Blogs / Discoblog

A coughing, sniffling allergy attack can be bad enough on its own. But one thing may exacerbate allergies even more: stressing out. A team led by Jan Kiecolt-Glaser of Ohio State University found that out when they put hay fever and seasonal allergy sufferers to the test, and found that people under high stress have much stronger and longer allergic reactions than people who stay relaxed.

First, Kiecolt-Glaser and colleagues had 28 test subjects participate in fairly-low stress activities like reading aloud from a magazine, and then checked them for wheals—small swellings on the skin that are usually signs of an allergic reactions. When researchers put the same people through more stressful activities, like solving math problems in their heads or giving a speech in front of people they were told to be behavioral experts, many of the subjects’ allergy symptoms spiked.

(more…)

Soon, any woman hoping for a smart, tall Swede to be her sperm donor might just have to leave the U.S. to make it happen.

Since 2005, the Food and Drug Administration has made it essentially impossible to import sperm donations from Europe into the United States, the Washington Post reports, because of fears over the pathogens that cause mad cow disease and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. And now, the last of the European sperm we imported before the embargo will soon be gone.

(more…)

While the science behind the placebo effect is still unclear, a new study may have found a group for whom it’s especially effective: children.

Kids’ tendency to be more open to the power of suggestion than adults appears to spill over into medicine. French pediatricians reviewing data from many different studies of children and adults receiving either anti-epilepsy medication or a sugar pill found that while children actually responded worse to the drugs than adults, they responded 50 percent better to a placebo, with one in five of the kids seeing a serious reduction in their seizure rates.

(more…)

Proponents of marriage like to toss around the statistic that married people (and married men in particular) are happier and healthier than the wretched ranks of the unwed. But new research has found that the happiness/health gap is narrowing, not because the married crew is losing its happy glow (though that may indeed be occurring), but because the single component is getting happier.

The study, led by Hui Liu, assistant professor of sociology at Michigan State University, used data from the National Health Interview Survey from 1972 to 2003. The researchers found that while the self-reported health of the married is “still better than that of the never-married,” the “gap has closed considerably.” Single women shouldn’t rejoice just yet: The uptick was due overwhelmingly to improvements in the health of never-married men. Liu thinks that this result may be “partly because never-married men have greater access to social resources and support that historically were found in a spouse.” (Female robots, perhaps? Or Internet porn?) Still, single women also saw an increase, and the singles health boost also spread across racial lines to both blacks and whites.

For those with one or more marriages in their past, the results aren’t as clear—the health of the the divorced, widowed, and separated worsened from 1972 to 2003 relative to their married peers (though whether entering into a second or third marriage increased your health wasn’t mentioned). So maybe the statistic should be revised to something like “first marriages and single-malehood, and possibly second and third marriages will make you happier and healthier.” Happy dating!

Image: iStockPhoto

Larva therapy, a method used to clean out wounds for centuries, is making a comeback in modern medicine. In the latest development, researchers claim they have purified an antibiotic from maggot secretions that kills many strains of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), as well as other bacteria. This new maggot juice may someday give patients all the benefits of the larva’s antibacterial properties, without the ick-factor of using actual larvae on a wound.

When some species of fly larvae are applied directly to wounds, they munch away on dead tissue, leaving healthy tissue intact. But keeping the maggots in a pouch on top of the infection seems to work, too, because the larvae secrete microbe-killing enzymes through the cloth.

(more…)

Smokers are more likely to die or become seriously ill from a flu or other viral infection than non-smokers are. According to researchers at the Yale School of Medicine, that might be because smokers’ immune systems don’t understand the value of proportional response.

Most scientists believed that viral infections hit smokers harder because smoking suppresses the immune system, making it less able to respond to the threat. But while working with mice exposed to cigarette smoke, the Yale scientists found the opposite—the rodents’ immune systems overreacted.

(more…)

It turns out that the spleen is a more useful organ than we thought. For a good part of the last 100 years, experts have assumed that the spleen was merely a piece of tissue above our abdomen, there to filter and store blood. In recent years, scientists have recognized the spleen’s role in manufacturing immune cells to fight off infection. The latest news (providing further evidence that the spleen is far from useless) tells us that the spleen actually connects the nervous system to the immune system.

(more…)

Scientists have been rushing to find new ways to kill mosquitoes, hoping to stem the tide of infectious diseases that the pesky insects carry. But Yoshiro Nagao of Japan’s Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine thinks having fewer mosquitoes around might cause an unexpected kind of harm.

Southeast Asia is riddled with dengue fever and its deadlier relative, called DHF. While studying towns in Thailand, Nagao found that in neighborhoods where fewer houses showed traces of Aedes mosquitoes, the incidence of DHF actually went up.

(more…)

All right, no more complaining about “old people smell”—according to George Preti, it doesn’t exist.

Preti, a scent expert at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, became incensed at 2001 Japanese study concluding that the skin of people over 40 produces more chemicals with an unpleasant or greasy odor. Preti, being over 40 himself, set out to disprove that idea.

(more…)

If you were a particularly mischievous youngster, you might have gotten a lecture about the dangers of aiming a laser pointer at someone’s eye. But those low-power classroom aids are practically nothing compared the damage one could cause with an industrial-sized laser.

About 30 Russians went to the hospital after suffering partial vision loss from a laser show gone wrong. Heavy rains forced organizers to hold the July 5 Aquamarine Open Air Festival, an all-night dance party, under huge tents. The lasers that normally shine harmlessly into the sky were instead refracted into the crowd. Russians officials are sure how it happened, whether the light bounced off the rain or the tent, but the beams gave some of the party-goers’ instant and irreversible retinal burns.

(more…)