By Alexander P. Burgoyne, David Z. Hambrick More than 60 years ago, Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the double-helical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid—better known as DNA. Today, for the cost of a Netflix subscription, you can have your DNA sequenced to learn about your ancestry and proclivities. Yet, while it is an irrefutable fact that the transmission of DNA from parents to offspring is the biological basis for heredity, we still know relatively little about the specific genes that make us who we are. That is changing rapidly through genome-wide association studies—GWAS, for short. These studies search for differences in people’s genetic makeup—their “genotypes”—that correlate with differences in their observable traits—their “phenotypes.” In a GWAS recently published in Nature Genetics, a team of scientists from around the world analyzed the DNA sequences of 78,308 people for correlations with general intelligence, as measured by IQ tests. The major goal of the study was to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms—or SNPs—that correlate significantly with intelligence test scores. Found in most cells throughout the body, DNA is made up of four molecules called nucleotides, referred to by their organic bases: cytosine (C), thymine (T), adenine (A), and guanine (G). Within a cell, DNA is organized into structures called chromosomes­. Humans normally have 23 pairs of chromosomes, with one in each pair inherited from each parent. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Intelligence; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 23986 - Posted: 08.23.2017

By Madhumita Murgia CINCINNATI — Just before Christmas 2015, child psychiatrist Daniel Nelson noticed an unusual number of suicidal kids in the hospital emergency room. A 14-year-old girl with a parent addicted to opioids tried to choke herself with a seat belt. A 12-year-old transgender child hurt himself after being bullied. And a steady stream of kids arrived from the city’s west side, telling him they knew other kids — at school, in their neighborhoods — who had also tried to die. “I think there’s an increase in suicidal kids in Cincinnati,” Nelson told a colleague. “We need to start mapping this out.” So Nelson and his colleagues collected the addresses of 300 children admitted to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital with suicidal behavior over three months in early 2016, looking for patterns. Almost instantly, a disturbing one emerged: Price Hill, a poor community with a high rate of opioid overdoses, was home to a startling number of suicidal kids. “This is who is dying from opiates — people in their 20s and 30s. Think about what that population is,” Nelson said. “It’s parents.” Nelson says there may be a connection between the opioid epidemic and the increased risk of suicide in teenagers and children. (Luke Sharrett for The Washington Post) Now Nelson is working with county coroners across the nation to try to corroborate his theory, that trauma from the nation’s opioid epidemic could help explain an extraordinary increase in suicide among American children. Since 2007, the rate of suicide has doubled among children 10 to 14, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death between the ages of 10 and 24. The suicide rate among older teenage girls hit a 40-year high in 2015, according to newly released data from the National Center for Health Statistics. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23985 - Posted: 08.23.2017

By Helen Thomson Our brains seem better at predictions than we are. A part of our brain becomes active when it knows something will be successfully crowdfunded, even if we consciously decide otherwise. If this finding stands up and works in other areas of life, neuroforecasting may lead to better voting polls or even predict changes in financial markets. To see if one can predict market behaviour by sampling a small number of people, Brian Knutson at Stanford University in California and his team scanned the brains of 30 people while they decided whether to fund 36 projects from the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. The projects were all recently posted proposals for documentary films. Each participant had their brain scanned while taking in the pictures and descriptions of each campaign, and they were then asked if they would want to fund the project. When the real Kickstarter campaigns ended a few weeks later, 18 of the projects had gained enough funding to go forward. Examining the participants’ brain scans, the team discovered that activity in a region called the nucleus accumbens had been different when they considered projects that later went on to be successful. Prediction paradox The team trained an algorithm to recognise these differences in brain activity using scan data from 80 per cent of the projects, then tested the program on the remaining 20 per cent. Using neural activity alone, the algorithm was able to forecast which Kickstarter campaigns would be funded with 59.1 per cent accuracy – more than would be expected by chance. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 23984 - Posted: 08.22.2017

