Links for Keyword: Stress

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by Greg Miller Only a small minority of people who fall victim to a violent attack or witness a bloody accident suffer the recurring nightmares, hypervigilance, and other symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Women seem to be twice as susceptible as men, but otherwise researchers know virtually nothing about who is most at risk or why. Now a study has linked a genetic mutation and blood levels of a particular peptide—a compound made from a short string of the same building blocks that make up proteins—to the severity of PTSD symptoms in women. The finding could lead to tests to identify people who may need extra help after a traumatic event. In the new study, researchers led by Kerry Ressler, a psychiatrist and molecular neurobiologist at Emory University in Atlanta, focused on a peptide thought to play a role in cells' response to stress: pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptide (PACAP). The team measured levels of PACAP in the blood of 64 patients who volunteered for their study at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. The vast majority of volunteers were from poor neighborhoods in the city, and Ressler says more than 90% reported having witnessed or suffered from a traumatic event such as gun violence or physical or sexual assault in the past. The researchers found a correlation between PACAP levels and scores on a standard scale of PTSD symptoms in women—but no such correlation in men. In a second group of 74 women, the researchers found a similar correlation between PACAP levels and symptom severity. Ressler estimates that with all else being equal, women with high PACAP levels are up to five times as likely as women with low levels to have symptoms severe enough to meet the diagnostic criteria for PTSD. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 15044 - Posted: 02.24.2011

For Some Troops, Powerful Drug Cocktails Have Deadly Results

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

Neurostress: How Stress May Fuel Neurodegenerative Diseases

By Brian Mossop In 2007, James Watson eyed his genome for the very first time. Through more than 50 years of scientific and technological advancement, Watson saw the chemical structure he once helped unravel now fused into a personal genetic landscape laid out before him. Yet there was a small stretch of nucleic acids on chromosome 19 that he preferred to leave uncovered, a region that coded the apolipoprotein E gene. APOE, as it’s called, has been a telling genetic landmark of Alzheimer’s risk, strongly correlated to the disease since the early 90s. Watson’s grandmother suffered from Alzheimer’s, and without any reasonable treatments or suitable preventive strategies, the father of DNA decided the information was too volatile, its revelation creating more potential harm than good. Watson’s apprehension was warranted. Treatments for Alzheimer’s Disease have consistently failed, sometimes miserably. But as we learn more and more about the brain, it has become apparent that genetics alone rarely dictate the course of disease. Instead, brain disorders result from a complex interaction of our genes and the environments to which we’re exposed. And now, a recent wave of research has unveiled another player in the genesis of neurodegenerative disease: stress. While scientists have already catalogued the effect of our surroundings and environment on psychological conditions – including depression and anxiety disorders – new studies suggest that stress may also figure into the complex equation that determines if someone will develop a neurodegenerative disease or not. Because stress can be mitigated through lifestyle changes, people may finally gain some control over these devastating, and feared, illnesses. © 2011 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 14945 - Posted: 02.01.2011

How Meditation May Change the Brain

By SINDYA N. BHANOO Over the December holidays, my husband went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Not my idea of fun, but he came back rejuvenated and energetic. He said the experience was so transformational that he has committed to meditating for two hours a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, until the end of March. He’s running an experiment to determine whether and how meditation actually improves the quality of his life. I’ll admit I’m a skeptic. But now, scientists say that meditators like my husband may be benefiting from changes in their brains. The researchers report that those who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. The findings will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging. M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes. But how exactly did these study volunteers, all seeking stress reduction in their lives but new to the practice, meditate? So many people talk about meditating these days. Within four miles of our Bay Area home, there are at least six centers that offer some type of meditation class, and I often hear phrases like, “So how was your sit today?” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 14930 - Posted: 01.29.2011

