Lady Gaga and PTSD: 5 Misconceptions About the Disorder

Lady Gaga recently revealed on the "Today" show that she has post-traumatic stress disorder.

"I told the kids today that I suffer from a mental illness. I suffer from PTSD. I've never told anyone that before," Lady Gaga told "Today" on Dec. 5, after visiting a shelter for homeless LGBT youth in Harlem, in New York City.

Between 7 and 8 percent of people in the United States will have PSTD at some point in their lives, according to the National Center for PSTD.

And the rate is higher among women than men: About 10 percent of women will develop the disorder at some point in their lives, compared with about 4 percent of men.

Here are five misconceptions about PTSD.

Myth: Only war zones trigger PTSD

People think that someone needs to experience a really huge catastrophic or personal event in order for PTSD to develop, said Thomas Babayan, a licensed marriage and family therapist at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Nathanson Family Resilience Center.

But although catastrophic events such as 9/11 or being in a war zone are indeed associated with PTSD, an event that leads to PTSD doesn't have to be big.

Rather, "it's less about the actual level of threat and more about one's perception [of threat] or what his or her internal experience is" during an event that can lead to PSTD, Babayan told Live Science.

Indeed, PTSD can happen in many different environments and can happen to children as well as adults, Babayan added.

Myth: PTSD is no different from the fear someone feels after a scary event

It's common to feel shook up after a scary event, but when mental health experts talk about PTSD, they're talking about people who have developed symptoms from four specific "symptom clusters" after a traumatic event, Babayan said.

One cluster involves avoidance behavior, which can mean avoiding particular events as well as emotional numbness. Another cluster involves changes in mood, such as feeling depressed. The third is a state of hyperarousal, or being very alert or attentive. The last cluster involves having "intrusive" thoughts and memories, which pop into a person's mind and become difficult to dismiss, according to the psychiatry handbook the DSM-V.

In addition, these symptoms need to last longer than a month for someone to be diagnosed with PTSD, Babayan said. When symptoms last less than one month, a person is experiencing "acute stress," which is more temporary condition, he said.  

Myth: In people with PTSD, flashbacks are big, dramatic events

Yes, flashbacks are a symptom of PTSD, but they're not as dramatic as they seem on TV.

Flashbacks are one aspect of the PTSD symptom cluster called intrusive thoughts and memories, Babayan said.

But a flashback doesn't have to be a big, dramatic event that makes a person actually feel as though they're back in a combat zone or witnessing or experiencing something awful, Babayan said. Often, people simply get taken away from the present moment and lose their connection with the people they are with, he said. Also, the person with PTSD may have a physiological reaction attached to this experience, such as an increased heart rate.

Still, flashbacks with subtle symptoms can have an impact on a person's life, Babayan noted. For example, if a parent drifts away from the present moment while taking care of his or her children, it could be dangerous.

Myth: People with PTSD are violent

This is another misconception that's been popularized in TV shows and movies. However, it's "not the case at all" that everyone with PTSD is violent and out of control, Babayan said. [Top 10 Stigmatized Health Disorders]

"Many people suffer very quietly with PTSD," Babayan said. Some people tend to experience avoidance symptoms and emotional numbing, and they may experience less of the arousal that may create more aggressive behaviors.

Everyone with PTSD has his or her own case, he said.

Myth: PSTD will just go away on its own

Sometimes people take a "just power through it" approach to mental health disorders, and PTSD is no exception, Babayan said.  But left untreated, PSTD can last for a long time, he said.

Fortunately, there are a lot of treatments for PTSD that have been shown to be helpful, Babayan said. One type of treatment, for example, is prolonged exposure therapy, he said. During prolonged exposure therapy, a person is asked to tell his or her story over and over again in order to become more comfortable with the experience.

Babayan added that unsolicited advice from friends and family members — such as telling someone with PTSD to "just calm down" or "forgot about that stuff" — is often unhelpful. Rather, friends and family members should focus on simply listening to those with PTSD, he said.

Don't Drowse and Drive: Sleepiness as Risky as DUI

Even with holiday travel approaching, it's important to get enough sleep before getting behind the wheel: Missing 1 or 2 hours of sleep nearly doubles a person's risk for a car crash, a new report finds.

