While medicines are available to relieve withdrawal symptoms in people recovering from opioid addiction, they cause side effects and can maintain the brain changes that led to addiction in the first place, which can lead to relapse before treatment is completed. New research offers hope that a better solution may be on the horizon. Rapastinel, an experimental drug originally developed as an antidepressant, substantially reversed acute signs of opioid withdrawal in rats in just three days.

Beth Francis swims in the cold sea for the 100th time as she seeks a cure for chronic Migraine.

If you’ve ever been suddenly and unexpectedly reminded of a past trauma, you may wonder if those old fears will ever stop haunting you.

Now, neuroscientists say they’ve discovered a group of brain cells that control frightening memories, and they suggest that the finding could lead to new ways to treat anxiety, phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The newly identified “extinction neurons” suppress fearful memories when they’re activated, or allow fearful memories to return unexpectedly when not activated, according to researchers at the University of Texas at Austin.

It’s long been known that memories believed to have been buried can suddenly appear and trigger a form of relapse called “spontaneous recovery,” the study authors explained in a university news release.

“There is frequently a relapse of the original fear, but we knew very little about the mechanisms,” said study senior author Michael Drew, an associate professor of neuroscience.

“These kinds of studies can help us understand the potential cause of disorders, like anxiety and PTSD, and they can also help us understand potential treatments,” he said in the news release.

Drew and his team discovered that brain cells that suppress fear memories are in the hippocampus. This was a surprise because fear is associated with another part of the brain, called the amygdala.

The hippocampus, responsible for memory and spatial navigation, appears to play a significant role in giving fear a context. For example, it may link a fearful memory to the place where it occurred.

The findings may help explain why exposure therapy, one of the leading ways to treat fear-based disorders, sometimes becomes ineffective.

This type of therapy is designed to create new, safe memories that can override an original fearful memory. For example, if someone is afraid of spiders, exposure therapy may involve letting a harmless spider crawl on the patient. The safe memories are called “extinction memories.”

“Extinction does not erase the original fear memory but instead creates a new memory that inhibits or competes with the original fear,” Drew said. “Our paper demonstrates that the hippocampus generates memory traces of both fear and extinction, and competition between these hippocampal traces determines whether fear is expressed or suppressed.”

With these new findings, the frequency and timing of exposure therapy may need to be reconsidered, and new pathways for drug development explored, the study authors suggested.

The study was published April 1 in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

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With so many heartburn medications available over the counter, it might be surprising to learn that heartburn itself isn’t a health condition, but rather a symptom of something else.

First, be sure to distinguish it from indigestion, which is primarily an uncomfortable fullness after eating. With heartburn, there’s a burning sensation in your chest or neck. It might feel like food is coming back up into your mouth, maybe with a bad taste.

Fatty, fried and spicy dishes, citrus fruits, caffeinated drinks, garlic, onions and tomatoes are some foods that can bring on heartburn. So can habits like smoking and drinking alcohol.

Other heartburn triggers

• Being overweight
• Eating large meals
• Lying down soon after eating

Making lifestyle changes to avoid these triggers may help reduce heartburn symptoms or their frequency.

If you still have heartburn on a regular basis, see your doctor. You could have GERD, which is gastro-oesophageal reflux disease. That’s when stomach acids and food back up into your oesophagus, the tube that links your mouth and stomach. It often happens because the muscle that seals off your stomach is weak.

Getting the right diagnosis is especially important if you have persistent symptoms like a sore throat, cough or scratchy voice, difficulty or pain when swallowing, frequent burping or vomiting. Don’t self-treat with over-the-counter heartburn medications. They’re not effective for everyone and some have serious long-term side effects. And they can’t treat any underlying problem.

Also know that chest pain called angina and even a heart attack can feel like heartburn. If you have persistent pain and you aren’t sure if it’s just heartburn, contact emergency services.

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Stimulant drugs used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) carry a small risk of a psychotic episode, but it appears to vary depending on which medication young people use, a new study finds.

Soon after receiving a stimulant prescription, about one in 660 teens and young adults developed psychotic symptoms, such as hallucinations and hearing voices, the researchers said.

Prescriptions have tripled

But the risk was not equal among the different stimulants. Amphetamines, like Adderall and Vyvanse, seemed to carry a relatively greater risk than the methylphenidates Ritalin and Concerta.

