By Perri Klass, M.D. I believe my mother thought that needing to medicate her own discomfort would be a kind of moral and physical weakness. This applied only to herself; if I told her that I was hurting, or that one of her grandchildren was in pain, she would have been anxious for something to help. She felt our pain, you might say, but she denied her own. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks thinking about pain in children and writing about pain in children — acute pain and chronic pain, pain with shots and pain after surgery, pain medicines and pain specialists. I asked the pain experts I interviewed about the different ways that different people experience pain from the same stimulus: Why does one child cry inconsolably after a needle stick while another, same age, same size needle, watches with curiosity as the shot is administered and doesn’t even flinch? There is a great deal of variation in how much pain people experience, I was told, and by and large we should take people at their word. Some people are more prone to soreness, some are relatively less sensitive, some hypersensitive, and there are differences in the ways that different people process pain, and in the ways they respond to drugs. And “hypersensitive” is not a code word for “complains more” — it’s a neurological category. And then of course there are psychological factors. That is not to say that pain is psychogenic, said Dr. Charles Berde, the founder of the division of pain medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, and one of my teachers when I did my training there. People who are anxious or terrified of pain, people who have post-traumatic stress disorder, may actually experience more pain, he said, because the pain circuits in their brains are revved up. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25931 - Posted: 02.04.2019

/ By Ronnie Cohen Dr. Samir Grover was taken aback when, early in his gastroenterology career, he saw one physician speak two times and present contradictory conclusions about the same medication. Each time, the speaker presented identical data on a drug used to treat inflammatory bowel disease. First, he recommended the pharmaceutical. A week later, he deemed it ineffective. “How could this exact same data be spun in two very different ways?” asked Grover, a professor at the University of Toronto. One fact did change — the drug manufacturer that sponsored and paid for the lecture. “Simply following clinical practice guidelines could lead doctors — even those who shun all industry gifts — to unwittingly dispense financially tainted medicine” It’s no secret that drug makers pay doctors to hype their products to other doctors. But few outside the halls of hospitals witness physicians bending a single set of facts in opposing ways. After watching similar acts of statistical wizardry throughout his nine years of medical practice, Grover set out to investigate a more sweeping question about conflicts of interest. Do they infect clinical practice guidelines? Professional societies produce thousands of these documents every year. They steer the decisions of health care professionals and insurance companies about how to prevent and treat an ever-widening range of conditions — from diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease to arthritis, hepatitis, cancer, and depression. Grover and his colleagues’ paper and a companion study recently published in JAMA Internal Medicine suggest that simply following clinical practice guidelines could lead doctors — even those who shun all industry gifts — to unwittingly dispense financially tainted medicine. More than half of the authors of guidelines examined in the two studies had financial conflicts of interest. In many cases, the doctors who wrote the guidelines were paid by the same companies that produced the drugs they recommended. In addition, a significant portion of the doctors who took pharmaceutical money failed to disclose the payments, many of which amounted to $10,000 or more. Copyright 2019 Undark

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25930 - Posted: 02.04.2019

by Esmé Weijun Wang "Schizophrenia terrifies." Those are the first two words of The Collected Schizophrenias, Esmé Weijun Wang's new book — part memoir, part scientific chronicle of her journey towards a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder. She first noticed that her brain worked differently than others, she says, when she was just five or six years old. And then, she says, "severe depression started when I was about 11, depression that was diagnosed by a doctor probably happened when I was 15 or 16. Bipolar disorder was diagnosed when I was about 17 or 18, and then the schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, was diagnosed when I was in my late 20s." Interview Highlights On her experience of schizoaffective disorder I like to kind of jokingly say that it's like a marriage between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. So my first hallucination that I ever had was actually when I was in the shower in college, and I heard a voice very clearly say to me, "I hate you." And it was so clear to me, and this is why I say that hallucinations really effectively kidnap the senses, because it's exactly like someone is standing next to you and saying this thing to you. And I started thinking, oh, is there something going on with the pipes, where I can hear maybe something on the floor below me, or maybe the floor above me, but it didn't really make sense to me physically, so I started thinking, maybe this is a hallucination, and it kind of went off from there ... and then later I started having delusions in which I was believing that my loved ones were replaced by doubles, or replaced by robots — so it's been an interesting journey. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 25929 - Posted: 02.04.2019

