Make your post-Thanksgiving food coma work for you: New research suggests that eating a big turkey dinner may keep you from spending impulsively on holiday sales.

The study, published in the December issue of the Journal of Marketing, builds on the turkey-tryptophan trope that we all hear this time of year -- it's practically guaranteed that somebody at your Thanksgiving gathering will say,"Did you guys know that turkey makes you sleepy?" That's only kind of true -- an amino acid called tryptophan is found in turkey, and it does work as a natural sedative, but we really don't eat enough of it, even at Thanksgiving, to be affected. Our after-dinner lethargy is more likely caused by overindulging on delicious carbs and cocktails.

But the body uses tryptophan to produce serotonin, and serotonin is known to inhibit impulsive behavior, which made researchers from the University of Utah curious: How might Thanksgiving dinner affect Black Friday binge buying?

To find out, they recruited 170 volunteers and instructed them to fill out an online survey on Thanksgiving evening in 2007. They rated how likely they were to buy popular items at a deep discount -- such as a Dell laptop marked down to $499. Those who had consumed a traditional Thanksgiving dinner were less likely to splurge on any of the marked-down items, say Arul Mishra and Himanshu Mishra, the University of Utah marketing professors that co-authored the study. (Fun fact: They're also husband and wife.)

Of course, as Himanshu Mishra points out, "The influences are not going to be there after 12 hours. If someone is going out shopping tomorrow morning, probably the person will not see that effect." So here's how to make these new findings work for your wallet: Either skip the shopping on Friday and do your holiday shopping online Thursday night, or load up on leftovers before heading out to the stores on Friday.

Would you give this a try? Or is impulse shopping on Black Friday half the fun?

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Jeff Garvin had never heard of Purple Glove Syndrome until his wife, Sue, woke up with her right hand painfully swollen and violently discolored from the wrist down.

The Fort Myers, Fla., woman had suffered a massive stroke in 2008 at age 52 and was hospitalized. Then, as if that weren’t bad enough, she got a botched injection of intravenous phenytoin, a seizure drug linked to cases of the oddly named disorder that has caused lingering pain, amputations -- and death.

“With the Purple Glove Syndrome, she can’t do all the things with her hands she used to do,” Jeff Garvin said. “Her biggest complaint from the stroke is a speech impediment -- and the pain in her hand."

Today, an advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration recommended that IV phenytoin, marketed as Dilantin, should be labeled with warnings that the drug can cause Purple Glove Syndrome. The group voted not to recommend pulling the drug from the market.

PGS is a rare condition first noted in the 1980s, when patients who received IV Dilantin were developing painful, swollen hands that turned a deep shade of violet. Some 43 cases of PGS have been documented, according to the FDA. However, it's very likely the disorder is under-reported.

No one’s sure exactly how often PGS occurs. Studies have suggested that severe cases of PGS may occur in up to 6 percent of patients who receive IV phenytoin, with less-serious incidents in perhaps 25 percent of patients.

The condition is often caused when the toxic drug doesn’t go directly into a vein, but instead seeps into the underlying tissue of the hand. Often, the damage is permanent.

Another drug, fosphenytoin, marketed under the brand name Cerebyx, appears to control seizures as well as phenytoin. It carries some risk of PGS, but the panel was divided on whether there's adequate information to conclude that it also causes the disorder. Both drugs have similar risks of other side effects.

The FDA will now consider the recommendations of the joint meeting of the Peripheral and Central Nervous System Drugs Advisory Committee.

In Jeff Garvin’s opinion, the agency should take it very seriously.

“I think they need to look at it really closely,” he said. “There are other ways to do it that don’t pose the risks. Certainly for somebody in my wife’s situation, I learned there were alternatives that had less toxic side effects with better results.”

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Talk about a bad case of indigestion.

One Rhode Island hospital has spent more than $2 million in the past eight years removing foreign objects -- including knives, batteries and bedsprings -- from the bodies of patients who swallowed them on purpose.

