People plagued by frequent nightmares may find relief from hearing a specific sound as they sleep, a new, small study suggests. It’s estimated that about 4% of adults have nightmares that are frequent and distressing enough to impair their sleep and daily functioning. In some cases, the nightmares are related to an underlying condition, like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), while others are considered “idiopathic,” or having no known cause. Many nightmare sufferers simply live with them. “Most people either think it’s normal to have so many nightmares, or they don’t know there’s treatment available,” said Jennifer Mundt, a behavioral sleep medicine specialist at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. When it comes to nightmare disorder, as it’s officially known, the treatment with the best evidence is imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT), Mundt said. With that technique, people work with a therapist to recall their nightmares, change the negative storyline to one with a positive ending, and then rehearse the new script during the day. Research shows that IRT can start to banish people’s nightmares within two to three weeks. However, around 30% of patients do not respond, according to the new study’s researchers, from the University of Geneva in Switzerland. So, they tried to boost the effectiveness of IRT by adding an approach known as targeted memory reactivation — where people learn to associate a cue, like a…  read on >  read on >

Universities sometimes offer “Pet Your Stress Away” events offering a chance to relax while gently patting the head and stroking the back of a calm dog. But some people are more interested in interacting with cats than dogs, according to a new study that linked preference to personality type. “Our study shows that we may be able to reach a larger audience by offering interventions that include dogs and cats,” said co-author Patricia Pendry, a professor of human development at Washington State University. Folks with strong and highly reactive emotions would benefit from having cats on campus, the study showed. “Emotionality is a pretty stable trait; it doesn’t fluctuate and is a quite consistent feature of our personalities,” Pendry said in a university news release. “We found that people on the higher end of that scale were significantly more interested in interacting with cats on campus,” she noted. “Given that prior research has shown that such individuals may be more open to forming strong attachments to animals, it makes sense they would want cats to be included in these programs.” For the study, the researchers surveyed more than 1,400 students and staff at more than 20 universities. They found that the link between personality and openness to interacting with cats mattered even after accounting for openness to dog visits, owning a cat and identifying as…  read on >  read on >

A tool used to restore forest ecosystems could also be key to the battle against tick-borne disease, researchers say. Forest managers and land owners use prescribed fire to combat invasive species, improve wildlife habitat and restore ecosystem health. A recent study suggests it could also reduce tick populations and transmission of diseases that have proliferated since the early 1900s when fire suppression created forest habitats that favored survival and spread of ticks. “Before the arrival of Europeans, Eastern forests were ‘fire-dependent,’ characterized by fire-tolerant species such as pine, oak and chestnut,” said lead study author Michael Gallagher, a research ecologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service in New Lisbon, N.J. “Frequent low-to-moderate intensity fires would have fostered dry conditions, thinned the understory and diminished layers of leaf litter, which in turn would have created microclimates with lower humidity and higher temperatures,” Gallagher explained. These conditions were likely to limit ticks’ population activity and interaction with hosts, he said. But fire suppression after deforestation enabled species that thrive in moister conditions to become dominate. The result is called mesophication, and it has been widely seen throughout the eastern United States. “In the absence of fire, these mesic habitats moderate forest temperatures and humidity, promote denser understory growth, and cause greater moisture retention in forest litter,” Gallagher said. “This creates microclimates within the ideal range…  read on >  read on >

Despite the presence of gorilla trekkers in their habitat, endangered gorillas in the region surrounding East Africa’s Virunga Volcanoes do not have human herpesvirus, researchers say. The Gorilla Doctors team was able to assess the region’s mountain gorillas in a noninvasive way, simply watching the animals as they walked through the forest. As the gorillas chomped on vegetation such as wild celery and tossed away the stalks, researchers would retrieve the discarded plant and record the name of the gorilla in this conservation area, where they know each one. The plant leavings would be drenched with enough saliva to analyze. Scientists from the University of California, Davis tested the gorilla saliva for orally shed pathogens to rule out the presence of human herpesviruses among these primates. “We were able to do this study entirely using chewed plants,” said study lead author Dr. Tierra Smiley Evans, an epidemiologist and wildlife veterinarian at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. “That allowed us to collect specimens from every known, habituated mountain gorilla in Uganda and Rwanda. This shows we can monitor gorillas — and potentially other primate species — over time, noninvasively, at the individual level and help answer questions regarding their conservation,” Evans said in a university news release. It’s an important mission. While herpesvirus may cause minor symptoms in humans, it could be more dangerous…  read on >  read on >

If your children are well-behaved, do they stand a greater chance of having healthy, happy lives as adults?

A new study says yes.  read on >

It’s no surprise that many Americans are working overtime. Conservative estimates say that 19 percent of adults put in 48 hours or more a week and 7 percent log in 60 or more. But what you might not realize is that, after a certain point, extra hours could be hurting both your health and your productivity. In addition to a variety of medical issues and unhealthy lifestyle choices associated with long hours, a British study used cognitive tests to show that working 55 hours a week was associated with lower scores in vocabulary and reasoning, and can lead to cognitive problems as you get older. Adding insult to injury, research done at Stanford University found that, besides the personal toll that overtime takes, you probably aren’t working effectively. Productivity starts to fall considerably after the 50th work hour of the week and gets worse with every additional hour. So, if you put in 70 hours a week, you’re not likely to accomplish anything worthwhile during those last 15. One reason for this is that you might be too stressed or tired to function at peak level since working overtime usually results in your getting less sleep — and that in turn leads to making mistakes that can set you back at work. Take action to improve the balance between your personal life and your work…  read on >

A smokeless method of vaporizing and then inhaling pot packs a much more powerful punch than simply smoking weed, researchers say. That could raise safety concerns for users — driving, for example. Marijuana vaporizers heat pot to a temperature just below combustion, allowing people to inhale the intoxicating chemical THC from the plant material without breathing in any smoke. This method produced much more intoxication in a small group of test participants than smoking the same amount of marijuana through a typical pot pipe, according to the report published online Nov. 30 in JAMA Network Open. The study participants also had more adverse effects associated with their pot use when they used vaporizers, and had more pronounced impairment of their ability to think and control their movements, the researchers said. “It’s often a fine line between someone getting the drug effect they desire and having a drug effect that’s too strong, and maybe produces paranoia and adverse effects that are uncomfortable for the person,” said lead researcher Tory Spindle. “That sort of thing might be more likely with vaporizers,” he added. Spindle is a postdoctoral research fellow at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in Baltimore. These vaporizers aren’t to be confused with “vaping” — a term used to describe electronic cigarettes. Survey data has shown that vaporizing is becoming a more popular method of…  read on >