Greg Miller Michael Meaney and Moshe Szyf work in the same Canadian city, but it took a chance meeting at a Spanish pub more than 15 years ago to jump-start a collaboration that helped create a new discipline. Meaney, a neuroscientist at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute in Montreal, studies how early life experiences shape behavior later in life. Across town at McGill University, Szyf is a leading expert on chemical alterations to DNA that affect gene activity. Sometime in the mid-1990s, both men attended the same meeting in Madrid and ended up at a bar talking and drinking beer. "A lot of it," Szyf recalls. Meaney told Szyf about his findings that rat pups raised by inattentive mothers tend to be more anxious as adults than pups raised by more nurturing mothers. He also described how the activity of stress-related genes was altered in the undernurtured pups. At some point in the conversation, Szyf had a flash of insight: This difference must be due to DNA methylation—the chemical alteration he had been studying in stem cells and tumor cells. The idea cut against the conventional thinking in both fields. In neuroscience, the prevailing wisdom held that long-term changes in behavior result from physical changes in neural circuits—such as when neurons build new synapses and become more sensitive to messages from their neighbors. And most scientists who studied DNA methylation thought the process was restricted to embryonic development or cancer cells. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science. All Rights Reserved.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Stress
Link ID: 14221 - Posted: 07.03.2010

Beds that cost up to $60,000 each are now available, note Dr. Michael Thorpy and Shelby Freedman Harris of the Sleep-Wake Disorders Center at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. But is a better mattress the secret to curing insomnia? Drs. Thorpy and Harris recently responded to questions about insomnia on the Consults blog. Here, they address which type of mattress is best for a sound night’s sleep and whether light or noise might be reasons for sleeping poorly. Q. Is there any research that shows if the kind of mattress you have affects sleep? Dee, Western New York A. It is common for people with insomnia to wonder if their bed, or some other environmental factor like light or noise, is the reason for their sleeping poorly. Sometimes an uncomfortable mattress is the cause of the sleep disturbance, but most often it is not. Very few studies have analyzed how the type of mattress affects sleep quality, and they’ve generally involved a small number of healthy subjects or patients who are in pain. The results have been variable, with some preferring a soft surface and others preferring a hard surface. No clear benefit of any mattress type has been shown. People in some jungle cultures, or even hikers or campers, who sleep on mats on the hard ground can usually get a good night’s sleep if they do it often enough. It is largely a matter of conditioning to the environment that allows a person to sleep comfortably. Problems can arise, however, with sudden changes, like staying in a hotel overnight, when a new bed or environment can be a factor in disrupting sleep. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 14220 - Posted: 07.01.2010

Exercise has previously been linked to possible benefits in staving off dementia, but a new look at the topic suggests the earlier the better. The prevalence of cognitive impairment was significantly lower in women aged 65 and older who reported they were physically active as teens than in those who were inactive in their teen years, the study found. "If we want to optimally prevent dementia, it's important to start physical activity as early in life as possible," said principal investigator Laura Middleton of the Heart and Stroke Foundation Centre for Stroke Recovery at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. "More and more people are starting to recognize physical activity as one of the most promising means to prevent cognitive impairment and dementia. And what this study adds is that it's not only important in mid and late life — that we really have to start as early as possible." The study was published Wednesday appears in the July issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. Middleton worked on the project while she was at the University of California in San Francisco, and used data from the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures. She analyzed the responses of 9,704 women in four U.S. cities: Baltimore, Minneapolis, Portland, Ore., and Monongahela Valley, Pa. © CBC 2010

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 14219 - Posted: 07.01.2010

Scientists at Penn State University say they have developed a mouse that gets depressed in a similar fashion to humans, which could led to better treatment for the condition among people. Biology professor Bernhard Luscher, the project's leader, said that is because scientists will be able to test different drugs for various mental conditions and observe the mice to see the results. "A mouse can't tell us if it is feeling depressed, so we used a number of different kinds of tests to gauge ... changes ... of a type of depression that, in humans, does not respond well to some antidepressant drugs," Luscher said. Drug trials Researchers essentially created a rodent with a genetic defect that interferes with the development of a protein in the brain, called the GABA-A receptor. The lack of that protein allows the mice to mimic brain disorders among humans but lets the researchers reach different conclusions, the scientists noted. For example, a GABA-A deficiency had been linked to anxiety disorders but not directly to depression. In a paper to be published in Biology Psychiatry, however, Luscher used the genetically-modified mouse to show that the protein is in fact important to proper brain function and that whatever cerebral problems cause anxiety also have a hand in the appearance of depression. © CBC 2010