That’s according to Dr. Steven F. Moss, a gastroenterologist who counted 305 cases of intentional consumption of odd objects at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence between 2001 and 2009. Moss decided to study the issue after noticing a peculiar trend.

“We have patients swallowing things almost every week or two,” said Moss, whose findings are published in the latest issue of the journal Clinical Gasroenterology and Hepatology. “We’re a pretty busy clinical service and the last thing we need is to spend a lot of time taking these things out.”

It’s not clear why so many patients showed up after swallowing objects that included teaspoons, toothbrushes and razor blades, Moss said. He doesn’t think there’s anything strange about the local region that would contribute to it, and, besides, a hospital in Los Angeles reported similar findings in 2008.

What is clear is that nearly 80 percent of the 33 people in the study who consumed foreign objects suffered from psychiatric disorders. Most were either prisoners or patients in a local psychiatric hospital. And even many of those who came from home settings were suffering from severe mental illness, Moss said. One mentally ill patient was responsible for 67 separate swallowing incidents.

Most of the patients were aware enough to know what they were doing and some were manipulative, Moss said. For prisoners, a trip to the hospital can be a chance to escape. Mentally ill patients sometimes swallow objects to ensure a change of scenery.

The tough part, Moss said, is getting the objects out. He and other doctors had to use complicated endoscopy tools, including snares, nets and rat-toothed forceps to do the job. Fortunately, only two cases required surgery and there were no deaths or serious injuries.

Still, the problem continues to confound Moss and others.

“We haven’t really come up with a good way to prevent people from doing it,” he said.

Many of the patients seem to be compelled to swallow things and will often awaken from anesthesia only to try to ingest nearby medical supplies. One patient managed to swallow something even while being watched by two guards in an acute care hospital.

The obvious answer of getting rid of objects too small to swallow doesn’t always work, Moss said. Eventually, you have to give a person a toothbrush. And many of the patients become psychologically stable enough to be discharged.

“Once he’s out,” Moss said, “he’ll do whatever he wants."

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Dizzy doesn’t begin to describe Gene Pugnetti’s bouts of vertigo.

For at least four years, the 56-year-old Yakima, Wash., man has suffered repeated episodes of stomach-lurching, head-spinning disruptions in his equilibrium, attacks so severe that they require him to sit down, cover his eyes and wait an hour – until the Valium kicks in.

Just since February, Pugnetti has endured 45 such spells, all caused by what doctors diagnosed as a severe case of Meniere’s disease, an inner ear disorder that erodes victims’ hearing and leaves them vulnerable to unexpected vertigo. The most recent bout was three weeks ago.

“It was pretty bad,” said Pugnetti, an information technology worker, who has 65 percent hearing loss in his right ear. “Just, bang!, you’re focusing on something and then all of a sudden you can’t focus on anything.”

Pugnetti has tried almost everything to quell the problem, which affects some 615,000 people in the United States, according to the National Institutes of Health. Drugs, diet, exercise and even an implanted shunt failed to do the trick.

On Thursday, though, Pugnetti became the first person to be implanted with a new device aimed at stopping the vertigo as soon as it starts. Dr. Jay Rubinstein and Dr. James Phillips of the University of Washington’s otolaryngology-head and neck surgery department, assisted by a team of experts, chose Pugnetti as the first member of a 10-person clinical trial to test an invention four years in the making.

It’s the “UW/Nucleus Vestibular Implant,” a clunky name for the behind-the-ear device that’s basically a revamped version of a cochlear implant, an electronic aid typically used to help deaf people hear. In Meniere’s, the disease short-circuits the power supply that allows balance, Rubinstein said. The new device restores it by sending electrical impulses to electrodes implanted in the bony ear, disrupting the vertigo.

Once it’s turned on, in about three weeks, Pugnetti will be able to don the device at the first sign of dizziness, disarming symptoms ranging from mild to severe.

It won’t eliminate the Meniere’s, for which there is no certain cause or cure, but it should get rid of the worst effect. If the clinical trial is a success, the device that was tested in monkeys and approved in June by the Food and Drug Administration could find a wide audience of Meniere’s victims, says Pugnetti, who has no qualms about being first.

