A clinical director of the Pediatric Partial Hospital Program at Bradley Hospital, John Boekamp, was the head of a study that discovered that toddlers that had sleep troubles were more likely to receive clinical treatment for psychiatric disorders. His study was published in Child Psychiatry & Human Development, which means that it is not suffering from the file drawer problem. His study was entitled “Sleep Onset and Night Waking Insomnias in Preschoolers with Psychiatric Disorders.”

Toddlers that do not receive a good night sleep are more likely to suffer from behavior problems due to daytime drowsiness, irritability, and hyperactivity. Boekamp and fellow researchers studied young children who have emotional, behavioral or relationship disturbances. This study focused on 183 young children. These 183 children are all diagnosed with sleep disorders including Sleep Onset Insomnia and Night Waking Insomnia. Out of all the children in the study, forty-one percent of them met criteria for being diagnosed with a sleep disorder.

The affects of having a sleep disorder include challenging daytime behaviors, such as problems with compliance, aggression, attention and mood, sleepiness, and fatigue.

Boekamp said, “This study is a great reminder that it’s critical for mental health providers working with young children and their families to ask about children’s sleep.” He continued by saying, “Simple questions about children’s sleep patterns, including how long it takes a child to fall asleep at night and how frequently a child awakens after falling asleep, may yield important information that is relevant to clinical care, even when sleep problems are not the primary focus of treatment.”

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Who would have thought that people who are sixty years old and older that consume alcohol can boost their memory? Researchers from the University of Texas, University of Kentucky, and University of Maryland found that sixty year olds who do not have dementia can consume light alcohol and have their memory boosted. Later in life, alcohol allows people to have a higher episodic memory, which allows people to recall memories. 

Researchers used 660 patients from the Framingham Heart Study Offspring Cohort. All of these patients completed surveys on their consumption of alcohol, demographics, neuropsychological tests, the presence or absence of Alzheimer’s disease risk factor APOE e4, and brain MRIs. By observing the surveys, researchers discovered that light/moderate consumption of alcohol in elders is linked to having a larger hippocampal brain volume. They also found that the amount of alcohol consumed had no impact on the function of brain memory.

Also, researchers found in animal studies that consuming a moderate amount of alcohol can lead to the hippocampal volume getting new nerve cells. When the brain was exposed to moderate alcohol amounts, certain brain chemicals were released that improve cognitive functions. Brian Downer, author and worker at the UTMB Sealy Center, said, “There were no significant differences in cognitive functioning and regional brain volumes during late life according to reported midlife alcohol consumption status.” He continued to say, “This may be due to the fact that adults who are able to continue consuming alcohol into old age are healthier, and therefore have higher cognition and larger regional brain volumes, than people who had to decrease their alcohol consumption due to unfavorable health outcomes.”

Despite the tests seeming to lead to alcohol enhancing memory in 60+ year olds, this does not necessarily mean that it is true. Correlation does not equal causation. Also, surveys are not the most affective way to conduct research. People can always make their information up. The most affective way to do multiple tests that are double-blind experiments.

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One day Nancy Best was napping on her sofa when her dog, Mia, suddenly jumped up on her. Then her dog began to “bury her nose” in the exact same spot on Nancy’s right breast (Cohen, CNN.com). Mia continued to do this for the next week. Mia began to use large amounts of force on Nancy, and Nancy noticed that their was a large lump on her breast. Soon Nancy went to the doctors, and her problem was uncovered. Stage II Breast Cancer.

In another case, a medical journal published another case when a dog was able to detect cancer. In 1989 a British medical journal, The Lancet , published a story that stated that a border collie-Doberman mix kept sniffing a mole on the owner’s thigh. Due to the dog pestering her leg, she decided to see a doctor. The doctor determined that she had malignant melanoma.

So is it just a coincidence that these dogs were able to detect cancer by using their smelling abilities? In 2004, the British Medical Journal published a study where dogs had to smell urine samples of a healthy and cancerous person. Because the study was published, it does not suffer from the file drawer problem. There were thirty-six dogs that were used in this experiment. The dogs only picked out the cancerous persons urine 41% of the time.

