Health and Medicine

People who cope with a life-threatening situation by ignoring their anxiety or diverting their attention away from it may be doing themselves a favor. Such practices may act as a buffer against stress disorders, according to the results of an Israeli study of heart attack patients.

“The findings of this study suggest that a repressive coping style may promote adjustment to traumatic stress, both in the short and longer term,” says lead study author Karni Ginzburg, Ph.D., of the Bob Shapell

Losartan tops beta blocker in patients with ’high top number’ blood pressure

A drug that reduces high blood pressure in people with a form of the disease that’s common later in life also cuts their risk of stroke and death, and does it better than another hypertension drug, a new study finds.

In the Sept. 25 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, an international team of researchers report that patients over age 55 who took a drug called los

An entirely new method for purifying blood has been developed at the Lund Institute of Technology, LTH, in Sweden. The blood is led out in hair-thin channels and is processed with ultrasound. A company in the neighboring research village IDEON is now perfecting the first medical application: a treatment to separate out clotted fat so-called fat embolin blood. But the method is a general one and can be applied to other medical treatments.

Heart surgery can be troubled by certain intellectual

Internet-based therapy can help sufferers cope with tinnitus, the medical term for the ringing sound in the ears that is experienced by 10 to 14 percent of adults, suggest the results of a Swedish study.

No cure for tinnitus exists, although some experts recommend the use of hearing aids and white-noise generators to help minimize the ringing, and sometimes hissing, chirping or clicking sounds associated with tinnitus. Symptoms are mild for most tinnitus patients, but the one-third of patien

Although stressful life events may affect the health of both men and women, men are more vulnerable, according to a recent study of nearly 3,000 people in Finland.
The study, published in the September/October issue of Psychosomatic Medicine, looked at whether psychological problems (such as anxiety and mental distress) and health-risk behaviors (such as smoking and alcohol use) underpin the health effects of life events.

Four major life events were studied: the death or serious illnes

Osteoporosis, which means porous bones, is a disease that thins and weakens bones, making them fragile and more likely to break. The vast majority of individuals affected by osteoporosis are women. Although the disease can strike at any age, the greatest risk for fractures from osteoporosis occurs after menopause. This is because women’s bodies produce less oestrogen after menopause, and oestrogen plays an important role in helping to prevent bone loss. As the EU population continues to age, the occ