Health & WellnessS


Magnify

Ignorance May Not Be Bliss, Brain Response To Information About The Future Suggests

New research demonstrates that single neurons in the reward center of the brain process not only primitive rewards but also more abstract, cognitive rewards related to the quest for information about the future. The study, published by Cell Press in the July 16 issue of the journal Neuron, enhances our understanding of learning and suggests that current theories of reward should be revised to include the effect of information seeking.

"The desire to know what the future holds is a powerful motivator in everyday life, but we know little about how this desire is created by neurons in the brain," says lead study author Dr. Ethan S. Bromberg-Martin from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Dr. Bromberg-Martin and coauthor, Dr. Okihide Hikosaka, investigated whether dopamine-releasing neurons associated with processing basic primitive rewards, such as food and water, are also involved in processing more abstract rewards.

People

The Influences Of Peers, Parents On Self Identity Confirmed By fMRI

Ask middle-school students if they are popular or make friends easily, they likely will depend on social comparisons with their peers for an answer. Such reliance on the perceived opinions of others, or reflected self-appraisals, has long been assumed, but new evidence supporting this claim has now been found in the teen brain.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers looked at adolescent and young-adult brain activity related to both direct self-appraisals, such as "Do I think I'm smart?" and perceptions of others' opinions -- reflected self-appraisals: "Do I think my friend thinks I'm lonely?"

During direct self-appraisals, researchers found that adolescents show more activity than adults in neural networks tied to self-perception (medial prefrontal and parietal cortices) and in areas linked to social cognition (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, temporal-parietal junction and posterior superior temporal sulcus). The results, said lead author Jennifer H. Pfeifer, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, suggest that adolescent self-perceptions depend heavily on others.

Magnify

Knowing Me, Myself, And I: What Psychology Can Contribute To Self-Knowledge

How well do you know yourself? It's a question many of us struggle with, as we try to figure out how close we are to who we actually want to be. In a new report in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologist Timothy D. Wilson from the University of Virginia describes theories behind self-knowledge (that is, how people form beliefs about themselves), cites challenges psychologists encounter while studying it, and offers ways we can get to know ourselves a little better.

The study of self-knowledge has tended to focus on how accurate we are at determining our own internal states, such as our emotions, personality, and attitudes. However, Wilson notes that self-knowledge can be broadened to include memory, like recalling how we felt in the past, and prospection, predicting how we will feel in the future. Knowing who we were and who we will be are as important to self-knowledge as knowing who we are in the present. And while a number of researchers are conducting studies that are applicable to those various facets of self-knowledge, Wilson observes that there is not much communication between them, one reason this field is challenging to investigate.

Health

The Mothers Act: Disease Mongering Campaign - Part I

Image
© Unknown
The Mothers Act represents the ultimate example of disease mongering at its worst because the eight-year attempt to pass this federal legislation has evolved into profiteering never before exhibited so conspicuously.

Disease mongering "is the selling of sickness that widens the boundaries of illness and grows the markets for those who sell and deliver treatments," according to Ray Moyniahan and David Henry in the April 11, 2006 paper in PLoS Med, titled, "The Fight against Disease Mongering."

"It is exemplified most explicitly by many pharmaceutical industry -- funded disease-awareness campaigns -- more often designed to sell drugs than to illuminate or to inform or educate about the prevention of illness or the maintenance of health," the authors explain.

"Drug companies are by no means the only players in this drama," they point out. "Through the work of investigative journalists, we have learned how informal alliances of pharmaceutical corporations, public relations companies, doctors' groups, and patient advocates promote these ideas to the public and policymakers -- often using mass media to push a certain view of a particular health problem."

Attention

Eating High Levels Of Fructose Impairs Memory In Rats

Image
© iStockphoto/Darko Radanovic
Researchers at Georgia State University have found that diets high in fructose - a type of sugar found in most processed foods and beverages - impaired the spatial memory of adult rats.

Amy Ross, a graduate student in the lab of Marise Parent, associate professor at Georgia State's Neuroscience Institute and Department of Psychology, fed a group of Sprague-Dawley rats a diet where fructose represented 60 percent of calories ingested during the day.

