By Amanda Svachula Marcos Gardiana, a self-proclaimed Disney fanatic with five tattoos of Disney characters on his body to prove it, was excited to see the company’s latest blockbuster, “Incredibles 2,” on Sunday, and took his girlfriend along with him. He never got to see the end of it. Mr. Gardiana, 27, who has epilepsy as a result of a brain injury from a 2011 car accident, said he started getting lightheaded and dizzy in the theater. He had a “small” seizure at first, he said, and then a “blackout seizure, a full-on shaking seizure.” His girlfriend, Courtney Anderson, 21, led him to a bench outside. “He sat down for a minute, pale as a ghost,” she said. “He had a second, full-on seizure, eyes rolled back. And he lost consciousness.” Mr. Gardiana had apparently suffered seizures triggered by flashing lights during the movie, an unusual but also a well-established peril for some people with epilepsy. It was unclear whether the Walt Disney Company, which did not respond to requests for comment on Monday, had warned theaters about the danger. But beginning on Friday, the first full day of showings for “Incredibles 2,” signs began appearing in movie houses warning that a “sequence of flashing lights” may affect people who are susceptible to “photosensitive epilepsy or other photosensitivities.” But it appears that some epileptic viewers did not get the memo. Mr. Gardiana said he saw no warning signs in the Las Vegas theater he went to. The manager of the theater said that a sign had been posted on Friday but that she could not comment further. In Times Square, where the movie was showing at the Regal Cinemas, a sign did not go up on Monday until this reporter asked where it was; that theater’s manager declined to comment. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 25103 - Posted: 06.19.2018

By Roni Caryn Rabin The director of the nation’s top health research agency pulled the plug on a study of alcohol’s health effects without hesitation on Friday, saying a Harvard scientist and some of his agency’s own staff had crossed “so many lines” in pursuit of alcohol industry funding that “people were frankly shocked.” A 165-page internal investigation prepared for Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, concluded that Kenneth J. Mukamal, the lead investigator of the trial, was in close, frequent contact with beer and liquor executives while designing the study. Buried in that document are disturbing examples of the coziness between the scientists and their industry patrons. Dr. Mukamal was eager to allay their concerns, respond to their questions and suggestions, and secure the industry’s buy-in. Dr. Mukamal has repeatedly denied communicating with the alcohol industry while planning the trial, telling The Times last year that he had, “literally no contact with the alcohol industry.” In a statement issued on Friday, Dr. Mukamal said he and his colleagues “stand fully and forcefully behind the scientific integrity” of the trial. But the report documented conference calls he held with alcoholic beverage companies and lengthy memos written in response to their concerns, long before the N.I.H. even announced it would sponsor the trial. Beer and liquor companies offered their own suggestions for carrying out the trial. Carlsberg, the Danish beer company, at one point suggested that clinical trial centers be established in Russia, China and Denmark. (A trial site was located in Copenhagen, but not in Russia or China.) The strategy of engagement with industry was effective. Five large beer and liquor companies eventually agreed to pick up most of the $100 million tab for the 10-year-long randomized trial. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25102 - Posted: 06.19.2018

Ed Yong Peter, aged 3, was scared of rabbits. So Mary Cover Jones kept bringing him rabbits. At first, she’d take a caged rabbit up to Peter, while he ate some candy and played with other children. At first, Peter was terrified by the mere presence of a rabbit in the same room. But soon, he allowed the animal to get closer—12 feet, then four, then three. Eventually, Peter was happy for rabbits to nibble his fingers. “The case of Peter illustrates how a fear may be removed under laboratory conditions,” Cover Jones wrote in 1924. Cover Jones is now recognized as the "mother of behavioral therapy." Her observations laid the groundwork for what would become known as exposure therapy—the practice of getting people to overcome their fears by facing them in controlled settings. A century later, neuroscientists can watch how the act of facing one’s fears actually plays out inside the brain. Using gene-engineering tools, they can label the exact neurons in a mouse’s brain that store a specific fearful memory. Then, they can watch what happens when the rodent recalls those experiences. By doing this, Ossama Khalaf from the EPFL in Lausanne showed that the extinction of fear depends on reactivating the neurons that encode it. A mouse has to re-experience a deep-rooted fear if it is to lose it. When someone encounters a new experience—say, a terrifying rabbit—groups of neurons in their brain fire together, the connections between them become stronger, and molecules accumulate at the places where neurons meet. Many scientists believe that these preserved patterns of strengthened connections are the literal stuff of memories—the physical representations of the things we remember. These connected neuron groups are called engrams.

