By Benedict Carey The research on brain stimulation is advancing so quickly, and the findings are so puzzling, that a reader might feel tempted to simply pre-order a genius cap from Amazon, to make sense of it all later. In just the past month, scientists reported enhancing the working memory of older people, using electric current passed through a skullcap, and restoring some cognitive function in a brain-damaged woman, using implanted electrodes. Most recently, the Food and Drug Administration approved a smartphone-size stimulator intended to alleviate attention-deficit problems by delivering electric current through a patch placed on the forehead. Last year, another group of scientists announced that they, too, had created a brain implant that boosts memory storage. All the while, a do-it-yourself subculture continues to grow, of people who are experimenting with placing electrodes in their skulls or foreheads for brain “tuning.” Predicting where all these efforts are headed, and how and when they might converge in a grand methodology, is an exercise in rank speculation. Neuro-stimulation covers too many different techniques, for various applications and of varying quality. About the only certainties are the usual ones: that a genius cap won’t arrive anytime soon, and that any brain-zapping gizmo that provides real benefit also is likely to come with risk. Nevertheless, the field is worth watching because it hints at some elementary properties of brain function. Unlike psychiatric drugs, or psychotherapy, pulses of current can change people’s behavior very quickly, and reliably. Turn the current on and things happen; turn it off and the effect stops or tapers. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 26232 - Posted: 05.14.2019

Ian Tucker Dr Hannah Critchlow is a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge. Her debut book, The Science of Fate, examines how much of our life is predetermined at birth and to what extent we are in control of our destiny. How has the slow march of scientific research affected our concept of fate? On one hand, we know more about how genetics drives our lives, yet we also have more good evidence for things that we can do to shape our own outcomes. This concept of fate and destiny has around since the Greeks – it threads through different cultures and is deeply rooted in the way that we speak today; for instance, we often say that babies are born destined for greatness. It’s a seductive idea. If outcomes are predetermined, that absolves us of blame when things go wrong. Yeah, in some ways it’s a really nice idea, it’s a get-out-of-jail card: we are who we are, so we can just rest on our laurels. It’s quite reassuring. As a parent, I find it quite comforting for my child, because there are a millions of decisions that I have to make for him and it’s quite nice to think a lot of the work has been done now. The genes, the basic neural circuitry that acts as foundation for his life is already there. But as your book explains, our brains are quite plastic… In 2000, a landmark study demonstrated how the brains of London black-cab drivers changed as they took the Knowledge. The hippocampus, which is involved in navigation, learning and memory, enlarged in cabbies who passed the test. This study got a lot of attention and informed the idea that we can hone our brains in the same way as muscle and therefore change our ingrained habits, even become superhumans if we just train our brains in the right way. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 26231 - Posted: 05.14.2019

By Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik The man and the woman sat down, facing each other in the dimly illuminated room. This was the first time the two young people had met, though they were about to become intensely familiar with each other—in an unusual sort of way. The researcher informed them that the purpose of the study was to understand “the perception of the face of another person.” The two participants were to gaze at each other’s eyes for 10 minutes straight, while maintaining a neutral facial expression, and pay attention to their partner’s face. After giving these instructions, the researcher stepped back and sat on one side of the room, away from the participants’ lines of sight. The two volunteers settled in their seats and locked eyes—feeling a little awkward at first, but suppressing uncomfortable smiles to comply with the scientist’s directions. Ten minutes had seemed like a long stretch to look deeply into the eyes of a stranger, but time started to lose its meaning after a while. Sometimes, the young couple felt as if they were looking at things from outside their own bodies. Other times, it seemed as if each moment contained a lifetime. Throughout their close encounter, each member of the duo experienced their partner’s face as everchanging. Human features became animal traits, transmogrifying into grotesqueries. There were eyeless faces, and faces with too many eyes. The semblances of dead relatives materialized. Monstrosities abounded. The bizarre perceptual phenomena that the pair witnessed were manifestations of the “strange face illusion,” first described by the psychologist Giovanni Caputo of the University of Urbino, Italy. Urbino’s original study, published in 2010, reported a new type of illusion, experienced by people looking at themselves in the mirror in low light conditions. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 26230 - Posted: 05.14.2019

