By Jennifer Squires SANTA CRUZ -- A vandal cut the brake lines on a UC Santa Cruz researcher's SUV late Saturday or early Sunday, and the Police Department has called in the FBI to help investigate. However, unlike prior attacks on UCSC staff, the scientist's work did not involve medical testing on animals, police reported. About seven FBI agents were at the researcher's Westside home Monday afternoon. Some agents peered under the sport utility vehicle to inspect the damage and collected pieces of snipped brake lines in plastic evidence bags. Other agents canvassed the neighborhood for witnesses. The 55-year-old researcher, whose name was not released, called police around 11 a.m. Sunday to report the vandalism to his SUV, which was parked in front of the researcher's house on the 1200 block of Laurent Street, according to Santa Cruz Deputy Police Chief Rick Martinez. "It's not something we see every day," Martinez said, referencing the cut brake lines. "Why was this one vehicle specifically targeted? ... Was this to injure the driver? Was it to send a message? Was it a threat? These are all questions we're trying to sort out right now." University officials had no comment about the incident and referred all questions to Santa Cruz police. A public records search of the house's address cross-referenced with the UCSC faculty directory showed the researcher works in the biology department at UCSC. The Sentinel is not naming the researcher. © 2010 - Santa Cruz Sentinel

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 14113 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Emily Sohn Exercising boosts your ability to burn fat by anywhere from 50 percent to more than 1,000 percent, depending on how fit you are to begin with and how long you exercise, found a new study. What’s more, this accelerated burn lasts long after the workout ends. The study was the first to look in detail at how exercise affects more than 200 molecules in the body that are related to metabolism. Besides helping explain why exercise is good for us, the findings might lead to better tests for assessing fitness, new ways to diagnose heart problems, and better nutritional supplements that replenish what’s lost during heavy exercise. Eventually, the work might even inspire a magic exercise pill. “This notion of changing metabolism by exercising is something that is very much confirmed by our paper,” said Gregory Lewis, a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. “Even after a 10-minute bout of exercise, when people’s heart rate is back to normal and their blood pressure is back to normal and they’re going about other activities, the metabolites that change during peak exercise persist for at least an hour afterwards.” “By virtue of taking the stairs at work or doing the treadmill for as little as 10 minutes, you’re altering your metabolism for a significant period of time that extends beyond that period of exercise,” Lewis said. “You’re going from a fuel-storage to a fuel-burning state.” © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 14112 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Michael Marshall In one of history's earliest recorded bioterrorist threats, Moses warned a recalcitrant pharoah: "I will bring locusts into your country… They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen. They will devour what little you have left…" Moses might have added, "and their brains will be freakishly enlarged". It turns out that swarming locusts have brains almost a third larger than their solitary cousins – brains that have also been radically redesigned. Locusts are essentially grasshoppers gone bad. Most of the time they lead solitary lives, but under certain conditions they gather into swarmsMovie Camera that can cover hundreds of square kilometres and devour everything in their path, including vast swathes of crops. This change in lifestyle, it seems, demands a new brain. Young solitary locusts, known as hoppers, are green, which camouflages them when they are feeding on plants. They are picky eaters, sticking to a limited range of plants, perhaps to better monitor their nutritional intake. Eventually the hoppers develop wings and change colour from green to brown. They are now adults, but will still avoid each other except when they are attempting to mate. The regular insect life cycle changes only after the rains come and vegetation blooms. Faced with a feast, the population swells, but the locusts remain fairly well isolated from each other – until the land dries out again and the vegetation dies back. As the area available for feeding shrinks, the locusts are driven together. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 14111 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Gary Stix The search for new drugs that can reverse the course of Alzheimer's has frustrated pharmaceutical companies, with several failures reported in recent years. Research advances have arrived, not in the form of new drugs but, rather, in technologies that track the underlying biology of the disease before the first symptoms appear. The capacity to track things early underlines the growing recognition that the disease process begins many years before a diagnosis, a realization that has placed new emphasis on the need for preventive measures to ward off the leading cause of dementia. Unfortunately, this understanding cannot immediately be translated into a series of recommendations that a 50- or 60-year-old can adopt with reasonable certainty to fend off Alzheimer's. In late April a panel of experts convened