Jaundice is when your eyes and skin start yellowing. Jaundice indicates that you have serious liver, gallbladder, or pancreas problems. This occurs when Bilirubin, a yellow pigment that forms when your liver breaks down dead red blood cells doesn’t get dissolved and washed out of your body. This means that your liver isn’t working the way it should be working. The symptoms for Jaundice include yellowing of skin and white brown of the eyes, you may also have dark urine. Other symptoms include excessive fatigue and vomiting.

Some of the causes of Jaundice are alcohol abuse, infections, parasites in the liver, and other sorts of infections. Doctors said that severe cases of Jaundice may eventually damage your brain over time.

The most common cases of Jaundice are in babies born prematurely, because their livers didn’t fully develop. Recently, it’s been said that breast feeding can cause Jaundice in babies.

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In a study, surveys were mailed to mothers of all eligible infants admitted over a two-and-a-half year period to the pediatric ward with a diagnosis of Jaundice. A total of 127 mother-patient pairs were included in the study. Breastfeeding rates at three and six months were compared with those of a city-wide survey (Infant Care Survey) conducted by Ottawa’s Public Health Department. The conclusion was as follows, breastfeeding rates following the discharge of infants diagnosed with jaundice were not significantly different from those reported for the general population. However, further studies must be conducted in order to make a full conclusion.

2.5% of high school students in the US will have taken steroids before graduating high school. The main use for steroids is to reduce inflammation.Steroid is used in: inhalers in order to reduce deaths from asthma, injections in order to treat painful joints and ligaments, and creams in order to treat eczema and other inflammatory skin conditions.

When used in healthcare and medicine, make people hungry and causes blood sugar to rise. People on steroids can gain weight and often develop a round, swollen face as well as getting diabetes. Also, People on high doses of steroids can die from chest infections and different kinds of cancers, because they develop immune-deficiency therefore many organisms that rarely caused problems can overgrow, upsetting the normal balance of mircobes in the body.

Steroids also affect the brain tremendously, and high doses can make people feel happy, euphoric, and hyped-up amongst other things. People also experience lack of sleep and become very aggressive. 

However, most people take steroids to increase muscle growth, but muscles don’t grow unless there is consistent exercise. There are two types of steroids: anabolic and androgenic. Anabolic steroid affect metabolism, immunity and muscle, while androgenic steroids have strong effects on women (making them more masculine) and effects on men (making them more feminine). Anabolic steroids cause men to find that their testes shrink, sperm count falls with a joint side effect of increase of infertility, hair falls out, breasts start to develop, and prostate cancer becomes more likely.

In a study conducted by Pope and his co-authors, from the Biological Psychiatry Laboratory at McLean, evaluated 134 male weight-lifters, including 72 who had never used steroids, 42 who had used steroids but had not developed dependence, and 20 with steroid dependence. Of the total who had used steroids, 30 percent had developed dependence.

Pope noted that anabolic steroids do cause actual biological dependence, pointing out that animal studies have shown that hamsters will continue to self-administer testosterone even to the point of death. Human users also exhibit classic criteria for addiction, even though the drugs do not produce a “high” as is the case with opiates, alcohol, or other addictive substances, he said.

“Anabolic steroids clearly do cause an actual biological dependence syndrome, and men who develop dependence on them often have considerable difficulty getting off the drugs, just like people with other forms of drug dependence,” Pope said.

Finally, after what Pope found and the risks mentioned before, would you still go out of your way to use steroids? Is it really necessary in order to get “big”?

Have you ever been chewing gum and all of a sudden coughed and swallowed it? Or maybe you had one of those moments where you just swallowed your gum without realizing it? Most people have swallowed their gum at least once in their lifetime, and if you did it as a kid you can’t help but think, “Is that going to take 7 years to get out of my stomach?” Seven years is a long time for a kid to wait around for the gum to come out the other end. I know I swallowed a handful of gum in my lifetime.

However, studies and observations by pediatric gastroenterologist David Milov of the Nemours Children’s Clinic in Orlando, Florida said that that is not true. In fact, he states, “If the legend were true, that would mean that every single person who ever swallowed gum within the last seven years would have evidence of the gum in the digestive tract, but colonoscopies and capsule endoscopy procedures turn up no such evidence. On occasion we’ll see a piece of swallowed gum,” he says, “but usually it’s not something that’s any more than a week old.”

It has been said that some of the gum is digested like the sweetners added however, that actual chewy, rubber like substance of the actual gum is not. Gum may be composed of many natural or synthetic elastomers, or rubberlike materials, as well as plasticizing softeners, resins and preservative antioxidizing agents. The permitted elastomers include natural, tree-derived chicle.

In the study, Milov says. “It probably passes through slower than most foodstuffs, but eventually the normal housekeeping waves in the digestive tract will sort of push it through, and it will come out pretty unmolested.” 