By Jordana Cepelewicz Genitals are among the fastest-evolving features in the animal kingdom. They’re also among the most diverse, arrayed in all shapes and sizes, adorned with spines, hooks and even teeth. Ducks have corkscrew-shaped genitalia. The male sea horse has a brood pouch that receives his mate’s eggs for fertilization and in which he nurtures the resulting offspring until birth. Female cabbage white butterflies have a hinged jaw inside their genital tract. Nature is full of strange reproductive organs with unusual uses. For the most part, though, certain genital morphologies are associated with males, others with females. But in 2014, a tiny insect called the barklouse broke even that rule when researchers reported that the females of all four species of a genus found in the caves of Brazil had a penis. It didn’t just look like a penis but acted like one, too: a penetrative organ the female insects used to anchor themselves to their mates during copulation. Moreover, complementary changes in the genitalia of the males had left them with a small pumping mechanism inside a membranous “vagina-like” cavity. Content from The Coca-Cola Company Sustainability and closed-loop recycling systems must now become a global priority, from emerging nations to the world's largest economies. Read More The finding not only piqued widespread interest (and amusement — the team was awarded a comedic Ig Nobel Prize in 2017), but also led to a debate about whether the scientists involved were correct to refer to the structure, called a gynosome, as a “female penis.” (Some experts, for instance, disagree with that characterization because the gynosome collects sperm rather than delivering it.) © 1996-2019 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 25928 - Posted: 02.04.2019

By Howard M. Fillit Alzheimer's disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S., and unlike with cancer and heart disease, we lack the tools to effectively diagnose and treat it. In sharp contrast to other illnesses and despite many efforts, huge expense and hundreds of clinical trials, no new treatments have been approved in the past 16 years. The emphasis has been on drugs targeting beta-amyloid proteins, which clump into plaques in the brains of afflicted people. Unfortunately, these approaches have not yet yielded the results we hoped for. So now it is time to target novel pathways to tackle this incredibly complex disease. This has been a challenge because of the absence of affordable and noninvasive tests based on biomarkers that doctors can easily use in their offices. The alternatives have been expensive and invasive spinal taps or neuroimaging tests that can be performed only in a hospital or freestanding radiology office. New biomarkers are needed for specific molecular targets that can be used to subtype patients; for predicting the likelihood that they will acquire Alzheimer's; and possibly for providing a diagnosis even before symptoms are noticeable, enabling prevention. That is, they could do what currently available amyloid positron-emission tomography (PET) scans and cerebrospinal fluid tests do. Biomarkers can also be used to enroll patients in clinical trials directed to a specific target, such as beta-amyloid, and to measure how the body responds to a treatment—as was done most recently by Biogen with its anti-beta-amyloid monoclonal antibody. Ultimately biomarkers can determine which therapies would be most effective for an individual. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25927 - Posted: 02.02.2019