She placed the rats in a pool of water to test their ability to learn to find a submerged platform, which allowed them to get out of the water. She then returned them to the pool two days later with no platform present to see if the rats could remember to swim to the platform's location.

People

Survey: 25% of Israelis suffering from mental distress

Study shows about quarter of population experienced mental problems, but only half sought professional help

About a quarter of the population in Israel had suffered from mental distress in 2007, but only about half of those who experienced problems reported seeking professional help, a new report on the subject published by the Myers JDC Brookdale Institute revealed.

The survey aimed at examining the patterns of seeking care ahead of the reform of the mental-health system under which it will transfer responsibility for providing mental-health services to the health plans.

The study showed that the rates of mental distress were particularly high among the Arab population (38%), the chronically ill (33%), low-income respondents (33%), the elderly (33%), and women (31%).

Bulb

Autism: It's the Environment, Not Just Better Diagnosis

Image
California's sevenfold increase in autism cannot be explained by changes in doctors' diagnoses and most likely is due to environmental exposures, University of California scientists reported Thursday.

The scientists who authored the new study advocate a nationwide shift in autism research to focus on an array of potential factors in the environment that babies and fetuses are exposed to, including pesticides, viruses and chemicals in household products.

"It's time to start looking for the environmental culprits responsible for the remarkable increase in the rate of autism in California," said Irva Hertz-Picciotto, an epidemiology professor at University of California, Davis who led the study.

Health

Parkinson's linked to high levels of pesticide in the body

Parkinson's sufferers are more likely to have significant levels of a pesticide in their body than healthy people, a new study has found.

Researchers believe that the chemical could act as a "trigger" to people already prone to develop the disease.

They hope that testing for the pesticide in the blood could someday identify patients at risk of developing the devastating neurological condition.

Around 120,000 people in Britain have Parkinson's, which occurs when nerve cells in the part of the brain that controls muscle movement become damaged or die.

Researchers found the pesticide beta-HCH in 76 per cent of people with Parkinson's, compared with 40 percent of healthy controls and 30 percent of those with Alzheimer's.

Cell Phone

Israeli study sees link between oral cancer, cell phones

cell phone use
© Photo: Abraham Hyhatt / flickrIsraeli researchers are linking increased cases of salivary gland cancer to the use of cell phones
A recent study documents a sharp rise in the incidence of salivary gland cancer in Israel that researchers believe may be linked to the use of mobile phones.

The study was commissioned by the Israel Dental Association and directed by Avi Zini of the community dentistry department at the Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Dental Medicine. The study included examination of the incidence of oral cavity cancers in Israel from 1970 to 2006. Among salivary gland cancer cases, researchers found a worrying rise in the number of cases of malignant growth in parotid glands - the salivary gland located under the ear, near the location where cell phones are held during conversations.

By contrast, the incidence of salivary cancers in glands of the lower mouth - the so-called submandular and sublingual salivary glands - remained stable. From 1980-2002 the number of cases of parotid salivary cancer held steady at around 25 per year. The number of cases rose dramatically in the five years after to 70 cases per year.

Health

Fetuses have short term memory at 30 weeks of development

Image
© Aramando Babani / EPA
Fetuses can remember, potentially long enough to shed light on their neural development.

Dutch researchers have found that, at 30 weeks of development, fetuses have a memory of 10 minutes. At 34 weeks old, they can remember events for four weeks. The findings help explain central nervous system development -- and how fetuses may react if that growth is abnormal.

In the study, researchers in the Netherlands applied a sound-and-vibration stimulus to the abdomens of 93 pregnant women. The stimulus lasted for one second and was repeated every 30 seconds, at a location just above the fetus' leg. The fetuses ranged from 30 weeks to 38 weeks.

At first, the fetus would make a startled-like movement, says study coauthor Dr. Jan Nijhuis, director of the Centre for Genetics, Reproduction and Child Health at Maastricht University Medical Centre in the Netherlands. Eventually though, it would stop reacting. The researchers then counted the number of stimuli before the fetus stopped responding.