Banging toward depression

Eddy donc by Éole Wind

by Luka Laden

From mysterious condition to hot-button medical issue, concussions have moved into the forefront of the conversation when sports and athletes are involved. Now that more and more young people are choosing to play football, basketball, and soccer, embracing the status of being a dedicated athlete, more and more young people are also at risk of sustaining a blow to the head and suffering from subsequent brain trauma, more commonly known as a concussion. While some of the symptoms usually associated with concussions, like dizziness, blurry vision, and nausea are well-known, the long-term impact of head trauma is the topic of many new studies, which attempt to clear up the true significance of brain trauma for young athletes. We know that migraines, ranging from mild and infrequent to severe and persistent, can result from head injuries, for obvious reasons, but are there more serious problems when a concussion is sustained?Compared to other injuries, such as a torn ankle ligament or sprained wrist, concussions are very unique in that the symptoms, as well as the duration of these symptoms, are so unpredictable and wide-ranging. Full recovery may take a few days, but it may also take several months. Some athletes never fully recover. We already know what’s common, but how bad can things get? Unfortunately, the indications aren’t very promising.

Several studies have shown that people who have sustained one or more concussions may experience greater difficulties involving emotion. Three studies in particular, documented by Jennie Ponsford, Rosemarie Scolaro Moser, and Robert J. Ferguson (among others), tracked symptom reports submitted by large groups of patients suffering from post-concussion syndrome (PCS), as well as reports of expected PCS symptoms submitted by non-injured participants in contact sports, who made up the control group. The specific focus of these studies was the emotional toll of brain injuries, as the injured subjects reported on their altered feelings and tendencies following their concussions. In fact, most of the injured subjects reported that they had noticed a negative effect on their respective personalities and emotional traits because of brain trauma, ranging from moodiness and irritability to sadness and a lack of enthusiasm. The symptom reports showed a common pessimism among the injured subjects, in terms of their changed emotional states of mind. As a result of these reports, emotional symptoms of irritability, moodiness, and depression were linked to head trauma among athletes (Moser, 2007). The subjects in these studies demonstrated that there appears to be a tangible connection between brain injuries and symptoms that resemble depression and emotional instability. If indeed true, these findings are far more worrisome than a minor headache or a little bit of lightheadedness. When sustaining a concussion, being at risk for some form of depression down the road must be an important consideration for an athlete deciding when and whether to return to the playing field or court. It has been found that, only three months after the injury, a concussed athlete tends to suffer from concurrent anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress, all of which may lead to prolonged depression (Ponsford, 2012). In the short run, concussions can carry severe emotional consequences and the threat of a snowballing downward spiral of persistent depression is rather ominous and scary. Even worse, the greater problem with concussions revolves around the fact that symptoms may linger for years, which means that PCS can result in heightened, sustained emotional distress that lasts for a decade, or maybe even longer (Ferguson, 1999). Emotional imbalance and instability may not go away after three months, for instance, which opens up the possibility of lifelong depression and connected emotional problems that never seem to subside. As these studies show us, it’s clearly not an understatement to say that sustaining a concussion can wreak havoc in the long run.

Concussions: Banging away at your brain

by Topher Toffoli

Rock Dennis tackles Taylor Wardlow by John McStravick

Injuries are becoming more prevalent in high contact sports as players move towards being bigger, stronger, and faster. In ice hockey as many as 66% of hockey players have experience a head injury known as a concussion, which is a mild to severe trauma to the brain caused by the soft brain tissue hitting the hard skull.  Injuries can cause serious long-term damage to the parts of the brain responsible for memory, judgment, social conduct, reflexes, speech, balance and co-ordination.  These parts, which are located in the frontal and parietal lobes, are hit against the brain and damaged by bleeding and bruising from contact with the hard cranium. Researchers at Albert Einstein college of Medicine used diffusion tensor imaging to find that damage from concussion can cause loss in higher level thinking from planning evens to personality change. They also found that 30% of people sustaining these injuries had long terms affects associated to memory and personality.