Jef Akst Whether you’re an early bird or a night owl is partly dependent on your genome, according to a study published this week (January 29) in Nature Communications. Scanning nearly 700,000 human genomes available through the UK Biobank and the consumer genetics testing company 23andMe and comparing the results with reported sleep preferences, an international team of researchers identified more than 350 variations associated with being a morning person. Additional analyses using the device-recorded activity patterns of more than 85,000 of these participants revealed that people who carried the most gene variants linked with being an early bird went to bed an average of 25 minutes earlier than those who carried the fewest. The team went on to study the potential roles of these gene variants, and found that many had functions in regulating circadian rhythms. Some were active in the brain, while others were active in the retina. One of the genes participates in the body’s responses to caffeine and nicotine. But, coauthor Michael Weedon, a bioinformaticist at the University of Exeter in the UK, tells The New York Times, “the most interesting ones are the ones where we don’t know what it is.” The researchers found links between people’s sleep preferences, or chronotypes, and their mental health, with those who identified as morning people being less likely to report having depression or schizophrenia and reporting higher levels of general well-being. But chronotype is not a simple variable, Suzanne Hood, an assistant professor of psychology at Bishop’s University in Quebec who was not involved in the study, tells CNN, and future studies should take the nuance of the phenotype into account. “It would be interesting to follow up these findings with other kinds of methods that can track sleep variables with more precision.” © 1986 - 2019 The Scientist.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25926 - Posted: 02.02.2019

Emily Conover Lasers can send sounds straight to a listener’s ear, like whispering a secret from afar. Using a laser tuned to interact with water vapor in the air, scientists created sounds in a localized spot that were loud enough to be picked up by human hearing if aimed near a listener’s ear. It’s the first time such a technique can be used safely around humans, scientists from MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Mass., report in the Feb. 1 Optics Letters. At the wavelengths and intensities used, the laser won’t cause burns if it grazes eyes or skin. The scientists tested out the setup on themselves in the laboratory, putting their ears near the beam to pick up the sound. “You move your head around, and there’s a couple-inch zone where you go ‘Oh, there it is!’… It’s pretty cool,” says physicist Charles Wynn. The researchers also used microphones to capture and analyze the sounds. The work relies on a phenomenon called the photoacoustic effect, in which pulses of light are converted into sound when absorbed by a material, in this case, water vapor. Based on this effect, the researchers used two different techniques to make the sounds. The first technique, which involves rapidly ramping the intensity of the laser beam up and down, can transmit voices and songs. “You can hear the music really well; you can understand what people are saying,” says physicist Ryan Sullenberger, who coauthored the study along with Wynn and physicist Sumanth Kaushik. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 25925 - Posted: 02.02.2019

Jonathan Lambert It's cold outside, you're sick and all you want to do is curl up under the covers until you feel better. In fact, the need for sleep can be so strong when we're sick that this may be all we can do. Scientists don't fully understand how this excessive sleepiness is different from your normal, everyday tiredness. Previous work in nematodes found a gene that dampens activity of wakefulness neurons in response to infection. Other research in mammals suggests elements of the immune response can influence behavior. Overall, scientists still have a lot to learn about what makes us feel sleepy, when we're healthy or sick. Some genes have been identified that seem to affect sleep, but none that actively induce sleepiness when turned on. But a study, published Thursday in the journal Science, finds one potential piece of the puzzle — in fruit flies. Scientists discovered a single protein that both puts flies to sleep when they're sick and also has antimicrobial properties. "This is a very interesting finding," says Dragana Rogulja, a sleep neurobiologist at Harvard who wasn't involved in the study. "It's pretty clear that infection or something that requires an immune response does lead to sleep, and this gene seems to do that." Neuroscientist Amita Sehgal led the study at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine. She didn't set out to find a gene linked to both sleep and immunity. Instead, her lab was interested in understanding the molecular triggers of sleep. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Sleep; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 25924 - Posted: 02.01.2019

/ By Jacob Appel One of the most upsetting illnesses any psychiatrist encounters is Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome (WKS). Caused by a deficiency of thiamine (vitamin B1), it results in devastating impairment of muscle control and memory. Able-bodied men and women develop a severe and irreversible amnesia that wipes clean their pasts and prevents them from forming new memories. Those who survive — and many patients don’t — are often relegated to nursing homes. Yet the neurological damage WKS causes is only part of what makes it so upsetting to emergency room psychiatrists; after all, many neurological and psychiatric illnesses inflict irreversible cognitive harm. The tragedy of WKS is that, with appropriate public health measures, it could be easily prevented. Historically, thiamine deficiency afflicted the indigent, prisoners of war, and societies with rice-based diets. Its most serious chronic manifestation, beriberi, can present in a “wet” form that results in cardiac overload and massive edema, or in a “dry” variant — of which WKS is a subset — that affects the peripheral nervous system, the brain, or both. In addition to amnesia, victims of WKS often display striking degrees of spontaneous confabulation, in which they volunteer personal stories that they believe to be true but are not. Prevalence rates for WKS at autopsy have been found to run as high as 2.8 percent in Australia, and between 0.1 to 2.2 percent in the U.S. Copyright 2019 Undark

