DailyDirt: Medical Research Discoveries

Bleeding Edge

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Mon, Mar 7th 2011 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Unfortunately, there are a lot of ailments that have no real cures, but medical science is making slow progress to develop various treatments for all kinds of disorders. Some treatments are discovered by accident, and others are skillfully crafted based on previous research. In either case, it's nice to know there are dedicated folks trying to solve these problems. Here are just a few interesting medical discoveries.

UCLA researchers accidentally found a treatment for re-growing hair on mice. Blocking a stress hormone seemed to work for mice, but it might be a bit harder to justify a stress-blocking drug for re-growing human hair. However, meditation gurus will likely jump on this news pretty soon. [url]
German surgeons are working on a way that might allow damaged nerve fibers to be re-grown over 6cm long distances. It's not a treatment ready for human testing yet, but it sounds cool. [url]
Measuring brain waves could predict how well you'll sleep. This study is only based on 13 healthy people sleeping, so I'll take "alpha waves" as a sleep predictor with a pretty large grain of salt. [url]
Maybe if we monitor pig farms more closely, we'll learn more about how flu viruses spread. Too bad pigs don't use Google... Also, the "Google Flu" project is really missing out on some critical data. [url]
To discover more interesting health-related stuff, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: balding treatment, brain waves, pig flu, sleep study

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Pixelation, 7 Mar 2011 @ 5:50pm

"but it might be a bit harder to justify a stress-blocking drug for re-growing human hair"

What a terrible side affect!

Let's see, stressed and bald or hairy and calm?
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- Michael Ho (profile), 7 Mar 2011 @ 6:02pm
  
  Re: calm and hairy...
  Pixelation,
  
  Well... I wonder if drugs meant for treating psychological disorders have exhibited this side effect at all...? That would be interesting.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Pixelation, 7 Mar 2011 @ 9:32pm

"Well... I wonder if drugs meant for treating psychological disorders have exhibited this side effect at all...? That would be interesting."

Heart medications have, why not psychological medicines?

Here is an interesting read. If correct, it's pretty cool...
http://tahomaclinicblog.com/lithium-the-misunderstood-mineral-part-1/
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Colin (profile), 8 Mar 2011 @ 10:06am

Hair
I'm getting really tired of shaving my head every couple of days. Couldn't researchers put a bit of effort into figuring out how to stop hair growth?
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- Michael Ho (profile), 8 Mar 2011 @ 10:37am
  
  Re: Hair
  Colin,
  
  That's kind of a solved problem...
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_hair_removal
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