Psychology is odd; it’s old enough to seem as though it’s been around forever but young enough so that there’s still an almost terrifyingly large amount of things that even professional psychologists don’t fully understand yet. When it comes to the general public’s popular image of psychology, a lot of folks hardly ever move past the timeless mantra of “lie down on the couch, and tell me how you feel” or Dr. Phil repeating people’s problems to them in a louder and slower voice on TV. While psychology and psychological disorders today are no longer kept in the corner like forbidden books of black magic, there’s still a long way to go in terms of actually spreading comprehensive knowledge.

Society has moved from tepidly prodding psychology with a long stick to an almost cult-like fascination and macabre fetishization of the concept. Comic books, TV shows, and movies almost always generate a buzz with the strategic use of the word “crazy.” Were that not the case, how much differently would Heath Ledger’s Joker performance have been received? Buzzwords like “psychopath,” “insane,” and “sociopath” are top contenders for words that are most frequently used despite a general misunderstanding of their meanings, right up there with “ironic” and “rhetorical.”

Schizophrenia is another one of those hot buzzwords that gets passed around corners in hushed tones but is rarely (accurately) expounded upon. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) defines schizophrenia as the presence of “two or more of the following symptoms for a significant portion of time during a 1-month period (or less if successfully treated): (1) delusions (2) hallucinations (3) disorganized speech (e.g., frequent derailment or incoherence (4) grossly disorganized or catatonic behaviour (5) negative symptoms, i.e., affective flattening, alogia (poverty of speech), or avolition (lack of motivation).” (Note: The DSM-V terminology is essentially the same.) The psychological community has examined schizophrenia with an increasingly stronger lens since the beginning of the 21st century, and they have made many surprising findings.

10 Schizophrenia Is The Result Of Over-Intense Mental Processing

A common misconception about schizophrenia is that those who suffer from it have weaker mental processing skills, which many believe is to blame for paranoid delusions and inaccurate memories. On the contrary, neural activity tests have provided evidence supporting the exact opposite explanation.

If you’ve ever been guilty of throwing back a shot or five too many on Cinco de Mayo, then you might be familiar with the phrase, “Follow my finger.” The follow-my-finger sobriety test is an example of more than just why you should usually have more water in your body than tequila; it’s an example of what psychology wizards refer to as saccadic eye movement. To put it simply, your brain processes resources and memories differently when your eyes are in motion, as opposed to a static point of view.

Scientists at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain conducted a test that focused on saccadic eye movement. The purpose of the study was to distinguish between the eye-movement (EM) brain activity of people with schizophrenia and healthy control subjects without the disease. All of the participants were asked to shift their eyes to a “target” in their peripheral vision, while avoiding a “non-target” closer to the center of vision—the catch was that they all had to keep a certain random color in mind during the exercise.

The hypothesis was that the non-target would be more distracting to the participant if its color matched the one that they were asked to keep in mind during the exercise. The results showed that the effect of matching color between the non-target and the imagined color was much more intense in participants with schizophrenia than those without. It was also observed that participants with schizophrenia were prone to hyper-focus on the space surrounding the main target’s position.

The findings served as more support to the belief that schizophrenic symptoms might actually be the result of a super-narrow, abnormally intense level of resource processing than normal.

9 Schizophrenia Is Linked With Brain Areas That Process Cannabis

Whenever somebody suggests that cannabis “kills the brain,” chances are that they’ve never heard of something called the endocannabinoid system (ECB). The ECB is a part of brain that modern science has found to be specially fine-tuned to reception of cannabinoids for emotional processing, memory maintenance, and learning.

The existence of the ECB is not evidence that lighting up in your parents’ basement actually makes you a genius, but its discovery helped us understand the brain a lot better and also raised many more questions. The existence of cannabinoid receptors provoked questions such as “why do we have cannabinoid receptors in the first place?” and “how do cannabinoid receptors interact with mental diseases?” Scientists at the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the University of Western Ontario conducted a study to address the latter question, specifically focusing on schizophrenia.

