Psychosocial stress predisposes to depression, especially chronic stress. Stress together with a functional genetic variant of the serotonin transporter gene and dysregulation of the stress hormone cortisol increase the risk of depression. Stress reactivity might be an important link between a genetic variant of the serotonin transporter gene, stressful life events in early years and depression. Psychosocial stress such as life-events predisposes susceptible patients not only to depression but also other psychiatric diseases such as anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder. Chronic stress is an important risk factor in psychiatry. In animals chronic stress has been shown to disrupt the functions of the .....read more »

In a recent published research 44,218 and 46,089 baseline users of single typical and atypical drugs, respectively, and 186,600 matched nonusers of antipsychotic drugs were retrospectively compared for the risk of sudden cardiac death. Current users of typical and of atypical antipsychotic drugs had a similar, dose-related increased risk of sudden cardiac death. It was already known that typical antipsychotics increased the risk of sudden cardiac death. This study adds the important knowledge that atypical antipsychotics also carriages that risk increasing with higher dosages. How high is the risk? Current users of typical antipsychotic drugs had an adjusted rate of sudden cardiac .....read more »

Make your own "Obamicon" — your image in a style inspired by Shepard Fairey's iconic poster. Regardless of your candidate of choice in the 2008 election, here's your chance to sound-off. Take your picture with a webcam or upload a photo, choose your own message, and submit to the gallery. Related post on this blog: Create Fake Magazine Covers Thanks @2525Related posts: The Man behind the Obama Poster Barack Obama in Paris: Dorothy’s Art Gallery On Palin and Parrots and the US election ..read more »

The digital divide in this post refers to the disparity in Internet access between developed and developing countries. In a recent published study they explored Internet addiction among university students in China and the United States to develop a better understanding of Internet addiction in a cross-national setting. Three hundred fourteen respondents were evaluated on 10 Internet addiction symptoms and five Internet addiction dimensions. And the conclusion was: We conclude that Internet addiction may result as an artifact of the stage of Internet adoption within a society. More information on the non existent diagnosis of Internet addiction can be found on this .....read more »

Twitter And Other Mobile Izing Tools For Teaching And LearningView SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: twitter teaching) One of my followers on twitter is a librarian, and also a blogger: Emerging Technologies Librarian. While scanning the blog stumbled upon this great slide show. Seems like fun to me to use twitter for medical education. Do you know of more initiatives or examples of the use of twitter in (medical) education, please let me know in the comments?Related posts: Twitter, Doctors, Hospitals and Medical Education Medical Education Evaluated With Twitter Teaching With Twitter ..read more »

There is a new social bookmarking site to manage and share journal articles called Labmeeting. You can upload your pdf's of articles after registration. It is only available for researchers with a current academic email address. If your academic institution is not on their list you can use their Academic Research Institution Submission form to add your institution to Labmeeting. I did it to test the site and it went quick and smoothly. Your pdf's are uploaded and they are automatically parsed and matched to bibliographic records. After upload you can see a thumbnail. The paper is also converted to iPaper .....read more »

Some bloggers, I think most of them reflect some of their inner feelings through their writing. Most bloggers more or less use self-disclosure, a process by which an individual shares his or her feelings, thoughts, experiences, or information with others. Self disclosure leads to gain of acquaintance or even develops intimate relationships with others. Witnessed this a couple of time. Posts with a high level of self-disclosure evokes more comments and more subscriptions to your blog. Therefore, self-disclosure may help bloggers to both maintain existing human relations and extend their human network, increase their social capital. More social capital .....read more »

This is an excellent book for physicians to read and learn about all the possibilities on the Internet. The book is very well structured. It starts with some basics such as searching with Google. Google is very efficient for searching for specific medical information. Examples and searches are on medical topics, even the advanced search options in google are presented. After some information about Google Health, Google Scholar and iGoogle the focus of the book shifts towards PubMed, one of the most important search engines for physicians and other scientists. The most important PubMed tools from third parties are explained .....read more »

A video clip made by Clemens Kogler for the musician Clark. You can see a better version of this video on Clemes Kogler's site: Herr Bar. The film solely consists of photos of human body parts, which are arranged to form landscapes, animals, plants,... Thanks Bright.nlRelated posts: How can technology transform the human body? Dutch Microfluidic Chip simulates metabolism of medicine in human body Human Computer Interfaces Better Matched to our Brains and Body ..read more »

This is the trailer of the film about the work of London-based neurosurgeon Henry Marsh and his colleague Igor Kurilets in the Ukraine.Marsh works at St George's, one of London's most established hospitals. Regularly he travels to the Ukraine since 15 years to do neurosurgery in this country. They have to work under extreme conditions without adequate equipment. The Youtube video is impressive will get the DVD. There is a website to this film, The English Surgeon Driven by the need to help others where he can, Henry has been going out to Kiev for over 15 years to help improve .....read more »