By RONI CARYN RABIN Many of us grab coffee and a quick bite in the morning and eat more as the day goes on, with a medium-size lunch and the largest meal of the day in the evening. But a growing body of research on weight and health suggests we may be doing it all backward. A recent review of the dietary patterns of 50,000 adults who are Seventh Day Adventists over seven years provides the latest evidence suggesting that we should front-load our calories early in the day to jump-start our metabolisms and prevent obesity, starting with a robust breakfast and tapering off to a smaller lunch and light supper, or no supper at all. More research is needed, but a series of experiments in animals and some small trials in humans have pointed in the same direction, suggesting that watching the clock, and not just the calories, may play a more important role in weight control than previously acknowledged. And doctors’ groups are taking note. This year, the American Heart Association endorsed the principle that the timing of meals may help reduce risk factors for heart disease, like high blood pressure and high cholesterol. The group issued a scientific statement emphasizing that skipping breakfast — which 20 to 30 percent of American adults do regularly — is linked to a higher risk of obesity and impaired glucose metabolism or diabetes, even though there is no proof of a causal relationship. The heart association’s statement also noted that occasional fasting is associated with weight loss, at least in the short term. “I always tell people not to eat close to bedtime, and to try to eat earlier in the day,” said Marie-Pierre St-Onge, an associate professor of nutritional medicine at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, who led the work group that issued the statement. Perhaps not surprisingly, the latest study found that those who supplemented three meals a day with snacks tended to gain weight over time, while those who ate only one or two meals a day tended to lose weight, even compared with those who just ate three meals a day. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 23983 - Posted: 08.22.2017

By JANE E. BRODY A very slender friend recently admitted to me that she “can’t stand to be around fat people.” Her reaction is almost visceral, and it prompts her to avoid social and professional contact with people who are seriously overweight. Although she can’t pinpoint the source of her feelings, she said they go back as far as she can remember. And she is hardly alone. Decades ago, researchers found that weight-based bias, which is often accompanied by overt discrimination and bullying, can date back to childhood, sometimes as early as age 3. The prejudiced feelings may not be apparent to those who hold them, yet they can strongly influence someone’s behavior. A new study by researchers at Duke University, for example, found that “implicit weight bias” in children ages 9 to 11 was as common as “implicit racial bias” is among adults. The study’s lead author, Asheley C. Skinner, a public health researcher, said that prejudices that people are unaware of may predict their biased behaviors even better than explicit prejudice. She traced the origins of weight bias in young children and adolescents to the families they grow up in as well as society at large, which continues to project cultural ideals of ultra-slimness and blames people for being fat. “It’s pretty common for parents to comment on their own weight issues and tell their children they shouldn’t be eating certain foods or remark about how much weight they’re gaining,” Dr. Skinner said.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 23982 - Posted: 08.22.2017

By Bianca Datta Hallucinations are often distressing—a suggestion that something is amiss in our brains. But new research suggests we’re all susceptible to hallucinations, and that may not be such a bad thing. In a paper released last week in Science, a team from Yale University set out to understand how we interpret the world around us—in short, how we determine what’s real and what’s not. They suspected that people who regularly hallucinate perceive the world based on what they expect to happen, while others, who don’t hallucinate, would rely more what their senses are telling them is happening in the world. Even healthy participants experienced conditioned hallucinations. The mechanism that causes auditory hallucinations is related to those used in normal perception. To determine that, authors Phil Corlett and Al Powers began by conditioning participants to hear a tone when they were shown a checkerboard pattern. Then they slowly removed the actual sound and asked people when they heard it. Participants who regularly heard voices were five times more likely to say they heard a tone when there wasn’t one, and they were 25-30% more confident in their choice. But they weren’t alone in hearing things. In fact, all of the participants experienced some induced hallucinations during the experiment. “I did not expect that people who did not have a psychotic illness would perform so similarly to people who did hear voices,” Powers says. “They were very, very alike.” © 1996-2017 WGBH Educational Foundation

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Hearing
Link ID: 23981 - Posted: 08.22.2017

Richard Harris It's always appealing to think that there could be an easy technical fix for a complicated and serious problem. For example, wouldn't it be great to have a vaccine to prevent addiction? "One of the things they're actually working on is a vaccine for addiction, which is an incredibly exciting prospect," said Dr. Tom Price, secretary of Health and Human Services. He was talking to reporters earlier this week, after the White House discussed the recommendations from a government commission tasked with suggesting ways to cope with the nation's opioid epidemic. Trump Says He Intends To Declare Opioid Crisis National Emergency But, as is so often the case, there's no quick fix on the horizon for an epidemic that is now killing more Americans than traffic accidents. Researchers have been working on vaccines against addictive drugs, including nicotine, cocaine and heroin, for almost two decades. "Like any other vaccine, you inject the vaccine and you use your immune system to produce antibodies," says Dr. Ivan Montoya, acting director of the division of Therapeutics and Medical Consequences at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. "In this case, the antibodies are against the drugs of abuse." © 2017 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23980 - Posted: 08.22.2017

