Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/ADHD

  • UneXXpected Science: Does ADHD have benefits in certain environments?

    …ature’s evolutionary terms. Modern society is just that—modern. This way of life has only been around for, at most, a few thousand years, which can be a blink of an eye for processes of natural selection. Dial back time about 10,000 years or 20,000 years, and you’ll be hard pressed to find any humans living in an environment anything remotely like a cubicle. Natural selection results from the interaction of genes and environment, and the ̶…

    Authored by on April 16, 2012

  • Biology Explainer: The big 4 building blocks of life–carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and nucleic acids

    …e X Extra: A triglyceride can have up to three different fatty acids attached to it. Canola oil, for example, consists primarily of oleic acid, linoleic acid, and linolenic acid, all of which are unsaturated fatty acids with 18 carbons in their chains. Why do we take in fat anyway? Fat is a necessary nutrient for everything from our nervous systems to our circulatory health. It also, under appropriate conditions, is an excellent way to store up…

    Authored by on June 8, 2012

  • After Newtown missteps, journalists get guidelines

    Protip: Don’t diagnose based on speculation. by Jessica Wright                Attention journalists: If you’ve been calling people “nuts” or “deranged” in your stories, the Associated Press is recommending that it’s time you stopped. This guideline — along with the common-sense assertion that writers shouldn’t diagnose individuals with a mental illness based entirely on speculation — is part of a new recommendation added to the AP styleboo…

    Authored by on March 27, 2013

  • I Am Mental Illness: a quarter-century chronicle

    Hit hard from an early age with no safety net in sight by AM [Trigger warnings: references to/descriptions of suicide attempts, self-harm, sexual assault, addictive behaviors] In my late teens, I found a journal entry I’d written at 11, “Sometimes I’ll be happy, then BOOM 1 bad thing + I wanna scream ARGH!!” [sic] I don’t remember writing it or when exactly I began to develop my mental illnesses but they started young and take up much of m…

    Authored by on February 22, 2013

  • The path from science to alarmism: How science gets twisted before it gets to you

    …ajority of what they’re looking at has never been demonstrated to have any kind of relationship to autism, not even a correlation. Problem #1 is the unnecessary autism name-checking. Problem #2 is much worse, it’s the list of 10 chemicals they suggest for future study. The list itself isn’t a bad idea, I guess. They’re suggesting places for potential research, which certainly needs to be done. But it does reek a little bit of the kind of thing ma…

    Authored by on May 4, 2012

  • Real science vs. fake science: How can you tell them apart?

    …211;and answer–before shelling out the benjamins for anything, whether it’s anti-aging cream, a diet fad program, books purporting to tell you secrets your doctor won’t, or jewelry items containing magnets: 1. What is the source? Is the person or entity making the claims someone with genuine expertise in what they’re claiming? Are they hawking on behalf of someone else? Are they part of a distributed marketing scam? Do th…

    Authored by on December 11, 2011

  • Friday Roundup: Land-walking octopus, he’s having a baby, defining veggies, & lots for the ladies

    …surrounding it for extra cushioning. But the human brain was never meant to endure years of the Newtonian physical pounding that comes with playing football. Now, researchers are beginning a brain study to test the brains of 100 former National Football League players to see what harm has been done and how to identify it early. Watch the video below. Imagine the brains inside those skulls. Recall that for every action, there is an equal and oppo…

    Authored by on November 25, 2011

  • Depressing genes

    …ch experience — yet it was obvious he didn’t have the knack for it. This student’s dogged pursuit of a mental health career made me wonder what kind of emotional turmoil he experienced which would make him think, at age 19, that psychiatry was the only vocation worth working towards. Then there were the two graduate students who both worked incredibly hard and were both prone to obsess about their experiments. Each burned off stress in quit…

    Authored by on May 17, 2013

  • Is the bar high enough for screening breast ultrasounds for breast cancer?

    …nt movement and legislation to inform women that they have dense breasts. Merits and pitfalls of device approval The approval of breast ultrasound hinges on a study of 200 women with dense breast evaluated retrospectively at 13 sites across the United States with mammography and ultrasound. The study showed a statistically significant increase in breast cancer detection when ultrasound was used with mammography. Approval of a device of this nat…

    Authored by on September 21, 2012

  • Autism and the DSM-5

    …questions in the context of these criteria. I’ve expanded on a couple of these reports at length elsewhere, as have others with an interest in the subject. The short version is that studies overall indicate that at the least, 10% of people who would currently have an autism diagnosis under the DSM-IV-TR criteria would lose that diagnosis under the DSM-5, and some studies go as high as 55% in their estimates. Even more troubling? The committee’s s…

    Authored by on April 23, 2013

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