The heavily cited report states that the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the basolateral nucleus of the amyglyda (BLA) are not only both cannabinoid receptor–heavy areas that are extremely important for emotional regulation but are also prone to serious distortions in cases of schizophrenia. In addition to the relationship between cannabinoids and schizophrenia-affective brain regions, research conducted at the University of Western Ontario’s labs also reported a strong interaction between cannabinoid transmission and dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that’s been found to be essential in explaining addiction and schizophrenic pathology.

8 Schizophrenics’ Memories Are More Resilient To Long-Term Substance Abuse

Up until very recently, there hasn’t been much research done on the effects of long-term substance abuse on the working memories of people with schizophrenia. The relationship between schizophrenia and poorer memory is well documented, as is the relationship between substance abuse and forgetting your entire weekend. Less well-studied is the impairment of base-level memory by substance abuse of schizophrenics.

Drs. Jessica A. Wojtalik and Deanna Barch of the Washington University School of Medicine conducted a study to provide some much-needed data in this area. Thirty-seven schizophrenia patients (17 with a history of substance abuse and 20 non–substance abusers) and 32 non-schizophrenic controls (12 with a history of substance abuse and 20 non–substance abusers) completed a working memory task while being scanned with an fMRI. The results of the study showed that the control group was much more divided in neural activation rates between past substance abusers and non–substance abusers than the schizophrenia group.

Whereas the memory-processing brain regions of the formerly substance abusing participants in the control group were far more active during memory tests than the non–substance abusing controls, there was little to no difference in neural activity between the formerly substance abusing schizophrenic participants and non–substance abusing schizophrenic participants. Schizophrenia patients were much less accurate than the controls on all tasks, but these findings indicate that substance abuse may have a relatively smaller impact on the base-level working memory of schizophrenics compared to those without.

7 Schizophrenics Have Trouble Identifying Facial Expressions But Process Them More

How many times have you awkwardly run into that one person whose name you just can’t ever seem to recall, but you recognize their face every time? It’s moments like those that seriously make you wonder about what your memory will be like a decade from now.

In a report on the interaction between cognition and emotions in schizophrenia, Dr. Quintino R. Mano and Dr. Gregory G. Brown cited a number of peculiar findings about the working memory patterns of schizophrenia patients, one of which had to do with simple facial recognition. It was found that while schizophrenia often causes those with the condition to have difficulty expressing and identifying facial emotions, schizophrenia patients also show a significantly heightened rate of automatic and implicit processing of facial emotions.

6 Siblings Of Schizophrenics Have Different Brain Activity Than Others

Dr. Alan Ceaser and associates conducted working memory tests with the participants split into three groups: schizophrenia patients, their siblings without schizophrenia, and a control group of healthy participants without the condition or any direct relationship to people with the condition. The results of the study showed that the patient and sibling group, but not the control group, exhibited different neural reactions to changes in dopamine availability than healthy controls. This supports the hypothesis of excess dopamine being a key player in the emergence of schizophrenic symptoms.

The most important implication of the study is that there are abnormal neural activity spikes in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), cerebellum, and striatum in both schizophrenia patients and those at risk for schizophrenia—this includes the brothers and sisters of those with the condition.

5 Male Schizophrenic Smokers Are More Susceptible To Nicotine Withdrawal

The subtle neurocognitive deficits of schizophrenia patients can even be observed in the brain’s reaction to nicotine withdrawal. The Clinical Psychiatry Research Center at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences conducted a study to examine the effect of short-term nicotine abstinence on schizophrenic smokers.

The 45 participants, all male schizophrenic smokers, were split into three groups: one group that would abstain from smoking for one night, a second group that would use a nicotine patch after avoiding smoking for a night, and a third control group with no intervention at all. Each participant was given a visuospatial memory test at the beginning of the experiment and the following morning, after the intervention.

The nicotine patch group and the freely smoking group showed no significant difference in scores between either test, but the group that was withheld from both smoking and nicotine patch use exhibited significantly worse test scores after the intervention. The study concluded that nicotine abstinence causes visuospatial deficits in male smokers with schizophrenia.