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 14218 - Posted: 07.01.2010

by Debora MacKenzie INFECTIOUS disease is taking an unexpected toll by sapping people's brainpower in the world's poorest countries. So say Christopher Eppig and colleagues at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, who found that a country's disease burden is strongly linked to the average IQ of its population. Building and maintaining the brain requires 87 per cent of all the body's energy in newborns and 44 per cent in 5-year-old children. Fighting infection also takes enormous amounts of energy, so children may struggle to do both at the same time. Eppig reasoned that an increased risk of catching an infectious disease during critical developmental stages may affect subsequent IQ levels. His team matched three sets of IQ estimates of healthy people in 192 countries, against the World Health Organization's estimate of the burden of 28 infectious diseases in those countries. With only a few exceptions, they found very high correlations: the more disease, the lower the IQ. Disease was more closely related to IQ than any other variable they tested. IQ differences are known to correlate with GDP, and educational and nutritional levels, but when variation in IQ due to disease was accounted for, IQ showed no correlation with these other factors (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.0973). This may explain the effect discovered by the political philosopher James Flynn, who noted that IQ soars following economic development. "Others have suggested that it is caused by better education, but we found that infectious disease is a much better predictor," Eppig says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 14217 - Posted: 07.01.2010

By Susan Milius PORTLAND, Ore. — A tendency for daughters to fall for guys that are like their dads helps keep two species of fish from interbreeding. Two distinct species of the threespine stickleback dart about in several lakes of British Columbia, where the two fishes could easily mate with each other. But they don’t; the slimmer ones, which feed on plankton in open water, mate with their own kind, while the larger, bottom-feeding ones mate with theirs. Experiments now show that early in life, females of both kinds pick up some cue from their fathers, probably his odor, that provides a guide later on when it comes time to choose a mate, according to Genevieve Kozak of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The experiments suggest that this process, known as imprinting, may help the stickleback species stay separate even though they live in the same lakes, Kozak said June 27 at the Evolution 2010 meeting. “One of the coolest talks I've seen,” said evolutionary biologist Daphne Fairbairn of the University of California, Riverside. Just how new species form and stay separate while sharing space remains a lively topic in biology, and for some creatures, such as the extraordinarily diverse cichlid fish in African lakes, biologists are still looking for a good explanation. “I think the cichlid people are going to jump on this,” Fairbairn said. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 14216 - Posted: 06.29.2010

Even if you haven't taken the invisible gorilla test, you've probably heard of it. It consists of a short video of two teams of students moving around while they pass basketballs. The idea is to count the number of passes made by one team while ignoring those made by the other. Roughly half of those who take the test fail to notice a person dressed as a gorilla who strolls into the middle of the players and beats its chest at the camera. The viewers are concentrating so hard on counting the passes that they're blind to the unexpected, even though it is staring them in the face. This book is by the psychologists who devised that experiment (see Gorilla psychologists: Weird stuff in plain sight). Their aim is to show how easy it is to miss things that are right in front of us when we're not looking out for them, and how illusions and distorted beliefs lead us astray every day. They cover what they consider to be six of the most common intuitive errors: Some of these biases have been widely written about, but it is worth reading them again here for the clarity with which Chris Chabris and Dan Simons explain them and their talent for making them relevant to everyday situations. They demonstrate, for example, how over-confidence in one's abilities can be hilarious in a talent show contestant or an incompetent criminal caught on camera, but worrying when it dissuades other members of a group from sharing their own - less confidently held but nonetheless important - opinions. And such over-confidence can be positively dangerous in a witness whose apparently credible evidence is given undue weight by jurors or police. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14215 - Posted: 06.29.2010

