Hot MedFax

We're screwed. A new study says says good communication does not lead to marital satisfaction. Say what? It's not quite so grim.  What the study found was that it takes more than good communication (duh) to make a marriage successful.  "Although communication and satisfaction were correlated, communication wasn’t a good guide for determining partners’ satisfaction with their relationships over time,” says the study’s lead author Justin Lavner, an assistant professor in UGA’s clinical psychology program in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. Although communication practices could predict satisfaction to some extent for some couples, the lack of a definitive causal relationship calls for additional attention to other factors that influence marital satisfaction, such as environmental stressors, what activities and interactions a couple has, and the personality traits of the individual partners. "It’s absolutely right to say more satisfied c...

Hey, blue eyes.  Do you like to drink?  A new study says it's more likely you'll be an alcoholic.   People with blue eyes might have a greater chance of becoming alcoholics, according to a unique new study by genetic researchers at the University of Vermont. The work, led by Arvis Sulovari, a doctoral student in cellular, molecular and biological sciences, and Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics Dawei Li, Ph.D., is the first to make a direct connection between a person’s eye color and alcohol dependence. The authors found that primarily European Americans with light-colored eyes – including green, grey and brown in the center – had a higher incidence of alcohol dependency than those with dark brown eyes, with the strongest tendency among blue-eyed individuals, newswise.com reports. The study outlines the genetic components that determine eye color and shows that they line up along the same chromosome as the genes related to excessive alcoh...

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...

How's this for a shock? A new study has found that your spouse's personality -- not yours -- influences your career success. Now, I love my husband but he is absent-minded (maybe only with me) and sometimes helpless (he'll kill me when he reads this) and forget about details.  He once asked me how to turn on the oven (you press a button). I realize that a lot of this is just men stuff -- you know, pretend you don't know how to do it so she'll do it, and I know we, at least I, am not very good at reinforcing when he does it right.  I can't stand the way he unloads the dishes from the dishwasher (usually in the wrong cabinet so I can never find them), or vacuum the family room (how can he keep missing that corner)?  And, I admit, I pick on him for it, so why should he want to help out?   At least he does his own laundry! But the study found that as people spend more and more time in the workplace (and these days it feels like we live there), it’s natural f...

A new study has found that teenage girls who skip school are probably doing much more than that. And none of it's good. Failing tests and engaging in risky sexual behavior have a lot in common with skipping school, researchers found, after flipping through 18,000 reports written daily by 14- to 17-year-old girls, according to newswise.com. The findings are based on a 10-year study of the development of 387 teenage girls' romantic/sexual relationships and sexual behavior, the Web site notes. During the study, the teens entered their daily activities and mood into a log. "This study demonstrates that young women’s weekday reports of skipping school and failing a test were significantly linked to more frequent vaginal sex, less frequent condom use and different sexual emotions, on that same day," said lead author Devon J. Hensel, Ph.D. Prior studies have shown that academic success is linked to lower sexual risk, but researchers have relied on retrospective infor...

Quick.  Gorgeous man. Eating yogurt. What do you think of? If you didn't think of John Stamos, they're right.  A new study says we tend to remember products when the celebrities endorsing them are clearly associated with the item. But if I'd said, Novak Djokovic and Wilson or Dunlop, chances are you'd remember the racquets. The Web site reports that Katie Kelting, a marketing researcher at the University of Arkansas, found that when consumers are shown two ads featuring the same celebrity, they are more likely to forget information when the celebrity is endorsing a product that is only moderately associated with the celebrity’s fame. When a product is either a really good -- or really bad -- fit with the reason for the celebrity’s fame, consumers are more likely to remember the information. But what happens when there is a low fit or match, such as LeBron James starring in a fast-food commercial? James is one of the world’s premier athletes. This woul...

Is your kid in the school choir?  Does he play the saxophone?  How about the drums, like my son (who is driving me crazy with all his pounding on walls and coffee cans and the floor and just about anything that makes a sound when you hit it). Well, be grateful, not annoyed.  A new study has found that even the smallest bit of musical training in early childhood provides a boost to the brain as an adult. According to medicalnewstoday.com, "Researchers discovered that, despite not having played an instrument in nearly 40 years, (the) participants who completed 4-14 years of music training early in life had the fastest response to (a) speech sound (approximately a millisecond faster than those without music training)."  The faster the response, the better the brain activity The story relates this to neural timing, and states that "neural timing is the first to go in aging adults."  Experts define neural ability as the physical basis for thoughts, feelings a...

Wouldn't it be nice if we all could not only "just get along," but love everyone? Stephen Asma, professor of philosophy at Columbia College, says universal love is a myth, according to a story by Christie Nicholson at smartplanet.com. She notes that he affirmed this in a   recent New York Times article , “All people are not equally entitled to my time, affection, resources or moral duties," he said in the article. Ansa told Nicholson tha the idea of universal love has been used for ill, not good, using as examples the Soviet Union and Mao's China, where " even family bias was bad and should be broken and subjugated to this universal love." Nicholson reported on Ansa's belief that love and expressions of it are finite. In fact, Ansa postulates that care is more a biological affect than an emotional one, according to Nicholson. All mammals experience it. "Caring for somebody is a lot like sprint racing," Ansa told Nicholson. You h...