4 Gender Affects Schizophrenia Symptoms

Few people really take into account the subtle differences that gender can make on the manifestation of a psychological disorder, let alone schizophrenia, but the effects are very real. It’s understood by many in the field of psychology that schizophrenia often, if not always, accompanies visual perceptual organization impairment—particularly in those patients with rough social histories. Until recently, there was not a complete understanding of just how intensely gender differences can affect the visuospatial deficits in question.

Dr. Jamie Joseph and associates at Rutgers University conducted a study to investigate the relationship between disorganized schizophrenic symptoms and gender. The tools used to measure the relationship were specially designed perceptual organization tasks: the Countour Integration Task and the Ebbinghaus Illusion.

The participant sample consisted of 43 females and 66 males. The results showed that while females (with more relatively intact bottom-up grouping skills) performed more impressively on the Contour Integration Task, males (with more top-down-oriented grouping skills) performed better on the Ebbinghaus Illusion task. This supports the notion that sex differences are an important factor to consider when weighing in on the visual-perceptual impairments caused by schizophrenia.

3 Younger Schizophrenics Aren’t Being Treated As Effectively

Psychological treatment has come a long way since the mid-19th century. These days, we tend to lean more toward the clinical communication and behavior-analysis method of approach than the “let’s try poking your crazy out with a literal icepick” approach. Despite the advancements in technology and basic human decency, there is some evidence to show that the relationship between age and quality of psychological care doesn’t necessarily improve in a linear fashion as one gets older.

In 2013, the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry published findings that show the results of medical-administrative data analyses run over adult schizophrenia patients in Quebec for two years. The results showed that 77 percent of patients aged 30 and over were receiving adequate pharmacological treatment, compared to only 47 percent of patients aged 18–29. The fact that schizophrenia has been documented to be better-treated in the earlier phases of the disease makes this a concerning discovery.

2 Schizophrenics Have Lower Sex Drive

Scientists at the Clinic for Young Schizophrenics ran a study in 2014 measuring the psychosexual tendencies of 45 young adults with schizophrenia. The 45 young adults were compared to 61 young adults without the disease as a control group.

The results found that a smaller number of the schizophrenia patients had a sexual partner or had ever had sexual intercourse compared to the control group. More men with schizophrenia who were being treated with risperidone or olanzapine reported issues with arousal than men in the control group. Proportionally, the schizophrenia patient group demonstrated an increased chance of developing negative psychosexual tendencies compared to the control group.

This doesn’t mean that anyone should start substituting the word “schizophrenic” for prude—schizophrenia doesn’t erase sexual urges or instantly overstimulate them. These findings only serve to play down the misconception that mental pathology instantly implies hypersexuality.

1 Schizophrenia Is Related To Low Appetite Control

At the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Montreal, a study was conducted in 2012 in order to examine appetite regulation and metabolic differences between schizophrenia patients and a healthy control group. Even if you don’t have a doctorate hanging on your wall, chances are that you’re somewhat familiar with the horror stories that center on metabolism dysfunctions caused by psychiatric treatment gone wrong; the study took this into account as well, measuring the relationship between food cravings and antipsychotic medication dosages.

The results showed that only schizophrenic patients demonstrated specific cerebral responses in the parahippocamus, thalamus, and middle frontal gyri to appetite stimulation. Schizophrenic patients’ parahippocampal activity and related hunger levels both increased linearly over time. It was found that medication dosage had a strong positive correlation with food cravings, and also that the severity of the disease was negatively correlated with dietary restraint.

The findings show that not only does schizophrenia lend itself to a weakened ability to control the appetite, but also that the antipsychotic drugs used to treat the disease may also drastically exacerbate the dietary symptoms.