by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including gerontologists, nutritionists, neurologists and geneticists, found that various postulated approaches to prevention, ranging from use of prescription drugs, dietary supplements and avoidance of toxins, have "no evidence considered to be of even moderate scientific quality" to back recommendations that these steps can be used to stop the onset of the disease. The panel called for more studies that can identify risk factors by tracking large groups over a lifetime, similar to the famed Framingham study, and also gold-standard, "randomized" clinical trials that test subjects pursuing a particular preventive approach against those in a placebo group. © 2010 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 14110 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Nora Schultz SINGING to elderly people with dementia helps them form new memories, one of the first skills they tend to lose. Music is known to aid memory, especially recalling autobiographical information. For example, people with Alzheimer's disease are better at remembering events from their own past when music is playing in the background. It was less clear whether tunes could also help them learn. Brandon Ally at Boston University and his team were inspired by the report of a man with Alzheimer's who could recall current events if his daughter sang the news to him to the tune of familiar pop songs. They decided to try it out for themselves. They gave 13 people with Alzheimer's and 14 healthy seniors the lyrics from 40 unfamiliar children's songs to read, half accompanied by the actual song and half by the spoken words. All the participants saw the lyrics again without audio and mixed in with lyrics from a further 40 unknown songs. Those with Alzheimer's were able to recognise 40 per cent of the original lyrics that had been accompanied by song but only 28 per cent of those read to them. The healthy seniors recognised 80 per cent of lyrics, regardless of whether they had been sung or spoken (Neuropsychologia, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.04.033). Very few things enhance new learning in people with dementia, says Ally. "It's really cool that hearing the lyrics sung did." He suggests that teaching patients new medication regimes via a song in the early stages of dementia might enable them to live independently for a bit longer. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Language
Link ID: 14109 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The stress caused by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center may have led to an increase in miscarriages of male foetuses, US researchers say. A study in the BioMed Central Journal found 12% more male babies were lost in September 2001 after the 20th week of pregnancy than in a "normal" September. Data says fewer boys were born in all states three to four months after 9/11. The review by the University of California, Irvine, is said to support the theory of "communal bereavement". This is defined as acute mental distress related to a major national event, like 9/11, even if there is no direct connection to those who died or were involved in these events. Pregnant mothers are thought to be particularly prone to this experience, as are unborn baby boys. In order to analyse male foetal death rates, the researchers gathered data for the years 1996-2002. When they analysed the data, they found that the average number of reported male foetal deaths per month in the US for that period was 995. Female foetal deaths numbered 871 on average per month. In September 2001, however, their research showed an additional 120 male foetal losses, equivalent to a 12% increase. Dr Tim Bruckner, who led the research at the University of California, Irvine, said that miscarriages were grossly under-reported in the US and that the real figure of male foetal losses was likely to be much higher. (C)BBC

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14108 - Posted: 05.25.2010

By Rachael Rettner Trusting women become more skeptical when they are given doses of the sex hormone testosterone, a new study suggests. In the study, these "socially naïve" women rated pictures of faces as less trustworthy after they were given testosterone compared with when they received a placebo. However, testosterone did not appear to have an effect on those who were naturally less trusting, the researchers say. Testosterone could serve as a balance to oxytocin, a hormone that has been implicated in human social bonding and trust, the researchers figure. The study also adds support to the idea that testosterone influences human behavior, not necessarily by increasing aggression, but by motivating people to raise their status in the social hierarchy or become more socially dominant. Testosterone might boost social watchfulness, making those who are most trusting a little more vigilant and better prepared for competition over rank and resources, the researchers say. "To be more successful in competition you have to be sharp ... you have to be also socially sharp," researcher Jack van Honk of the University of Cape Town, South Africa told LiveScience. "And to be socially sharp it's not smart to trust people you don't know," he said. © 2010 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14107 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ALAN SCHWARZ When B. J. Upton hit a home run last Thursday night to help the Tampa Bay Rays defeat the New York Yankees, it was not the first time that day that Upton had gone deep. Just a few hours earlier, chatting in front of his locker, he