Workers, who face high emotional demand and conflicting roles, are more likely to report psychological distress, a new study has revealed.

Hakon A Johannessen, PhD, and colleagues of the Norwegian National Institute of Occupational Health, Oslo, used nationwide survey data to look at how the psychosocial work environment affects employees ` levels of psychological distress.

It was found that 16 percent of workers said that they were at least slightly bothered by psychological distress- including symptoms of depression and anxiety- over the past month.

The study focused on two main risk factors: role conflict, such as being given work tasks without enough resources to complete them and receiving contradictory requests from different people; and emotional demands, defined as "dealing with strong feelings such as sorrow, anger, desperation, and frustration" at work.

The research suggested that perceived role conflict and emotional demands were "the most important and most consistent risk factors" for psychological distress.

The study was published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, official publication of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM).

Scientists have for the first time used brain scans to identify emotions such as happiness, anger, sadness or even envy that a person may be experiencing.

The study combines functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and machine learning to measure brain signals to accurately read emotions in individuals.
The findings by Carnegie Mellon University illustrate how the brain categorises feelings, giving researchers the first reliable process to analyse emotions.

"This research introduces a new method with potential to identify emotions without relying on people`s ability to self-report," said Karim Kassam, assistant professor of social and decision sciences and lead author of the study.

"It could be used to assess an individual`s emotional response to almost any kind of stimulus, for example, a flag, a brand name or a political candidate," said Kassam.

For the study, 10 drama actors were scanned while viewing the words of nine emotions: anger, disgust, envy, fear, happiness, lust, pride, sadness and shame.

While inside the fMRI scanner, the actors were instructed to enter each of these emotional states multiple times, in random order.

The computer model, constructed from using statistical information to analyse the fMRI activation patterns gathered for 18 emotional words, had learned the emotion patterns from self-induced emotions.

It was able to correctly identify the emotional content of photos being viewed using the brain activity of the viewers.

To identify emotions within the brain, the researchers first used the participants` neural activation patterns in early scans to identify the emotions experienced by the same participants in later scans.

The team took the machine learning analysis of the self-induced emotions to guess which emotion the subjects were experiencing when they were exposed to the disgusting photographs.

The computer model achieved a rank accuracy of 0.91. With nine emotions to choose from, the model listed disgust as the most likely emotion 60 per cent of the time and as one of its top two guesses 80 per cent of the time.

Finally, they applied machine learning analysis of neural activation patterns from all but one of the participants to predict the emotions experienced by the hold-out participant.

"Despite manifest differences between people`s psychology, different people tend to neurally encode emotions in remarkably similar ways," noted Amanda Markey, a graduate student in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences.

A surprising finding from the research was that almost equivalent accuracy levels could be achieved even when the computer model made use of activation patterns in only one of a number of different subsections of the human brain.

Men who cannot produce sperm are more prone to developing cancer than the general population, a new study has revealed.

The study also found that a diagnosis of azoospermia - infertile because of an absence of sperm in their ejaculate - before age 30 carries an eight-fold cancer risk.
Lead author Michael Eisenberg, MD, PhD, assistant professor of urology at the medical school and director of male reproductive medicine and surgery at Stanford Hospital and Clinics, said that a man suffering from azoospermia has a risk for developing cancer similar to that for a typical man 10 years older.

He said that there is evidence that infertility may be a barometer for men`s overall health, asserting that a few studies have found an association of male infertility with testicular cancer.

Eisenberg said that the new study not only assigns the bulk of infertile men`s increased cancer risk to those with azoospermia, but also suggests that this risk extends beyond testicular cancer.

The study population consisted of 2,238 infertile men who were seen at a Baylor andrology clinic from 1989 to 2009. Their median age was 35.7 when they were first evaluated for the cause of their infertility. Of those men, 451 had azoospermia, and 1,787 did not. There were otherwise no apparent initial differences between the two groups.

After undergoing a semen analysis, the men were followed for an average of 6.7 years to see which of them turned up in the Texas Cancer Registry.

Their rates of diagnosed cancer incidence were then compared with age-adjusted cancer-diagnosis statistics of Texas men in general.

In all, a total of 29 of the 2,238 infertile men developed cancer over a 5.8-year average period from their semen analysis to their cancer diagnosis. This contrasted with an expected 16.7 cases, on an age-adjusted basis, for the male Texas population in general.

This meant that infertile men were 1.7 times as likely to develop cancer as men in the general population. This is considered a moderately increased risk.

