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The Food and Drug Administration has issued sweeping new rules that tighten its control over e-cigarettes, banning their sale to minors. The agency is also expanding its regulation of tobacco.
Read more at NPR.org.
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Teenage brains are more susceptible to drug abuse, but it’s often hard to find treatment. It’s even harder to find evidence-based treatment designed for youth. But that’s starting to change.
Read more at NPR.org.
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Roughly 2.5 million Americans are addicted to heroin and opioids like Oxycontin. Researchers say addiction takes over the brain’s limbic reward system, impairing decision making, judgment and recovery.
Read more at NPR.org.
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Young adults who watch at least three hours of TV a day might end up with less cognitive function by middle age, a study published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry finds. That’s especially true if they’re sedentary couch potatoes.
Read more at NPR.org.
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To make foods irresistible, the food industry has added sweetness in unexpected places — like bread and pasta sauce. That’s helped shape our cravings but may also be coming back to bite the industry.
Read more at NPR.org.
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Fear campaigns can motivate people to quit smoking or eat less. But fearmongering can go too far. When is scaring for health’s sake acceptable, and when is it distasteful?
Read more at NPR.org.
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Having police, school nurses, drug users and family equipped with kits to reverse an overdose saves lives, doctors say. But reversing addiction requires follow-up care that many users aren’t getting.
Read more at NPR.org.
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With deaths from heroin and painkillers on the rise, more nurses at high schools and middle schools are prepared to intervene in the event of an overdose on school grounds.
Read more at NPR.org.
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Math anxiety is much like other fears, say scientists who scanned the brains of third-graders. Fortunately, new research published in the Journal of Neuroscience, indicates that one-on-one tutoring soothed the fear circuit in anxious kids’ brains and improved performance, too.
Read more at NPR.org.
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The synthetic opioid fentanyl is used for surgery and to treat severe pain. Abuse has always been a problem. Now that it’s being used to cut heroin, the risk of overdose or death has soared.
Read more at NPR.org.
Ben Allen/WITF. Cris and Valerie Fiore hold one of their favorite pictures of their sons Anthony (with the dark hair) and Nick. Anthony died from a heroin overdose in May 2014 at the age of 24.
Federal law requires insurance firms to cover treatment for addiction as they do treatment for other diseases. But because addiction treatment is so different from treatment for other medical issues, it’s hard to figure out exactly what equal treatment looks like, and some families say that drug users aren’t getting the care they need.
Read more at NPR.org.
Lorenzo Gritti for NPR
Dozens of games and apps claim to improve your memory or make you smarter or reduce stress. But do they really? In October 2014, 75 scientists signed a letter to the brain training industry, criticizing companies for exaggerating claims and preying on the anxieties of customers. Now game developers say the next step is clinically valid poof of cognitive gains, and one developer (also a neuroscientist) is looking for the best proof he can get — FDA approval — and he’ll start with his game NeuroRacer which already has results published in the journal Nature.
Read more at NPR.org.
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In a new study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, a psychologist says there could be a simple way to make calorie-packed foods like French fries or ice cream seem unappealing, even a bit disgusting. Others are less sure.
Read more at NPR.org.
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A walk in the park may soothe the mind and, in the process, change the workings of our brains in ways that may improve our mental health, according to an interesting new study of the physical effects on the brain of visiting nature.
Read more at NYTimes.com.
Emily Strange
Mice given even brief opportunities to solve puzzles are less likely to become addicted to cocaine, a study has found. The research adds to an increasing body of work suggesting that addiction is in large part a reaction to living in an intellectually and emotionally unsatisfying environment, and indicates that intellectual stimulation could be more lasting than has been realized.
Read more at iflscience.com.
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In recent years, a body of research has shown that beneficial microbes play a critical role in how our bodies work. And it turns out there’s a lot of communication between our gut and our brain.
Read more at NPR.org.
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The residue from meth labs can cause health problems, but people aren’t always told that the house they’re buying is contaminated. An Indiana law requires disclosure but not mandatory testing.
Read more at NPR.org.
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Drug overdoses — many from opioid painkillers — cause more deaths in the U.S. than car crashes, shootings or alcohol. But stigma keeps many addicts from an antidote that could quickly save them.
Read more at NPR.org.