By Abby Olena Our brains quickly characterize everything we see as familiar or new, and scientists have been investigating this connection between vision and cognition for years. Now, research in Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) reveals that the activation of neurons in a part of the primate brain called the perirhinal cortex can cause monkeys to recognize new objects as familiar and vice versa. The study was published today (August 17) in Science. “There are a lot of really exciting aspects to this paper,” says neuroscientist David Sheinberg of Brown University, who did not participate in the work. “This group continues to make advances that are helping us understand how we convert visual impressions into things we know.” Primate brains process visual information through several brain structures that make up the ventral visual stream. The last stop in this stream is the perirhinal cortex, part of the medial temporal lobe. Scientists know that this brain structure plays roles in visual memory and object discrimination. But one open question is whether the perirhinal cortex represents objects’ physical traits or whether it might also communicate information about nonphysical attributes, such as whether an object has been seen before. “In the primate, the perirhinal cortex is the link between the visual pathway and the limbic memory system,” coauthor and University of Tokyo neuroscientist Yasushi Miyashita writes in an email to The Scientist. “Therefore, the perirhinal cortex is one of the most likely candidates in the brain where visual information is transformed to subjective semantic values by referring to one’s own memory.” © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 23979 - Posted: 08.19.2017

/ By Steven Lubet There is a memorable episode in the now-classic sitcom Scrubs in which the conniving Dr. Kelso unveils a plan to peddle useless “full body scans” as a new revenue stream for the perpetually cash-strapped Sacred Heart Hospital. The irascible but ultimately patient-protecting Dr. Cox objects loudly. “I think showing perfectly healthy people every harmless imperfection in their body just to scare them into taking invasive and often pointless tests is an unholy sin,” he says. Undeterred, Kelso launches an advertising campaign that promotes the scans in a tear-jerking television commercial and a billboard screaming “YOU may already be DYING.” Alarmist medical advertising is pretty funny on television, but it can be far more troubling in real life. Although I’ve never been alerted to impending death, I recently received an advertisement from my own trusted health care provider warning that I may have Alzheimer’s disease, although I have no known symptoms and no complaints. As long-time patients at NorthShore University Health System, which is affiliated with the University of Chicago, my wife and I received two solicitations from its Center for Brain Health touting the development of “ways to slow brain aging and even prevent the onset of Alzheimer’s.” According to the ads, which arrived in both postcard and email form, there is “new hope for delaying — even preventing — aging brain diseases” through “genetic testing, advanced diagnostics, and lifestyle factors.” Copyright 2017 Undark

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 23978 - Posted: 08.19.2017

By Denise D. Cummins Looking directly at the camera, NPR's Skunk Bear host Adam Cole laments, "It's pretty clear that I'll never be able to have a real human-style conversation with an ape.” In his short and very entertaining video, Cole summarizes decades of research aimed at teaching apes human language, all of which, we are to understand, came to naught. But what the video actually shows us is how little the average person (and many scientists) understands about language. At one point, Cole tells his dog to sit, and the dog sits. This, he tells us, is not evidence that the dog knows English. But actually, it is. The dog's behavior shows us that he is capable of understanding the simple concept of sitting, that he is capable of distinguishing the verbal signal "sit" from other verbal signals, and that he is capable of connecting the two. This isn't rocket science, it isn't magic, and it isn't anthropomorphizing. It is just the way word learning works. In studies conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, a border collie named Rico was taught the meanings of 200 words. He could even use theprocess of elimination to figure out unfamiliar words: If he already knew the word "ball,” and his trainer showed him a ball and a stick and told him to get the "stick,” he would bring the stick. He could remember new words even after a month of not hearing them. © 2017 Scientific American,

