Elderly people who suffer from depression can take the edge off faster by using a drug called mirtazapine, which appears to work more quickly compared to rival drugs. These results come from a study by researchers at Stanford University Medical Center who compared two drugs in an eight-week trial. Although both drugs treated the depression, mirtazapine began working sooner and eased the patient’s anxiety – a common effect of depression in elderly people.

“There’s a sense that we n

Witnessing violence between parents has the same detrimental effect on teen-age girls as being a victim of abuse themselves, according to a new study by Brown University sociologists: The teen-agers are more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior.

A study of 710 girls ages 14 to 17 who were living in two-parent families found that teen-agers who witnessed domestic violence or were the subject of violence from a parent were at least three times more likely to engage in risky sexual activi

Heat-denatured p24 Antigen Tests Can Cut Cost of HIV Progression Monitoring

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the University of Zurich, Switzerland, have identified a test for monitoring the progression of HIV in the early stages of the disease that is less expensive than current tests used to monitor the progression of HIV. The test, called HIV-1 protein 24 (p24) antigen, predicts disease progression as well as CD4 lymphocyte count and HIV-1 RNA v

Supermassive black holes – the name given to black holes whose mass is more than 1,000,000 times the mass of the sun – can be found at the center of many galaxies. Scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, and several institutions in France have succeeded in tracking a star racing around a dark mass at the center of our galaxy. This achievement offers more support for the widely held view that the dark mass is a supermassive black hole.

Researchers have found that a primitive type of ion channel similar to those found in mammalian nerve cells helps bacteria resist the blast of acid they encounter in the stomach of their hosts.

The discovery suggests a plausible mechanism whereby bacteria can fend off stomach acidity long enough to establish themselves in the intestine. More broadly, said the scientists, the finding represents the first insight into why bacteria have forms of the same ion channels — proteins that control t

A Londoner who is greenhouse gas (GHG) aware could save up to £80,000 over a lifetime by making basic lifestyle changes. Significant reductions in GHG emissions are possible at no net cost to the US economy. These are two of the conclusions made by Dr David Reay of the Institute of Ecology and Resource Management at the University of Edinburgh, in his paper `Costing Climate Change`, to be published in the special, triennial Christmas issue of Philosophical Transactions A*, a learned journal published