Although this problem is very serious since the diagnoses of a “Concussion” have become so main stream players are unaware of the consequences and thus return to play too soon. 40% of younger players and 30% of adult players could not recognize symptoms and believed that they could return to play after two days with mild headaches. Researchers have found that by being diagnosed as having a concussion instead of re-wording it as brain trauma can have drastic effects on the perception of the injury to the patients. Patients diagnosed with a concussion rather than brain trauma were more than twice as likely to return to school and athletics before doctors orders allowed them too. The simple familiarity of the word concussion is putting people at risk. This is due to the mere exposure effect, meaning that the more you are exposed to a stimulus, in this case a word, the more positively you will perceive that stimulus. Since people have heard and can associate concussions with others they know they do not take it as seriously as when the more specific term of brain trauma is used.

Also athletes wishing to return to sports in our win-driven sports world are willing, in their ignorance, to put there bodies in harms way for the “win at all cost” mentality. New rules in safety such as helmets and rules prohibiting fighting are steps that are being taken in hockey to prevent further injuries however players and parents must be educated so that they know, fully, the risk they are putting themselves in.

References

St. Michael’s Hospital (2009, June 1). Minor League Hockey Players Unable To Identify Concussion Symptoms, Study Says. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 5, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­/releases/2009/05/090527121051.htm

McMaster University (2010, January 18). Concussions not taken seriously enough, researcher finds. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 5, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­/releases/2010/01/100118001721.htm

Albert Einstein College of Medicine (2009, August 25). Strong Link Found Between Concussions And Brain Tissue Injury. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 5, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­/releases/2009/08/090824115905.htm

Something eating your brain?

by Alex Lee

…non fidarsi è meglio – my scared cat / gatto by Paolo Margari

One of the stranger tropes of science fiction is the idea of mind control. A well-known example of a similar phenomenon in nature is the rabies virus, which causes dramatic changes in the behavior of infected individuals. Lacking the full power of a mind-ray, but much closer to reality, is the protist (or single celled organism) Toxoplasma gondii.

Toxoplasma can infect nearly all warm-blooded mammals, and has two stages of infection, one active and one dormant. Relatively unknown until the end of the 20^th century, Toxoplasma became a subject inquiry when AIDS compromised patients began to exhibit encephalitis and coma as a result of infection. Since then it has been eclipsed by a multitude of other issues, and a 2007 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey linked study found 10.8% of persons 6-49 in the U.S. tested positive for Toxoplasma infection(Jones et al. 2007).

Research on the organism’s effects on human and animal subjects has been slow due to the difficulty of studying an infectious agent with two activity levels such as Toxoplasma. T. gondii has been found to infect nearly all mammals, whether by accidental digestion of spores or consumption of infected meat. Early research on rats shows that infected rats are more active than uninfected rats, and do not exhibit the innate rat fear of cats and cat-related smells such as urine (Lafferty, 2005). Research suggests that these behavioral changes provide a way for Toxoplasma to spread to cats, which are its primary carrier in most countries. .  Humans that are affected by T. gondii do not exhibit such dramatically different behavior, but new diagnostic techniques such as PCR (which rapidly and cheaply reproduces DNA)  have shed a great deal of light on Toxoplasma, which is now being implicated in several psychological disorders.

Most instances of toxoplasmosis, or infection with Toxoplasma, are in older adults, for whom infection seems to slowly induce changes in personality and behavior. Infected individuals may have slightly slower reaction time than non-infected individuals, and have a weaker capacity to focus on simple tasks (Havlicek et al., 2000). A long-term study of individuals in the Czech army found that individuals infected with T. gondii are 2.5 times as likely to be in a car accident than uninfected same-aged soldiers (Flegr, Klose, Novotna, Berenreitterova & Havlicek,, 2009). Schizophrenia is also more common in individuals exposed to T. gondii,and a recent study on schizophrenic patients found elevated Toxoplasma related immune cell levels (Torrey & Yolken, 2003). Strangely, anti-schizophrenia drugs have been shown to reduce the ability of Toxoplasma to replicate itself. More mundane, but no less bizzare effects include individuals repeatedly self-scoring themselves differently than peers on personality questionnaires. Personality effects differ with gender; a survey of infected women in Czechoslovakia found higher likelihood of self-scoring as warm-hearted, conscientious, and moralistic than non-infected women (Lafferty, 2005). Men involved in the study scored themselves in exactly the opposite way as the women.