by Eliza Strickland When the housing market crashed in late 2008, most people were surprised by the sudden collapse. John Coates was not among them. He had spent 12 years trading derivatives for New York’s biggest banks—and had left finance for neuroscience, studying what happens in the brains of traders who put billions of dollars on the line in risky financial decisions. Coates, who now studies neuroscience and behavioral economics at the University of Cambridge, has made the London stock market his laboratory. His experiments seem to show that a trader’s success may be determined not by his wits but by the hormones that course through his brain. Hormone-fueled decision making can have powerful effects, intensifying market booms and busts and destabilizing the economy, Coates suggests. The markets’ operations are determined by legions of young men governed by confidence-boosting testosterone and the stress-related hormone cortisol. When hormones spiral out of control, economic behavior can do so as well. How did you get inside the heads of the people working in the financial markets? In our first experiment, we were on a trading floor in London with 250 traders, of which only three were women; the average age was maybe 28. They traded in and out very quickly, which means they would hold positions for minutes or even seconds. They would spot a price anomaly and jump on it, then quickly unwind. And they would make trades of huge value —$1 billion or $2 billion at a crack. We wanted to find out what was going on in the brains and bodies of these men who were taking such huge risks. So we collected saliva samples from the traders to measure their levels of testosterone and cortisol in the morning and the afternoon, bracketing the bulk of the day’s trading. Our hypothesis was that when traders had above-average testosterone their profits would go up, and in fact that’s exactly what we saw. It turned out that their morning testosterone levels were actually predicting their afternoon profits.

Keyword: Emotions; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 14214 - Posted: 06.29.2010

By Carolyn Butler No matter what I do, and despite the fact that my baby has arisen at the crack of dawn for well over a year now, I just can't seem to turn myself into a morning person. My body simply refuses to shut down much before midnight, and so I work, pay bills and watch terrible reality-TV reruns until the wee hours, only to be dog-tired and disagreeable come 6 a.m., when my live little alarm clock begins wailing for me. Even when I force myself to go to bed on the early side or when my husband lets me sleep in on a Saturday, waking up always seems a chore. My brother-in-law, on the other hand, is known for unabashedly yawning in people's faces starting right around 8:30 at night, whether he's at home, a family dinner or the theater. I ran into him bright and early the other morning on my way to Starbucks, when I was so beat that I could barely communicate -- and he was clear-eyed and chipper, heading off on a long run. What makes one person greet the day with smiles and energy, and another hide under the covers until the last possible moment? It's a combination of genetics, the environment and our lifestyle choices, says sleep specialist Mark Wu, an assistant professor in neurology at Johns Hopkins Medicine. He explains that your body's natural circadian rhythms, which cycle up and down over an average 24.1 hours, control sleep and wakefulness and differ from person to person. How much sleep you've had lately also makes a difference, influencing how great your body's drive for more shut-eye is. © 2010 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Sleep; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 14213 - Posted: 06.29.2010

By DENISE GRADY For her first appointment with Dr. Daniel Simon, Neelima Raval showed up with a rolling file cabinet full of documents. She had downloaded every word written by or about Dr. Paolo Zamboni, a vascular surgeon from Italy with a most unorthodox theory about multiple sclerosis. Dr. Zamboni believes that the disease, which damages the nervous system, may be caused by narrowed veins in the neck and chest that block the drainage of blood from the brain. He has reported in medical journals that opening those veins with the kind of balloons used to treat blocked heart arteries—an experimental treatment he calls the “liberation procedure”— can relieve symptoms. The idea is a radical departure from the conventional belief that multiple sclerosis is caused by a malfunctioning immune system and inflammation. The new theory has taken off on the Internet, inspiring hope among patients, interest from some researchers and scorn from others. Supporters consider it an outside-the-box idea that could transform the treatment of the disease. Critics call it an outlandish notion that will probably waste time and money, and may harm patients. These critics warn that multiple sclerosis has unpredictable attacks and remissions that make it devilishly hard to know whether treatments are working — leaving patients vulnerable to purported “cures” that do not work. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 14212 - Posted: 06.29.2010

