health 72

"These findings suggest that a patient's quality of life could be impacted by a diagnostic label and their expectations for the prognosis. So, when a clinician discloses the diagnosis and prognosis of Mild Cognitive Impairment or mild stage Alzheimer's disease, a patient may experience additional symptoms, like anxiety or depression," said the study's lead author, Shana Stites, PsyD, MA, MS, a clinical psychologist in the Penn Memory Center, senior research investigator for the Penn Project on Precision Medicine for the Brain (P3MB). For many years, a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease was often not made until a patient had substantial memory and cognitive problems -- by which time patients themselves were often unaware of their diagnosis. Advances in awareness, as well in diagnostic methods, mean doctors are diagnosing Alzheimer's disease earlier, and in the future, routine diagnosis may occur before symptoms even begin. According to Stites, early diagn...

Shortage of serotonin is believed to be a cause of depression. The most common anti-depressant drugs are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), including Prozac and Zoloft, which block the absorption of the neurotransmitter serotonin, increasing the amount of serotonin active in the brain at any one time. While SSRIs have been used to treat depression for decades, exactly how they work has been a mystery. Another question was why the behavioral effects are delayed for weeks or months despite of the immediate pharmacological impact. To better understand SSRIs and their effect on the brain, Paul Greengard's lab at Rockefeller University in New York teamed up with Adrien Peyrache, a researcher at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital of McGill University. A few years ago Greengard's lab established that a protein called p11 plays a key role in depression-like behaviours. This protein is strongly expressed in one particular neuronal subclass in the hippoc...

The finding is reported in today's online edition of the journal  Current Biology . "This discovery, which identifies a direct dopamine neuron connection to the circadian center, is possibly the first step toward the development of unique drugs, targeting specific neurons, to combat the unpleasant symptoms of jet-lag and shiftwork, as well as several dangerous pathologies," said Ali Deniz Güler, a UVA professor of biology and neuroscience who oversaw the study in his lab. Modern society often places abnormal pressure on the human body -- from shifting time schedules due to air travel, to work cycles that don't conform to natural light, to odd eating times -- and these external conditions create an imbalance in the body's natural cycles, which are evolutionarily synchronized to day and night. These imbalances may contribute to depression, obesity, cardiovascular diseases and even cancer. "Scientists have been working for decades to help the body's ...