By DAVID TULLER A new study suggests that psychotherapy and a gradual increase in exercise can significantly benefit patients with chronic fatigue syndrome. While this may sound like good news, the findings — published Thursday in The Lancet — are certain to displease many patients and to intensify a fierce, long-running debate about what causes the illness and how to treat it. Many patients, citing two recent high-profile studies, believe the syndrome may be caused by viruses related to mouse leukemia viruses, and they are clamoring for access to antiretroviral drugs used to treat the virus that causes AIDS. That treatment is very expensive and would be expected to continue indefinitely, and health insurers are not generally willing to pay for untested drug regimens. The new study, conducted at clinics in Britain and financed by that country’s government, is expected to lend ammunition to those who think the disease is primarily psychological or related to stress. The authors note that the goal of cognitive behavioral therapy, the type of psychotherapy tested in the study, is to change the psychological factors “assumed to be responsible for perpetuation of the participant’s symptoms and disability.” In the long-awaited study, patients who were randomly assigned to receive cognitive behavioral therapy or exercise therapy, in combination with specialized medical care, reported reduced fatigue levels and greater improvement in physical functioning than those receiving the medical care alone — or getting the medical care along with training in how to recognize the onset of fatigue and to adjust their activities accordingly. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 15015 - Posted: 02.19.2011

by Elizabeth Pennisi Every year, some 50 billion birds take to the air for their seasonal migrations. They may go 500 kilometers in a day and a few even travel from pole to pole. But how do they know when, where, and how far to fly? Although some of the answer lies in their DNA, nobody knew which genes or how they worked. Now ornithologists have pinned down one of those genes, and strange as it may sound, the length of that gene influences the length of the flights. "If we understand the genetics underlying migratory behavior, we can understand more about how and why migration evolves," says Chris Guglielmo, who studies bird migration at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. "We may also be better able to understand how quickly migration can disappear in response to climate change." As the moment for migration approaches, birds bulk up, adding muscle and fat. They hop and flap restlessly at night, shifting their internal clocks in anticipation of nighttime flights. Breeding experiments have shown that these shifts have a genetic basis, as do the timing, amount, and intensity of flights. Since the 1970s, ornithologists at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Starnberg, Germany, have studied European blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla), a common warbler in Europe, which typically head to the Mediterranean for the winter. Some blackcaps had established a new wintering area in the past few decades. The researchers wanted to know the genetic basis for the change. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Migration; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15014 - Posted: 02.17.2011

By Ferris Jabr We like to think of our brain as an incredibly sophisticated thinking machine that has been fine-tuned by evolution. But recently researchers working with mice found that a tiny genetic manipulation significantly boosted brainpower with seemingly no negative consequences. People have this gene, too, and it is active in the same brain area. In other words, we may have a gene in our heads that is actively making us dumber. Emory University pharmacologist John Hepler and his team studied a section of the hippocampus called CA2, found in both mice and humans. Although the hippocampus is crucial for memory, the neurons in CA2, oddly, fail to participate in the cellular process on which learning and memory depend: long-term potentiation, which strengthens communication between neurons that fire together. The researchers noticed that the neurons in CA2 were saturated with RGS14, a signaling protein that mysteriously inhibits long-term potentiation. When the investigators bred mice lacking the gene that codes for RGS14, they found that the neurons in CA2 suddenly demonstrated long-term potentiation. The genetic tweak affected more than physiology—it changed how the mice performed on memory tests, too. The experimenters presented two identical objects to knock­out mice, which lacked the RGS14 gene, and to normal mice. Four hours and again 24 hours later, the researchers switched one of the objects with a new object. The knockout mice spent far more time exploring the new object than the normal mice did, indicating that the altered rodents had a better memory for distinguishing familiar and strange objects. Knockout mice also learned to navigate a water maze and locate a submerged platform faster than normal mice did. The scientists observed no detriments from removing the RGS14 gene. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15013 - Posted: 02.17.2011

