Links for Keyword: Schizophrenia

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Getting to the Root of the Problem: Stem Cells Are Revealing New Secrets about Mental Illness

By Dina Fine Maron Millions of Americans who suffer from bipolar disorder depend on lithium. The medication has been prescribed for half a century to help stabilize patients’ moods and prevent manic or depressive episodes. Yet what it does in the brain—and why it does not work for some people—has remained largely mysterious. But last year San Diego–based researchers uncovered new details about how lithium may alter moods, thanks to an approach recently championed by a small number of scientists studying mental illness: The San Diego team used established lab techniques to reprogram patients’ skin cells into stem cells capable of becoming any other kind—and then chemically coaxed them into becoming brain cells. This process is now providing the first real stand-ins for brain cells from mentally ill humans, allowing for unprecedented direct experiments. Proponents hope studying these lab-grown neurons and related cells will eventually lead to more precise and effective treatment options for a variety of conditions. The San Diego team has already used this technique to show some bipolar cases may have more to do with protein regulation than genetic errors. And another lab discovered the activity of glial cells (a type of brain cell that supports neuron function) likely helps fuel schizophrenia—upending the theory that the disorder results mainly from faulty neurons. This new wave of research builds on Shinya Yamanaka’s Nobel-winning experiments on cellular reprogramming from a decade ago. His landmark findings about creating induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) have only recently been applied to studying mental illness as the field has matured. “What’s really sparked that move now has been the ability to make patient-specific stem cells—and once you can do that, then all sorts of diseases become amenable to investigation,” says Steven Goldman, who specializes in cellular and gene therapy at the University of Rochester Medical Center. © 2018 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24703 - Posted: 02.27.2018

Schizophrenia patients calmed by video game

People with schizophrenia can be trained by playing a video game to control the part of the brain linked to verbal hallucinations, researchers say. Patients in a small study were able to land a rocket in the game when it was connected to the brain region sensitive to speech and human voices. In time, the patients learnt to use the technique in their daily lives to reduce the power of hallucinations. But this is a small pilot study and the findings still need to be confirmed. The research team, from King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience and the University of Roehampton, says the technique could be used to help schizophrenia patients who do not respond to medication. People with the condition are known to have a more active auditory cortex, which means they are more sensitive to sounds and voices. All 12 patients in the study experienced nasty and threatening verbal hallucinations every day - a common symptom of schizophrenia. To try to control their symptoms, they were asked to play a video game while in an MRI scanner, using their own mental strategies to move a computerised rocket - and in doing so they were able to turn down the volume on the external voices they heard as well. Image copyright King's College London Image caption The auditory cortex (in yellow) is hypersensitive in the brains of people with schizophrenia Dr Natasza Orlov, from King's College London, said: "The patients know when the voices are about to start - they can feel it, so we want them to immediately put this aid into effect to lessen them, or stop the voices completely." She said all the patients in the study, who each had four turns in the MRI scanner, found that their voices became less external and more internal, making them less stressful. They were also better able to cope with them. Dr Orlov added: "Although the study sample size is small and we lacked a control group, these results are promising. "We are now planning to conduct a randomised controlled study to test this technique in a larger sample." © 2018 BBC

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 24645 - Posted: 02.12.2018

Major mental illnesses unexpectedly share brain gene activity, raising hope for better diagnostics a

By Roni Dengler Mental illness affects one in six U.S. adults, but scientists' sense of the underlying biology of most psychiatric disorders remains nebulous. That's frustrating for physicians treating the diseases, who must also make diagnoses based on symptoms that may only appear sporadically. No laboratory blood test or brain scan can yet distinguish whether someone has depression or bipolar disorder, for example. Now, however, a large-scale analysis of postmortem brains is revealing distinctive molecular traces in people with mental illness. This week, an international team of researchers reports that five major psychiatric disorders have patterns of gene activity that often overlap but also vary in disease-specific—and sometimes counterintuitive—ways. The findings, they say, might someday lead to diagnostic tests and novel therapies, and one has already inspired a clinical trial of a new way to treat overactive brain cells in autism. Outsiders say the data mark a milestone in psychiatry. "This [work] is changing fundamental views about the nature of psychiatric illness," says Kenneth Kendler, a psychiatric geneticist at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Researchers have long known that genes influence mental illness. Five years ago, for example, the global Psychiatric Genomics Consortium found that people with autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder frequently share certain DNA variations. But that 2013 study did not say how those genetic alterations might lead to symptoms. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Avatar therapy 'reduces power of schizophrenia voices'

