By Simon Baron-Cohen, The Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger has long been recognized as a pioneer in the study of autism. He was even seen as a hero, saving children with the condition from the Nazi killing programme by emphasizing their intelligence. However, it is now indisputable that Asperger collaborated in the murder of children with disabilities under the Third Reich. Historian Herwig Czech fully documented this in the April 2018 issue of Molecular Autism (a journal I co-edit; see H. Czech Mol. Autism 9, 29; 2018). Now, historian Edith Sheffer’s remarkable book Asperger’s Children builds on Czech’s study with her own original scholarship. She makes a compelling case that the foundational ideas of autism emerged in a society that strove for the opposite of neurodiversity. Advertisement These findings cast a shadow on the history of autism, already a long struggle towards accurate diagnosis, societal acceptance and support. The revelations are also causing debate among autistic people, their families, researchers and clinicians over whether the diagnostic label of Asperger’s syndrome should be abandoned. In 1981, psychiatrist Lorna Wing published the paper in Psychological Medicine that first brought Asperger’s clinical observations to the attention of the English-speaking medical world, and coined the term Asperger’s syndrome (L. Wing Psychol. Med. 11, 115–129; 1981). A decade later, in the book Autism and Asperger Syndrome (1991), developmental psychologist Uta Frith translated into English the 1944 treatise by Asperger in which he claimed to have discovered autism. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 24989 - Posted: 05.18.2018

Nicola Davis People who experience disrupted 24-hour cycles of rest and activity are more likely to have mood disorders, lower levels of happiness and greater feelings of loneliness, research suggests. While the study does not reveal whether disruptions to circadian rhythms are a cause of mental health problems, a result of them or some mixture of the two, the authors say the findings highlight the importance of how we balance rest and activity. “Because people have these 24-hour patterns of living nowadays and because by 2050 two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities where circadian disruption is much more likely, it is quite a big public health issue. How do we take account of our natural patterns of rest and activity and how do we design cities or jobs to protect people’s mental health?” said Daniel Smith, professor of psychiatry at the University of Glasgow and lead author of the research. Writing in the journal Lancet Psychiatry, a team of researchers from Scotland, Ireland and Sweden report how they carried out the largest study of its kind to date by harnessing data from the UK BioBank, a research endeavour that has collected health information on 500,000 participants, aged between 37 and 73, since 2006. To explore the link between mental health and the 24-hour cycles of sleep and activity known as circadian rhythms, the team looked at data from more than 91,000 participants who had worn a wrist-based activity tracker for a week at some point between 2013 and 2015. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Depression
Link ID: 24988 - Posted: 05.17.2018

by Ariana Eunjung Cha Women having trouble getting pregnant sometimes try yoga, meditation or mindfulness, and some research suggests that psychological stress may affect infertility. But what about men: Does their mental state affect a couple's ability to conceive? The latest research on this subject was published Thursday in the journal Fertility and Sterility and suggests that a link between mental health and fertility may exist for women and men. The study involved data from 1,650 women and 1,608 men who were recruited through the National Institutes of Health's Reproductive Medicine Network at six sites in the United States. Most of the participants were couples, and they were undergoing some kind of fertility treatment, such as ovarian stimulation medication or artificial insemination, but not in vitro fertilization. Based on a questionnaire, about 6 percent of the women and 2 percent of the men were rated as having major depression. While the number of men with major depression in the analysis was small — just 34 — an analysis found differences between them and the other men in the study. Those with major depression were 60 percent less likely to have a live birth than men who did not have major depression. More specifically, of the 34, only three of the couples, or less than 9 percent, achieved a live birth. That compares with nearly 25 percent having a live birth for couples in which the male partner did not have major depression. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Depression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24987 - Posted: 05.17.2018

