In response to today’s YouGov poll reporting a lack of public awareness about Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, Dr Lorna Layward, Research Manager of the Help the Aged biomedical Research into Ageing programme, says: ‘The findings from today’s YouGov poll give cause for concern, highlighting that the public has little awareness of dementia, and that most people assume memory loss is a natural part of ageing. People should not assume that mental decline is inevitable. [click link for full article]

Physicians apparently learn to “shut off” the portion of their brain that helps them appreciate the pain their patients experience while treating them and instead activate a portion of the brain connected with controlling emotions, according to new research using brain scans at the University of Chicago. [click link for full article]

People who have the common chronic pain condition fibromyalgia often report that they don’t respond to the types of medication that relieve other people’s pain. New research from the University of Michigan Health System helps to explain why that might be: Patients with fibromyalgia were found to have reduced binding ability of a type of receptor in the brain that is the target of opioid painkiller drugs such as morphine. [click link for full article]

Highly pathogenic H7N3 avian influenza has been detected in a commercial poultry operation in Saskatchewan, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) announced recently. This virus is not the same as the strain circulating in Asia, Africa and Europe, which has been associated with human illness. H7N3 is not normally associated with serious human illness. Avian influenza viruses do not pose risks to food safety when poultry and poultry products are properly handled and cooked. [click link for full article]

The more that is invested in mental health services for young adults and teenagers - tackling the problem at an early stage, the better it is for a country’s economy and mental health in general, according to an article in the Medical Journal of Australia. [click link for full article]

Rochelle Schwartz-Bloom, a Duke University pharmacology professor who left the lab bench to focus on science education, has developed a tactic for keeping students hands in the air at the end of class.”What does get students’ attention?” she and her co-authors asked in their new research article on fostering science literacy. “Sex, drugs and rock-n-roll, of course.”Schwartz-Bloom’s team describe in the Sept. [click link for full article]

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have found that more than 50 percent of the current asthma cases in the country can be attributed to allergies, with approximately 30 percent of those cases attributed to cat allergy.”It has long been debated whether people who develop asthma have a genetic propensity to develop allergies, or atopy,” said Darryl C. Zeldin, M.D., a senior investigator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). [click link for full article]

New clinical data showed an experimental drug called pertuzumab prolonged the survival time for women with recurrent ovarian cancer, a University of Alabama at Birmingham doctor said recently.The data was presented during a scientific session of the 14th European Cancer Conference held in Barcelona, Spain. The session’s main speaker was Sharmila Makhija, M.D., an associate professor in UAB’s Division of Gynecologic Oncology. [click link for full article]

The Football Association together with England Footballer, Michael Carrick, have teamed up with the British Heart Foundation (BHF) for World Heart Day 2007 with a common goal: to get the nation to up the tempo of their heart. [click link for full article]

People with heart disease should take special precautions before undergoing any kind of surgery, even noncardiac surgery, to reduce their risk of a cardiac event, according to new joint guidelines from the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association. [click link for full article]