Keyword: Emotions; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25101 - Posted: 06.18.2018

By Jessica Wright, Spectrum o Young people with autism have more psychiatric and medical conditions than do their typical peers or those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a new study suggests. The early onset of these problems suggests they do not stem solely from a lifetime of poor healthcare, says lead researcher Lisa Croen, director of the Autism Research Program at Kaiser Permanente, a managed healthcare provider based in California. “One possible explanation is that there’s something physiologic or genetic that’s underlying not only what falls into the definition of autism, but also physical health and, more broadly, mental health,” she says. Some of the problems in young people with autism, such as obesity, may be related to poor diet, medication use and limited physical activity, says Alice Kuo, associate professor of internal medicine and pediatrics at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study. Several studies have documented the co-occurrence of psychiatric and medical conditions in people with autism. Croen’s team published a similar analysis in 2015 of adults with autism aged 18 to 74. (The oldest control was 92.) © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 25100 - Posted: 06.18.2018

by Judith Graham You’ve turned 65 and exited middle age. What are the chances you’ll develop cognitive impairment or dementia in the years ahead? New research about “cognitive life expectancy” — how long older adults live with good vs. declining brain health — shows that after age 65, men and women spend more than a dozen years in good cognitive health, on average. And, over the past decade, that time span has been expanding. By contrast, cognitive challenges arise in a more compressed time frame in later life, with mild cognitive impairment (problems with memory, decision-making or thinking skills) lasting about four years, on average, and dementia (Alzheimer’s disease or other related conditions) occurring over 1½ to two years. Even when these conditions surface, many seniors retain an overall sense of well-being, according to new research presented in April at the Population Association of America’s annual meeting. “The majority of cognitively impaired years are happy ones, not unhappy ones,” said Anthony Bardo, a co-author of that study and an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Kentucky at Lexington. Recent research finds that: Most seniors don’t have cognitive impairment or dementia. Of Americans 65 and older, about 20 to 25 percent have mild cognitive impairment while about 10 percent have dementia, according to Kenneth Langa, an expert in the demography of aging and a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan. Risks rise with advanced age, and the portion of the population affected is significantly higher for people older than 85. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25099 - Posted: 06.18.2018

By Jan Hoffman One in seven high school students reported misusing prescription opioids, one of several disturbing results in a nationwide survey of teenagers that revealed a growing sense of fear and despair among youth in the United States. The numbers of teenagers reporting “feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” suicidal thoughts, and days absent from school out of fear of violence or bullying have all risen since 2007. The increases were particularly pointed among lesbian, gay and bisexual high school students. Nationally, 1 in 5 students reported being bullied at school; 1 in 10 female students and 1 in 28 male students reported having been physically forced to have sex. “An adolescent’s world can be bleak,” said Dr. Jonathan Mermin, an official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which conducted the survey and analyzed the data. “But having a high proportion of students report they had persistent feelings of hopelessness and 17 percent considering suicide is deeply disturbing.” In 2017, 31 percent of students surveyed said they had such feelings, while 28 percent said so in 2007. In 2017, nearly 14 percent of students had actually made a suicide plan, up from 11 percent in 2007. The Youth Risk Behavior Survey is given every two years to nearly 15,000 students in high schools in 39 states, and poses questions about a wide array of attitudes and activities. The report did offer some encouraging trends, suggesting that the overall picture for adolescents is a nuanced one. Compared to a decade ago, fewer students reported having had sex, drinking alcohol or using drugs like cocaine, heroin or marijuana. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Depression
Link ID: 25098 - Posted: 06.18.2018

By Aaron E. Carroll The medical research grant system in the United States, run through the National Institutes of Health, is intended to fund work that spurs innovation and fosters research careers. In many ways, it may be failing. It has been getting harder for researchers to obtain grant support. A study published in 2015 in JAMA showed that from 2004 to 2012, research funding in the United States increased only 0.8 percent year to year. It hasn’t kept up with the rate of inflation; officials say the N.I.H. has lost about 23 percent of its purchasing power in a recent 12-year span. Because the money available for research doesn’t go as far as it used to, it now takes longer for scientists to get funding. The average researcher with an M.D. is 45 years old (for a Ph.D. it’s 42 years old) before she or he obtains that first R01 (think “big” grant). Given that R01-level funding is necessary to obtain promotion and tenure (not to mention its role in the science itself), this means that more promising researchers are washing out than ever before. Only about 20 percent of postdoctoral candidates who aim to earn a tenured position in a university achieve that goal. This new reality can be justified only if those who are weeded out really aren’t as good as those who remain. Are we sure that those who make it are better than those who don’t? A recent study suggests the grant-making system may be unreliable in distinguishing between grants that are funded versus those that get nothing — its very purpose. When a health researcher (like me) believes he has a good idea for a research study, he most often submits a proposal to the N.I.H. It’s not easy to do so. Grants are hard to write, take a lot of time, and require a lot of experience to obtain. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 25097 - Posted: 06.18.2018