By Cara Giaimo Here’s a pop quiz for you. Tom is taller than Dick. Dick is taller than Harry. Who’s taller, Harry or Tom? If you said Tom, congratulations! You just demonstrated what’s called “transitive inference” — the ability to compare things indirectly, based on previous juxtapositions. But before you pat yourself on the back too much, you should know that this skill was recently demonstrated by another creature: the humble paper wasp that might be living in your backyard right now. In the summer of 2017, researchers at the University of Michigan put two species of paper wasps through a transitive inference test. A statistically significant portion of the time, the wasps passed. Other animals — including rats, geese and cichlid fish — have also exhibited this capacity. But this study, which was published Tuesday in Biology Letters, is the first to successfully showcase it in an invertebrate (honeybees failed a similar test in 2004). Paper wasps are found on every continent except Antarctica. You might be near some right now. “They tend to nest in the eaves of houses, or inside barbecue grills,” said Elizabeth Tibbetts, the study’s lead author. In a previous study, Dr. Tibbetts showed that individual female wasps can identify one another by their distinct facial patterns, which resemble Rorschach ink blots. “When two wasps meet, they learn, ‘Oh, that’s what Suzy looks like,’” she said. “And the next time they meet, they remember who Suzy is.” In the spring, the females spend a lot of time brawling, getting in each other’s faces and trading slaps with their appendages. These matchups look like schoolyard tussles. “Some wasps will be fighting; some wasps will be watching the fights,” said Dr. Tibbetts. “It’s a very exciting time.” The wasps remember the winners and losers, and use them to establish a social hierarchy: the strongest reproduce, while the weaker ones do all the work. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 26229 - Posted: 05.11.2019

Jenny Kitzinger In 1991, a car crash left Munira Abdulla, a 32-year-old woman from the United Arab Emirates, with devastating brain injuries. Doctors reportedly thought she might never regain full consciousness. However, in late 2018, almost three decades after her initial injury, Abdulla showed signs of recovery – including calling out her son’s name. Abdulla’s story became public on April 22 2019, when an interview with her son was published in The National (a major news outlet in the United Arab Emirates). The following day it was reported by international media under headlines such as “Modern-day miracle: Woman wakes after almost three decades in a coma”. The story was framed as extraordinary and inspiring – and I received a flurry of calls from journalists asking me to explain what had happened. Was she trapped in her body all along? How will she adjust to the modern world? What does this mean for families considering whether it would be kinder to let a loved one die? Just like these journalists – working to a tight timeframe – I relied on The National’s report to try to contribute to the public discussion of Abdulla’s case. This is far from ideal but, looking at this original source, there were clues that, although a very unusual case, the “miracle” might have been overstated and oversimplified. © 2010–2019, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 26228 - Posted: 05.11.2019

By Maggie Koerth-Baker Where is the loudest place in America? You might think New York City, or a major airport hub, or a concert you have suddenly become too old to appreciate. But that depends on what kind of noise you’re measuring. Sound is actually a physical thing. What we perceive as noise is the result of air molecules bumping into one another, like a Newton’s cradle toy. That movement eventually reaches our eardrums, which turn that tiny wiggle into an audible signal. But human ears can’t convert all molecular motion to sound. Sometimes the particles are jostling one another too fast. Sometimes they’re too slow. Sometimes, the motion is just happening in the wrong medium — through the Earth, say, instead of through the air. And when you start listening for the sounds we can’t hear, the loudest place in America can end up being right under your feet. Scientists have tools that can detect these “silent” waves, and they’ve found a lot of noise happening all over the U.S. Those noises are made by the cracking of rocks deep in the Earth along natural fault lines and the splashing of whitecaps on the ocean. But they’re also made by our factories, power plants, mines and military. “Any kind of mechanical process is going to generate energetic waves, said Omar Marcillo, staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Some of that goes through the atmosphere as acoustic waves, and some goes through the ground as seismic waves.” Marcillo’s work focuses on the seismic. © 2019 ABC News Internet Ventures.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 26227 - Posted: 05.11.2019

