A report published in the BMJ suggests it might be time to re-think the long-held belief that you should always finish your complete course of prescribed antibiotic treatment. The thinking has been that stopping the medication early—when you’re feeling better, for example—may undertreat the infection and fuel antibiotic resistance. But that may not be the case.

According to a team of researchers in England, using antibiotics for longer than necessary increases the risk of resistance, and reducing the use of antibiotics is necessary to combat this alarming problem. In some cases, a short course of antibiotics—three to five days—works just as well as a longer course to treat many types of infection.

But the subject remains controversial within the medical community. Many health care providers say it’s far too early to change prescription antibiotic directions they give their patients. For now, if your health care provider prescribes antibiotics, it’s important to carefully follow the instructions for taking the medication.

Sourced from: BBC

Young people who try electronic cigarettes—e-cigarettes or e-cigs—are more likely to begin smoking cigarettes than non-smokers who don’t experiment with e-cigarettes, suggests a study led by researchers at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

Their study involved students 11 and 18 years old at four Scottish schools in 2015. Among the 2,125 students who had never smoked, 183 reported they had tried e-cigarettes and 1,942 had not. When researchers followed up with study participants in 2016, 74 of those who had tried an e-cigarette—40.4 percent—reported smoking a cigarette within the next year. Among students who had not tried an e-cig, 249—only 12.8 percent—reported smoking a cigarette.

The study, which was published in the British Medical Journal’s Tobacco Control journal, concludes that using e-cigarettes raised smoking risk in young non-smokers. Results of this new study are similar to those of eight earlier studies conducted in the United States.

Sourced from: News Medical

The next time you are feeling stressed, instead of asking yourself, “Why am I getting so upset?” try, “Why is [insert your name here] getting so upset?” or “What is bothering [insert your name here]?” Referring to yourself in the third person during times of stress can help you control your emotions, say psychology researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) and the University of Michigan (UM), reporting in Scientific Reports.

The study involved two separate experiments that reinforced the same conclusion: Referring to yourself in the third person allows you to think about yourself in a way similar to the way you think about others. There’s even evidence for this in the brain, according to Jason Moser, MSU associate professor of psychology.

In one experiment, participants viewed images designed to be either neutral or disturbing, and reacted to them in the first person and then in the third person while researchers monitored their brain activity using electroencephalography. Emotional brain activity decreased within one second when the participants referred to themselves in the third person while viewing upsetting images. In the second experiment, participants thought about past painful experiences in the first person and then in the third person while researchers monitored brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This study also showed less emotional brain activity when participants referred to the painful experiences in the third person.

Sourced from: Michigan State University