Why Loneliness Is Hazardous to Your Health

Greg Miller Everyone knows what it's like to be lonely. It often happens during life's transitions: when a student leaves home for college, when an unmarried businessman takes a job in a new city, or when an elderly woman outlives her husband and friends. Bouts of loneliness are a melancholy fact of human existence. But when loneliness becomes a chronic condition, the impact can be far more serious, says John Cacioppo, a social psychologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois. Cacioppo studies the biological effects of loneliness, and in a steady stream of recent papers, he and collaborators have identified several potentially unhealthy changes in the cardiovascular, immune, and nervous systems of chronically lonely people. Their findings could help explain why epidemiological studies have often found that socially isolated people have shorter life spans and increased risk of a host of health problems, including infections, heart disease, and depression. Their work also adds a new wrinkle, suggesting that it's the subjective experience of loneliness that's harmful, not the actual number of social contacts a person has. “Loneliness isn't at all what people thought it was, and it's a lot more important than people thought it was,” Cacioppo says. Colleagues credit him with building an impressive network of collaborations with researchers in other disciplines to pioneer a new science of loneliness. “He's placed it on the scientific map,” says one collaborator, Dorret Boomsma, a behavioral geneticist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. “He's doing very creative work,” says Martha Farah, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “He's created a new way of thinking about the biology of interpersonal relationships.” © 2011 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 14875 - Posted: 01.15.2011

To Tell the Truth: Brain Scans Are Not Ready for the Courtroom

By Hank Greely Neuroscientists have been using brain scans to learn how to read minds. This research is increasing our basic understanding of the human brain and offering hope for medical breakthroughs. We should all applaud this work. Commercial firms, however, are beginning to apply this research to lie detection, selling their services. The technology is tempting, but before we accept it, we need to think hard about it—and go slow. The trouble is not with the pace of research. Neuroscientists have been publishing articles about detecting lies with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for nearly 10 years. About 25 published studies have found correlations between when experimental subjects were telling a lie and the pattern of blood flow in their brains. The trouble is that different studies, using different methods, have drawn conclusions based on the activity of different brain regions. And all the studies so far have taken place in the artificial environment of the laboratory, using people who knew they were taking part in an experiment and who were following instructions to lie. None of the studies examined lie detection in real-world situations. No government agency has found that this method works; no independent bodies have tested the approach. Yet people are buying lie-detection reports, wrapped in the glamour of science, to try to prove their honesty. In May two separate cases wound up in the courts. © 2010 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 14783 - Posted: 12.16.2010

More than shyness

By Elizabeth Cooney Jennipher Ray knew her son was on the quiet side. Even as a baby, he was nervous, and as he grew older his body would stiffen when he crossed the threshold into his day-care center near his mother’s part-time job in downtown Boston. His pediatrician said he was “just shy’’ and would outgrow it. Despite Ray’s misgivings, nothing prepared her for the first parent-teacher conference when her son was 3 1/2. “They said he doesn’t know his ABCs and he can’t count to 10. We were shocked,’’ Ray said in a recent interview. When she told his teachers he talked nonstop at home, they said, “He has never spoken to us.’’ Her heart dropped. Then they said, “We think he’s just shy.’’ That moment started Ray and her son on a search that eventually led to a diagnosis of selective mutism, a relatively rare anxiety disorder that affects an estimated 0.5 to 0.75 percent of the population. Children like Ray’s now 9-year-old son — whose name she declined to disclose because of the stigma that clings to such problems — can be chatterboxes at home, but they do not speak in other settings such as school, their neighborhoods, or the grocery store. They may develop other ways to communicate, through nods, gestures, or whispers to trusted teachers or peers, but their inability to fully participate in communications can lead to academic and emotional problems in childhood and in some cases set the stage for depression and social isolation later in life. © 2010 NY Times Co.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 14742 - Posted: 12.06.2010