By JOHN TIERNEY At long last, the doodling daydreamer is getting some respect. In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions. But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems. Consider, for instance, these three words: eye, gown, basket. Can you think of another word that relates to all three? If not, don’t worry for now. By the time we get back to discussing the scientific significance of this puzzle, the answer might occur to you through the “incubation effect” as your mind wanders from the text of this article — and, yes, your mind is probably going to wander, no matter how brilliant the rest of this column is. Mind wandering, as psychologists define it, is a subcategory of daydreaming, which is the broad term for all stray thoughts and fantasies, including those moments you deliberately set aside to imagine yourself winning the lottery or accepting the Nobel. But when you’re trying to accomplish one thing and lapse into “task-unrelated thoughts,” that’s mind wandering. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14211 - Posted: 06.29.2010

By NATALIE ANGIER WHEN the annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission ended on Friday with the 24-year ban on commercial whaling still intact, however tenuous its hold and leviathan its loopholes, sighs of relief issued from many quarters — along with, no doubt, a volley of whistles, clicks and proudly parochial squeals. After two years of transcontinental haggling, the commission had been expected to replace today’s hunting ban with limited hunting quotas. Supporters of the policy change had argued that by specifying how many whales of a given species could be sustainably harvested over a 10-year period, and by tightening or eliminating current loopholes through which whaling nations like Japan and Norway kill the marine mammals for “scientific” purposes, the new measure would effectively reduce the number of whales slaughtered each year. Yet many biologists who study whales and dolphins view such a compromise as deeply flawed, and instead urge that negotiators redouble efforts to abolish commercial whaling and dolphin hunting entirely. As these scientists see it, the evidence is high and mounting that the cetacean order includes species second only to humans in mental, social and behavioral complexity, and that maybe we shouldn’t talk about what we’re harvesting or harpooning, but whom. “At the very least, you could put it in line with hunting chimps,” said Hal Whitehead, who studies sperm whales at Dalhousie University in Halifax. “When you compare relative brain size, or levels of self-awareness, sociality, the importance of culture, cetaceans come out on most of these measures in the gap between chimps and humans. They fit the philosophical definition of personhood.” Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14210 - Posted: 06.28.2010

By Elizabeth Cooney Adam Davis says one of his brightest friends makes the most ridiculous mistakes. For all his smarts, he’ll cross the street without looking. “I know some people who are heavy drinkers, and they’ve actually told me they feel their memory is going. They drink and then they black out, more and more,’’ said Davis, a 20-year-old Lexington High graduate who attends Occidental College in Los Angeles. “They don’t change their behavior. I don’t think it’s addiction. I guess that gets into judgment.’’ Smart kids doing stupid things: It’s the teen brain paradox. Extraordinarily quick to learn and rapidly reaching fluency in abstract thought, teens still make bonehead decisions, perhaps more so when routines relax in summer. But that’s because they’re operating with brains that are still a work in progress. Of all the organs in our bodies, the brain takes the longest to develop. Frontal lobes — the seat of judgment — are the last pieces to be fully connected to the parts of the brain that sense danger or solve calculus problems. A growing body of neuroscientific evidence places full brain maturity at about age 25, well past the point when young people begin to drive, drink, vote, or go off to war. “We all know what the frontal lobe does,’’ said Dr. Frances Jensen, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital Boston. “It’s insight, judgment, inhibition, self-awareness, cause and effect, acknowledgment of cause and effect. And big surprise: It’s not done in your teen years. Hence [teens’] impulsiveness, their unpredictable behavior, their lack of ability to acknowledge and see cause and effect, despite the fact they are getting 800s on their SATs and can be cognitively highly functional and memorize at a much more impressive rate than we as adults do later.’’ © 2010 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 14209 - Posted: 06.28.2010

