New Insights Into Causes Of Anorexia

New imaging technology provides insight into abnormalities in the brain circuitry of patients with anorexia nervosa (commonly known as anorexia) that may contribute to the puzzling symptoms found in people with the eating disorder. In a review paper published online in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Walter Kaye, MD, professor of psychiatry and director of the Eating Disorders Program at the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues describe dysfunction in certain neural circuits of the brain which may help explain why people develop anorexia in the first place, and behaviors such as the relentless pursuit of dieting and weight loss.

"Currently, we don't have very effective means of treating people with anorexia," said Kaye. "Consequently, many patients with the disorder remain ill for years or eventually die from the disease, which has the highest death rate of any psychiatric disorder."

A better understanding of the underlying neurobiology – how behavior is coded in the brain and contributes to anorexia —is likely to result in more effective treatments, according to the researchers.

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Anti-Inflammatory Medications May Become A Treatment For Schizophrenia

Many of the structural and neurochemical features of schizophrenia are present long before the full syndrome of schizophrenia develops. What processes tip the balance between the ultra-high risk states and the development of schizophrenia? One candidate mechanism is cerebral inflammation, studied by Dr. Bart van Berckel and colleagues in the November 1st issue of Biological Psychiatry.

Using positron emission tomography, or PET, imaging, the researchers provide evidence of a brain inflammatory state that may be associated with the development of schizophrenia. The authors reported increased binding levels of [11C]PK11195, a radiotracer with high affinity for the peripheral benzodiazepine receptor (PBR) in patients who had carried the diagnosis of schizophrenia for five years or less. PBR is a molecular target that is present at higher levels in activated microglia. Microglia are activated during inflammatory states. Drs. van Berckel and Kahn further explain: “It was found that microglia activation is present in schizophrenia patients early after disease onset, suggesting brain cells are damaged in schizophrenia. In addition, since microglia can have either a protective or a toxic role, activated microglia may be the result, but also the cause of damage to brain cells.”

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Schizophrenia Ties to Random DNA Mutations Bolstered in Study

Spontaneous defects in DNA may trigger schizophrenia, according to research that bolsters results of smaller studies aimed at finding the genetic causes of the disabling mental disorder.

In the largest study of its kind, international research teams found evidence that schizophrenia can be caused when genes are duplicated or deleted in an often random process that isn't inherited from parents, according to reports published today in the journals Nature and Nature Genetics. Scientists found that people with schizophrenia are more than 10 times as likely to have these rare chromosomal alterations as people who don't have the illness.

While the findings fill in parts of the puzzle of the disease, they also suggest it may be caused by a complex set of genetic flaws, which could complicate the search for effective treatments.

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Gene-Hunters Find Hope and Hurdles in Schizophrenia Studies

Two groups of researchers hunting for schizophrenia genes on a larger scale than ever before have found new genetic variants that point toward a different understanding of the disease.

The variants discovered by the two groups, one led by Dr. Kari Stefansson of Decode Genetics in Iceland and the other by Dr. Pamela Sklar of Massachusetts General Hospital, are rare. They substantially increase the risk of schizophrenia but account for a tiny fraction of the total number of cases.

This finding, coupled with the general lack of success so far in finding common variants for schizophrenia, raises the possibility that the genetic component of the disease is due to a large number of variants, each of which is very rare, rather than to a handful of common variants.

“What is beginning to emerge is that a lot of the risk of brain diseases is conferred by rare deletions,” Dr. Stefansson said. The three variants discovered by his group and Dr. Sklar’s involve the deletion of large sections of DNA from specific sites in a patient’s genome.

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More children are suffering from mental health problems, says report

Rising numbers of children are suffering mental health problems caused by family breakdown and peer pressure, a report suggests.

It says that more than a quarter of under-16s regularly feel depressed because of the stresses of family life, friendships and school. The report by the Good Childhood Inquiry, which heard evidence from mental health experts, says that 13 per cent of girls between 13 and 15 years old and 10 per cent of boys in the same age group suffer from mental health problems, yet there is little treatment on offer.

The report is part of a two-year inquiry into the state of modern childhood commissioned by the Children’s Society. It comes after Unicef concluded that Britain was one of the worst places in the industrialised world to be a child.

Thousands of children took part in the study. Twenty-seven per cent of those aged 14 to 16 said that they often felt depressed, and 22 worried about the state of their physical health. Anxiety about appearance was mentioned by seven out of ten under16s, who said that they dieted some or all of the time. Family breakdown was a common problem.

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Making Sense of the Great Suicide Debate

AN expression of true love or raw hatred, of purest faith or mortal sin, of courageous loyalty or selfish cowardice: The act of suicide has meant many things to many people through history, from the fifth-century Christian martyrs to the Samurais’ hara-kiri to more recent literary divas, Hemingway, Plath, Sexton.

But now the shadow of suicide has slipped into the corridors of modern medicine as a potential drug side effect, where it is creating a scientific debate as divisive and confounding as any religious clash.

And the shadow is likely to deepen.

After a years-long debate about whether antidepressant drugs like Prozac and Paxil increase the risk of suicide in some people, the Food and Drug Administration in recent days reported that other drugs, including medications used to treat epilepsy, also appear to increase the remote risk of suicide. The agency has been evaluating suicide risk in a variety of medicines, and more such reports — and more headlines — are expected.

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