“The fact is, there are a whole lot of people who are out there suffering,” he said. “Just talking about this procedure to them gives them hope. And that’s a big deal."

For information about the new device, call (206) 598-8896.

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Unnhh! Ahhrroooo!

Some sound like growls, others sound like sirens, but no matter what a tennis player’s grunt sounds like, new research has found it actually helps by throwing their opponent off their game.

In a study conducted by Scott Sinnett, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii, 33 undergraduate students watched tennis players hitting balls – with some of the tennis players grunting as they hit. Researchers then had the students indicate the direction of the shot immediately afterwards.

Turns out grunting not only slowed down the students’ response time – it caused them to make more mistakes in guessing the direction of the shots.

“In a nutshell, if the shot included a grunt, the students were slower and less accurate with their response,” says Sinnett. It's kind of like "icing" an NFL kicker, which we've written about before.

Sinnett hopes that his research will help to shed light on some of the controversy that’s bubbled up the last few years with regard to grunting in women’s tennis. During the 2009 Wimbledon Championship, for instance, both spectators and tennis players complained about the loud shrieks and grunts coming from some of the players.

It's not just tennis. Loud, obnoxious grunting causes frequent complaints in fitness gyms and at least one high-profile lawsuit over a dispute in a New York spinning class.

Portuguese tennis star Michelle Larcher de Brito – a notorious grunter – has even been booed off the court after being accused of using her banshee-like grunts and shrieks to distract opponents. Her grunts have reportedly reached a decibel reading of 109. (That's louder than a subway train or a motorcycle, and it's almost as loud as a rock concert.)

“There are a number of findings that would suggest that a consistent grunt should actually help an opponent by drawing and focusing attention on the ball being struck, but this obviously isn’t how many players and spectators feel,” says Sinnett, who hopes to test out his findings on professionals tennis players next. “This project allowed us to look at the theoretical question of whether the basic lab findings can be extended to a real world situation while at the same time look at a debate in professional tennis.”

David Partikian, a 45-year-old Seattle merchant marine who’s played tennis for most of his life, says using some annoying trait to psych out an opponent is nothing new in tennis.

“There are all sorts of little things that super competitive people will do,” he says. “I used to play a guy who smoked while he served. He was daring you to smack it at him. This is how racket sports can be. It’s a psych out.”

Might these new findings might inspire a cacophony of groans, howls, and shrieks at the health club tennis court?

“I think a grunt should be reserved for a serve that’s going over a hundred miles per hour,” says Partikian. “Unless you’re at a pro level and ... it’s a huge athletic effort, it’s a bit of an exaggeration."

Do you grunt when you play sports or workout? Tell us about it in the comments.

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Too much junk food and lack of exercise makes us pudgy. But new research out of Ohio State University suggests there may be another factor at play: too much light at night.

“We were looking at the increasing level of obesity and realized that light at night -- and by that I mean electricity, TV viewing at night, people using computers later at night ... has also been increasing,” says Laura Fonken, a neuroscientist at Ohio State University in Columbus and lead author of the study.

To see if there was a connection, Fonken and her colleagues conducted a series of experiments exposing laboratory mice first to 16 hours of light and then eight hours of either total darkness, dim light -- like you’d get if the TV was on in your bedroom -- or full bright light. The result? The mice that “watched TV” all night gained weight. It was the same with the mice exposed to bright light all night long.

It didn’t take long for the pounds to pile up, either.

“After one week, the body mass increased with the mice with light at night and continued to increase throughout the eight-week study,” Fonken says. By the end of the study, the mice in the light cycle had about a 50 percent increase in weight compared to mice in the dark.

You might think the mice that were staying up late were chowing down on food more than the others. Perhaps a few bags of Cheetos?

Not so, Fonken says. When looking at the total food intake and total activity, the researchers didn’t see any difference between the groups.

There was a difference, however, when it came to when the mice were eating.