And missing 2 to 3 hours of sleep more than quadruples the risk for a crash, according to the new report, published today (Dec. 6) from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. This is the same crash risk a person faces when driving over the legal limit for alcohol, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

"Our new research shows that a driver who has slept for less than 5 hours has a crash risk comparable to someone driving drunk," David Yang, the executive director of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, said in a statement.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that adults get at least 7 hours of a sleep each night. [5 Things You Must Know About Sleep]

In the new report, the researchers found that the more hours of sleep a person missed over a 24-hour period, the more his or her risk for a car crash increased, compared with people who got the recommended 7 hours of sleep.

The researchers looked at survey data from the NHTSA, which included information on more than 7,200 drivers involved in more than 4,500 crashes across the U.S. The drivers reported the number of hours of sleep they got during the 24 hours preceding their crashes.

Results showed that people who said that they got 6 to 7 hours of sleep that night, or up to 1 hour less than recommended, were 1.3 times more likely to get in a car accident than those who got the full 7 hours. Getting 5 to 6 hours of sleep, or 1 to 2 hours less than recommended, was associated with a 1.9-times increased risk of crash.

But getting 4 to 5 hours of sleep a night was associated with a 4.3 times increase in the risk of a crash, and for those who got less than 4 hours of sleep, the risk increased more than 11-fold.

Among the drivers surveyed, 97 percent said that they viewed drowsy driving as a completely unacceptable behavior, according to the report. However, nearly one in three drivers admitted that they drove at least once in the past month when they were so tired they could barely keep their eyes open.

Staying safe behind the wheel

Having trouble keeping your eyes open is one symptom of drowsy driving, along with drifting from your lane and forgetting the last few miles driven. But more than half of drivers who are involved in drowsy-driving-related crashes experience no symptoms before falling asleep behind the wheel, AAA said.

Because of this, AAA recommends that people not rely on their bodies to provide the "warning signs" that they are too tired to drive. Rather, people should prioritize getting at least 7 hours of sleep each night.

AAA also recommends that on longer trips, drivers should plan to travel at times when they are normally awake, schedule a break every 2 hours or 100 miles (160 kilometers), avoid heavy foods, travel with an alert passenger and take turns driving, and avoid taking medications that cause drowsiness or other impairment.

2,000-Year-Old Roman Skeletons Show Signs of Malaria

Malaria afflicted the Roman Empire some 2,000 years ago, according to a new analysis of human teeth collected in Italian cemeteries.

Malaria is a serious and sometimes fatal mosquito-borne disease caused by parasites. In 2015, an estimated 214 million cases of malaria occurred worldwide, leading to 438,000 deaths, mostly children, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Previous research suggested that malaria was a major disease that afflicted Italy during the Roman Empire. "Its presence during this time is indirectly supported by extensive writings from ancient authors, such as Celsus and Galen, as well as ancient human skeletal remains," said lead study author Stephanie Marciniak, a biological anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University.

However, it was uncertain which species of parasite caused malaria during the Roman Empire. Currently, Plasmodium falciparum is responsible for the largest number of malaria-related deaths globally, but different species of Plasmodium can cause other, usually milder forms of malaria. [27 Devastating Infectious Diseases]

"Knowing the specific species helps frame interpretations about the diversity of the experience of disease in the past," Marciniak told Live Science. "Being able to have a window to ancient microbes can also help to understand how a particular causative agent may have evolved or changed over time."

To learn more about ancient malaria, Marciniak and her colleagues examined human teeth from the bodies of 58 adults and 10 children that date back to the Imperial period of the first to third centuries A.D. These remains came from three cemeteries in southern Italy — the sites of Isola Sacra and Velia were known as important port cities and trading centers, while Vagnari was located farther inland and is thought to be the burial site of laborers who would have worked on a rural Roman estate, the researchers said.

"In order to explore a complex disease like malaria, having a range of sites is beneficial, since malaria could technically flourish in any of these locations," Marciniak said.

The scientists analyzed DNA fragments from dental pulp taken from the teeth. "The only way to identify the specific species of malaria is to use molecular techniques," Marciniak said.