Stressed out? It could be in your genes

By Laura Spinney Stress: there's not a system in your body it doesn't poison in the end. Over time, it raises your blood pressure, increases your chances of infertility and makes you age faster, and that's not all. Remove the source of the stress and all those horrors vanish, right? Wrong. A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that not only can stress bring about permanent changes in your body, but you can even pass on some of those changes to your offspring. What's more, some researchers are now arguing that, far from being an exclusively human problem, psychological stress is rampant in nature. Its influence is so powerful, they claim, that like the conductor of an orchestra, it imposes a rhythm on whole ecosystems, determining which species are booming, and which are bust. In fact, says Rachel Yehuda, a neuroscientist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, it's time to rewrite the textbooks about stress, doing away with the outdated idea that its effects are transient. "Some effects of the environment and of experience are long lasting," she says. "And for that we need a new biology." Yehuda had her first inkling of the indelible mark that stress can leave on families back in 1993, when she opened a clinic to treat the psychological problems of Holocaust survivors, and was deluged with calls from their adult children. Investigating further, she found that those children were particularly prone to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Both parents and children tended to have low levels of the hormone cortisol in their urine. Stranger still, the more severe the Holocaust survivor's PTSD symptoms, the less cortisol there was in their child's urine. ©independent.co.uk

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 14734 - Posted: 12.02.2010

Behind the Facade, Post-Traumatic Stress

By KAREN BARROW A soldier returns from war unable to get the images of battle out of his head. An earthquake survivor rides out long, anxiety-filled nights. A young woman in a pretty floral dress walks her dog along the streets of Manhattan. All three may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The woman walking her dog is Robin Hutchins, 25. She looks confident and self-assured, and few would guess that a year ago she discovered that she had the stress disorder. “When I tell people I have P.T.S.D., it’s like I have to convince them it’s a real issue,” she said. The disorder — in which a traumatic experience leaves the patient suffering from severe anxiety for months or years after the event — is often associated with battlefield combat and natural disasters. But as Dr. Frank Ochberg, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Michigan State University, noted in an interview, the typical trigger is more mundane — most commonly, a traffic accident. In Ms. Hutchins’s case, it was sexual violence. During her first year in college, on a weekend home to tend to a broken leg, she was raped by a young man she knew. She returned to college without telling her parents about it. “I just really wanted to be a freshman in college,” she said. Ms. Hutchins spoke to a counselor there and resumed her routine — attending class, hanging out with friends and trying to put the trauma behind her. “Nobody ever said, ‘You need to stop your life and deal with this — you can’t just walk through it,’ ” she said. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 14704 - Posted: 11.23.2010

Genes marked by stress make grandchildren mentally ill

by Andy Coghlan A little thing called methylation means that parental neglect, or eating a poor diet, could lead to depression or schizophrenia two generations later WHAT if your bad habits mean that your children and even their children end up with a psychiatric disorder? That is one of the implications of a study in rodents that suggests poor diet and parental neglect can leave their mark on the genes of your children and your children's children. A cryptic epigenetic code added to the DNA of mice shows for the first time that changes in gene activity can pass down three generations. It is likely that the same mechanisms are at work in humans. Epigenetics deals with the regulation of gene activity within a cell - which genes are switched on or off, and when it happens (see diagram). Every cell in the body contains the same DNA but epigenetic settings on cells in the bone and blood, for example, mean the tissues do very different jobs. The epigenetic consequences of a huge range of environmental factors are under investigation, from exposure to drugs, chemicals and hormones, to the impact of poor maternal care in infancy, and the likelihood that they are as heritable as DNA. So far, most epigenetic research has focused on cancer because epigenetic marks unique to cancer cells may set them apart from healthy tissue. Now it's the turn of psychiatric illness. The latest results will be presented this week in Washington DC at the annual meeting of the American Society for Human Genetics (ASHG). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Lemmings swap suicide for infanticide