“The ones with the light at night were eating more during their typical rest phase, when they would normally be sleeping,” she says. “They were eating about 55 percent of their food during their rest phase.”

Another experiment was conducted with the same parameters -- light at night or total darkness -- only this time the mice were only allowed to eat within their normal waking period.

The result: skinnier mice. Something about the light changed their feeding behavior and disrupted their metabolism, Fonken suggested.

Fonken and her team haven’t tested their findings out on humans yet, but she says this does have important implications for people.

“If you consume food at the wrong time of day, if you eat during your rest phase, it disrupts your metabolic parameters so you see an increase in weight,” she says.

The Ohio State research backs up prior studies showing that late-night eating influences weight gain. It also helps explain obese people who suffer night eating syndrome – where they obsessively consume calories at night – and seem to experience disruptions in their internal body clocks.

Fonken says this doesn’t mean we should all go to bed as soon as it’s dark out (which in some parts of the country would mean hitting the hay at 4 p.m. in the winter), but we should think about the levels of light we have when we sleep and be cognizant of when we’re eating.

“It could be that ambient levels of light seeping in could make a difference,” she says. “We don’t really know yet, but it might be better for people to have black-out curtains or wear sleep masks. And leave time between their bedtime meal and when they actually go to bed.”

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Rebecca Adler writes: My game face has been known to cause genuine panic on the field -- mostly among race officials and umpires worried they’ve got some kind of medical emergency on their hands. Either they think I’ve somehow been severely sunburned on just one side of my face or they worry that I’m on my way to having heat stroke.

I have a condition called Harlequin Syndrome, which causes me to sweat and flush red on only on the left side of my body.

I got it the day after I was born, in the same way that anyone gets it -- by sustaining an injury to the sympathetic nervous system (the part of the nervous system that reacts to stress and flight-or-fight circumstances), according to Peter Drummond, a professor at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia.

(FYI, it was Drummond who first researched the condition and coined the catchy term “Harlequin Syndrome” in 1988 after researching others who have it.)

But it isn’t just general trauma to the sympathetic nervous system. It occurs at a very specific area of that system: the space right between the shoulder blades where the sympathetic nerves leave the spinal cord.

While many of the subjects in Drummond’s studies were unable to identify the cause of the trauma to the nervous system, mine left a road map in the form of a six-inch-long scar tracing the shape of my right shoulder blade. It was an emergency operation that caused the damage to my nervous system that would later earn me the nickname Two-Face -- Thank you, Tim Burton, for releasing the movie "Batman Forever" during my freshman year of high school! -- and cause every shirt I own to get sweat stains on only the left side.

Only about 200,000 people in the United States are thought to share in the phenomenon that is Harlequin Syndrome, which can affect either the left or the right side of the body. Some with the condition are even known to turn red on one side and sweat on the other side. Regardless, there is always a strict dividing line between the flushed, sweaty side and the cool, dry side. While there are no real treatments for the condition, there are also, luckily, no known dangerous side effects, says Drummond. This means that as long as we’re OK with strangers' panicked requests that we go to the emergency room, the constant disposal of only half-ruined T-shirts and the discomfort of feeling our heartbeat in only the flushed side of our faces, then those of us with the condition can sweat it out as much as we’d like.

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Here's a question about urine we never thought about but now has us rather curious: Does everybody make that icky smell after eating asparagus and some people simply can't smell it -- like those guys on the bus who seem incapable of sensing their own ripe body aromas -- or is it some people just don't turn asparagus into chemical weaponry?

Scientists at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia cared enough to find out.

The answer (drum roll, please): Both.

About 8 percent of 38 test subjects who ate roasted asparagus (yum!) did not have smelly pee. About 6 percent could not smell the odor. One lucky person could not do either.

Why would anybody care? Well, it all has to do with individual genetic variation and metabolism, which is kind of interesting. But there might be a practical implication, too. The no-smell folks might not be able to detect a compound related to the one in smelly asparagus pee, mercaptan, which is added to natural gas to make it noticeable.

