Jud Esty-Kendall Josh Hanagarne, 39, and his son Max, 9, recently sat down at StoryCorps to talk about Tourette's syndrome. Josh has dealt with Tourette's since he was Max's age and while Max hasn't been officially diagnosed, he has started to show symptoms, too. Courtesy of StoryCorps Josh Hanagarne is a dad, a librarian and an author, who also has an extreme form of Tourette's syndrome. But he doesn't let it and his tics — his involuntary movements and sounds — stop him from living his life. He says he actually chose to work in a library because it was the quietest place he knew of. Josh first started showing symptoms of Tourette's syndrome when he was in elementary school, about the same age that his son Max is now. Not everyone with Tourette's syndrome has the same tics. Max, 9, describes his dad's as "you hitting yourself and making a lot of noise." "You've seen me hit myself hard enough to almost knock myself out," Josh, 39, says. "I also do all of the blinking and the face things and the little ahem noises." Josh's form of Tourette's is so extreme that his tics have been severe enough that they've put him in the hospital before. "To me, it feels like when you have that urge to sneeze so bad that you just feel like you'll just go insane if you don't let the sneeze out," Josh says. But he says that's not the most difficult part of living with Tourette's. "The hardest thing I do every day is decide to go outside or not, because I know when I walk into a group of strangers, I will yell or I will do something weird and they will all look at me," Josh says. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Tourettes
Link ID: 24020 - Posted: 09.01.2017

Ewen Callaway Japanese researchers report promising results from an experimental therapy for Parkinson’s disease that involves implanting neurons made from ‘reprogrammed’ stem cells into the brain. A trial conducted in monkeys with a version of the disease showed that the treatment improved their symptoms and seemed to be safe, according to a report published on 30 August in Nature1. The study’s key finding — that the implanted cells survived in the brain for at least two years without causing any dangerous effects in the body — provides a major boost to researchers’ hopes of testing stem-cell treatments for Parkinson’s in humans, say scientists. Jun Takahashi, a stem-cell scientist at Kyoto University in Japan who led the study, says that his team plans to begin transplanting neurons made from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells into people with Parkinson’s in clinical trials soon. The research is also likely to inform several other groups worldwide that are testing different approaches to treating Parkinson’s using stem cells, with trials also slated to begin soon. Parkinson’s is a neurodegenerative condition caused by the death of cells called dopaminergic neurons, which make a neurotransmitter called dopamine in certain areas of the brain. Because dopamine-producing brain cells are involved in movement, people with the condition experience characteristic tremors and stiff muscles. Current treatments address symptoms of the disease but not the underlying cause. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Parkinsons; Stem Cells
Link ID: 24019 - Posted: 08.31.2017

By Ryan Cross Weight loss seems to come easiest to those who want it least. Every year, hundreds of thousands suffer from the loss of appetite that comes with tumor-induced anorexia, which can accompany many late-stage cancers. Now, researchers from three major pharmaceutical companies have independently published papers showing that the culprit behind this condition—a protein called growth differentiation factor-15 (GDF15)—helps mice, rats, and monkeys lose weight without any apparent side effects. “The idea of having another medication to add to our armamentarium is exciting news,” says Katherine Saunders, an obesity medicine physician at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City who was not involved with the work. There are currently five U.S. Food and Drug Administration–approved obesity medications for long-term weight management, which can help patients lose 5% to 8% of their body weight on average. “That’s very limited,” Saunders says, adding that many drugs used to treat obesity don’t have the same level of specificity as GDF15. GDF15’s potential as a weight-loss agent was first discovered by Samuel Breit, an immunologist and physician at St. Vincent's Hospital in Sydney, Australia. He saw levels of the protein rise 10 to 100 times higher than normal during tumor-induced anorexia in mice with prostate tumors and in humans with advanced prostate cancer. Breit also showed that GDF15 likely exerts its effects through the brain—though he says that until now the protein’s target has befuddled scientists. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 24018 - Posted: 08.31.2017