by Michael Marshall In 1958, Disney released a documentary called White Wilderness, which showed the wildlife of the Arctic on the cinema screen. David Attenborough it ain't. The film is now notorious for containing faked footage of something that simply doesn't happen: lemmings committing suicide en masse. Realising that the Arctic rodents did not collectively top themselves, the film-makers resorted to trickery. After producing footage of the lemmings migrating by placing them on a snow-covered turntable, they shipped some of them to a cliff overlooking a river and herded them over the edge. The resulting footage (available on YouTube and still shocking today) shows hordes of lemmings plummeting off a cliff, with the culpable humans studiously out of frame. It helped cement the myth of lemming mass suicide in popular culture. Yet had the film-makers looked a little closer, they would have found that lemmings really are bizarre creatures. Finally, the true nature of lemming behaviour is being revealed. Lemmings are small rodents, related to hamsters, gerbils and mice. There are over 20 species, all found in the far north, including Canada, Scandinavia and Russia. Unlike many Arctic animals, lemmings do not hibernate through the winter. Instead, they forage along runs and tunnels dug beneath the snow layer. This allows them to carry on breeding even as temperatures drop to -20 °C, driving the population up. In most species the population grows for three years, then crashes to near-extinction in the fourth. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

How Did 9/11 and the Holocaust Affect Pregnant Women and Their Children?

by Annie Murphy Paul This is an excerpt from the new book Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives, by Annie Murphy Paul. At 8:46 AM on September 11, 2001, there were tens of thousands of people in the vicinity of the World Trade Center—commuters spilling off trains, waitresses setting tables for the morning rush, brokers already working the phones on Wall Street. About 1,700 of these people were pregnant women. When the planes struck and the towers collapsed, many of these women experienced the same horrors inflicted on other survivors of the disaster: the overwhelming chaos and confusion, the rolling clouds of potentially toxic dust and debris, the heart-pounding fear for their lives. As the catastrophe began to unfold, psychiatrist Rachel Yehuda was arriving for work at the Bronx Veterans Affairs Medical Center, about 15 miles north of the Twin Towers. “I was leading a meeting at the center when I got a call from my mother, who lives in Florida,” Yehuda tells me. “She had seen news of the attack on TV and wanted to know if I was all right.” Yehuda and her colleagues located a television of their own and watched, aghast, as the awful events of that day took shape. “Of course I was thinking about what the long-term reactions of the survivors would be,” she says. Yehuda, who is director of the Traumatic Stress Studies pision at the VA center and a professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, is a leading expert on post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that forces survivors of a traumatic event into a state of hyper-vigilance, assailing them with nightmares and panic attacks. In the course of her career as a PTSD researcher, she has worked mostly with Holocaust victims and Vietnam War veterans—people whose trauma happened far away and many years, even many decades, ago. As Yehuda watched in real time as tragedy struck her own city, she was already thinking about how to investigate its impact. © 2010, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Harlequin Syndrome is no sweat -- no, really

Rebecca Adler, a freelance writer in Sacramento, has lived with Harlequin Syndrome for 29 years. Rebecca Adler writes: My game face has been known to cause genuine panic on the field -- mostly among race officials and umpires worried they've got some kind of medical emergency on their hands. Either they think I've somehow been severely sunburned on just one side of my face or they worry that I'm on my way to having heat stroke. I have a condition called Harlequin Syndrome, which causes me to sweat and flush red on only on the left side of my body. I got it the day after I was born, in the same way that anyone gets it -- by sustaining an injury to the sympathetic nervous system (the part of the nervous system that reacts to stress and flight-or-fight circumstances), according to Peter Drummond, a professor at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. (FYI, it was Drummond who first researched the condition and coined the catchy term "Harlequin Syndrome" in 1988 after researching others who have it.) But it isn't just general trauma to the sympathetic nervous system. It occurs at a very specific area of that system: the space right between the shoulder blades where the sympathetic nerves leave the spinal cord. © 2010 msnbc.com