We don't really want you commenting on this post, because we feel that enough has been said about asparagus and pee for the day. But if you insist, go on.

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It’s not exactly Love Potion No. 9, but giving a guy squirt up the nose of a “cuddle” hormone may make him sweeter, according to new research announced in the journal Psychological Science.

In a study conducted at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Columbia University, 27 healthy men in their 20s were tested on their social competence, then were given either a nasal squirt of oxytocin or a placebo.

A naturally-occuring hormone, oxytocin is known to regulate prosocial behavior in both animals and humans and is said to be responsible for everything from bonding with baby to better orgasms. For women, oxytocin plays a major role in birth, lactation and maternal bonding. In men, it's linked to sexual arousal. It also helps with trust and pair ponding in both genders.

As a result, it’s been dubbed the “hormone of love” or the “cuddle chemical.”

Upon being given a blast of either oxytocin or a placebo, the men in the study were asked to perform an “empathic accuracy task,” such as watching videos of people discussing emotional events from their lives.

Move over, Monday Night Football. Hello, Lifetime channel!

After watching the videos, the men rated how they thought the people in the videos were feeling, then researchers tallied the results. The less socially adept men who were given the so-called “hormone of love” performed significantly better.

The guys who already had high scores in social proficiency -- the easygoing extroverts -- were just as empathetic whether they had the oxytocin or the placebo.

“Our data show that oxytocin selectively improves social cognition in people who are less socially proficient, but had little impact on more socially proficient individuals,” said Dr. Jennifer Bartz, assistant professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and lead author of the study told Science Daily .

Does this mean some kind of anti-shyness drug is on the way? Or how about a nasal nudge for insensitive boyfriends? Don’t hold your breath.

The oxytocin findings will be used to help treat people with disorders like autism, a disorder that predominantly affects men, says Bartz.

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Nobody likes to be told their feet stink. In fact, an 18-year-old Washington woman recently stabbed a man for saying as much when she took off her shoes at a party.

The man suffered a punctured lung but is expected to recover. The woman was charged with second-degree assault with a deadly weapon.

That's certainly an over-the-top response to being teased about your smelly feet. But why, exactly, do our tootsies sometimes smell worse than old potatoes? And is there anything we can do about it?

According to Brooklyn podiatrist Dr. Howard Dinowitz, the feet contain a disproportionate amount of sweat glands -- about 250,000 -- and “when you have that many sweat glands, things are bound to happen.”

Sweating alone doesn’t cause a bad smell, though. It’s the bacteria on our skin that eats the sweat -- bacteria that thrive in the warm, damp, dark environment found within our socks and shoes.

Then there’s funk caused by fungus.

“Funguses are known to breed heavily in shoes or materials that don’t breathe,” says Dinowitz. “Ultimately, it’s the fungal germ cells that really do smell. If you ever take a whiff of a bad fungus infection, it’s horrible.”

Luckily, there are plenty of things we can do that don’t involve flying into a knife-wielding rage when someone complains about our reeking feet.

To reduce bacteria, wash your feet with antibacterial soap and always wear clean, absorbent socks. Alternate shoes, too, allowing them to “air out” between wearings. To reduce the sweat, change your socks often, buy odor-eating shoe inserts and use antiperspirant on your feet. Antifungal powder sprinkled into your shoes can also help, says Dinowitz.

One last thing -- if you're suffering from toxic sock syndrome, see a doctor, particularly if you’re sensitive about it. You may have a condition called bromhidrosis, or excessive body odor, which can be helped by washing with antibacterial creams or taking oral medications.

Have you ever run into anyone with particularly smelly feet? Or do you have embarrassingly stinky feet? Now's your chance to confess.

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A rare skin disease that leaves victims with red, scaly flesh mottled with tiny patches of normal pigment just might hold the secret to curing other genetic disorders, scientists say.

Called “ichthyosis with confetti” because of a random sprinkling of normal skin cells, the disease is so unusual it might affect only “a couple dozen” people worldwide, said Dr. Keith Choate, a Yale University dermatologist and research scientist.

