Resilience is in psychiatry the positive capacity of people to cope with stress and catastrophe. In this post it's used as having an adaptive system that uses exposure to stress to provide resistance to future negative events. Stress can lead to depression accompanied by atrophy and loss of neurons in the adult hippocampus in experimental studies. The effect of stress or whether you can become depressed due to stress seem to depend on individual characteristics. One characteristic is gene expression. Is it in your genes? Caspi et al showed that the 5-HTT genotype (serotonin transporter gene) moderates the depressogenic influence of .....read more »

A number of studies have shown cardiovascular benefits of eating flavanol rich cocoa. Cocoa is the important substance of chocolate. Especially dark chocolate can contain high levels of flavanols. The possible underlying mechanisms of these cardioprotective properties of chocolate can be several. The biggest question that remains is about the right dose of dark chocolate. From prior publications suggestion were made about the right dose: an average amount of 6.7 grams of chocolate per day, corresponding to a small square of chocolate twice or three times a week no more than 25 gram, or 2.5 squares of dark chocolate, a day up to .....read more »

Now Dr Shock is a big fan of computer games, this game: Foldit lacks shooters and flames but it's very useful. Guessing how a protein will fold up based on its DNA sequence is often too difficult for even the most advanced computer programs. Now scientists have created Foldit, an online game that lets human players do the work. Read the original research and read more about 'citizen science' in this Nature News feature Related posts:Does Brain Training Help? It’s Not The Video Game It’s The Player That’s The Problem 10 ways to defeat brain drain ..read more »

Very nice and instructive video about mirror neurons, empathy and it's place in human development and civilization. Want to understand this sentence: Empathy is grounded in the acknowledgment of death and the celebration of life watch this very good video. Related posts:Gender Differences in Empathy Were do Mirror Neurons Come From? About Mirror Neurons ..read more »

About 13 to 19% of new mothers experience depression in the first year after birth. Most of them are never identified nor diagnosed. New mothers often read about pregnancy, giving birth and raising their children in popular magazines. It's eminent that adequate information in these magazines about postpartum depression is of importance. A recent study evaluated the information on postpartum depression in these popular magazines in the period from 1998 to 2006. Does the information on postpartum depression in popular lay magazines correspond to scientific knowledge? Their conclusion was Although some of the articles reviewed for this study contained accurate and helpful .....read more »

The new Medlib's Round `carnival is up at EBM and Clinical Support Librarians@UCHC! . Kathleen aka Creaky did a wonderful job compiling this round. The broad topic of this Carnival is about service. Librarians talk a lot among themselves about providing quality information services and library collections for their core users. We are great believers in training our library visitors to recognize quality information sources, showing them what to search, how to search and how to appraise those sources effectively; we also spend considerable time, effort and money to create digital or physical library collections that meet .....read more »

A lot. Medical journals often don't designate which specific types of interests they want to be disclosed. Far less than 50% of medical journals specify a monetary threshold for author disclosure. Only 16% of medical journals include a time period over which the authors should disclose their financial interest, is it the last year, three years or five years? This is often left to their own discretion for the time period when nothing is specified in the conflict of interest policy. This can vary from physician to physician as well as region our country. “authors should report any relationship that would .....read more »

This is my tickler file in a box, a very efficient way to keep organized with Getting Things Done. A Tickler File consists of a series of 43 file folders: 12 monthly and 31 daily folders. Items are filed in a folder corresponding to when the item will need to be handled, thus reminding or "tickling" the user about it. These items might be action reminders, agendas, bills, receipts, reports, letters, or any number of other things. 31 daily files are labeled “1” through “31” and twelve monthly files are labeled with the months of the year. The daily files are .....read more »

As you might be aware some journals enable immediate free online access for a fee to the publisher. This fee can amount to a large sum of money. Other publishers use a hybrid model allowing authors to choose between subscription access and author paid open access. This is an opportunity for pharmaceutical or other biomedical companies to fund authors and researchers to publish their results in open access. Recently a published study in the BMJ looked at publications in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases and Rheumatology during the period of October 2007 until September 2008 for access through subscription .....read more »

Scientia Pro Publica, a blog carnival that celebrates that best science, medicine, and nature writing aimed at the general public is up at Southern Fried Scientist, and written by WhySharksMatter Related posts:Scientia Pro Publica 24 is up Scientia Pro Publica: a call for submissions Scientia Pro Publica 28 is up at Mauka to Makai ..read more »