By Bruce Bower Don’t be shocked if car sellers soon decide to seat prospective buyers in beanbag chairs, or maybe in La-Z-Boys. Soft seats subtly steer people away from driving hard bargains, a provocative new study suggests. Objects’ tactile qualities, such as a chair’s softness or hardness, automatically call to mind associated metaphors, such as flexibility or rigidity, say MIT psychologist Joshua Ackerman and his colleagues. In this way, sensations of weight, texture and hardness surreptitiously create mindsets that influence how people think about and deal with others, the researchers propose in the June 25 Science. The team conducted six experiments in which people, some passersby on streets and some volunteers in a lab, experienced different touch sensations while making several kinds of decisions. In one case, 43 people sitting in hard wooden chairs showed less willingness to compromise in price negotiations for a new car than 43 people who sat in cushioned chairs. After being told that their initial offer on a car with a $16,500 sticker price had been refused, wooden-chair sitters upped their offers by an average of $897, compared with $1,244 for the cushioned crowd. In other words, people in soft chairs increased their offers 38% more than people in hard chairs. “I suspect that the stresses of real-world decision-making environments will act as mental distracters, making people even more susceptible to the effects of tactile cues,” Ackerman says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Emotions; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 14208 - Posted: 06.26.2010

By Nathan Seppa In science’s struggle to keep up with life on the streets, smoking cannabis for medical purposes stands as Exhibit A. Medical use of cannabis has taken on momentum of its own, surging ahead of scientists’ ability to measure the drug’s benefits. The pace has been a little too quick for some, who see medicinal joints as a punch line, a ruse to free up access to a recreational drug. But while the medical marijuana movement has been generating political news, some researchers have been quietly moving in new directions — testing cannabis and its derivatives against a host of diseases. The scientific literature now brims with potential uses for cannabis that extend beyond its well-known abilities to fend off nausea and block pain in people with cancer and AIDS. Cannabis derivatives may combat multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease and other inflammatory conditions, the new research finds. Cannabis may even kill cancerous tumors. Many in the scientific community are now keen to see if this potential will be fulfilled, but they haven’t always been. Pharmacologist Roger Pertwee of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland recalls attending scientific conferences 30 years ago, eager to present his latest findings on the therapeutic effects of cannabis. It was a hard sell. “Our talks would be scheduled at the end of the day, and our posters would be stuck in the corner somewhere,” he says. “That’s all changed.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 14207 - Posted: 06.26.2010

by Andy Coghlan Fetuses aged 24 weeks or less do not have the brain connections to feel pain, according to a working party report published this week by the UK Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG). Its conclusion is the latest to challenge the rationale for a law introduced in the US state of Nebraska in April. This law, which bans almost all abortions beyond 20 weeks of pregnancy, was introduced primarily on the grounds that the fetus feels pain. The report, which reviews recent scientific literature on the subject, also concludes that the fetus is sedated throughout pregnancy by chemicals such as adenosine contained in the amniotic fluid that surrounds it. Because the fetus is unable to feel pain before 24 weeks, no pain relief is needed for medical procedures up to that time, including abortion, the report concludes. This reverses the position the RCOG took in its previous report on fetal pain in 1997, which supported the use of analgesia. "We have now advised that analgesia is not indicated up to 24 weeks," says Allan Templeton, chairman of the working group that produced the report. He adds that administering painkillers carries risks of harming the fetus. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14206 - Posted: 06.26.2010

by Ewen Callaway Why would anyone put people who are afraid of snakes into a brain scanner, alongside the cause of their fear? To work out what is going on in the brain when people display courage, of course. This was the strategy used by Uri Nili and Yadin Dudai, at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, and it showed that courage does not come when we completely banish fear, but through overcoming it enough to act. "A firefighter having to go into a burning building should display courage, but that firefighter is not fearless," Dudai says. Their observations suggest an area of the brain that could be targeted in efforts to rid people of their phobias. The researchers examined the brain activity of 39 people with an abnormally strong fear of snakes as they lay on their backs in a functional MRI (fMRI) brain scanner. They were given the option to move a venomless 1.5-metre-long corn snake further away from their heads along a conveyer belt, or to bring it closer, to within a distance as small as 20 centimetres. One participant panicked so much that they had to withdraw from the study, and all said they were scared when they had to choose which way to move the snake. The nearer the snake was, the more scared volunteers said they felt. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 14205 - Posted: 06.26.2010