Usable malaria parasite DNA was challenging to extract because the microbes primarily dwell within the bloodstream and organs, including the spleen and liver, which decompose and break down over time — in this case, over the course of two millennia. Still, the researchers were able to pin down the presence of Plasmodium falciparum in the remains of two adults — one from Velia, the other from Vagnari.

These findings revealed that malaria afflicted Imperial-era Italy both on the coasts and inland. "Malaria was likely a significant historical pathogen that caused widespread death in ancient Rome," study senior author Hendrik Poinar, a paleogeneticist and director of McMaster University's Ancient DNA Center in Hamilton, Canada, said in a statement.

Marciniak cautioned that while they know that this parasite was present in ancient Rome, they do not know if the disease killed the people it was found in. "Finding Plasmodium falciparum malaria in the two adult skeletons cannot be extrapolated to interpretations about widespread death or catastrophe caused by this parasite in Imperial-period Italy," she said.

Future research can explore other sites and time periods "in order to explore the scope of the parasite," Marciniak said. Future discoveries of ancient malaria DNA could help them see how the disease might have evolved over time, she said.

The scientists detailed their findings online yesterday (Dec. 5) in the journal Current Biology.

Fingernails on a Chalkboard: Why This Sound Gives You the Shivers

If you're like most people, you probably can't stand the sound of fingernails scraping across a blackboard. You're probably cringing just thinking about it. This ear-piercing noise is so universally disliked, perhaps it's no surprise that dozens of scientists have researched why it evokes such a visceral reaction.

Overall, research shows that this ear-splitting noise has the same frequency as that of a crying baby and a human scream, indicating that these sounds are tied to survival. For instance, people attuned to these frequencies may rescue a crying infant sooner, improving the baby's longevity.

One study has suggested that the shape of our ear canals, as well as our own perceptions, are to blame for our distaste of shrill sounds.

The study's participants rated their discomfort to various unpleasant noises, such as a fork scraping against a plate or Styrofoam squeaking. The two sounds rated as the most unpleasant, they said, were fingernails scratching on a chalkboard and a piece of chalk running against slate.

The researchers then created variations of these two sounds by modifying certain frequency ranges, removing the harmonic portions (or other concordant tones). They told half of the listeners the true source of the sounds, and the other half that the sounds came from pieces of contemporary music. Finally, they played back the new sounds for the participants, while monitoring certain indicators of stress, such as heart rate, blood pressure and the electrical conductivity of skin.

They found that the offensive sounds changed the listeners' skin conductivity significantly, showing that they really do cause a measureable, physical stress reaction.

The most painful frequencies were not the highest or lowest, but instead those that were between 2,000 and 4,000 Hertz. The human ear is most sensitive to sounds that fall in this frequency range, said study researcher Michael Oehler, a professor of media and music management at Macromedia University of Applied Sciences in Germany.

Oehler pointed out that the shape of the human ear canal may have evolved to amplify frequencies that are important for communication and survival. Thus, a painfully amplified chalkboard screech is just an unfortunate side effect of this (mostly) beneficial development. "But this is really just speculation," Oehler told Live Science in 2011, when the research was presented at a meeting for the Acoustical Society of America. "The only thing we can definitively say is where we found the unpleasant frequencies."

Listeners in the study, Oehler said, rated a sound as more pleasant if they thought it was pulled from a musical composition. (Though this didn't fool their bodies, as participants in both study groups expressed the same changes in skin conductivity.) The implication, then, is that chalkboard screeches may not irk people so much if they didn't already think the sound was incredibly annoying. [Why Do Seashells Sound Like the Ocean?]

Brain pickings

Another study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2012, reveals what's happening in the brain when people hear screechy sounds. The findings suggest that the fingernail-chalkboard sound triggers an uptick in communication between a region of the brain involved in hearing and another region of the brain involved in emotions.

In the study, 13 participants listened to 74 sounds, including nails on a chalkboard and the whine of power tools, and rated them according to their pleasantness. Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine how the participants' brains responded to the sounds.

When the participants heard an unpleasant sound, there was an interaction between the auditory cortex, which processes sound, and the amygdala, which processes negative emotions.

