bondi at its finest
proud to be Australian.
lovely.
FACT: 1 out of 255 women and 1 out of 12 men have some form of color vision deficiency.
Take the online color challenge, based on the official FM100 Hue Test by X-Rite. (Drag and drop the colors in each row to arrange them by hue order. The first and last color chips are fixed. Click on “Score Test” when done.)
Internet addiction has same effect as cocaine on brains: study
This is your brain on the Internet: Messed up where there should be connections for making decisions and having normal emotions.
Results of a new study suggest people who cannot control, cut back or stop their use of the Internet have abnormal white matter structure in the brain similar to what is seen in cocaine and crystal-meth addicts.
According to the study’s authors, as the number of people logging onto cyberspace soars, “Internet addiction disorder” — which is poised to enter the official lexicon of psychiatric illnesses — “is becoming a serious mental-health issue around the world.”
The disorder, as described in the study published this week in the journal PLoS One, is defined as “problematic” or pathological computer use that can cause “marked distress” and interfere with school, work, family and social relationships.
For their study, led by Hao Lei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, researchers scanned the brains of 17 teens and young adults, aged 14 to 24, with Internet addiction and 16 healthy “controls” of similar age.
People were classified as suffering from Internet addiction disorder, or IAD, based on a questionnaire that included the following: Do you feel preoccupied with the Internet? Do you stay online longer than originally intended? Do you feel restless, moody, depressed or irritable when attempting to cut down or stop Internet use?
(via medicalschool)
Argyria results from prolonged contact with or ingestion of silver salts. It is characterized by gray to gray-black staining of the skin and mucous membranes produced by silver deposition. The most common cause of argyria is mechanical impregnation of the skin by small silver particles in workers involved in silver mining, silver refining and photographic processing. Colloidal silver dietary supplements are marketed widely for cancer, AIDS, diabetes mellitus, and herpetic infections. Cases have followed the prolonged use of silver salts for the irrigation of urethral or nasal mucous membranes, in eye drops, wound dressing, and the excessive use of an oral smoking remedy containing silver acetate. Argyria has also been attributed to surgical and dental procedures (eg, silver amalgam-tattooing, silver sutures used in abdominal surgery). Great individual variability exists in the length of exposure and total dose needed to result in argyria.
Brain Electrodes Fix Deep Depression Long-Term
A placebo-controlled study showed that an electrode surgically implanted into a particular brain region could eliminate symptoms of the deepest, most untreatable forms of depression:
Deep depression that fails to respond to any other form of therapy can be moderated or reversed by stimulation of areas deep inside the brain. Now the first placebo-controlled study of this procedure shows that these responses can be maintained in the long term1.
Neurologist Helen Mayberg at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, followed ten patients with major depressive disorder and seven with bipolar disorder, or manic depression, after an electrode device was implanted in the subcallosal cingulate white matter of their brains and the area continuously stimulated.
For psychiatrists accustomed to seeing severely depressed patients fail to respond — or fail to maintain a response — to antidepressant or cognitive therapy, these results seem near miraculous.
All but one of twelve patients who reached the two-year point in the study had completely shed their depression or had only mild symptoms.
“Its almost spooky.”
Of course, surgical implants to treat depression will never be mainstream or generally ethical, but it shows that focused therapies dealing with very precise brain regions could alleviate symptoms, at least for some of the most untreatable sufferers of depression.
(via Nature News)
(via fuckyeahmedicalstuff)
