11 medical facts that raise your blood pressure

The world of medicine is a wonderful field at times. Some medical facts are so strange they are hard to believe. Here’s a small selection of them:

Hiccups, whom the Austrians mischievously call “Schnackerl”, are a nasty fellow. But it’s usually harmless if it doesn’t take too long. It is clear how hiccups happen: the diaphragm suddenly spasms involuntarily, the glottis between the vocal cords closes. So the air from the lungs cannot escape; incoming air collides with the closed vocal cords. The resulting pressure is then released in the form of the characteristic hitch. Hiccups are more common in men.

However, it is not entirely clear why the hiccups occur. The phrenic reflexes are controlled by nerves in the brainstem; They are often caused by irritation of the phrenic nerve. The cause is often a temporary excessive distension of the stomach, for example when swallowing hastily. Carbonated and cold drinks, spicy foods, and alcohol or nicotine can also cause hiccups. It is interesting that unborn children already have hiccups in the womb. One theory explains this as training the fetal breathing reflex – without amniotic fluid entering the lungs. Babies hiccup more often than adults. They may hiccup to expel air from their stomachs, similar to belching.

As you read this sentence, your body has just made the tidy sum of 2 million new red blood cells. Each day, one percent of the bone marrow’s supply of these important disc-shaped blood cells is regenerated. In total, there are about 25 trillion in the blood. The new red blood cells – their medical term is “erythrocytes” – then perform their job for about four months, which consists of binding oxygen in the lung capillaries with their hemoglobin and then transporting it to the organs and body tissues. Then they gradually lose their elasticity and are then processed into bile by the body’s own scavenger cells in the liver, spleen and bone marrow.

If our vision is intact and we’re not color blind, our eyes can distinguish at least 2.3 million colors – and yet we can only see about 40 percent of the colors in sunlight. Incidentally, men tend to perceive colors with a stronger blue tint. Color perception depends on a special type of receptor in our retina called cones. The other type of receptors, the rods, on the other hand, mainly register differences in brightness. There are three different types of cones, responsible for red, blue and green. The actual color perception then takes place in the brain, where the impressions of color and brightness are brought together.

While red-green blindness, in which those affected cannot distinguish red and green as well as people with normal vision, occurs mainly in men, about 12 percent of women suffer from what is known as tetrachromasia: they have a different type of cone, which functions as a yellow or orange receptor. However, because the signals are usually not processed separately in the brain, this does not lead to an altered color perception. However, this can happen in individual cases; indeed, these women perceive additional shades of color.

There are no less than 59 elements in our body, writes non-fiction author Bill Bryson in his entertaining book The Body: A Guide for Occupants. Just six of these – carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus – make up 99.1 percent of the body, the rest being exotic elements like selenium, molybdenum, vanadium and manganese. Some are present in extremely small amounts, such as cobalt, of which we have only 20 for every 999,999,999.5 other atoms.

Some elements are essential, meaning we need them to live. Others are useless, but they do no harm either. But some are even harmful, for example cadmium, which is the 23rd most abundant element in the body at 0.1 percent. It’s poisonous, but we can’t avoid getting it in our food. What is funny, however, is the fact that we are 61 percent oxygen, but we don’t fly away like a balloon. Most of the gas is bonded with hydrogen to form water – and this is quite heavy, although it consists of two very light things.

From the 14th to the early 16th century, a strange phenomenon occurred in Europe: large groups of people were seized by a “dance frenzy” and danced seemingly without will until froth spewed from their mouths and left them exhausted and sometimes even bleeding into each other fell. This dance disease, presumably a mass hysterical phenomenon, was named “Vitus dance” at the time because in these cases Saint Vitus was called for help. The cause of the mysterious dancing frenzy may have been religious ecstasy, the bite of a spider – the European black widow – or poisoning with psychoactive substances – such as ergot in grain or henbane. Today, “St. Vitus’ dance” is more commonly used as a term for the disease Chorea Huntington used.

