Category: Health

Blister fluid could help diagnose burn severity

Tom Patriot

Severe burns can leave physical and psychological scars, especially in children. When a burn patient enters the clinic, doctors use factors such as the depth and size of the burn, as well as the time required for skin healing — or re-epithelialization — to determine the best course of treatment. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Journal of Proteome Research have found another, possibly more accurate way to classify burn severity: analyzing proteins in blister fluid. Diagnosing burn depth, which can continue to increase even hours after the injury initially occurs, takes up…

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Oral contraceptives could impair women’s recognition of complex emotions

Tom Patriot

The pill could be blurring your social judgement — but perhaps not enough so you’d notice. By challenging women to identify complex emotional expressions like pride or contempt, rather than basic ones like happiness or fear, scientists have revealed subtle changes in emotion recognition associated with oral contraceptive pill (OCP) use. Published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, their study found that OCP users were nearly 10% worse on average than non-users in deciphering the most enigmatic emotional expressions, raising questions over the possible impact of OCPs on social interactions in intimate relationships.…

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Looking to choose a healthy post-workout snack? Decide early, study says

Tom Patriot

You’ve just exercised for an hour, tracking the burned calories with a sense of satisfaction. Then comes a choice: munch on an apple or indulge in the chocolatey goodness of a brownie? A post-exercise snack can threaten to undo the gains (or losses) of a workout. But the decision itself may depend on when you make it, according to a new study from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The takeaway? Avoiding delay can keep temptation at bay. Nebraska’s Karsten Koehler, Christopher Gustafson and their colleagues conducted an experiment that asked two…

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New skin test detects prion infection before symptoms appear

Tom Patriot

Prions can infect both humans and animals, causing Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans, mad cow disease in cattle, and chronic wasting disease in elk and deer. The infectious, misfolded protein particles often go undetected as they destroy brain tissue, causing memory loss, mobility issues, and ultimately death. Preclinical detection of prions has proven difficult, but new research suggests skin samples hold early signs of prion disease that precede neurologic symptoms. “Currently a definitive diagnosis of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is dependent on the examination of diseased brain tissue obtained at biopsy or…

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Identifying brain’s preparation for action

Tom Patriot

Neuroscientists at Bangor University (Wales, UK) and University College London (UCL) have for the first time, identified the processes which occur in our brains milliseconds before we undertake a series of movements, crucial for speech, handwriting, sports or playing a musical instrument. They have done so by measuring tiny magnetic fields outside the participants’ head and identifying unique patterns making up each sequence before it is executed. They identified differences between neural patterns which lead to a more skilled as opposed to a more error-prone execution. The research, funded by…

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