MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Picower Institute for Learning and Memory researchers dug deeply into one of the developing brain’s signaling pathways and uncovered new details on how a key gene is implicated in psychiatric diseases such as schizophrenia and bipolar disease. The knowledge could lead to better drug targets for these disorders. The results will be published in the journal Neuron. ...

Researchers from William Beaumont Hospital’s Department of Urology in Royal Oak, Michigan, conducted a pilot study to see if guided imagery might have an effect on the symptoms of interstitial cystitis, a condition involving urinary urgency, frequency, and pelvic pain, which affects more than a million women in the U.S. The results were published in the Journal of Alternative & Complementary Medicine. ...

The LENA™ (Language Environment Analysis) system automatically labeled infant and child vocalizations from recordings and thereafter an automatic acoustic analysis designed by the researchers showed that pre-verbal vocalizations of very young children with autism are distinctly different from those of typically developing children with 86 percent accuracy. The system also differentiated typically developing ...

Soldiers who receive traumatic brain injuries during war may be at a higher risk of epilepsy even decades after the brain injury occurred. The new research is published in the July 20, 2010, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Post-traumatic epilepsy is the most common cause of new-onset epilepsy in young adults with nearly 30,000 new cases per year in the Un ...

Your facial expression may tell the world what you are thinking or feeling. But it also affects your ability to understand written language related to emotions, according to research published in the July issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The interactions of facial expression, thoughts, and emotions have intrigued scientists for more than a century, says ...

Psychologists are not usually called to the battlefield, but the 2008-09 Gaza War gave Tel Aviv University researchers a unique picture of how anxiety manifests during stressful situations. In a new study in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Prof. Yair Bar Haim of TAU's Department of Psychology reports that people confronted with acute stress - daily rocket attacks - tend to dissociate from threats instea ...

The more an older woman weighs, the worse her memory, according to new research from Northwestern Medicine. The effect is more pronounced in women who carry excess weight around their hips, known as pear shapes, than women who carry it around their waists, called apple shapes. This the first study to link obesity and body shape to poorer brain function in older women. The study will be published July 14 in ...

As the current global economic crisis drives up the demand for mental health care services, cash-strapped agencies are slashing mental health budgets, according to a new Brandeis University study out this month in the International Journal of Mental Health. However, while most nations are cutting spending, a handful of countries are earmarking funding to meet the anticipated growth in mental health problems ...

Results of a study of antidepressant treatment for major depression suggest that changes in personality traits seen in patients taking the drug paroxetine (Paxil) may not be the result of the medication’s lifting of mood but may instead be a direct effect of this class of drugs and part of the mechanism by which they relieve depression. The results are published in Archives of General Psychiatry. ...

Medical experts have warned parents that using domestic spoons to dispense children's medicine could lead to overdoses after discovering that some hold two to three times as much as others. The study in the August issue of IJCP, the International Journal of Clinical Practice, looked at 71 teaspoons and 49 tablespoons collected from 25 households in Attica, Greece. Check the end of this report for a link to ...