http://medicalxpress.com/ en-us Medical Xpress internet news portal provides the latest news on Health and Medicine. Stress triggered neuropsychiatric disorders take an enormous personal, social and economic toll on society. In the US more than half of adults are exposed to at least one traumatic event throughout their lives. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a debilitating anxiety disorder associated with exposure to a traumatic event outside the range of normal human experience. PTSD typically follows a chronic, often lifelong, course. Patients have diminished quality of life, are more likely to manifest other psychiatric disorders such as depression and six times more likely as demographically matched controls to attempt suicide. Prevention and treatment of PTSD remains a challenge with improved therapies needed to help save billions of dollars in medical care and provide enormous society benefit. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-04-intranasal-neuropeptide-therapeutic-potential-post-traumatic.html Psychology & Psychiatry Sun, 21 Apr 2013 19:01:00 EST news285789540 (Medical Xpress)—A new study by scientists in France and Denmark has identified a neurological marker in the brain of babies as young as five months that is associated with visual consciousness, or the ability to process and remember images they have seen. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-04-babies-visual-consciousness-months.html Neuroscience Fri, 19 Apr 2013 06:23:59 EST news285571424 New research from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine for the first time explains exactly how two brain regions interact to promote emotionally motivated behaviors associated with anxiety and reward. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-03-brain-areas-interact-trigger-divergent.html Neuroscience Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:00:01 EST news283000101 Repeat traumatic brain injury affects a subgroup of the 3.5 million people who suffer head trauma each year. Even a mild repeat TBI that occurs when the brain is still recovering from an initial injury can result in poorer outcomes, especially in children and young adults. A metabolic marker that could serve as the basis for new mild TBI vulnerability guidelines is described in an article in Journal of Neurotrauma. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-01-period-vulnerability-traumatic-brain-injury.html Neuroscience Thu, 10 Jan 2013 10:58:45 EST news277037912 Caffeine perks up most coffee-lovers, but a new study shows a small dose of caffeine also increases their speed and accuracy for recognizing words with positive connotation. The research published November 7 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Lars Kuchinke and colleagues from Ruhr University, Germany, shows that caffeine enhances the neural processing of positive words, but not those with neutral or negative associations. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-caffeine-recognition-positive-words.html Neuroscience Wed, 07 Nov 2012 17:00:04 EST news271519669 While studying the sense of touch, scientists at Duke Medicine have pinpointed specific neurons that appear to regulate perception. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-10-sensory-neurons-critical.html Neuroscience Thu, 25 Oct 2012 15:25:38 EST news270397497 (Medical Xpress)—Her name is Charlie, and the purple bows sitting on top of her head are the prettiest thing about her. But her looks are not what matter – which is good because she's green. Charlie is a robot designed by University of South Carolina's College of Engineering and Computing doctoral student, Laura Boccanfuso. She hopes Charlie, short for Child Centered Adaptive Robot for Learning Environments, will help children with autism improve their communication skills and interactions with others. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-09-robots-children-autism.html Autism spectrum disorders Fri, 28 Sep 2012 08:30:57 EST news268039847 A new study finds that mice have a distinct neural subsystem that links the nose to the brain and is associated with instinctually important smells such as those emitted by predators. That insight, published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, prompts the question whether mice and other mammals have specially hardwired neural circuitry to trigger instinctive behavior in response to certain smells. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-07-mice-distinct-subsystem.html Neuroscience Mon, 23 Jul 2012 15:00:25 EST news262267312 Sleep deprivation in the first few hours after exposure to a significantly stressful threat actually reduces the risk of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), according to a study by researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and Tel Aviv University. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-07-deprivation-ptsd.html Psychology & Psychiatry Wed, 18 Jul 2012 13:05:44 EST news261835498 (Medical Xpress) -- Every day the human brain is presented with tasks ranging from the trivial to the complex. How much mental effort and attention are devoted to each task is usually determined in a split second and without conscious awareness. Now a study from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers finds that a structure deep within the brain, believed to play an important role in regulating conscious control of goal-directed behavior, helps to optimize behavioral responses by predicting how difficult upcoming tasks will be. The report is receiving advance online publication in Nature. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-brain-behavior-demands.html Medical research Sun, 24 Jun 2012 13:10:05 EST news259758450 Researchers at Georgia State University have discovered that in one species of freshwater crustaceans, social status can affect the configuration of neural circuitry. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-scientists-neurological-due-social-status.html Neuroscience Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:00:04 EST news254065867 What characterizes many people with depression, schizophrenia and some other mental illnesses is anhedonia: an inability to gain pleasure from normally pleasurable experiences. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-brain-mechanism-reward-enjoyment.html Neuroscience Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:44:37 EST news251552669 University of Arizona Regents' Professor John G. Hildebrand has been elected to the Council of the National Academy of Sciences. In addition, he is being honored for his lifetime accomplishments on how olfaction, the sense of smell, influences the behavior of animals, from bugs to humans. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-moth-air-freshener-secrets-scent.html Neuroscience Fri, 24 Feb 2012 09:33:41 EST news249298393 War, the aftermath of war, and political violence are harmful to children's and teens' mental health and well-being. But few studies have looked at how this happens. A new longitudinal study of neighborhoods in Belfast, Northern Ireland, has found that political violence affects children by upsetting the ways their families function, resulting in behavior problems and mental health symptoms among the youths over extended periods of time. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-northern-ireland-political-violence-youths.html Health Wed, 08 Feb 2012 03:50:05 EST news247894273 Researchers are using innovative tools to perform psychological experiments a lot faster than they used to. Experts believe the number of smartphone users worldwide will top the 1 billion mark by 2013. Now an international team of scientists has taken advantage of smartphone technology to examine the mental processes involved in how humans remember, think, speak and solve problems. Presented in the journal PLoS ONE, the findings demonstrate how these tiny tools can dramatically change cognitive science research. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-10-smartphones-niche-human-behavior.html Psychology & Psychiatry Mon, 31 Oct 2011 11:58:38 EST news239281112 Pheromone preference, and the initiation of a complex programmed sexual behavior, is determined by the specificity of a single sex pheromone receptor protein expressed in a population of olfactory receptor neurons in the silkmoth (Bombyx mori). The study, which will be published on June 30th in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics, provides the first direct proof of the long-held belief that the control of sexual behavior in male moths originates in the chemical specificity of the pheromone receptor proteins expressed in pheromone receptor neurons. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-06-reproductive-behavior-silkmoth-pheromone-receptor.html Genetics Thu, 30 Jun 2011 17:42:27 EST news228674525 A team of researchers is beginning to see exactly what the response to threats looks like in the brain at the cellular and molecular levels. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-05-picture-threat-brain-neuroinflammation.html Neuroscience Tue, 03 May 2011 11:27:11 EST news223640808 Scientists at the Fisher Center for Alzheimer's Disease Research at The Rockefeller University, led by Paul Greengard, Ph.D., and Jennifer Warner-Schmidt, Ph.D., have shown that anti-inflammatory drugs, which include ibuprofen, aspirin and naproxen, reduce the effectiveness of the most widely used class of antidepressant medications, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, taken for depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety disorders. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-04-ibuprofen-aspirin-anti-inflammatory-drugs-effectiveness.html Medications Mon, 25 Apr 2011 15:00:01 EST news222950053