Hot MedFax

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 (...

So I'm not crazy after all. Even mice agree with me. Running is fun.  According to James Gorman at The New York Times, "Wheel-running is not a neurotic behavior found only in caged mice.  They like the wheel." Scientists in the Netherlands did an experiment that it seems nobody had tried before. "They placed exercise wheels outdoors in a yard and in an area of dunes, and monitored the wheels with motion detectors and automatic cameras," he writes. For the experiment, the wheels were enclosed so that small animals could come and go but so that larger animals could not knock them over. Researchers set up motion sensors and automatic video cameras. A scientist who observed the mice -- and the wheel -- says the study made it clear that wheel-running is “some type of rewarding behavior” and “probably not driven by stress or anxiety.” Mice accounted for 88 percent of the wheel-running events, and spent one minute to 18 on the wheel.  (Frogs a...

Be very careful when you're pregnant not to get an infection.  A new study has found that moms-to-be who do are more likely to have the infection impair their fetuses' neurological functions, resulting in autism or schizophrenia. According to newswise.com, Johns Hopkins researchers report that fetal mice — especially males — show signs of brain damage that lasts into their adulthood when they are exposed in the womb to a maternal immune system kicked into high gear by a serious infection or other malady. The findings suggest that some neurologic diseases in humans could be similarly rooted in prenatal exposure to inflammatory immune responses. "The investigators say that the part of the brain responsible for memory and spatial navigation (the hippocampus) was smaller over the long term in the male offspring exposed to the overactive immune system in the womb," the Web site notes. The males also had fewer nerve cells in their brains and their brains contained a ty...

Who knew?  But moms who have a lot of sex partners have sexier male children.  We're talking mice, of course. At least that's what a new study has found, according to newswise.com. "University of Utah biologists found that when mother mice compete socially for mates in a promiscuous environment, their sons play hard (read: make lots of babies) and die young," according to the Web site. The male mice attract more females by making more urinary pheromones, but smelling sexier shortens their lives. (Not sure this would work for humans.) “If your sons are particularly sexy, and mate more than they would otherwise, it’s helping get your genes more efficiently into the next generation,” newswise.com quotes biology professor Wayne Potts, senior author of the new study. Yet there's no faking that male mice who create more baby mice run out of life more quickly.  In the study, only 48 percent of these hard-working mice lived to the end of the experiment, compared ...