Anyone who has cats may be familiar with this particular conjunctival fold, often referred to as the “third eyelid”: the nictitating membrane. Not only cats have them, but also many other vertebrates, such as birds or reptiles. However, unlike most other mammals, cats can move them at will with a muscle. In many species, the cut membrane is transparent and protects the cornea from mechanical influences such as glasses; it can also be used as a kind of windshield wiper to remove foreign objects. Depending on the species, it also contains additional tear glands.

We humans also have a cutting membrane; it is visible in the inner corner of the eye, i.e. on the side of the nose. In our case, however, as in almost all primates, it no longer fulfills any function and has atrophied. So it is an evolutionary rudiment.

Normally, as a rule of thumb, an organ uses more energy the larger it is. Not the human brain: It makes up only two percent of an adult’s body weight, but consumes about a fifth to a quarter of its energy resources. For infants, the proportion is even higher; about 60 percent of the available energy goes to the brain. One reason for this is that the brain, like the heart and lungs, is always active, even when we are asleep. The normal metabolism of the nerve cells alone consumes about half of the energy available to our thinking organ.

Another part goes to the formation of electrical signals with which the neurons communicate with each other. The signal transmission only works through the transport of ions and messenger substances across the cell membranes. These substances then have to be returned and recycled, which costs energy. When our brains are particularly active, for example because we have to solve a memory task, the neurons in the brain regions involved fire at the same rate, which takes about twice as much energy as the “sleep mode”.

The kidneys are among the organs that occur in pairs. During embryonic development, paired organs form—according to the body’s basic bilateral plan—spaced apart on either side of the central axis. Sometimes, once every 1000 to 1500 births, a person is born with only one kidney – this is what doctors call unilateral renal agenesis. It is more common in men than women and more common on the left than on the right.

In the even rarer case of missing both kidneys – bilateral renal agenesis – life is only possible with kidney dialysis. This is not the case if only one kidney is missing – the second kidney is a kind of backup solution in case the other kidney fails. In fact, it is possible to live a healthy life with one kidney – according to current knowledge, the life expectancy of kidney donors is not reduced.

An adult has just over 200 bones, about half of which are in the arms and legs. Not so babies: Their skeleton has up to 350 bones. But what happens to the 100+ bones babies have more than adults? Basically, it’s a misleading claim because they’re actually skeletal parts that are still evolving and haven’t fully grown into a single entity yet. This also changes the number.

An example of this growing together is the skull: in babies, the skull roof is not yet fully ossified, but consists of several bony plates that only grow together in the first two years of life. The larger gaps between these plates are called fontanelles. There’s a reason the baby’s skull is so multi-pieced: On the one hand, the head can become misshapen in the narrow birth canal during birth. On the other hand, with a completely ossified skull, the brain could not sufficiently increase in volume.

The list of known human phobias is apparently almost endless and includes some extremely strange forms. Caligynephobia, also known as venustraphobia, for example, is the fear of women who seem attractive to the affected person. It is a subtype of gynophobia, the fear of women. It can arise as a result of traumatic experiences, especially during childhood, and manifests itself in symptoms such as stuttering or stopping, nervousness, sweating and so on, when the affected person – usually males – is faced with a frightening situation.

In addition to well-known phobias such as arachnophobia (fear of spiders), there are truly exotic variants of human fears. A small selection: Peladophobia is the fear of bald people, Pteronophobia is the fear of being tickled with feathers. Amaphophobia is a fear of trains while siderodromophobia is a fear of train travel or rails. Those who suffer from rhytidophobia fear wrinkles and getting them. Triskadekaphobia is the fear of the number thirteen and finally vitricophobia is the fear of the stepfather.

Unlike most cells in the body, skin cells continue to divide even after their development is complete; they retain this ability throughout their lives. In the skin renewal process, new basal cells are constantly being formed in the lower layer of the epidermis. The upper cells are thus pushed upwards, slowly dry out and gradually become horny. The cells of this stratum corneum do not have a nucleus and contain keratin. This protein prevents water from evaporating from the surface of the skin.

The dead skin cells eventually peel off the skin. Every hour, the skin sheds 600,000 skin particles – that’s about 14 grams per day. Within an average of 28 days, the outer layer of the epidermis is completely replaced. However, as we age, this renewal process slows down and the skin generally retains less moisture.