By Nathan Seppa Some premature infants with a potentially blinding eye condition called retinopathy may now have an alternative to the laser surgery currently used to treat it. A drug outperforms the surgery in newborns who have abnormal blood vessel growth in the back of the retina near the optic nerve, researchers report in the Feb. 17 New England Journal of Medicine. The drug, bevacizumab, is used against some cancers because it inhibits manufacture of a protein called vascular endothelial growth factor, or VEGF, that drives vessel growth. Although VEGF is necessary for normal organ development, some premature newborns make too much in the eyes, fostering aberrant vessel networks that can lead to a detached retina and blindness if untreated. Babies born 10 weeks or more prematurely and weighing less than 3 pounds at birth are at highest risk for this condition, called retinopathy of prematurity. It usually resolves on its own. If not, laser surgery can burn off abnormal vessels, curbing VEGF and stopping vessel growth, reducing the blindness risk to 1 percent from 50 percent in untreated eyes, says Kimberly Drenser, a retinal surgeon at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., who wasn’t involved in this study. “Laser surgery, when it’s done well, is extremely effective,” she says. But laser treatment and cryotherapy, a freezing technique, damage peripheral areas of the retina, limiting side vision while saving more essential straight-on vision. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15012 - Posted: 02.17.2011

By James Gallagher Health reporter, BBC News A patient's belief that a drug will not work can become a self fulfilling prophecy, according to researchers. They showed the benefits of painkillers could be boosted or completely wiped out by manipulating expectations. The study, published in Science Translational Medicine, also identifies the regions of the brain which are affected. Experts said this could have important consequences for patient care and for testing new drugs. Heat was applied to the legs of 22 patients, who were asked to report the level of pain on a scale of one to 100. They were also attached to an intravenous drip so drugs could be administered secretly. The initial average pain rating was 66. Patients were then given a potent painkiller, remifentanil, without their knowledge and the pain score went down to 55. They were then told they were being given a painkiller and the score went down to 39. Then, without changing the dose, the patients were then told the painkiller had been withdrawn and to expect pain, and the score went up to 64. BBC © MMXI

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15011 - Posted: 02.17.2011

by Michael Marshall It's not just humans that benefit from the occasional power nap. Snails do too. Richard Stephenson and Vern Lewis of the University of Toronto in Canada noticed that great pond snails (Lymnaea stagnalis) in tanks in their lab spent 10 per cent of the time in a "quiescent" state: they would attach themselves to a solid surface and sit still with their muscles relaxed and their tentacles partially withdrawn. An animal that is sleeping rather than resting should be less responsive to stimulation. So the pair reasoned that if the quiescent snails only sluggishly withdrew into their shells when prodded in the head with a metal rod, they are probably sleeping – which is exactly what they found. This is the first evidence of sleep in gastropods, says Stephenson. Surprisingly, unlike most animals, snails do not sleep at a regular time each day. "Their sleeping behaviour is organised over two to three days," Stephenson says. He thinks the snails haven't evolved tight control of their sleep patterns because they need so little. Euan Brown of the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station in Naples, Italy, says the evidence for a sleep-like state is "very convincing". Animals sleep more if they regularly need to store new memories – not such an issue for the snail's plant-eating lifestyle, Brown says. He thinks the snails' simple form of sleep could date from early in evolutionary history, and that animals with more mentally demanding lifestyles subsequently evolved more elaborate ways of controlling their sleep. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sleep; Evolution
Link ID: 15010 - Posted: 02.17.2011

By Rachel Ehrenberg The kicks and somersaults of a developing baby aren’t the only in utero calisthenics. Babies also flex their mental muscles months before birth. Nerve cells from developing brains as young as 20 weeks old fire in a pattern that persists into adulthood, researchers report February 15 in the Journal of Neuroscience. The research provides a glimpse into the behavior of extremely young brain cells and could help scientists understand what happens when brain development goes awry. Cells from the cerebral cortices of 20- to 21-week-old fetuses exhibit bursts of electrical activity interspersed with periods of quiet, researchers from the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington found. When the adult brain is sleeping, or under anesthesia, it also displays this busy-then-quiet firing pattern, suggesting it may be an intrinsic property of human brains. The cerebral cortex deals with sensory information, thinking, emotion and consciousness. But even when not receiving input from the outside world, the nerve cells, or neurons, in this region oscillate between firing and resting. “In adults, we go to sleep and the cortex is disconnected from the outside environment — it sleeps alone. But you see this quiet synchronized activity,” says Igor Timofeev of Laval University in Québec. That young nerve cells behave in a similar way long before they grapple with outside input suggests that the firing pattern “is a very basic feature of the brain that occurs in very early stages of development,” says Timofeev. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15009 - Posted: 02.17.2011

