Mental Health

Today’s elderly may be mentally sharper than yesterday’s

Elderly people today might be more mentally nimble than their counterparts were a decade or two ago, according to a new European study.

Researchers found people who were in their 80s when they took thinking and memory tests in the late 2000s performed similarly to others who were tested more than 10 years earlier while in their 70s.

General health in old age is probably improving for most people, Dallas Anderson said.

“People are better educated than they used to be, their economic wellbeing may be better compared to previous groups,” Anderson said. He studies dementia at the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Maryland, and was not involved in the new study.

“All these various factors working together lead to an improved situation.”

For their study, researchers tested the thinking and memory skills of 204 elderly French men and women selected from the memory clinic of a Paris hospital between 1991 and 1997. They compared their test scores to those from 177 similar people tested at the same clinic in 2008 and 2009.

None of the participants had dementia at the time.

As expected, people under age 80 performed better on the cognitive tests than older participants during both study periods, researchers led by Jocelyne de Rotrou from Hôpital Broca in Paris wrote in PLOS One.

The 2000s group as a whole also did better than the 1990s group. Participants tested more recently scored an average 83.2 out of a possible 100 on the exams, compared to 73.5 for their earlier counterparts.

The differences were consistent across almost every component of the tests, including how well people remembered stories and pictures and their ability to separate objects into different categories.

The authors said this trend might simply parallel increased life expectancies: the longer you live, the more good years you have.

But there could be something else going on too, Anderson told Reuters Health, like improvements in the average person’s education and socioeconomic status.

These new results may also indicate that better drug regimens for controlling blood pressure and heart problems are having a positive effect on aging, he said.

“This is consistent with other studies, especially a couple already published from Europe, in Denmark and the UK,” and it’s likely happening in the U.S. as well, he said.

But Louis Bherer, who studies cognitive decline at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, believes it is too soon to generalize the Paris results more broadly.

“France is a country in which education is free and open to everyone, and where everyone has access to free medical care,” he told Reuters Health. “Generalization to countries that do not offer the same social advantages would be misleading.”

It’s possible that more careful screening for early stages of dementia in 2008 and 2009 led to a more mentally sound group, said Bherer, who didn’t participate in the new research.

As often happens, it’s hard to tell whether researchers are sensing a true trend in the population, or tools have improved and changed what they can see.

Bherer and Anderson agreed these types of studies need to be replicated before any larger conclusions can be drawn.

A recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine highlighted evidence of declining dementia rates in the U.S.

“The idea that some people will get extra years of healthy living before they get demented, that’s important,” Anderson said. “When you look at it from a public health perspective, it’s huge.”

But the trend might not continue, he said, especially in the U.S. as more obese, diabetic generations age into retirement. Their health problems could help speed mental decline.

Dementia is still a public health issue, especially with the baby boomer generation getting older, he said.

“Even if the rates go down, the numbers are still going to go up.”

Source: Reuters

Study shows how brain forms memories

Scientists have discovered how memories are stored in specific brain cells. The new study also pinpoints how these incidents are recalled.

Using a video game in which people navigate through a virtual town delivering objects to specific locations, a team of neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania and Freiburg University has discovered how brain cells that encode spatial information form “geotags” for specific memories, and are activated immediately before those memories are recalled.

Their work showed how spatial information is incorporated into memories, and why remembering an experience can quickly bring other events to mind that happened in the same place, reports the Science Daily.

“These findings provide the first direct neural evidence for the idea that the human memory system tags memories with information about where and when they were formed, and that the act of recall involves the reinstatement of these tags,” said Michael Kahana, professor of psychology in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences.

Source: Daijiworld

 

Modafinil could help fight depression

A new study has concluded that taking the drug modafinil, typically used to treat sleep disorders, in combination with antidepressants reduces the severity of depression more effectively than taking antidepressants alone.

The study, a collaboration between King’s College London and the Universities of Cambridge and East London, was published online in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

Approximately a third of depressed patients receive little or no benefit from taking antidepressants even when used in combination with psychological counselling. Furthermore, of those who respond to treatment, residual symptoms such as fatigue and trouble sleeping pose risk factors for relapse. The authors of the study believe that these individuals in particular would benefit the most from supplementing their antidepressants with modafinil.

Professor Barbara Sahakian from the University of Cambridge said, “Modafinil has actions on a number of neurotransmitter systems. This may explain why adding it to traditional anti-depressants, such as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors,has beneficial effects on the symptoms experienced by depressed patients.”

