Mental & Emotional Health

Don’t Read This Too Fast, Your Brain Might Cramp Up! - Those whose hands curl into painful seizures when they scribble for too long or too fast could once tell themselves, “I scribbled for too long or too fast,” and let it go at that. Now, for the syndrome-inclined, comes thrilling news: Writer’s cramp, we learn, is associated with its very own brain abnormality. Read on. This could be you.

Literacy Linked to Survival in Medicare Patients - Medicare patients who couldn’t read a physician’s instructions, or who didn’t understand what they read had a higher mortality rate than patients with adequate reading skills. After adjusting for demographics, socioeconomic status, disability, and chronic conditions, patients with inadequate health literacy where 52% more likely to die during an average of 67.8 months of follow-up (P<0.001), according to a study reported in the July 23 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.

Phone Counseling Can Coax Reluctant Alcoholism Patients Into Treatment -
Telephone counseling might be an effective primary care intervention for men who are not seeking treatment for their alcohol dependence or abuse, according to a new study. Men benefited more from the short-term telephone counseling used in the study, which appears in the August issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. Lead researcher Richard Brown, M.D., said that the study could empower time-strapped doctors to persuade reluctant alcoholism patients to seek treatment.

For girls, obesity a roadblock to success - AUSTIN — Obese girls, often suffering from negative self-images as teenagers, are half as likely to attend college as girls who aren’t as overweight, according to a new study at the University of Texas. The same trend does not hold true for obese boys, likely because American mass culture holds adolescent girls to stricter weight standards, the study’s author said.

Report: Man with Almost No Brain Has Led Normal Life - French doctors are amazed that a 44-year-old civil servant with an abnormally small brain has led a normal life with a slightly lower than normal IQ, according to a report on Physorg.com. Doctors said the father of two went to the Hopital de la Timone in Marseille with mild weakness in his left leg. He was given a CT scan and an MRI, which showed that his cerebral cavities or ventricles had massively expanded, according a case history to be published in Saturday’s Lancet.

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