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The antidepressant Prozac selectively targets the chemical serotonin. When the drug was introduced in the 1980s, it helped solidify the idea in many minds that depression was the result of a chemical imbalance. But the real story is far more complicated.
Read more at NPR.org.
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Lots of people say they’re having trouble with alcohol. Native Americans and young, college-educated white men are most apt to be at risk. And most people don’t get any help cutting back.
Read more at NPR.org.
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Like asthma or diabetes, opioid addiction is a chronic condition. Could treatment that begins when people show up in the ER get them on the right road faster? New studies suggest it could.
Read more at NPR.org.
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Even as the use of traditional cigarettes and most other tobacco products dipped or stayed the same from 2013 to 2014, the use of e-cigarettes climbed among students in high school and middle school. This concerns Dr. Tom Frieden, chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, because nicotine exposure at a young age “may cause lasting harm to brain development.”
Read more at NPR.org.
Source
Denise Kandel coined the term, often associated with marijuana, in a research paper 40 years ago. But her work suggested nicotine, not pot, was most likely to lead to the use of harder drugs.
Read more at NPR.org.
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Gabrielle Glaser challenges the usefulness of Alcoholics Anonymous in April’s issue of The Atlantic. She claims that the program’s tenets aren’t based science and that other options may work better.
Read more at NPR.org.
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We know some people are more at risk for abusing alcohol than others. Now scientists say they’re getting closer to predicting which teenagers are most at risk.
Read more at NPR.org.
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The limit for healthy drinking may be less than you think: one drink a day for women and two for men, according to the CDC. New strategies aim to help heavy drinkers reduce their intake.
Read more at NPR.org.
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To keep people from getting into trouble with alcohol, it would be helpful to know why they’re at risk. Genes make some people more susceptible to dependence or addiction, while the surroundings exert a stronger pull on others. A new study published in the journal of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Review suggests that a person’s income level influences the push and pull of genes and the environment.
Read more at NPR.org.
Where there’s pot, there’s often an insatiable hunger. A new study gives a clue why: Cannabinoids, the drug in marijuana, appear to flip a neural circuit that normally tells us we’re full into thinking we’re hungry.
Read more at NPR.org.
After eating sweet bread from a Santa Ana bakery, thirty people got ill, complaining of heart palpitations and hallucinations. The deputy health counselor for the Orange County Health Agency said that people developed symptoms somewhere between 20 minutes and two hours after they consumed the rosca de reyes — Mexican sweet bread, traditionally eaten on Jan. 6 for Dia de los Reyes (The Three Wise Men Day). Preliminary lab results indicate the presence of a synthetic drug in the bread. A criminal investigation has been launched.
Around the same time as the incident, senators from California and Ohio introduced legislation that takes aim at producers and importers of synthetic drugs. The bill is called the Protecting Our Kids from Dangerous Synthetic Drugs Act.
Read more about the evolving problem of synthetic drug use at NPR.org.
Last week the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a new device that aims to curb hunger by zapping a nerve. The device stimulates the vagus nerve and may curb hunger by blocking communication between the stomach and the brain, but researchers still aren’t sure why it makes people feel less hungry.
Read more about the new device at NPR.org.
How many times have you said you’re going to exercise more or eat better? Maybe the reason it is so hard to keep resolutions is because your environment is sabotaging you — or at least that’s what some psychologists are saying based on a study of U.S. soldiers’ heroin addiction during the Vietnam War.
Read the full story at NPR.org.
Public health officials in Colorado are facing an unprecedented challenging: explaining to teens why they shouldn’t smoke marijuana after the state legalized it. Campaigns against teen drug use usually rely on the scientifically proven health risks, but the studies on the risks of marijuana, especially to the developing teen brain, are still in their preliminary stages. Colorado’s public health campaign hinges on that exact idea and tells teens “Don’t be a lab rat”, complete with human-sized lab rat cages.
Read more about Colorado’s public health campaign at NRP.org.
Marijuana is the most widely used illicit drug, and more teenagers and young adults are using the drug in states that have made it available for medical use. Yet, several studies suggest that marijuana use during the teenage years can dampen the development of brain regions critical for memory and problem solving. In one study, researchers analyzed the effect of marijuana use on IQ. The researchers found that people who began using marijuana in their teenage years and continued to use marijuana for several years lost about 8 IQ points from childhood to adulthood. Read more at NPR’s coverage: Marijuana’s effect on Teenage Brain
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