Health News - Sunday, March 11, 2007
This might help explain why teenagers act like, well, teenagers. Researchers reported on Sunday that a hormone produced by the body in response to stress that normally serves to calm adults and younger children instead increases anxiety in adolescents. They conducted experiments with female mice focusing on the hormone THP that demonstrated this paradoxical effect, and described the brain mechanism that explains it.
If, as the scientists suspect, the same thing happens in people, the phenomenon may help account for the mood swings and anxiety exhibited by many adolescents, they said. "Teenagers don't go around crazy all the time," lead researcher Sheryl Smith, a professor of physiology and pharmacology at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, said in a telephone interview. "But it really is a mood swing where things seem fine and calm, and then the next thing is someone's crying or angry," she added. "And I think that's why people have used the term 'raging hormones.'" Continue reading
A team of UCSB researchers, in collaboration with colleagues from UC Berkeley and StrataGent Life Sciences, of Los Gatos, California, has designed a novel pulsed microjet system engineered to deliver protein drugs into the skin without the pain or bruising that deeper penetration injection systems cause. The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The effort to create needle-free drug delivery systems is driven by a combination of factors, including needle phobia, pain and discomfort, infections, and accidental needle sticks to healthcare providers. Currently, about 12 billion needle injections are performed every year for the delivery of vaccines and protein therapeutics such as insulin, growth hormone and erythropoietin, a red blood cell booster. Needle-free delivery of vaccines has recently been identified as one of the significant emerging challenges in global health. Continue reading