By Colin Hendrie and Alisdair Pickles The current global crisis of depressive illness has a simple root cause: a failure of treatment. This is the result of a broken scientific process that has for nearly 70 years fallen short in delivering the drug therapies it was set up to provide. Given existing antidepressants don’t work for many people, the excitement surrounding the development of a new class of treatments from recreational drugs such as magic mushrooms is understandable. But there are strong reasons to doubt they will have the kind of impact hoped for. Instead, we are more likely to be seeing the latest episode in a long-running saga of repeated disappointment. This saga began when antidepressant use became widespread in the 1950s and 1960s. It was hoped they would have the same transformative effect on mental illness that antibiotics had on non-viral infectious diseases. As it turned out, antidepressants were only of value to some people with depression. Studies involving thousands of people with the condition reveal that the proportion seeing a clinically significant response to antidepressants is often very similar to that seen with a placebo, which is about 40 per cent. In double-blind, placebo-controlled studies, antidepressants don’t fare well. This helps to explain why, by the end of the 20th century, Big Pharma was floundering over the development of new drugs for depression. In 2010, many companies stopped such work. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24017 - Posted: 08.31.2017

By Mo Costandi Voluntary movements are one of the brain’s main “outputs,” yet science still knows very little about how networks of neurons plan, initiate and execute them. Now, researchers from Columbia University and the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal, say they have discovered an “activity map” that the brain uses to guide animals’ movements. The findings, published Wednesday in Neuron, could advance our understanding of how the brain learns new movements—and of what goes wrong in related disorders such as Parkinson's disease. Movements are controlled and coordinated by multiple brain structures including the primary motor cortex. Located at the back of the frontal lobe, it contains cells whose long fibers extend down through the spinal cord, where they contact “secondary” motor neurons that signal the body muscles. A set of deep brain structures called the basal ganglia are also critical for movement, as evidenced by their degeneration in conditions such as Parkinson’s. One component of the basal ganglia, called the striatum, receives information about possible actions from the motor cortex and is thought to be involved in selecting, preparing and executing the appropriate commands before they are sent to the body. Earlier research had shown that signals leave the striatum along one of two distinct pathways: one that facilitates movement, and another that suppresses it. A number of more recent studies show that both pathways are active during motion, however, suggesting that they do not act by simply sending “stop” and “go” signals. And although it has long been suspected that different groups of neurons in the striatum represent distinct actions, exactly how they might do so has remained unclear. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Parkinsons; Brain imaging
Link ID: 24016 - Posted: 08.31.2017

BY Patrick Skerrett, An international study is casting doubt on the wisdom of eating lots of carbohydrates. Photo by Flickr user Dani Armengol Garreta Fat, once a dirty word when it came to diet, has been edging back toward respectability. New results from a huge international study help continue to reshape its image while at the same time casting doubt on the wisdom of eating lots of carbohydrates and questioning the “more is better” recommendations for eating fruits and vegetables. The latest evidence comes from data released Tuesday by the international Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study. Its research team recorded the eating habits of 135,000 adults in 18 countries — including high-income, medium-income, and low-income nations — and followed the participants’ health for more than seven years on average. Among the PURE participants, those with the highest intake of dietary fat (35 percent of daily calories) were 23 percent less likely to have died during the study period than those with the lowest fat intake (10 percent of calories). The rates of various cardiovascular diseases were essentially the same across fat intake, while strokes were less common among those with a high fat intake. Upending conventional wisdom, the findings for carbohydrate intake went in the opposite direction. PURE participants with the highest carbohydrate intake (77 percent of daily calories) were 28 percent more likely to have died than those with the lowest carbohydrate intake (46 percent of calories). The results were presented at the European Society of Cardiology meeting in Barcelona, and published in the Lancet. © 1996 - 2017 NewsHour Productions LLC.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 24015 - Posted: 08.31.2017

By The Scientist Staff Researchers demonstrated that the mouse subiculum, a brain region associated with the hippocampus, is important for recalling certain types of memories, but it doesn’t appear to play a role in forming them. When they optogenetically turned off neurons within the subiculum, mice’s abilities to retrieve a memory they had previously formed was disrupted. Some scientists think that brain circuits responsible for forming memories are the same as those necessary for retrieving them, write the authors in their report. These data, however, offer evidence to the contrary. See D.S. Roy et al., “Distinct neural circuits for the formation and retrieval of episodic memories,” Cell, doi:10.1016/j.cell.2017.07.013, 2017. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Brain imaging
Link ID: 24014 - Posted: 08.31.2017

