If last week's government shutdown left you nauseated, Outliers hopes you were in Pittsburgh. The Steel City had the distinct honor of hosting the first ever international vomiting conference. Of if you want to be formal, “Biology and Control of Nausea and Vomiting 2013.”
Of course this struck Outliers as pretty hilarious, but don't tell that to the experts.
“I haven't seen a lot of humor in this field,” Charles Horn, a neuroscientist and associate professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who studies vomiting, told the Associated Press. “It's a very adverse event. Most people don't like vomiting.”
The gathering attracted about 100 vomiting and nausea experts from around the world. The subject had never led to scientific meetings before, officials say.
“It is something that I think for the most part has been neglected within science,” Horn says. “What we're trying to do is ... get more people involved in it.”
The two-day conference examined why some patients—such as pregnant women or cancer patients who get chemotherapy—experience vomiting and nausea, often in excessive amounts. Research shows vomiting affects more than half of pregnant women during their first trimester.
Better understanding of the genetics and biology of vomiting and nausea could lead to better treatments, Horn says. Though medications exist to treat the symptoms, they're not effective in roughly half of patients. Treatments for chemotherapy side effects control nausea but not vomiting, he said.
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