Mental introspection increases as brain areas begin to act in sync

Mental introspection increases as brain areas begin to act in sync

Science News

Mental Introspection Increases as Brain Areas Begin to Act in Sync

ScienceDaily (Nov. 16, 2010) — Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center can now show, using functional MRI images, why it is that behavior in children and young adolescents veers toward the egocentric rather than the introspective.

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In findings presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego on Nov. 14, the researchers say that the five scattered regions in the brain that make up the default-mode network (DMN) have not started working in concert in youngsters aged six to nine. These areas light up in an fMRI scan, but not simultaneously.

The DMN is only active when the mind is at rest and allowed to wander or daydream. This network is believed to be key in how a person introspectively understands themselves and others, and forms beliefs, intentions, and desires through autobiographical memory.

By ages 10 to 12, the researchers found that these diffuse regions start functioning together as a unit, and at ages 13 to19, they acted in concert, just like they do in adults.

"These results suggest that children develop introspection over time as their brains develop," says the study's first author, neuroscientist Stuart Washington, Ph.D., who will be presenting the results. "Before then they are somewhat egocentric, which is not to mean that they are negatively self-centered, but they think that everyone views the world in the same way they do. They lack perspective in that way."

In this study, the researchers sought to understand if connectivity between distant regions in the brain increases with age. They chose the DMN to study in part because it consists of a widespread system of neuronal nodes that work together, but are linked in a way that is not yet well understood. (These discrete nodes could be physically connected by neuronal synapses or they could fire together and not be connected.)

Previous research has suggested that the DMN is not well synchronized in many autistic individuals, and this may explain the perceptions many of these individuals express in testing -- a viewpoint that is also seen in younger children who do not have autism, Washington says.

An example that illustrates the difference between an egocentric and an introspective view is the simple puzzle, Washington says: "Jane" walks into a room, and puts a marble in a closet, and then "Bill" comes in and takes the marble out of the closet and puts it into a box. Jane comes back in and looks for the marble and she has not spoken to Bill. Where does she look for the marble?

The right answer, of course, is that she looks in the closet. But many autistic individuals say Jane looks in the box, "because they know that the marble is in the box and they think that everyone else knows that," Washington says. The ability to see the world from the perspective of others is called "Theory of Mind" (ToM) and certain nodes of the DMN have been associated with it. The failure to develop ToM seen in many autistics individuals and younger children may lie in asynchronous firing of the DMN, Washington says.

In this study, the research team enrolled 42 participants: 10 individuals which were aged six to 9; 12 were aged 10 to 12; 9 individuals which were aged 13 to19, and 10 were aged 22 to 27 years. The scientists' goal was to study the development of functional connectivity between the anterior and posterior nodes of DMN across the four age groups.

They gave the participants a task to perform, but the scientists were actually interested in recording brain activity that took place after the task was over, when the patients were told to rest.

In the group of children ages six to nine, the researchers saw the same kind of lack of synchronicity seen in older autistic children, Washington says.

The older participants in this study were, the more in sync the DMN functioned, reaching a plateau in adulthood, he says. Significant differences were noted between children and adolescents, and children and adults, he adds. "These increases in functional connectivity coincide with introspective mental activity that has been shown to emerge during adolescence."

The study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development

Binge drinking in adolescence changes stress response in adulthood

Binge Drinking in Adolescence Changes Stress Response in Adulthood

ScienceDaily (Nov. 16, 2010) — Alcohol exposure during adolescence alters the body's ability to respond to stress in adulthood, according to new research in rats presented at Neuroscience 2010, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, held in San Diego. Because problems regulating stress are associated with behavioral and mood disorders, the findings may indicate that binge drinking in adolescence leads to increased risk of anxiety or depression in adulthood.

Binge drinking, defined as more than four or five drinks in a single session, typically begins around age 13 and peaks between ages 18 and 22. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 36 percent of teens aged 18 to 20 reported at least one binge-drinking episode in the previous 30 days.

The researchers, directed by Toni Pak, PhD, at Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine, found that rats exposed to a binge pattern of alcohol consumption around the time of puberty had lower circulating levels of the stress hormone corticosterone -- akin to the human hormone cortisol -- in adulthood. However, in response to the physical stress of alcohol exposure, these same rats showed a greater spike in corticosterone than rats that had not previously been exposed to alcohol.

"Our findings suggest that alcohol exposure during puberty permanently alters the system by which the brain triggers the body to produce stress hormones," said Pak. "This indicates that exposing young people to alcohol could permanently disrupt connections in the brain that are normally formed during puberty and are necessary to ensure healthy adult brain function," she said.

Research was supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Pregnant drinking 'affects sperm'

Page last updated at 11:06 GMT, Tuesday, 29 June 2010 12:06 UK

From BBC News

By Emma Wilkinson
Health reporter, BBC News, in Rome The relationship between drinking and sperm quality is not clear

Women who drink during pregnancy may be damaging the future fertility of their sons, research suggests.

In a study of almost 350 young men, sperm levels were a third lower in those whose mothers had drunk more than four drinks a week during pregnancy compared with teetotallers.