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25923 - Posted: 02.01.2019

By Virginia Morell It’s hard to imagine a teen asking their mother for approval on anything. But a new study shows that male zebra finches—colorful songbirds with complex songs—learn their father’s tune better when mom “fluffs up” to signal her approval. This is the first time the songbirds, thought to be mere memorization machines, have been shown to use social cues for learning—putting them in an elite club that includes cowbirds, marmosets, and humans. The finding suggests other songbirds might also learn their tunes this way, and that zebra finches are better models for studying language development than thought. “Female zebra finches play an important role in male learning, in some ways even rivaling that of the male tutors,” says Karl Berg, an avian ecologist at the University of Texas in Brownsville, who was not involved in the new study. Previously, scientists knew only that the nonsinging females played some role in song acquisition, because males raised with deaf females develop incorrect songs. Researchers have long known that female brown-headed cowbirds make quick, lateral wing strokes to approve the songs of juvenile males (as in finches, only male cowbirds learn to sing). Most scientists discounted the cowbirds’ social cues as an isolated oddity, because the birds are brood parasites. But cowbirds’ similarities to zebra finches—both are highly social and use their songs to attract mates rather than claim territories—led Cornell University developmental psychobiologists Samantha Carouso-Peck and Michael Goldstein to wonder whether female finches also use social cues to help young males learn the best, mate-attracting songs. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25922 - Posted: 02.01.2019

By Roni Caryn Rabin A sudden shortage of one of the safest anti-anxiety drugs on the market has spread alarm among people who rely on the medication, buspirone, to get through the day without debilitating anxiety and panic attacks. Physicians are also expressing concern, because there is no information about when the supply will resume, making it difficult to manage patients. Shelby Vittek, a 27-year-old writer in New Jersey, fruitlessly called dozens of drugstores in New Jersey and Pennsylvania in an attempt to locate the medication after her pharmacist told her the drug was on back-order with no end in sight. She ended up weaning herself off the drug, spreading her last three pills over six days to avoid having to go “cold turkey” before starting a difficult transition to an antidepressant. “I pretty much lost over a month of work, and have just started to feel like myself again,” she said. A 34-year-old New York woman who couldn’t get her buspirone refilled in January said she couldn’t sleep and had such severe panic attacks that she had to use Klonopin, a drug she dislikes because it is addictive. “I’m trying to take care of my anxiety, and it’s giving me a panic attack,” said the woman, a sexual assault survivor who asked not to be identified. A Pennsylvania medical school student received her mail-order shipment of medication last week with no buspirone in it and no explanation, so she scrounged around the house and dug up old pills from missed doses. Last weekend, the student, who asked not to be identified, was so anxious she could not leave the house. “This is potentially messing with people’s clinical stability,” said Dr. Dennis Glick, a psychiatrist in Greenbelt, Md. “When you have a patient with a complicated and balanced regimen, you really don’t want to just arbitrarily have someone come off the medicine.” Dr. Glick said he has been in practice for 34 years “and I honestly don’t recall issues like this interfering with care until maybe a couple of years ago.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25921 - Posted: 02.01.2019

