Brain & mental disorder research

So are you saying they aren't schizophrenic UNTIL they're medicated?

Because I can tell you, that's what you're saying.

Question...you have a brain disorder, don't you?

no, I am saying there is no physical sign of any definitive brain abnormality in people prone to psychotic states but there is clear evidence of physical brain abnormalities in people treated with nercoleptic drugs and these drugs may well be the reason for increased seizures in so called schizophrenics and without questions these drugs can in fact cause psychotic states ..this is not an opinion it is in fact that is that is not in dispute and is included in the list of possible side effects...no I have no brain disorder and have never taken an kind of medications ..I have however worked as an advocate for people being forced medication and under out patient status after having a loved one suffer a psychotic episode and have been very involved for many years in this time the only people I have ever seen or heard of being cured of schizophrenia, who have gone on to have a completely normal life free of any medications and never relapsing has been through the work of this great man I had the privilege of knowing may he rest in peace

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgUvAVQbxDY]Mother cures son with schizophrenia with Dr. Abram Hoffer's niacin therapy - YouTube[/ame]
 
Last edited:
Oh, ok. I thought I read that you were schizophrenic or something, I don't remember.

I'm not sold on the meds either, I've seen the damage they do as well.
 
Granny suspects Uncle Ferd hooked onna Internet, he alla time goin' to dem nekid fat girl sites...
:eusa_shifty:
Web addicts have brain changes, research suggests
11 January 2012 - Web addicts have brain changes similar to those hooked on drugs or alcohol, preliminary research suggests.
Experts in China scanned the brains of 17 young web addicts and found disruption in the way their brains were wired up. They say the discovery, published in Plos One, could lead to new treatments for addictive behaviour. Internet addiction is a clinical disorder marked by out-of-control internet use. A research team led by Hao Lei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan carried out brain scans of 35 men and women aged between 14 and 21. Seventeen of them were classed as having internet addiction disorder (IAD) on the basis of answering yes to questions such as, "Have you repeatedly made unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back or stop Internet use?"

Specialised MRI brain scans showed changes in the white matter of the brain - the part that contains nerve fibres - in those classed as being web addicts, compared with non-addicts. There was evidence of disruption to connections in nerve fibres linking brain areas involved in emotions, decision making, and self-control. Dr Hao Lei and colleagues write in Plos One: "Overall, our findings indicate that IAD has abnormal white matter integrity in brain regions involving emotional generation and processing, executive attention, decision making and cognitive control. "The results also suggest that IAD may share psychological and neural mechanisms with other types of substance addiction and impulse control disorders."

Prof Gunter Schumann, chair in biological psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London, said similar findings have been found in video game addicts. He told the BBC: "For the first time two studies show changes in the neuronal connections between brain areas as well as changes in brain function in people who are frequently using the internet or video games."

Commenting on the Chinese study, Dr Henrietta Bowden-Jones, consultant psychiatrist and honorary senior lecturer at Imperial College London, said the research was "groundbreaking". She added: "We are finally being told what clinicians suspected for some time now, that white matter abnormalities in the orbito-frontal cortex and other truly significant brain areas are present not only in addictions where substances are involved but also in behavioural ones such as internet addiction." She said further studies with larger numbers of subjects were needed to confirm the findings.

BBC News - Web addicts have brain changes, research suggests
 
Oh gawd- something else that we will end up paying disability payments for, lol.

On a serious note, are they saying that internet usage causes these changes, or just that there's a correlation. I would guess the latter to be the case, not the former.
 