had helped confirm the results of a recent study of sibling risk-taking behavior. In the current issue of Personality and Social Psychology Review, Frank J. Sulloway and Richard L. Zweigenhaft went digging for evidence of siblings behaving differently in the vast database of baseball statistics. Given how younger siblings have been shown to take more risks than their older counterparts — perhaps originally to fight for food, now for parental attention — Drs. Sulloway and Zweigenhaft examined whether the phenomenon might persist to the point that baseball-playing brothers would try to steal bases at significantly different rates. In fact they did: For more than 90 percent of sibling pairs who had played in the major leagues throughout baseball’s long recorded history, including Joe and Dom DiMaggio and Cal and Billy Ripken, the younger brother (regardless of overall talent) tried to steal more often than his older brother. B. J. and his younger brother, Justin, a slugger for the Arizona Diamondbacks, are actually among the 1 in 10 exceptions (B. J., who at 25 is 3 years older than Justin, has been more of a speedy leadoff hitter, a position in the batting order often associated with base stealing). Yet B. J. nodded thoughtfully when told that scientists have found younger brothers tend to take more risks. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14106 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Lenny Bernstein I do some of my best writing on the run. I mean literally. When the words won't come, when the syntax doesn't feel right, when I just can't figure out what angle to take on a column, I'll often go for a good, hard run. And usually it works. With the sweat pouring and lungs working overtime, the mental fog lifts. I make connections I hadn't seen earlier. How to be clear becomes, well, a little more clear. If you work out routinely, I bet you've had the same experience. Three researchers I interviewed for this story say they have achieved it regularly, on a treadmill, on outdoor runs and on a bicycle, respectively. A couple of studies seem to confirm it. The tantalizing question for those of us in middle age and beyond (I am 52) is whether this short-term cognitive benefit can be replicated over the long haul. Can exercise help keep our minds sharp? And if so, can it help delay or prevent the truly terrifying mental deterioration of dementia, most commonly seen as Alzheimer's disease? Researchers studying both animals and humans increasingly say the answer is yes. Because the science of this mind-body connection is only about 15 years old, there are many caveats and a wide range of opinion on how effective exercise is. At one end of the continuum are people such as John J. Ratey, a Harvard University psychiatrist who synthesized volumes of research for his intriguing 2008 book "Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain." Ratey says flatly that there is overwhelming evidence that exercise produces large cognitive gains and helps fight dementia. © 2010 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Attention; Alzheimers
Link ID: 14105 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Ferris Jabr Charles Darwin is famous for his prolific writing about biology. In addition to publishing his theory of evolution, Darwin wrote books about coral reefs, earthworms and carnivorous plants. But the eminent naturalist made important contributions to more than just the life sciences. It turns out Darwin was also an early experimental psychologist. Darwin conducted one of the first studies on how people recognize emotion in faces, according to new archival research by Peter Snyder, a neuroscientist at Brown University. Snyder's findings rely on biographical documents never before published; they now appear in the May issue of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences. While looking through Darwin's letters at the University of Cambridge in England, Snyder noticed multiple references to a small experiment on emotion that Darwin had performed in his house. With the help of librarians, Snyder uncovered the relevant documents—research notes and tables filled with the illegible scrawl of Darwin's elderly hands and the neater writing of his wife Emma. Although Darwin's fascination with emotional expression is well documented, no one had pieced together the details of his home experiment. Now, a fuller narrative emerges. "Darwin applied an experimental method that at the time was pretty rare in Victorian England," Snyder said. "He pushed boundaries in all sorts of biological sciences, but what isn't as well known are his contributions to psychology." © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 14104 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Teresa Shipley Do you know that feeling you get when you're done with work for the day and take those first few steps out the office door? I always thought that happy, alert sensation was simply the satisfaction of being done with work for the day or feeling the sun on my face. Research, however, suggests it may be all about the bacteria. Tiny organisms living naturally in the soil and carried in the air can actually make us more positive and alert when ingested or breathed in, say researchers from the Sage Colleges of Troy, N.Y. At the 110th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego today, scientists presented research that showed a particular bacterium increased learning abilities in mice when ingested. Studies had already shown that the bacterium could increase serotonin levels and decrease anxiety, but the researchers wanted to know if it could improve learning as well as mood. The team fed Mycobacterium vaccae to a group of mice and compared the animals' ability to navigate a maze to those who had not eaten the bacteria. "We found that mice that were fed live M. vaccae navigated the maze twice as fast and with less demonstrated anxiety behaviors as control mice," said Dorothy Matthews in a press release. "Mycobacterium vaccae is a natural soil bacterium which people likely ingest or breath in when they spend time in nature." The researchers tested the mice a couple more times, once after immediately stopping the bacteria meals, and once after three weeks of no bacteria. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Intelligence