by William Wan and Lenny Bernstein The National Institutes of Health on Friday canceled a mammoth study of moderate drinking after determining that officials had irrevocably compromised the research by soliciting over $60 million from beer and liquor companies to underwrite the effort. NIH Director Francis S. Collins said the results of the 10-year, $100 million study would not be trusted because of the secretive way in which staff at an institute under NIH met with major liquor companies, talked to them about the trial’s design and convinced them to pick up most of the tab for it. “Many people who have seen this working-group report were frankly shocked to see so many lines crossed,” he said, calling the staff interaction with the alcohol industry “far out of bounds.” Collins ordered the examination of what was originally planned as a study of more than 7,800 people around the globe after the New York Times reported in March that officials had aggressively sought the industry funding and routed their donations through the institutes’ nongovernmental foundation. In May, NIH suspended enrollment of participants in the research, which was already underway when the newspaper published its story. The findings released Friday address the scientific merit of the study. The review found that the staff who met with five liquor companies did not follow existing rules that required them to report such contacts. In a statement, NIH said that “a small number” of employees at the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) violated policies and that “appropriate personnel actions” would be taken, without specifying what that would entail. The report includes a lengthy appendix with emails between staff and industry representatives. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25096 - Posted: 06.16.2018

Ian Sample Science editor Rats with spinal cord injuries have regained the use of their paws after being given a groundbreaking gene therapy that helps to mend damaged nerves in the spine. The new therapy works by dissolving the dense scar tissue that forms a thick barrier between severed nerves when the spinal column is broken. Animals that were given the treatment produced an enzyme called chondroitinase which breaks down scar tissue and allows the broken nerves to reconnect with each other. Tests showed that when the therapy was given for two months, rats relearned the kinds of skilled movements they needed to grab little sugar balls from a platform. “The gene therapy has enabled us to treat large areas of the spinal cord with only one injection,” said Elizabeth Bradbury, who led the research at King’s College London. “This is important because the spinal cord is long and the pathology spreads down its whole length after injury.” While more animal studies are needed before the therapy can go into human trials, researchers hope that ultimately the treatment will help people with spinal injuries who have lost the ability to perform daily tasks, such as using a knife and fork, picking up a mug, and writing. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 25095 - Posted: 06.16.2018

Christine Herman A painkiller prescription could become a ticket for medical marijuana in Illinois. Lawmakers there passed a bill making anyone with a prescription for opioids eligible for its medical cannabis program. With this move, Illinois joins a growing number of states turning to legal cannabis in the fight against painkiller addiction. "As we see the horrible damage inflicted by opioid use and misuse, it seems like a very low-cost and low-risk alternative," says state Sen. Don Harmon, a Democrat from Oak Park, Ill., and sponsor of the Senate version of the bill. The Alternatives to Opioids Act would allow millions of patients to apply for temporary access to the state's existing medical cannabis pilot program. The bill, which passed on May 31, is now awaiting Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner's signature. Though the bill has bipartisan support, marijuana advocates have some doubts about whether he'll sign it, given his past opposition to medical cannabis. Lawmakers in several states have taken action to initiate or expand their medical marijuana programs in light of the opioid crisis. Among them, in Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal signed a law adding PTSD and intractable pain to the list of conditions covered in its medical marijuana program in May. And New York state Sen. George Amedore, a Republican, introduced legislation that would allow doctors to prescribe cannabis oil as an alternative to opioids for certain conditions. Under Illinois' proposed new law, anyone 21 or older with a condition for which opioids might be prescribed could get near-immediate access to cannabis products at licensed dispensaries by presenting paperwork signed by their doctor. They would no longer be fingerprinted or need criminal background checks, or wait months for approval. The measure would reduce the backlog of applications, Harmon says. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25094 - Posted: 06.16.2018

