Health

Medications often prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder seem to work differently than science previously thought. A study published in December by researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in the United States has found that drugs commonly prescribed for ADHD — such as Ritalin or Adderall — "act primarily on the brain's reward and wakefulness centers, rather than on its attention circuitry." The study shows what such stimulants can realistically achieve and what they can't, information important for people with ADHD because it demonstrates why some tasks suddenly feel less strenuous for people who use medication. It also explores why sleep deprivation is such an important factor. ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder that begins in childhood. People af...

All it takes is one night's sleep in a laboratory, during which physiological signals are recorded, for a new artificial intelligence model to be able estimate a person's risk for about 130 diseases later in life. That includes risks for Parkinson's disease, dementia, heart disease, and cancers of the prostate and breast. SleepFM can make these predictions years before the first symptoms become evident, said James Zou, a Stanford University professor of biomedical data science and a co-senior author of the the SleepFM study, published in early January in the journal Nature Medicine. SleepFM was fed nearly 600,000 hours of sleep data collected from 65,000 sleepers. The study and measurement of sleep is called polysomnography and it uses various sensors to measure brain waves, heart activi...