Uncle Ferd says dat's why Granny gets cantankerous at times - she's nuts...
:eusa_eh:
Government survey finds that 5 percent of Americans suffer from a ‘serious mental illness’
Thursday, January 19,`12: About 20 percent of American adults suffer some sort of mental illness each year, and about 5 percent experience a serious disorder that disrupts work, family or social life, according to a government report released Thursday.
The annual National Survey on Drug Use and Health sketches a now-familiar picture of a country where mental illness is common and the demand for treatment high. Mental illness is most prevalent in women, young adults, the unemployed and people with low incomes. Drug and alcohol abuse is more than twice as common in people with mental illness than those without it. About 4 percent of adults contemplate suicide each year. According to the study, slightly less than half the people with any mental illness — and only 60 percent of those with serious, disabling ones — get treatment each year. Whites and Native Americans are more likely to get treatment than blacks, Hispanics or Asians.

In all, about 14 percent of American adults receive some sort of behavioral care each year — and one in five said he or she wanted more, the survey found. Of the people reporting an “unmet need” for mental-health care, about 40 percent said they couldn’t afford it. Prescription medicine was the most common treatment, used by 12 percent of adults. Between 2002 and 2010, the percentage of adults getting outpatient counseling fell slightly (to 7 percent), while the fraction of adults using a prescription drug went up. The findings were drawn from interviews with about 68,500 randomly selected Americans living at homes, dormitories or shelters in 2010. It did not include people living on the street, active-duty members of the military, prisoners or hospital patients. “This is a good picture of what the households in the country really look like,” said Pete Delany, an official of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the agency that oversees the survey.

The survey was face to face, although the interview subjects answered many of the questions on a computer screen, a technique shown to increase candor about touchy subjects. The surveyors were not mental health professionals, although a sample of respondents were interviewed in greater detail by such people. The questions were designed to uncover a range of problems, such as depression, anxiety, psychosis and adjustment disorders. Although drug and alcohol abuse qualify as mental disorders in psychiatry’s diagnostic manual, they weren’t considered as such in this survey. That will allow researchers to see the extent to which substance abuse and specific mental illnesses occur simultaneously.

Among the 46 million people age 18 and older who had a mental illness in 2010, 20 percent also met the criteria for substance abuse. For people ages 18 to 25, the rate was 32 percent. About 8 percent of Native Americans had both mental illness and substance abuse — twice the rate seen in blacks and whites. “These should be taken as upper limits only,” Allen Frances, a retired professor of psychiatry at Duke University, said of the numbers in the survey. “I am skeptical that rates this high make sense.” Frances oversaw the revision of the profession’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from 1987 to 1994. He said surveys generally lack the ability to judge the severity of symptoms, which is essential to deciding whether something qualifies as an illness.

Daniel J. Carlat, a Massachusetts psychiatrist whose 2010 book “Unhinged: The Trouble With Psychiatry” criticized the profession’s overreliance on prescription drugs, agreed “that there is a kind of alarmist quality to these reports.” The disorders found could include spider-phobia and staying upset for a long time after arguing with one’s spouse. “There is a stigma about ‘mental illness’ that as soon as you hear the term people assume that it’s something quite severe. The nuances of this type of data tend to be lost on people,” he said. He added, however, that he doesn’t doubt that 5 percent of the population has a serious mental disorder.

Source
 
From the link, I find the numbers astounding. :(
Have we really gotten to the point that we can't maintain a functional mental status anymore, in better numbers than this?

In all, about 14 percent of American adults receive some sort of behavioral care each year — and one in five said he or she wanted more, the survey found. Of the people reporting an “unmet need” for mental-health care, about 40 percent said they couldn’t afford it. Prescription medicine was the most common treatment, used by 12 percent of adults. Between 2002 and 2010, the percentage of adults getting outpatient counseling fell slightly (to 7 percent), while the fraction of adults using a prescription drug went up. The findings were drawn from interviews with about 68,500 randomly selected Americans living at homes, dormitories or shelters in 2010. It did not include people living on the street, active-duty members of the military, prisoners or hospital patients. “This is a good picture of what the households in the country really look like,” said Pete Delany, an official of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the agency that oversees the survey.
 
How many times do you hear the words "researchers say" and it goes in one ear and out the other? The truth is that "researchers say" whatever their lavish federal grant pays them to say. Most of the time it's B.S.
 
