Ramanisblog

Tag: mental illness

  • Psychiatric Drugs shrink Brain.

    High resolution fMRI of the Human brain.
    Image via Wikipedia

     

    Psychiatry at best is randomly proved quackery.

    They treat the Brain instead of the Mind.

    They are not sure which system of Psychology to follow.

    Freud,Jung,Adler et all.

    Or William James’s behavior theory!

    They end up treating Brain biologically and most of the drugs they prescribe are harmful to health.

    Evidence that prescription drugs shrink patients’ brains would, one might think, suggest only one course of action: stop prescribing them. But the matter turns out to be much more complicated, according to research published today inArchives of General Psychiatry on the effects of antipsychotic drugs in people with schizophrenia1.

    In the past 15 years, research has indicated that people with schizophrenia have smaller cerebral volumes than the general population, and that this reduction is particularly large in ‘grey-matter‘ structures, which contain the cell bodies of neurons. For instance, one meta-analysis points to 5–7% reductions in the size of the amygdala, hippocampus and parahippocampus2, which are all involved in memory storage and retrieval.

    But scientists have debated whether the decrease is caused by the disease alone, or whether powerful antipsychotic drugs also have a role. According to the latest findings, the more antipsychotics patients receive, the more likely they are to have a decreased amount of grey matter.

    The research was led by Beng Choon Ho, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. His team used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of 211 patients, administering on average 3 scans per patient over a 7.2-year period1. They found that treatment length and the type and dose of antipsychotic drugs taken were both relatively good predictors of total brain volume change. Use of antipsychotics explained 6.6% of the change in total brain volume and 1.7% of the change in total grey-matter volume.

    The study developed from a previous work in which Ho’s team analysed the contribution of a genetic variation to grey-matter volume reduction3. In the latest work, the researchers looked again at those results and added data from more patients. This time, they examined the contribution from the dose of antipsychotics prescribed. They found that the greatest reduction came in those who had been recently diagnosed — and so would have just started taking the medications. “We did not expect to see this,” says Ho.

    Ho says that the effect is “small but significant”. He adds, “We have been looking at the data for five years. We’ve been very careful to get it right because of the potential implications.”

    Missing control

    The scale of the study is impressive, says Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Heidelberg in Mannheim, Germany. “It’s by far the largest sample studied longitudinally. And there was a great follow-up and retention rate,” he says. Stefan Borgwardt, a neuropsychiatrist at the University of Basel, Switzerland, says that the study “will definitely have a great impact, not only on the field of schizophrenia research but also on clinical practice”.

    Animal studies support the link. David Lewis, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, found that healthy non-human primates, given doses of antipsychotics similar to those given to humans, showed brain volume reductions of around 10%, mostly attributable to loss of the glial cells that support and protect neurons4,5.

    But Lewis, who has written an editorial to accompany Ho’s study6, warns that his own, Ho’s and other studies are “convergent but still circumstantial”. It is impossible to distinguish the effect of the disease from that of the drug, he says, because “both are changing over time”.

    Ho acknowledges that his study is marred by the lack of a placebo control group — for ethical reasons, patients cannot be deprived of the medications they need — and the lack of ‘within individual’ studies in which the same patient either uses or does not uses the drugs. “It’s not the ideal study design, but as good as we could ever get with something like this,” says Ho.

    Meyer-Lindenberg warns against over-interpreting MRI data, which can be affected by confounding factors including lifestyle, smoking and socioeconomic differences. “Although it does address them as far as possible statistically, this study cannot exclude them,” he says. Meyer-Lindberg himself published a study last year showing that antipsychotics cause quickly reversible changes in brain volume that do not reflect permanent loss of neurons (see ‘Antipsychotic deflates the brain’)7.

    http://current.com/news/92972272_wtf-psychiatric-drugs-shrink-patients-brains-please-comment.htm?xid=320

    http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110207/full/news.2011.75.html

     

     

  • Internet’rewires brains’,makes teenagers vulnerable to mental illness.


    Young people are losing the ability to concentrate because of the internet, a controversial new study suggests.

    Researchers say the digital revolution may be ‘rewiring’ the brains of children and teenagers – making it easier for them multi-task, but making it harder to pay attention for any length of time.

    The findings add to the growing concerns that the rise of the internet and the proliferation of electronic gadgets isn’t just changing people’s behaviour, it is also changing the way they think.
    Prof David Nicholas at University College London tested the ability of 100 volunteers to answer a series of questions by surfing the internet.

    Early results from the study found that 12 to 18 year olds spent less time searching for information before giving their answers than older volunteers.

    On average they answered a question after looking at half the number of web pages – and spent only one sixth of the time viewing the information – than their elders.

    Teenagers who have grown up with the web were also much better at multitasking – or carrying out several mental jobs at once.
    The youngest volunteers – born after 1993 – were also more likely to seek out answers from their friends than use reliable sources of information.

    Previous research by Prof Nicholas found that younger people use the internet in a different way to their elders, flitting more between sites and rarely returning to the same web page twice.

    ‘The really big surprise was that people seemed to be skipping over the virtual landscape,’ he said.

    ‘They were hopping from sites, looking at one or two pages, going to another site, looking at one or two pages and then going on. Nobody seemed to be staying anywhere for very long.’

    Reading time: Prof Dave Nicholas says internet users are skipping over virtual landscapes

    The study is due to be featured on a BBC2 documentary The Virtual Revolution on Saturday.

    Some psychologists have argued that there is no evidence that the internet is changing our brains – and that young people have always struggled to concentrate.

    But others have claimed the internet encourages users to dart between pages instead of concentrating on one source such as a book, the traditional staple of student research.

    This new ‘associative’ thinking leaves the majority incapable of ‘linear’ disciplines like reading and writing at length because their minds have been remoulded to function differently.

    Documentary presenter and social psychologist Dr Aleks Krotoski said: ‘It seems pretty clear that, for good or ill, the younger generation is being remoulded by the web.

    ‘Facebook’s feedback loops are revolutionising how they relate. There is empirical evidence now that information overload and associative thinking may be reshaping how they think.

    ‘For many, this seems to be a bleak prospect – young people bouncing and flitting between a thoughtless, throwaway virtual world.’

    Other academics told the programme that younger people are losing the ability to read and study books.

    Dr David Runciman, political scientist at Cambridge University,said: ‘What I notice about students from the first day they arrive at university is that they ask nervously, ‘What do we have to read?’

    ‘When they are told the first thing they have to read is a book, they all now groan, which they didn’t use to do five or 10 years ago.

    ‘You say, ‘Why are you groaning?’ and they say, ‘It’s a book. How long is it?’ ‘Books are still at the heart of what it means to be educated and to try to educate. The generation of students I teach see books as peripheral.’

    Neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield, a professor at Oxford University, told the documentary that the web and social networking sites were ‘infantilising’ children’s minds and detaching them from reality.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1249946/Internet-rewiring-brains-psychologists-warn-thousands-teens-need-mental-health-treatments.html