Cutting post surgical infection rate:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130613092016.htm

Three in ten people in the U.S. unwittingly carry staph in their noses, where they reside benignly as the alpha bacterium in a warm, moist olfactory world. While harmless in the nose, staph can wreak major havoc if introduced within the body, such as a wound healing from surgery. In fact, the researchers found that 78 percent to 85 percent of surgical-site infections involving staph come from the patients' own bacteria. In those cases, the infecting agents were traced to bacteria in the patients' noses by comparing the DNA profile of the bacteria at the surgical site with those in the patients' noses. Most likely, people touched their noses and then touched the wound, freeing the bacteria to roam.

In heart surgeries and knee and joint-replacement procedures, up to 85 percent of staph infections after surgery come from patients' own bacteria… a team of researchers led by the University of Iowa is recommending guidelines that will cut the infection rate by 71 percent for staph bacteria and 59 percent for a broader class of infectious agents known as gram-positive bacteria

the researchers recommend three steps to reduce post-surgical staph infections:

• Swab patients' noses for two strains of staph (MRSA and MSSA) before surgery

• For the 30 percent of patients who have staph naturally in their noses, apply an anti-bacterial nose ointment in the days before surgery

• At surgery, give an antibiotic specifically for MRSA to patients who have the MRSA strain in their noses; for all others, give a more general antibiotic

"We now know we can target staph where it exists naturally in some patients, which is in the nose," she says. "That's the bull's-eye , and we can wipe it out. What we are recommending is a really simple, cheap solution to a big problem."

Those post-surgery staph infections mean pain, personal and financial, with two studies estimating treatment to cost between 40,000 and $100,000, most of it due to follow-up surgeries.

Despite the risks and repercussions, the team found that 47 percent of hospitals reported in a survey that they don't use the nose ointment for staph carriers.

As if you needed more reasons to play video games:

Video gamers appear to process more visual information faster:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130611161943.htm
Earlier research by others has found that gamers are quicker at responding to visual stimuli and can track more items than non-gamers. When playing a game, especially one of the "first-person shooters," a gamer makes "probabilistic inferences" about what he's seeing -- good guy or bad guy, moving left or moving right -- as rapidly as he can.

Appelbaum said that with time and experience, the gamer apparently gets better at doing this. "They need less information to arrive at a probabilistic conclusion, and they do it faster."
Both groups experienced a rapid decay in memory of what the letters had been, but the gamers outperformed the non-gamers at every time interval.

The visual system sifts information out from what the eyes are seeing, and data that isn't used decays quite rapidly, Appelbaum said. Gamers discard the unused stuff just about as fast as everyone else, but they appear to be starting with more information to begin with.

Looking at these results, Applebaum said, it appears that prolonged memory retention isn't the reason. But the other two factors might both be in play -- it is possible that the gamers see more immediately, and they are better able make better correct decisions from the information they have available.


Video gamers have faster reaction times and hand eye coordination which may explain their better surgical skills:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070220012341.htm
"Training curricula that include video games may help thin the technical interface between surgeons and screen-mediated applications, such as laparoscopic surgery," the authors conclude. "Video games may be a practical teaching tool to help train surgeons."


Video games may improve your memory:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130418094751.htm
In a study published in the journal Psychological Research, Dr. Lorenza Colzato and her fellow researchers compared, on a task related to working memory, people who played at least five hours weekly with people who never played video games...The researchers found that gamers outperformed non-gamers. They suggest that video game experience trains your brain to become more flexible in the updating and monitoring of new information enhancing the memory capacity of the gamers.

Video games will make you immortal....oh wait, no sorry, they will make you slow mental decay. Which means, compared to your old coger friends, you will SEEM immortal...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130501192918.htm
elderly people who played just ten hours of a game priming their mental processing speed and skills delayed declines by as many as seven years in a range of cognitive skills.