By Jeremy Rehm A man may be attractive because of his curly, blond hair or slick pin-striped suit, but strip everything away and one luring—maybe evolutionary—piece remains, a new study finds: how proportional his body is, especially his legs. Women prefer a man with legs that are about half his height, according to previous research; scientists believe that is an evolutionary result of women wanting to choose only healthy men. Legs that are too short, for example, have been linked to type 2 diabetes. But other proportions, such as arm length to body height or whether the elbow and knee divide a limb in half, can also relate to a person’s health. Do they influence women’s views as well? To answer this, researchers collected average body proportions from roughly 9000 men in the U.S. military and used them to create computer-generated images of male models (pictured). The scientists made the model’s arms and legs slightly longer or shorter, and then asked more than 800 heterosexual U.S. women to rank each model’s attractiveness. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 24986 - Posted: 05.17.2018

By Abdul-Kareem Ahmed “Dad, hold still.” As we entered the hospital room that morning, our patient’s daughter was attempting to give him a shave. He was bed-bound after his operation and had grown a salt-and-pepper stubble. A week earlier, his wife had brought him to the emergency room . He was behaving oddly, mumbling nonsensical sentences and stumbling through the house. Sixty-two years old, male, Caucasian, new and profound neurological symptoms. An M.R.I. of his brain seemed redundant but confirmed the diagnosis: A four-centimeter malignant tumor was invading his right frontal cortex, the seat of his personality, where “Dad” lived. I’m drawn to the human brain, its unforgiving and protean nature. Just five minutes without oxygen, and the brain loses function. The occipital cortex processes visual information and allows us to see faces, trees, the stars. However, in a young child who becomes blind, as with Helen Keller, this same cortex can be repurposed for entirely distinct functions, like language processing. Early astronomers looked to the heavens for answers. But in the human brain, a three-pound ball of fat, there resides enough mystery and potential to have satisfied Galileo, Kepler and Brahe. And so I found myself, on what had now been a four-year foray toward a career in neurosurgery, helping care for this patient. I was the sub-intern at a hospital away from home for the month. It was my first week on the job. The resident and I stood around his bed in our cerulean scrubs and white coats and watched him smiling. His daughter looked toward me, the only other male in the room, and paused, razor in hand. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 24985 - Posted: 05.17.2018

By Shawn Hayward Brenda Milner has collected her share of awards, prizes, honourary degrees and other recognitions throughout her amazing career, but there is something special about being recognized with top honours from the city and province she has called home since 1944, all within one week. On May 8, the Speaker of the National Assembly of Quebec, Jacques Chagnon presented Milner with its Medal of Honour, along with seven other Quebecers including McGill alumna Dr. Joanne Liu. The Medal of Honour is awarded to public figures from all walks of life who, through their career, their work or their social commitment, have earned the recognition of the Members of the National Assembly and the people of Quebec. Milner added to that recognition the title of Commander of the Order of Montreal, given to her by Mayor Valérie Plante during a ceremony at City Hall on May 14. The Order of Montreal was created on the city’s 375th anniversary to recognize women and men who have contributed in a remarkable way to the city’s development and reputation. There are three ranks in the Order, Commander being the highest. A celebrated researcher at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (The Neuro), Milner turns 100 years old on July 15. She is the Dorothy J. Killam Professor at The Neuro, and a professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University. © 2018 McGill Reporter ·

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 24984 - Posted: 05.17.2018

By Maya Salam Three years ago, the internet melted down over the color of a dress. Now an audio file has friends, family members and office mates questioning one another’s hearing, and their own. Is the robot voice saying “Yanny” or “Laurel”? The clip picked up steam after a debate erupted on Reddit this week, and it has since been circulated widely on social media. One Reddit user said: “I hear Laurel and everyone is a liar.” “They are saying they hear ‘Yanny’ because they want attention,” a tweet read. Others claimed they heard one word for a while, then the other — or even both simultaneously. It didn’t take long for the auditory illusion to be referred to as “black magic.” And more than one person online yearned for that simpler time in 2015, when no one could decide whether the mother of the bride wore white and gold or blue and black. It was a social media frenzy in which internet trends and traffic on the topic spiked so high that Wikipedia itself now has a simple entry, “The dress.” Of course, in the grand tradition of internet reportage, we turned to a scientist to make this article legitimately newsworthy. Dr. Jody Kreiman, a principal investigator at the voice perception laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, helpfully guessed on Tuesday afternoon that “the acoustic patterns for the utterance are midway between those for the two words.” “The energy concentrations for Ya are similar to those for La,” she said. “N is similar to r; I is close to l.” She cautioned, though, that more analysis would be required to sort out the discrepancy. That did not stop online sleuths from trying to find the answer by manipulating the bass, pitch or volume. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Attention
Link ID: 24983 - Posted: 05.16.2018

