My Best Life: un aiuto per vivere meglio

   
HEALTH DEPRESSIONE SEXUALITY PRINCIPLES GRAFOLOGIA FOOD ENVIRONMENT MUSICA RIDERE MIX SEARCH



Home
page

Breaking
news

In caso di...

Medicina
occidentale

Medicine
complementari

Medicina cinese
e agopuntura

 

Omeopatia

 

Fitoterapia

 

Dipendenze

 

Chi è

Links

E-mail

Cerca nel sito

 

Per conoscere la psicosomatica:

Italiano - English 

 


Alterations in brain activity in children at risk of schizophrenia (2013-04-02)

 

Brain scans of children who have parents or siblings with the illness reveal a neural circuitry that is hyperactivated or stressed by tasks that peers with no family history of the illness seem to handle with ease.

Image reflects brain activation abnormalities in children and adolescents with a family history of schizophrenia, themselves at greater risk for schizophrenia. Image source: Aysenil Belger, PhD.

Because these differences in brain functioning appear before neuropsychiatric symptoms such as trouble focusing, paranoid beliefs, or hallucinations, the scientists believe that the finding could point to early warning signs or “vulnerability markers” for schizophrenia.

Individuals who have a first degree family member with schizophrenia have an 8-fold to 12-fold increased risk of developing the disease. However, there is no way of knowing for certain who will become schizophrenic until symptoms arise and a diagnosis is reached. Some of the earliest signs of schizophrenia are a decline in verbal memory, IQ, and other mental functions, which researchers believe stem from an inefficiency in cortical processing – the brain’s waning ability to tackle complex tasks.

In this study, Aysenil Belger, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry at the UNC School of Medicine and her colleagues sought to identify what if any functional changes occur in the brains of adolescents at high risk of developing schizophrenia.
She performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on 42 children and adolescents ages 9 to 18, half of which had relatives with schizophrenia and half of which did not.
Study participants each spent an hour and a half playing a game where they had to identify a specific image – a simple circle – out of a lineup of emotionally evocative images, such as cute or scary animals. At the same time, the MRI machine scanned for changes in brain activity associated with each target detection task.

Belger found that the circuitry involved in emotion and higher order decision making was hyperactivated in individuals with a family history of schizophrenia, suggesting that the task was stressing out these areas of the brain in the study subjects.

“This finding shows that these regions are not activating normally,” she says. “We think that this hyperactivation eventually damages these specific areas in the brain to the point that they become hypoactivated in patients, meaning that when the brain is asked to go into high gear it no longer can.”

Belger is currently exploring what kind of role stress plays in the changing mental capacity of adolescents at high risk of developing schizophrenia. Though only a fraction of these individuals will be diagnosed with schizophrenia, Belger thinks it is important to pinpoint the most vulnerable people early to explore interventions that may stave off the mental illness.

“It may be as simple as understanding that people are different in how they cope with stress,” says Belger. “Teaching strategies to handle stress could make these individuals less vulnerable to not just schizophrenia but also other neuropsychiatric disorders.”

The research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Study co-authors from UNC include Sarah Hart, PhD, postdoctoral fellow; Joshua Bizzell, MS, lab engineer; Carolyn Bellion, study coordinator; and Diana Perkins, MD, MPH, professor of psychiatry.

For more information
Altered fronto–limbic activity in children and adolescents with familial high risk for schizophrenia

(MDN)

 


L'armadietto omeopatico casalingo
(del Dott. Turetta)
Quali sono i problemi o le disfunzioni che possono giovarsi di un intervento omeopatico d'urgenza e, di conseguenza, come dovrebbe essere un ideale armadietto medicinale omeopatico casalingo.


A cura di: Dott.ssa S.Cavalli, Dott. L. Colombo, Dott. U. Zuccardi Merli
[_private/vid/salute/minisommario_video_salute.htm]

 

Aggiungi questo sito ai tuoi preferiti
(aggiungi segnalibro):
premi il tasto  Ctrl   assieme al tasto  D


Home di mybestlife.com - Salute - Sessualità - Gola - Depressione - I consigli del nonno - Musica - Grafologia - Ambiente - Per saperne di più - Viaggi: tutto in una pagina - Meteo - Ridere - Mix

Cerca nel sito

Chi siamo e come contattarci

Copyright © 1998/2018 mybestlife.com tutti i diritti sono riservati eccetto quelli già di altri proprietari.