By David Grimm CORVALLIS, OREGON—Carl the cat was born to beat the odds. Abandoned on the side of the road in a Rubbermaid container, the scrawny black kitten—with white paws, white chest, and a white, skunklike stripe down his nose—was rescued by Kristyn Vitale, a postdoc at Oregon State University here who just happens to study the feline mind. Now, Vitale hopes Carl will pull off another coup, by performing a feat of social smarts researchers once thought was impossible. In a stark white laboratory room, Vitale sits against the back wall, flanked by two overturned cardboard bowls. An undergraduate research assistant kneels a couple of meters away, holding Carl firmly. "Carl!" Vitale calls, and then points to one of the bowls. The assistant lets go. Toddlers pass this test easily. They know that when we point at something, we're telling them to look at it—an insight into the intentions of others that will become essential as children learn to interact with people around them. Most other animals, including our closest living relative, chimpanzees, fail the experiment. But about 20 years ago, researchers discovered something surprising: Dogs pass the test with flying colors. The finding shook the scientific community and led to an explosion of studies into the canine mind. Cats like Carl were supposed to be a contrast. Like dogs, cats have lived with us in close quarters for thousands of years. But unlike our canine pals, cats descend from antisocial ancestors, and humans have spent far less time aggressively molding them into companions. So researchers thought cats couldn't possibly share our brain waves the way dogs do. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 26226 - Posted: 05.10.2019

Chauncey DeVega Human behavior is a function of both nature and nurture. This, of course, extends to politics. Hence, researchers have shown that, on average, the brains of conservative authoritarians as compared to liberals are quite different from one another. For example, conservative authoritarians are more fear-centered, tend to fixate on negativity, default to order and hierarchy, and are averse to new stimuli. By comparison, liberals are more tolerant of ambiguity and are more open to new experiences. The brains of liberals also seek out novelty. However, there is an important qualifier: the social dynamics of a given society at a specific time also have a profound impact on how nature and nurture interact and the types of human behavior which results. Ultimately, human beings are much more than the sum of their parts — though biology may, in fact, play a very outsize role in human behavior. In the United States and Europe, the relationship between nature, nurture and politics is particularly important in light of our shared authoritarian moment. How are right-wing authoritarian leaders such as Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen are able to use fear to stir up racism, nativism, bigotry, and even violence among their supporters? © 2018 Salon Media Group, Inc

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 26225 - Posted: 05.10.2019

By Elizabeth Pennisi When the ancestors of cave fish and certain crickets moved into pitchblack caverns, their eyes virtually disappeared over generations. But fish that ply the sea at depths greater than sunlight can penetrate have developed super-vision, highly attuned to the faint glow and twinkle given off by other creatures. They owe this power, evolutionary biologists have learned, to an extraordinary increase in the number of genes for rod opsins, retinal proteins that detect dim light. Those extra genes have diversified to produce proteins capable of capturing every possible photon at multiple wavelengths—which could mean that despite the darkness, the fish roaming the deep ocean actually see in color. The finding "really shakes up the dogma of deep-sea vision," says Megan Porter, an evolutionary biologist studying vision at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu who was not involved in the work. Researchers had observed that the deeper a fish lives, the simpler its visual system is, a trend they assumed would continue to the bottom. "That [the deepest dwellers] have all these opsins means there's a lot more complexity in the interplay between light and evolution in the deep sea than we realized," Porter says. At a depth of 1000 meters, the last glimmer of sunlight is gone. But over the past 15 years, researchers have realized that the depths are pervaded by a faint bioluminescence from flashing shrimp, octopus, bacteria, and even fish. Most vertebrate eyes could barely detect this subtle shimmer. To learn how fish can see it, a team led by evolutionary biologist Walter Salzburger from the University of Basel in Switzerland studied deep-sea fishes' opsin proteins. Variation in the opsins' amino acid sequences changes the wavelength of light detected, so multiple opsins make color vision possible. One opsin, RH1, works well in low light. Found in the eye's rod cells, it enables humans to see in the dark—but only in black and white. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 26224 - Posted: 05.10.2019

Sara Reardon The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be required to reduce its use of non-human primates in research, under a spending bill approved on 8 May by a committee in the US House of Representatives. The bill would direct the NIH “to accelerate efforts to reduce and replace the use of nonhuman primates with alternative research models” in its laboratories. It would apply to the 2020 budget year, which begins on 1 October, 2019. The agency would also be required to produce a report on the number and purpose of primates it uses in research, the amount of pain they feel and a timeline for replacing and retiring the animals. To become law, the bill would need to win approval from the full House, the Senate and President Donald Trump. Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard (Democrat, California), who has worked for years to curb and regulate animal research, added the provision to the spending legislation for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the NIH’s parent. Roybal-Allard and three other members of Congress requested a bioethical review of experiments involving baby monkeys at an NIH lab in 2014. The review resulted in adjustments to some of the procedures involving the animals. The agency ended those studies in late 2015.

