Sunday, February 13, 2011

Spicy new drug helps post-stroke regeneration

Currently, the only pharmaceutical treatment prescribed after a stroke is a "clot-buster" molecule that, well... bust clots.  While this ensures the return of a good blood flow and prevents further damage, it does nothing to alleviate the damage that's already done.
This may eventually change as researcher from Cedars-Sinai Med Center are presenting a new compund - CNB-001, which does just that.
The kicker?  This new drug is an hybrid derivative from curcumin, a common spice found in dozens of Indian and Middle-Eastern recipe.
Hmmmm... curry.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Turns out more testosterone gets in the way of empathy

The latest from Cambridge and Ulrecht researchers: dosing a girl with a shot of testosterone in the tongue will make her less able to "read minds" (deduce a person's emotions and thinking based on their facial expression, which is a good part of empathy).
This is especially interesting considering that a leading hypothesis to explain autism (marked by mostly absent empathy) is linked to unbalance of pre-natal exposure to androgen, like testosterone.

Then again, maybe the subjects in the study just got a lower score because the testosterone made them stop caring about others' emotions and just want to smash their faces in instead.