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 23977 - Posted: 08.19.2017

Tina Hesman Saey Add a new ingredient to the sugar, spice and everything nice needed to make girls. A protein called COUP-TFII is necessary to eliminate male reproductive tissue from female mouse embryos, researchers report in the Aug. 18 Science. For decades, females have been considered the “default” sex in mammals. The new research overturns that idea, showing that making female reproductive organs is an active process that involves dismantling a primitive male tissue called the Wolffian duct. In males, the Wolffian duct develops into the parts needed to ejaculate sperm, including the epididymis, vas deferens and seminal vesicles. In females, a similar embryonic tissue called the Müllerian duct develops into the fallopian tubes, uterus and vagina. Both duct tissues are present in early embryos. A study by French endocrinologist Alfred Jost 70 years ago indicated that the testes make testosterone and an anti-Müllerian hormone to maintain the Wolffian duct and suppress female tissue development. If those hormones are missing, the Wolffian duct degrades and an embryo by default develops as female, Jost proposed. That’s the story written in textbooks, says Amanda Swain, a developmental biologist at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. But the new study “demonstrates that females also have a pathway to make sure you don’t get the wrong ducts,” says Swain, who wrote a commentary in the same issue of Science. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 23976 - Posted: 08.19.2017

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR A handful of walnuts may be an effective weight loss tool. Walnuts are rich in omega-3 fatty acids and other substances and, in moderation, have been linked to reduced risk of obesity and diabetes. They may also efficiently reduce appetite. Researchers now may have found out why. They had nine hospitalized obese patients drink, on five consecutive days, either a smoothie containing 48 grams of walnuts (1.7 ounces, or about 14 walnut halves and 315 calories) or a placebo smoothie identical in taste and calorie content. Then, after a month on their regular diet, the patients returned for a second five-day trial, with placebo drinkers on the first trial receiving a walnut smoothie, and vice versa. The participants underwent M.R.I. brain exams while looking at pictures of high-fat food (cake, for example), low-fat food (vegetables) or neutral pictures of rocks and trees. The study, published in Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, found that when people looked at pictures of high-fat food, activation in the insula, a part of the brain involved in appetite and impulse control, increased among those who drank the walnut smoothie, but not among placebo drinkers. The study was funded in part by the California Walnut Commission. “Walnuts can alter the way our brains view food and impact our appetites,” said the lead author, Olivia M. Farr, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “Our results confirm the current recommendations to include walnuts as part of a healthy diet.” © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 23975 - Posted: 08.19.2017

Nicola Davis The eternal sunshine of a spotless mind has come one step closer, say researchers working on methods to erase memories of fear. The latest study, carried out in mice, unpicks why certain sounds can stir alarming memories, and reveals a new approach to wiping such memories from the brain. The researchers say the findings could be used to either weaken or strengthen particular memories while leaving others unchanged. That, they say, could potentially be used to help those with cognitive decline or post-traumatic stress disorder by removing fearful memories while retaining useful ones, such as the sound of a dog’s bark. “We can use same approach to selectively manipulate only the pathological fear memory while preserving all other adaptive fear memories which are necessary for our daily lives,” said Jun-Hyeong Cho, co-author of the research from the University of California, Riverside. The research is the latest in a string of studies looking at ways to erase unpleasant memories, with previous work by scientists exploring techniques ranging from brain scans and AI to the use of drugs. Published in the journal Neuron by Cho and his colleague Woong Bin Kim, the research reveals how the team used genetically modified mice to examine the pathways between the area of the brain involved in processing a particular sound and the area involved in emotional memories, known as the amygdala. “These mice are special in that we can label or tag specific pathways that convey certain signals to the amygdala, so that we can identify which pathways are really modified as the mice learn to fear a particular sound,” said Cho. “It is like a bundle of phone lines,” he added. “Each phone line conveys certain auditory information to the amygdala.” © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Emotions; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23974 - Posted: 08.18.2017

By Ingfei Chen, Spectrum In October 2010, Lisa and Eugene Jeffers learned that their daughter Jade, then nearly 2 and a half years old, has autism. The diagnosis felt like a double whammy. The parents were soon engulfed by stress from juggling Jade’s new therapy appointments and wrangling with their health insurance provider, but they now had an infant son to worry about, too. Autism runs in families. Would Bradley follow in his big sister’s footsteps? "We were on high alert,” Lisa Jeffers says. “There were times I would call his name, and he wouldn't look.” She says she couldn’t help but think: Is it because he's busy playing or because he has autism? In search of guidance, the parents signed Bradley up for a three-year study at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) MIND Institute, a half-hour drive from their home near Sacramento. Researchers there wanted answers to some of the same questions the couple had: What are the odds that infants like Bradley—younger brothers or sisters of a child with autism—will be on the spectrum too? Could experts detect autism in these babies early on, so that they might benefit from early intervention? The infant-sibling study at UC Davis is one of more than 20 similar long-running investigations across the United States, Canada and United Kingdom, the first of which began around 2000. These ‘baby sib’ studies, which collectively have followed thousands of children, are among the most ambitious and expensive projects in autism research. Many of the scientists who run them anticipated that by tracking this special population, they would be able to spot signs of autism before age 1, and ultimately create an infant screen for the condition. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23973 - Posted: 08.18.2017