What do scientists that publish this study think the dogs smelled? Elizabeth Cohen, a contributor for CNN.com said that, “Some scientists theorize there are certain “biomarkers” in cancer that might be unique to cancer and smelly to a dog’s sensitive nose but undetectable to ours.”

Michael Broffman and Michael McCulloch, members of the Pine Street Foundation, researched if dogs could smell cancer. The Pine Street Foundation is a medical center outside of San Francisco. They took breath samples from breast/lung cancer patients and cancer-free people. Then, they trained the dogs. When the dogs detected cancer, they received a treat from the researchers. When the dogs detected the samples from the cancer-feee patients, they did not receive a treat. This training period took three weeks. The researchers then set four cancer-free and one cancer sample in a row. The dogs were able to complete this task with impressive accuracy. They were able to detect 88% accurately with the breast cancer samples and 99% with the lung cancer samples.

Elizabeth Cohen asked, “So is the point to eventually have a dog in every doctor’s office?” Michael Broffman and Michael McCulloch concluded that there is no point to having a dog in the doctor’s office, however scientists may be able to turn this into a technology into a more useful to detect different types of cancer.

There are many skeptics with this research experiment. Dr. Larry Myers, a veterinarian and dog trainer at Auburn University, says that there is no way that Broffman and McCulloch could have trained the dogs to detect cancer in just three weeks. Myers says that it takes thirteen weeks to just train a dog to smell explosives. Also, there is not a large enough sample size. Lastly, even though there may be a correlation, this does not mean it is a case of causation.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/02/06/cohen.dogcancerdetect/index.html?iref=newssearch
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=97979

Whenever there is a bomb or drug incident, there is always a dog sniffing for the object. We have seen this plenty of times in the news. However, are dogs the only animal that have this detection of bombs/drugs? Are there any other animals that have this ability?

New research has showed that fruit flies have the ability to detect bombs and drugs. Recently, a study published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics showed that fruit flies are able to detect explosives with their noses. Because this study was published, it does not suffer from the file drawer problem. Professor Thomas Nowotny, Professor of Informatics at the University of Sussex, was the leader of the study. Professor Nowotny and other researchers studied how twenty different fruit fly receptor neurons responded to 36 chemicals that resembled wine and 35 chemicals related to the material in drugs and explosives. Professor Nowotny and his team studied each of the neuron’s firing rates. This allowed the team to see which chemicals triggered the strongest neuron reactions. When the neurons were studied with the 36 wine chemicals, 29 of the 36 chemicals had an “excitatory” reaction. When the neurons were studied with the 35 drug/explosive material, 21 of the 35 chemicals had an “excitatory” reaction. Professor Nowotny and his team were very surprised by this data, because this showed that over 50% of the neurons displayed this reaction. However, this study does not necessarily prove that fruit flies can detect bombs/drugs because we would need a larger sample. There would need to be more than twenty different fruit flies to test the chemicals. In conclusion, this study discovered an interesting conclusion that other studies can build upon in the future. In the future, we could possibly use fruit flies to detect drug or explosive material.

Fresno State, along with many other colleges, are making rules on being diagnosed with A.D.H.D. Many students are faking being diagnosed with ADHD, so they will be able to receive Adderall. However, one student, Lisa Beach, went through two months of testing before she was diagnosed with having ADHD. In this article, there were different views expressed between the student who had ADHD and the student health offices. Lisa Beach is happy that the process of diagnosing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is legitimate. As Beach said, “It’s nice to know, ‘O.K., this is legit.’” Other students are opposed to the lengthy procedure, and they choose to either borrow pills from other people or go without taking the pills. In contrast, the student health offices’ goal is to avoid pills being shared or overdosed.

One article focused mostly on how millions of Americans are overdosing on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder drugs. In 2010, the number of emergency room visits that were linked to overdosing on ADHD medications rose to 31,224. The article continued to say how overdosing will not help you get ahead in your academic studies, and that drinking coffee is a better option. Govinda Koirala, a student at University of Missouri-Kansas City, said that relaxing and working hard is the perfect combination to succeeding in school.

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Whenever you see an elderly person, it is not surprising to see them have gray hair. However, some hair starts to gray at a younger age. Gray hair is very common, but do we know why this happens?