By Philippa Roxby Confronting an avatar on a computer screen helped patients hearing voices to cope better with hallucinations, a UK trial has found. Patients who received this therapy became less distressed and heard voices less often compared with those who had counselling instead. Experts said the therapy could add an important new approach to treating schizophrenia hallucinations. The trial, on 150 people, is published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal. It follows a much smaller pilot study in 2013. Hallucinations are common in people with schizophrenia and can be threatening and insulting. One in four patients continues to experience voices despite being treated with drugs and cognitive behavioural therapy. In this study, run by King's College London and University College London, 75 patients who had continued to hear voices for more than a year, were given six sessions of avatar therapy while another 75 received the same amount of counselling. In the avatar sessions, patients created a computer simulation to represent the voice they heard and wanted to control, including how it sounded and how it might look. Image copyright King's College London Image caption Three avatars created by people taking part in the therapy The therapist then voiced the avatar while also speaking as themselves in a three-way conversation to help the patient gain the upper hand. Prof Tom Craig, study author from King's College London, said getting patients to learn to stand up to the avatar was found to be safe, easy to deliver and twice as effective as counselling at reducing how often voices were heard. "After 12 weeks there was dramatic improvement compared to the other therapy," he said. "With a talking head, patients are learning to confront and get replies from it. "This shifts the idea that the voice is all-controlling," he said. © 2017 BBC.

Scientists are learning to predict psychosis years in advance—and possibly prevent it

By Jennifer Couzin-Frankel Rachel Loewy was an undergraduate in 1995 when she answered a flyer seeking students to assist with a research study. A couple of floors up in a psychology department building, Loewy sat, clipboard in hand, interviewing teenagers whose brain health was beginning to falter. Some heard whispers. Others imagined that their teachers could read their minds, or that fellow students stared at them and wished them harm as they walked down the halls. The teenagers had been diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder, a condition that can precede schizophrenia. Among the most debilitating and stigmatized psychiatric diseases, schizophrenia can rob sufferers of their self and their future, often in early adulthood. Although these teens didn't have schizophrenia, the researchers believed that some would later deteriorate and be diagnosed with the disorder. But when Loewy met them they were lucid and self-aware. And they were frightened that their mind sometimes spun out of control. Doctors routinely assess a patient's risk of heart attack, various cancers, and diabetes, often intervening to slow or stop disease before it strikes. But preventing psychiatric conditions, from anxiety to depression to schizophrenia, has received scant attention. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Radical new approach to schizophrenia treatment begins trial

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent British scientists have begun testing a radically new approach to treating schizophrenia based on emerging evidence that it could be a disease of the immune system. The first patient, a 33-year old man who developed schizophrenia after moving to London from Cameroon a decade ago, was treated at King’s College Hospital in London on Thursday, marking the start of one of the most ambitious trials to date on the biology of the illness and how to treat it. During the next two years, 30 patients will receive monthly infusions of an antibody drug currently used to treat multiple sclerosis (MS), which the team hopes will target the root causes of schizophrenia in a far more fundamental way than current therapies. The trial builds on more than a decade’s work by Oliver Howes, a professor of molecular psychiatry at the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences and a consultant psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital in south London. Howes’s team is one of several worldwide to have uncovered evidence that abnormalities in immune activity in the brain may lie at the heart of the illness – for some patients, at least. “In the past, we’ve always thought of the mind and the body being separate, but it’s just not like that,” said Howes. “The mind and body interact constantly and the immune system is no different. It’s about changing the way we think about mental illnesses.” Recent work by Howes and colleagues found that in the earliest stages of schizophrenia, people experience a surge in the number and activity of immune cells in the brain. As well as fighting infection, these cells, called microglia, have a “gardening” role, pruning unwanted connections between neurons. But in schizophrenia patients, the pruning appears to become more aggressive, leading to vital connections being lost. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 24293 - Posted: 11.04.2017

