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WEDNESDAY, June 10, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- If there is one thing that recent police brutality protests have demonstrated, it is that life for black people in America is steeped in stress. And while it might seem logical to assume that all that stress would translate into higher rates of mental health conditions like depression and anxiety, that doesn't seem to be the case -- at least not when actual diagnoses are tallied. But official numbers don't capture the whole story, as a multitude of factors stand in the way of good mental health care for black Americans. "There's an assumption that all people express symptoms of depression the same, but some culture groups express symptoms differently," explained Sherry Davis Molock, an associate professor of psychology at George...

WEDNESDAY, June 10, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Very sensitive people may owe about half of their heightened feelings to their genes, a British study of twins suggests. Researchers looked at pairs of identical and fraternal 17-year-old twins to gauge how much differences in sensitivity owed to genes or the environment. While identical twins share the same genes, fraternal twins don't, so findings among identical twins are more likely to be genetic than environmental, the researchers explained. The study found that 47% of the differences in sensitivity were due to genetics and 53% environmental. "We know from previous research that around a third of people are at the higher end of the sensitivity spectrum. They are generally more strongly affected by their experiences," said study...

WEDNESDAY, June 10, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- A cutting-edge "lab-on-a-chip" has shown promise in detecting early breast cancers and tumors that have developed in other parts of the body. Roughly the size of a glass microscope slide, the EV-CLUE uses nanotechnology to pump a tiny amount of blood into eight miniscule channels equipped to detect different markers of cancer, explained co-researcher Liang Xu, a professor of molecular bioscience at the University of Kansas. How tiny? The EV-CLUE requires about 2 microliters of blood to run a scan, Xu said. A typical droplet of blood contains 50 microliters. Xu and his colleagues tested their lab-on-a-chip by equipping one of its channels to look for MMP14, an enzyme released by tumors that has been linked to cancer progression. The enzyme...

WEDNESDAY, June 10, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- People have certain qualities they look for in a mate, and now a new study finds that a woman's eggs may be choosy about sperm, too. Researchers said the findings offer new insight into human reproduction -- showing that eggs will not accept just any sperm, and actually have more say in the union than previously recognized. In the moments just before fertilization, there is a chemical "conversation" between an egg and sperm, explained John Fitzpatrick, an associate professor at Stockholm University, in Sweden, and leader of the new study. "The chemical signals released from eggs allow sperm to change their swimming behavior," Fitzpatrick said. "Sperm swim straighter and move towards the egg when they are exposed to the chemical signals....