I suspect a mental illness for various reasons, but ultimately, they are based on one or other brain trauma. In working with large-scale trams brain people and see their tremendous changes in personality, the result of these traumatic events, I believe that all "mental illness" deviation from "normal" brain activity results.
 
Mental illness is real and can be devastating to the person and society. To pretend it doesn't exist IS a mental illness in itself! Many famous people from Lincoln to Churchill and others battled with that their entire lives. It doesn't mean people cannot do well and accomplish and function. What it does mean is that is real and that it makes sense to study and treat.
 
New hope in regenerating brain cells?...
:eusa_eh:
Skin transformed into brain cells
30 January 2012 - Skin cells have been converted directly into cells which develop into the main components of the brain, by researchers studying mice in California.
The experiment, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, skipped the middle "stem cell" stage in the process. The researchers said they were "thrilled" at the potential medical uses. Far more tests are needed before the technique could be used on human skin. Stem cells, which can become any other specialist type of cell from brain to bone, are thought to have huge promise in a range of treatments. Many trials are taking place, such as in stroke patients or specific forms of blindness.

One of the big questions for the field is where to get the cells from. There are ethical concerns around embryonic stem cells and patients would need to take immunosuppressant drugs as any stem cell tissue would not match their own. An alternative method has been to take skin cells and reprogram them into "induced" stem cells. These could be made from a patient's own cells and then turned into the cell type required, however, the process results in cancer-causing genes being activated.

Direct approach

The research group, at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, is looking at another option - converting a person's own skin cells into specialist cells, without creating "induced" stem cells. It has already transformed skin cells directly into neurons. This study created "neural precursor" cells, which can develop into three types of brain cell: neurons, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes. These precursor cells have the advantage that, once created, they can be grown in a laboratory into very large numbers. This could be critical if the cells were to be used in any therapy. Brain cells and skin cells contain the same genetic information, however, the genetic code is interpreted differently in each. This is controlled by "transcription factors". The scientists used a virus to infect skin cells with three transcription factors known to be at high levels in neural precursor cells.

After three weeks about one in 10 of the cells became neural precursor cells. Lead researcher Prof Marius Wernig said: "We are thrilled about the prospects for potential medical use of these cells. "We've shown the cells can integrate into a mouse brain and produce a missing protein important for the conduction of electrical signal by the neurons. "More work needs to be done to generate similar cells from human skin cells and assess their safety and efficacy." Dr Deepak Srivastava, who has researched converting cells into heart muscle, said the study: "Opens the door to consider new ways to regenerate damaged neurons using cells surrounding the area of injury."

BBC News - Skin transformed into brain cells
 
Scientists unlocking secrets of child brain tumors...
:cool:
Genetic mutations behind fatal brain cancer in kids identified
Tuesday 31st January, 2012 - An international research team has identified two genetic mutations responsible for up to 40 per cent of glioblastomas in children - a fatal cancer of the brain that is unresponsive to chemo and radiotherapy treatment.
The mutations were found to be involved in DNA regulation, which could explain the resistance to traditional treatments, and may have significant implications on the treatment of other cancers. The finding of the team led by the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI MUHC) could change the way pediatric cancers are treated in the future. Using the knowledge and advanced technology of the team from the McGill University and GEnome QuEbec Innovation Centre, the researchers identified two mutations in an important gene known as the histone H3.3.

This gene, one of the guardians of our genetic heritage, is key in modulating the expression of our genes. "These mutations prevent the cells from differentiating normally and help protect the genetic information of the tumor, making it less sensitive to radiotherapy and chemotherapy," said Dr. Nada Jabado, hematologist-oncologist at The Montreal Children's Hospital of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) and principal investigator of the study.

