Month: September 2022

Over four thousand people were followed for six years to assess their chance of dying through any cause.

Even small increases in happiness are linked to living longer, research finds.

Dr Rahul Malhotra, study co-author, said:

“The findings indicate that even small increments in happiness may be beneficial to older people’s longevity.

Therefore individual-level activities as well as government policies and programs that maintain or improve happiness or psychological well-being may contribute to a longer life among older people.”

The results come from 4,478 people aged over 60, living in Singapore.

They were followed for six years to assess their chance of dying through any cause.

The results showed that among unhappy older people, 20% died in the subsequent six years.

However, in happy older people, just 15% had passed away.

Dr June May-Ling Lee, study co-author, said:

“The consistency of the inverse association of happiness with mortality across age groups and gender is insightful — men and women, the young-old and the old-old, all are likely to benefit from an increase in happiness.”

The study was published in the journal Age and Ageing (Chei et al., 2018).

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Monkeypox has now spread to 90 different countries, with one-third of the cases occurring in the U.S..

The top way that monkeypox spreads is through prolonged skin-to-skin contact, especially when there are lesions, research finds.

Lesions are abnormal areas of skin that have been affected by disease or injury.

In monkeypox these can be rashes, scabs, pimples or bumps on the skin.

The other two main ways that monkeypox is spread is through touching contaminated objects and surfaces and by contact with respiratory secretions such as mucus.

However, simply brushing against someone or shaking their hand might not spread the virus.

Scientists are also not convinced that contaminated surfaces are strong vectors for the transmission of the virus.

Monkeypox has now spread to 90 different countries, with one-third of the cases occurring in the U.S..

Most cases have been among men who have sex with men, especially those who have more casual or anonymous sex.

Dr Michael Marks, co-author of a recent study on monkeypox, said:

“The more we understand about the monkeypox virus and how it spreads, the better we can diagnose and treat patients in order to get this outbreak under control.

One striking finding was that the viral load – the amount of virus present – was more than 1000 times higher in skin lesions than in lesions in the throat.

This, combined with the correlation between sexual contact type and location of lesions, suggests that transmission is most likely to have occurred by direct close contact during sex rather than through respiratory droplets.

This points to an increased risk of disease spread through sexual networks.”

The study examined 181 confirmed cases of monkeypox in Spain.

Skin-to-skin contact, mainly during sexual intercourse, emerged as the main method of transmission, certainly above airborne transmission.

Next researchers want to find out how the viral load changes over time, said Dr Marks:

“We now need to see how the viral load caries over time during the infection.

For example, whether the amount of virus in the throat is highest during early stages of illness, which could indicate how the risk of transmission may vary over the course of infection.”

The study was published in the journal The Lancet (Tarín-Vicente et al., 2022).

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The two strongest signals that someone is a psychopath.

Two key personality traits of a psychopath are being callous and unemotional, research finds.

Being callous means having a cruel disregard for others.

Callous people lack compassion, are cold-blooded and heartless.

On top of this, psychopaths typically have difficulty responding to the emotions of others in a normal way — they also appear unemotional themselves.

For example, psychopaths tend to show no feeling when they see others in pain.

However, some psychopaths use an unemotional exterior to hide inner turmoil.

Professor Tim Stickle, who led the study, explained that a sub-group of psychopaths do experience strong emotions:

“They appear callous and unemotional to others but their own emotional experience is that they’re very distressed, have high levels of anxiety, higher levels of depression, higher levels of emotion.

We think of these harmful, antisocial, aggressive kids as being immune to fear, immune to negative feelings, but in fact we’re showing a whole group of them are not only not immune, but are very susceptible.”

The conclusions come from a study of 150 adolescents held in juvenile detention centres.

All were classified as callous and unemotional and most conformed to this stereotype — but not all.

A small group fell into a category the researchers label “low psychopathy delinquents”.

Other studies have also shown that among adults there is a group who look like psychopaths, but actually experience strong emotions.

Professor Stickle said:

“It’s not just one characteristic that allows clear identification of who falls in which group; it takes a wide range of traits.

These traits are particularly prevalent in adolescent females in the juvenile justice system.

Untreated callous unemotional traits put these youth at risk for becoming lifelong criminals.”

The researchers hope that identifying and treating this sub-group can help save them from a lifetime of antisocial behaviour — and society from its consequences.

The study was published in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology (Gill & Stickle, 2015).

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