Can Job Strain Increase the Risk of Death? According to a recent pan-European study published in the Lancet, the answer is yes. Pooling 13 studies from 1986-2006, the average increase in heart disease was about 25%. However, in published, individual studies, the rate was twice as high. What Is Job Strain? A feeling of stress […]
The Numbers Fetish (9/24/12)
Are You More Than Your Lab Test Numbers? I’ve heard the story many times: a patient comes into a doctor’s office for a “checkup”. He or she is handed glowing lab reports, told they’re in the peak of health – walks out and drops dead. So our lives are more than the sum of our […]
Are You A Figment of Someone’s Imagination? (9/20/12)
Nothing is Always Something Could I and everything I know be nothing more than lines of computer code? The movie “The Matrix” and the manga and books it spawned enthralled and appalled. Yet the idea of the universe as “mere” artificially created information lies at the base of much human creativity. Mathematical equations describe multiple […]
Simple Ways to Live Longer – the Kungsholmen Study (9/18/12)
Keeping Healthy in Kungsholmen Modifiable lifestyle factors can add six years to men and five years’ to women’s lifespan at age 75. They can even expand survival four years in those aged 85. These are some of the results of an important study from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm published in the British Medical Journal. […]
The Human Genome and You (9/13/12)
Is This the Next Information Revolution? Figuring Out How Humans Work A funny thing happened to the Human Genome Project from the 1990s. At a cost of billions of dollars, human genes would finally be “mapped”. The new knowledge would unlock new, dramatic explanations for why we get sick. The few major “genes” for heart […]