Our hair is made up of two parts, the shaft and the root. The shaft is is the colored part that we see growing out of our heads. The root is the bottom part, which keeps the hair anchored under the scalp. Underneath the skin, there is something called a follicle. There are pigment cells in the follicle. Pigment cells produce melanin, which determines the color of your hair. When people start to age, these pigment cells begin to die. Because of the pigment cells dying, hair does not have the same amount of melanin. Soon the hair turns a gray or white color. When a person is younger and their hair is graying, this is caused by naturally occurring hydrogen peroxide building up in the hair.

It is always said that graying hair is very common for presidents. They are under an immense amount of pressure. So, is gray hair also caused by stress? Amy McMichael, professor of dermatology at Wake Forest Baptist Health said, “Perhaps over long periods of stress, there may be an acceleration of gray hair in some people. I don’t know of any studies showing this. I’m not sure I have a scientific answer.”

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Now that football season has returned, fans no longer have to experience football withdrawal symptoms. When the Superbowl comes to a close, fans realize that they will be deprived of watching games for the next several months. Post Football Depression Syndrome is something that many fans experience according to Dr. Angelos Halaris, a doctor at Loyola University Medical Center.

During these long months that seem to drag on forever, fans are in a state of emptiness, despair, and panic. Dr. Angelos Halaris says that because football fans are watching something that is a “pleasurable activity”, dopamine is released throughout the brain. When the football season ends, the person feels deprived. Halaris related this to how a smoker feels when they are deprived of smoking a cigarette.

As silly as Post Football Depression Syndrome may sound, Dr. Angelos Halaris ensures that many fans experience this sort of depression. To help these fans experiencing this depression, he offers some helpful tips on how to avoid Post Football Depression Syndrome. First he suggests that fans should not go “cold turkey” with football. Fans should watch clips online or past games! Next, he says that you should not keep your depressed feelings to yourself. Make sure you talk to family members or friends about how saddened you are about the conclusion of the football season. Halaris also suggests that fans should not use drugs or alcohol to treat this depression. Experiencing this Post Football Depression Syndrome is not serious enough to go to those extremes. Finally, he says that fans should be strong and do not overreact. Yes the end of a football season is sad, however all fans will have to wait a couple more months until September arrives.

Because football season has now arrived, the thought of the end of a football season is far out of the minds of all fans. All football fans should know that millions of people are experiencing the same emotions. Even though we experience months without football, this only makes the football kickoff in September that much more exciting.

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Researchers at the University of Surrey and the University of Southampton have recently studied whether narcissistic people can feel empathy for other people’s suffering. Before, it has been well known that narcissists do no have empathy, however lately it has been put into question whether narcissists have the ability to change this behavior. Researchers have found that with the correct frame of mind, people can feel empathy for other’s suffering.

When we think of a narcissistic person, we think of self-centered person. There are some people who exhibit subclinical narcissism, and there are others who exhibit narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). The difference is that subclinical narcissism includes people who are psychologically healthy, while people with narcissistic personality disorder do not function daily life activities well.

Researchers focused on people who exhibit subclinical narcissism. The participants of the experiment were broken down into low narcissists and high narcissists. The researchers studied whether the narcissists were capable of empathizing with another person by having them read a brief description of a relationship break-up. The results showed that high-narcissists did not show any empathy towards the person. Next, the researchers then tested whether the narcissists were even capable of showing empathy. Female participants of the experiment were shown a video describing a woman’s experience involving domestic violence. Then, they were reminded that they should imagine how they would feel if they were in the situation. Low-narcissists were not affected, for they had already taken the woman’s perspective into account. High-narcissists had much higher empathy for the woman once they were asked to take her perspective. High-narcissists had lower heart rate when exposed to the person’s situation. All of these findings show that narcissists do not have the ability to consider how other’s feel. However, if others promote that the narcissist should consider how other’s feel, they may be more understanding to their situation.

When reading this article, I was amazed. No conclusion scientists make are set in stone, and there is always room to build on their findings. We know how narcissists behave, however now we are able to add more to what the narcissists are capable of achieving. This way we are able to help them in the future. We can help those that have mental illnesses and help them reach their potential.

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