Category: Health

All Too Human: The Price We Pay for Our Advanced Brains May Be a Greater Tendency to Disorders

Tom Patriot

Prof. Rony Paz of the Weizmann Institute of Science suggests that our brains are like modern washing machines – evolved to have the latest sophisticated programming, but more vulnerable to breakdown and prone to develop costly disorders. He and a group of researchers recently conducted experiments comparing the efficiency of the neural code in non-human and human primates, and found that as the neural code gets more efficient, the robustness that prevents errors is reduced. Their findings, which recently appeared in Cell,may help to explain why disorders as ADHD, anxiety, depression,…

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Makeup of an individual’s gut bacteria may play role in weight loss.

Tom Patriot

A preliminary study published in the August issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings suggests that, for some people, specific activities of gut bacteria may be responsible for their inability to lose weight, despite adherence to strict diet and exercise regimens. “We know that some people don’t lose weight as effectively as others, despite reducing caloric consumption and increasing physical activity,” says Purna Kashyap, M.B.B.S., a Mayo Clinic gastroenterologist and co-senior author of the study. Dr. Kashyap and his colleagues wondered if there may be other factors at work that prevented these patients from…

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Do Skin Care Products Need To Tingle To Prove They’re Working?

Tom Patriot

Do you even tingle though? When it comes to skin care, the answer can be complicated. Last week while brainstorming with my editor, she mentioned that she’d run out of her beloved Skinceuticals C E Ferulic serum and started using Drunk Elephant’s C-Firma day serum in its place. (The Drunk Elephant product has been cited as a dupe for the more costly Skinceuticals version, and I had recommended she give it a shot.) One of the first things she said about the new serum was that it didn’t leave her face tingling like the Skinceuticals one…

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Signs of Memory Problems May Instead Be Symptoms of Hearing Loss

Tom Patriot

What might appear to be signs of memory loss could actually point to hearing issues, says Dr. Susan Vandermorris, one of the study’s authors and a clinical neuropsychologist at Baycrest. A recent Baycrest study, published in the Canadian Journal on Aging, found that the majority (56 per cent) of participants being evaluated for memory and thinking concerns and potential brain disorders had some form of mild to severe hearing loss, but only about 20 per cent of individuals used hearing aids. Among the participants, a quarter of them did not show…

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How sleep loss may contribute to adverse weight gain

Tom Patriot

In a new study, researchers at Uppsala University now demonstrate that one night of sleep loss has a tissue-specific impact on the regulation of gene expression and metabolism in humans. This may explain how shift work and chronic sleep loss impairs our metabolism and adversely affects our body composition. The study is published in the scientific journal Science Advances. Epidemiological studies have shown that the risk for obesity and type 2 diabetes is elevated in those who suffer from chronic sleep loss or who carry out shift work. Other studies have…

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