By Meredith Wadman Luca Rossi tried to hang himself in a bedroom in Perugia, Italy, in 2012. Suspended by his belt from a wardrobe, he had begun to choke when his fiancée unexpectedly walked in. He struggled to safety, defeated even in this intended last act. The 35-year-old physician had everything to live for: a medical career, plans for a family, and supportive parents. But Rossi* was addicted to crack cocaine. He had begun his habit not long after medical school, confidently assuming that he could control the drug. Now, it owned him. Once ebullient and passionate, he no longer smiled or cried. He knew he might be endangering his patients, but even that didn’t matter. He was indifferent to all except obtaining his next fix. “It pushes you to suicide because it fills you with your own emptiness,” he says. In the first months after his near suicide, Rossi didn’t drop his $3500-a-month habit. Early in 2013, he learned that his fiancée was pregnant. Frightened by impending fatherhood, he smoked even more. He didn’t—couldn’t—stop. Then, in April 2013, Rossi’s father, a chemist, happened upon a local newspaper article describing work just published in Nature. Neuroscientists led by Antonello Bonci and Billy Chen at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in Baltimore, Maryland, had studied rats trained to seek cocaine compulsively—animals so powerfully addicted that they tolerated repeated electric shocks to their feet to get their fixes. The rats had also been genetically engineered so that their neurons could be controlled with light. When the researchers stimulated the animals’ brains in an area that regulates impulse control, the rats essentially kicked their habit. “They would almost instantaneously stop searching for cocaine,” Bonci says. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Brain imaging; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24013 - Posted: 08.30.2017

Maria Temming Bacteria living in the human gut have strange influence over mood, depression and more, but it has been unclear exactly how belly-dwelling bacteria exercise remote control of the brain (SN: 4/2/16, p. 23). Now research in rodents suggests that gut microbes may alter the inventory of microRNAs — molecules that help keep cells in working order by managing protein production — in brain regions involved in controlling anxiety. The findings, reported online August 25 in Microbiome, could help scientists develop new treatments for some mental health problems. Mounting evidence indicates “that the way we think and feel might be able to be controlled by our gut microbiota,” says study coauthor Gerard Clarke, a psychiatrist at University College Cork in Ireland. For instance, the presence or absence of gut bacteria can influence whether a mouse exhibits anxiety-like behaviors, such as avoiding bright lights or open spaces. Clarke and colleagues compared normal mice, whose gastrointestinal tracts were teeming with bacteria, with mice bred in sterile environments, whose guts didn’t contain any microbes. The researchers discovered that in brain regions involved in regulating anxiety — the amygdala and prefrontal cortex — microbe-free mice had an overabundance of some types of microRNA and a shortage of others compared with normal mice. After scientists exposed some sterilized mice to microbes, the rodents’ microRNA levels more closely matched those of normal mice. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017.

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 24012 - Posted: 08.30.2017

By Michael Nedelman, CNN (CNN)Emily Gavigan was convinced that a nearby truck was following her. Someone was after her. She was a sophomore at the University of Scranton in January 2009 when the "bizarre" behavior began, said her father, Bill. Her parents noticed that she had been rambling, not making any sense. At one point, she called her family and friends to warn them: Something terrible was going to happen to all of them. "Emily was like a different person. We didn't know who she was," Bill Gavigan said. "We had gone from having this daughter who was perfectly normal, happy, vibrant ... with a bright future ahead. "All of a sudden, this all came crashing down." Then, one day, Gavigan disappeared. "We didn't know where she was for more than 24 hours," her father said. She had gotten in her car and driven from Pennsylvania to New Jersey with no money. She went right through toll booths without paying. But she eventually found her way back to her grandparents' house, still convinced that she was being followed. Her grandfather peered out the window, looking for something suspicious. But they soon realized there was no one after her. "I get emotional when I think about it," said Gavigan's grandfather Joseph Chiumento. Her parents showed up and took her to the hospital. Emily Gavigan began exhibiting odd behavior when she was 19, which doctors mistook for a mental illness. Emily Gavigan began exhibiting odd behavior when she was 19, which doctors mistook for a mental illness. Say, 'I love you, dad' Doctors initially thought Gavigan had a mental illness. She spent time in different psychiatric facilities, which made her family uneasy. One in particular reminded her father of the movie "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." "They just kept trying medication after medication after medication, and none of it worked," Bill Gavigan said. Things kept getting worse. There was some numbness in her face and hands, and she would develop seizures. © 2016 Cable News Network.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 24011 - Posted: 08.30.2017