I was raised on the nation’s capital’s concrete, spent three years eating swordfish and terrible barbeque in the Massachusetts mountains, took a nap, and woke up in this weird dimension they call Long Island to get a doctorate in psychology. I can give you a rough play-by-play on what’s happening in a Spanish soap opera and teach you a lot of Chinese curse words. Slam poetry, rock climbing, marathon running, Muay Thai, Buddhism, electronic music, and stupid YouTube videos keep me sane—if you like any of those, you go on the pretty cool person list. You can also check out my website, Instagram, or Twitter.

This is a list of 10 unusual deaths. This list includes unique or extremely rare circumstances of death recorded throughout history,  noted as being unusual by multiple sources.

The 10 truly unusual deaths of 21st century.

10. Death of Brittanie Cecil by a hockey puck shot.

Brittanie Nichole Cecil, 13-year-old American, was a hockey fan who died from injuries suffered when a puck was deflected into the stands and struck her in the left temple at Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio. on March 16, 2002. It was the first fan fatality in the NHL’s 85-year history.

9. A girl died when she was sucked down the intake pipe of pool.

Erika Tomanu, a seven-year-old girl in Saitama, Japan, died when she was sucked head first 10 meters down the intake pipe by the powerful pump of the water park’s current pool in Saitama, Japan. Despite of the grille not covering the inlet when it came off, lifeguards considered the pool safe to swim. It took 6 hours for the rescuers to recover the her body.

8. S Korean man died after playing the video game online for 50 consecutive hours.

Lee Seung Seop, a 28-year-old from South Korea, died after playing the video game StarCraft online for almost 50 consecutive hours.

In 2005, Lee visited an Internet cafe in the city of Taegu and played StarCraft almost continuously for fifty hours. He went into cardiac arrest, and died at a local hospital. A friend reported: “…he was a game addict. We all knew about it. He couldn’t stop himself.” About six weeks before his death, his girlfriend, also an avid gamer, broke up with him, in addition to him being fired from his job.

7. British man in webcam suicide.

Kevin Whitrick, a 42-year-old British man, committed suicide by hanging himself live in front of a webcam during an Internet chat session.

He was in a chatroom on PalTalk and was joined by about 60 other users in a special “insult” chatroom where people “have a go at each other”. He stood on a chair, punched a hole in his ceiling and placed a rope around a joist. and then tied the other end around his neck, then stepped off the chair.

Some people thought this was a prank, until his face started turning blue. Some people in the chat room egged him on while others tried desperately to find his address. A member in the room contacted the police, who arrived at the scene two minutes later.

6. Woman died of heart attack caused by shock of waking up at her OWN funeral.

Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov from Kazan, Russia had been wrongly declared deceased by doctors. The horrified 49-year-old began screaming when she realized they were getting ready to bury her. She was rushed back to the hospital, where doctors had declared her dead from a suspected heart attack.

Now her husband is suing the Hospital. “I am very angry and want some answers. She wasn’t dead when they said she was and they could have saved her,” he said.

5. A man who was killed by his own lawn mower.

A man died while mowing a lawn outside a train station in Kungsbacka in southern Sweden. We think he was mowing the grass on what turned out to be a severely steep incline, a witness said. The man, who fell with the machine, went under the mower and was ravaged badly by the blades.

4. The bride who drowned herself while doing her nuptial photo shoot.

A bride who drowned during a photo shoot in her wedding dress was purposefully in the water to take part in a popular ritual called ‘Trash the Dress’, it has emerged. During August of 2012, while getting her wedding pictures, tumbling down from a cliff into a waterfall while she was wearing her wedding dress.

Her body was recovered about four hours after she slipped from a rock and fell into Darwin Falls in Rawdon, north of Montreal. She had chosen the site as the backdrop for her wedding pictures. She was on the verge of getting married within days. (source).

3. Newlywed woman killed in freak explosion caused by horse.

Erica Marshall, a 28-year-old British veterinarian in Ocala, Florida, died when the horse she was treating in a hyperbaric chamber kicked the wall, released a spark from its horseshoes and triggered an explosion.

2. A husband who was ‘raped to death’ by five wives.

Uroko Onoja, a Nigerian businessman, died after being forced by five of his six wives to have s.x with each of them. Onoja was caught making love with his youngest wife by the remaining five, who were jealous of him paying her more attention.