The Danish researchers told a fertility conference these men may have a harder time getting their partner pregnant.

UK experts said alcohol may not be the issue, but a marker for other factors.

Current advice is to avoid alcohol during pregnancy, but those who do so are advised to have no more than one or two units of alcohol once or twice a week.

The study included men, now aged between 18 and 21, whose mothers had taken part in a large study on lifestyle while they were pregnant with them.

Researchers told the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference that they split the men into four groups - those whose mothers drank nothing, those who had one to one and a half drinks a week, two to four drinks a week, or more than four drinks a week.

One drink was classed as a beer, small glass of wine or one measure of spirits.

Four drinks in the study is equivalent to around six UK units.

When they looked at sperm counts in the men's semen samples, they found those with the highest alcohol exposure in the womb had average concentrations of 25 million per millilitre compared with 40 million/ml in those whose mothers drank no alcohol.

After adjusting for factors which might influence sperm, such as smoking and medical history, they calculated that average sperm concentration was 32% lower in the highest alcohol group than the abstinence group.

Fertility effects

The World Health Organization says that a normal range of sperm is 20 to 40 million/ml.

It is known that lower concentrations of sperm - even within the normal range - may mean it takes longer to conceive.

Study leader Dr Cecilia Ramlau-Hansen, from Aarhus University Hospital, said that if the link is proven in further studies, it may explain why semen quality seems to have fallen in recent decades.

"If exposure to alcohol in foetal life causes poor semen quality in adult life, we would expect that populations with many pregnant women drinking, possibly heavily, in pregnancy would have lower fertility in comparison with populations where pregnant women do not drink."

Dr Allan Pacey, senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield, said the study was very interesting and supported the theory that male fertility was influenced at an early stage by factors in the womb.

But he pointed out that the low sperm levels seen did not equate to infertility.

"I don't think we can be certain that alcohol is necessarily the bad thing here - it could be a surrogate marker for something else - but clearly there is some kind of relationship.

"It needs following up but it might help us understand factors which affect testicle development in the womb."

Drug addicts offered cash to stop reproducing

From Britain's Daily Telegraph:

Addicts are being offered up to £200 cash to be sterilised so they do not give birth to drug dependent children.

By Tom Whitehead, Home Affairs Editor
Published: 4:24PM BST 09 Apr 2010

A controversial American charity is now offering the service to addicts in the UK and has set up a helpline for those interested.

Pro-life campaigners said the offer was "inhuman".

Project Prevention claims to have stopped 3,500 drink and drugs addicts from having more children by paying them to be sterilised.

It has now received £13,000 from an anonymous British donor to help launch a similar service in the UK.

But the campaigner behind the scheme, Barbara Harris, from North Carolina, shrugged off concerns that the money will just be spent on buying more drugs.

And anyone in Britain taking up the offer will still be expected to have the treatment done on the NHS at the taxpayer's expense.

Barbara Harris said she has visited drugs agencies in London to discuss the scheme and added: “I’ve got hundreds of emails from people in the UK saying: 'You need to come here, please come over here, we need your help.

"We’re going to make this offer to drug addicts, social workers, law enforcement. Anyone who comes in contact with these women can refer addicts to us now we have an 0800 number here in the UK."

She said drug users would have to go to their own GP or hospital to arrange the sterilisation and produce a certificate to prove it had been carried out.

She came up with the idea after seeing her own adopted children having to withdraw off crack cocaine after their birth.

Anthony Ozimic, of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), said: "It is inhuman to seek to eliminate human problems by eliminating humans themselves. Such campaigns should have no place in Britain."

Select Committee on Mental Health and Addictions (Ontario)

I reported to the Select Committee on mental Health and Addictions vis-a-vis FASD, along with a colleague back in September and the Committee has now completed its Interim Report. This report is available on the Legislative Assembly web site at: http://www.ontla.on.ca/committee-proceedings/committee-reports/files_pdf/SCMHA-InterimReport-March2010.pdf

Pages of particular interest are 10 (First Nations, Inuit and Metis Peoples), and 31 (specific illnesses). Some snippets:

"Witnesses noted that early diagnosis is key, as is the case with most conditions. However, FASD diagnoses are complex and typically require a multi-disciplinary team. Thus, FASD is frequently misdiagnosed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or autism, and treated incorrectly, if at all, or simply dismissed as bad behaviour.

"Witnesses advocated for proper diagnostic services, case management, special education and developmental programs, addictions counselling, assisted living options, skills training, the provision of structured environments, and respite care for families.

"It was also recommended that a single ministry take the lead for this condition and provide a targeted pool of resources. At present, FASD has "orphan" status, as no ministry assumes responsibility for it, and it lacks as OHIP billing code. Finally, care for individuals with FASD should be incorporated into a strategy for those with concurrent disorders, and a prevention campaign sensitive to the needs of particular communities should be developed."

High prevalence of epilepsy associated with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder

http://news.oneindia.in/2010/04/06/highprevalence-of-epilepsy-associated-with-fetal-alcoholsp.html

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) refers to a range of negative developmental outcomes that result from maternal drinking during pregnancy. Children with FASD can suffer from many problems, including epilepsy, a disorder characterized by spontaneous recurrence of unprovoked seizures.