A 1998 study in the journal Pediatrics, for example, described three children who came to a clinic with intestinal pain, constipation and other symptoms, and were found to have small masses of chewing gum in their guts. One was a 4-year-old boy who “always swallowed his gum after chewing five to seven pieces each day.” Another was a 4-year-old girl.

Three other studies, including one in The American Journal of Diseases of Children, describe similar cases. In most, the young patients were fine after removal of the obstructions. The phenomenon is rare, the studies noted. But they might also serve as a cautionary tale for the parents of small children, particularly those with a strong fondness for gum.

Therefore, it is not recommended to swallow gum if you don’t absolutely have to because it is fairly more difficult for your body to digest gum than to digest other things you eat, but at the end of the day it is rare to encounter a complication in your body due to gum.

A sleep cycle consists of five steps, which are divided into two categories: REM sleep and non-REM sleep. REM sleep, or rapid eye movement sleep, occurs toward the end of each cycle and is typically the stage for our most lucid dreams. Non-REM sleep is generally lighter and dreamless, save for a few fragmentary images here and there.

In the first stage mental activity begins to slow down, with brain waves switching to theta-band activity. This wave pattern has been described as a deep, marking the threshold between consciousness and the “subconscious.” However, intermittent bursts of alpha activity, or quiet wakefulness, often give you the sense that you’re still awake.

A study performed in the 1960s found that people who wake up at this stage  don’t realize they’ve been sleeping. “Investigators asked subjects aroused out of various stages of sleep whether they considered themselves asleep,” the researchers wrote. “Only about 10 percent of those aroused from stage 1 said that they had been asleep.”

In the second stage eye movement stops and brain waves become slower, with alpha activity shutting down entirely.

Stage three and four set the stage for extremely slow brain waves called delta waves. In this stage,nightmares, sleepwalking, and somniloquy occur.

Stage five is the REM stage where the dreams that we remember start to take place. REM sleep is very important because the brain will do anything to not be disrupted by noises occurring around you such as alarms going off.

Rabies is a deadly disease that can transferred from the saliva of the animal that has it or from a bite. In the U.S animals such as bats, coyotes, foxes, raccoons, and skunks carry rabies.

Some signs that shows that you have rabies are: fever,headache, nausea, vomiting, agitation, fear of water (hydrophobia) because of the difficulty in swallowing, and hallucinations. It has been said that a bat’s bite may not wake you up while you’re sleeping, so if you wake up and see a bat in your room assume that you have been bitten and get help immediately.

However, sometimes it’s difficult for someone to tell that they have rabies because it moves throughout the body unknown. This happens because the rabies virus attaches to nerve cells, working its way through the nervous system. Eventually the virus makes its way to the brain, and by then it’s usually too late to be able to recover. 

Once it reaches the brain, the virus typically travels through the nerves to the salivary glands, which often causes foam to come out of your mouth. Saliva is its principle method of transmission into new hosts. After hitting the salivary glands, the virus continues its way down throughout the rest of the body. The person carrying the rabies may have hallucinations and mood swings. Sometimes the person is just in a “dumb” phase where they’re just peaceful. Either way both of these cases die from total paralysis or respiratory paralysis.

I was reading an article online about nosebleeds and why people get them, and I thought it was interesting because some of us get nosebleeds out of nowhere. Most of the time we have no idea what causes them or even why they happen.

I learned that 60 million people in the U.S have nosebleeds each year. There are some reasons why we have nosebleeds that may not be clear to everyone. For example, some immediate causes of nosebleeds include, trauma to the nose from an injury, deformities inside the nose, inflammation in the nose, or even, intranasal tumors. 

However, there are other reasons for nosebleeds more serious than the ones I mentioned before. A liver or kidney condition, or chronic alcohol consumption can lower the blood’s ability to clot therefore causing the nose to bleed.

Other things like colds and allergies can irritate your nose and also cause it to bleed. At the same time, dry air can cause nosebleeds because the lining of the nose cracks from dryness. In reality, nose bleeds aren’t extremely serious unless you have some sort of condition that you know may cause your nose to bleed. Therefore, you can easily stop nosebleeds at home by simply pinching your nose for 10 min while you sit forward and by adding saline and topical ointments to moisturize the lining of your nose after a nosebleed has occurred. 

Hi everyone! I read an article that says that your brain is just as active when you’re sleeping as it is when you’re awake. There was a study done where a group of men and women were brought in and had to categorize animals. Then they were put into a dark room and as soon as they fell asleep scientists measured their brain activity. The activity was just the same when they were asleep and when they were awake. However, scientists came to the conclusion that it took their brains two to three times longer for them to categorize these animals, but when they did, they did it properly.

Hi! My name is Nicole Avila and I’m taking this course because science is not for me. The crazy part is that both of my parents are nurses. Anyway, I’m not planning to be a science major because I don’t understand science and science doesn’t stick to me. I can’t remember a chemistry formula or what exactly ATP is needed for.

Here’s a link.