Several years ago, in 2013, the American Psychiatric Association made a controversial change to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
For years, the DSM’s criteria for diagnosing depression had included what was known as the “bereavement exclusion.” In a nutshell, the exclusion stated that people who had…
Thirty thousand nucleotide bases.
Just 30,000 letters of the alphabet of life are enough to create the entire SARS-CoV-2 virus, provided those letters find the machinery present in all of our cells to do the hard work. Those letters get copied, and copied, and copied with each new infection, in…
By now, you may have heard the alarming news out of South Africa: Scientists there have tracked a new variant of Covid-19, and it has way more mutations than Delta.
Countries are halting flights from South Africa; the variant has also been found in Botswana, Belgium, Hong Kong and Israel…
Gertrude Stein once wrote that coffee “is a lot more than just a drink; it’s something happening.”
The more experts study coffee, the more that “something” seems to be good for us.
Just this month, a large study in the journal PLOS Medicine found evidence that those who drink 1…
Some food for thought as you laze about during the holidays: As you get older, you might naturally think you should take it easy, be less physically active to protect your precious body. …
There’s a disturbingly long list of ways in which the brain can go wrong. I might name for you a sample of mental health conditions: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, anxiety disorders of all kinds, obsessive compulsive disorder. Even just the list of movement disorders is miserably long: Parkinson’s disease…
When healthy young adults were pitted against healthy older people in mindless tasks for a recent research project, a surprising thing happened. The older folks scored lower on cognitive tests, yet each group ultimately performed the same on the boring task at hand. How? …
In the 1960s and 1970s, people smoked, drank a LOT of cocktails, and ate some really dodgy fat-filled foods averaging 2,600 calories per day. But almost no one was obese. …
It’s a mystery that has confounded nutrition scientists.
People who have high levels of cholesterol in their blood — especially LDL cholesterol, a.k.a. the “bad” kind — are at elevated risk for cardiovascular disease.
Meanwhile, foods high in saturated fatty acids — including eggs, full-fat dairy products, and red meat…
For the nth time that day, I was being told to work on myself. “You can’t heal if you’re hiding from yourself,” the post said. I had only recently started following the account, but already I’d gotten tired of it.
The past few years have seen a steady and growing…
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