ADHD a 'brain disorder', not just bad behaviour: study

People with ADHD have slightly smaller brains than those without the condition, according to a study released Thursday which insisted it is a physical disorder and not just bad behavior.

The largest analysis to date of the brains of people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder found "structural differences" and evidence of delayed development compared with non-sufferers, researchers reported.

"The results from our study confirm that people with ADHD have differences in their brain structure and therefore suggest that ADHD is a disorder of the brain," said the study's lead author, Martine Hoogman of Radboud University Medical Centre in the Netherlands.

"We hope that this will help to reduce stigma that ADHD is 'just a label' for difficult children or caused by poor parenting," she said in a statement.

The results of the study, which involved 1,713 people with ADHD and 1,529 people without the condition, were published in The Lancet Psychiatry.

Most often diagnosed in children, ADHD is blamed for severe and repeated bouts of inattention, hyperactivity or impulsiveness that can cause problems at school or home.

The symptoms can persist into adulthood.

The causes remain in dispute, and some specialists say ADHD is nothing but an excuse for using drugs to subdue children with difficult personalities or bad parents.

Drugs for treating ADHD, such as Ritalin, have been blamed for side effects including weight loss or gain, liver damage and suicidal thoughts.

For the latest study, Hoogman and a team analysed the MRI scans of people aged four to 63, suffering from ADHD or not.

- Emotional control -

They measured overall brain volume as well as the size of seven regions thought to be linked to the disorder.

The volume overall was smaller in people diagnosed with ADHD, as were five of the brain regions, the team said.

"These differences are very small -- in the range of a few percent -- so the unprecedented size of our study was crucial to help identify these," Hoogman said.

"Similar differences in brain volume are also seen in other psychiatric disorders, especially major depressive disorder."

The regions affected included the amygdala, which is involved in the regulation of emotion.

Previous studies which associated changes in brain volume with ADHD had been too small to be conclusive, the team said.

The differences observed in their study were most prominent in children, but also present in adults with the condition.

The findings suggest that delays in the development of several brain regions were characteristic of ADHD, the researchers said.

They found no difference between people who were taking or had taken ADHD drugs, and those who had never taken such medications -- suggesting that the brain changes were not caused by psychostimulants.

In a comment on the study, Jonathan Posner of Columbia University said it was an "important contribution" to the field of ADHD science.

He said further research was needed to determine the effects of medication on the brains of people with ADHD, and how they develop as people get older.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Trump has a history of questionable behavior with women: NY Times

Interviews with dozens of women who have worked for Donald Trump or interacted with him socially reveal a pattern of often unsettling personal behavior by the Republican presidential candidate, The New York Times reported on Saturday.

The Times, which said it based the article on more than 50 interviews, quoted women who recounted episodes in which he treated women as sexual objects and made comments about their bodies. But some women said Trump had encouraged them in their careers and promoted them within his businesses, often in positions in which women tended to be excluded.

When asked about the unflattering incidents described in the article, Trump either denied that they took place or disputed the details, the newspaper said.

“A lot of things get made up over the years,” Trump told the Times. “I have always treated women with great respect.”

A Trump representative did not immediately respond to a request by Reuters for comment.

Barbara Res, who oversaw construction of Trump's Manhattan business headquarters, said he would sometimes interrupt meetings with comments about women's figures.

During a job interview for a Los Angeles project, for example, Trump made a random aside about Southern California women. "They take care of their asses," Res recalled Trump saying.

Years later, when Res says she had gained weight, she said Trump told her: "You like your candy."

Even so, Res, who worked for Trump for 12 years before quitting and then came back as a consultant for six more, said she was grateful to Trump for her professional opportunities, though she said he frequently called her "Honey Bunch," the Times reported.

Trump also earned a reputation for being seen with beautiful women dating back to his days at a New York military-style boarding school where he was named "ladies' man" in the yearbook, the Times reported.

Barbara Fife, a deputy New York mayor in the 1990s, recalls Trump telling her at her City Hall office that he was in a hurry because he had "a great date tonight with a model for Victoria’s Secret," she told the Times.

“I saw it as immature, quite honestly,” Fife was quoted as saying.