People who smoke cigarettes or have smoked in the past may be more likely to develop Lou Gehrig's disease, according to a new study. The disease slowly kills the neurons that send messages between the brain and the rest of the body, causing patients to lose control of their muscles -- including those that are essential for eating and breathing. Most people who are diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, don't survive more than five years after the diagnosis. About 20,000 to 30,000 people in the United States have ALS, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While about 10 percent of those cases are caused by a genetic defect, the rest have no known cause. Some previous studies have suggested that smoking may be one factor that increases a person's risk of getting ALS, but others have found no link. "Results have been rather conflicting regarding the association between smoking and ALS," said Dr. Fang Fang, who has investigated the question at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, but was not involved with the current study. Many ALS researchers tend to agree on a positive association between cigarette smoking and ALS risk although some quite-recent studies still report no link, he told Reuters Health in an e-mail. In the current study, researchers led by Dr. Hao Wang of the Harvard School of Public Health collected data from five long-term studies in the United States that altogether included more than a million adults. In all of the studies, participants had been asked if they currently smoked or had smoked in the past, and if so, how frequently and for how many years. Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease ; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15008 - Posted: 02.15.2011

By Rachel Saslow Once, "relaxation beverages" consisted of alcohol, chamomile tea and warm milk. Now, the field includes a slew of new drinks promising a better night's sleep using such ingredients as melatonin, valerian root and - think turkey - tryptophan. They have apt names such as Unwind, iChill and Dream Water, and offer such flavors as Berry-Berry Tired, Snoozeberry and Lullaby Lemon. They're the inverse of energy drinks. Consumers can wake up with Red Bull and then wind down with Slow Cow. But can consumers trust these fruity concoctions to give them their z's? According to Steven M. Scharf, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, the answer is a resounding maybe. "The issue is this: Some of them probably have some biologic effect, but they haven't been as well studied as you'd like," Scharf says. "Nobody's ever compared valerian root to [the prescription sleep aid] Ambien." The chief ingredient in many of these beverages is melatonin, a hormone that induces sleepiness and helps coordinate the body's biological clock. It's typically released by the pineal gland around 10 p.m.; secretion stops around 4 or 5 a.m., helping to trigger the body to wake up, Scharf says. The body produces about three-fourths of a milligram of melatonin a day. The manufacturer of the sleep aid Snooz'n says its 2.5-ounce "shots" contain five milligrams of melatonin; Unwind, a "relaxation blend," has three milligrams per 12-ounce can. © 2011 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Sleep; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 15007 - Posted: 02.15.2011

By MARC E. AGRONIN, M.D. The woman described the sensation as a delicate flicker, like a moth trapped in a small gauze bag. She ran her slender fingers repeatedly over the spot in her slightly distended abdomen and said, “Doctor, right here.” Sometimes, she told me, the flicker gave way to a more forceful kick that rippled beneath her hand and then spread like a warm tide over her body. She felt contented and soothed as she imagined the baby growing inside. I was tempted to smile, but I kept still. An actual pregnancy would have been international news: the woman was 83 years old, recovering from a hip fracture and pneumonia. But her delusion was not unique. Indeed, our nursing home was having something of a baby boom. Just the day before, another woman who had recently suffered a stroke insisted that she had given birth to twin boys, who were now crying in the adjacent nursery. I reminded her that she was 90, but my words were no match for the force of her belief. She looked at me blankly and called again for her babies. Her husband, distraught, begged me to consider some pharmacologic remedy. But I was struck not by any mental suffering on the woman’s part, but by the opposite. In the face of terrible losses and confusion, her mind had found refuge in imaginary children. Their coos and cries brought comfort and hope. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke; Attention
Link ID: 15006 - Posted: 02.15.2011