Infection appears to last indefinitely. However, despite the fact that the dormant form of the infection is extremely common, few people experience the active form, which superficially resembles the flu. The only people for whom this active infection is dangerous in the short-term are those with weakened immune systems, such as AIDS patients or pregnant women. Women who are infected during pregnancy can spread the infection to their children, with children at birth exhibiting symptoms ranging from mild rash to hydrocephalus (water in the brain) and death (Holliman, 1995). More concerning is the result of Yolken and Torrey, a study of individuals logged in the Kaiser Hospital birth database which found that 66.7% (82/123) of children born to mothers infected with Toxoplasma develop schizophrenia related disorders. Another pressing finding of the study was that a startling 40-70% of the children of infected mothers that were not diagnosed with schizophrenia related disorders later developed learning or movement disabilities.

Can exercise treat drepession?

by Ava Sadeghi

Run! by Steve Garner

Every morning, you wake up, brush your teeth, go for a run, and then head to work. If you are stressed out, unhappy, or concerned, daily exercise can lift your moods and make you happier. Exercising and getting into a routine that you enjoy can relieve depression, anxiety and ultimately increase your happiness.

In recent studies, it has been shown that exercise works well for depression patients. Psychologists have been using exercise as a form of medication and treatment for many of their anxiety and depression patients (UT Southwestern Medical Center, 2011).

A clinical psychologist, James Blumenthal, at Duke University set up an experimental study to see the connection between mood and exercise. In this study, patients with a major depressive disorder were put into four groups: supervised exercise, home-based exercise, antidepressant therapy, and a placebo pill. After several months of treatment the study showed that exercise effects were similar to antidepressant medications.

A year later, Blumenthal, followed up with the patients and found that the patients who kept exercising did not go into remission. They still had low depression scores. With this study, psychologists have now started to couple antidepressant treatment with exercise, to increase mood and lessen depression.

Not only can exercise improve moods, but it can relieve anxiety as well. Jasper Smits of Southern Methodist University in Dallas performed an experiment involving 60 subjects with anxiety disorders.  These subjects were asked to take a carbon-dioxide challenge test. This test triggers symptoms of panic attacks. According to this study, Smits concluded that people with high anxiety were less likely to panic if they had high activity levels. This finding supports the idea that exercise can help lessen panic attacks (Weir, 2011).

The next step is figuring out why exercise brightens your mood. There are not many studies on this, but many psychologists believe that it has to do with increasing antibodies, endorphins, and other neurotransmitters.

Superstition may be good for you

Rome Braves by The Suss-Man (Mike)

by  105 student

To the detached observer, athletes may seem like a strange group of people, performing irrational routines in preparation for an event. Perhaps you have heard that Michael Jordan wore blue University of North Carolina shorts under his Bull’s uniform for good luck or that National Hockey League goaltender, Patrick Roy, was said to have talked to the goalposts throughout games, or noticed that Tiger Woods always wears red on Sundays. If you have ever played a sport, you or your team may have had certain rituals such as wearing purple socks on game days or eating waffles at the previous meal.

Superstition is generally first developed in hindsight, for example: an athlete reviews a performance and then establishes cause and effect between certain circumstances such as wearing green socks and playing well. In 1948, B.F. Skinner studied superstitious behavior in pigeons. After a pigeon was reduced to 75 percent of its weight (when well fed), a food hopper was presented at regular intervals into the pigeon’s cage. In the majority of cases, the birds started to perform distinct behaviors such as turning counter clockwise or swinging the head and body in a pendulum motion close to the time the food was presented. Even though there was no actual causal relationship, the birds continued to perform certain behaviors presumably because of an initial coincidence. By definition, superstitious actions do not have any inherent value yet many athletes still refuse to change their behavior. Are they wrong or simply stubborn by acting this way? Many studies indicate the opposite, superstitious behavior does serve a purpose.

