Nearly 1 Million Children With ADHD Are Potentially Misdiagnosed And More Likely To Receive Stimulant Medication
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Depression is actually defined by specific clinical symptoms such as sadness, difficulty to experience pleasure, and sleep problems that are present for at least two weeks with impairment of psychosocial functioning. These symptoms guide the physician to make a diagnosis and to select antidepressant treatment such as drugs or psychotherapy.
Scientists at Harvard University have found that humans can make difficult moral decisions using the same brain circuits as those used in more mundane choices related to money and food. These circuits, also found in other animals, put together two critical pieces of information: How good or bad are the things that might happen? What are the odds that they will happen, depending on one’s choice? The results suggest that complex moral decisions need not rely on a specific “moral sense.”
UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have identified a chemical system in the brain that reacts differently in cocaine addicts, findings that could result in new treatment options for individuals addicted to the drug. The findings were published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.
Whether it is sports, poker, or the high-stakes world of business, there are those who always find a way to win when there is money on the table. Now, for the first time, psychology researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are unraveling the workings of a novel brain network that may explain how these “money players” manage to keep their heads in the game. The results are published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
It is unavoidable: breakdowns in brain connections slow down our physical response times as we age, a new study suggests. This slower reactivity is associated with an age-related breakdown in the corpus callosum, a part of the brain that acts as a dam during one-sided motor activities to prevent unwanted connectivity, or cross-talk, between the two halves of the brain, said Rachael Seidler, associate professor in the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology and Department of Psychology, and lead study author.
Just 11 hours of learning a meditation technique induces positive structural changes in brain connectivity by boosting efficiency in a part of the brain that helps a person regulate behavior in accordance with their goals, researchers report. The technique – integrative body-mind training (IBMT) – has been the focus of intense scrutiny by a team of Chinese researchers led by Yi-Yuan Tang of Dalian University of Technology in collaboration with University of Oregon psychologist Michael I. Posner.
Scientists from the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at King’s College London have developed a pioneering new method of diagnosing autism in adults. For the first time, a quick brain scan that takes just 15 minutes can identify adults with autism with over 90 per cent accuracy. The method could lead to the screening for autism spectrum disorders in children in the future. The paper, ‘Describing the brain in autism in five dimensions – MRI-assisted diagnosis using a multi-parameter classification approach,’ is published in the Journal of Neuroscience today.
Everyone experiences social stress, whether it is nervousness over a job interview, difficulty meeting people at parties, or angst over giving a speech. In a new report, UCLA researchers have discovered that how your brain responds to social stressors can influence the body’s immune system in ways that may negatively affect health. The study appears in the current online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Our belief as to whether we will likely succeed or fail at a given task – and the consequences of winning or losing – directly affects the levels of neural effort put forth in movement-planning circuits in the human cortex, according to a new brain-imaging study by neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). A paper about the research – led by Richard A. Andersen, the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience at Caltech – appears in the August issue of PLoS Biology.
In a study of an experimental treatment for major depression, pretreatment testing to probe the function of a specific brain center predicted how patients would respond to ketamine, a medication that can lift depression rapidly in some people. The work suggests it may be possible to develop ways to use such assessments in the future, not only to better understand depression, but to guide treatment choices for individuals.
The onset of severe antisocial behavior in teenagers may be more than just ‘falling in with the wrong crowd’. A new study jointly funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council (MRC) reveals that young adults with conduct disorder display an abnormal pattern of brain activity compared with their peers without the disorder. The study appears in the latest issue of the journal Archives of General Psychiatry.
The pain and anguish of rejection by a romantic partner may be the result of activity in parts of the brain associated with motivation, reward and addiction cravings, according to a study published in the July issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology. The study’s findings could have implications for understanding why feelings related to romantic rejection can be hard to control, and may provide insight into extreme behaviors associated with rejection, such as stalking, homicide and suicide – behaviors that occur across many cultures throughout the world.
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