The remaining wives demanded that he also have s.. with each of them. They threatening him with knives and sticks. He had ___ with four of them in succession, but stopped breathing before having __ with the fifth.

1. University student beheaded in go-kart crash.

Tuğba Erdoğan, a 23-year old Turkish university student , died on 8 February 2013, in a go-cart accident at a circuit located in Adapazarı, a town in the west of Istanbul. Her scarf was stuck on the rear wheel of the car causing her head to decapitate.

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We all make bad decisions. Fortunately our decisions don’t usually cause continent-wide destruction. Here are the most catastrophic decisions of the twentieth century. I think you’ll find a few surprises.

Though Harry Truman was under extreme pressure to end the war and reduce American casualties I think his decision to drop two atomic bombs on August 6th and August 9th, 1945 was in error. The Japanese were already defeated. According to Army Air Force General Henry H. (Hap) Arnold, “It always appeared to us, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.” President Eisenhower declared in an interview with Newsweek: “…the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

Bad move. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the so very lofty upper-class took control of the Democratic Party. Since then the Democrats rarely win elections, no matter how stupidly the Republicans behave. Tragically some thought this new elitist Democratic Party would be pro-peace. In fact the Democrats are more war-like than ever, only now the wars are even more pointless. (Example: our invasions of small Muslim nations.) What happened to Democrats that stand up for working people?

General MacArthur said that any defense secretary who advises the president to fight a land war is Asia should “have his head examined.” Unfortunately this is just the advice Defense Secretary Robert McNamara gave to President Johnson, and troop levels rocketed upward in the mid-1960s. The war suited the enemy. No domestic opposition was permitted in Vietnam so the government didn’t have to worry about public opinion. Vietnam possessed a large population that could hide from American firepower in the dense jungle. In contrast, the United States media often criticized the war effort. Americans don’t like high casualties, especially not in an interminable war half way around the world.

The 9/11 Commission chaired by Republican Tom Kean concluded that Saddam Hussein did not aid Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack. The Iraq Survey Group concluded that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction after 1991. So why did so many people die in the 2003 launched Iraq War? Why the huge expense?

After World War II, many Jews fled to Palestine and established the new nation of Israel, thus antagonizing a huge new set of people – the Muslim community which now numbers about 1/5 of the world’s population. Hitherto Muslims had been particularly anti-Jewish, but after the Zionists massacred villages and forced the original population to flee, Muslims turned against the Jews. It would have been far preferable for Jews to migrate to any of the English-speaking nations.

The December 7th, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor was madness. What’s startling is that Admiral Yamamoto, who planned the attack, knew very well Japan could not possibly win a protracted war against the United States. The U.S. possessed a far larger population and greatly superior industrial strength. Though his staff celebrated on December 8th, Yamamoto was sunk in depression.

If only the decision had been made to remove Chairman Mao from power! The long-suffering Chinese people would have been spared the Great Leap Forward (actually Backward), the Great Famine of 1958-1962, and the Cultural Revolution. Just one of Mao’s bright ideas during the Great Leap Forward: his plan to exterminate sparrows. He thought the sparrows consumed primarily grain, where in fact they consume a lot of insects. With the sparrows gone the locust population exploded, causing immense ecological damage.

Winston Churchill never should have issued a guaranty to Poland in 1939, which led to war when Germany invaded Poland. As esteemed American diplomat and historian George Kennan wrote: “the British guaranty to Poland … was neither necessary nor wise.” The British and French didn’t have the power to save Poland from Germany. Churchill’s foolish guaranty only benefited Stalin, who was happy to see Germany, France, and Britain destroying one another. Stalin had killed millions of his own people in his vast system of prison camps and the engineered famine of 1932-1933 (the Holodomor). Churchill I think should be singled out as the single worst decision-maker of the century. As First Lord of the Admiralty he energetically banged the drums for war as Britain pondered whether to enter World War I. Churchill also deserves a great deal of blame for the disastrous Gallipoli campaign. Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer oversaw the catastrophic return of Britain to the gold standard, which helped bring about the Great Depression.