"It appears there is something very primitive kicking in," study researcher Sukhbinder Kumar, a research fellow at Newcastle University, told Live Science in 2012. "It's a possible distress signal from the amygdala to the auditory cortex."

Moreover, the more averse the sound, the greater the activity between these two brain regions, the researchers said. Some of the most unpleasant sounds, according to the participants' ratings, included a knife on a bottle, a fork on a glass and chalk on a blackboard. The nicest sounds included flowing water, thunder and a laughing baby, they found. [Why Does the Sound of Water Help You Sleep?]

Frequencies between 2,000 and 5,000 Hertz were found to be unpleasant — roughly the same frequencies found by the 2011 research. "This is the frequency range where our ears are most sensitive," Kumar said. The reason for such sensitivity is not exactly understood, but this range includes the sounds of screams, which people find intrinsically unpleasant, he said.

Ig Noble Prize

A study investigating shrill sounds won a 2006 Ig Nobel Prize, awarded by the Society for Improbable Research. For the study, published in 1986 in the journal Perception & Psychophysics, scientists recorded the sound of a garden tool scraping over a chalkboard. Then the researchers fiddled with the recording, removing the high, middle and low frequencies from different recordings.

After playing the modified sounds to volunteers, the researchers found that removing the high frequencies didn't make the sounds more pleasant. Rather, eliminating the low and middle frequencies of the sound made the sounds more appealing, they learned, according to Medical Press.

In addition, the warning cry of a chimpanzee is similar to the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, they found. Perhaps people have an unconscious reflex to this sound because of its uncanny resemblance to a warning call, the researchers told Medical Press.

Best & Worst States for Older Adults' Well-Being: The Full List

A new poll shows how older Americans fare in terms of their well-being in all 50 states.

According to the poll, from Gallup-Healthways, older adults living in Hawaii have the best well-being, with an average score of 67 out of 100 on the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index in 2015.

Gallup-Healthways calculated this well-being score based on participants' answers to questions about different aspects of well-being, including how they rated their sense of purpose, social relationships, financial lives, community involvement and physical health.

Golden Years: Americans Get Happier in Older Age

There is an upside to aging: Older Americans tend to be happier, according to a new poll.

In the poll, from Gallup-Healthways, older adults in the United States scored higher on a survey of well-being than did their younger counterparts.

On average, adults ages 55 and older scored 63.6 out of 100 on the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index in 2015, which is 3 points higher than the average score of adults younger than 55, Gallup-Healthways said. [7 Things That Will Make You Happy]

Gallup-Healthways calculated this well-being score based on participants' answers to questions about different aspects of well-being, including how they rated their sense of purpose, social relationships, financial lives, community involvement and physical health.

As Americans get older, they tend to report greater satisfaction with their standard of living and increased financial stability, as well as less worry and stress, the survey found. For example, in 2015, 40 percent of Americans ages 18 to 54 said they were worried about money, compared with 25 percent of Americans ages 65 and older, the survey showed.

In addition, 45 percent of Americans ages 18 to 55 reported feeling stress, compared with 20 percent of those ages 65 and older.

Although adults ages 55 to 64 reported higher rates of obesity and depression than younger adults, those people ages 65 and older reported lower rates of these conditions.

The poll also ranked well-being among older adults in all 50 states. The state with the highest well-being among older adults in 2015 was Hawaii, where adults ages 55 and older achieved a well-being score of 67, on average. The runners-up were Arizona, New Hampshire and North Dakota, where older adults scored 65.2, on average, in each state. [ Best & Worst States for Older Adults' Well-Being: The Full List]

On the flip side, West Virginia had the lowest well-being score among seniors, with older adults in that state scoring 59.9, on average. Also near the bottom were Kentucky, Oklahoma and Ohio, where older adults had well-being scores of 61.2, 62 and 62.5, respectively.

The findings are based on interviews with more than 177,000 U.S. adults, including more than 93,000 adults ages 55 and older, in all 50 states, Gallup said.

This Tiny Electronic Chip Is Just 3 Atoms Thick

A tiny electronic chip just three atoms thick could yield advanced circuits that are powerful, flexible and transparent, researchers said in a new study. The scientists said the chip demonstrates a new way to mass-produce atomically thin materials and electronics.

