Brain: Study Eyes Autism and Brain Size

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From Denny: Published 4 May 2009 in the Archives of General Psychiatry is a new study about the brain size in autistic small children. The study was done at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

What part of the brain did researchers focus?

There is a region deep in the brain that helps control emotions. It also regulates attention and reads social cues from eye contact. This region of the brain is called the amygdala.

Who was studied?

The scientists studied two-year-olds with and without autism.

What did these researchers find?

What was quite a surprise is that autistic children exhibited a more enlarged amygdala where non-autistic children did not. This unusual distinction persisted in the follow-up screening of these same children two years later.

How is this study helpful?

For autism researchers this study adds insight into the brain size anomalies of autism and could help doctors diagnose autism.

Most of all, this study could help develop new interventions that help strengthen young childrens' social functioning.

Written by Denny Lyon

Video: Erasing Painful Memories

From Denny: Says CBS, “Very early research that might prove promising for addition and PTSD. Too early for selective memory erasing.”

Sounds like early sci-fi and a bit unethical. Reminds me of reading science history when psychiatrists were enthralled with electrical shock therapy and lobotomies for depression. This sounds unethical and a bit spooky to me no matter how much they market it to the contrary. There are just too many ways this could be used to harm others - and easily: military torture, medical malpractice, divorce, easy way to get a hold of multi-million dollar estates and wealthy businesses. Con artists could have a field day with this research.

This video news segment makes it appear benign when clearly this could be used for great abuse of power. The real question is: Just who is behind this research AND why is it so important to them?


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Video: Antisocial-Personality-Disorder

Sociopaths and psychopaths are both listed under antisocial personality disorder. Certainly explains why the global financial markets created an economic meltdown: no restraints on ruthless people!

This plain-talking therapist calls it as she sees it about the interaction of psychopaths and understanding their behavior.

Brain: Relationship of Thinning of Brain's Cortex Linked to Depression

"Images of the right and left hemispheres of the brain, as viewed from the side. The colors represent the differences in cortical thickness between the high-risk group, which has a family history of depression, and the low-risk group, which has no known risk. Blue and purple represent the thinning of the cortex, with purple regions having the greatest thinning. Green areas show no significant differences between the two groups."

From Denny: If you missed it yesterday, like I did because of scheduled Blogger outages and general slow down of the internet in the Hurricane Katrina zone, here's a disturbing study. Fortunately, the study was only done on 131 people, hardly a large sampling of the population.

I'm always wary of studies these days as often they are done on too small a group for too short a time and the biggest pet peeve: often paid for by drug companies with the most to gain if researchers give them the results they desire.

It would appear the scientists have drawn no hard conclusions yet - just found some startling data. They have a long way to go before they can apply this new data across the board in the general population that determines "x" number of people will be predicted to suffer from depression. It is an interesting finding though, one worthy of a lot more serious study if only to help those already suffering from depression.

Here are a few excerpts. For the full article at the New York Times click on the title link.

"Scientists who have been following families with a history of depression have found structural differences in family members’ brains — specifically, a significant thinning of the right cortex, the brain’s outermost surface. The thinning may be a trait or a marker of vulnerability to depression, the researchers suggested.

The scientists’ brain imaging study found the thinning in descendants of depressed parents and grandparents, whether or not the individuals themselves had ever suffered a depressive episode or an anxiety disorder, researchers said...

The cerebral cortex is the region of the brain centrally involved in reasoning, planning and mood, and thinning of the cortex may affect an individual’s ability to pay attention to and interpret social and emotional cues, scientists suggested.

'If you have thinning in this portion of the brain, it interferes with the processing of emotional stimuli,' Dr. Peterson said. 'We think that’s what makes them vulnerable to developing anxiety and depression — it essentially isolates them in an emotional world.'

While thinning in the right hemisphere was not associated with actual depression, additional thinning in the same region of the left hemisphere was, and 'seems to tip you over from having a vulnerability to depression to actually developing symptoms,' Dr. Peterson said."