Prime Minister Clemenceau perhaps deserves the most blame for the vindictive Versailles Treaty (signed 1919) though some of his compatriots thought him too generous. Despite promises made to the Central Powers, territory was parceled out by the victors regardless of the wishes of the inhabitants. Germany was saddled with huge reparations payments, impossible to pay. Economist John Maynard Keynes wrote of this decision: “I believe that the campaign for securing out of Germany the general costs of the war was one of the most serious acts of political unwisdom for which our statesmen have ever been responsible.” The Central Powers were unfairly forced to accept sole responsibility for the war. Keynes concluded that the Versailles treaty was a “Carthaginian peace.” Versailles vengeance sowed the seeds for World War II.

In 1914 Prime Minister Asquith and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey decide to involve Britain in World War I, although it was France and Russia – not Germany – that threatened the British Empire. British policy called for an alliance against the most formidable continental power, but long-term was Germany alone so overwhelmingly superior to both France and Russia? If Britain had not send troops the war would have ended within a year. Europe would have been spared one of its greatest nightmares – the millions that died from machine gun, cannon, disease, poison gas, and starvation. The rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia, with all its attendant misery, and the atrocities of World War II would also have been avoided. Instead of the Great War we would have had the relatively minor War of 1914, and Europe would never have descended into the depths of despair and decadence from which they still haven’t entirely recovered.

Believe it or not, one-fifth of the 21st century is already behind us, and the past 20 years were pretty intense. While there were plenty of social and political changes across the world, one industry that has seen significant advancement is medicine.

The first 20 years of the 21st century have seen advancements in the way we identify, catalog, and treat a plethora of diseases. This list highlights the 10 most significant medical advances made in the first fifth of the 21st century.

10 Prosthetics Have Gone Bionic

The Six Million Doller Man made it seem like bionic implants and prostheses were an impossible future. That show aired in the 1970s, and the future is now! Of course, people aren’t transformed from crippled astronauts into superheroes, but bionic prosthetics have gone from science fiction to reality.

It will be a while before these limbs look and feel like biological appendages. Still, advancements are being made towards that goal. Modern prostheses can function better than past versions. Some even make it possible for the wearer to manipulate them with their minds.

By placing electrodes on various parts of the skull, a person can manipulate their bionic prostheses by thinking. The technology needs some work, but it’s been proven to function with some patients being able to open and close a bionic hand to pick up and manipulate objects.

The technology has gone beyond manipulation to make it possible to “feel” with bionic fingers. Other advancements include bionic lenses that restore vision. Work is being done to create implantable neuroprosthetic devices that can control computers, so expect this technology to improve and advance over the next 20 years.

9 HIV/AIDS Treatment Has Taken The Fight To The Virus

For years, it seemed that HIV was a virus that couldn’t be defeated. When it infected someone, it was only a matter of time before they developed AIDS, which would ultimately claim the patient’s life. For the latter part of the 20th century, that was typically the result of an infection.

There were antiviral medications patients could take, but they were numerous, and each came with side effects. This made it difficult for patients to stay on schedule, and eventually, the virus won out. That began to change in 2006 with the release of Atripla.

The medicine combined three antiretroviral drugs into a single dose, making it much easier and less damaging to take. In 2013, Stribild was released, and it combined four HIV antiretroviral medications into a single dose. Medicines and treatments continued to improve over the first two decades of the 21st century.

In 2017 and 2019, two new medications, Juluce and Dovato, were released, drastically improving treatment options for patients. Those two breakthrough drugs made it possible for every patient with HIV to be on an effective single-dose therapy, helping to reduce the number of HIV patients who develop AIDS while drastically reducing healthcare costs.

8 We Cracked The Human Genome

In 1990, an international scientific research project began the arduous task of cracking the human genome. The idea was to determine the base pairs that make up human DNA. These would then be mapped to better understand the human genome, which would aid in medical research and treatment.

