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Intimacy plays a larger role in casual sex among college students than previously thought, a new U.S. study reports. Researchers analyzed the results of an online survey that asked several hundred students at a university in the Northeast about their romantic relationships and casual sex. As expected, affectionate and intimate activities — such as cuddling, spending the night, eye gazing and foreplay — were more common in relationship sex than in casual sex, but the rate of these acts in casual sex was much higher than anticipated. While women were more likely to engage in intimate acts, there were no gender differences in terms of eye gazing and foreplay. “We have a stereotype that casual sex [hookups] are just about meaningless sex, but this research shows this is not necessarily true,” said study author Ann Merriwether, a developmental psychologist and lecturer at Binghamton University in New York. The study “shows intimacy is important and desired by many people, especially those who prefer hookups to more traditional relationships,” she added in a university news release. A survey question that asked students if they prefer casual sex or sex in a long-term relationship led to a surprising finding. “Young adults who indicated they prefer casual sexual encounters over relationship sex were more likely to want affection and intimacy from them. This suggests they seek to meet their… read on >

Those Sunday crossword puzzles may not prevent the aging brain from slowing down — but they might protect it in a different way, a new study suggests. Researchers looked at the “use it or lose it” theory on brain health. The concept holds that mentally engaging activities — from reading to crosswords to board games — may help the brain resist dementia later in life. In this study, older adults who said they enjoyed those pastimes were no less likely to show signs of mental decline over time, versus other older folks. But they did, on average, score higher on standard tests of mental sharpness. That means that while they did decline over time, they did so from a higher “starting point,” the researchers explained. “The results indicate that a lifetime of engagement lifts you to a high point from which you decline, and that can be considered as passive cognitive reserve,” said lead researcher Roger Staff, of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. “Starting from a high point,” he said, “will mean that the threshold at which you are considered impaired will be farther into the future.” “Cognitive reserve” can be seen as the brain’s ability to find alternative ways to get things done. In theory, a person with greater cognitive reserve may be able to withstand pathological changes in the brain for a… read on >

Discrimination doesn’t just cause emotional pain in the moment, it may affect a victim’s physical recovery from a heart attack, new research suggests. In studying more than 2,600 heart attack survivors between the ages of 18 and 55, researchers found that those reporting more perceived discrimination were more likely to have poorer outcomes. A year after their heart attacks, they had more physical limitations and chest pain, lower quality of life and impaired mental health. Perceived discrimination — being treated unfairly because of personal characteristics such as race, gender or sexual orientation — was already associated with risk factors for having a heart attack. Discrimination is a chronic stressor, said study author Andrew Arakaki, a doctoral candidate at the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Conn. “It’s linked to a heightened reactive stress response as well as chronic systemic inflammation,” Arakaki said. “There’s quite a bit of literature out there about the impact of chronic inflammation on cardiovascular disease, and so that may be part of the underlying mechanism, but I think that what makes discrimination stand out from some other chronic psychosocial stressors is that it’s also really closely linked to structural barriers to health.” That includes things like economic status, access to health insurance and neighborhood investment. It may be that disadvantaged people have trouble accessing essential post-care visits. While the… read on > read on >

Women who have autism are more vulnerable during pregnancy to depression and anxiety, according to a new British study. That makes it imperative that effective mental health screening and support is available to help this group, said lead researcher Sarah Hampton, from the University of Cambridge. “The results also suggest that autistic people may benefit from accommodations to prenatal health care. These may include adjustments to the sensory environment of health care settings, as well as adjustments to how information is communicated during prenatal appointments,” co-author Rosie Holt said in a university news release. She is a research associate at the Cambridge-based Autism Research Center. For their study, researchers surveyed more than 900 women about their pregnancy experience. Anyone who was pregnant at the time or had previously given birth was eligible to take part in the online survey. In all, 417 respondents had autism and 524 did not. Women with autism were about three times more likely to report having had prenatal depression. About 24% of those with autism experienced depression, compared to 9% of others. Nearly half — 48% — of those with autism experienced anxiety, while only 14% of respondents without autism did. “We are grateful to members of the autistic community for providing feedback when we designed this research,” said study co-author Carrie Allison, deputy director of the Autism Research Center.… read on > read on >

More than 10,000 nerve fibers — many more than expected — power the human clitoris, according to Oregon researchers who were able to count them for the first time while performing gender-affirming genital surgery. That’s about 20% more than previous estimates, they said. “It’s startling to think about more than 10,000 nerve fibers being concentrated in something as small as [the] clitoris,” said Dr. Blair Peters, a plastic surgeon from the Transgender Health Program at Oregon Health & Sciences University (OHSU) in Portland. He said it’s particularly surprising if you compare the clitoris to other, larger parts of the body, including the human hand. “Even though the hand is many, many times larger than the clitoris, the median nerve only contains about 18,000 nerve fibers, or fewer than two times the nerve fibers that are packed into the much-smaller clitoris,” Peters said in a university news release. The clitoris’ only job is enabling pleasurable sensations. It consists of the highly sensitive glans outside the body and more tissue internally. Internal parts of the clitoris include the dorsal nerve, which is the main one responsible for sensation. Peters collected samples of dorsal nerve tissue from seven transmasculine (assigned female at birth but do not identify as female) volunteers who were undergoing gender-affirming genital surgery. A small amount of the tissue is typically trimmed during phalloplasty, a… read on > read on >