By Julia Jacobs Humans, it turns out, can annoy more than just one another. In fact, some animal populations are escaping their Homo sapien cohabitants by sleeping more during the day, a new study finds. Mammals across the globe are becoming increasingly nocturnal to avoid humans’ expanding presence, according to the study, published Thursday in Science magazine. The findings show that humans’ presence alone can cause animals across continents — including coyotes, elephants and tigers — to alter their sleep schedules. “We’re just beginning to scratch the surface on how these behavioral changes are affecting entire ecosystems,” said Kaitlyn Gaynor, an ecologist and graduate student in environmental science at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the study. Previous research has found that mammals went from being noctural to being active during both day and night about 65.8 million years ago, roughly 200,000 years after most dinosaurs went extinct. “Species for millions of years have been adapting to diurnal activity, but now we’re driving them back into the night and may be driving natural selection,” Ms. Gaynor said in an interview. The researchers compiled data from 76 studies of 62 species living on six continents in reaching their conclusions. On average, human disruption is making these animals 1.36 times more nocturnal, according to the study. “For example,” it says, “an animal that typically split its activity evenly between the day and night would increase its proportion of nocturnal activity to 68 percent of total activity near human disturbance.” In California’s Santa Cruz mountains, for example, coyotes are opting to sleep more during the day in response to recreational human activities such as hiking and bicycling. As a result, coyotes are eating more nocturnal prey, whose waking hours match up more closely with theirs. Recent research such as this was used to provide data for the new study, Ms. Gaynor said. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 25093 - Posted: 06.15.2018

By James Gallagher Health and science correspondent, BBC News Scientists say they have taken a significant step towards the goal of giving paralysed people control of their hands again. The team at King's College London used gene therapy to repair damage in the spinal cord of rats. The animals could then pick up and eat sugar cubes with their front paws. It is early stage research, but experts said it was some of the most compelling evidence that people's hand function could one day be restored. The spinal cord is a dense tube of nerves carrying instructions from the brain to the rest of the body. The body repairs a wounded spinal cord with scar tissue. However, the scar acts like a barrier to new connections forming between nerves. How the gene therapy works The researchers were trying to dissolve components of the scar tissue in the rats' spinal cord. They needed to give cells in the cord a new set of genetic instructions - a gene - for breaking down the scar. The instructions they gave were for an enzyme called chondroitinase. And they used a virus to deliver them. Finally, a drug was used to activate the instructions. The animals regained use of their front paws after the gene therapy had been switched on for two months. Dr Emily Burnside, one of the researchers, said: "The rats were able to accurately reach and grasp sugar pellets. "We also found a dramatic increase in activity in the spinal cord of the rats, suggesting that new connections had been made in the networks of nerve cells." The researchers hope their approach will work for people injured in car crashes or falls. © 2018 BBC.

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 25092 - Posted: 06.15.2018

By Elizabeth Pennisi What if you could flip a single DNA switch and make a world of only women? That sci-fi vision is unlikely to become reality anytime soon, yet such a switch—one near the gene that prompts the development of male body parts in embryos—has just been discovered in mice. The finding could help explain why some human babies with a male chromosome are born female, and the “groundbreaking” method used to unearth this so-called enhancer might one day identify similar DNA switches that are key to a variety of diseases. “This is pinpointing a region that was a needle in a haystack,” says Vincent Harley, a molecular geneticist at the Hudson Institute of Medical Research in Clayton, Australia, who was not involved in the new study. “[The switch] seems alone to be able to do the job” of making a man. If left to their own devices, all human embryos would develop into girls. But a gene on the Y chromosome, named SRY, brings about a change in early development, causing testes, a penis, and other male traits to form. This gene indirectly turns on another gene called Sox9, which kick-starts the construction of the testes. Although developmental biologists have long known that one or more enhancers flips on Sox9 early in this process, they were at a loss to figure out exactly which ones were most important. Across the genome about 1 million enhancers control nearly 21,000 genes. These short pieces of DNA lie outside a gene but serve as landing spots for the proteins that turn that gene on or off. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25091 - Posted: 06.15.2018