In 2000, the Human Genome Project released a rough draft of the human genome. It was the first time in history that people could read a complete set of human genetic information. Three years later, a final draft was released as the program shut down, having delivered on its promise to map the three billion nucleotides contained in our DNA.

The finished project presented a mosaic of various individuals, and the data derived from the study has been instrumental in furthering our understanding of human genetics. The project made it possible to map an individual human genome easier and relatively inexpensively. This makes it possible to identify disease-causing mutations before they manifest in a patient.

Genomics advancements have furthered cancer research and treatment with the creation of more targeted drugs. Additionally, we now know the genetic basis of nearly 5,000 conditions, which is a significant improvement over the 60 we understood before we cracked the human genome.

7 Advances In Genetic Engineering

Science fiction tells us that genetic engineering results in the creation of monsters. In reality, it offers a means of correcting congenital defects and mutations that result in disease. The most well-known process for accomplishing this is CRISPR, or clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.

Essentially, CRISPR is a means of targeted editing a living organism’s genes. It can also be used to create agricultural products, genetically modified organisms, and control pests and pathogens. The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier for developing the technique.

The use of CRISPR genomic modification remains controversial, but it has been shown to be effective in various medical applications. Research in biomedicine shows that CRISPR can treat cancer, progeria, sickle cell disease, hemophilia, Huntington’s disease, and many more diseases resulting from a person’s genes.

In 2020, CRISPR was used effectively to treat glioblastoma and metastatic ovarian cancer. Further research and development will likely yield more advancements in treating various diseases, pathogens, and more. Research is being conducted worldwide to advance CRISPR into various therapies, suggesting it will become commonplace in the future.

6 Heart Disease Is No Longer A Death Sentence

Before the turn of the century, doctors could do very little for a patient who suffered a heart attack. Treatment typically consisted of providing a drip of morphine and lidocaine, which was believed to prevent irregular heartbeats. Most patients didn’t recover, but these days, deaths from heart disease have dropped by 40%.

A lot of that is due to the development of new medicines, including Lipitor, Mevacor, Crestor, and Simvastatin, which all work to slow the progression of atherosclerosis (plaque and fatty material buildup in the arteries). With those drugs, fewer patients are getting to the point of having a heart attack.

Still, heart attacks do occur, but when they do, they are treated very differently than they were in the past. Today, it’s all about speed. Once a patient arrives at the hospital, a clot can be destroyed with drugs. A genetically engineered tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) can bust up a clot, restoring blood flow.

Patients who require surgery are treated differently from the past, resulting in far fewer deaths from a cardiac infarction. The improvement stems from a 1998/2000 goal set by the American Heart Association, which wanted to reduce cardiac deaths by 25% by 2010. In 2008, the goal was achieved, and by 2020, a 40% reduction was reached.

5 Stem Cell Research & Application Made Leaps & Bounds

The use of stem cells in research isn’t anything new, as the technology to derive them from embryos was developed in the early 1980s. Since then, technology has advanced significantly, and medical research and treatment applications have hit the ground running in the 21st century.

Stem divide to form “daughter cells,” which can then turn into new stem cells or become any other specialized cell in the body. Under the right laboratory conditions (or in the body), stem cells can replace damaged cells. Potentially, they can be used to grow new organs.

The applications of the latter are promising, as any organs grown from a patient’s own cells wouldn’t require a lifetime of anti-rejection medication. Furthermore, the organ would theoretically be accepted without a problem, reducing the risk of transplantation, which is already a complex procedure.

Other applications include treating against disease and genetic conditions. In one study, manipulated bone marrow cells were transplanted into two seven-year-old boys. This stopped the progress of a fatal brain disease called adrenoleukodystrophy. Research into other applications is promising, suggesting stem cell therapy is truly the future of medicine.

4 Targeted Cancer Therapies Are Improving Survival Rates

For years, the primary method to treat a patient with cancer was through chemotherapy and radiation therapy. While these often worked, they did so by attacking cancer cells and healthy cells, which presents its own set of problems. Over the past decade, new techniques have been developed that make it possible to treat cancer more effectively.

