How to Avoid the Most Common Medical Mistakes | Newsweek Health

MY TURN
Batting for the Cure
Michael Goldsmith 11/1/2008 12:00:00 AM
I received my death sentence in September 2006 when doctors told me I had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a progressively paralyzing neuromuscular disorder. There is no cure. Commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease after the Yankee Hall of Famer who died of it, ALS is so uncommon that medical researchers consider it an "orphan" illness—so few people have it that pharmaceutical companies lack financial incentive to invest in finding a cure.
HEALTH FOR LIFE M.D.
How to Help Anxious Minds
9/14/2008 12:00:00 AM
The brain is the source of thought and emotion. When things go wrong, the results are devastating. Here, a Harvard psychiatrist answers your questions.
HEALTH FOR LIFE
Mysteries of Memory
Jeneen Interlandi 9/13/2008 12:00:00 AM
Think about yesterday's lunch and a variety of details may leap to mind, each of them employing a different section of your brain. The olfactory system calls up what the meal smelled like, while the visual cortex retrieves images of the restaurant you ate in and the temporal lobe recalls the sound of your waitress's voice. Scientists have long suspected that every recollection—from the mundane to the momentous—ignites a distinct pattern of neurons. But for decades, they have struggled to understand how the brain assembles such disparate elements into a single coherent memory, one that can be retrieved intact, spontaneously or on demand, hours, days or even years after the fact. "It's not like a tape recorder where you store it all on one cassette," says Lynn Nadel, a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "There's more than one PLAY button to hit."
HEALTH FOR LIFE
My Mother’s Case of ‘Pleasant Dementia’
Sara Davidson 9/13/2008 12:00:00 AM
My mother, Alice, had always been strong-willed, opinionated and demanding, a fiery real-estate agent who was a life master in bridge and a maven of musical theater. She'd told my sister, Terry, and me never to put her in a care facility. But at 93, she had advancing dementia and was living in L.A., 1,200 miles from my home in Colorado and twice that distance from Terry's in Hawaii. For years we'd put off moving her, fearing she would yell and berate us for disobeying her wishes. I trembled when the day finally came to transport Alice to a home for the memory-impaired. What I hadn't reckoned on was the radical personality change that accompanied her dementia—a condition, I learned later, known as "pleasantly demented."
A Gulf War Link to Lou Gehrig's Disease?
Barbara Kantrowitz 11/10/2006 12:00:00 AM
SCIENCE
Born Happy?
Sharon Begley
The latest offering in ""the gene for...'' sweepstakes is ""happy DNA.'' In the current issue of the journal Nature Genetics, molecular biologist Dean Hamer of the National Cancer Institute reviews studies suggesting that one's baseline level of happiness--the very small range within which one's happiness level fluctuates--is ""largely a matter of heredity.'' Identical twins (who have exactly the same genes) are alike in their happiness level 44 percent of the time, according to studies at the University of Minnesota. Fraternal twins, who are no more genetically similar than other siblings, are alike only 8 percent of the time. ""These data show that the broad heritability of well being is 40 to 50%,'' Hamer writes. Moreover, people's happiness levels seem extraordinarily stable through the years (NEWSWEEK, July 29); they are affected neither by winning a lottery nor by becoming paralyzed. Studies of twins suggest that 80 percent of this stable component of happiness is heritable. ""How you feel right now is about equally genetic and circumstantial,'' says Hamer. ""But how you'll feel on average over the next ten years is fully 80% because of your genes.'' Though no one has identified genes wearing teeny smiles, Hamer suggests that a good place to look would be the DNA involved in the brain's ""pleasure chemical,'' dopamine. This molecule is released in the brain after good food or good sex, for instance. ""I don't think there will be a gene for happiness,'' Hamer says, ""but rather many genes, each explaining maybe 1 percent'' of someone's happiness level.