By Helen Briggs BBC News They migrate thousands of kilometres across the sea without getting lost. The Arctic tern, for instance, spends summer in the UK, then flies to the Antarctic for the winter. Yet, scientists are still unsure exactly how birds perform such extreme feats of migration, arriving in the right place every year. According to new research, smell plays a key role when birds are navigating long distances over the ocean. Researchers from the universities of Oxford, Barcelona and Pisa temporarily removed seabirds' sense of smell before tracking their movements. They found the birds could navigate normally over land, but appeared to lose their bearings over the sea. This suggests that they use a map of smells to find their way when there are no visual cues. Previous experiments had suggested that removing birds' sense of smell impairs homing ability. However, some had questioned whether sensory deprivation might impair some other function, such as the ability to search for food. ''Our new study eliminates these objections, meaning it will be very difficult in future to argue that olfaction is not involved in long-distance oceanic navigation in birds,'' said study researcher Oliver Padget of Oxford University's Department of Zoology. The researchers studied 30 Scopoli's shearwaters living off the coast of Menorca. The birds nest in the Mediterranean, but spend the non-breeding season in the Atlantic, including areas off the west coast of Africa and the east coast of Brazil. Some of the birds were made to temporarily lose their sense of smell through nasal irrigation with zinc sulphate; another group carried small magnets; and a third group acted as a control. © 2017 BBC.

Keyword: Animal Migration; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 24010 - Posted: 08.30.2017

By Jessica Hamzelou For the first time, researchers have shown in a randomised trial that looking at photos of thin women is enough to shape a person’s beauty ideals. It has long been thought that images of slender women in the media influence what people find attractive, and can make a person feel unhappy with their body. But these pictures are now ubiquitous in many places, making testing this idea difficult. To find people who haven’t been exposed to such images, Jean-Luc Jucker at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and his team travelled to rural villages along the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua. At first, these villages had no electricity beyond the odd solar panel used to power a bulb. The Nicaraguan government is in the process of adding villages like these to the electricity grid – which is likely to bring TV with it. “When they get electricity, people generally say they want two things – a fridge and a television,” says Jucker. “They go from having no television to 100 channels.” Before two villages were hooked up to the grid, Jucker’s team recruited 80 volunteers from them. These included men and women aged between 16 and 78. The volunteers were first asked to create their “ideal” body shape for a woman, using computer software that enabled them to generate women of different shapes and sizes. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 24009 - Posted: 08.30.2017

By Diana Kwon Sometimes our brains are on acid—literally. A main source of these temporary surges is the carbon dioxide that is constantly released as the brain breaks down sugar to generate energy, which subsequently turns into acid. Yet the chemistry in a healthy human brain tends to be relatively neutral, because standard processes including respiration—which expels carbon dioxide—help maintain the status quo. Any fleeting acidity spikes usually go unnoticed. But a growing body of work has suggested that for some people, even slight changes in this balance may be linked with certain psychiatric conditions including panic disorders. New findings this month provide additional evidence that such links are real—and suggest they may extend to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. There were earlier hints that this was the case: Post-mortem studies of dozens of human brains revealed lower pH (higher acidity levels) in patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Multiple studies in the past few decades have found that when people with panic disorders are exposed to air with a higher-than-normal concentration of carbon dioxide—which can combine with water in the body to form carbonic acid—they are more likely to experience panic attacks than healthy individuals are. Other research has revealed that the brains of people with panic disorders produce elevated levels of lactate—an acidic source of fuel that is constantly produced and consumed in the energy-hungry brain. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 24008 - Posted: 08.29.2017

