http://medicalxpress.com/ en-us Medical Xpress internet news portal provides the latest news on Health and Medicine. Compulsive gamblers suffer from an optimism bias that modifies their subjective representation of probability and affects their decisions in situations involving high-risk monetary wagers. This is the conclusion drawn by Jean-Claude Dreher's research team at the CNC (Centre de Neurosciences Cognitives, CNRS / Université Claude Bernard Lyon). These findings, published in the May print edition of Psychological Medicine, could help explain and anticipate certain individuals' vulnerability to gambling, and could lead to new therapeutic approaches. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-04-pathological-gambling-excessive-optimism.html Psychology & Psychiatry Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:25:49 EST news286532741 Marital conflict is a significant source of environmental stress for children, and witnessing such conflict may harm children's stress response systems which, in turn, may affect their mental and intellectual development. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-03-marital-conflict-stress-children-affect.html Psychology & Psychiatry Thu, 28 Mar 2013 00:00:03 EST news283629816 Children whose mothers take the antiepileptic drug sodium valproate while pregnant are at significantly increased risk of autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders, suggests a small study published online in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-01-exposure-antiepileptic-drug-womb-linked.html Autism spectrum disorders Wed, 30 Jan 2013 18:30:01 EST news278789774 Human intelligence and behavior require optimal functioning of a large number of genes, which requires enormous evolutionary pressures to maintain. A provocative hypothesis published in a recent set of Science and Society pieces published in the Cell Press journal Trends in Genetics suggests that we are losing our intellectual and emotional capabilities because the intricate web of genes endowing us with our brain power is particularly susceptible to mutations and that these mutations are not being selected against in our modern society. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-humans-slowly-surely-intellectual-emotional.html Genetics Mon, 12 Nov 2012 12:00:04 EST news271942686 A Yale-led team of researchers has identified the gene that, when mutated, causes a devastating early-onset disorder in babies known as "malignant migrating partial seizures of infants," or MMPSI. The study appears online in Nature Genetics. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-10-genetic-mmpsi-rare-infant-epileptic.html Genetics Wed, 24 Oct 2012 08:50:05 EST news270285585 Early life emotional trauma may stunt intellectual development, indicates the first long term study of its kind, published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-early-life-emotional-trauma-stunt.html Health Mon, 02 Apr 2012 18:30:02 EST news252590847 Emerging data clarifying the risks of insufficient thyroid activity during pregnancy on the health of the mother and fetus, and on the future intellectual development of the child, have led to new clinical guidelines for diagnosing and managing thyroid disease during this critical period. The guidelines, developed by an American Thyroid Association (ATA) expert task force, are presented in Thyroid. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-07-effects-hypothyroidism-maternal-fetal-health.html Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes Mon, 25 Jul 2011 13:22:46 EST news230818937