Hot MedFax

Born in May?  Lucky for you.  How about October?  Not so much. Apparently the month you were born in can tell you a lot about your health.  (I was born in June.  Does it count that I was born four days late, and was actually due in May?) Turns out Columbia University scientists have developed a computational method to investigate the relationship between birth month and disease risk. The researchers used this algorithm to examine New York City medical databases and found 55 diseases that correlated with the season of birth. But before you start panicking, by identifying what's causing disease disparities by birth month, researchers hope to figure out how they might close the gap.Earlier research on individual diseases such as ADHD and asthma suggested a connection between birth season and incidence, but no large-scale studies had been undertaken. This motivated Columbia's scientists to compare diseases against birth dates and health histories. An...

It didn't happen with my husband (maybe because, 13 years ago, ultrasounds were milky and hard to see), but a new study has found that "s eeing their babies’ ultrasound images for the first time is a powerful moment for expectant fathers, and could hasten family bonding and provide an opportunity for promoting positive partnering and parenting," according to newswise.com. Today, with just about everything visible from your baby's nose to his toes, I'm sure it's a much more dramatic experience.  But when our son was in-utero, we could barely make out his head. (Even so, I have his 20-week ultrasound in a frame in our room and I feel happy every time I look at it.) It's all about being left out. “While all our fathers felt the mothers were receiving good care, about half of them felt excluded or ignored and wished that providers would offer them more explanation and opportunity to ask questions during the appointment,’’ says  Dr. Tova Walsh, a resea...

An amazing thing.  Children in a recent study said they believed they didn't have eyes or a head before they were conceived but that their soul -- their essence -- was around before they were even physically formed. Boston University  postdoctoral fellow Natalie Emmons studied both children who came from a background with no cultural references to religion (no school, no church, no TV) in remote Ecuador as well as an urban area near Quito where children did have access to such amenities. Emmons found, according to newswise.com, " Both groups gave remarkably similar answers, despite their radically different cultures. The children reasoned that their bodies didn’t exist before birth, and that they didn’t have the ability to think or remember. However, both groups also said that their emotions and desires existed before they were born." Emmons says that, while the children generally reported that they didn’t have eyes and couldn’t see things before birth, "they...

This may be hard for you to read.  It was a little hard for me to watch.  But once I got over the initial awkwardness, it was truly beautiful. I'm talking about a piece a Connecticut College student did on vaginas. She asked a series of men her age what they thought about vaginas, and the answers ranged from sheer embarrassed silence to "they're very strong" to "cosy" to "they run the world," to "spent some time in a vagina back in '92 and it was homey," to "you don't have the vagina for it," in place of what people usually say, referring to men's genitals. In the beginning the answers were a little stiff, a little embarrassed, but once the young men got going, you could tell they really were thinking hard and taking it seriously.  Quite a few commented that they wouldn't be here if it weren't for a vagina. Newswise.com notes that BuzzFeed says the “endearing and uplifting” video “forces us to think o...

I found this truly depressing.  Adolescents who have half-siblings with a different father are more likely to have used drugs and had sex by age 15 than those who have only full siblings. Researchers examined a phenomenon known as “multi-partnered fertility” or MPF, according to newswise.com. "This happens when parents who are not romantically involved with each other form new relationships and have another child with a new partner," the Web site reports.  (Hmm.  Wonder if they know Kody Brown.) What the researchers focused on were the connections between this re-partnering and additional childbearing on adolescent drug use and early sex. They focused on mothers and first-born children who lived with their mothers most of their lives. “For children, MPF means having a half-sibling, but it also means, for first-born children, that they usually experienced their biological parents splitting up — if they were together at all, lived in a single mother household fo...