“This is good news for individuals struggling to fight depression,” said Professor Cynthia Fu who undertook the research whilst at King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, and currently at the University of East London, . “Depression affects all aspects of life, leading to occupational and social disability at varying levels. It is particularly important that people receive effective treatment as the residual symptoms – e.g. fatigue, lack of concentration etc. -can persist and have a negative impact in people’s lives.”

For the research, the scientists reviewed various studies which had examined the use of modafinil as an add-on treatment for depression. The meta-analysis involved a total of 568 patients with unipolar depression and a total of 342 patients with bipolar depression. The analysis revealed that modafinil improved the severity of depression as well as remission rates. Modafinil also showed beneficial effects on fatigue and sleepiness, with the added benefit of the comparable side effects to placebo.

The research also revealed that the symptomatic benefits of modafinil might also have implications for improving the difficulty of functioning at work sometimes caused by depression. This is significant because depression is a major cause of absenteeism (absence due to sick leave) and presenteeism (present at work but not functioning as before).

Dr Muzaffer Kaser from the University of Cambridge added: “The next step is for longer trials to evaluate potential benefits of supplementing antidepressants with modafinil more comprehensively.”

Depression is a major global health problem. According to the World Health Organisation, it is estimated to be the second leading cause of disability worldwide by 2020.Recent studies revealed that depression represents more than a third of global burden of disease attributable to mental health problems*. The annual cost of mood disorders to the UK economy is estimated to be around £16 billion**.Disability caused by depression is mainly due to the negative impact on work and social functioning and its relapsing nature.

The paper ‘Modafinil Augmentation Therapy in Unipolar and Bipolar Depression: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials’ is published in the November edition of Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. 

Source: Kings College London

Fruit flies may harbor dementia cure

Researchers have taken a significant step forward in unraveling the mechanisms of Pavlovian conditioning and understanding this will help understand how memories form and, ultimately, provide better treatments to improve memory in all ages.

“Memory is essential to our daily function and is also central to our sense of self. To a large degree, we are the sum of our experiences. When memories can no longer be retrieved or we have difficulty in forming new memories, the effects are frequently tragic. In the future, our work will enable us to have a better understanding of how human memories form,” Gregg Roman, an associate professor of biology and biochemistry at University of Houston’s said.

Roman along with his team studied the brains of fruit flies (Drosophila). Within the fly brain, Roman said, there are nerve cells that play a role in olfactory learning and memory.

Roman said they found that these particular nerve cells- the gamma lobe neurons of the mushroom bodies in the insect brain- are activated by odours. Training the flies to associate an odour with an electric shock changed how these cells responded to odours by developing a modification in gamma lobe neuron activity, known as a memory trace.

They found that training caused the gamma lobe neurons to be more weakly activated by odours that were not paired with an electric shock, while the odours paired with electric shock maintained a strong activation of these neurons. Thus, the gamma lobe neurons responded more strongly to the trained odour than to the untrained odour.

The team also showed that a specific protein – the heterotrimeric G(o) protein – is naturally involved in inhibiting gamma lobe neurons.

Roman said removing the activity of this protein only within the gamma lobe neurons resulted in a loss of the memory trace and, thus, poor learning. Therefore, inhibiting the release of neurotransmitters from these neurons through the actions of the G(o) protein is key to forming the memory trace and associative memories.

The significance of using fruit flies is that while their brain structure is much simpler with far fewer neurons, the mushroom body is analogous to the perirhinal cortex in humans, which serves the same function of sensory integration and learning.

The study was published in journal Current Biology.

Times of India

Mid life economic recessions linked to later cognitive decline

The greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression may wreak lasting neurological damage on a generation of Americans who lost jobs, homes, and even marriages — with steeper levels of cognitive decline as they age.

Older, wizened Americans recognized trouble on Sept. 28, 2008, as Congressmen rejected a massive Wall Street bailout, voting one by one as the Dow Jones Industrial Average continued to slide, thus beginning the Great Recession. Although Washington later approved controversial bailouts and fiscal stimuli, macroeconomic malaise blossomed millions of times over as personal recessions deeply ingrained in the mind.

Now, economic recovery continues in the United States with record corporate profits and broad public support for raising the federal minimum wage to more than $10 per hour, restoring the wage floor to pre-inflation 1968 levels. However, painful repercussions from the past half-dozen years of recession and recovery continue with downward career mobility and lowered expectations for millions of Americans, with many European populations faring worse throughout the 28-country economic block.