A bad marriage can break your heart — literally. Heart attack survivors in a stressful relationship are more likely to have a rocky recovery, a new study reports. “We found there’s an independent association between severe marital stress and worse outcomes within their first year of recovery,” said lead researcher Cenjing Zhu, a doctoral candidate in chronic disease epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. Compared to people in healthy relationships, heart patients under severe marital stress were 67% more likely to suffer recurring chest pain during the first year of their recovery, Zhu and her colleagues found. Severe marital stress also increased a person’s chances of rehospitalization by nearly 50%, and affected their quality of life and health. On a 12-item scale, for example, participants with severe marital stress scored 2.6 points lower in mental health and more than 1.6 points lower in physical health, compared with those reporting little to no stress. Zhu is scheduled to present the findings Sunday at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting, in Chicago. The findings shed new light on the nuanced effect that relationships can have on a person’s health, said Dr. Nieca Goldberg, medical director of Atria New York City and a clinical associate professor of medicine at NYU Grossman School of Health. “Earlier studies on marriage found that people who were couples have better… read on > read on >

People trying to adopt a healthier diet probably aren’t the best judges of how well they’re actually eating, a new study discovers. Only about 1 in 4 people could accurately estimate how healthy they were eating when asked to assess their diet after a year spent trying to lose weight, researchers found. Worse, only 1 in 10 people understood how their diet had actually changed during that year, with most assuming they’d made much greater strides than they actually had. “There’s not very good agreement between what they perceive their diet quality to be and what we’ve calculated their diet quality to be. They’re also overestimating the amount of change that they’ve made in their diet quality,” said lead researcher Jessica Cheng. She’s a postdoctoral research fellow in epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. “And so that was really the big takeaway here, that there might be some disconnect among people trying to diet with both how healthy they think their diet is and how much change they think they’ve made in their diet over the course of attempting to lose weight,” Cheng added. Cheng will present these findings at this weekend’s annual meeting of the American Heart Association, held in Chicago and virtually. Findings presented at medical meetings are considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal. Nearly… read on > read on >

MONDAY, Oct. 31, 2022 (HealthDay News) – It could be harder to fill a prescription for the widely used antibiotic amoxicillin because of a shortage that appears to be linked to an ongoing surge in RSV infections across the United States. Supplies of amoxicillin oral solution, which is typically used in children, are low, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned Friday. One issue could be that the pharmacy has the drug in stock, but not in the strength needed for the prescription, so it may require some back and forth between the pharmacy and the prescriber, CNN reported. “I think it’s going to be challenging for doctors and prescribers to give their patients a prescription that they’ll then be able to get filled, because pharmacies are going to have a variety of different strengths in stock, and you hate to have that delay of the back and forth, especially for an antibiotic they usually want to get started pretty quick. So I think it’s going to be a frustrating shortage,” Erin Fox, a senior pharmacy director at University of Utah Health, told CNN. In the meantime, the FDA is working with manufacturers to prevent further shortages or reduce the effects of any delays, CNN reported. The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists said it started hearing about shortages of both tablets and oral solutions about… read on > read on >

MONDAY, Oct. 31, 2022 (HealthDay News) – Conspiracy theories have abounded during the COVID-19 pandemic and in American politics in recent years. Now, researchers overseas say they have identified a link between being bullied in the workplace and developing conspiracy theories, which they define as “explanations for important events that involve secret plots by powerful and malevolent groups.” Both are associated with similar psychological factors, including feelings of paranoia, according to researchers at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. and Paris Nanterre University in France. “Bullying experiences can significantly impact the victim in numerous ways, with the development of conspiracy beliefs being another detrimental consequence,” said lead author Daniel Jolley, an assistant professor of social psychology at the University of Nottingham. “We believe victims of bullying may find conspiracy theories appealing because bullying experiences frustrate the exact psychological factors, such as disempowerment, that are a route to developing conspiracy beliefs.” To study this, his team measured 273 people’s experiences of a range of negative acts. Not only was workplace bullying associated with conspiracy theories, victims were also more likely to report increased feelings of paranoia. These feelings are associated with a higher endorsement of conspiracy beliefs, researchers said. In a second study, 206 participants were asked to imagine one of two scenarios. One was being bullied in the workplace. The other was receiving positive… read on > read on >

Intermittent fasting has taken off as a way to lose weight without having to limit types of a food a person eats. But there was little research on how eating only during a few hours of the day and then only drinking water might affect female reproductive hormones. A new study shows that while hormones do change with intermittent fasting, it might not harm fertility. “We’ve observed thousands of pre- and postmenopausal women through different alternate-day fasting and time-restricted eating strategies. All it’s doing is making people eat less,” said Krista Varady, a professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois Chicago. “By shortening that eating window, you’re just naturally cutting calories.” Much of the negative information on intermittent fasting has come from studies on mice or rats, she said, calling for more research of the effects on people. For this study, the researchers followed women with obesity for eight weeks. They ate a “warrior diet,” which was four or six hours of eating without counting calories followed by 18 or 20 hours of water and nothing else. Researchers then compared the women’s hormone levels to those of a control group. Levels of sex-binding globulin hormone, a protein that carries reproductive hormones throughout the body, did not change. Neither did levels of testosterone and androstenedione, which the body uses to produce both testosterone and estrogen.… read on > read on >

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All Sauce from Weekly Gravy:

For College Students, ‘Hookup Sex’ More Intimate Than Thought

How Puzzles, Games Might Help Your Aging Brain

Impact of Racism Could Slow Recovery After Heart Attack

Pregnancy Often More Stressful for Women With Autism

Science Helps Reveal Secrets of the Clitoris

Bad Marriages Put Heart Attack Recovery in Peril

You’re Eating Healthier These Days, But Is It as Healthy As You Think?

FDA Warns of Amoxicillin Shortage

Workplace Bullies May Help Produce Conspiracy Theorists: Study

Do Fasting Diets Affect a Woman’s Hormones?