By Shawna Williams Even as patients with Parkinson’s disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other conditions turn to deep brain stimulation (DBS) to keep their symptoms in check, it’s been unclear to scientists why the therapy works. Now, researchers in Texas report that in mice, the treatment dials the activity of hundreds of genes up or down in brain cells. Their results, published in eLife March 23, hint that DBS’s use could be expanded to include improving learning and memory in people with intellectual disabilities. “The paper is very well done. . . . It’s really a rigorous study,” says Zhaolan “Joe” Zhou, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine who reviewed the paper for eLife. Now that the genes and pathways DBS affects are known, researchers can home in on ways to improve the treatment, or perhaps combine the therapy with pharmacological approaches to boost its effect, he says. In DBS, two electrodes are surgically implanted in a patient’s brain (the area depends on the disorder being treated), and connected to generators that are placed in the chest. Gentle pulses of electricity are then passed continuously through the electrodes. The treatment reduces motor symptoms in many people with Parkinson’s, and allows some patients to reduce their use of medications, but it does not eliminate symptoms or slow the disease’s progression. In addition to its use in movement disorders, DBS is being explored as a potential therapy for a range of other brain-related disorders. For instance, as a way to boost learning and memory in people with Alzheimer’s disease, researchers are looking into stimulating the fimbria-fornix, a brain region thought to regulate the activity of the memory-storing hippocampus. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Parkinsons; Epigenetics
Link ID: 24982 - Posted: 05.16.2018

Richard Harris Children and adolescents are getting fewer prescription drugs than they did in years past, according to a study that looks at a cross-section of the American population. "The decrease in antibiotic use is really what's driving this overall decline in prescription medication use that we're seeing in children and adolescents," says Craig Hales, a preventive medicine physician at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics and lead author of a study published Tuesday in JAMA. Hales says that's a good thing. "Thirty percent of antibiotic prescriptions are unnecessary and potentially dangerous," he says. They're often given for colds and other viral infections, where they are useless. And they may have side effects. Antibiotic overuse also increases the risk that these drugs lose their curative powers. The study is based on data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Study, which included more than 38,000 children and adolescents. The study compared prescription drug use from 1999 to 2002 with prescriptions given in 2011 to 2014, the last period for which data were available. Overall, the proportion of children and teenagers getting prescriptions dropped from about 25 percent to 22 percent. Prescriptions for some drugs increased, such as for treatments for asthma, contraception and attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The survey also noted a large gap in prescription use among children and adolescents who were insured versus those who weren't. Some 23 percent of insured youth had recently taken a prescription of some sort, compared with 10 percent of those who were uninsured. © 2018 npr

Keyword: ADHD; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24981 - Posted: 05.16.2018

by Eli Rosenberg In what is believed to be one of the first deaths from an e-cigarette explosion, a 38-year-old man in Florida was killed when his vape pen exploded, sending projectiles into his head and causing a small fire in his house. Tallmadge D’Elia was found May 5 in the burning bedroom of his family’s home in St. Petersburg, according to the Tampa Bay Times. An autopsy report released his week blamed a vape pen explosion for his death, local news outlets reported. The cause of death was listed as “projectile wound of head” — the pen exploded into pieces, at least two of which were sent into his head, the Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner said — and he suffered burns on about 80 percent of his body. The “mod”-type pen, distributed by Smok-E Mountain, is manufactured in the Philippines, according to a company Facebook page, the Times reported. The Facebook page is not currently publicly accessible. According to a report from the U.S. Fire Administration, which is part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, there were at least 195 incidents in which an electronic cigarette exploded or caught fire from 2009 through 2016, resulting in 133 injuries, 38 of which were severe. But there were no recorded deaths in the study's period. The explosions usually occur suddenly, the report found, “and are accompanied by loud noise, a flash of light, smoke, flames, and often vigorous ejection of the battery and other parts.” © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24980 - Posted: 05.16.2018