"This research helps explain the ineffectiveness of conventional treatments against cancer in children and adolescents - we've been failing to hit the right spot. "It is clear now that glioblastoma in children is due to different molecular mechanisms than those in adults, and should not be treated in the same way. Importantly, we now know where to start focusing our efforts and treatments instead of working in the dark," added Dr. Jabado, who is also an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at McGill University.

Inappropriate regulation of this gene has been observed in other cancers such as colon, pancreatic, lymphoma, leukemia and pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer, and future research could therefore reveal improved treatments for these diseases. "What is significant here is that for the first time in humans we have identified a mutation in one of the most important genes that regulates and protects our genetic information. This is the irrefutable proof that our genome, if modified, can lead to cancer and probably other diseases. What genomics has shown us today is only the beginning," Dr. Jabado said. The study was published this week in the journal Nature.

Genetic mutations behind fatal brain cancer in kids identified
 
This is most interesting... If things were to come about so that those whose mental health was in question and/or being studied were not boxed up under labels to merely drug up but to educate and be educated... it would change a great deal of how things have been done. The potential is profound, for the hospitals and institutions to become learning centers and teaching facilities for their clients and/or patients. It's exciting, the computer technology that can be utilized in the treatments/informing of a multitude of things. The computer programmers/programming and such things have really opened many doors... There are only more to be opened! *he*arts*


brainalin.com
 
Uncle Ferd gonna try hookin' Granny up to a car battery...
:eusa_eh:
Study: Electric boost helps brain to learn better
Wed Feb 8,`12 – People learned better when a key part of their brains got mild zaps of electricity, a finding that may someday help Alzheimer's patients keep more of their memories.
In a small but tantalizing study, participants played a video game in which they learned the locations of stores in a virtual city. They recalled the locations better if they learned them while receiving a painless boost from tiny electrodes buried deep inside their brains. In the future, that strategy might help curb memory loss for people in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, suggested Dr. Itzhak Fried, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, Los Angeles. But he cautioned that the results were preliminary. Using implanted electrodes to treat brain disease is hardly new. Such "deep-brain stimulation" has been used for about a decade for Parkinson's disease and some other disorders. Researchers are also testing it for depression.

Some 80,000 or more people worldwide have had stimulation units implanted, mostly for Parkinson's. Fried and colleagues reported the new work in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. It was financed by the federal government and the Dana Foundation. "I think it's a terrific paper," said Dr. Andres Lozano, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Toronto, who didn't participate in the work but is studying the approach in Alzheimer's patients. The new work shows stimulation can modify the workings of brain circuits that control memory in people, he said. But like Fried, he cautioned that the research was still in the early stages. "Whether it will translate into something useful, we do not know," he said, noting that years of additional study would be needed. "You don't want to do brain surgery on people unless you have a pretty clear idea you're going to make them better," Lozano said. Deep-brain electrodes are implanted through holes drilled in the skull.

The study participants were seven epilepsy patients who had the electrodes implanted to help surgeons identify the source of their seizures. Fried and colleagues took advantage of that to stimulate a part of the brain that's key to learning. The patients could not feel the stimulation. The patients played the video game on a laptop at their beds. Using a joystick, they took the role of taxi drivers in a small town consisting of four blocks by four blocks. They searched for passengers and dropped them off at any of six stores they were asked to find. The electrical stimulation was turned on while they learned the locations of some stores, but not others.

Testing showed that the stimulation made a difference. When given a store to find, the patients took a more direct route to it, and got there faster, if they had learned its location during a time of stimulation. When researchers looked at how much extra wandering they did beyond the shortest possible path, they found that stimulation reduced this excess by an average of 64 percent. The patients were tested only a few minutes after learning the store locations, so it's not yet clear how long the effect can last, Fried said. Researchers will also have to see if stimulation helps for other kinds of knowledge, he said.

Source
 
Epilepsy surgery works in 50% of patients...
:cool:
Study: Epilepsy Surgery Is Effective
February 10, 2012 - No seizures reported in half the patients decades later
A new study of epilepsy patients who had surgery to treat their illness decades ago indicates that seizures can be controlled safely and effectively with surgery. The study's author suggests surgery could be used more often to treat epileptic seizures.