By DAVID DeSTENO, CYNTHIA BREAZEAL and PAUL HARRIS Why is educational technology such a disappointment? In recent years, parents and schools have been exposing children to a range of computer-mediated instruction, and adults have been turning to “brain training” apps to sharpen their minds, but the results have not been encouraging. A six-year research project commissioned by the Department of Education examined different cybertechnology programs across thousands of students in hundreds of schools and found little to no evidence that they improved academic performance. Unfortunately, it appears the same goes for cognitive-training programs. Lumos Labs, the company behind Lumosity, one of the leading programs in this area, agreed to pay $2 million to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission that it misled customers with claims that Lumosity improved people’s performance in school and at work. In our view, the problem stems partly from the fact that the designers of these technologies rely on an erroneous set of assumptions about how the mind learns. Yes, the human brain is an amazing information processor, but it evolved to take in, analyze and store information in a specific way: through social interaction. For millenniums, the environs in which we learned best were social ones. It was through other people’s testimony or through interactive discourse and exploration with them that we learned facts about our world and new ways of solving problems. And it’s precisely because of this history that we can expect the mind to be socially tuned, meaning that it should rely on and incorporate social cues to facilitate learning. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 24007 - Posted: 08.29.2017

By Kai Kupferschmidt One of the main targets in the war on drugs could well become a drug to treat the scars of war. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has designated 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), better known as the illegal drug ecstasy, a "breakthrough therapy" for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a status that may lead to faster approval. The agency has also approved the design for two phase III studies of MDMA for PTSD that would be funded by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit in Santa Cruz, California. MAPS announced the "breakthrough therapy" designation, made by FDA on 16 August, on its website today; if the group can find the money for the trials, which together could cost an estimated $25 million, they may start next spring and finish by 2021. That an illegal dancefloor drug could become a promising pharmaceutical is another indication that the efforts of a dedicated group of researchers interested in the medicinal properties of mind-altering drugs is paying dividends. Stringent drug laws have stymied research on these compounds for decades. "This is not a big scientific step," says David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College London. "It’s been obvious for 40 years that these drugs are medicines. But it’s a huge step in acceptance." Since 2012, FDA has designated close to 200 drugs as breakthrough therapies, a status that indicates there’s preliminary evidence that an intervention offers a substantial improvement over other options for a serious health condition. The agency aims to help develop and review these treatments faster than other candidate drugs. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Stress; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24006 - Posted: 08.28.2017

By Aylin Woodward If you’re trying to overthrow the boss, you might need a friend to back you up. The same is true for female macaques, who need allies to resist authority and take down more powerful members of the group. Most primates have social hierarchies in which some individuals are dominant over the others. For rhesus macaques, these strict hierarchies are organised around female relationships. Lower-ranked females have little social mobility and must silently bare their teeth to higher-ranked females. The signal means “I want you to know that I know that you out-rank me” and is important in communicating social rank, says Darcy Hannibal at the University of California, Davis. “They are ‘bending the knee’.” But Hannibal and her colleagues have discovered that subordinate females can override the status quo. To do this, female macaques form alliances with family, friends or both. These alliances help females maintain or increase their social rank and compete for resources. A female who wants to challenge those higher up needs this help, says Hannibal. Insubordination events were more likely if the lower-ranked female was older. They were most likely if the subordinate outweighed the dominant female by 7 kilograms and the dominant female had no family allies. The more allies the subordinate female had, and the more days her mother was present in the group, the more often she would exhibit insubordinate behaviour. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Aggression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24005 - Posted: 08.28.2017

By Andy Coghlan How and when did we first become able to speak? A new analysis of our DNA reveals key evolutionary changes that reshaped our faces and larynxes, and which may have set the stage for complex speech. The alterations were not major mutations in our genes. Instead, they were tweaks in the activity of existing genes that we shared with our immediate ancestors. These changes in gene activity seem to have given us flat faces, by retracting the protruding chins of our ape ancestors. They also resculpted the larynx and moved it further down in the throat, allowing our ancestors to make sounds with greater subtleties. The study offers an unprecedented glimpse into how our faces and vocal tracts were altered at the genetic level, paving the way for the sophisticated speech we take for granted. However, other anthropologists say changes in the brain were at least equally important. It is also possible that earlier ancestors could speak, but in a more crude way, and that the facial changes simply took things up a notch. Liran Carmel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his colleagues examined DNA from two modern-day people and four humans who lived within the last 50,000 years. They also looked at extinct hominins: two Neanderthals and a Denisovan. Finally, they looked at genetic material from six chimpanzees and data from public databases supplied by living people. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 24004 - Posted: 08.28.2017