By Usha Lee McFarling, STAT UCLA neuroscientists reported Monday that they have transferred a memory from one animal to another via injections of RNA, a startling result that challenges the widely held view of where and how memories are stored in the brain. The finding from the lab of David Glanzman hints at the potential for new RNA-based treatments to one day restore lost memories and, if correct, could shake up the field of memory and learning. “It’s pretty shocking,” said Dr. Todd Sacktor, a neurologist and memory researcher at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. “The big picture is we’re working out the basic alphabet of how memories are stored for the first time.” He was not involved in the research, which was published in eNeuro, the online journal of the Society for Neuroscience. Advertisement Many scientists are expected to view the research more cautiously. The work is in snails, animals that have proven a powerful model organism for neuroscience but whose simple brains work far differently than those of humans. The experiments will need to be replicated, including in animals with more complex brains. And the results fly in the face of a massive amount of evidence supporting the deeply entrenched idea that memories are stored through changes in the strength of connections, or synapses, between neurons. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 24979 - Posted: 05.15.2018

Laurel Hamers Sluggish memories might be captured via RNA. The molecule, when taken from one sea slug and injected into another, appeared to transfer a rudimentary memory between the two, a new study suggests. Most neuroscientists believe long-term memories are stored by strengthening connections between nerve cells in the brain (SN: 2/3/18, p. 22). But these results, reported May 14 in eNeuro, buoy a competing argument: that some types of RNA molecules, and not linkages between nerve cells, are key to long-term memory storage. “It’s a very controversial idea,” admits study coauthor David Glanzman, a neuroscientist at UCLA. When poked or prodded, some sea slugs (Aplysia californica) will reflexively pull their siphon, a water-filtering appendage, into their bodies. Using electric shocks, Glanzman and his colleagues sensitized sea slugs to have a longer-lasting siphon-withdrawal response — a very basic form of memory. The team extracted RNA from those slugs and injected it into slugs that hadn’t been sensitized. These critters then showed the same long-lasting response to touch as their shocked companions. RNA molecules come in a variety of flavors that carry out specialized jobs, so it’s not yet clear what kind of RNA may be responsible for the effect, Glanzman says. But he suspects that it’s one of the handful of RNA varieties that don’t carry instructions to make proteins, the typical job of most RNA. (Called noncoding RNAs, these molecules are often involved in manipulating genes’ activity.) |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 24978 - Posted: 05.15.2018

By Nicholas St. Fleur What makes humans so smart? For a long time the answer was simple: our big brains. But new research into the tiny noggins of a recently discovered human relative called Homo naledi may challenge that notion. The findings, published Monday, suggest that when it comes to developing complex brains, size isn’t all that matters. In 2013 scientists excavating a cave in South Africa found remains of Homo naledi, an extinct hominin now thought to have lived 236,000 to 335,000 years ago. Based on the cranial remains, the researchers concluded it had a small brain only about the size of an orange or your fist. Recently, they took another look at the skull fragments and found imprints left behind by the brain. The impressions suggest that despite its tiny size, Homo naledi’s brain shared a similar shape and structure with that of modern human brains, which are three times as large. “We’ve now seen that you can package the complexity of a large brain in a tiny packet,” said Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at Wits University in South Africa and an author of the paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Almost in one fell swoop we slayed the sacred cow that complexity in the hominid brain was directly associated with increasing brain size.” Not every scientist agrees with their interpretation. Since its remains were first retrieved, Homo naledi has puzzled scientists. From head to toe the ancient hominin displays a medley of primitive, apelike features and more advanced, humanlike characteristics. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 24977 - Posted: 05.15.2018