As a candidate, Trump has made frequent references to his record in business as evidence of how American women would benefit if he is elected. He has often said that no one “cherishes” or “respects” women more than him.

Some of those interviewed praised Trump for giving women positions of power.

“I think there are mischaracterizations about him,” Jill Martin, assistant counsel at the Trump Organization, told the Times. “For me, he’s made it a situation where I can really excel at my job and still devote the time necessary for my family.”

The story comes less than two weeks after the last of Trump's Republican rivals dropped out, all but assuring him the party's presidential nomination this summer.

Throughout his improbable campaign, Trump has managed to deflect criticism about his attitude to women, fueled by verbal insults he lobbed at Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly and former Republican candidate Carly Fiorina.

(Reporting by Frank McGurty; Editing by Leslie Adler)

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Why Superstition Makes You Buy Insurance

As a teenager, I had a love-hate relationship with horror flicks. I loved watching them with my friends and feeling deliciously frightened in a crowded theater. I hated driving home alone in the dark to my parents' house afterwards. I was always certain that Freddy Krueger or Ghostface or the "Jeepers Creepers" monster was just waiting for me in the back seat of my car, and I would eventually become the fodder of a horror film "based on true events" that would frighten teenagers in years to come.

So, in order to keep my panic in check, I came up with an ingenious superstition — I convinced myself that Freddy couldn't attack me as long as I never looked to see if he was there. So, other than checking my mirrors to change lanes, I studiously avoided looking behind me during my entire drive home. Because the moment I checked to see if there was a monster, it would be there. I had to trust that I was safe.

Believe it or not, this completely irrational habit of mine has a great deal to do with how we all go about buying insurance. We may become wiser and more mature than our teenaged selves (and you might have already been there as a teenager compared to me), but we cannot get past the irrational parts of our brains that lead us to strange and stupid behavior.

Here's what you need to know about why purchasing insurance coverage is not nearly the straightforward, risk-mitigating, and mature course of action that you may think it is.

Part of Us Thinks That Insurance Is Magic

 

After you complete the process of purchasing life insurance; umbrella insurance; or earthquake, flood, or fire insurance, how do you feel? You might feel a little more financially secure, knowing that you'll be covered in case of an issue. You might be relieved to be finished with an unpleasant but important task.

But most likely, you'll also stop worrying about the likelihood of whatever you're now insured against. Not because you're financially covered now — but because some superstitious part of you feels like having the insurance is a guard against that specific bad event occurring.

Before you scoff, think about how much better you'd feel about doing something dangerous if you purchased life insurance ahead of time. Wouldn't you be more likely to accept the opportunity to go bungee jumping or white-water rafting if you got a chance to buy insurance coverage at the same time?

This sense of insurance providing a kind of shield has become prevalent among leisure travelers, particularly since 9/11. According to John Tierney of The New York Times,

[in 2007], tens of millions of people bought life insurance for scheduled flights of airlines in the United States. Not one of those insured passengers died in a crash — and this was not just a coincidence, at least not to many of the people who bought the insurance. No, at some level they believed that their insurance helped keep the plane aloft, according to psychologists with new experimental evidence of just how weirdly superstitious people can be.

We may understand on a rational level that purchasing insurance will have absolutely no effect on a plane's ability to safely reach our destination, but that does not keep our gut from feeling a little better about traveling once we have insurance.

Tierney goes on to show that this magical thinking about insurance is not limited to potentially devastating incidents. After all, we can be forgiven for being irrational about plane crashes and terrorism. However, apparently we even assign magical properties to insurance when the stakes are a great deal lower:

In one…experiment [by Orit Tykocinski, a professor of psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel], players drew colored balls out of an urn and lost all their money if they picked a blue one. Some players were randomly forced to buy insurance policies that let them keep half their money if they drew a blue one. These policies didn't diminish their risk of drawing a blue ball — but the insured players rated their risk lower than the uninsured players rated theirs.

The problem with this particular aspect of our superstitious brains is that it is very difficult to counteract. We have difficulty thinking rationally about loss, whether it is loss of money, property, or life and limb. Basically, there's not a great deal we can do in order to turn off the sense that insurance is protective, rather than just compensation. So, if purchasing insurance will make you feel better, taking steps to make certain you are buying a legitimate policy (and avoiding volcano insurance salesmen) is the most rational thing you can do with your superstition.