Recognising that mind and body are not separate opens door for new treatments

Hannah Devlin Descartes’s notion of dualism – that the mind and body are separate entities – is wrong, but has proved surprisingly persistent, and until recently dominated attempts to understand mental illness. When the brain stopped working properly, a psychological origin was sought. Undoubtedly, life’s experiences and our personalities shape the way our brains function. But there is now a compelling body of evidence that brain disorders can also originate from things going awry in our basic biology. Particularly intriguing is the discovery that the brain, once thought to be separated from the immune system by the blood-brain barrier, is powerfully influenced by immune activity. The latest trial, focused on schizophrenia, is backed by converging evidence from several fields that immune cells in the brain, called microglia, play at least some role in this disease. Prof Oliver Howes, the psychiatrist leading the work, discovered that these cells appear to go into overdrive in the early stages of schizophrenia. Genetics studies have linked changes in immune system genes to increased risk for schizophrenia and anecdotal evidence, including a recent case report of a patient who developed schizophrenia after receiving a bone marrow transplant from a sibling with the illness, also triangulates on to the immune system. “It’s all challenging the idea that the brain is this separate privileged organ,” said Howes. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Geneticists are starting to unravel evolution's role in mental illness

Sara Reardon Human genome databases are enabling researchers to take a deeper dive into the evolution of psychiatric disorders. Psychiatric disorders can be debilitating and often involve a genetic component, yet, evolution hasn’t weeded them out. Now, recent work is beginning to reveal the role of natural selection — offering a peek at how the genetic underpinnings of mental illness has changed over time. Many psychiatric disorders are polygenic: they can involve hundreds or thousands of genes and DNA mutations. It can be difficult to track how so many genetic regions evolved, and such studies require large genome data sets. But the advent of massive human genome databases is enabling researchers to look for possible connections between mental illnesses and the environmental and societal conditions that might have driven their emergence and development. Others are looking to Neanderthal genetic sequences to help inform the picture of these disorders, as well as cognitive abilities, in humans. Several of these teams presented their findings at the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) meeting in Orlando, Florida, in late October. One project found that evolution selected for DNA variants thought to protect against schizophrenia. The study, led by population geneticist Barbara Stranger of the University of Chicago in Illinois, looked at hundreds of thousands of human genomes using a statistical method that identified signals of selection over the past 2,000 years1. There were no signs of selection in genetic regions associated with any other mental illness. Many of schizophrenia's symptoms, such as auditory hallucinations and jumbling sentences, involve brain regions tied to speech, says Bernard Crespi, an evolutionary biologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. Over the course of hominid evolution, he says, the ability to speak could have outweighed the small, but unavoidable risk that the genes involved in language could malfunction and result in schizophrenia in a small percentage of the population. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited

When the Make-Believe World Is All Too Real

By MARK LUKACH For my son Jonas’s first Halloween, when he was 5 months old, I dressed the two of us as matching lumberjacks. For the second, we were characters from the movie “Up.” I was Carl, the old man, my wife was Ellie, and Jonas was Russell, the enthusiastic Wilderness Explorer. We tied a dozen balloons to our bulldog’s collar, to make him the house. In our version, the wife didn’t die at the beginning of the movie, and we all lived happily ever after. The next Halloween, Jonas wanted to be an elephant. He loved the scene in “The Jungle Book” where Mowgli tries to march with the elephants. We resisted, since we like family costumes and didn’t want to buy three elephant outfits, but conceded. We displayed his elephant costume in his room the week before Halloween so he could look at it in anticipation of the big day. My wife, Giulia, wasn’t there for the lumberjack Halloween. She was in the hospital. Giulia was there for the “Up” Halloween. But as we approached the elephant Halloween, I suspected she wasn’t going to dress up. Because, once again, she was going psychotic. Giulia was 27 when the first psychotic episode happened. It came out of nowhere. She got nervous about her new job; she lost her appetite; she stopped sleeping; she began having delusions. The first delusions were encouraging. She said she spoke to God, who told her that she was going to be fine. Giulia had never been very religious, so I was alarmed, but at least she was hearing things that were comforting. But then the delusions turned on her. The voices said she wasn’t going to make it, there was no point in even trying, she was better off not being here. That’s how she ended up in the hospital the first time. They gave her medication. The delusions eventually went away. She was depressed for a long time afterward. They gave her more medication, and then she got better. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Link between Adolescent Pot Smoking and Psychosis Strengthens