Laura Sanders Do you floss regularly? A study published January 23 in Science Advances — and the news stories that it inspired — might have scared you into better oral hygiene by claiming to find a link between gum bacteria and Alzheimer’s disease. Those experiments hinted that the gum disease–causing bacteria Porphyromonas gingivalis was present in the brains of a small number of people who died with the degenerative brain disease. Some headlines trumpeted that the cause of Alzheimer’s had finally been found. Enzymes made by P. gingivalis, called gingipains, interact with key Alzheimer’s proteins called amyloid-beta and tau in test tube experiments and in the brains of mice, the researchers found. Gingipains prod A-beta to accumulate and tau to behave abnormally, both signs of Alzheimer’s disease in people, the experiments suggest. And compounds that block gingipains seemed to reduce the amount of A-beta in the infected mice. The findings “offer evidence that P. gingivalis and gingipains in the brain play a central role” in the development of Alzheimer’s disease, the researchers write in their study. The research was paid for and conducted in part by employees of Cortexyme, Inc., a San Francisco–based biotech company that’s developing these compounds. The results fit with an idea that’s gaining traction among Alzheimer’s researchers — that bacteria, viruses and even fungi could spark the disease (SN: 7/21/18, p. 10). But the Science Advances study is far from conclusive, cautions Rudolph Tanzi, an Alzheimer’s researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Science News asked him what the study can, and can’t, answer about Alzheimer’s disease. His responses are edited for length and clarity. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25920 - Posted: 02.01.2019

By Benedict Carey The world’s most common digital habit is not easy to break, even in a fit of moral outrage over the privacy risks and political divisions Facebook has created, or amid concerns about how the habit might affect emotional health. Although four in 10 Facebook users say they have taken long breaks from it, the digital platform keeps growing. A recent study found that the average user would have to be paid $1,000 to $2,000 to be pried away for a year. So what happens if you actually do quit? A new study, the most comprehensive to date, offers a preview. Expect the consequences to be fairly immediate: More in-person time with friends and family. Less political knowledge, but also less partisan fever. A small bump in one’s daily moods and life satisfaction. And, for the average Facebook user, an extra hour a day of downtime. The study, by researchers at Stanford University and New York University, helps clarify the ceaseless debate over Facebook’s influence on the behavior, thinking and politics of its active monthly users, who number some 2.3 billion worldwide. The study was posted recently on the Social Science Research Network, an open access site. “For me, Facebook is one of those compulsive things,” said Aaron Kelly, 23, a college student in Madison, Wis. “It’s really useful, but I always felt like I was wasting time on it, distracting myself from study, using it whenever I got bored.” Mr. Kelly, who estimated that he spent about an hour a day on the platform, took part in the study “because it was kind of nice to have an excuse to deactivate and see what happened,” he said. Well before news broke that Facebook had shared users’ data without consent, scientists and habitual users debated how the platform had changed the experience of daily life. A cadre of psychologists has argued for years that the use of Facebook and other social media is linked to mental distress, especially in adolescents. Others have likened habitual Facebook use to a mental disorder, comparing it to drug addiction and even publishing magnetic-resonance images of what Facebook addiction “looks like in the brain.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Depression
Link ID: 25919 - Posted: 01.31.2019

By Laurie McGinley E-cigarettes are almost twice as effective at helping smokers quit as nicotine replacement therapies such as lozenges and patches, according to a new study that immediately stoked the debate over whether e-cigarettes are an important smoking-cessation tool or a health menace. The study, published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, is the first randomized trial to test the effectiveness of modern e-cigarettes vs. nicotine-replacement products, said Peter Hajek, a psychologist at Queen Mary University of London, who led the trial. The researchers found that 18 percent of the e-cigarette users were smoke-free after a year, compared with 9.9 percent of those in the nicotine-replacement group. The participants also received behavioral support to stop smoking. For years, physicians have been reluctant to recommend e-cigarettes for smoking cessation because of a lack of clinical trial data, Hajek said. “This is now likely to change,” he added in a statement. But two editorials in the same publication threw some cold water on the trial’s results. One editorial, by Boston University researchers, said e-cigarettes should be used only when Food and Drug Administration-approved treatments do not work. Those approved therapies, as well as drugs such as bupropion, have higher effectiveness rates than the new study suggested, and much more is known about their side effects, said Belinda Borrelli, a Boston University researcher who co-wrote the editorial. © 1996-2019 The Washington Post