Our Brains Are Like Google

 

The other aspect of our irrational brains that throws us off course when purchasing insurance is something behavioral economists call the availability heuristic. This cognitive bias works like this — if you are able to easily recall something that happened, then your brain assigns it more likelihood. In the same way that the top hits for Google searches are considered the most "important" hits according to Google's ranking and algorithms, our brains seem to think anything we can recall in detail must be more important than other information — like statistics, scientific evidence, etc.

The availability heuristic was a big part of the reason why I would be freaked out about the possibility of being attacked by Ghostface immediately after watching "Scream." What the killer did in the film was fresh in my mind, so it seemed more likely to happen. By the next day, I could laugh about my paranoia of the night before, but it was next to impossible to ignore my fear at the time.

We're all victims of the availability heuristic. Any time you find yourself thinking that it's not safe to let children play outside by themselves these days, you are relying on a mental shortcut that makes it easy to recall kidnapped children but difficult to remember the crime statistics that show today's kids are the safest that have ever lived. (Really, they are.)

As much as the availability heuristic steers us wrong these days, it was an important method for gauging risk for our ancestors, long before the invention of statistical analysis. According Daniel Gardner, author of "The Science of Fear,"

As a rule of thumb for hunter-gatherers walking the African savannah, the Example Rule [availability heuristic] makes good sense. That's because the brain culls low-priority memories: If time passes and a memory isn't used, it is likely to fade. So if you have to think hard to remember that, yes, there was a time when someone got sick after drinking from that pond, chances are it happened quite a while ago and a similar incident hasn't happened since — making it reasonable to conclude that the water in the pond is safe to drink. But if you instantly recall an example of someone drinking that water and turning green, then it likely happened recently and you should find somewhere else to get a drink (48).

Unfortunately, our brains haven't caught up with our global 24-hour news culture, which means that something unusual that happened on the other side of the world is enough to make us irrationally think that extraordinary event is likely to happen to us. (Just look to see how many people are concerned about meteor insurance after Russia's meteor hit earlier this month to see what I mean.)

What this means specifically for insurance is that people are much more likely to purchase policies immediately after a loss. Whether it's seeing a relative die, seeing your house damaged by an earthquake or a flood, or even seeing a friend get sued for an injury sustained on her backyard trampoline, you're much more likely to seek out an insurance agent and get yourself covered when such an incident is fresh in your mind.

This is only a problem in that the level of fear and concern you feel fades over time. That means you're more likely to let your policy lapse. You mean to keep on top of it, but everything's copacetic right now, so insuring against something like that is not a big worry.

This is particularly troubling when it comes to the sorts of events that become more likely the more time goes on. For instance, the weeks after an earthquake are when you are least likely to experience another quake — and yet that is when people are most likely to purchase earthquake insurance. Areas on fault lines have more likelihood of experiencing an earthquake after some time has passed since the last one, but because of the availability heuristic, many of those policyholders are allowing their insurance to lapse and simply aren't worrying about the next quake.

Being a Rational Policyholder

 

Unfortunately, the only way to combat superstition and the availability heuristic when it comes to rationally purchasing insurance is to sit down and do an actual cost-benefit analysis with a look at the statistical analyses. (Sounds like a barrel of laughs, no?) But without countering your irrational impulses with hard numbers and science, you're likely to be purchasing policies you might not need at the wrong times — and forgetting about them as the need grows.

That's almost as crazy as refusing to look behind you for fear of being attacked by Freddy.

source: wisebread.com

Is your cat making you crazy? Feline feces linked to suicide among women

WASHINGTON - Women infected with a parasite spread by cat feces run a higher risk of attempting suicide, suggests a study of more than 45,000 women in Denmark published in a scientific journal this week.

"We can't say with certainty that T. gondii caused the women to try to kill themselves," said Teodor Postolache of the University of Maryland medical school, senior author of the study in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

"But we did find a predictive association between the infection and suicide attempts later in life that warrants additional studies. We plan to continue our research into this possible connection."

