Month: January 2022

You can feel the pressure of humanity wanting everything to be "normal" again, so much so that calls for a "new normal"—one in which we learn to "live with COVID"—have begun. But what does this new normal look like exactly? How can we live with a disease that takes away life? Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to the President and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was asked what a new normal looks like, this morning at the World Economic Forum conference, during the "COVID-19: What's Next?" panel. Read on—and to ensure your health and the health of others, don't miss these Sure Signs You've Already Had COVID. Shutterstock"It is very difficult to predict what a new normal is going to be until we get our...

Nearly a month after Sheba Medical Center launched a landmark study to test the efficacy of a fourth COVID shot, the hospital said Monday that this fourth booster was only partially effective in protecting against the Omicron strain. “The vaccine, which was very effective against the previous strains, is less effective against the Omicron strain,” Prof. Gili Regev-Yochay, a lead researcher in the experiment said. “We see an increase in antibodies, higher than after the third dose,” Regev-Yochay said. “However, we see many infected with Omicron who received the fourth dose. Granted, a bit less than in the control group, but still a lot of infections,” she added. “The bottom line is that the vaccine is excellent against the Alpha and Delta [variants], for Omicron it’s no...

The human brain pays attention to unfamiliar voices during sleep to stay alert to potential threats, a new study reveals.  Researchers in Austria measured the brain activity of sleeping adults in response to familiar and unfamiliar voices.  Hearing unfamiliar voices when asleep caused the human brain to 'tune in' during non-rapid eye movement sleep (NREM), the first stage of sleep. However, researchers didn't see the effect during REM, the deepest stage of sleep, likely due to micro-structure changes in the brain, they say.  Even though our eyes are shut off from what's around us, the brain continues to monitor the environment as we sleep, balancing the need to protect sleep with the need to wake up.  One way the it accomplishes this is by selectively responding to unfamiliar voices over ...

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In frontotemporal dementia, portions of the brain that lie behind the forehead and ears shrink, resulting in dramatic personality changes, socially inappropriate or impulsive behavior and emotional indifference. Movement and memory problems typically develop later in the course of the disease. According to the Mayo Clinic, frontotemporal dementia often begins between the ages of 40 and 65 and may be misdiagnosed as a psychiatric problem. Lewy body disease is another cause of dementia in younger adults. It is associated with abnormal deposits of a protein called alpha-synuclein in the brain that affects brain chemistry and leads to behavioral, thought and movement problems. Most of the symptoms are similar to those seen in other dementias, and additional symptoms like hallucinations may re...