Laurel Hamers Scientists have traced the sensation of itch to a place you can’t scratch. The discomfort of a mosquito bite or an allergic reaction activates itch-sensitive nerve cells in the spinal cord. Those neurons talk to a structure near the base of the brain called the parabrachial nucleus, researchers report in the Aug. 18 Science. It’s a region that’s known to receive information about other sensations, such as pain and taste. The discovery gets researchers one step closer to finding out where itch signals ultimately end up. “The parabrachial nucleus is just the first relay center for [itch signals] going into the brain,” says study coauthor Yan-Gang Sun, a neuroscientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai. Understanding the way these signals are processed by the brain could someday provide relief for people with chronic itch, Sun says. While the temporary itchiness of a bug bite is annoying, longer term, “uncontrollable scratching behavior can cause serious skin damage.” Previous studies have looked at the way an itch registers on the skin or how neurons convey those sensations to the spinal cord. But how those signals travel to the brain has been a trickier question, and this research is a “major step” toward answering it, says Zhou-Feng Chen, director of the Center for the Study of Itch at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 23972 - Posted: 08.18.2017

By Aggie Mika | In a report published today (August 16) in Nature, researchers uncover the mechanisms by which the psychoactive and addictive drug fenethylline, trade name Captagon, exerts its potent stimulating effects. Essentially, one component of the drug, theophylline, boosts the effects of another, amphetamine. “This combination greatly enhances amphetamine’s properties,” says coauthor and Scripps Research Institute researcher Kim Janda in a press conference this week, Reuters reports. “So this now makes sense why it’s being so heavily abused.” In exploring fenethylline’s mode of action, the researchers came upon a method to vaccinate against the drug in mice using small, antibody-eliciting molecules called haptens that target the drug’s chemical components. Once antibodies for a specific chemical are prompted by a vaccine, they bind to and prevent it from interacting with its receptors in the body, thus preventing the effects of the drug driven by that chemical. Fenethylline’s use is mostly confined to the Middle East, where approximately 40 percent of young adult drug users in Saudi Arabia are addicted to the drug, the authors write in their report. According to Reuters, the drug initially sparked Janda’s interest because of its use by Islamic State jihadists. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, “Syrian civil war combatants and Islamic State terrorists have reportedly used the drug to boost their fighting ability and to lessen fear.” © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 23971 - Posted: 08.18.2017

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health have identified a class of sensory neurons (nerve cells that electrically send and receive messages between the body and brain) that can be activated by stimuli as precise as the pulling of a single hair. Understanding basic mechanisms underlying these different types of responses will be an important step toward the rational design of new approaches to pain therapy. The findings were published in the journal Neuron. “Scientists know that distinct types of neurons detect different types of sensations, such as touch, heat, cold, pain, pressure, and vibration,” noted Alexander Chesler, Ph.D., lead author of the study and principal investigator with the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health’s (NCCIH) Division of Intramural Research (DIR). “But they know more about neurons involved with temperature and touch than those underlying mechanical pain, like anatomical pain related to specific postures or activities.” In this study, Chesler and his colleagues used a novel strategy that combined functional imaging (which measures neuronal activity), recordings of electrical activity in the brain, and genetics to see how neurons respond to various stimuli. The scientists focused on a class of sensory neurons that express a gene called Calca, as these neurons have a long history in pain research. The scientists applied various stimuli to the hairy skin of mice cheeks, including gentle mechanical stimuli (air puff, stroking, and brushing), “high-threshold” mechanical stimuli (hair pulling and skin pinching), and temperature stimulation. They found that the target neurons belong to two broad categories, both of which were insensitive to gentle stimulation. The first was a well-known type of pain fiber—a polymodal nociceptor—that responds to a host of high intensity stimuli such as heat and pinching. The second was a unique and previously unknown type of neuron that responded robustly to hair pulling. They called this previously undescribed class of high-threshold mechanoreceptors (HTMRs) “circ-HTMRs,” due to the unusual nerve terminals these neurons made in skin. They observed that the endings of the fibers made lasso-like structures around the base of each hair follicle.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 23970 - Posted: 08.17.2017