By R. Douglas Fields BERLIN—Society’s embrace of cannabis to treat nausea, pain and other conditions proceeds apace with the drive to legalize the plant for recreational use. Pot’s seemingly innocuous side effects have helped clear a path toward making it a legal cash crop, with all of the marketing glitz brought to other consumer products. But that clean bill of health only goes so far. Marijuana’s potentially detrimental impact on the developing brains of adolescents remains a key focus of research—particularly because of the possibility teenage users could go on to face a higher risk of psychosis. New findings may fuel those worries. At the World Psychiatric Association’s World Congress in Berlin on October 9, Hannelore Ehrenreich of the Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine presented results of a study of 1,200 people with schizophrenia. The investigation analyzed a wide range of genetic and environmental risk factors for developing the debilitating mental illness. The results—being submitted for publication—show people who had consumed cannabis before age 18 developed schizophrenia approximately 10 years earlier than others. The higher the frequency of use, the data indicated, the earlier the age of schizophrenia onset. In her study neither alcohol use nor genetics predicted an earlier time of inception, but pot did. “Cannabis use during puberty is a major risk factor for schizophrenia,” Ehrenreich says. Other studies, although not all, support the thrust of Ehrenreich’s findings. “There is no doubt,” concludes Robin Murray, a professor of psychiatry at King’s College London, that cannabis use in young people increases the risk of developing schizophrenia as an adult. Speaking at the Berlin conference, Murray—one of the first scientists to research pot’s link to the disorder—cited 10 studies that found a significant risk of young cannabis users developing psychosis. © 2017 Scientific American

The Touch of Madness

David Dobbs By the time Nev Jones entered DePaul University's esteemed doctoral program in philosophy, she had aced virtually every course she ever took, studied five languages and become proficient in three, and seemed to have read and memorized pretty much everything. Small and slightly built, with a commanding presence that emerged when she talked, she was the sort of student that sharp teachers quickly notice and long remember: intellectually voracious, relentlessly curious, endlessly capable, and, as one of her high school teachers put it, "magnificently intense." Her mind drew on a well-stocked, seemingly flawless memory with a probing, synthesizing intelligence. With astounding frequency she produced what one doctoral classmate called "genius-level reflections." So Jones grew alarmed when, soon after starting at DePaul in the fall of 2007, at age 27, she began having trouble retaining things she had just read. She also struggled to memorize the new characters she was learning in her advanced Chinese class. She had experienced milder versions of these cognitive and memory blips a couple times before, most recently as she’d finished her undergraduate studies earlier that year. These new mental glitches were worse. She would study and draw the new logograms one night, then come up short when she tried to draw them again the next morning. These failures felt vaguely neurological. As if her synapses had clogged. She initially blamed them on the sleepless, near-manic excitement of finally being where she wanted to be. She had wished for exactly this, serious philosophy and nothing but, for half her life. Now her mind seemed to be failing. Words started to look strange. She began experiencing "inarticulable atmospheric changes," as she put it—not hallucinations, really, but alterations of temporality, spatiality, depth perception, kinesthetics. Shimmerings in reality's fabric. Sidewalks would feel soft and porous. Audio and visual input would fall out of sync, creating a lag between the movement of a speaker's lips and the words' arrival at Jones' ears. Something was off. © 2017 The Social Justice Foundation