But the strange ailment may one day show scientists how to silence certain genes that cause disease, said Choate, who with colleagues reported findings in the latest issue of the journal Science Express. In effect, the confetti gene double-crosses the disease gene, forcing it to reverse itself to good health.

“One could envision dealing with other conditions caused by dominant gene functions like cancer and imagine taking the defective copy and causing the disease to go away by the same mechanism,” Choate said.

First, though, a little about ichthyosis. Named after the Greek word for fish, ichthyosis is usually characterized by the development of extremely thick, scaly skin, or, sometimes, very thin skin. It can lead to severe medical problems like calorie loss, water loss, overheating, blistering and psychological issues related to disfigurement and skin color changes. About 16,000 babies are born who either have or will develop the general condition, far more than ever develop the confetti variety.

But it’s the “confetti” in ichthyosis with confetti that intrigued one of Choate’s Yale mentors, Dr. Leonard Millstone, who, Choate recalled, “called me over and said ‘You should see this patient, see what’s happening.’ Practically before his very eyes, he saw a white spot developing."

In a study released last week, Choate and colleagues described how they unlocked the secret. In some skin cells, an entire chunk of chromosome 17 that contains the defective gene inherited from one’s parents is replaced from the spot of the bad gene all the way to the end of that arm of the chromosome. The replacement section contains a good copy of the gene, also inherited from parents.

Patients with the confetti tend to grow more and more normal patches of skin the longer they live, but while those patches could be called “cured,” and while the increase in normal patches does lessen ichthyosis symptoms somewhat, patients still have ichthyosis and Choate said the benefits are “relatively mild.”

Still, Choate said the strange disease offers hope that somehow, other genetic diseases – such as muscular dystrophy or cancer – may be forced to become self-correcting, too. One day, that could be a big payoff of the research.

Do you grapple with an annoying skin issue? Do tell.

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Chris Tachibana writes: Could a giant, spit-sniffing rat save your life? Maybe — they can be better than humans at diagnosing tuberculosis.

A pilot program in Tanzania is using trained rats to smell TB in sputum samples. Up to 1,000 samples a week are collected from local hospitals by APOPO, a nonprofit that also trains rats to sniff out landmines. Although the TB samples have already been checked by a human under the microscope, the rat pack’s sniff tests have improved disease detection by 44 percent because the clever rodents often find TB that was missed.

While the World Health Organization estimates that 2 billion people around the world are infected with TB, it can be hard to detect under a microscope, particularly in those who are also HIV positive. That’s where the giant rats can help. They might turn out to be just as accurate at finding TB. They're low-tech and could screen for TB in resource-limited countries. They’re also faster than the standard microscope test, says Bart Weetjens, APOPO founder. A human with a microscope can process 40 samples a day. A rat can do 40 in seven minutes, he says.

Weetjens, who was inspired by a childhood pet rat, started APOPO in the 1990s to train giant pouched rats, which are native to sub-Saharan Africa, to detect land mines in the region. The rats were so good at sniffing out hidden bombs that in 2003, APOPO started training their nosy little friends to smell TB in a spit sample. Currently working with a team of 30 rats, APOPO is now optimizing their unique program, so in the future, it might be used in other communities.

Rats aren’t the only creatures making medical diagnoses. Dogs can also be trained to find disease in humans, like smelling urine samples for signs of cancer. (One little terrier recently chewed off his owner’s big toe after sniffing out a dangerous diabetes-related infection.)

But in a nose-to-nose contest, Weetjens says rats are better than bomb- or disease-sniffing dogs.

"Whatever dogs can detect, rats can detect equally well," he says, noting a rat can be trained for one-fifth the cost. "They're more calm than most small animals, very intelligent and social, and they love humans."

Rats’ reputation as disease-carrying vermin is exaggerated. Weetjens says that in 12 years of working with the giant rats, no one at APOPO has gotten sick from them. The rats themselves are resistant to TB and many tropical diseases. "They're really lovable creatures," says Weetjens. "Like a pet you can work with."

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