A new tool developed by researchers at the National Institutes of Health has determined, for the first time, how two distinct sets of neurons in the mouse brain work together to control movement. The method, called spectrally resolved fiber photometry (SRFP), can be used to measure the activity of these neuron groups in both healthy mice and those with brain disease. The scientists plan to use the technique to better understand what goes wrong in neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease. The study appeared online in the journal Neuron. According to Guohong Cui, M.D., Ph.D., head of the In Vivo Neurobiology Group at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of NIH, the project began because he wanted to find out why patients with Parkinson’s disease have problems with movement. Typically, the disease motor symptoms include tremor, muscle stiffness, slowness of movement, and impaired balance. Cui explained that an animal’s ability to move was controlled by two groups of neurons in the brain called the direct pathway (D1) and indirect pathway (D2). Based on clinical studies of patients with Parkinson’s and primate models, some researchers hypothesized that the loss of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the midbrain resulted in an imbalance of neural activities between D1 and D2. Since previous methods could not effectively distinguish different cell types in the brain, the hypothesis remained under debate. However, using SRFP, Cui’s team was able to label D1 and D2 neurons with green and red fluorescent sensors to report their neural activity.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 24976 - Posted: 05.15.2018

by Erin Blakemore Teenagers! They chew Tide Pods and have unprotected sex. They use social media we haven’t even heard of and are walking hormone machines. It’s easy to mock their outsize sense of self and their seemingly dumb decisions. But not so fast, says cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore: The adolescent brain is nothing to laugh at. In “Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain,” Blake­more (no relation to the writer of this article) challenges adults to take teenagers and their growing brains seriously. Her book explains what’s happening inside those brains during the teen years — a complex period of neurological change that is fundamental to maturity. Blakemore breaks down the most up-to-date science on adolescent brain development. It turns out that much of what makes teenagers seem so, well, teenage is due not to their hormones but to their rapidly changing brain circuitry. The malleable mind continues to develop during adolescence, consolidating personality, preferences and behaviors. Some of those behaviors, including risk-taking and a tendency toward self-consciousness, may seem connected to peer pressure. But, Blakemore writes, they’re actually signs of brain development. With the help of data from studies that show the teenage brain in action, she connects brain development to all sorts of things, including self-control and depression. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24975 - Posted: 05.15.2018

By Gretchen Reynolds Call them tip-of-the-tongue moments: those times we can’t quite call up the name or word that we know we know. These frustrating lapses are thought to be caused by a brief disruption in the brain’s ability to access a word’s sounds. We haven’t forgotten the word, and we know its meaning, but its formulation dances teasingly just beyond our grasp. Though these mental glitches are common throughout life, they become more frequent with age. Whether this is an inevitable part of growing older or somehow lifestyle-dependent is unknown. But because evidence already shows that physically fit older people have reduced risks for a variety of cognitive deficits, researchers recently looked into the relationship between aerobic fitness and word recall. For the study, whose results appeared last month in Scientific Reports, researchers at the University of Birmingham tested the lungs and tongues, figuratively speaking, of 28 older men and women at the school’s human-performance lab. Volunteers were between 60 and 80 and healthy, with no clinical signs of cognitive problems. Their aerobic capacities were measured by having them ride a specialized stationary bicycle to exhaustion; fitness levels among the subjects varied greatly. This group and a second set of volunteers in their 20s then sat at computers as word definitions flashed on the screens, prompting them to indicate whether they knew and could say the implied word. The vocabulary tended to be obscure — “decanter,” for example — because words rarely used are the hardest to summon quickly. To no one’s surprise, the young subjects experienced far fewer tip-of-the-tongue failures than the seniors, even though they had smaller vocabularies over all, according to other tests. Within the older group, the inability to identify and say the right words was strongly linked to fitness. The more fit someone was, the less likely he or she was to go through a “what’s that word again?” moment of mental choking. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 24974 - Posted: 05.15.2018