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25918 - Posted: 01.31.2019

Jon Hamilton For comedian Lewis Black, anger is a job. Black is famous for his rants about stuff he finds annoying or unfair or just plain infuriating. Onstage, he often looks ready for a fight. He leans forward. He shouts. He stabs the air with an index finger, or a middle finger. To a scientist, Black looks a lot like a belligerent dog, or an irritated gerbil. "Practically every sexually reproducing, multicellular animal shows aggressive behavior," says David Anderson, a professor of biology at Caltech and co-author of the book The Neuroscience of Emotion. "Fruit flies show aggression." When I relay that last bit to Black, he's skeptical. "Really?" he says. "Come on." But Anderson, whose lab studies fruit flies, says the evidence is compelling. "They fight over females, they fight over food, they threaten each other, they put their wings up in the air, they charge at each other," he says. But does aggressive behavior mean a fruit fly gets angry the way Black does? Anderson says that depends on how you define the term. "We use anger subjectively to refer to our experience, our conscious experience, of rage, the feeling that you are about to explode, the feeling of irritation," he says. Black feels that way a lot. And he has spent decades thinking about how anger works in his own brain. "My anger comes from a collection of things that occur during the course of a day that build up," he says. "So by the end of a day, six or seven things have happened to me that have gone into my anger bank." © 2019 npr

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 25917 - Posted: 01.31.2019

Ewen Callaway Neanderthals and Denisovans might have lived side by side for tens of thousands of years, scientists report in two papers in Nature1,2. The long-awaited studies are based on the analysis of bones, artefacts and sediments from Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, which is dotted with ancient-human remains. They provide the first detailed history of the site’s 300,000-year occupation by different groups of ancient humans. “We can now tell the whole story of the entire cave, not just bits and pieces,” says Zenobia Jacobs, a geochronologist at the University of Wollongong, Australia, who co-led one of the studies. Soviet archaeologists began unravelling the story of Denisova Cave, at the foot of the Altai Mountains, in the early 1980s. Since then, scientists have found the fragmentary remains of nearly a dozen ancient humans at the site. The cave became world famous in 2010, after an analysis of the DNA from a tiny hominin finger bone found that the creature was distinct from both modern humans and Neanderthals3. It belonged to a previously unknown hominin group, later named Denisovans. Additional sequencing of the DNA in bone remains from the cave found that Denisovans were a sister group to Neanderthals, and might once have lived across Asia — where they interbred with the ancestors of some humans now living there4. © 2019 Springer Nature Publishing AG

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 25916 - Posted: 01.31.2019

By Carl Zimmer In 2014 John Cryan, a professor at University College Cork in Ireland, attended a meeting in California about Alzheimer’s disease. He wasn’t an expert on dementia. Instead, he studied the microbiome, the trillions of microbes inside the healthy human body. Dr. Cryan and other scientists were beginning to find hints that these microbes could influence the brain and behavior. Perhaps, he told the scientific gathering, the microbiome has a role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. The idea was not well received. “I’ve never given a talk to so many people who didn’t believe what I was saying,” Dr. Cryan recalled. A lot has changed since then: Research continues to turn up remarkable links between the microbiome and the brain. Scientists are finding evidence that microbiome may play a role not just in Alzheimer’s disease, but Parkinson’s disease, depression, schizophrenia, autism and other conditions. For some neuroscientists, new studies have changed the way they think about the brain. One of the skeptics at that Alzheimer’s meeting was Sangram Sisodia, a neurobiologist at the University of Chicago. He wasn’t swayed by Dr. Cryan’s talk, but later he decided to put the idea to a simple test. “It was just on a lark,” said Dr. Sisodia. “We had no idea how it would turn out.” He and his colleagues gave antibiotics to mice prone to develop a version of Alzheimer’s disease, in order to kill off much of the gut bacteria in the mice. Later, when the scientists inspected the animals’ brains, they found far fewer of the protein clumps linked to dementia. Just a little disruption of the microbiome was enough to produce this effect. Young mice given antibiotics for a week had fewer clumps in their brains when they grew old, too. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Depression
Link ID: 25915 - Posted: 01.29.2019