By BENEDICT CAREY In recent years, many psychiatrists have come to believe that the last, best chance for some people with severe and intractable mental problems is psychosurgery, an experimental procedure in which doctors operate directly on the brain. Hundreds of people have undergone brain surgery for psychiatric problems, most in experimental trials, with some encouraging results. In 2009, the government approved one surgical technique for certain severe cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or O.C.D. For the first time since frontal lobotomy fell into disrepute in the 1950s, surgery for behavior problems seemed back on the road to the medical mainstream. But now some of the field’s most prominent scientists are saying, “Not so fast.” In a paper in the current issue of the journal Health Affairs, these experts say approving the surgery for O.C.D. was a mistake — and a potentially costly one. They argue that the surgery has not been sufficiently tested, that neither its long-term effectiveness nor its side effects are well known and that even calling it “therapy” raises people’s hopes well beyond what is scientifically supportable. “We’re not against the operation, we just want to see it tested adequately before it’s called a therapy,” said the paper’s lead author, Dr. Joseph J. Fins, chief of medical ethics at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital. “With the legacy of psychosurgery, it’s important that we don’t misrepresent things as therapy when they’re not.” Doctors who run programs offering the operation strongly object. “These patients are very capable of making informed decisions based on our experience with the surgery,” said Dr. Wayne K. Goodman, chairman of psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, “and I would not want to deprive them of the option, any more than I would deny someone with AIDS access to a promising therapy that has not been established yet. Their life has been so destroyed by O.C.D. that they might contemplate suicide” if the surgery were not available. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 15005 - Posted: 02.15.2011

By KATHERINE BOUTON Imagine, Michael Chorost proposes, that four police officers on a drug raid are connected mentally in a way that allows them to sense what their colleagues are seeing and feeling. Tony Vittorio, the captain, is in the center room of the three-room drug den. He can sense that his partner Wilson, in the room on his left, is not feeling danger or arousal and thus has encountered no one. But suddenly Vittorio feels a distant thump on his chest. Sarsen, in the room on the right, has been hit with something, possibly a bullet fired from a gun with a silencer. Vittorio glimpses a flickering image of a metallic barrel pointed at Sarsen, who is projecting overwhelming shock and alarm. By deducing how far Sarsen might have gone into the room and where the gunman is likely to be standing, Vittorio fires shots into the wall that will, at the very least, distract the gunman and allow Sarsen to shoot back. Sarsen is saved; the gunman is dead. That scene, from his new book, “World Wide Mind,” is an example of what Mr. Chorost sees as “the coming integration of humanity, machines, and the Internet.” The prediction is conceptually feasible, he tells us, something that technology does not yet permit but that breaks no known physical laws. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Robotics; Hearing
Link ID: 15004 - Posted: 02.15.2011

By Mark Fischetti A dozen brain regions, working together, create feelings of passionate love. Stephanie Ortigue of Syracuse University and her colleagues worldwide compared MRI studies of people who indicated they were either in love or were experiencing maternal or unconditional love. The comparison revealed a "passion network"—the red regions shown here at various angles. The network releases neurotransmitters and other chemicals in the brain and blood that create the sensations of attraction, arousal, pleasure…and obsession. For more details on how the network affects cognitive functions, see "Graphic Science: Your Brain in Love" in the February 2011 issue of Scientific American. Graphic by James W. Lewis, West Virginia University © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Brain imaging
Link ID: 15003 - Posted: 02.15.2011