Link ID: 14103 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Dr. David Rock A new study about the impact of free will on success at work recently caught my attention. It's by one of my favorite researchers, Roy Baumeister. The authors discovered that a belief in free will predicted better career attitudes and actual job performance, at levels greater than well-established predictors. This appears a little crazy at first. Why would a philosophical stance influence how well you perform at work? The answer is complex but worth exploring. The debate about free will has raged for centuries, embroiling philosophers, psychologists and religious academics. The advent of neuroscience has only made the arguments more fierce, as there was more ambiguous data to argue about. Benjamin Libet in 1983 undertook a now famous experiment which showed that some time before we are aware of taking a voluntary action, a brain signal relating to that action, called an 'action potential' shows up in an EEG. This would seem to claim that we don't have free will, and our perception of choice is only a mirage. Others scientists, such as Jeffrey Schwartz, author of 'The Mind and the Brain', (and the scientists who I co-wrote the 'Neuroscience of Leadership' paper with) argue that the time gap between observing an internal urge and then taking action on that urge, is long enough to be able to thwart the original urge. Schwartz says we may not have free will, but we have 'free wont', which is as good as saying we're not totally deterministic. So far so good. Schwartz and others like him are up against a large body of neuroscientists who think that the mind is only an ephemeral by-product of the brain, that the mind is 'reducible' to only the brain. It's like the physicist's search for the ultimate particle. The trouble with this stance is it makes the idea of human agency false, or at best an illusion. Because it's an illusion, the logic goes, we shouldn't believe in it. There's another group of people also fighting against the idea of free will. If you are a deeply religious person of certain faiths, then you might believe that god knows everything, in which case there is not much role for free will either. © Copyright Sussex Publishers, LLC

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14102 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Steve Connor, Science Editor Human nerve cells carrying a critical mutation linked with motor neurone disease have been created in the laboratory for the first time from the skin cells of affected patients. The breakthrough could lead to new treatments for the debilitating disease. Scientists hope that mutated nerve cells, grown from a patient's skin cells after first being transformed into stem cells, will allow them to perform new types of laboratory experiments that will lead to a better understanding and possibly a cure for a disease that affects around 5,000 people in Britain and kills about five people every day. Research into motor neurone disease, a paralysis of the nervous system leading to the wasting of the muscles controlling breathing and swallowing, has been severely hampered by the lack of a good laboratory "model" of the disease. Growing human motor nerves – the cells that conduct messages from the brain and spinal cord to the muscles – carrying a mutation known as TDP-43 could open the way to finding the precise cause of the disorder as well as possible therapies that could prevent or slow damage to the nervous system, scientists said. "Being pragmatic, slowing down the disease is the first aim, stopping the disease the second, and the home run is to restore function," said Professor Siddharthan Chandran of the University of Edinburgh, the principal investigator on a new £800,000 research project. The team also includes Sir Ian Wilmut, the scientist who cloned Dolly the sheep. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 14101 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Elizabeth Cooney Maybe you’ve seen the public service announcements on TV. Actress Glenn Close, her sister Jessie Close, and her nephew Calen Pick stand in Grand Central Station wearing white T-shirts. In blue letters, Glenn’s shirt says “sister,’’ Jessie’s says “bipolar,’’ and Calen’s says “schizophrenia.’’ People with other diagnoses on their chests enter and leave the frame, accompanied by their family members. “Our single goal is to get people talking openly and without shame about mental illness,’’ Glenn Close said earlier this month, when she and her family members talked about their experiences and accepted awards from McLean Hospital in Belmont for their work reducing the stigma that surrounds psychiatric disorders. “Say it loud, say it again and again until it has lost its power over us. Make the unspeakable speakable.’’ The TV ads, from a campaign called BringChange2Mind, are part of a new emphasis in the mental health community that sees families as crucial to the success of a patient’s treatment, and also recognizes that mental illness takes a toll on parents and siblings. It seeks to educate family members to correct any misperceptions they may have, and provide them support. “It’s not just an individual who lives with and suffers illness but a family that lives with and suffers illness, whether that illness is breast cancer or diabetes or mental illness,’’ said Joanne Nicholson, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who specializes in family mental health. “Families provide an incredible opportunity to promote recovery and well-being and functioning. Families who don’t understand about mental illness, or don’t talk about mental illness, can undermine a person’s treatment or access to treatment.’’ © 2010 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 14100 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rachael Rettner Anorexia and bulimia are probably the most familiar types of eating disorders, but they are not the most common. Some 50 to 60 percent of patients don't quite make the cut to be diagnosed with full-blown anorexia or bulimia, and are instead classified as having an eating disorder "not otherwise specified" (EDNOS). But this group is so vast, and the cases within it so diverse, that many in the field believe it creates more problems than it does solutions in terms of treating patients and understanding the syndromes. Patients lumped into this unspecified group can also have misperceptions about their condition, thinking it is not as serious as anorexia or bulimia. But in fact, recent studies have found that there really isn't a medical difference between the three recognized types of eating disorders. Now, physicians and psychiatrists are taking action to remedy the situation. They are proposing revisions to the psychiatric "bible," the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, for the newest version (DSM-5) to be published in 2013. The suggested changes include relaxing the strict criteria for anorexia and bulimia somewhat, and giving other conditions, such as binge eating, their own official labels. These more specific labels could be a boon to treatment and the mental health of the patient, who will finally know what he or she "has." In addition, experience has shown that when a disorder gets a name, more research and attention is paid to it. Even so, some experts aren't sold, saying these DSM changes won't make any real difference as far as treatment goes. © 2010 msnbc.com

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 14099 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jerome Kagan Alice, a young scientist working in a biological laboratory, likes her work, and her supervisor values her conscientiousness and perfectionism. But when her colleagues take a coffee or lunch break she usually sits quietly on the periphery of the group, fingering her hair and blinking rapidly if someone asks her a question. Alice dreads the occasions during the year when it is her turn to tell the staff about the experiments she is working on and what she has learned. She usually doesn't sleep well on the nights before these performances, and her mouth becomes dry and her palms sweaty when she stands up to give her report. During the period between the two World Wars, when Sigmund Freud's ideas were dominant, most psychiatrists and psychologists would have attributed Alice's behaviour and moods to her childhood experiences. Perhaps Alice's mother had been hypercritical and she felt guilty over her anger towards the mother who had punished her occasional disobedience severely. I had accepted such experiential accounts as an obvious truth when I was a graduate student at Yale University from 1950 to 1954. But I began to question my inflexible commitment to the sole influence of early experience in 1962, when Howard Moss and I were reflecting on the evidence we had gathered on a group of normal adults, born in the 1930s, who were members of a longitudinal study conducted at the Fels Research Institute in Ohio. About 15 per cent of these adults, who had been timid, fearful, and shy during their first three years, resembled Alice: they told me that they were shy, often felt unsure, avoided risky activities, and were reluctant to take on difficult challenges. When Howard and I wrote the book Birth to Maturity summarising the project, we suggested that these children inherited a constitutional disposition. This was our way of saying that their temperament was relevant – where temperament refers to a set of biological properties affecting brain chemistry that are usually, but not always, due to the presence of specific genes. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Stress; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14098 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rachel Ehrenberg As any dating woman knows, men can be dogs — but a new study suggests antelopes might be a better fit. Male topi antelopes will resort to deception to keep a potential mate around, snorting as if there’s a lion nearby just when it seems she might wander off. The discovery is the first report of outright mate deception in an animal other than Homo sapiens, a research team reports in the July American Naturalist. Some mother birds will feign a broken wing to lure a predator away from their nest, and there are reports in animals such as monkeys and squirrels of males deceiving other males in the heat of competition. But the male antelope behavior “is the clearest