The Wrong Pill Can Play With Your Mind

By JAIME LOWE WHEN I was 16, I was admitted to U.C.L.A.’s neuropsychiatric institute. I’d been suffering from increasing paranoia (I thought war was imminent; I thought I would be called into battle) and lack of sleep (I paced our staircase into the early hours of morning). Most profoundly, I thought my parents were actually secret agents, wearing masks, sent to monitor my behavior. My hallucinations encompassed a wide range of cultural references — Michael Jackson, the Muppets, the Night Stalker, Bob from “Twin Peaks” and the clown from “It.” My parents told the doctors at U.C.L.A. that my behavior had been erratic for two months — I was obsessing over odd things, I wasn’t eating and I was convinced that the end of the world was on its way. In short, I was manic. I was hospitalized for almost a month, and I left the institute with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. My cure came in the form of three pink pills: 900 milligrams of lithium. It worked when I was on it. But a few years ago, my general practitioner had discovered heart-attack-level blood pressure and high creatinine measures — side effects that I couldn’t feel but were serious enough to warrant a visit to the E.R. As a result of my taking lithium, my kidneys were breaking down — I basically had a 60-year-old’s kidneys in my 37-year-old body. I was given a choice: I could stay on the lithium and get a kidney transplant eventually, or I could switch medication and risk having mania return. I chose to try a new medication. No drug could ever be as cool as lithium, a mysterious element that was present during the Big Bang and lingers throughout the galaxy as primordial stardust. Lithium has a medicinal history that dates to the Greeks and Romans, yet no doctor or researcher knows exactly how or why it works. It just does. It’s on the periodic table of elements, unpatentable and therefore cheap. Depakote, a drug officially approved for bipolar patients in the United States in the mid-1990s, has none of this cachet, and yet it’s known to be as effective as lithium in bipolar cases like mine. So my psychiatrist prescribed it to replace my pink pills. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Bringing My Own Kind of ‘Madness’ to the Office

By ERICA CROMPTON I’ve been fired more times than I care to admit. I have even more resignation letters to my name. Work and paranoid schizophrenia aren’t exactly a recipe for success. At one job I had, on the ground floor of a city office, there were bars on the windows. The bars were no doubt put in for security reasons, like all the other shops and offices on the street. But I grew increasingly convinced that they were placed there just for me as part of a grand conspiracy. I have always felt that people are setting me up for heinous crimes or that I’ve committed one that I can’t remember and that the police are spying on me to gather evidence. With the windows I felt they’d been fitted by a stranger who knew of me, sometime before I started work, to send me the message that I would soon “be behind bars.” Seeing a policeman on the street outside the office or hearing a helicopter fly by would set my heart racing. I was convinced they’d finally come for me. I didn’t last long in that office. The sedative effects of my medications also mean I often oversleep and get into the office late. Really late. Sometimes 90 minutes late. The head of my department at another job I had didn’t seem to mind, as I always made the time up in the evening. But colleagues did mind, others in the office told me, including the girl who sat next to me. Back then, I wasn’t open about having schizophrenia. I didn’t want to stigmatize myself by giving reasons for my tardiness. So I assume people just thought I was lazy. Far too often, I would regard an off-the-cuff remark by a work colleague, a roll of the eyes when I offered an idea at a meeting, or a sigh when I arrived late, as aggressive and threatening, an insult directed toward me. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Doctors thought she was psychotic, but her body was attacking her brain