But comparing the cancer risk of azoospermic and nonazoospermic infertile men revealed a major disparity: The azoospermic men were at a substantially elevated risk - nearly three times as likely to receive a diagnosis of cancer as men in the overall population.

Infertile men who weren`t azoospermic, in contrast, exhibited a statistically insignificant increased cancer risk of only 1.4 times that of men in the overall population.

By excluding men whose cancer diagnosis came within two or three years of their infertility evaluation, the researchers were able to rule out the possibility that azoospermia caused by an undiagnosed cancer had affected the statistics.

The findings suggest that genetic defects that result in azoospermia may also broadly increase a man`s vulnerability to cancer, Eisenberg said, supporting the notion that azoospermia and cancer vulnerability may share common genetic causes.

The study has been published online in Fertility and Sterility.

The new respiratory virus, MERS coronavirus, that originated in the Middle East is mostly spread in hospitals and appears more deadly than SARS, according to a new study.

The virus which infected more than 60 people and killed 38 of them has some striking similarities to SARS but hasn't spread as quickly as SARS did in 2003.

"To me, this felt a lot like SARS did," said Dr. Trish Perl, a senior hospital epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Medicine, who was part of an international team.

Perl said they couldn`t nail down how it was spread in every case - through droplets from sneezing or coughing, or a more indirect route. Some of the hospital patients weren`t close to the infected person, but somehow picked up the virus.

"In the right circumstances, the spread could be explosive," said Perl, while emphasizing that the team only had a snapshot of one MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) cluster in Saudi Arabia.

Cases have continued to trickle in, and there appears to be an ongoing outbreak in Saudi Arabia. MERS cases have also been reported in Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Tunisia. Most have had a direct connection to the Middle East region.

In the Saudi cluster that was investigated, certain patients infected many more people than would be expected, Perl said. One patient who was receiving dialysis treatment spread MERS to seven others, including fellow dialysis patients at the same hospital. During SARS, such patients were known as "superspreaders" and effectively seeded outbreaks in numerous countries.

Perl and colleagues also concluded that symptoms of both diseases are similar, with an initial fever and cough that may last for a few days before pneumonia develops.

But MERS appears far more lethal. Compared to SARS` 8 percent death rate, the fatality rate for MERS in the Saudi outbreak was about 65 percent, though the experts could be missing mild cases that might skew the figures.

While SARS was traced to bats before jumping to humans via civet cats, the source of the MERS virus remains a mystery. It is most closely related to a bat virus though some experts suspect people may be getting sick from animals like camels or goats. Another hypothesis is that infected bats may be contaminating foods like dates, commonly harvested and eaten in Saudi Arabia.

Other experts said there are enough worrying signs about MERS that it can`t yet be written off, despite the relatively small number of cases it has caused.

WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan has previously called MERS the single biggest public health threat and acknowledged officials were "empty-handed" regarding prevention measures.

"We understand too little about this virus when viewed against the magnitude of its potential threat," she said last month in Geneva.

Aspirin lowers the rate of the accumulation of DNA mutations in abnormal cells in at least one pre-cancerous condition, a new study has claimed.

Carlo Maley, PhD, a member of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, said that aspirin and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, which are commonly available and cost-effective medications, may exert cancer-preventing effects by lowering mutation rates.

Maley, working with gastroenterologist and geneticist Brian Reid, MD, PhD, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, analyzed biopsy samples from 13 patients with a pre-cancerous condition called Barrett`s esophagus who were tracked for six to 19 years.

In an "observational crossover" study design, some patients started out taking daily aspirin for several years, and then stopped, while others started taking aspirin for the first time during observation. The goal was to track the rate of mutations in tissues sampled at different times.

The researchers found that biopsies taken while patients were on an aspirin had on average accumulated new mutations about 10 times more slowly than biopsies obtained during years when patients were not taking aspirin.

Gender and ethnic distribution of study patients reflected the known demographics of esophageal cancer, which predominantly affects, white, middle-aged and elderly men, he said. Barrett`s esophagus only occasionally progresses to esophageal cancer.

Maley said that less inflammation may result in less production within pre-cancerous tissue of oxidants known to damage DNA, and may dampen growth-stimulating signaling.

For the duration of the study, the rate of accumulation of mutations measured in the biopsied tissue between time points was slow, even when patients were not taking aspirin, with the exception of one patient.

While mutations accumulated at a steady rate, the vast majority of mutations arose before the abnormal tissue was first detected in the clinic, the researchers concluded.

In the one patient who later went on to develop cancer, a population of cellular "clones" with a great number of mutations emerged shortly before he started taking aspirin.

The study has been published online in journal PLOS Genetics.