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 26223 - Posted: 05.10.2019

By Diana Kwon When Cynthia Bulik started studying eating disorders back in the early 1980s, what she read in the scientific literature clashed with what she saw in the clinic. At the time, theories about the causes of these conditions were focused primarily on explanations based on family dynamics and sociocultural factors. These descriptions could not explain how, despite dangerously low body weights, patients with eating disorders were often “hyperactive and said they felt well, and only started feeling poorly when we nourished them,” says Bulik, who is currently a professor at both the University of North Carolina and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. “I became convinced that there had to be something biological going on.” Since then, a growing body of research has confirmed Bulik’s observations. Cases of individuals developing rapid alterations in eating behaviors after various infections—the first of which emerged nearly a century ago—have built up over decades. For example, symptoms of eating disorders often occur in pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome (PANS), a condition in which children experience sudden behavioral changes, typically after a streptococcal infection. In addition, over the last few years, several large-scale epidemiological investigations based on data from population registers in Scandinavia—compiled by Bulik and others—have linked eating disorders and autoimmune diseases, including Crohn’s, celiac and type 1 diabetes. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 26222 - Posted: 05.09.2019

By: Michael Miller, M.D. W e’ve known for decades that smoking, hypertension, high cholesterol, and diabetes account for most cardiovascular problems. But it wasn’t until publication of the Interheart study (25,000 volunteers spanning 52 countries) that emotional stress was identified as another key risk factor, accounting for about one-third of heart attacks and strokes. Previously, in the 1970s, when volunteers were asked to begin to count to 100 and then to serially subtract seven’s in quick succession (in a test of “mental stress”), blood vessels constricted as if they had taken and failed a cardiac stress test. Except in these cases, testing occurred at rest. In other words, external stressors that are not effectively managed have direct internal implications by placing undue stress on the heart. Fast forward from the 1970s to the present era, and a recent study of more than 135,000 men and women in Sweden that found a history of stress-related disorders, such as post-traumatic stress syndrome, increased the risk of cardiovascular disease by more than 60 percent within just the first year of diagnosis. Mechanistically, the underlying cause of a heart attack is a sudden rupture of an unstable plaque within a coronary artery. During stressful situations, the “fight-or-flight” response jumps into full gear, releasing biochemical compounds such as adrenaline, which raises heart rate and blood pressure, and signals platelets to release a chemical, neuropeptide Y, that can cause spasm and transient occlusion of the coronary artery. © 2019 The Dana Foundation

Keyword: Stress; Emotions
Link ID: 26221 - Posted: 05.09.2019

By Daniel Barron It’s 3 P.M. on a Saturday in March, and I’m working at Silver Hill Hospital. As the on-duty doctor, my job is to admit new patients and to work with the other staff to make sure that everything goes smoothly. I’m about to see a young patient I’ll call Adrian* I glance in the glass-paned waiting room and notice Adrian sitting on the sofa. Their parents are also in the room (I’m using gender-neutral names pronouns for the patients in this essay, as the author’s note at the bottom explains), standing with concerned looks on their faces. A few minutes later, I meet with Adrian, who turns out to be a pleasant college student. They’ve been feeling anxious and depressed and, in addition to worsening paranoid thoughts, is thinking about suicide. Each patient is uniquely complex. I have never seen two identical patients: even within the same family, even among twins, patients are unique. Each patient’s history and symptoms, brain and genes, hopes and fears differ, which is one reason why psychiatry is so difficult. I need to figure out how to help Adrian. To do this, I need to reduce their complexity into something cognitively manageable, into something I can understand. The way I (and all clinicians) do this is to look for patterns: common symptoms and trends that help me understand what’s going on and suggest a type of treatment. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 26220 - Posted: 05.09.2019