By ALICIA CHANG LOS ANGELES - Dozens of people who were blinded or otherwise suffered severe eye damage when they were splashed with caustic chemicals had their sight restored with transplants of their own stem cells — a stunning success for the burgeoning cell-therapy field, Italian researchers reported Wednesday. The treatment worked completely in 82 of 107 eyes and partially in 14 others, with benefits lasting up to a decade so far. One man whose eyes were severely damaged more than 60 years ago now has near-normal vision. "This is a roaring success," said ophthalmologist Dr. Ivan Schwab of the University of California, Davis, who had no role in the study — the longest and largest of its kind. Stem cell transplants offer hope to the thousands of people worldwide every year who suffer chemical burns on their corneas from heavy-duty cleansers or other substances at work or at home. The approach would not help people with damage to the optic nerve or macular degeneration, which involves the retina. Nor would it work in people who are completely blind in both eyes, because doctors need at least some healthy tissue that they can transplant. In the study, published online by the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers took a small number of stem cells from a patient's healthy eye, multiplied them in the lab and placed them into the burned eye, where they were able to grow new corneal tissue to replace what had been damaged. Since the stem cells are from their own bodies, the patients do not need to take anti-rejection drugs. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Vision; Stem Cells
Link ID: 14204 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By GINA KOLATA Dr. Daniel Skovronsky sat at a small round table in his corner office, laptop open, waiting for an e-mail message. His right leg jiggled nervously. A few minutes later, the message arrived — results that showed his tiny start-up company might have overcome one of the biggest obstacles in diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease. It had found a dye and a brain scan that, he said, can show the hallmark plaque building up in the brains of people with the disease. The findings, which will be presented at an international meeting of the Alzheimer’s Association in Honolulu on July 11, must still be confirmed and approved by the Food and Drug Administration. But if they hold up, it will mean that for the first time doctors would have a reliable way to diagnose the presence of Alzheimer’s in patients with memory problems. And researchers would have a way to figure out whether drugs are slowing or halting the disease, a step that “will change everyone’s thinking about Alzheimer’s in a dramatic way,” said Dr. Michael Weiner of the University of California, San Francisco, who is not part of the company’s study and directs a federal project to study ways of diagnosing Alzheimer’s. Still, the long tale behind this finding shows just how difficult this disease is and why progress toward preventing or curing it has been so slow. Ever since Alzheimer’s disease was described by a German doctor, Alois Alzheimer, in 1906, there was only one way to know for sure that a person had it. A pathologist, examining the brain after death, would see microscopic black freckles, plaque, sticking to brain slices like barnacles. Without plaque, a person with memory loss did not have the disease. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14203 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael J. Thorpy, M.D. Michael J. Thorpy, M.D. “Everybody suffers from a few sleepless nights, but most people do not suffer from the disorder of insomnia,” explains Dr. Michael Thorpy, a neurologist and director of the Sleep-Wake Disorders Center at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. “Insomnia disorder typically occurs when the sleeplessness occurs for at least one month, though even a few days of bad sleep may be sufficient to require treatment.” Shelby Freedman Harris, Psy.D. Shelby Freedman Harris, Psy.D. Dr. Thorpy and Shelby Freedman Harris, a psychologist and director of the center’s behavioral sleep medicine program, recently took readers’ questions about insomnia on the Consults blog. Here, Dr. Thorpy and Dr. Harris respond to a reader inquiring whether insomnia is always a result of some underlying condition like stress or pain, or whether it can exist as a standalone disorder. Q. Is insomnia always coupled with an underlying cause (chronic pain, stress, anxiety disorder, etc) or is it truly possible to have insomnia and not have any underlying condition? Moreover, if you solve the underlying condition of your insomnia, is it possible to still suffer from insomnia? wiparker824, Chandler, Ariz. Great question, and something that has caused a lot of debate in sleep medicine over the years. Briefly, you can have an underlying condition and insomnia. But once the original condition is treated, the insomnia may remain and require its own treatment. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 14202 - Posted: 06.24.2010