Copy of `Time Inc. - Psychology glossary`

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Time Inc. - Psychology glossary Category: Health and Medicine Date & country: 19/01/2008, UK Words: 29

Botox
2002 was the year of the Botox party—a festive variation on the Tupperware klatch—in which women gather for tea sandwiches and a shot of diluted botulinum toxin in the face. The FDA last year approved the use of Botox, which creates a temporary and localized paralysis in facial muscles, for smoothing wrinkles between the eyebrows. But doctors are a …

Breast Cancer
Things were confusing enough for breast-cancer patients, but in one regard doctors now have clarity: a lumpectomy followed by radiation, it has been definitively shown, is just as effective as a full mastectomy. Doctors and patients had long been concerned that simply removing a tumor instead of an entire breast might increase the chances of a rela …

Bypass Surgery
Doctors called it 'pump head'—the mental decline suffered by 30% of heart-bypass patients in the days and weeks following their operations. The theory was that their difficulties in thinking, remembering and paying attention were somehow caused by the heart-lung machines that oxygenate and circulate blood during surgery while the heart is stopped. …

Cataracts
Cataract operations have become routine—3 million are performed in the U.S. each year—but they are not perfect. In too many cases, the performance of the implanted lens is marred by imperfections caused by measurement errors or variations in the healing process. Solution: an implantable lens that can be recalibrated weeks after surgery. The new len …

Cloning
While Dolly the sheep settles into old age (and prematurely advanced arthritis), scientists continue to churn out carbon copies of cows, pigs, mice, goats, cats and maybe even humans. Last year saw not only the birth of a cloned calico cat called CC (the sole survivor of 87 embryos) but also the widely publicized claim by a bizarre sect called the …

Defibrillator
If you suffer a cardiac arrest, your only chance of survival is to have your heart shocked back into operation within minutes. That's why portable defibrillators are popping up everywhere, notably on airplanes, and why the FDA last year approved the first household version, called the HeartStart Home Defibrillator. It isn't cheap ($2,295), and you …

Diabetes
Close to 20 million Americans have diabetes, and nearly that many have a condition doctors have started to call prediabetes. Experts project that by the end of the decade, 10% of the U.S. will be diabetic. A big part of the problem is that cases of Type 2 diabetes, which used to be called adult-onset diabetes, are exploding among children and young …

Exercise
What's a couch potato to think? First, researchers told us that even a 30-minute walk in the park a few times a week was enough to get the bulk of the cardiovascular benefit of exercise. Then other studies argued that intense activity was much better. Now the government has weighed in with new guidelines that call for an hour of exercise daily—doub …

Fetal Hearts
In a surgical first, doctors fixed a deadly heart-valve defect in a 5-month-old fetus. Guided by ultrasound, they angled a needle-thin catheter into the aortic valve, a spot one-eighth of an inch in diameter in a beating heart the size of a grape. A minuscule balloon was then inflated to enlarge the constricted valve, which had been obstructing the …

French Fries
Cooking potatoes and other starchy foods at high temperatures can trigger the formation of acrylamide, a compound that has been shown to cause cancer in lab rats. Scientists also know there are toxic consequences to breathing the acrylamide in cigarette smoke. So are chips and fries even worse for us than we thought or just the latest food fright? …

Gene Therapy
When French doctors reported that they had successfully treated four boys for the devastating immune-system disorder called bubble-boy disease, the news was hailed as the first clear victory for gene therapy. The researchers overcame their patients' genetic deficit by inserting a working version of a gene that enabled the boys to produce healthy in …

Herbs
The multimillion-dollar herbal-remedy market took a hit when new studies questioned the efficacy of two of its top sellers. A six-week trial of ginkgo biloba, used to enhance memory, found that ginkgo was no better than a placebo at improving memory, learning or concentration. St.-John's-wort, which is supposed to lift your mood, didn't fare much b …

Hormone-Replacement Therapy
For millions of women of a certain age, the news struck like a hot flash. A huge, federally funded study of hormone-replacement therapy (HRT) involving more than 16,000 women was abruptly halted when researchers discovered that long-term use of estrogen and progestin was not lowering the risk of heart disease and stroke in postmenopausal women, as …

Hyperactivity
Nobody knows what causes the impulsivity and fidgetiness of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but a brain-imaging study provided further evidence that the disorder is biologically hard-wired. A federally funded 10-year study of nearly 300 children ages 4 to 19 found that the brains of kids diagnosed with ADHD were 3% to 4% smaller in …