By JoAnna Klein You’d think that narwhals couldn’t be more enchanting. These elusive, ice-dodging, deep-diving whales have 10-foot snaggletoothed tusks, and they see with sound. But then there’s the narwhal of east Greenland. It’s kind of the narwhal of narwhals. “Because they’re so hard to access, we honestly hardly knew anything,” said Susanna Blackwell, who studies the effects of human sounds on marine mammals for Greenridge Sciences. “It’s an animal that’s been hidden from civilization for an awful long time.” Their genes are only slightly different than their western cousins. And since glaciers separated them some 10,000 years ago, this smaller population of about 6,000 narwhals, has lived relatively free from human contact amid sharp cliffs and mile-wide glaciers that break into huge, bobbing icebergs. But as the ocean warms, ice caps melt and summers get longer in the Arctic, the once inaccessible habitat of east Greenland narwhals is opening up to scientists — as well as cruise ships and prospectors interested in minerals or offshore drilling. And because toothed whales like narwhals use sounds to orient themselves, Dr. Blackwell worries this potential activity will disturb the narwhal’s acoustic way of life. So she and a team attached acoustic sensors to narwhals to monitor their behavior while human sounds are still scarce. What they found, published Wednesday in a paper in the journal PLOS One, will be used as a baseline behavior for an upcoming study to test how narwhals respond to air gun blasts similar to the ones used by oil surveyors, and may help protect them in the future. Narwhals live only in the Arctic, where it’s dark much of the time, diving thousands of feet to hunt, where it’s dark all of the time. Scientists knew they used acoustics to echolocate and communicate from studies done on narwhals in west Greenland or Canada, but they didn’t know much about the sounds of individual narwhals, especially the east Greenland population. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Communication; Hearing
Link ID: 25090 - Posted: 06.14.2018

By Melissa Healy At some point in their treatment for cancer, somewhere between 17% and 75% of patients with malignancies that don’t affect the central nervous system report the sensation that a mental fog has set in. For months or years after their hair has grown back, the exhaustion has lifted and the medical appointments taper off, the “new normal” for these patients includes problems with concentration, word-finding, short-term memory and multitasking. Their doctors nod their heads knowingly: It’s “chemobrain,” they report. Among the nation’s roughly 15.5 million cancer survivors, the ranks of those who’ve experienced mental fog after cancer treatment are probably increasing as detection and therapies improve, survival rates rise and lives are extended. But when it comes to cancer’s cognitive aftermath, the medical profession’s expertise ends. Why chemobrain happens, how long it will linger, and what deficits it actually causes — and especially whether it could be treated, or even prevented — are questions for which oncologists have no answers. But they want them. And three specialists from the National Cancer Institute have issued an appeal to neuroscientists for help. “We need an infusion of new ideas," said Todd S. Horowitz, a cognitive psychologist and program director in the institute’s Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences. “Cognitive neuroscience would help us characterize the deficits people have and allow us to connect them to particular brain systems." Writing this week in the journal Trends in Neurosciences, Horowitz and two fellow researchers at the institute drafted a road map toward a better understanding of the condition officially known as cancer-related cognitive impairment, which was first described by breast cancer survivors.

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25089 - Posted: 06.14.2018

By Diana Kwon In an ischemic stroke a clot blocks a blood vessel to the brain, depriving oxygen and nutrients to part of the crucial organ. Without immediate treatment this can cause irreversible tissue damage, leading to complications ranging from behavioral changes to paralysis. Stroke is the fifth-highest cause of death in the U.S., and the leading cause of long-term disability. Ischemic strokes are the most common type, accounting for more than 80 percent of all cases. Until recently the only treatment available for ischemic stroke was tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA, a protein that can dissolve blood clots if injected up to four and a half hours after stroke onset. Care has improved dramatically in the last few years as advances in thrombectomy—surgical clot removal—have allowed doctors to clear larger blockages and treat patients up to 24 hours after symptoms began. Even after successful clot removal, however, the rush of blood back into the brain and the dying tissue left behind can lead to additional complications such as inflammation. To address this problem, researchers have been searching for more than 30 years for drugs that could protect the brain from damage after an ischemic stroke. More than a thousand compounds have been investigated in animal studies, and many have made it to clinical trials in people—with little success. “It’s been very disappointing for me and hundreds of other investigators that everything seems to work in animals and nothing works in humans,” says Susan Fagan, a clinical pharmacologist at The University of Georgia. “Neuroprotection is a hard nut to crack.” © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Stroke; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 25088 - Posted: 06.14.2018