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 14527 - Posted: 10.05.2010

Zeros to heroes: Ulcer truth was hard to stomach

by Michael Le Page No one would believe that bacteria caused stomach ulcers – until Barry Marshall swallowed some BACK in 1984, a young Australian doctor called Barry Marshall swallowed a nasty-tasting solution of bacteria. This was no accident. He did it to convince his peers that his suspicions about a highly prevalent disease were not as far-fetched as they thought. In 1981, Marshall had met pathologist Robin Warren, who had found curved bacteria in inflamed stomach tissue. In further studies, they found that this bacterium, later named Helicobacter pylori, was present in most people who had inflammation or ulcers of the stomach or gut. Like two long-forgotten German researchers in 1875, they concluded that these bacteria were to blame. "I was met with constant criticism that my conclusions were premature," Marshall later wrote. "My results were disputed and disbelieved, not on the basis of science but because they simply could not be true." It is often claimed that doctors were wedded to the idea that ulcers were caused by excess stomach acid, or that they didn't believe that bacteria could grow in the stomach. In fact, the main reason for the scepticism, says Richard Harvey of the Frenchay Hospital in Bristol, UK, was that four-fifths of ulcers were not in the stomach but further down the digestive tract. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 14467 - Posted: 09.20.2010

Cycle of stress: Getting pregnant, having monster PMS - how the S factor may play a part

By Stephen Smith It’s a story that rings familiar: A couple tries and tries — frustration surging — to have a baby, finally deciding to adopt. Then, lo and behold, the woman receives the news that once proved elusive: You’re pregnant. Maybe, armchair psychiatrists have long opined, it has something to do with a cloud of stress dissipating. Or consider women who swear that the fatigue, bloat, and irritability that herald a menstrual period are magnified when life’s anxieties rage with particular ferocity. For generations, such anecdotes existed largely in the realm of accepted wisdom, evoking dismissive entreaties to women to “just relax.’’ And studies of reproductive health sometimes consisted of little more than asking infertile couples to jot down their levels of stress. “We thought there has to be something better than that,’’ said Germaine Buck Louis, a top scientist at the National Institute of Child Health & Human Development. Now, researchers at her agency are opening a wider window onto the fraught relationship between stress and women’s reproductive health — research that could one day lead to use of saliva tests for stress and better methods for muting it. Two studies released last month by federal scientists offer tantalizing clues. One suggests that elevated levels of a stress-related enzyme might predict whether a woman will have difficulty getting pregnant. The other shows that a wave of stress in the days before a woman’s period may act like an accelerant for premenstrual symptoms. © 2010 NY Times Co.

Second Paper Supports Viral Link to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

by Martin Enserink There's a new twist in the ongoing battle over whether a virus is linked to chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). After the journal held it for 2 months, a study supporting a link between a mouse retrovirus and CFS was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS). Many are still doubtful of the link, but they're impressed by the authors' efforts to ensure accuracy. In the new study, conducted by scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Harvard University, researchers scanned for traces of a virus known as XMRV in samples taken from 37 CFS patients, collected by Harvard Medical School CFS specialist Anthony Komaroff in the mid-1990s. They found evidence for the virus in 32 (87%) of the patients, but in only three out of 44 healthy controls (6.8%). It remains to be seen whether the infection causes the disease or vice versa, says NIH virologist and co-author Harvey Alter—but he's "confident" that the findings are correct. XMRV—less succinctly known as xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus—was first implicated for its potential involvement in prostate cancer, a link that's still under intense debate. Then, in a Science paper published last year, a team led by retrovirologist Judy Mikovits of the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease (WPI) in Reno, Nevada, found evidence of infection in 67% of CFS patients, compared with just 3.4% of healthy controls. But since then, four other papers failed to find the link, or any evidence of XMRV infection in humans at all. The last of the four, by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was also held for a while, at the researchers' request, while they tried to figure out how government labs could come to such opposite conclusions. The CDC paper was eventually published on 1 July in Retrovirology. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Prior stress could worsen premenstrual symptoms