The story begins about 10 years ago, when neurosurgeon Matthew Smyth came to the Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis, Missouri, to focus on epilepsy surgery. "And one of my predecessors, Dr. Sidney Goldring, used to perform these surgeries. And I inherited a large stack of three loose-leaf binders filled with about 350 records from his epilepsy surgery patients and realized that many of those patients could still be identified and located and interviewed."

Smyth and his colleagues tracked down about one-third of those patients who had epilepsy surgery between 1967 and 1990. After all those decades, about half the patients were still completely free of seizures. Previous studies had similar results, but they followed patients for only for about five or ten years after surgery. "So the fact that it was durable and prolonged for 20, 30, even 40 years in some cases, was meaningful new information for us," Smyth said. The patients were also asked to complete a 31-point quality of life questionnaire, and "about 80 percent of the patients had improved quality of life by this measurement tool that we used," he added.

Still, surgery - especially brain surgery - is a scary prospect. "As you can imagine, many families and patients are frightened by the idea of epilepsy surgery, or any kind of surgery. But again, with modern techniques, it's a very safe approach to these patients." There are alternatives to surgery in a variety of anti-seizure drugs. But these drugs can have significant side effects, they're very expensive, and Smith says that in about one-third of patients, they just don't work.

Source
 
DSM-5 Approves New Fad Diagnosis For Child Psychiatry:The DSM-5 Scientific Review Group was the last hope for an eleventh hour DSM-5 save. This hope recently died. Its first decision makes clear that the group will be no more than an easy rubber stamp willing to approve even the worst ideas dreamed up by the DSM-5 work groups. Its quick acceptance of Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD, also known as Temper Dysregulation) shows that just about anything can make it through this sham review process. Watch out for yet another fad sparked by child psychiatry.

A brief update may be in order for those of you not fully up to speed on the arcana of DSM-5 organizational functioning. The appointment of the DSM-5 scientific review group was a belated response to criticisms that many of the DSM-5 proposals did not have a reasoned rationale or deep scientific support; were reckless and radical; and would trigger diagnostic inflation and excessive use of medication.

DSM-5 Approves New Fad Diagnosis For Child Psychiatry: Antipsychotic Use Likely to Rise
 
SAN DIEGO - Not long ago, autism was among the rarest of disorders, afflicting only one child in every 2,000-5,000. This changed dramatically with the publication in 1994 of DSM IV (the manual of psychiatric diagnosis widely used around the world). Soon, rates exploded to about 1 per 100. And a large study in South Korea recently reported a further jump to 1 in 38 - an astounding 3% of the general population was labeled autistic. What is causing this epidemic and where are we headed?

This dramatic swing from under- to overdiagnosis has been fueled by widespread publicity, Internet support and advocacy groups, and the fact that expensive school services are provided only for those who have received the diagnosis. The Korean study, for example, was financed by an autism advocacy group, which could barely contain its enthusiasm at the high rates that were reported.

The Autism Generation – Opinion – ABC Ramp Up (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
 
New stroke drug could limit permanent disability...
:cool:
Drug Might Limit Stroke Brain Damage
March 02, 2012 - An experimental drug could help protect against brain damage during a stroke, reducing the risk of permanent disability.
An experimental drug could protect stroke victims from brain damage. The treatment has shown very promising results in animal tests, and early results with humans are also encouraging. There is currently only one effective treatment for stroke. Tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) can dissolve the blood clots that cause a stroke. But it has to be given very soon after symptoms appear, and doctors first have to make sure that the stroke was not caused by a ruptured blood vessel, in which case tPA can make the situation a lot worse.

