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We know that stress can harm relationships, make us ill, even make us sad or depressed.  But did you know it can also erode your memories? A new study says that, sustained stress erodes memory, and the immune system plays a key role in the cognitive impairment, according to a new study from researchers at The Ohio State University, newswise.com reports.  “This is chronic stress. It’s not just the stress of giving a talk or meeting someone new,” says lead researcher Jonathan Godbout, associate professor of neuroscience at Ohio State. Mice that were repeatedly exposed to an aggressive intruder had a hard time recalling where the escape hole was in a maze they’d mastered prior to the stressful period.  They also had measurable changes in their brains, including evidence of inflammation brought on by the immune system’s response to the outside pressure. This was associated with the presence of immune cells, called macrophages, in the brain of the stressed m...

We all know men are babies when it comes to pain (sorry, guys!).  But there may be a reason for it. A new study has revealed that the pain "circuitry" of men and women is different.  According to newswise.com, new research released today reveals for the first time that pain is processed in male and female mice using different cells. "Research has demonstrated that men and women have different sensitivity to pain and that more women suffer from chronic pain than men, but the assumption has always been that the wiring of how pain is processed is the same in both sexes,” says co-senior author Jeffrey Mogil, Ph.D., E.P. Taylor professor of pain studies at McGill University and director of the Alan Edwards Centre for Research on Pain. I've been through major cancer surgery, many surgical biopsies, a c-section, eight stitches from falling and cutting my eye while running, and now am dealing with a kidney stone.  My husband, who had laser knee surgery years ago (...

Bullying hurts enough when it's happening.  But a new study has found that its effects last well into adulthood. According to newswise.com, bullying may have long-term health consequences. Bullied children may experience chronic, systemic inflammation that persists into adulthood, while bullies may actually reap health benefits of increasing their social status through bullying, according to researchers at Duke Medicine. How depressing is that.   “Our findings look at the biological consequences of bullying, and by studying a marker of inflammation, provide a potential mechanism for how this social interaction can affect later health functioning,” the Web site quotes William E. Copeland, Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine and the study’s lead author. Is it all in the head?  Researchers think not. Earlier studies have suggested that victims of childhood bullying suffer social and emotional cons...

Love dark chocolate and been think you've been conned into eating it because it's "healthy." I know, my friends and family laughed at me, too.  But it's true ; a new study has confirmed it.   Turns out  certain bacteria in the stomach "gobble the chocolate and ferment it into anti-inflammatory compounds that are good for the heart," newswise.com reports. “We found that there are two kinds of microbes in the gut: the ‘good’ ones and the ‘bad’ ones,” explained Maria Moore, an undergraduate student and one of the study’s researchers, at newswise.com. “The good microbes. . . feast on chocolate,” she added. “When you eat dark chocolate, they grow and ferment it, producing compounds that are anti-inflammatory.  When these compounds are absorbed by the body, they lessen the inflammation of cardiovascular tissue, reducing the long-term risk of stroke,” said John Finley, Ph.D., who led the work. He noted that cocoa powder, an ingredient in chocolate, c...

It's one of the most feared diseases.   The American Cancer Society estimates that in 2013, about 22,240 new cases of it will be diagnosed and 14,030 women will die of it in the United States. We're talking about ovarian cancer and it's so deadly because it's most often diagnosed at a late stage, when it may already have spread to other organs.   But what if there were something simple you could take every day to try to prevent this disease? What if it were something that's also supposed to ward off heart attacks and colon cancer, too? It's the miraculous aspirin .   According to newswise.com, w omen who take aspirin daily may reduce their risk of ovarian cancer by 20 percent, according to a study by scientists at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health.   "Symptoms associated with this disease can mimic more common conditions, such as digestive and bladder disorders, so for this reason and others, it is ofte...

That's right.  Some of us are more susceptible to it than others, thanks to our forebears, according to a new study , as noted by newswise.com. "New research shows that chronic stress changes gene activity in immune cells before they reach the bloodstream. With these changes, the cells are primed to fight an infection or trauma that doesn’t actually exist, leading to an overabundance of the inflammation that is linked to many health problems," the Web site reports. What does this mean?  We're not talking about occasional stress -- stuck in a traffic jam, the copier won't work, your son stuck his tongue out at you as you were driving away from school.  No, this is repetitive stress, newswise.com says. Repeated stress that triggers the sympathetic nervous system, "commonly known as the fight-or-flight response," stimulates the production of new blood cells. "While this response is important for survival, prolonged activation over an extended per...

Now, this will astonish you.  And break your heart.  But a new study has found that obesity  in teens can lead to hearing loss. Growing up with a deaf mother and grandmother, I know how debilitating this is.  My mother wasn't able to have a conversation with her mother until she was 16 years old. A story in today's New York Times reports that "the definition of obesity in teenagers — was independently associated with poorer hearing over all frequencies, and with almost double the risk of low-frequency hearing loss in one ear."   Even worse, researchers suggest that this may be the early signs of losing your hearing in both ears, as happens in adults. That bad boy, inflammation, is at work here, too. It's thought that, when it's induced by obesity, it "may be a factor in organ damage," Nicholas Bakalar writes. (Inflammation is also a player in cancer and heart disease.) Losing weight, of course, would help, but so would early intervention, doc...

Yes, indeed.  We've known for a while that for some reason, taking aspirin daily may help prevent heart disease and certain cancers. But no one knew why until now. A new study has found that "aspirin slows the accumulation of DNA mutations in abnormal cells in at least one pre-cancerous condition," according to a story at newswise.com.  Aspirin apparently lowers "mutation rates." Cancer is caused by the mutating of genes, and up till now, no one has been able to figure out why some genes do, and some don't.  That's the answer to the hundred-million-dollar question.  What turns these cell changes on and off?  There's the cure for cancer. Something I found interesting recently was that inflammation  damages DNA and often, particularly with chronic diseases, that's what leads to cancer.  Inflammation, a response of the immune system, in recent years has been recognized as a hallmark of cancer. Medicalnewstoday.com puts it better than I can...