Rates of depression and substance use higher for pregnant teens, study finds

Researchers from Lawson Health Research Institute and Brescia University College found that teenage pregnant women are more likely to live in poverty, have poorer mental health and have higher rates of substance use. There are limited Canadian studies on teenage pregnancies, in particular looking at risk factors and birth outcomes compared to women who became pregnant during adulthood. London researchers […]

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New gene therapy for epilepsy provides on-demand release of endogenous substance

Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Medical University of Innsbruck have developed a new therapeutic concept for the treatment of temporal lobe epilepsy. It represents a gene therapy capable of suppressing seizures at their site of origin on demand. Having been shown to be effective in an animal model, the new method will now be optimized for clinical use. Results from this […]

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Opioid gene variant in adolescents reduces reward, may increase later substance abuse risk

Adolescents with a particular variant of an opioid receptor gene have less response in a part of prefrontal cortex that evaluates rewards, compared to those with the other version of the gene, say researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC). For the study, presented Monday at Neuroscience 2018, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (abstract #7517), the investigators […]

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