Targeted therapies make it possible to eliminate many of the dangerous side effects of chemo and radiation therapies by going after the cancer cells without the danger of harming healthy cells. These targeted therapies work in several ways, but for the most part, they do the following:

-They identify and kill cancer cells directly.
-They interfere with the spread of cancerous cells, blocking the ones responsible for tumor growth.

The past decade has seen FDA approval for more than 25 new medicines that have shown an effectiveness in treating cancer patients through targeted therapy. The drugs are either small-molecule or monoclonal antibodies, which target specific cancer cells’ functions of how they divide, grow, and spread.

The technology behind targeted therapy is still relatively new, so advances are continuing around the world. It doesn’t mean we’ve beaten cancer, but we have advanced in the fight against one of humanity’s most insidious enemies.

3 Nanomedicine Left Science-Fiction Behind And Became A Reality

Sci-Fi has long been the domain of nanotechnology, and for a good reason. Programming machines smaller than cells is fantastical in nature, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. To be clear, that’s not what modern nanomedicine is, but the impact of what it has become suggests the future may be devoid of side effects.

Current nanomedicine is centered mainly around drug delivery. Instead of programming impossibly tiny robots, nanomedicine works by employing nanoparticles that are specifically engineered to target specific cells in targeted drug delivery. In short, it takes medicine directly to the affected cells, which reduces the total amount of drugs required.

Additionally, nanoparticles avoid healthy cells, which limits side effects. As the technology develops, it could reduce side effects in targeted therapies, improving drug effectiveness and survival rates.

Nanotechnology-based drugs are already on the market. Drugs like Abraxane, Onivyde, Rapamune, and others have improved anti-rejection and cancer treatments. Research is ongoing, and further advances in the treatment of HIV and cancer are looking to be the way of the future.

2 It Is Now Possible To Print Body Parts

Fabricating a body part from raw materials has long been the subject of science fiction, but that’s not the case any longer. Since 3D printing technology has advanced over the past two decades, new methods in creating implantable body parts have emerged. The current technology makes it possible to combine cell types with polymers to create living, functional tissues.

The technology behind this is still in the early phases of development, and it isn’t widely available at this time. Still, studies have made significant leaps and bounds via the technology. By 2020, researchers had successfully printed and implanted bionic eyes, hearts, skin, bionic ears, elastic bones, ovaries, and antibacterial teeth.

Because it’s still in the research and development phase, these items and organs have been successfully implanted into mice and other animals. Still, the technology is incredibly promising. As it develops, it should be possible to utilize a specialized 3D printer to recreate organs that can be implanted into patients.

Bioprinting and biotechnology companies are working hard to recreate everything from blood vessels to ears and whatever is needed in the future. It may eventually be possible to print a person’s heart to replace a damaged one without having to wait for months or even years on a transplant list.

1 RNA Vaccines Left The Lab And Took The Fight To The Virus

On their own, the vaccines developed to fight against COVID-19 are a fantastic medical achievement. Simply getting them through all the necessary red tape is noteworthy. Still, there’s far more going on behind the scenes than the average person knows because the technology that went into creating the vaccines represents a significant advancement.

The vaccines were made as quickly as they were, in part, because the research was already underway to develop the technology of RNA vaccines. Traditional vaccines work by placing an inactive version of the whole virus into the body. The immune system responds by learning how to attack and deal with it.

Another way to fight a virus is to deliver the nucleic acid that encodes the protein. The person’s immune system reacts by making the necessary protein to fight the virus. RNA vaccinations inject the nucleic acid that codes for the proteins that the cells need to make, delivering the “instructions” the body needs to fight off the virus . . . in other words, the vaccine changes the host’s DNA.

RNA vaccine technology is relatively new, and the COVID-19 vaccines are the first to make it out of the testing phase and into patients’ bodies. Thus far, it’s appeared successful, but it’s only the beginning. Further research and advancements in the technology could battle against viruses that have been difficult in the past, making RNA vaccines one of the most important medical advancements of the 21st century.