By Catherine Offord | On August 21, the moon will pass between the Earth and the sun, resulting in a total solar eclipse visible across a large strip of the United States. Self-proclaimed eclipse-chaser Ralph Chou, an emeritus professor of optometry at the University of Waterloo, has been working to spread awareness about eye-safety during eclipses for around 30 years. Last year, he put together the American Astronomical Society’s technical guide to eye safety, aimed at everyone from astronomers to educators to medical professionals. The Scientist spoke to Chou to find out what happens to the eye when exposed to too much sunlight, and how to watch next week’s solar eclipse safely. Ralph Chou: Light comes into the eye and goes through all the various layers of cells until it reaches the photoreceptors—essentially, the bottom of a stack of cells. The photoreceptors themselves guide the light towards a specialized structure [of the cells] called the outer segment, where there is a stack of discs that contain the visual pigment. Under normal circumstances, the light would interact with the pigment, which generates an electrical signal that then starts the process of sending an impulse through the optic nerve to the brain. In looking at the sun, you have a very large volume of photons—light energy—coming in and hitting these pigment discs, and it’s more than they can really handle. In addition to generating the electrical signal, [the cell] also starts generating photo-oxidative compounds. So you’re getting oxidative species like hydroxyl radicals and peroxides that will go on to attack the cell’s organelles. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 23969 - Posted: 08.17.2017

Marci O'Connor, a mother of two teenagers, struggles with her confident, independent self and recurring loneliness — feelings that psychologists say are increasingly posing public health challenges. O'Connor, 46, of Mont-Saint-Hilaire, 30 kilometres east of Montreal, said loneliness snuck up on her after she moved away from her family to a predominantly French-speaking area. She now works from home. O'Connor lost the camaraderie of her community of stay-at-home moms as her children, now 15 and 17, grew and families' circumstances changed. "I found that I constantly check in with myself and my motives for doing things," O'Connor said. "If I go hiking alone, is it to avoid other people or is that the day I really want to be on my own?" Taken too far, a sense of independence and self-sufficiency can be a detriment. Psychologists say it's important to recognize loneliness and prioritize the meaningful relationships we all need. Demographics are another challenge. Earlier this month, Statistics Canada released new information from the 2016 census suggesting a record number of households, 28.2 per cent, have only one person living in them. In an upcoming issue of American Psychologist, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, says social connection should be a public health priority. Holt-Lunstad says social connection is associated with a 50 per cent reduced risk of early death, and loneliness exacts a grave toll. ©2017 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 23968 - Posted: 08.17.2017

By Katie Moritz If you’re like a lot of people all over the world, you have a hard time sleeping. Maybe you’ve tried apps that promote sleep, or going without electronics for the hours leading up to bedtime, or supplements like melatonin or magnesium. But have you tried thinking differently about your waking life? Research suggests that having a purpose in life leads to a better night’s sleep. Picture in your mind your biggest interests and your loftiest goals. Pursuing those could help you get better shut-eye. A research team at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine looked at the sleep habits of more than 800 older adults—though they said the results are likely applicable to everyone—and found that the ones who reported having a purpose in life have fewer sleep disturbances like sleep apnea and restless leg syndrome and sleep better over a long period. Purpose pbs rewire“Helping people cultivate a purpose in life could be an effective drug-free strategy to improve sleep quality, particularly for a population that is facing more insomnia,” said Jason Ong, one of the study’s authors and an associate professor of neurology at the Feinberg School of Medicine, to the university. “Purpose in life is something that can be cultivated and enhanced through mindfulness therapies.” In the Northwestern study, the people who felt their lives had meaning were 63 percent less likely to have sleep apnea, 52 percent less likely to have restless leg syndrome and had better sleep quality. Poor sleep quality is defined by having trouble falling and staying asleep and feeling tired during the day.

Keyword: Sleep; Depression
Link ID: 23967 - Posted: 08.17.2017