“These events are rare,” stressed lead researcher Dr Lauren Moran, of McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

But, she added, they raise concerns because amphetamine prescriptions to young people have more than tripled in recent years.

About five million Americans under age 25 receive prescriptions for the drugs. Symptoms of ADHD include inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity, which can affect social relationships, academics and job performance.

It’s long been known that some young people taking stimulants for ADHD develop psychotic symptoms. In 2007, the US Food and Drug Administration mandated a warning be placed on the drugs.

According to Moran, the findings suggest that when prescribing stimulants – particularly amphetamines – doctors should screen young people for their risk of psychosis. That means asking about factors such as drug abuse or a family history of psychosis.

Other factors considered

There are alternative treatments, such as non-stimulant medications and behavioural therapy, Moran pointed out.

The findings are based on insurance records for nearly 222 000 teenagers and young adults, aged 13 to 25, who received a new prescription for a stimulant to treat ADHD. Overall, one out of every 486 amphetamine patients developed a psychotic episode that required an antipsychotic medication. That compared with one in 1 046 patients on Ritalin-like stimulants.

The results do not actually prove that amphetamines, per se, caused the higher risk of psychosis, Moran said. But, she added, other factors were weighed – including the patients’ age and sex, the severity of their ADHD, and any diagnoses of other mental health conditions or substance abuse.

And young people on amphetamines were still at higher risk of psychosis than those on methylphenidates.

Moran said the two groups of stimulants work by different mechanisms – with amphetamines triggering a more potent release of the brain chemical dopamine. That might help explain the higher psychosis risk.

Dr Rahil Jummani is a child and adolescent psychiatrist at NYU Langone, in New York City. He stressed the rarity of psychosis with ADHD medications, and said that risk needs to be weighed against the benefits of treatment.

No new psychotic symptoms

“The baseline risk of psychosis is very low,” Jummani said, adding that, in some cases, psychotic episodes may not be related to the medication at all.

Jummani said that in his experience, parents are usually more concerned about issues like the impact of ADHD medication on kids’ growth. (The evidence is mixed on that, he noted.)

“Once we start talking about medication options, we discuss all the risks and benefits,” Jummani said. “That conversation has to happen.”

The patients in this study were all newly diagnosed with ADHD. As for young people who’ve been on stimulants for a long time, Jummani said it’s “very unlikely” the medications will feed any new psychotic symptoms.

Moran agreed. “I don’t think parents should be taking their kids off of [amphetamines] because of this,” she said. “Not if they’ve been using them for a long time and are doing well.”

The US National Institutes of Health funded the study. The report was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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Belle Curran won numerous bravery awards as she battled with rare Interstitial Lung Disease.

Rolling Stones fans were concerned by the news Mick Jagger needs a new heart valve. But they’ll be happy to know that these days most patients in his situation can get what they need – and often without intensive surgery.

Giving the millions of fans some Satisfaction, is that Jagger is recovering and in good health after undergoing the heart valve procedure in New York City, reports the Associated Press.

Jagger is being monitored for any complications that could occur, such as excess bleeding, sources told Billboard.

Plenty of company

Jagger has plenty of company. More than 5 million Americans live with heart-valve disease. In 2013, the most recent year for which numbers are available, more than 100 000 people had heart-valve surgery, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Dr Catherine Otto, a professor of medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle, offered this primer on the heart’s four valves – and how they can malfunction.

The two valves on the right side, which pump blood into the lungs, are rarely a problem, said Otto, co-chair of the committee that wrote the latest American Heart Association guidelines on heart-valve disease. The valves on the left, which pump blood into the body, are typically the issue when something goes wrong, she said.

If one of these valve narrows, blood can’t go forward without the heart working extremely hard to push it, she said. And if a valve leaks, the heart has to pump extra blood to make up for it.

Wear and tear

“It’s a very delicate structure that with time can become a little bit thicker and get a little bit of scar tissue,” said Dr Robert Bonow, professor of cardiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago and co-author of those AHA guidelines.

A small percentage of people are born with malformed valves; many live for decades without problems. But even an anatomically normal valve is opening and closing with every heartbeat. Dr Bonow did the math: For someone with an average heart rate, the valve opens about 3 billion times over 80 years.

