Healthwrap Teens and Stress
The largest study ever conducted on acne and stress reveals that teenagers who were under high levels of stress were 23 percent more likely to have increased acne severity.
The research also looked specifically at whether levels of sebum, the oily substance that coats the skin and protects the hair, increase in times of stress and are related to acne severity.
Hormone levels, sebum production and bacteria are all known to play major roles in acne.
However, the results showed that sebum production didn’t differ significantly between the high-stress and low-stress conditions.
Still, stress did make acne worse.
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Anxiety affects many of us. And most don’t know it, and aren’t treated.
New research shows among almost a thousand randomly sampled patients, nearly twenty percent had least one anxiety disorder--.including generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, which is like shyness, and post traumatic stress disorder.
41 percent said they weren't getting any medication, counseling, or psychotherapy.
The anxious patients were more likely to be depressed and reported more disability days in the previous three months compared with those without anxiety disorders.
The authors say the survey may help doctors identify patients with anxiety disorder.
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There is increasing hope for a blood test to detect ovarian cancer in its early, curable stages.
Researchers at Yale University have been developing a test that incorporates six biomarkers, proteins that are associated with ovarian cancer.
In a group of more than 500 volunteers, the six-biomarker test had a sensitivity of 97.5%, meaning, if cancer is there, it picks it up 97.5 percent of the time.
It’s 99.7 percent specific, in other words, if it is positive, it means with practically 100 percent assurance there is ovarian cancer.
Of the 37 blood samples from patients with early stage, stage i and ii cancer, four were misclassified as healthy, meaning the system got 89% correct.
According to the researchers, these kinds of numbers are good enough to make it an acceptable screening test.
That is a holy grail in medicine…there is no screening test for ovarian cancer currently.
The disease has a paltry 20 percent five year survival rate for advanced stages--and most cancers are diagnosed when advanced.
If, however, the cancer is caught early, the five year survival rate goes up to 90 percent!
The authors say the test now needs to be tested prospectively to see how well it applies to the general population.
Yale is enrolling patients in a prospective unblinded study among women at high risk for ovarian cancer and healthy controls, in which at three-month intervals volunteers will be given the six-marker test, a test for ca-125 alone, and trans-vaginal ultrasound.
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