By Kenneth Chang Jerrold Meinwald, who conducted pathbreaking studies of how creatures use chemicals to attract mates, repel predators and send other messages back and forth, died on April 23 at his home in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 91. His death was reported by Cornell University, where Dr. Meinwald had worked for more than 50 years. One project that Dr. Meinwald, an organic chemist, tackled soon after he arrived at Cornell in 1952 was determining what exactly in catnip drives some cats into a playful frenzy. Dr. Meinwald isolated from the plant the active ingredient — a chemical called nepetalactone — and then deduced its structure. He soon discovered an aspect of nepetalactone he had not known about. He was a giving a talk about his chemical findings, and someone had brought in a cat so he could demonstrate the effects. “It turns out not all cats respond,” Dr. Meinwald said in an interview in 2011. “I had a nonresponsive cat. The chemistry was good, but I had not realized you have to pick your subjects carefully.” Dr. Meinwald had a fruitful partnership with Thomas Eisner, an entomologist who joined the Cornell faculty in 1957. That collaboration continued for more than a half-century and established a new field of science, chemical ecology. Dr. Eisner died in 2011 at 81. Biologists had noted decades earlier that organisms produced substances that were not directly needed for the biological processes that maintain life. They suspected that these substances might be used for communications or defense. But it was only in the middle of the 20th century that chemists had the tools to study the substances in detail. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 24973 - Posted: 05.15.2018

Adam Barrett Understanding the biology behind consciousness (or self-awareness) is considered by some to be the final frontier of science. And over the last decade, a fledgling community of “consciousness scientists” have gathered some interesting information about the differences between conscious and unconscious brain activity. But there remains disagreement about whether or not we have a theory that actually explains what is special about the brain activity which produces our miraculous inner worlds. Recently, “Integrated Information Theory” has been gaining attention – and the backing of some eminent neuroscientists. It says that absolutely every physical object has some (even if extremely low) level of consciousness. Some backers of the theory claim to have a mathematical formula that can measure the consciousness of anything – even your iPhone. These big claims are controversial and are (unfortunately) undermining the great potential for progress that could come from following some of the ideas behind the theory. Integrated Information Theory starts from two basic observations about the nature of our conscious experiences as humans. First, that each experience we have is just one of a vast number of possible experiences we could have. Second, that multiple different components (colours, textures, foreground, background) are all experienced together, simultaneously. © 2010–2018, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 24972 - Posted: 05.13.2018

Hannah Devlin Scientists are preparing to create “miniature brains” that have been genetically engineered to contain Neanderthal DNA, in an unprecedented attempt to understand how humans differ from our closest relatives. In the next few months the small blobs of tissue, known as brain organoids, will be grown from human stem cells that have been edited to contain “Neanderthalised” versions of several genes. The lentil-sized organoids, which are incapable of thoughts or feelings, replicate some of the basic structures of an adult brain. They could demonstrate for the first time if there were meaningful differences between human and Neanderthal brain biology. “Neanderthals are the closest relatives to everyday humans, so if we should define ourselves as a group or a species it is really them that we should compare ourselves to,” said Prof Svante Pääbo, director of the genetics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, where the experiments are being performed. Pääbo previously led the successful international effort to crack the Neanderthal genome, and his lab is now focused on bringing Neanderthal traits back to life in the laboratory through sophisticated gene-editing techniques. The lab has already inserted Neanderthal genes for craniofacial development into mice (heavy-browed rodents are not anticipated), and Neanderthal pain perception genes into frogs’ eggs, which could hint at whether they had a different pain threshold to humans. Now the lab is turning its attention to the brain.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Evolution
Link ID: 24971 - Posted: 05.13.2018

Jesara Sinclair · Amanda Spidel, now pregnant with her third child, experienced postpartum depression with her first two. (Jesara Sinclair/CBC) Amanda Spidel had trouble getting pregnant with her first child. After her son was finally born, the stress of conceiving turned into anxiety around his health. Before long, her anxiety turned into postpartum depression, a condition that affects about 14 per cent of mothers. She struggled with her emotions and how she thought she should feel about motherhood. "I only wanted to be nothing but grateful, but he was very colicky, he cried all the time, and there were moments where it was really hard," she said. "All I could think was I should just be happy. Why am I not happy? But it was because he was crying all the time." Spidel's family doctor asked her how she was feeling at every visit, and that's how she reached out for help. "One day I went in and he asked that question and I just broke down and said, 'You know what — I'm not okay.'" Now 32 and expecting her third child, Spidel is speaking out about her experience with postpartum depression for the first time in hopes that it will help other mothers struggling not feel so alone. "It was really hard to admit that there was something wrong with me and it needed to be fixed," she said. "It's an illness, it really is and I was sick." ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Depression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 24970 - Posted: 05.13.2018