By Michael Nedelman, CNN (CNN)Emily Gavigan was convinced that a nearby truck was following her. Someone was after her. She was a sophomore at the University of Scranton in January 2009 when the "bizarre" behavior began, said her father, Bill. Her parents noticed that she had been rambling, not making any sense. At one point, she called her family and friends to warn them: Something terrible was going to happen to all of them. "Emily was like a different person. We didn't know who she was," Bill Gavigan said. "We had gone from having this daughter who was perfectly normal, happy, vibrant ... with a bright future ahead. "All of a sudden, this all came crashing down." Then, one day, Gavigan disappeared. "We didn't know where she was for more than 24 hours," her father said. She had gotten in her car and driven from Pennsylvania to New Jersey with no money. She went right through toll booths without paying. But she eventually found her way back to her grandparents' house, still convinced that she was being followed. Her grandfather peered out the window, looking for something suspicious. But they soon realized there was no one after her. "I get emotional when I think about it," said Gavigan's grandfather Joseph Chiumento. Her parents showed up and took her to the hospital. Emily Gavigan began exhibiting odd behavior when she was 19, which doctors mistook for a mental illness. Emily Gavigan began exhibiting odd behavior when she was 19, which doctors mistook for a mental illness. Say, 'I love you, dad' Doctors initially thought Gavigan had a mental illness. She spent time in different psychiatric facilities, which made her family uneasy. One in particular reminded her father of the movie "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." "They just kept trying medication after medication after medication, and none of it worked," Bill Gavigan said. Things kept getting worse. There was some numbness in her face and hands, and she would develop seizures. © 2016 Cable News Network.

Are Some Psychiatric Disorders a pH Problem?

By Diana Kwon Sometimes our brains are on acid—literally. A main source of these temporary surges is the carbon dioxide that is constantly released as the brain breaks down sugar to generate energy, which subsequently turns into acid. Yet the chemistry in a healthy human brain tends to be relatively neutral, because standard processes including respiration—which expels carbon dioxide—help maintain the status quo. Any fleeting acidity spikes usually go unnoticed. But a growing body of work has suggested that for some people, even slight changes in this balance may be linked with certain psychiatric conditions including panic disorders. New findings this month provide additional evidence that such links are real—and suggest they may extend to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. There were earlier hints that this was the case: Post-mortem studies of dozens of human brains revealed lower pH (higher acidity levels) in patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Multiple studies in the past few decades have found that when people with panic disorders are exposed to air with a higher-than-normal concentration of carbon dioxide—which can combine with water in the body to form carbonic acid—they are more likely to experience panic attacks than healthy individuals are. Other research has revealed that the brains of people with panic disorders produce elevated levels of lactate—an acidic source of fuel that is constantly produced and consumed in the energy-hungry brain. © 2017 Scientific American

Anyone Can Be Trained to Hallucinate, and That’s Teaching Scientists About Perception

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

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 9: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Link ID: 23981 - Posted: 08.22.2017

Do You Hear What I Hear? Auditory Hallucinations Yield Clues to Perception

By Knvul Sheikh At his psychiatric clinic in the Connecticut Mental Health Center, Albert Powers sees people every day who experience hallucinations. The condition is often a hallmark of psychosis, occurring in an estimated 60 to 70 percent of people with schizophrenia, and in a subset of those diagnosed with bipolar disorder, dementia and major depression. Auditory hallucinations are the most common type experienced. Some patients report hearing voices; others hear phantom melodies. But increasing evidence over the past two decades suggests hearing imaginary sounds is not always a sign of mental illness. Healthy people also experience hallucinations. Drugs, sleep deprivation and migraines can often trigger the illusion of sounds or sights that are not there. Even in the absence of these predisposing factors, approximately one in 20 people hear voices or see visual hallucinations at least once in their lifetimes, according to mental health surveys conducted by the World Health Organization. Whereas most researchers have focused on the brain abnormalities that occur in people suffering at an extreme end of this spectrum, Powers and his colleagues have turned their attention to milder cases in a new study. “We wanted to understand what’s common and what’s protecting people who hallucinate but who don’t require psychological intervention,” he says. Normally when the brain receives sensory information, such as sound, it actively works to fill in information to make sense of what it hears—its location, volume and other details. “The brain is a predictive machine,” explains Anissa Abi-Dargham, a psychiatrist at Stony Brook University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the new work. “It is constantly scanning the environment and relying on previous knowledge to fill in the gaps [in] what we perceive.” Because our expectations are usually accurate, the system generally works well. For example, we are able to hear the sound of running water or the murmur of a friend talking across the room and then react in an instant, Abi-Dargham says. © 2017 Scientific American,

Mice Show Signs of Mental Disorder After Injections of Cells from Schizophrenia Patient