“It’s just one of those things that if you live long enough, these valves will begin to wear out at some point,” said Bonow, a past AHA president.

Risk factors include the same ones that lead to heart attacks, high cholesterol, smoking, high blood pressure and diabetes, Bonow said.

“But even people who have no risk factors, including athletes, can develop problems,” he said.

Valves can be replaced

Symptoms can include chest pain or palpitations; shortness of breath; fatigue; lightheadedness or swelling in the ankles, feet or abdomen. But the warning signs can be “very subtle,” Otto said. (Jagger, in fact, was spotted frolicking with his girlfriend and toddler son in Miami Beach just after the band cancelled upcoming tour dates because of his health.)

Otto said the most common symptoms she sees include reduced ability to exercise. Patients get out of breath, fatigued or just don’t feel like doing it.

“If they get to the point of actually having chest pain with exertion or shortness of breath or dizziness or passing out – those are really more severe symptoms of the disease,” she said.

Worn-out valves can be replaced with new ones made from metal or from animal tissue. And treatment has undergone a “transformative” change in recent years, Bonow said, with the growth of a procedure called transcatheter aortic valve replacement, or TAVR. The aortic valve is on the left side of the heart and releases blood to the body’s main artery, the aorta.

Some risk

Until recently, complicated open-heart surgery was standard. But with TAVR, a replacement valve can be inserted without surgery by puncturing a leg artery, inserting a new valve, threading it up to the heart “and just popping it in place”, Otto said.

“It’s a very short procedure – it takes an hour or two at the most,” she said. The patient is the hospital overnight or maybe a couple of days, followed by a week or two of recovery at home. That compares with six weeks to three months of recovery for surgery.

TAVR is currently approved in people for whom open-heart surgery would be considered risky, although both doctors were excited about a recent study indicating TAVR can produce results comparable to traditional surgery in even low-risk patients.

Also, Dr Otto noted, if the problem is related to the mitral valve – that’s less likely in someone Jagger’s age – a transcatheter approach is possible, but a patient is more likely to need open-heart surgery.

The good news is that barring complications, heart valve problems are usually “pretty much alleviated completely” by treatment, she said. “There is some risk up front, but the outcomes are excellent.”

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When it’s finally time to store away your winter coats and boots, it’s also a good time to rid your home of the allergens that accumulated over the winter, an allergist suggests.

“If you aren’t someone who regularly undertakes spring cleaning, consider tackling it this year,” said Dr Todd Mahr, president of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI).

Indoor allergens can also cause chaos

“A thorough cleaning helps get rid of things like dust, mould, pet dander and other allergens, which may have been making you miserable all winter. Many people think spring and fall is when their seasonal allergies kick in. They might not realise indoor allergens can also cause chaos with your nasal passages and lungs and that a thorough cleaning can help,” Mahr explained in an ACAAI news release.

Pet dander, fur and saliva are among the allergens that can build up during winter. The best way to control them is to vacuum often and wash upholstery, including your pet’s bed. Never let your pet in the bedroom.

Change your air filters every three months and choose ones with a MERV rating of 11 or 12, Mahr advised. Fight dust mites by vacuuming regularly with a cyclonic vacuum – which spins dust and dirt away from the floor – or one equipped with a HEPA (high-efficiency particulate air) filter. Wash bedding and stuffed animals weekly.

Keep your windows closed

Mould is another major indoor allergen typically found in the basement, bathroom and kitchen. Reducing moisture is the key to eliminating it. Use bathroom fans and always wipe away any standing water immediately. Use detergent and water to scrub visible mould from surfaces, and then dry surfaces completely. Keep your home’s humidity below 60% and clean your gutters regularly to prevent leaks.

As tempting as that fresh, warm air outside is, keep your home’s windows closed during spring, Mahr suggested, because breezes can bring pollen through open windows. Keep your car windows closed too; use your air conditioning.

Mahr pointed out that allergy symptoms can appear before spring actually arrives. By starting to take your allergy medications two to three weeks before symptoms usually begin, you can avoid severe symptoms. If over-the-counter allergy medicines don’t help, talk with an allergist, he said.

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With new genome analysis tools, scientists have made significant advances in our understanding of modern humans’ origins and ancient migrations.