Chance plays a part in the outcome of virtually all sports, creating a relatively uncertain environment. Optimal athletic performance demands a heightened mental state known as the flow state or being in the zone,essentially a good match between the demands of the sport and the abilities of the athlete (Marr, 2001). A survey of male and female athletes at the University of Western Ontario indicated that athletes use superstitions to regulate their emotions in stressful situations such as sporting events. Though superstitious behavior may have no rational foundation, athletes believe they have a greater sense of control over the outcome of the situation, helping them to reach an optimal mental state (Burke, 2006).

Regardless of an athlete’s specific rituals, superstitions may serve an important role in athletic performance. Remember this the next time you hear about an athlete’s strange pregame routine.

References

Burke, Kevin L. (2006). An Exploratory Investigation of Superstition, Personal Control, Optimism and Pessimism in NCAA Division I Intercollegiate Student-Athletes.  Athletic Insight, 8(2). Retrieved April 21, 2010 from http://www.athleticinsight.com/Vol8Iss2/Superstition.htm

Gregory, Jane C. and Brain M. Petrie. (1972).  Superstition in Sport.  University of  Waterloo.  Presented at the Fourth Canadian Psychomotor Learning and Sports Psychology Symposium. Retrieved from http://www.eric.ed.gov:80/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/34/0f/45.pdf

Marr, Arthur J. (2001). In the Zone: A Biobehavioral Theory of the Flow Experience.  Athletic Insight, 3(1). Retrieved from http://www.athleticinsight.com/Vol3Iss1/Commentary.htm

Skinner, B.F. (1947). Superstition in the Pigeon. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38, pgs. 168-172. Retrieved March 5, 2010 from http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/

Skinner/Pigeon/

This is your brain on diabetes

by Clayton Masterman

Photo by Andrew Scott

It is easy to think of memory as a cognitive process, but like everything in our brain it depends on physiological processes to function. New research has revealed that diabetes can have physiological effects that are severely detrimental to memory. Diabetes comes in two forms, both of which have been linked with the degradation of mental processes. Type 1 diabetes occurs because the body fails to create enough insulin, and type 2 occurs because the body’s cells are unable to use the insulin correctly.  Insulin is a hormone secreted by the pancreas that helps cells absorb glucose and create energy. In diabetes blood sugar levels become too high and various complications arise.

Recent studies have shown that both types of diabetes are having an impact on cognitive abilities and memory. Sometimes a diabetic patient can experience diabetic ketoacidosis, which occurs when the body reaches a state where it burns fat for energy instead of sugar. This can have severe complications, the worst of which being a coma.  According to a recent study children that have gone through diabetic ketoacidosis perform worse on memory tests than other children. This research was based on children with type 1 diabetes, but these results aren’t isolated to this form of the disease.

A study performed by Dr. Tali Cukierman-Yaffe found that diabetics are 1.5 times more likely to experience a decline in cognitive performance and 1.6 times more likely to experience dementia than individuals without diabetes. This is complicated by the fact that diabetes is an intensive disease to manage; patients must remain constantly vigilant. If a treatment cycle begins to get off course, things quickly get out of control.

The reason for these effects is not entirely understood. Several studies have examined the influence of other factors such as stress and determined that they increase the risk of mental decline in patients, but that they are not the sole cause. Other studies are pointing to cardiovascular damage caused by diabetes as a mechanism for cognitive decline, leading to a form of dementia similar to pure vascular dementia. (Biessels et al, 2005)  Until the cause is confirmed and a treatment is developed, patients are left with little hope of a way to prevent these issues from occurring. The only real recommendation that exists is for patients to keep on their treatments to ensure that blood sugar levels remain at normal levels. New cases must be diagnosed immediately to make sure treatment begins as soon as possible. Hopefully soon we’ll confirm the cause of this problem and be able to combat it more effectively.

