News by Subject Social & Behavior

The current practice of testing most pregnant women for thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) may be leading to overdiagnosis and overtreatment, according to new research in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). http://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.191664

Researchers at the Yale School of Public Health have found that death records of LGBTQ youth who died by suicide were substantially more likely to mention bullying as a factor than their non-LGBTQ peers.

Researchers from Pennsylvania State University have discovered that alcohol withdrawal impacts somatostatin neurons in key brain regions associated with emotional processing and addiction. The findings are significant as they suggest that somatostatin neurons may be a viable new target for the treatment of depression related to alcohol withdrawal.

Researchers at the Yale School of Public Health have found that death records of LGBTQ youth who died by suicide were substantially more likely to mention bullying as a factor than their non-LGBTQ peers. The researchers reviewed nearly 10,000 death records of youth ages 10 to 19 who died by suicide in the United States from 2003 to 2017.

Variants in a gene of the human immune system cause men and women to have different vulnerabilities to the autoimmune diseases lupus and Sjögren's syndrome, according to findings published in the journal Nature. This extends recent work that showed the gene variants could increase risk for schizophrenia. The gene variants are a member of the complement system, a cascade of proteins that help as an infection defense that promotes inflammation and attacks pathogens.

Center for BrainHealth published findings underscoring differences between men and women's craving or desire to consume cannabis when exposed to a specific situation. Examining differences in neural and subjective craving responses, and measuring the relative contributions of each as it relates to heavy cannabis use, they found that neural activity primarily underlies response to cannabis cues with no differences between male and female users. This is followed by subjective craving, where there are sex-related differences.

Roughly 3 to 5% of children with an aunt or uncle with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can also be expected to have ASD, compared to about 1.5% of children in the general population, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. The findings call into question the female protective effect, a theory that females have a lower rate of ASD than males because they have greater tolerance of ASD risk factors.

The impact of COVID-19 on underserved and vulnerable populations, including persons of color, is addressed in a new roundtable discussion in Health Equity, a peer-reviewed open access journal

A woman's genetic make-up may cause her to gain weight when using a popular form of birth control, according to a study from researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

Girls and young women shouldn't spend a lot of time editing selfies for social media because it negatively influences their thoughts about their looks, according to a new Flinders University publication. In a study published in Body Image, Flinders University psychology researchers asked 130 women aged 18 to 30 to view Instagram snaps of thin and average sized women, before analysing their selfie habits.