example of tactical deception between mates in animals other than humans,” comments Cornell University’s H. Kern Reeve, an expert in the evolution of cooperation and conflict in animal societies. “This is quite interesting.” Study leader Jakob Bro-Jørgensen discovered the devious behavior while studying topi antelopes on the savannas of the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, where during the spring mating season males stake out territories rich in grass. The female antelopes are sexually receptive for one day only, and they spend that day visiting several males, munching grass and mating. Bro-Jørgensen noticed that when a female would start to wander away from a male’s territory, the male would look in the direction she was headed, prick his ears and snort loudly — the same snort the animals use when they’ve noticed a lion, leopard or other approaching predator. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14097 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jennifer Viegas Your family tree has a new and colorful member, Homo gautengensis, a toothy, plant-chomping, literal tree swinger that was just named the world's earliest recognized species of human. The new human, described in a paper accepted for publication in HOMO-Journal of Comparative Human Biology, emerged over 2 million years ago and died out approximately 600,000 years ago. The authors believe it arose earlier than Homo habilis, aka "Handy Man." Darren Curnoe, who led the project, told Discovery News that Homo gautengensis was "small-brained" and "large-toothed." Curnoe, an anthropologist at the University of New South Wales School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, said that it was "probably an ecological specialist, consuming more vegetable matter than Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, and probably even Homo habilis. It seems to have produced and used stone tools and may even have made fire," since there is evidence for burnt animal bones associated with this human's remains. Identification of the new human species was based on partial skulls, several jaws, teeth and other bones found at various times at South Africa's Sterkfontein Caves, near Johannesburg. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14096 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Fish are scared of their own reflection — a new finding that suggests their brains are more sophisticated than originally thought, say biologists. Stanford University researchers compared the brain activity of male African cichlid fish during and after encounters with either a mirror or other another male cichlid. The fish are territorial and usually react to another male by fighting with a series of alternating movements triggered by the other fish's tactics. While scientists have long known that the fish will fight with their own reflection, up till now they didn't know what was going on in their brains. Post-doctoral researcher Julie Desjardins suspects the fish fighting their own reflections got scared because their enemy in the mirror didn't act as they would expect. "In normal fights, they bite at each other, one after the other, and will do all kinds of movements and posturing, but it is always slightly off or even alternating in timing," Desjardins said in a release. "But when you are fighting with a mirror, your opponent is perfectly in time. So the subject fish really is not seeing any sort of reciprocal response from their opponent." She and biology professor Russell Fernald described in last week's Biology Letters how they arranged 20-minute sparring sessions for their fish and the brain analysis that followed. © CBC 2010

Keyword: Aggression; Intelligence
Link ID: 14095 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katherine Harmon NEW YORK—One-size-fits-all treatments are particularly rare in the mental health world, where each patient's ailments can seem unique. But a team of researchers seems to have found a therapeutic model to treat anxiety disorders as wide-ranging as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), social phobia and panic disorder. Lead study author Dr. Peter Roy-Byrne, of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine, presented the findings May 18 at a press briefing in New York convened by JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association. When taken together, anxiety disorders affect about 18 percent of the population (which is more than twice the rate of depression). Some three fourths of people with mental disorders are managed in primary care (which Roy-Byrne called "the de facto mental health system"), but getting those patients—especially those with anxiety disorders—to see mental health specialists is much harder than getting them to see a radiologist, Roy-Byrne noted. He and his team devised a flexible, collaborative care system that lightened loads for both doctors and psychiatrists (or psychologists) while making it easier for patients to get the help they needed. By enlisting the skills of nurses or masters-level clinicians with some training in anxiety management and an online patient progress tracking system, the treatment plan could adapt to patients without sending them to an expensive psychiatrist or psychologist, which has been shown to be especially difficult in anxiety patients (and could also allow specialists more time to address patients who most need their care). And a controlled trial, published May 19 in JAMA, showed promising results. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Stress; Emotions
Link ID: 14094 - Posted: 06.24.2010