Stress, eating, and the college student

by Stephanie Scott

Twinkie by nataliej

Stressful situations cause the production of cortisol, a stress hormone.  This hormone causes an increased heart rate, diversion of blood flow to muscles, and metabolic changes, which allows energy to be made ready for use by the muscles.  All of these responses aim to aid in survival in stressful, and possibly life-threatening, situations.  This mechanism works through a negative feedback system, so the stress response is able to quickly shut itself off and allow the body to function normally again.

Generally, this is not the type of stress that college students deal with in their lives. With ever-increasing demands from classes, the responsibility of being on one’s own, possible financial responsibilities, lack of sleep, substance abuse (or decisions about whether to take part in such activity), and trying to figure out how to balance everything, stress levels are often elevated in college students. If students do not learn to manage their busy lives, it can lead to chronic stress.

Chronic stress affects the body using the same mechanism as a regular stress response.  However, chronic stress causes the body to produce cortisol in a routine manner to allow the body to physiologically respond to the stressful situations it is placed in, and these stress responses do not shut themselves off using a negative feedback system. When a response that requires much energy does not shut off, it quickly depletes the body’s energy supply.  This can lead to food cravings– especially cravings for high-energy foods containing much sugar and fat.  These foods are favorable because they tend to be deposited as fat in the abdomen, and abdominal fat is easily accessible by the liver to be used for energy.  Also, these abdominal fat deposits send out metabolic signals that turn off the stress response in the body. Therefore, eating high-energy foods is important when dealing with chronic stress because it allows the body to gain energy deposits so the body can function once previously stored fat deposits have been depleted by energy-consuming stress responses.

Alzheimer’s, sleep and copper

by Robert Rooney and Jesse Greenberg*

Alzheimer's disease brain (note the enlarged ventricles, or holes in the middle)

Named after German physician Alois Alzheimer, Alzheimer’s disease is a terminal brain disorder that gets progressively worse over time.  Alzheimer’s deteriorates and destroys brain cells, causing detrimental effects to memory, behavior and one’s thought process.  A main characteristic of Alzheimer’s is the extensive development of “plaques and tangles.”  Plaques are deposits of the protein beta-amyloid that accumulate in the spaces between nerve cells.  Tangles are deposits of the protein tau that accumulate inside of nerve cells.  Although most people develop some plaques and tangles over time, those diagnosed with Alzheimer’s tend to have a much larger build up of these proteins.  The plaques and tangles are thought to impede interaction between nerve cells and interrupt cell activities necessary for survival.

Scientists are still not sure what exactly causes Alzheimer’s, but current research and evidence point to a few key risk factors.  These factors include, but are not limited to, aging, heart disease, head injury, and genetic history.  While lack of sleep is not considered a risk factor, recent studies suggest it may play a role.

One study performed by members of the Department of Neurology at Washington University, St. Louis showed that plaque levels increased significantly in mice when they were deprived of sleep.  They also found a correlation between beta-amyloid levels and sleeplessness.  The research team also studied a group of male volunteers and found similar correlations.  They found increased levels of beta-amyloid during the time while the men were awake, with the highest peak level around the evening, but the protein levels decreased when the men slept.  Due to the similarities between the results of the mice and the men, the researchers concluded that optimization of sleep time could potentially reduce aggregation of the beta-amyloid protein and slow the progression of AD.

Meanwhile, copper has also been getting a lot of attention from Alzheimer’s researchers.  Over the past decade, the role of copper in Alzheimer’s disease has also been extensively explored, yet two conclusions are being drawn which only serve to cloud our understanding.  The continuing exploration of the interesting relationship between copper and Alzheimer’s disease will hopefully yield an important breakthrough in the near future.

OK, so you haven’t been sleeping much. How bad could that be?

