CARE YOUR HEALTH

A musician who has been hiccupping for 15 months is hoping an operation will solve his problem.

Chris Sands, 24, from Lincoln, hiccups as often as every two seconds - and sometimes even when he is asleep.

He has tried a variety of cures, including hypnosis and yoga, but nothing has worked.

Doctors at Nottingham's Queen's Medical Centre will put a tube into his stomach to monitor acid levels and decide if keyhole surgery is possible.

Brain scan

Mr Sands thinks his problem stems from an acid reflux condition caused by a damaged valve in his stomach.

"If the acid levels are severe enough they are going to do keyhole surgery and grab part of my stomach and wrap it around the valve to tighten it," he said.

Mr Sands, who is a backing singer in the group Ebullient, said the condition has hampered his career as he has only been able to perform four times.

He said brain and chest scans have not revealed what causes the hiccups.

The hiccups first started in September 2006 but disappeared before returning in February 2007.

"When you've had them this long it really drains you, because you can't eat properly and can't sleep properly and it is a proper bane on your life," he said.

He said he has tried about 100 different ways of drinking water to try to stop the condition.

Mr Sands said a fellow hiccup sufferer who has been plagued for four years has had the same operation - and it helped with heartburn but did not cure the hiccups.

American Charles Osborne, of Anthon, Iowa, holds the record for the longest ever bout of hiccups, which lasted for 68 years from 1922 until 1990.

That's the story of AJ, an extraordinary 40-year-old married woman who remembers everything.

The "human calendar."

That's what some people call the woman who contacted UC Irvine neurobiologist Jim McGaugh six years ago and said, "I have a problem. I remember too much."

She wasn't exaggerating. McGaugh and fellow UCI researchers Larry Cahill and Elizabeth Parker have been studying the extraordinary case of a person who has "nonstop, uncontrollable and automatic" memory of her personal history and countless public events.

If you randomly pick a date from the past 25 years and ask her about it, she'll usually provide elaborate, verifiable details about what happened to her that day and if there were any significant news events on topics that interested her. She usually also recalls what day of the week it was and what the weather was like.

The 40-year-old woman, who was given the code name AJ to protect her privacy, is so unusual that UCI coined a name for her condition in a recent issue of the journal Neurocase: hyperthymestic syndrome.

"I have studied learning and memory for over 50 years, and I had never read of or even heard about a person who has a comparable ability to remember," McGaugh said. "However, we do not know whether she is unique or whether there may be others with comparable remembering ability who have not as yet been identified."

McGaugh answered dozens of questions about AJ last week. Here are excerpts from our interview.

It's a bitterly cold winter day and students on the University of Minnesota campus are bundled up, hurrying to their next class. Wim Hof, dressed in shorts, sandals and nothing else, appeared from the doorway of a school building.

He's known as 'The Ice Man."

Scientists can't really explain it, but the 48-year-old Dutchman is able to withstand, and even thrive, in temperatures that could be fatal to the average person.

From the Arctic Circle to Mount Everest

It's an ability he discovered in himself as a young man 20 years ago.

"I had a stroll like this in the park with somebody and I saw the ice and I thought, what would happen if I go in there. I was really attracted to it. I went in, got rid of my clothes. Thirty seconds I was in," Hof said. "Tremendous good feeling when I came out and since then, I repeated it every day." It was the moment that Hof knew that his body was different somehow: He was able to withstand fatally freezing temperatures.

Hof began a lifelong quest to see just how far his abilities would take him. In January of 1999 he traveled 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle to run a half-marathon in his bare feet. Three years later, dressed only in a swimsuit, he dove under the ice at the North Pole and earned a Guinness World Record for the longest amount of time swimming under the ice: 80 meters, almost twice the length of an Olympic-sized pool.

When he didn't experience frostbite or hypothermia, the body's usual reactions to extreme cold, his extraordinary ability started to get the attention of doctors who specialize in extreme medicine.

Dr. Ken Kamler, author of "Surviving the Extremes," has treated dozens of people who tried to climb Mount Everest, and instead nearly died from the frigid temperatures. He couldn't believe it when he got word of a Dutchman making the ascent with no protection other than a pair of shorts.

"People are always looking for new firsts on Everest. It's been climbed so many times now, people climb it without oxygen, they … they climb it with all different kinds of handicaps. But no one has come close to climbing Everest in those kinds of conditions," Dr. Kamler said. "It's … it's almost inconceivable."

Millions of dieters would give their right arm to be afflicted by the illness that is plaguing John Perry.

* Freud painting of 20-stone woman expected to smash auction records
* Fat Russian generals told to shape up
* How about that: More tales of the bizarre

Mr Perry, 59, can eat whatever he likes - including unlimited pies, burgers and desserts - and never get fat.

He cannot put on weight because of a condition called lipodystrophy that makes his body rapidly burn fat.

Mr Perry regularly eats Chinese takeaways, chips, chocolate and clotted cream, but his weight has remained stable at 11st 12lb.

He told the Sun that he used to be a chubby child, but at age 12 the fat dropped off "almost over night".

Doctors thought he was refusing to eat or had a stomach ulcer, he said.

He initially tried to eat more to gain weight, but it had no effect.

“I didn’t like being slim at first. As a teenager playing football I was so thin I got embarrassed taking my shirt off," he said.

“I used to eat loads of chocolate to try and put on weight but I couldn’t.”

Mr Perry, of Ilford in Essex, endured a decade of tests before the illness was diagnosed. It finally emerged that his body produces six times the normal level of insulin.

Doctors have admitted that the condition would be a "slimmer's dream".