Darby Saxbe Flinching as a gunshot whizzes past your window. Covering your ears when a police car races down your street, sirens blaring. Walking past a drug deal on your block or a beating at your school. For kids living in picket-fence suburbia, these experiences might be rare. But for their peers in urban poverty, they are all too commonplace. More than half of children and adolescents living in cities have experienced some form of community violence – acts of disturbance or crime, such as drug use, beatings, shootings, stabbings and break-ins, within their neighborhoods or schools. Researchers know from decades of work that exposure to community violence can lead to emotional, social and cognitive problems. Kids might have difficulty regulating emotions, paying attention or concentrating at school. Over time, kids living with the stress of community violence may become less engaged in school, withdraw from friends or show symptoms of post-traumatic stress, like irritability and intrusive thoughts. In short, living in an unsafe community can have a corrosive effect on child development. Few studies, though, have specifically looked at the toll community violence may take on the growing brain. Recently, I studied this question in collaboration with a team of researchers here at the University of Southern California. Our goal: to see whether individuals exposed to more community violence in their early teen years would show differences in the structure and function of their brains in late adolescence. © 2010–2018, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Aggression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25087 - Posted: 06.14.2018

Rhitu Chatterjee The number of people dying by suicide in the United States has risen by about 30 percent in the past two decades. And while the majority of suicide-related deaths today are among boys and men, a study published Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics finds that the number of girls and women taking their own lives is rising. "Typically there's between three and three times as many suicides among males as among females," says Dr. Holly Hedegaard, a medical epidemiologist at the NCHS and the main author of the new study. In 2016, about 21 boys or men out of 100,000 took their own lives. On the other hand, just six girls or women out of 100,000 died by suicide that year. But when Hedegaard and her colleagues compared the rise in the rates of death by suicide from 2000 to 2016, the increase was significantly larger for females — increasing by 21 percent for boys and men, as compared to 50 percent for girls and women. There's "sort of a narrowing of the [gender] gap in rates," Hedegaard notes. The biggest change was seen among women in late middle age. "For females between the ages of 45 and 64, the suicide rate increased by 60 percent," she says. "That's a pretty large increase in a relatively short period of time." That the increase for women was more than double the increase for men "did indeed surprise me," says Nadine Kaslow, a psychologist at Emory University and the past president of the American Psychological Association, who was not involved in the study. She says she finds the overall trends for both men and women "disturbing." © 2018 npr

Keyword: Depression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25086 - Posted: 06.14.2018

by Sarah DiGiulio Why is it that you can perfectly recite the words to *NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye,” but can’t remember the title of the new TV show you started watching on Netflix and wanted to tell your coworker about? We remember things because they either stand out, they relate to and can easily be integrated in our existing knowledge base, or it’s something we retrieve, recount or use repeatedly over time, explains Sean Kang, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Education at Dartmouth College, whose research focuses on the cognitive psychology of learning and memory. “The average layperson trying to learn nuclear physics for the first time, for example, will probably find it very difficult to retain that information." That's because he or she likely doesn’t have existing knowledge in their brain to connect that new information to. And on a molecular level neuroscientists suspect that there’s actually a physical process that needs to be completed to form a memory — and us not remembering something is a result of that not happening, explains Blake Richards, DPhil, assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. In the same way that when you store a grocery list on a piece of paper, you are making a physical change to that paper by writing words down, or when you store a file on a computer, you’re making a physical change somewhere in the magnetization of some part of your hard drive — a physical change happens in your brain when you store a memory or new information. © 2018 NBC UNIVERSAL

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25085 - Posted: 06.14.2018

Allison Aubrey If you take Prilosec or Zantac for acid reflux, a beta blocker for high blood pressure, or Xanax for anxiety, you may be increasing your risk of depression. More than 200 common medications sold in the U.S. include depression as a potential side effect. Sometimes, the risk stems from taking several drugs at the same time. Now, a new study finds people who take these medicines are, in fact, more likely to be depressed. The list includes a wide range of commonly taken medications. Among them are certain types of proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) (used to treat acid reflux), beta blockers, anxiety drugs, painkillers including ibuprofen, ACE inhibitors (used to treat high blood pressure), and anti-convulsant drugs. "The more of these medications you're taking, the more likely you are to report depression," says study author Mark Olfson, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. The study, which was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, included 26,192 adults who participated in a federal survey, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. All of the participants listed the medications they were taking at the time of the survey. In addition, they each completed a depression screening, the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), which asks about sleep, mood and appetite. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25084 - Posted: 06.13.2018