Michael Tymianski and his team, at the Toronto Western Hospital Research Institute in Canada, devised a different kind of stroke treatment, a drug known as a PSD-95 inhibitor. It works by blocking a key protein in the chain reaction of events that leads to brain-cell death. "So by inhibiting this protein, by having a drug that binds to it so the protein can't do what it usually does, we prevent the formation of a toxic free radical called nitric oxide. And as a result of that, brain cells that are treated with this drug become more resilient to a stroke," he said.

In a new scientific paper published online in Nature, Tymianski has published the results of research on macaques - primates with complex brains much like ours. "Animals that were treated with the placebo drug got very large strokes and were very disabled from their strokes. But animals that received the drug had much smaller strokes on their MRI scans and they were neurologically much better off."

Those encouraging results have already led to human trials, and Tymianski says "the top-line results of that particular trial have already been announced at the International Stroke Conference in New Orleans in February. So we already know that when this drug is given to humans the same way that it's given to the primates and at the same doses, it reduces stroke damage in the human brain." Tymianski says that, unlike current treatment with tPA, the PSD-95 inhibitor can help patients with hemorrhagic strokes, which are caused by a ruptured blood vessel, and it may even be useful in treating other brain injuries as well.

Source

See also:

Study Links Falls to Hearing Loss
March 02, 2012 - Seniors with hearing loss more likely to fall
Researchers have found an intriguing link between the risk of falling and hearing loss. Among aging populations, falls are a major health hazard. A stumble that might lead to just a painful bruise in a younger person can result in a broken hip, disability, and even death in older adults. Researchers analyzed data from an ongoing U.S. health study, called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).

Lead author Frank Lin, of Johns Hopkins University, said he and his colleague, Luigi Ferrucci of the National Institute on Aging, compared measurements of hearing loss in adults age 40-69 with participants' response to questions about any recent falls they might have had. "And what we found is that someone's hearing ability is directly related to their chances of having falls in the past year," Lin said. "For someone with just even a mild hearing loss compared to normal hearing, they basically had about a three-fold increased chance of having falls over the past year." Lin's study found a strong association, not cause-and-effect. But why might hearing loss contribute to falling? He says there are several possibilities.

Poor hearing could make people less aware of the environment around them. Or it may be linked to another function of the ear, specifically the inner ear, which isn't used just for hearing. "It actually helps you maintain balance; so it provides balance information to the brain. But in the current study, we actually accounted for someone's balance ability, and we still saw this association between someone's hearing abilities and their chances of having falls over time." Lin's findings, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, confirm several previous studies that have probed the link between hearing loss and falls.

Source
 
When drugs don't work, surgery often does...
:cool:
Surgery Helps Epilepsy Patients Stay Seizure-Free
March 09, 2012 : A new study highlights the value of treating epilepsy patients with brain surgery if they don't improve with anti-epilepsy drugs. Patients who had surgery soon after the drugs proved ineffective usually stopped having seizures.
The study involved patients who had a form of epilepsy - mesial temporal lobe epilepsy, or MTLE - that commonly resists drug treatment. Surgery is an alternative; in fact, it's been used for more than 100 years. But according to the head of the Seizure Disorder Center at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), most epilepsy patients who are not helped by medicine don't have surgery, or they wait years before they try it. "The sad fact is that those patients who are referred for surgery today - those few patients who are referred - are referred an average of 22 years after the onset of their epilepsy. And by this time it's just too late to make a difference in their lives."

Jerome Engel, Jr., is the lead author of a new study of patients who had surgery within two years after it became apparent that drugs alone weren't working. "If you operate on patients, then 85 percent in this study were seizure-free," Engel said. "And none of the patients who just continued to have medical care were seizure-free. And there was a statistically significant improvement in quality of life among those patients who had surgery" compared to those who took anti-epilepsy drugs. Memory impairment is sometimes a side effect of this surgery - which, after all, involves cutting out part of the brain. But this study was too small to be conclusive on that question. Engel says, however, that if surgery did have an impact on memory, it was outweighed by improvements in quality of life related to being seizure-free.