Those personal recessions may later hit middle-aged people the hardest, investigators from the University of Luxembourg find. In analyzing data from more than 12,000 Europeans throughout 11 countries in the European Union, investigator Anja Leist finds recessionary troubles most damaging to middle-aged men in their mid- to late-forties and women ages 25-44.

“Our study was motivated by previous evidence that working conditions are associated with later-life cognitive function and decline,” Leist and her colleagues wrote in a study published Wednesday. “Our findings provide evidence that economic recessions experienced at vulnerable periods in midlife are associated with decreased later-life cognitive function and that part of this association may operate through the link of recessions with working conditions and career trajectory.”

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When hit by economic setbacks at this most vulnerable point in career trajectory, people in early middle-age suffer a hampered ability to build “cognitive reserve” — the neurological equivalent to a retirement savings account.

Despite some beliefs held by conservatives and libertarians, the investigators assumed for the purpose of study that individuals wage little control over large macroeconomic forces, meaning that people across a broad spectrum of intellectual functioning would be harmed by massive shocks to the economy, such as the recent global recession. Leist and her colleagues analyzed data from study subjects assessed for cognitive ability in 2004 through 2005, and then again in 2006 through 2007, to determine whether past recessions had affected them as they aged into retirement.

Those results they linked to detailed work histories collected retrospectively between 2008 and 2009, and analyzed along with factors, such as self-rated health, material deprivation, occupational status, self-reported language and math skills, educational attainment, and even the number of books in the home. Among men, those in their mid- to late-forties had lived through an average of 0.73 recessions, whereas women, between the ages of 35 and 44, had lived through 1.33.

In the analysis, men and women who’d endured economic recession scored lower on cognitive tests than others, suggesting effects lasting a lifetime.

Source: Medical daily

Video Game Creators Are Using Apps To Teach Empathy

Much of the modern education reform movement has centered around the drive for data. Standardized tests now gauge whether children are at grade level seemingly every few months. Kids are observed, measured and sorted almost constantly.

In Silicon Valley, a $20 billion industry does much the same thing — but for a different purpose.

Video game design has become a data-driven industry where games evolve depending on how they are played.

Now, some game designers are hoping to take these new skills and apply them back to education. But not in a classroom — they want to teach with a game on an iPad.

From Football To Feelings

More than 30 years ago, Trip Hawkins left Apple and founded Electronic Arts, the company behind EA Sports. The man who helped make Madden NFL a cultural icon now has a new vision for games: He wants to teach.

For sports video games, Hawkins brought game designers together with experts in the field — athletes and statisticians. Now he’s bringing counselors into the mix. He wants to give those counselors data about what kids are actually doing in the games they play.

Analyzing data on how people play has become a huge part of the gaming industry.

“It’s incredibly important,” Hawkins says. “In the past you couldn’t do it at all because the customer was playing a game in the basement on a machine that’s not hooked up to the Internet. Once you bring the Internet into the equation, it’s much easier to figure out what your problem is and how to improve the product.”

So now, he says, they can apply that to other new markets, like education and social development.

Hawkins thinks a well-designed video game can teach kids empathy — how to listen to each other and control negative emotions. It could teach children basic skills that would ultimately help them get along better with each other and adults out in the real world.

Working Through Failure

Hawkins has gathered experts in social development and learning, and they’re creating a new game called If. In the game, players visit an imaginary village called Greenberry.

“Greenberry is a world in which there are cats and there are dogs, and they don’t get along well,” says Jessica Berlinski, who helped design and write the game’s story. “So part of the challenge is to figure out why, and then working to heal that.”

As kids progress through the game, they begin to rebuild the village of Greenberry. And kind of like in Pokemon, they collect magical creatures who enhance their power.

Sometimes the creatures might die — but the game does something totally different: It helps them work through it. There’s a virtual counseling session with a community leader, who teaches kids deep breathing exercises and has a dialogue about feelings of loss.

Berlinski, a founder of the educational tech company If You Can, says one goal of the game is to get kids to navigate interpersonal challenges and failures.

“The messaging that kids get in real life and certainly in schools is not that failure is OK — but in game environments, 80 percent of the time, gamers are failing, yet they are completely motivated to keep going,” she says. “So something is going on there that is very positive. And we need to capitalize on that.”

Will It Work?