Amy Lewis Cynthia Bulik began her scientific career studying childhood depression. But while she was working as a research assistant at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1980s, psychiatrist David Kupfer asked her to help write a book chapter comparing electroencephalography studies in depression and anorexia. As preparation, she shadowed a psychiatrist at a hospital inpatient unit for people with eating disorders. Bulik was intrigued by what she witnessed there. “These people were my age, my sex, and weighed half as much as I did,” she says. “They seemed very eloquent and interactive, but at the same time, in this one area of their psychology and biology, they occupied a completely different space.” Now the founding director of the Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Bulik has been unraveling the biology behind eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa (AN) ever since. Characterized by extreme caloric restriction resulting in weight loss, an intense fear of gaining weight, and a distorted body image, anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder. Death can be a result of various risks associated with the condition, from suicide to heart failure. While many AN sufferers go undiagnosed, making incidence rates hard to pin down, some researchers estimate that up to 2 percent of women and 0.3 percent of men are affected globally. © 1986 - 2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25914 - Posted: 01.29.2019

By Pam Belluck In dementia research, so many paths have led nowhere that any glimmer of optimism is noteworthy. So some experts are heralding the results of a large new study, which found that people with hypertension who received intensive treatment to lower their blood pressure were less likely than those receiving standard blood pressure treatment to develop minor memory and thinking problems that often progress to dementia. The study, published Monday in JAMA, is the first large, randomized clinical trial to find something that can help many older people reduce their risk of mild cognitive impairment — an early stage of faltering function and memory that is a frequent precursor to Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. The results apply only to those age 50 or older who have elevated blood pressure and who do not have diabetes or a history of stroke. But that’s a condition affecting a lot of people — more than 75 percent of people over 65 have hypertension, the study said. So millions might eventually benefit by reducing not only their risk of heart problems but of cognitive decline, too. “It’s kind of remarkable that they found something,” said Dr. Kristine Yaffe, a professor of psychiatry and neurology at University of California San Francisco, who was not involved in the research. “I think it actually is very exciting because it tells us that by improving vascular health in a comprehensive way, we could actually have an effect on brain health.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25913 - Posted: 01.29.2019

A study has shed light on the neurocomputational contributions to the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in combat veterans. The findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, revealed distinct patterns for how the brain and body respond to learning danger and safety depending on the severity of PTSD symptoms. These findings could help explain why symptoms of PTSD can be severe for some people but not others. The study was funded in part by the National Institute of Mental Health, part of the National Institutes of Health. “Researchers have thought that the experience of PTSD, in many ways, is an overlearned response to survive a threatening experience,” said Susan Borja, Ph.D., chief of the NIMH Dimensional Traumatic Stress Research Program. “This study clarifies that those who have the most severe symptoms may appear behaviorally similar to those with less severe symptoms, but are responding to cues in subtly different, but profound, ways.” PTSD is a disorder that can sometimes develop after exposure to a traumatic event. People with PTSD may experience intrusive and frightening thoughts and memories of the event, experience sleep problems, feel detached or numb, or may be easily startled. While almost half of all U.S. adults will experience a traumatic event in their life, most do not develop PTSD. One theory explaining why some symptoms of PTSD develop suggests that during a traumatic event, a person may learn to view the people, locations, and objects that are present as being dangerous if they become associated with the threatening situation. While some of these things may be dangerous, some are safe. PTSD symptoms result when these safe stimuli continue to trigger fearful and defensive responses long after the trauma has occurred.

Keyword: Stress; Brain imaging
Link ID: 25912 - Posted: 01.29.2019