Medicine

To all the men (and women) I've ever heard complain about the female libido, it's time to take the batteries out of your high-tech remote-control sex toys.

Flibanserin, a drug originally designed to fight depression, turns out to be an ineffective antidepressant but a highly effective libido booster in women who report low sex drives, according to results pooled from three separate clinical trials. (It's long been thought that antidepressants suppress sex drives, so it makes its own strange sense that a poor antidepressant might not have the same suppressing effect.)

"It's essentially a Viagra-like … Read more

Google on Tuesday announced a new Maps feature to help make it easier to determine the availability of flu vaccine.

According to the company, users can now visit Google's new flu shot Google Maps page to find out if there is any vaccine available in their area. It partnered with "the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services, their Flu.gov collaborators, and the American Lung Association on the flu shot finder," the company wrote in a blog post.

On the flu shot page, users can input their Zip code or town and find all the … Read more

My dad used to say technology is advancing so quickly that, by the time a product reaches market, it is already obsolete. Moreover, if you wait just a little longer, you can pay a lot less. The sequencing of the human genome takes the advancement of technology, and its fast reduction in cost, to an entirely new level.

The Human Genome Project, which officially completed the mind-boggling achievement of sequencing Jim Watson's genome in 2006, carried the equally mind-boggling price tag of $3 billion. If I may be so bold as to use that word thrice in one paragraph, … Read more

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the H1N1 virus is widespread in 48 states. Last weekend, the president declared a national emergency. A new vaccine is supposed to save the country from the worst-case scenario. But that vaccine isn't coming as fast as expected and there's lots of skepticism. Should you get it? Can you get it? Is it safe?

To find some answers, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley went inside the federal government's $3 billion H1N1 vaccine project. This is the first time the public has seen where and how the vaccine … Read more

Physicist Tanmoy Bhattacharya and HIV researcher Bette Korber are creating an evolutionary genetic family tree based on samples taken by the international Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology consortium, in order to compare the evolutionary history of more than 10,000 sequences from more than 400 people with HIV.

If they can identify common features of the virus as it is transmitted, researchers might be able to create a vaccine that recognizes the virus before the body's immune system reacts to--and mutates--it.

What already sounds like a lot of data, however, could balloon further, hence the importance of Roadrunner. &… Read more

Depression researcher Eva Redei presented research at the Neuroscience 2009 conference in Chicago this week that calls into question two tenets of depression science: that stressful life events are a major cause of depression, and that an imbalance in neurotransmitters triggers depressive symptoms.

For decades, drugs have been developed around these beliefs, leading to antidepressant medications that are actually designed to relieve stress. But stress-related genes have almost no overlap with depression-related genes, reports Redei, the David Lawrence Stein professor of psychiatry at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. (Full disclosure: Northwestern is my alma mater.)

That … Read more

Cocaine addiction is notoriously tough to beat. Engineers at the University of Missouri in Columbia, using computational models, think they now better understand why.

"Our model showed that the glutamate transporters, a protein present around these connections that remove glutamate, are almost 40 percent less functional after chronic cocaine usage," says Ashwin Mohan, a doctoral student in the department of electrical and computer engineering. "This damage is long lasting, and there is no way for the brain to regulate itself. Thus, the brain structure in this context actually changes in cocaine addicts."

The team found that … Read more

For some women, menstrual cramps can get so bad that they lead to nausea, vomiting, and an inability to do much of anything for days. Having to endure this on a monthly basis is a pain in the, well, gut.

Good news, then, for the unlucky among us. New research to be presented at the 2009 American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) annual meeting in November reveals that a new device to treat this pain is safe and effective--not to mention most likely affordable, since the device is essentially a glorified tampon.

The study was admittedly small: 18 participants, 18 … Read more

There are many medical conditions that involve medication with intermittent doses on an as-needed basis, and often, that medication cannot be taken orally.

Scientists have long struggled with how best to deliver medication under these circumstances, where the delivery system might meet three key needs: intermittent dosing, with extreme precision, over the long term.

Research led by Daniel Kohane at Children's Hospital Boston may have hit on an effective new approach: a tiny, implantable device that releases the medication through a membrane whose porousness responds to the switching on or off of a magnetic field.

The membrane is embedded … Read more