Triss can you scratch my back? Yeah right there, yeah. Down a little bit. OK. Oh, yeah, that's it. Don't stop.
Hey guys, Tara here with an answer to one of life's greatest mysteries, why is scratching an itch always make it worse.
Every one of us has been bitten by a mosquito at some point.
It actually happened to a friend of mine last week, and he ended up scratching it so hard he created an open wound, the size of a dime which is disgusting.
But we've all been there , well some of us.
Most of us get a bug bite, we scratch it for a while and then in a few days it goes way, and we never think about it again.
But believe it or not there are millions of people out there who suffer from chronic itching. Conditions like eczema and even cancer or kidney failure can worsen it. and in many cases it can have a serious impact on someone's life.
While it boils down to serotonin. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that regulates tons of different functions in your body. Your mood, your memory, your sleep, your appetite, even blood clotting. It produces feelings about happiness and well-being but it also controls pain, and that's where the itching part comes in.
Chu France Chen, as a researcher at Washington University, and he's been conducting studies over the years to see what produces the urge to itch.
His most recent one involved mice who were genetically engineered to produce no serotonin. And he found that when those mice were injected with a chemical to induce itching, they had almost no urge to scratch.