Esther Honig Denver voters narrowly approved a grassroots ballot initiative to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms, commonly referred to as psychedelic mushrooms. What appeared to be a failed effort on the evening of Tuesday's referendum made an unexpected comeback the following afternoon, when Denver election officials released the final count. It showed a slim majority of 50.56% voted in favor of ordinance 301. The action doesn't legalize psilocybin mushrooms, but effectively bars the city from criminally prosecuting or arresting adults 21 or older who possess them. In the ballot language, adults can even grow the fungus for personal use and be considered a low priority for Denver police. The changes could take effect as soon as next year. What happened in Denver may be the start of a much larger movement, which seeks safe access to psilocybin for its purported medicinal value. Supporters point to research, suggesting psilocybin is not addictive and causes few ER visits compared to other illegal drugs. Ongoing medical research shows it could be a groundbreaking medicine for treatment-resistant depression and to help curb nicotine addiction. In Iowa, a Republican lawmaker recently proposed two bills to remove the drug from the state's list of controlled substances. And in Oregon and California, campaigns are working to get similar issues on the ballot for the 2020 elections. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26219 - Posted: 05.09.2019

By Dana G. Smith Training software that emulates brain networks to identify dog breeds or sports equipment is by now old news. But getting such an AI network to learn a process on its own that is innate to early child development is truly novel. In a paper published Wednesday in Science Advances, a neural network distinguished between different quantities of things, even though it was never taught what a number is. The neural net reprised a cognitive skill innate to human babies, monkeys and crows, among others. Without any training, it suddenly could tell the difference between larger and smaller amounts—a skill called numerosity, or number sense. Many believe number sense is an essential precursor to our ability to count and do more complex mathematics. But questions have persisted about how this ability spontaneously comes about in the young brain. To research its development, scientists from the University of Tübingen in Germany used a deep-learning system designed to mimic the human brain to see if numerosity would emerge without having to train the software. “We were trying to simulate the workings of the visual system of our brain by building a deep-learning network, an artificial neural network,” says Andreas Nieder, a professor in the Institute of Neurobiology at Tübingen and senior author on the new paper. “The big question was, how is it possible that our brain and the brain of animals can spontaneously represent the number of items in a visual scene?” © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26218 - Posted: 05.09.2019

By Meredith Wadman The data behind the promising trial of a drug that blocks the production of a mutant protein that causes brain damage in people with Huntington disease—an inherited and ultimately fatal neurological disorder—were published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, giving an official imprimatur to news that first electrified the community of patients with the disease 17 months ago. The results, originally announced in December 2017, were published alongside an editorial that called the trial “pathbreaking.” The new paper reports that the drug, a short stretch of synthetic DNA called HTTRx that blocks the production of the mutant protein huntingtin, is safe in humans; no serious adverse events were reported by the 46 people who participated in the trial. (Last summer, Science wrote in depth about the first participant, Michelle Dardengo.) The results also provide details behind the source of excitement about the trial: that HTTRx reduced levels of huntingtin in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that bathes the spinal cord—a proxy, it is hoped, for what is happening in the brain—by amounts that had reversed Huntington-like motor and cognitive symptoms in mice. And the reductions in the mutant protein in the CSF of patients were dose-dependent: Through a range of dosing levels, the bigger the dose, the more the reduction of the mutant protein. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Huntingtons; Prions
Link ID: 26217 - Posted: 05.07.2019

By Veronique Greenwood You’re holed up with colleagues in a meeting room for two hours, hashing out a plan. Risks are weighed, decisions are made. Then, as you emerge, you realize it was much, much warmer and stuffier in there than in the rest of the office. Small rooms can build up heat and carbon dioxide from our breath — as well as other substances — to an extent that might surprise you. And as it happens, a small body of evidence suggests that when it comes to decision making, indoor air may matter more than we have realized. At least eight studies in the last seven years have looked at what happens specifically in a room accumulating carbon dioxide, a main ingredient in our exhalations. While the results are inconsistent, they are also intriguing. They suggest that while the kinds of air pollution known to cause cancer and asthma remain much more pressing as public health concerns, there may also be pollutants whose most detrimental effects are on the mind, rather than the body. So can you trust the decisions made in small rooms? How much does the quality of air indoors affect your cognitive abilities? And as our knowledge of indoor air’s effects grows, do we need to revise how we design and use our buildings? Buildings in the United States have grown better sealed in the last 50 years, helping reduce energy used in heating and cooling. That’s also made it easier for gasses and other substances released by humans and our belongings to build up inside. Although indoor air quality is not as well monitored as the air outdoors, scientists and ventilation professionals have extensively monitored carbon dioxide indoors. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 26216 - Posted: 05.07.2019