These materials could be used to develop electronic displays on windows or windshields, along with powerful microchips in which circuitry spreads not just two-dimensionally but also rises three-dimensionally, the researchers said.

For more than 50 years, silicon has been the backbone of the electronics industry. However, as silicon transistors reach the limit of miniaturization, scientists worldwide are investigating new materials that could serve as the foundation of even tinier devices. [10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life]

In the past decade or so, researchers discovered that atomically thin materials could serve as the basis of electronic devices. For instance, sheets of graphene — a material related to the "lead" in pencils — are each just one carbon atom thick. Graphene is an excellent conductor of electricity, making it ideal for use in wiring.

However, previous research found that graphene is not a semiconductor, whereas silicon is. This means that graphene cannot easily be used in transistors, the microscopic switches that lie at the heart of electronic circuits. A semiconductor can act either as a conductor or insulator to enable or disable the flow of electricity. Transistors are typically made of semiconductors, relying on the properties of these materials to flick on and off to symbolize bits of data as digital ones and zeroes.

Instead of graphene, therefore, some researchers are exploring molybdenite, or molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), for use in advanced electronics. Molybdenum disulfide is a semiconductor, and the new study finds that molybdenum disulfide transistors "can be switched on and off significantly better than graphene and somewhat better than silicon," said study senior author Eric Pop, an electrical engineer at Stanford University in California.

Moreover, films of molybdenum disulfide can be as thin as only three atoms, each consisting of a sheet of molybdenum atoms sandwiched between two layers of sulfur atoms. A single-molecule layer of molybdenum disulfide is only six-tenths of a nanometer thick. In contrast, the active layer of a silicon microchip is up to about 100 nanometers thick, Pop said. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter; the average human hair is about 100,000 nanometers wide.)

These single-molecule-thin chips would be not only flexible, but also transparent. "What if your window was also a television, or you could have a heads-up display on the windshield of your car?" study lead author Kirby Smithe, an electrical engineer at Stanford University, said in a statement.

Scientists have struggled to find ways to mass produce extraordinarily thin layers of materials such as graphene and molybdenum disulfide. For example, initial experiments with graphene involved ripping layers of the material off a rock using sticky tape, a messy technique likely of no practical use in large-scale manufacturing, Pop said.

Now, Pop and his colleagues have developed a new strategy to mass produce molybdenum disulfide chips. "We finally don't have to rely on the Scotch-tape method of producing these extraordinarily thin materials," Pop told Live Science.

To create their ultrathin chip, the scientists incinerated small amounts of molybdenum and sulfur and then used the resulting vapor to form molecule-thin layers of molybdenum disulfide on a variety of surfaces, such as glass or silicon. "We went through a lot of painstaking trial and error to find the right combination of temperature and pressure to help grow these layers in a repeatable manner," Pop said.

Using this new technique, the researchers manufactured single-molecule-thick molybdenum disulfide chips measuring about 0.06 inches (1.5 millimeters) wide. These chips are each about 25 million times wider than they are thick, the researchers said.

To show how circuits might get etched onto these single-molecule-thick chips, the scientists used electron beams to carve the Stanford University logo onto the molybdenum disulfide films. The researchers also etched portraits of the two major-party candidates in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

"Perhaps seeing portraits etched into a three-atom-thick canvas will inspire future researchers in ways we can't even imagine yet," Pop said in a statement.

The scientists will now focus on ways to make these films uniform across their entirety, and on building actual circuits from them, Pop said. "We can imagine putting molybdenum sulfide layers onto silicon layers, to build microchips vertically instead of just horizontally," Pop said. "It would be much easier to shuffle energy around such 3D architectures than conventional flat architectures."

Further studies could also explore ways to delicately remove molybdenum disulfide layers from the surfaces on which they are manufactured and transfer them onto materials such as cloth or paper. One strategy for doing this might involve a relatively well-known industrial process that would coat the single-molecule-thin film with a sticky, flexible plastic polymer and then gently peel this combination off a surface.

"This sounds a lot like using Scotch tape, but it'd involve uniform polymer films that can be peeled off with constant force in an automated and much more controlled way," Pop said.