Baltimore. He was 87. Dr. Ayd’s clinical results were usually influential and sometimes stunning. In May 1955, he reported at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association on his use of two antipsychotic drugs, chlorpromazine, best known by the trade name Thorazine, and reserpine. Dr. Ayd, who received the first permit from the Food and Drug Administration to use Thorazine to treat schizophrenia, found that many of the 300 patients he treated with the drugs no longer needed hospitalization in a specialized setting and could be treated in a general hospital or nursing home. He said 80 percent were usefully employed. The New York Times reported that his finding had “profound economic implications,” because it offered a way to cut the $1 billion the nation was then spending on mental illness. It said many patients could receive immediate treatment and avoid long-term hospitalization. Dr. Ayd never doubted he was treating brain diseases. He tested his patients’ psychological, neurological and behavioral responses to new drugs, then quantified the results. This placed him at odds with the more impressionistic traditions of psychiatry, and more in tune with the biological approach favored by many European researchers. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 11450 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Brendan Borrell Here's a riddle: You're miserable without it, but once you get it, you'll be happier if you give it away. What is it? The answer, according to a study in this week's Science 1, is money. The more cash people dole out to charity and to friends, the happier they tend to be. “We’ve understood that happiness and money go together,” says Robert Biswas-Diener, a psychologist at the Center for Applied Positive Psychology in Coventry, who was not involved in the research. It is known, for example, that the more people make, the happier on average they are (although this effect is actually remarkably small, particularly among people who have enough money to meet their basic needs). “The next level is to ask: how much happiness does it buy? How might it buy happiness?” To tackle these lofty questions, Elizabeth Dunn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and two colleagues asked people how much money they made, how they spent their money and how happy they were. In their sample of 632 Americans, the researchers found that an average of nearly 10% of the monthly budget was spent on what Dunn terms “prosocial spending” — that is, gifts for others and donations to charity. Overall spending levels were not related to happiness, but prosocial spending was. The effect of spending a dollar on other people was similar in magnitude to earning an extra dollar in income. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11449 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Steve Mitchell When it comes to versatile vision, the mantis shrimp reigns supreme. Its specialized eyes can pick up several types of light, including infrared and ultraviolet, and its color vision tops ours. Now scientists report that this reef-dwelling crustacean has done itself one better: It can see a type of polarized light that no other animal is known to be able to detect. The function of this new form of vision is still a mystery, but researchers speculate that the crustacean may use it in mating displays or as a secret form of communication. The key to the mantis shrimp's (Odontodactylus scyllarus) extraordinary vision is in the structure of its eyes, which consist of six rows of numerous smaller eyes called ommatidia. Justin Marshall first suspected that the shrimp could see a new type of light based on the way light-sensing cells in some ommatidia are arranged. They sit at just the angle to convert circularly polarized light (CPL)--a type of light wave that travels in a spiral--to a form that other cells underneath can detect, says Marshall, a sensory neurobiologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Certain beetles have shells that change color when various types of CPL are shone on them, but no animal is known to have the ability to see this type of light. (To humans using special goggles, CPL appears as a bright light.) © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 11448 - Posted: 06.24.2010

It seems simple. We get hungry and we eat. But eating is much more complex than that, and scientists are only starting to understand the many factors that regulate eating behavior. One of these factors is stomach expansion that sends signals to the brain resulting in feelings of fullness. Nuclear medicine physician Gene-Jack Wang and colleagues at Brookhaven National Laboratory wanted to find out why it takes different volumes of food to satisfy different people. This is where the water balloons come in. The researchers asked 18 healthy volunteers with body mass indices (BMI) ranging from 20 (low/normal weight) to 29 (extremely overweight/borderline obese) to swallow a balloon connected to a water tube. The balloon assembly is actually a plain-end, non-lubricated latex condom securely connected to a tube with unwaxed dental floss. In order to make it easier to swallow, volunteers were first asked to put small plastic mouthpieces coated with a numbing lidocaine gel in their mouths. The volunteers then rinsed the back of their tongues with more lidocaine. Then the subjects swallowed the balloon, which ended up in their stomachs. The tube was taped to their cheeks. Before asking any volunteers to try the procedure, each of the scientists themselves tried swallowing the balloons and having it filled with water. While the brain activity of volunteers was monitored using functional magnetic imaging (fMRI), the scientists filled the balloons first with about one cup (250 ml) of body-temperature water, and then with about two cups (500 ml). A normal adult stomach can hold about 750 ml. As Wang explains, scientists knew that people respond differently to different volumes of food. © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Obesity; Brain imaging
Link ID: 11447 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katja Gaschler Bouts of crying and irritability, along with concentration lapses and exhaustion, affect 80 percent of new mothers. But these baby blues disappear within a few hours or days of delivery. In contrast, 10 to 20 percent of women in the U.S. develop a more disabling and longer-lasting disorder called postpartum depression in the first year after childbirth that often impairs their ability to care for their babies. Dramatic hormonal fluctuations that occur after de­livery may contribute to postpartum depression in susceptible women, but causes of the disorder are not fully understood. Postpartum depression can weaken the developing bonds between a mother and her child and thereby make a toddler more passive, insecure and socially inhibited. As a result, therapy often focuses on repairing the mother-child bond by changing the negative behavior patterns that develop between mother and child during depression. The psychologist smiles at Manuela, a new mother in her late thirties. “Please play with your baby for two minutes,” the therapist instructs her and then leaves the room. Two video cameras film Manuela (which is not her real name) and her three-month-old daughter. In the next room, a split-screen monitor shows the mother’s profile on the left and her infant in a baby chair on the right. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 11446 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sufferers of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome may see significant relief from their symptoms when administered the stress hormone cortisol, finds a new study. A review of 50 published studies conducted by researchers in California has found that people who suffer from chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia have adrenal dysfunction, meaning their adrenal glands, which produce sex hormones and cortisol, don't work effectively. Chronic fatigue is a condition in which people have debilitating fatigue that may be get worse with activity and is not relieved by rest. Fibromyalgia is a syndrome characterized by multiple pain points in muscles throughout the body and fatigue. Chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia affect 0.5 to five per cent of the population, according to the study's authors. "My review of existing studies suggests that a treatment protocol of early administration of cortisol may help improve and reduce the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia," said Dr. Kent Holtorf, medical director of the Holtorf Medical Group Center for Endocrine, Neurological and Infection Related Illness in Torrance, Calif., in a release. Holtorf also conducted an observational study with 500 patients from his clinic, who received cortisol as part of their treatment. He found that by the fourth visit, 84 per cent reported improvement, with 75 per cent showing "significant improvement," and 62 per cent reporting substantial improvement. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Stress; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 11445 - Posted: 06.24.2010