Infertility
It has been 25 years—and 1 million births—since the arrival of Louise Joy Brown, the world's first test-tube baby, and you would think doctors would know by now if the procedure carried any extra risks. But only last year studies showed that babies conceived through in-vitro fertilization were more than twice as likely to suffer major birth defects …

Knee Surgery
Arthroscopic knee surgery has been a popular treatment for people whose knees are racked by osteoarthritis. Minimally invasive, it flushes out debris in the joint and smooths bone surfaces without major surgery. But a surprising study showed that the operation is no more effective than a placebo. One in three patients reported improvement, whether …

Mammography
For two years, a bitter argument has raged over medical advice that most women thought was unimpeachable: routine mammograms save lives. The contrarians insist that the statistics don't bear this out. They also argue that mammograms miss 10% to 15% of breast cancers and that the vast majority of the abnormalities mammograms do spot are benign, whic …

Mercury
You may not be into heavy-metal music, but if you are a fish eater, heavy metals are inside you. The omega-3 fatty acids in big, deep-ocean fish are good for the heart, but the flesh of fish at the top of the pelagic food chain also tends to be laced with pollutants. Chief among them: mercury, which can increase the risk of heart disease. Should yo …

Nicotine
You can't smoke 'em if you got 'em in more and more public places, but what about licking 'em or drinking 'em? Not without the government's green light. The FDA warned pharmacists to stop mixing up nicotine-laden lollipops and lip balm, both of which the agency ruled were illegal drugs that could appeal to children. A few months later, the FDA drie …

Osteoporosis
Bone may look hard and static, but it's very much alive: new bone cells are constantly being made and old bone cells destroyed. With age, however, less bone gets made than destroyed. Result: half the population over 50 has low bone mass, or osteoporosis. This process can be reversed, however, and in November the FDA approved Forteo, the first treat …

Prostate Cancer
Watchful waiting has become a byword for prostate-cancer patients, most of whom won't need aggressive surgery to remove their slow-growing tumors. But doctors have long felt uneasy about the tightrope they walked, trying to find the right balance between advising surgery for those men most likely to survive the cancer and counseling those with the …

Smallpox
The rise of terrorism and the anthrax attacks of 2001 have led to concern that this historic scourge, banished from the U.S. in 1949, could be reintroduced into the population. That's why the U.S. government has begun vaccinating military and health-care personnel and ordered up enough vaccine to inoculate the entire U.S. population if necessary. I …

Stem Cells
If 2001 was the year of the embryonic stem cell, 2002 was the adult stem cell's turn. When President Bush stopped government funding for the creation of new stem-cell lines from embryos, researchers turned their attention to the next best thing—stem cells extracted from adult sources like bone marrow. Exactly how useful these adult cells will be fo …

Tamoxifen
Most women treated for breast cancer take tamoxifen to prevent the cancer from recurring, but it seems that for the drug to be most effective, timing is key. Until last year, most women with early-stage, estrogen-sensitive breast cancer had surgery followed by chemotherapy and tamoxifen. Tamoxifen blocks estrogen's cancer-promoting effects, but it …

Vaccines
Why is autism 10 times as prevalent among young children today as it was in the 1980s? Many parents, noting that the onset of symptoms coincided with their child's vaccination against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), are convinced that the mercury used as a preservative in the vaccine is to blame. But doctors have not been able to find a link, and …

West Nile Virus
Carried by birds on the wing, the West Nile virus continued its westward flight across the U.S. in 2002, killing more than 200 people in the largest outbreak of West Nile encephalitis in the world. Mosquitoes, the virus' reservoir, have been infecting birds and following them on their seasonal migration paths to 40 states. Even more worrisome, doct …

Xenotransplants
Nobody likes the idea of taking organs from another species and putting them in people, a procedure known as xenotransplantation. But human organs are scarce, and pigs' body parts are similar in size and physiology to humans'. Researchers have even found a way to make pig organs less piglike (and thus less likely to be rejected by human immune syst …

Zoloft
For 5% of menstruating women, their time of the month can be particularly draining, both emotionally and physically. Those who suffer from premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), a severe form of premenstrual syndrome, are often so debilitated by feelings of sadness and anxiety or changes in their sleeping and eating habits that they become withdra …

C-Reactive Protein
You still have to count your cholesterol, but the latest thing your doctor is watching is your CRP level. C-reactive protein is a blood chemical that provides a good measure of the degree of inflammation in your heart vessels. New studies have provided the strongest evidence yet that inflammation is a better predictor than cholesterol levels of you …