Studies show loss of executive function occurs as people reach middle age; other studies say our cognitive decline begins as soon as 28 years of age. Either way, our mental capacities do diminish, and medical and public health experts are keen to understand why in an effort to stem the inexorable tide as much as possible.

The groups that played the game at least 10 hours, either at home or in a lab at the university, gained at least three years of cognitive improvement when tested after one year, according to a formula developed by the researchers. A group that got four additional hours of training with the game did even better, improving their cognitive abilities by four years, according to the study.
"We not only prevented the decline; we actually sped them up," Wolinsky says.

Mind you, the game they played seemed bat-shit boring:
a video game called "Road Tour." Briefly, the game revolves around identifying a type of vehicle (displayed fleetingly on a license plate) and then reidentifying the vehicle type and matching it with a road sign displayed from a circular array of possibilities, all but one of them false icons. The player must succeed at least three out of every four tries to advance to the next level, which speeds up the vehicle identification and adds more distractions, up to 47 in all.

A bit of OCD

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130604093830.htm

Dogs (Doberman pinschers) and humans affected by OCD have similar brain abnormalities – namely: “MRI brain images of eight Dobermans with CCD to the control group, Ogata found that the CCD group had higher total brain and gray matter volumes, lower gray matter densities in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and right anterior insula, and higher fractional anisotropy in the splenium of the corpus callosum (the degree of which correlated with the severity of the behavioral traits). These findings are consistent with those reported in humans with OCD.”

“The causes of OCD, which affects about 2 percent of the population, are not well understood and the disorder often goes untreated or undiagnosed for decades. People with OCD often exhibit repetitive behaviors or persistent thoughts that are time consuming and interfere with daily routines. Dogs with CCD engage in repetitious and destructive behaviors such as flank- and blanket-sucking, tail chasing, and chewing. However, both OCD and CCD often respond to similar treatments.”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130603193102.htm

Surgery effective for nearly 50% of treatment resistant OCD:

Standard treatments for the disorder are antidepressant medication and/or psychotherapeutic help such as cognitive behavioural therapy, but other studies have shown that such treatment does not help relieve symptoms for between 20-30% of patients…Nineteen patients were studied who had a severe form of OCD that had not responded to drugs or psychotherapeutic treatment. All of these patients underwent psychosurgery in the form of bilateral capsulotomy between 1997 and 2009.

Their results showed that 36.8% of the patients responded fully to the procedure and 10.5% were considered partial responders, meaning that almost half of the patients (47.3%) responded to the surgery.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130610152002.htm

OCD linked to obesity in mice genome:

“His mouse model of compulsivity lacks a brain protein called SAPAP3. These mice groom themselves excessively to the point of lesioning their skin, and their compulsive behavior can be effectively treated by fluoxetine, a drug that is commonly used to treat OCD in people… a mouse that genetically mimics an inherited form of human obesity. This mouse lacks a brain protein known a MC4R. Mutations in the MC4R gene are the most common single-gene cause of morbid obesity and over-eating in people… An old study hinted that in addition to its role in food intake and obesity, MC4R might also play a role in compulsive behaviour… we decided to breed the two mice together to see if it would have an effect on compulsive grooming."

The experiment proved their original hypothesis -- knocking out the MC4R protein in the OCD mouse normalized grooming behavior in the animals. In addition, chemically blocking MC4R in the OCD mice also eliminated compulsive grooming. The rescued behavior is mirrored by normalization of a particular pattern of brain cell communication linked to compulsive behavior.

However, the breeding experiment revealed another totally unexpected result. Loss of the SAPAP3 protein from the mice that were obese due to lack of MC4R produced mice of normal weight.

"We had this other, completely shocking finding -- we completely rescued body weight and food intake in the double null mouse," Lutter says. "So, not only were we affecting the brain regions involved in grooming and behavior, but we also affected the brain regions involved in food intake and body weight."

"Food safety has been an issue through the entire course of human evolution – refrigeration is a relatively recent invention," he says. "Obsessive behavior, or fear of contamination, may be an evolutionary protection against eating rotten food."