By Sharon Begley, STAT Lab mice whose brains were injected with cells from schizophrenia patients became afraid of strangers, slept fitfully, felt intense anxiety, struggled to remember new things, and showed other signs of the mental disorder, scientists reported on Thursday. The latest advance in “chimeras,” animals created by transplanting cells from one species into another, demonstrated the value of the technique, scientists not involved in the study said, but is likely to draw renewed attention to a controversial field that opponents see as deeply immoral and undermining the natural order. Under a 2015 moratorium, the National Institutes of Health does not fund research that transplants human stem cells into early embryos of other animals. When the NIH asked for public comment on lifting the moratorium, it received nearly 20,000 responses, almost all objecting to “grossly unethical research”; many mentioned Frankenstein. But the new study, in Cell Stem Cell, injected human cells into newborn mice, not embryos. It received funding from the NIH as well as private foundations, to unravel how brain development goes off the rails to cause schizophrenia. Although the prevailing idea has been that the devastating disease, which strikes some 1 percent of U.S. adults, is primarily caused by something going wrong with neurons, the scientists suspected the brain’s support cells, called glia. © 2017 Scientific American,

Mental Illness Is Common, but Long-Lasting Mental Illness Is Rare

By Aaron Reuben, Jonathan Schaefer Most of us know at least one person who has struggled with a bout of debilitating mental illness. Despite their familiarity, however, these kinds of episodes are typically considered unusual, and even shameful. New research, from our lab and from others around the world, however, suggests mental illnesses are so common that almost everyone will develop at least one diagnosable mental disorder at some point in their lives. Most of these people will never receive treatment, and their relationships, job performance and life satisfaction will likely suffer. Meanwhile the few individuals who never seem to develop a disorder may offer psychology a new avenue of study, allowing researchers to ask what it takes to be abnormally, enduringly, mentally well. Epidemiologists have long known that, at any given point in time, roughly 20 to 25 percent of the population suffers from a mental illness, which means they experience psychological distress severe enough to impair functioning at work, school or in their relationships. Extensive national surveys, conducted from the mid-1990s through the early 2000s, suggested that a much higher percentage, close to half the population, would experience a mental illness at some point in their lives. These surveys were large, involving thousands of participants representative of the U.S. in age, sex, social class and ethnicity. They were also, however, retrospective, which means they relied on survey respondents’ accurate recollection of feelings and behaviors months, years and even decades in the past. Human memory is fallible, and modern science has demonstrated that people are notoriously inconsistent reporters about their own mental health history, leaving the final accuracy of these studies up for debate. Of further concern, up to a third of the people contacted by the national surveys failed to enroll in the studies. Follow-up tests suggested that these “nonresponders” tended to have worse mental health. © 2017 Scientific American

Does Living in a City Make You Psychotic?

By Sharon Begley, STAT Living in a city makes people develop schizophrenia. Tell me more: The claim is not quite that stark, but it’s close. For a study published last week, researchers interviewed 2,063 British twins (some identical, some not) at age 18 about “psychotic experiences” they’d had since age 12—such as feeling paranoid, hearing voices, worrying their food might be poisoned, and having “unusual or frightening” thoughts. Among those who lived in the most densely populated large cities, 34 percent reported such experiences; 24 percent of adolescents in rural areas did. The twins are part of a long-running study that has followed them from birth in 1994-95, so the researchers— led by Helen Fisher of King’s College London and Candice Odgers of Duke University—also knew the teens’ family income, parents’ education, where they lived, and more. Conclusion: 18-year-olds raised in big cities were 67 percent more likely to have had psychotic experiences, the researchers reported in Schizophrenia Bulletin. They then used standard statistics tools to account for possible psychosis-related factors other than cities per se. Cities have more people who are poor and uneducated, which are risk factors for schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis, so they controlled for socioeconomic status. Family psychiatric history raises the risk of an individual’s developing psychosis, and since there is some evidence that people with mental illness move to cities, which have more treatment facilities, the researchers controlled for this, too. They also controlled for drug use, some forms of which are more common in urban than rural areas. These calculations brought the extra risk of psychosis among urban teens down to 43 percent. © 2017 Scientific American,

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