About one in three people in the world are believed to be infected with T. gondii, which has been linked to schizophrenia and behavior changes, but often produces no symptoms as it lurks in brain and muscle cells.

Human run the risk of infection when they clean out their cats' litter boxes, as well as by consuming unwashed vegetables, undercooked or raw meat, or water from a contaminated source.

"The study found that women infected with T. gondii were one-and-a-half times more likely to attempt suicide compared to those who were not infected, and the risk seemed to rise with increasing levels of the T. gondii antibodies," a summary of the findings said.

"Previous mental illness did not appear to significantly alter these findings. The relative risk was even higher for violent suicide attempts."

The suspected perils of T. gondii featured in The Atlantic magazine in March this year when it ran a widely-read profile of Czech biologist Jaroslav Flegr, who suspects the parasite of literally changing people's minds.

It headlined the article: "How Your Cat is Making You Crazy."

source: interaksyon.com

Spanking increases odds of mental illness - study

WASHINGTON - People who were hit or spanked as children face higher odds of mental ailments as adults, including mood and anxiety disorders and problems with alcohol and drug abuse, researchers said Monday.

The study, led by Canadian researchers, is the first to examine the link between psychological problems and spanking, while excluding more severe physical or sexual abuse in order to better gauge the effect of corporal punishment alone.

Those who were spanked or hit as kids were between two and seven percent more likely to encounter mental issues later, said the research in the US journal Pediatrics, based on a retrospective survey of more than 600 US adults.

That figure may seem low, particularly since about half of the US population recalls being spanked in childhood, but nevertheless shows that physical punishment can raise the risk of problems later on, experts said.

"The study is valuable because it opens the conversation about parenting," said Victor Fornari, director of the division of child and adolescent psychiatry at North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System in New York.

The rate "is not dramatically higher, but it is higher, just to suggest that physical punishment is a risk factor for developing more mental disturbances as an adult," said Fornari, who was not involved in the study.

Previous research has repeatedly shown that children who were physically abused as youngsters suffer from more mental disturbances as adults, and are more likely to engage in aggressive behavior than kids who were not hit.

But these studies have typically included more serious abuse.

The current study excludes both sexual abuse and physical abuse that left bruises, marks, or caused injury.

Instead it focuses on "harsh physical punishment," defined as pushing, grabbing, shoving, slapping or hitting as a form of punishment from elders.

While 32 nations around the world have banned corporal punishment of kids, the United States and Canada are not among them.

Using a nationally representative survey sample of 653 Americans, they found that those who recalled experiencing harsh punishment as children faced higher odds of a range of mental problems.

Between two and five percent of disorders like depression, anxiety, bipolar, anorexia, or bulimia were attributable to physical punishment as a child, the study said.

From four to seven percent of more serious problems including personality disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and intellectual disabilities were associated with such punishments in childhood.

Researchers stressed that the study could not establish that spanking had actually caused these disorders in certain adults, only that there was a link between memories of such punishment and a higher incidence of mental problems.

The survey data came from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions collected between 2004 and 2005, and included adults over age 20.

Participants were asked: "As a child how often were you ever pushed, grabbed, shoved, slapped or hit by your parents or any adult living in your house?" Those who answered "sometimes" or greater were included in the analysis.

Roya Samuels, a pediatrician at Cohen Children's Medical Center in New York, said the parents' genes may influence both their response to raising an unruly child as well as their likelihood of passing down certain ailments.

"Parents who are resorting to mechanisms of corporal punishment might themselves be at risk for depression and mental disorders; therefore, there might be a hereditary factor going on in these families," she told AFP.

Future research could shed more light on the issue. In the meantime, the study offers a reminder that other disciplinary options such as positive reinforcement and removing rewards are viewed more favorably by doctors.

"The reality is, if 50 percent of the population has experienced being spanked in the past year, most kids are resilient. It is just that there are better ways for parents to discipline kids than spanking," Fornari said.

"And for some vulnerable kids, the spanking may increase their risk for the development of mental disturbances. So for those reasons it is important to really minimize or extinguish physical punishment."

The American Academy of Pediatrics opposes striking children for any cause and the Canadian Pediatric Society recommends that doctors strongly discourage the use of physical punishment.

source: interaksyon.com