By Leksi Kolanko

Dr. Insomnia's, #2 by Thomas Hawk

We all suffer an occasional restless night of sleep here and there, whether it is the result of stressful events occurring in our lives, jetlag, pain due to a physical injury, or simply the overuse of caffeine.  For some people, however, insomnia, a sleep disorder in which an individual has recurring problems in falling or staying asleep, can become chronic.  Multiple studies have been conducted showing a strong relationship between insomnia, depression, and anxiety.  For instance, a longitudinal study conducted by Dag Neckelmann of Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen, Norway, surveyed 25,130 adults.  The results of the general health surveys showed that the group of participants with chronic insomnia had increased depression and anxiety, as compared to the group without chronic insomnia.  Another study, carried out by Daniel Taylor, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Texas in Denton, and his colleagues, sampled 722 adults of age 20 to 89.  This cross-sectional and retrospective study reported that people with insomnia were 10 times more likely to have clinically significant depression and 17 times more likely to have clinically significant anxiety.

The wonders of dreaming

By Nick Johnson

Sleeping EEG Monitor by cobalt123

Why do we dream? Is it necessary to dream? Dreaming occurs during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, during which the brain does not recognize any sensory input. One experiment concerning dreams studied REM sleep and how subjects reacted when they were awoken during REM sleep. (Dement, 1960). To establish a baseline percentage of REM sleep per total sleep time, the subjects were observed for a few nights. When they were woken up during non-REM sleep they showed no increase in dream time on the nights after the night when they were woken up continually. However, when the subjects were woken up frequently during REM sleep, they entered REM sleep more often on the recovery nights than on the baseline nights, indicating that the brain needed to make up for lost REM sleep time. Furthermore, subjects that had been woken up repeatedly during REM sleep showed changes in behavior that included anxiety and difficulty concentrating.

A similar experiment involved waking rats up during REM sleep. The observers placed a rat in a bucket full of water on an upside-down flower pot. When the rat wanted to sleep, it had to climb onto the flower pot, but when it entered REM sleep, muscular paralysis made the rat fall into the water and wake up. After several of these dreamless nights the rats were put into survival situations to test their reactions. Though rats have innate responses to threatening situations, the dream-deprived rats could not complete the tasks. According to the article, the rats, when placed in an open area, would not dash for cover, as an alert rat would, but instead would roam aimlessly. Furthermore, after each rat failed the basic survival tests, they were given amphetamines to determine if it was merely sleep-deprivation that was causing their behavior or if it was dream-deprivation that was the culprit. If sleep-deprivation was the cause then the amphetamines would have counteracted the rats’ tiredness but the experimenters found that the rats did not perform better on the survival tests, indicating that dream-deprivation caused their failure on the tests. Just as with the human subjects, the rats could not concentrate on the proper tasks and could not react correctly when they were deprived of REM sleep and therefore deprived of dreaming.  Consistent with the results of this study, some  scientists theorize that dreams served as a sort of theater to prepare one for situations one might encounter when awake.

Another hypothesis (Siegel, 2003) is that REM sleep may be necessary to prevent an overabundance of certain neurotransmitters. The release of monoamines, including the mood-related neurotransmitters norepinephrine and serotonin, stops during REM sleep.  An overabundance might lead to desensitization and a lack of ability to regulate mood. Furthermore, during REM sleep there is a lot of brain activity that may help in allowing the brain to develop properly.  The platypus, which is blind at birth and receives little sensory input, has a lot of REM sleep, whereas the dolphin which is active from birth has very little. The platypus’ greater amount of REM sleep could possibly allow its brain to develop more since it did not have the chance to develop much at birth. The evidence from the results from both the experiments and observations shows the brain needs a certain amount of REM sleep per night to allow the brain to develop and to allow the organism to act properly in its waking hours.

References:
Dement, W. (1960, June 10). The Effect of Dream Deprivation. Science, 131, 1705-1707. Retrieved April 28, 2009, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1705755?origin=JSTOR-pdf

Dixit, J. (2007, Nov. – Dec.). Dreams: Night School. Psychology Today. Retrieved April 28, 2009, from http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20071029-000003&print=1

Siegel, J. (2003, November). Why We Sleep. Scientific American, 289. Retrieved April 28, 2009, from http://moodlepilot.vassar.edu/file.php/51/articles/html_files/Siegel%202003.html

Why do we dream? – The REM state. (n.d.). Retrieved April 28, 2009, from http://www.why-we-dream.com/remstate.htm