/ By Elizabeth Svoboda As he neared his 50s, Anthony Andrews realized that living inside his own head felt different than it used to. The signs were subtle at first. “My wife started noticing that I wasn’t getting through things,” Andrews says. Every so often, he’d experience what he calls “cognitive voids,” where he’d get dizzy and blank out for a few seconds. It wasn’t just that he would lose track of things, as if the thought bubble over his head had popped. Over time, Andrews’ issues became more pronounced. It wasn’t just that he would lose track of things, as if the thought bubble over his head had popped. A dense calm had descended on him like a weighted blanket. “I felt like I was walking through the swamp,” says Andrews, now 54. He had to play internet chess each morning to penetrate the mental murk. In 2016, Anthony Andrews and his wife Mona were told he likely had CTE, a neurodegenerative disorder caused by repeated head impacts. With his wife, Mona, by his side, Andrews went to doctor after doctor racking up psychiatric diagnoses. One told him he had ADHD. Another thought he was depressed, and another said he had bipolar disorder. But the drugs and therapies they prescribed didn’t seem to help. “After a month,” Andrews recalls of these treatments, “I knew it’s not for me.” Copyright 2019 Undark

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 26215 - Posted: 05.07.2019

Richard Harris Scientists who recently announced an experimental genetic test that can help predict obesity got immediate pushback from other researchers, who wonder whether it is really useful. The story behind this back-and-forth is, at its core, a question of when it's worth diving deep into DNA databanks when there's no obvious way to put that information into use. The basic facts are not in dispute. Human behavior and our obesity-promoting environment have led to a surge in this condition over the past few decades. Today about 40% of American adults are obese and even more are overweight. But genetics also plays an important role. People inherit genes that make them more or less likely to become seriously overweight. While some diseases (like Huntington's and Tay-Sachs) are caused by a single gene gone awry, that's certainly not the case for common conditions, including obesity. Instead, untold thousands of genes apparently play a role in increasing obesity risk. Many of those gene variants contribute a miniscule risk. Sekar Kathiresan, a cardiologist at Harvard and a geneticist at the Broad Institute, set out to see whether he and his team could find a bunch of these genetic variants and add up their effects. The goal was to identify genetic patterns that put people at the highest risk. This genetic information "could explain why somebody's so big, why they have so much trouble keeping their weight down," Kathiresan says. His team identified more than 2 million DNA variants of potential interest. He figures most of those variants are irrelevant, but his hunch is, hidden somewhere in there are a few thousand changes that each contribute at least a tiny bit to a person's risk of developing obesity. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 26214 - Posted: 05.07.2019

By Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi In 1945, Dorothy Still, a nurse in the United States Navy, met with a Navy psychiatrist to discuss disturbing symptoms she had been experiencing. Miss Still was one of 12 Navy nurses who had been held prisoner of war by the Japanese military in the occupied Philippines during World War II. For more than three years, Miss Still and the other nurses had provided care to diseased, starving and destitute civilian inmates in a makeshift infirmary at the P.O.W. camp. In the months after liberation, Miss Still found she often cried without provocation and had trouble stopping her tears. She most likely suffered from what today we could call post-traumatic stress disorder, but the Navy psychiatrist offered no support or solutions. Instead, he called her a “fake” and a “liar.” Nurses, he claimed could not suffer the kind of shell shock from war that sailors or soldiers could. Mental health experts now recognize that PTSD can indeed affect nurses, both military and civilian. As many as 28 percent of nurses experience PTSD at some point in their careers, said Meredith Mealer, an associate professor at the Anschutz Medical Campus at the University of Colorado, Denver, though health care providers still often struggle to treat it. “It’s probably improved from Dorothy’s experience, but we still have a ways to go,” Dr. Meal. PTSD, as defined by the DSM-5, the psychiatric professions’ official manual of mental health disorders, can arise after a person has been exposed to a traumatic event, typically involving or threatening death, injury or sexual violence. Someone might experience the trauma first-hand or witness it happening to someone else, learn it happened to a loved one or repeatedly hear details about a violent event. The result can be intrusive symptoms such as unwanted memories, nightmares, flashbacks and overwhelming feelings of stress when exposed to reminders of the event. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 26213 - Posted: 05.07.2019