Oxytocin and affection: does intimacy help wounds heal faster?

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Oxytocin alone didn’t speed wound healing in couples, but combined with affectionate touch and partner appreciation, it showed modest benefits. Social context matters more than hormones.

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Under the skin: How childhood maltreatment may trigger lifelong multimorbidity

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Why do people who were maltreated as children face higher risks of both mental and physical illness? A new Mendelian randomisation study suggests that metabolic markers — like triglycerides and blood sugar — may be part of the chain connecting adversity to later multimorbidity.

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Could measuring cortisol levels become a biological test for risk of depression in adolescent males?

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Is it possible to work out which of two adolescents sitting before you complaining of unhappiness, which one will go home and sleep it off and which will go on to develop an episode of major depression? Has the biological revolution in psychiatry finally come to fruition with a useful biomarker for making treatment decisions? [read the full story…]

Meta-analysis finds that pituitary volume is not affected in people with first episode psychosis or schizophrenia

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* Declaration; I have published articles with two of the authors of this article, including on this topic, and know most of them professionally One influential model of the onset of psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia is the stress-vulnerability model, first put forward by Zubin and Spring in 1977. This model proposes that people at [read the full story…]