Engel says he hopes the results of this study will encourage doctors to consider surgery as a treatment option. "We're hoping to use the study to publicize the fact that there should not be a delay in referring patients. But not only that, the patients who continue to have seizures are at risk for all kinds of problems in the future including, as I said, premature death." Engel says only about one percent of U.S. epilepsy patients who might benefit from surgery are referred to specialized epilepsy treatment centers. But the surgery is widely used around the world, he noted, citing the example of Brazil, where officials determined that it's more cost effective to surgically treat epilepsy than pay for the ongoing costs of seizures.

Source

See also:

Children's hyperactivity, aggression cited in new study...

Sleep Breathing Disorders Linked to Behavior Problems
March 09, 2012 - Sleep-disordered breathing in children can lead to increased hyperactivity, aggressiveness and problems in relationships with other kids.
When sleeping children don't breathe properly, it can lead to serious behavioral and emotional problems, according to a new study. Sleep-disordered breathing includes a variety of conditions including snoring, mouth-breathing, and sleep apnea. An estimated one child in 10 snores regularly, and a smaller number suffer from the other conditions.

In a new study, published in Pediatrics, parents were asked about their children's breathing from infancy up to about age six. They also filled out a behavior questionnaire at ages four and seven. Researchers led by Karen Bonuck, at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York, sifted through the data.

"The central finding overall is that sleep-disordered breathing is associated with a 50 percent increase in adverse neurobehavioral outcomes," she said. Those "adverse neurobehavioral outcomes" most notably include hyperactivity, but also aggressiveness and problems in relationships with other children. Bonuck says the more significant the breathing problems were, the more serious the behavioral issues were likely to be. "What we found was the worst outcomes were seen in the children with the worst symptoms."

This isn't the first study to link children's sleep issues with behavioral problems, but it was big enough - with some 11,000 youngsters involved - to rule out other possible causes. "Before this study, certainly we knew of a lot of the adverse effects in terms of behavior, growth, cognition," she said. "The difference with our study is we studied lots of kids, we followed them for nearly six years, and these were a general population." Bonuck notes that some earlier studies tracked children for a shorter period of time, or were limited, for example, to tonsillectomy patients.

Source
 
Last edited:
Can Brains Be Repaired With Robots?...
:confused:
Ed Boyden: The brain is like a computer, and we can fix it with nanorobots
Saturday 10 March 2012 - Synthetic biology has the potential to replace or improve drug therapies for a wide range of brain disorders
Ed Boyden heads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group at MIT Media Lab. He is working on developing technologies and tools for "analysing and engineering brain circuits" – to reveal which brain neurons are involved in different cognitive processes and using this knowledge to treat brain disorders.

What is synthetic neurobiology?

The synthetic biology part is about taking molecules from the natural world and figuring how to make them into little machines that we can use to address complex brain problems. Moreover, if we can synthesise the computation of the brain and write information to it, that allows us to test our understanding of the brain and fix disorders by controlling the processes within – running a piece of software on the brain as if it is a computer.

The brain as computer… we probably shouldn't be surprised that your initial training was in electrical engineering and physics?

Training as a physicist was very helpful because you are trained to think about things both at a logical and intuitive level. Electrical engineering was great too because neurons are electrical devices and we have to think about circuits and networks. I was interested in big unknowns and the brain is one of the biggest, so building tools that allow us to regard the brain as a big electrical circuit appealed to me.

So do you have a "circuit board" of the brain?

It's not even known how many kinds of cells there are in the brain. If you were looking for a periodic table of the brain, there is no such thing. I really like to think of the brain as a computer. Let's take an iPhone – there are millions around the world, they all have the same map but at this moment they are all doing a different computations – from firing birds at walls to reading an email. You need more than just a map to understand a computation.

So how do you find out about the functions of the different neurons?
 
Last edited:

New Topics

Forum List

Back
Top