By Jocelyn Kaiser The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, has confirmed that the agency’s definition of clinical trials now includes imaging studies of normal brain function that do not test new treatments. The change will impose new requirements that many researchers say don’t make sense and could stifle cognitive neuroscience. Although NIH revised its definition of clinical trials in 2014, the agency is only now implementing it as part of a new clinical trials policy. Concerns arose this summer when an NIH official said the definition could apply to many basic behavioral research projects, including brain studies—for example, having healthy volunteers perform a computer task while wearing an electrode cap or lying in an MRI machine. Scientists say the new requirements—such as training and registration on clinicaltrials.gov—are unnecessary, will impose a huge paperwork burden, and will confuse patients seeking to enroll in trials. NIH told ScienceInsider in July that the agency was still deciding exactly which behavioral studies would be covered by the new definition. On 11 August, the agency released a set of case studies that has confirmed many researchers’ fears. Case No. 18 states that a study in which a healthy volunteer undergoes MRI brain imaging while performing a working memory test is now a clinical trial because the effect being evaluated—brain function—is a health-related outcome. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 24003 - Posted: 08.26.2017

Andrea Hsu Dan Fabbio was 25 and working on a master's degree in music education when he stopped being able to hear music in stereo. Music no longer felt the same to him. When he was diagnosed with a brain tumor, he immediately worried about cancer. Fortunately, his tumor was benign. Unfortunately, it was located in a part of the brain known to be active when people listen to and make music. Fabbio told his surgeon that music was the most important thing is his life. It was his passion as well as his profession. His surgeon understood. He's someone whose passion has been mapping the brain so he can help patients retain as much function as possible. Dr. Web Pilcher, chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Rochester Medical Center, and his colleague Brad Mahon, a cognitive neuroscientist, had developed a brain mapping program. Since 2011, they've used the program to treat all kinds of patients with brain tumors: mathematicians, lawyers, a bus driver, a furniture maker. Fabbio was their first musician. The idea behind the program is to learn as much as possible about the patient's life and the patient's brain before surgery to minimize damage to it during the procedure. "Removing a tumor from the brain can have significant consequences depending upon its location," Pilcher says. "Both the tumor itself and the operation to remove it can damage tissue and disrupt communication between different parts of the brain." © 2017 npr

Keyword: Hearing; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 24002 - Posted: 08.26.2017

Darby Saxbe Postpartum depression has become more visible as celebrity moms including Brooke Shields, Drew Barrymore and Chrissy Teigen have publicly shared their struggles with feeling sad and hopeless after birth. But when a father – Adam Busby, from reality TV show “OutDaughtered” – recently opened up about his own postpartum depression, he received instant backlash, including comments telling him to “man up.” Despite the skepticism, postpartum depression in fathers is very real, with estimates that around 10 percent of men report symptoms of depression following the birth of a child, about double the typical rate of depression in males. Postpartum depression in women has been linked with hormonal shifts, but the role of hormones in men’s postpartum depression has been unknown. In an attempt to solve this mystery, my colleagues and I recently tested whether men’s levels of the hormone testosterone are related to their postpartum depression risk during early parenthood. We found that men’s testosterone levels might predict not only their own postpartum depression risk, but their partner’s depression risk as well. Testosterone is an androgen hormone, responsible for the development and maintenance of male secondary sex characteristics. It promotes muscle mass and body hair growth, and motivates sexual arousal and competitive behavior. Many studies have found that testosterone dips in new fathers across the animal kingdom. Among animals that engage in the biparental care of offspring – Mongolian gerbils, Djungarian hamsters, California mice and cotton-top tamarins – males show lower testosterone levels following the birth of pups. © 2010–2017, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Depression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 24001 - Posted: 08.26.2017