The study will be published in the June 2010 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

"There are very few studies that have examined the relationship between seizures and epilepsy among individuals with FASD," noted James Reynolds, a senior scientist with the department of pharmacology and toxicology and the Centre for Neuroscience Studies, at Queens University. Reynolds is one of the study's authors.

"Many patients with epilepsy have a history of exposure to a prenatal insult, so we reasoned that prenatal exposure to alcohol could be such an epileptogenic insult," added Peter Carlen, a neurologist and senior scientist for the division of fundamental neurobiology at the Toronto Western Hospital, another of the study's authors.

"Secondly, there is a significant overlap in brain structures that suffer from deficits as a result of chronic prenatal alcohol exposure and those that are associated with seizures, specifically in the brain's hippocampus. Thirdly, previous studies had failed to examine other complications that occur in mothers who drink alcohol during pregnancy, such as the effects of drinking on seizure activity. Finally, previous studies used small sample sizes and failed to clearly define seizures and FASD."

"Recently, scientists have begun investigating whether fetal alcohol exposure increases the risk for developing other behavioral health and neurological problems," added Dan Savage, Regents' Professor and chair of neurosciences at the University of New Mexico. "Indeed, evidence has begun to suggest that children with FASD are at greater risk for alcoholism, substance abuse or depression later in life.

While it is too soon in the relatively young history of this research field to assess whether maternal drinking during pregnancy increases the risk of aging-related neurologic disorders, such as stroke or Parkinson's disease, several recent large-scale retrospective studies have examined whether fetal alcohol exposure increases the risk of developing epilepsy."

For the study, researchers examined the histories of 425 individuals (254 males, 171 females), between the ages of two and 49 years, from two FASD clinics. Relationships between a confirmed FASD diagnosis and other risk factors - such as exposure to alcohol or other drugs, type of birth, and trauma - were examined for the co-occurrence of epilepsy or a history of seizures.

"This study revealed a much higher prevalence of epilepsy and seizure history in individuals with a diagnosis of FASD," said Stephanie H. Bell, a researcher with the Centre for Neuroscience Studies at Queens University and corresponding author for the study. "In the general population, less than one percent are expected to develop epilepsy; of those with FASD, six percent had epilepsy and 12 percent had one or more seizures in their life. Subjects were more likely to have epilepsy, or a history of seizures, if exposure to alcohol had occurred in the first trimester or throughout the entire pregnancy."

"While this report supports a growing impression that fetal alcohol exposure may predispose the immature brain to the development of epilepsy, the results do not establish a direct cause-effect relationship between FASD and epilepsy," cautioned Savage. "Establishing a direct link between these clinical conditions will be a difficult challenge given our incomplete understanding of how ethanol damages the developing brain and what neuropathological changes in brain tissue lead to the development of different types of epilepsy." (ANI)

'Unfit' mother of 10 costs council £2.5m

A council faces a £2.5m bill because social workers have taken 10 children away from a mother judged unfit to have them.

By Alastair Jamieson
Published: 5:20PM BST 28 Mar 2010

The woman, named only as Rachael, wants custody of her children and has said she will “keep going” until authorities let her keep one.

The 33-year-old, who lives in Birmingham, had the 10 children by six different fathers but social workers deemed them at risk of neglect; five were adopted, four are in long-term foster care and one is awaiting adoption.

The total projected cost to the taxpayer of looking after her children – aged between 17 months and 15 years – is estimated at £1.5m, while legal fees, adoption costs and social workers’ time, bring the total to £2.5m.

John Hemming, woman’s MP in Birmingham Yardley and a campaigner for reform of the family courts, said the case illustrated the potential cost of removing children because parents often go on to have more offspring.

He said at least 500 of the 6,000-plus annual care applications involved mothers having more than one child taken away.

“You could not sit down and devise a more expensive and wasteful way of dealing with a family problem,” he said. “The legal costs involved can be almost as much as the care itself.

“In practice, if Rachael had been allowed to keep her children in a place where she was away from abusive men and where she could be supervised, it would have been much more beneficial in the long term.

“She is trying to cope and all the state is doing is hitting her over the head every time. This is a problem not just in Birmingham but throughout England.”

Rachael, who has never married, told a newspaper she intended to have her next child in Spain or Ireland to try to prevent the authorities from taking it.

“I want my kids back but I know it isn’t going to happen,” she said. “I will keep going until they let me keep one.”

Social services first placed her children on the protection register because her first partner was abusive while her second was revealed to be a sex offender.

She had further children with another partner but he left her and she was deemed unable to cope.

Birmingham City Council, which has about 2,000 children in its care, said it could not comment on individual cases or their costs but that it was spending £41m over five years on pilot programmes to offer early support to parents who are struggling to cope.

It hopes to reduce the number of children it takes into care by five per cent per year, saving the agencies involved £400m.

Cheryl Hopkins, Birmingham’s director of strategy and commissioning in children’s services, said: “Obviously we have to keep children safe, but what we know is that the outcomes for children who are in care are not good in terms of their life chances, and it costs us a fortune.”