Women who report feeling stressed early in their monthly cycle were more likely than those who were less stressed to report more pronounced symptoms before and during menstruation, according to a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and other institutions. The association raises the possibility that feeling stressed in the weeks before menstruation could worsen the symptoms typically associated with premenstrual syndrome and menstruation. Women who reported feeling stressed two weeks before the beginning of menstruation were two to four times more likely to report moderate to severe symptoms than were women who did not feel stressed. Premenstrual syndrome (http://www.nichd.nih.gov/health/topics/menstruation_and_the_menstrual_cycle.cfm.)is a group of physical and psychological symptoms occurring around the time of ovulation, which may extend into the early days of menstruation. Symptoms include feelings of anger, anxiety, mood swings, depression, fatigue, decreased concentration, breast swelling and tenderness, general aches, and abdominal bloating. "We were interested in identifying factors that might predict who might be most at risk for having more severe symptoms," said Audra Gollenberg, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in NICHD's Division of Epidemiology, Statistics and Prevention Research. "It may be possible to lessen or prevent the severity of these symptoms with techniques that help women to cope more effectively with stress, such as biofeedback, exercise, or relaxation techniques."

Mid-life stress 'increases dementia risk'

By John von Radowitz, Mid-life stress can increase the risk of women developing Alzheimer's disease, a study has shown. Women who reported repeated episodes of stress and anxiety in middle age were up to twice as likely to develop dementia than those who did not, a team of Swedish scientists found. The majority of those affected were diagnosed with Alzheimer's, the most common form of dementia. Researchers followed the progress of 1,415 women between 1968 and 2000. Three surveys in 1968, 1974 and 1980 were carried out to assess levels of psychological stress experienced by the women, who were aged between 38 and 60 at the start of the study. Stress was defined as a "sense of irritation, tension, nervousness, anxiety, fear or sleeping problems" lasting a month or more. During the course of the study, 161 of the women taking part developed dementia, mainly in the form of Alzheimer's disease. Dementia risk was 65% higher in women who suffered frequent stress in middle age. ©independent.co.uk

Ecstasy 'may help trauma victims'

Ecstasy may help boost therapy success in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, say researchers. A small trial in 20 patients has shown use of the drug is safe and seems to improve the effects of psychotherapy. The US team has now gained approval for a larger study in military veterans, but stresses more research is needed to confirm the finding. It is thought the drug reduces fear enabling patients to get more out of their therapy sessions. Writing in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, the team said patients were selected on strict criteria - they had to have had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for many years and have failed with conventional treatments. Doctors also excluded those with a history of psychosis or addiction. In the trial, patients were offered two eight-hour psychotherapy sessions scheduled a few weeks apart, with 12 of them given a dose of ecstasy and eight a placebo. Two months later, 10 of the 12 patients given ecstasy responded to the treatment, the researchers said. In contrast, just two out of eight patients offered a placebo showed an improvement. BBC © MMX

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 4: The Chemical Bases of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 14272 - Posted: 07.19.2010

VA to ease rules on posttraumatic stress

By James Dao NEW YORK — The government is preparing to issue new rules that will make it substantially easier for veterans who have been found to have posttraumatic stress disorder to receive disability benefits for the illness, a change that could affect hundreds of thousands of veterans from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam. The regulations from the Department of Veterans Affairs— which will take effect as early as Monday and cost as much as $5 billion over several years, according to congressional analysts — will essentially eliminate a requirement that veterans document specific events like bomb blasts, firefights, or mortar attacks that might have caused post-traumatic stress disorder, an illness characterized by emotional numbness, irritability, and flashbacks. For decades, veterans have complained that finding such records was extremely time consuming and sometimes impossible. And in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, veterans groups assert, the current rules discriminate against tens of thousands of service members — many of them women — who did not serve in combat roles but nevertheless suffered traumatic experiences. Under the new rule, which applies to veterans of all wars, the department will grant compensation to those with the illness if they can simply show that they served in a war zone and in a job consistent with the events that they say caused their conditions. They would not have to prove, for instance, that they came under fire, served in a front-line unit, or saw a friend killed. © Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.

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