by Wendy Zukerman Is it that time of the month? These are the words no man should ever utter. How about this for a diplomatic alternative: "Are your GABA receptors playing up?" You may be spot on. It seems that these brain cells are to blame for some women's monthly mood swings. Many women feel a little irritable before menstruating, but up to 8 per cent suffer extreme symptoms, including anxiety, depression and fatigue. Symptoms of what's called premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) begin around a week before menstruation when women are in the "late luteal phase" of their cycle and progesterone levels are at their height. Symptoms quickly subside after menstruation, once the so-called "follicular phase" has kicked in. To investigate potential mechanisms behind PMDD, Andrea Rapkin at the University of California, Los Angeles used a PET scan, which shows where glucose is being metabolised to identify activity in the brain. The idea was to analyse the brain activity of 12 women with PMDD and 12 without the condition, at various times throughout their menstrual cycle. Before each scan, the women rated the severity of any symptoms they had on a scale of one to six. Blood samples were also taken to test their hormone levels. Fluctuating hormones were not to blame: all the women experienced similar jumps in progesterone levels throughout their cycle, irrespective of whether they had PMDD or not. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 15002 - Posted: 02.15.2011

by Rachel Courtland How does a nose generate the signals that the brain registers as smell? The conventional theory says it's down to the different shapes of smelly molecules. But fruit flies have now distinguished between two molecules with identical shapes, providing the first experimental evidence to support a controversial theory that the sense of smell can operate by detecting molecular vibrations. The noses of mammals, and the antennae of flies, are lined with different folded proteins that form pocket-shaped "receptors". It has been generally assumed that a smell arises when an odour molecule slides into a receptor like a key in a lock, altering the receptor's shape and triggering a cascade of chemical events that eventually reach the brain. But this "shape" theory has limitations. For one, it can't easily explain why different molecules can have very similar smells. In 1996, Luca Turin, a biophysicist now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed a solution. He revived a theory that the way a molecule vibrates can dictate it odour, and came up with a mechanism to explain how this might work. His idea was that electrons might only be able to pass across a receptor if it was bound to a molecule that vibrated at just the right frequency. Ordinarily, the energy needed for the electron to make this journey would be too great, but the right vibrational energy could prompt a quantum effect in which the electron "tunnels" through this energy barrier, and this would then be detected and registered as a particular smell (see diagram). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 15001 - Posted: 02.15.2011

By JAMES DAO, BENEDICT CAREY and DAN FROSCH In his last months alive, Senior Airman Anthony Mena rarely left home without a backpack filled with medications. He returned from his second deployment to Iraq complaining of back pain, insomnia, anxiety and nightmares. Doctors diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed powerful cocktails of psychiatric drugs and narcotics. Yet his pain only deepened, as did his depression. “I have almost given up hope,” he told a doctor in 2008, medical records show. “I should have died in Iraq.” Airman Mena died instead in his Albuquerque apartment, on July 21, 2009, five months after leaving the Air Force on a medical discharge. A toxicologist found eight prescription medications in his blood, including three antidepressants, a sedative, a sleeping pill and two potent painkillers. Yet his death was no suicide, the medical examiner concluded. What killed Airman Mena was not an overdose of any one drug, but the interaction of many. He was 23. After a decade of treating thousands of wounded troops, the military’s medical system is awash in prescription drugs — and the results have sometimes been deadly. By some estimates, well over 300,000 troops have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan with P.T.S.D., depression, traumatic brain injury or some combination of those. The Pentagon has looked to pharmacology to treat those complex problems, following the lead of civilian medicine. As a result, psychiatric drugs have been used more widely across the military than in any previous war. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Depression
Link ID: 15000 - Posted: 02.14.2011

NEW YORK — Compared to a sleek new laptop, that three-pound mass of fatty tissue called the brain may not look like much. But when it's injured, it adapts and rewires its circuits in new ways. That's the kind of flexibility that doctors and rehabilitation specialists hope to encourage in Gabrielle Giffords, the brain-injured Arizona congresswoman. Details about her recovery have been thin. But members of her staff say she recently began speaking for the first time since the Jan. 8 attack by a gunman in Tucson. Brain injury patients who regain speech typically begin to do that about four to six weeks after the injury, experts say. Still, recovery for the 40-year-old Giffords will be a long, tough journey, as it is for anyone with a significant brain injury. Patients can make remarkable progress. But experts caution that they shouldn't expect to return to exactly the way they were before. Too little has been revealed and it's too early to say if Giffords might be able to return to her job in Congress. One expert questioned whether that would be the best thing for her to do. Most people with such injuries have some level of impairment for the rest of their lives. The New York Times on Sunday reported that some of Giffords' efforts to relearn how to speak include mouthing the words to song lyrics, such as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," and briefly talking with her brother-in-law by telephone while he orbited aboard the International Space Station. Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Regeneration; Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 14999 - Posted: 02.14.2011

