News lifestyle 2008-05-27 Andanh.com

Deep brain stimulation eases depression Tue, 27 May 2008 02:04 EDT
It's a new frontier for psychiatric illness: Brain pacemakers that promise to act as antidepressants by changing how patients' nerve circuitry fires.

Scientists already know the power of these devices to block the tremors of Parkinson's disease and related illnesses; more than 40,000 such patients worldwide have the implants.

But psychiatric illnesses are much more complex and the new experiments with so-called deep brain stimulation, or DBS, are in their infancy. Only a few dozen patients with severe depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder so far have been treated in closely monitored studies.

Still, the early results are promising. Dramatic video shows one patient visibly brightening as doctors turn on her brain pacemaker and she said in surprise: "I'm starting to smile." New reports this month show that some worst-case patients, whose depression wasn't relieved by medication, psychotherapy, even controversial shock treatment, are finding lasting relief.

Six of 17 severely depressed patients were in remission a year after undergoing DBS and four more markedly improved, and more than half of 26 obsessive-compulsive patients showed substantial improvement over three years, said studies from a team at the Cleveland Clinic, Brown University, and Belgium's University of Leuven.

Celiac disease a growing problem Mon, 26 May 2008 19:37 EDT

A few months ago, I began to notice more and more .gluten-free. labels in the grocery store. Then, recently, I saw it on a .restaurant menu.

I figured there were people who needed to know such a thing, just like people with particular allergies need to know when foods contain ingredients to which they are sensitive.

But I didn't really have a name for the disease that would require folks to avoid gluten. Now I know it is celiac disease.

According to everything I've read, celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder in the small intestine that is aggravated by gluten, a protein found in wheat, rye, and barley.

Chinese Dir