Weekly Newsletter

FRIDAY, Oct. 26 (HealthDay News) -- Within a year after having face transplant surgery, some patients regain sensory and motor functions such as the ability to speak, chew food and smile, experts have found.

For the study, Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, director of the plastic surgery transplantation program at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston, and colleagues assessed the return of sensory and motor functions in four patients who had full or partial face transplants between 2009 and 2011.

Initially, the transplant patients could not breathe through their new mouth or nose and required a breathing tube. They were also unable to speak or chew, and could not sense objects touching the surface of their skin.

But one year after the transplant, some of the patients could breathe, eat and talk quite easily. They also regained their sense of smell, were able to make facial expressions and could do some socializing, the investigators found.

These successes depended on whether major nerves in the body were able to be reconnected with those in the transplanted face, the researchers noted. In some patients, severe damage from their original injuries made it impossible to reconnect nerves in some areas.

The study was scheduled for presentation Saturday at the American Society of Plastic Surgeons' annual meeting in New Orleans.

"What we found is that a face transplant is more than a way to create a more pleasing appearance because the new face can be functional as well," Pomahac, who is also an ASPS member surgeon, said in a society news release.

The data and conclusions of research presented at medical meetings should be viewed as preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More information

The American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery has more about face transplantation.

SATURDAY, Oct. 27 (HealthDay News) -- Wearing nonprescription decorative contact lenses that make your eyes look like those of creatures such as vampires or werewolves is a bad idea and could damage your eyes, an expert warns.

Many people use over-the-counter decorative contact lenses at Halloween or at other times of the year, even though they are illegal and may cause serious eye infections and possibly permanent vision loss.

"There is no such thing as a 'one-size-fits-all' contact lens," Dr. Randall Fuerst, chairman of the American Optometric Association's contact lens and cornea section, said in an association news release. "Consumers who purchase lenses illegally, without a prescription or without consultation from an eye doctor, put themselves at risk for serious bacterial infections, allergic reactions or even significant damage to the eye's ability to function, with the potential for irreversible sight loss."

Even though they're illegal, decorative lenses are marketed and distributed to consumers through sources including the Internet, flea markets, convenience stores and beauty salons.

A 2012 American Optometric Association survey found that 18 percent of Americans wear noncorrective, decorative or colored contact lenses. Of those, 28 percent said they bought the lenses without a prescription and from a source other than an eye doctor.

"Decorative contact lenses carry the same risks as corrective contact lenses," Fuerst said. "Because of this, it's important for consumers to obtain a prescription and familiarize themselves with the information available from an eye doctor to reduce the risk of infection."

A proper medical eye and vision examination ensures that contact lenses are suitable for a person, that the lenses are properly fitted and that the patient knows how to care for their contact lenses.

More information

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has more about decorative contact lenses.

WEDNESDAY, Oct. 24 (HealthDay News) -- If you're yawning from fatigue or boredom, your loyal dog is likely yawning as well, a new study finds.

But this isn't the case with puppies of 7 months or younger, who may not have developed empathy yet. (And they're far too busy chewing up shoes or jumping on the furniture.)

Researchers in Sweden explained that dogs, like humans, gradually become susceptible to yawns as they get older. They noted that contagious yawning is a sign of empathy, as well as a response to being tired or bored.

The researchers, led by Elainie Alenkaer Madsen and Tomas Persson at Lund University, observed the response of 35 dogs between 4 and 14 months old during play and cuddling when a human repeatedly yawned, gaped or did neither.

The final analysis only included 32 dogs. "Three dogs were excluded from analyses, due to, respectively, distractions, over-excitedness and poor owner yawning," the researchers wrote.

Dogs older than 7 months showed signs of contagious yawning. The study also showed that roughly half the dogs became tired themselves, so much so that some dogs needed to be prevented from falling asleep. The researchers concluded that empathy slowly develops over the first year of a dog's life.

Children also typically start to yawn contagiously at the age of 4 years, when their ability to accurately identify other people's emotions is more developed. Unlike humans and other primates, however, adult dogs do not respond differently to strangers and are just as likely to catch yawns from people they don't know very well.

The study was published online Oct. 17 in the journal Animal Cognition.

More information

Utah State University has information about teaching empathy.

WEDNESDAY, Oct. 24 (HealthDay News) -- Even without any external clues, your body can predict events that are about to happen. For example, you might sense that your boss is about to show up while you're playing a video game at your desk.

That's the conclusion of Northwestern University researchers who analyzed the results of 26 studies published between 1978 and 2010, and published their findings recently in the journal Frontiers in Perception Science.

It has already been shown that your subconscious mind sometimes knows more than your conscious mind, according to study author Julia Mossbridge, a research associate in the visual perception, cognition and neuroscience laboratory at Northwestern.

"What hasn't been clear is whether humans have the ability to predict future important events even without any clues as to what might happen," she said in a university news release.

For example, a worker playing a video game while wearing headphones wouldn't be able to hear if the boss was coming around the corner.

"But our analysis suggests that if you were tuned into your body, you might be able to detect these anticipatory changes between two and 10 seconds beforehand and close your video game," Mossbridge said. "You might even have a chance to open that spreadsheet you were supposed to be working on. And if you were lucky, you could do all this before your boss entered the room."

This type of occurrence is sometimes called presentiment (as in sensing the future) but it's not clear if people are actually sensing the future.

"I like to call the phenomenon 'anomalous anticipatory activity,'" Mossbridge said. "The phenomenon is anomalous, some scientists argue, because we can't explain it using present-day understanding about how biology works, though explanations related to recent quantum biological findings could potentially make sense. It's anticipatory because it seems to predict future physiological changes in response to an important event without any known clues, and it's an activity because it consists of changes in the cardiopulmonary, skin and nervous systems."

More information

The Parapsychological Association has more about precognition.