By Gary Stix A debate rages on whether President Reagan did or didn't have Alzheimer's disease during his time in office. With what we have learned in the last decade about the disease, the question is relatively meaningless, except perhaps to score political points. The simple answer: of course he did. The newest technology—consisting of imaging and spinal taps—shows that the disease process begins its relentless course as many as 15 years before a firm diagnosis. By the time the first symptoms appear, the disease is already progressing. While in office, Reagan had moments of incomprehension interspersed with fully lucid thinking. So Reagan was well along the glide path to dementia when he was staring down the Evil Empire. The beloved conservative acronym WWRD might have been reframed: WSHBDAR: What Should Have Been Done About Reagan. It doesn't really matter. Reagan will retain his exalted status within conservative hagiography. The more interesting question lurks ahead for future presidential candidates. The most significant advance in the Alzheimer's field in recent years is the advent of these imaging and spinal fluid "biomarkers" that can probe the course of the disease years before the first symptom. The techniques might not be fully ready for prime time, but they're getting there fast. In January, an FDA advisory panel voted to recommend, with just a few conditions, the approval of an imaging test that shows in living patients the buildup of the amyloid protein fragments characteristic of the disease. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 14998 - Posted: 02.14.2011

By Emily Sohn People love music for much the same reason they're drawn to sex, drugs, gambling and delicious food, according to new research. When you listen to tunes that move you, the study found, your brain releases dopamine, a chemical involved in both motivation and addiction. Even just anticipating the sounds of a composition like Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" or Phish's "You Enjoy Myself" can get the feel-good chemical flowing, found the study, which was the first to make a concrete link between dopamine release and musical pleasure. The findings offer a biological explanation for why music has been such a major part of major emotional events in cultures around the world since the beginning of human history. Through music, the study also offers new insights into how the human pleasure system works. "You're following these tunes and anticipating what's going to come next and whether it's going to confirm or surprise you, and all of these little cognitive nuances are what's giving you this amazing pleasure," said Valorie Salimpoor, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal. "The reinforcement or reward happens almost entirely because of dopamine." "This basically explains why music has been around for so long," she added. "The intense pleasure we get from it is actually biologically reinforcing in the brain, and now here's proof for it." © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Hearing; Emotions
Link ID: 14997 - Posted: 02.14.2011

Dr. Russell A. Barkley First, it is important to note that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder does not present all that much differently in women from the way it does in men. Most research on this issue has confirmed this. While symptoms may vary somewhat among children, they are virtually the same by adulthood. In childhood, boys are three times as likely as girls to have A.D.H.D. Boys with the disorder tend to be more hyperactive and impulsive and are more likely to develop oppositional behavior, conduct problems and later delinquency than girls, though girls, too, can develop these problems. Girls, on the other hand, may be more prone to develop anxiety, depression and eating disorders — bulimia, in particular. By adulthood, the proportion of men to women with the disorder is nearly even, and there are few differences in the symptoms. Both men and women have significant problems with executive functioning, which involves skills like time management, self-organization and problem-solving, as well as self-restraint, self-motivation and self-regulation of emotions. All of these problems can have a major effect on daily life activities, like family relations, child-rearing, managing money, functioning at work or driving. Where men and women may differ is in the amount of time they engage in these activities – and the subsequent impact on daily life. A woman who works full time outside the home, for instance, would have more work-related difficulties, whereas a stay-at-home mother might have more problems related to home life. To the extent that women may opt for certain roles, those roles will be more greatly affected by the disorder, and vice versa for men. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14996 - Posted: 02.12.2011