But Catherine Steiner-Adair, a clinical psychologist at Harvard and author ofThe Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age, is concerned that kids and their parents already spend too much time on devices.

“Nothing — no new app, no new game — can replace the old truth, I think, that children thrive, that families thrive, in the context of healthy real-life relationships,” she says.

Still, Steiner-Adair says, a game that helps kids practice skills like listening and working through difficult emotions might be useful if it’s played in moderation. “I am cautious, but I am guardedly optimistic that there could be some kind of computer game that could strengthen children’s social and emotional intelligence,” she says.

In the end, even Hawkins is the first to admit that kids won’t actually play this game or learn anything unless the game is fun.

And building a kind of virtual counseling session into a fun video game is a tough trick.

Source: KAWC

Playing music at young age can keep brain healthy

A new study has found that playing an instrument at a young age might make you healthier later in life.

Dr. Nina Kraus, professor of neurobiology at Northwestern University, said what is seen in an older adult who has made music is a biologically younger brain, Fox News reported.

Kraus said that the fact that your cognitive sensory reward system is so engaged in the process of playing music seems to strengthen those circuits that are worked for music …and those functions that are important for language.

The study is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Source: ANI

CDC importing meningitis vaccine to fight Princeton outbreak

Federal health officials have agreed to import a meningitis vaccine approved in Europe and Australia but not the U.S. as officials at Princeton University consider measures to stop the spread of the disease on the Ivy League campus.

The Food and Drug Administration this week approved importing Bexsero for possible use on Princeton’s campus, said Barbara Reynolds, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Princeton officials confirmed the school’s seventh case of meningitis in 2013 this week and a spokesman said trustees will discuss the issue this weekend.

No vaccine for use against the type B meningococcal bacteria which caused the cases at Princeton is available in the U.S., Reynolds said, adding that the decision to receive the vaccine would be optional if Princeton and CDC officials agree to offer it to students.

Bacterial meningitis can cause swelling of the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord. The disease is fairly rare in the United States. Those who get it develop symptoms quickly and can die in a couple of days. Survivors can suffer mental disabilities, hearing loss and paralysis.

The bacteria are spread by coughing, sneezing and kissing, and most cases occur in previously healthy children and young adults. The disease can easily spread in crowded conditions, like dorm rooms. All students living in dorms are required by state law to have a licensed meningitis vaccine, but it does not protect against type B.

The school is telling students to wash their hands, cover their coughs and not to share items such as drinking glasses and eating utensils.

Source: WGN tv

 

People with Depression May Age Faster

People suffering from depression may be aging faster than other people, according to a new study from the Netherlands.

In the study of about 1,900 people who had major depressive disorders at some point during their lives, along with 500 people who had not had depression, researchers measured the length of cell structures called telomeres, which are “caps” at the end of chromosomes that protect the DNA during cell division. Normally, telomeres shorten slightly each time cells divide, and their length is thought to be an index of a cell’s aging.

The researchers found telomeres were shorter in people who had experienced depression compared with people in the control group. This suggests cellular aging in people with depression is accelerated by several years, the researchers said.

Source: Live Science

 

How antidepressants work in brain

A new study has allowed researchers better understanding of how antidepressants work in the human brain – and may lead to the better antidepressants’ development with few or no side effects.

The article from Eric Gouaux, Ph.D., a senior scientist at OHSU ‘s Vollum Institute and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator describes research that gives a better view of the structural biology of a protein that controls communication between nerve cells.

The article focuses on the structure of the dopamine transporter, which helps regulate dopamine levels in the brain.

Dopamine is an essential neurotransmitter for the human body’s central nervous system; abnormal levels of dopamine are present in a range of neurological disorders, including Parkinson’s disease, drug addiction, depression and schizophrenia.

Along with dopamine, the neurotransmitters noradrenaline and serotonin are transported by related transporters, which can be studied with greater accuracy based on the dopamine transporter structure.

The Gouaux lab’s more detailed view of the dopamine transporter structure better reveals how antidepressants act on the transporters and thus do their work.

Another article published also dealt with a modified amino acid transporter that mimics the mammalian neurotransmitter transporter proteins targeted by antidepressants.

It gives new insights into the pharmacology of four different classes of widely used antidepressants that act on certain transporter proteins, including transporters for dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline.

The second paper in part was validated by findings of the first paper – in how an antidepressant bound itself to a specific transporter.

The two papers have been published in journal Nature.

Source: Deccan Chronicle