GHB
Psychiatrist Martijn van Noorden at the Leiden University Medical Centre is an expert on GHB withdrawal symptoms. In the medical journal Psychosomatics, Van Noorden and his colleagues in Nijmegen describe the hospital admittance of three GHB addicts. 4-hydroxybutanoic acid is a substance that occurs naturally in the body, but it is addictive if you consume it in large quantities. In fact, the withdrawal symptoms can be severe and even life-threatening.
The standard treatment is to prescribe the junkies huge amounts of benzodiapines – sedatives – until the worst symptoms disappear. A disadvantage of this method is that the benzodiapines and the GHB can affect each other’s effects, which is what happened to the three patients in the paper. Instead, LUMC doctor Cor de Jong developed a method that prescribed pharmaceutical GHB.
Yellow star
An international team of astronomers, including Arnout van Genderen from Leiden, have discovered the largest yellow star known to us. It is 1,300 times larger than the sun and one of the ten largest stars ever discovered. Being astronomers, they have given this thing a completely unmemorable name: HR 5171 A.
The gigantic star is accompanied by a smaller star that revolves around it every 1,300 days. The two are about 12,000 light-years away from Earth. The scientific paper on the discovery has been submitted to the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
War
The science journal Injury features a paper, with Leiden surgeon Rigo Hoencamp as the first author, on injured NATO soldiers who have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq. Hoencamp and his colleagues collected all the literature on that subject and the combined meta-study found a total of 19,750 wounded soldiers.
The greatest offenders were explosions: as many as 72 per cent of all injuries were caused by an explosion, compared to 18 per cent caused by bullets. The percentage of injuries caused by explosions is higher than that of the Vietnam War, which was also a guerrilla war. The distribution of the wounds varies too: in recent wars, head and neck injuries have been more common. The authors call for a NATO-wide registration of all injuries.
Parasites
If you visit the tropics, you could be accompanied by all sorts of stowaways on your return. Some parasites can secrete themselves in your body for years before emerging suddenly, when you are ill due to other causes, for instance.
English research has revealed that a large majority of people who have lived in the tropics for a year return infected with horrid worms or amoebas. Should all travellers to exotic parts be screened? That depends on how often infections actually occur.
A group of scientists from Leiden and Wageningen, with LUMC doctor Darius Soonawala as the first author, describe a study into this problem in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Soonawala and his colleagues examined the excrement of over five hundred visitors to the tropics, looking for parasite DNA.
They found some, but so little that systematic screening would not be worthwhile. One exception was the tiny Schistosoma worm, but that was limited to travellers who had swum in large African freshwater lakes. The researchers claim that, in the event, it would be more practical to just screen that group.