In the News

Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is an anxiety disorder in which the experience of a traumatic event has long-term, serious consequences. People with PTSD, who number 3.6% of all American adults, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, experience symptoms including flashbacks, nightmares and hyper-vigilance as a result of their traumatic experiences, sometimes many decades after the trauma itself happened. Neurologists explain to Bustle that PTSD actually has a complicated relationship with the brain — and that while there are clearly many ways in which PTSD changes neurobiology, there are a huge amount of unanswered questions about what PTSD looks like in the brain and why.

PTSD isn’t just a case of three independent brain areas operating poorly. The pre-frontal cortex, a part of the frontal lobe, and the hippocampus are part of a system that helps us solidify our memories. “It’s the system that binds together multiple components of the memory,” Professor Israel Liberzon, head of Texas A&M’s department of psychiatry and a psychiatrist who’s done extensive research on PTSD, tells Bustle. “These mechanisms are dependent on the integrity and appropriate function of hippocampus and prefrontal cortex and appropriate communications between the two.” In people with PTSD, he says, researchers can track changes all through the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, all the way down to their molecules.

I easily remember laughing at Wile E. Coyote trying to catch the Road Runner while watching Saturday morning cartoons as a child. I can still see the Coyote walking slowly through the sweltering desert, sun high in the sky, sweating, tongue-hanging-out, about to collapse from heat, hunger and thirst. Then, BEEP! BEEP! the Road Runner would fly past, and the chase was on with a perfectly revived Coyote.

If only fixing heat stroke were that quick and easy.

Chronic kidney disease—which affects about 14 percent of Americans—kills more people each year than breast or prostate cancer. Patients often develop metabolic acidosis, where there is too much acid in bodily fluids because diseased kidneys are less able to remove it.

Clinicians currently treat the condition in two ways. Most commonly, they prescribe drugs like sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) that are absorbed from the gut into the blood to neutralize accumulated acid. Alternatively, clinicians prescribe a diet that limits acid accumulation in body fluids.

The new drug candidate, called veverimer, offers a way to remove accumulated acid from the gut without entering the bloodstream to treat metabolic acidosis safely and effectively, according to a phase III clinical trial detailed in The Lancet.

Many of us are familiar with the concept of introverts and extroverts. Some people, according to this theory of personality, recharge socially in environments with a lot of people, while others expend a lot of energy in social situations and need to recharge their batteries on their own. The former are extroverts, the latter introverts— but the boundaries between these two categories are pretty fluid, and experts tell Bustle that there’s some evidence that even the most dyed-in-the-wool introverts can adopt some extrovert tendencies. However, they say, a complete category shift — changing from an introvert who loves staying at home with the cat to an extrovert who finds time at parties invigorating — is virtually impossible, particularly as we get older.

The concept of introversion and extroversion isn’t actually that old. “It was popularized around the 1920s and 1930s by the writings of Carl Jung and later utilized in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator,” Dr. Trey Armstrong, PhD, of the Texas A&M Department of Psychiatry, tells Bustle. You’ve likely taken Myers-Briggs personality tests online. These days, we know a bit more about introvert and extrovert tendencies — including the fact that introversion isn’t necessarily shyness, and that extroverts aren’t necessarily socially invincible.

Dental hygiene has come a long way since the days of wine-soaked toothpicks and the urine mouthwash once thought to disinfect mouths and whiten teeth.

Some of the earliest tooth-cleaning artifacts archaeologists have found are ancient toothpicks, dental tools and written tooth care descriptions dating back more than 2,500 years. Famous Greek doctor Hippocrates was one of the first to recommend cleaning teeth with what was basically a dry toothpaste, called a dentifrice powder.

Ancient Chinese and Egyptian texts advised cleaning teeth and removing decay to help maintain health. Some of the early techniques in these cultures included chewing on bark or sticks with frayed ends, feathers, fish bones and porcupine quills. They used materials like silver, jade and gold to repair or decorate their teeth.

Nowadays, there are dozens of kinds of tools and potions to help keep your mouth healthy. As a professor of dental hygiene, I believe it’s most important to clean your mouth daily, no matter how you choose to do so.