• Was Junior Seau's apparent suicide brain-injury related?

    Stephen Dunn / Getty Images

    Junior Seau, former linebacker for the San Diego Chargers, was found dead in his home Wednesday in what police are calling an apparent suicide.

    By Linda Carroll

    Former NFL star Junior Seau’s death on Wednesday is fueling debate over whether football’s big hits leave some players with lingering brain damage that can lead to depression and possibly even suicide.

    The police have yet to determine whether the 43-year-old linebacker did, in fact, commit suicide. But because his death follows so closely on the heels of two high-profile suicides in former NFL defensive backs, many are wondering if the concussions Seau sustained during his 20 years as a hard-hitting star, known mostly for his stint with the San Diego Chargers, including the 1994 Super Bowl team, were implicated in his death. 

    In February 2011, former Chicago Bear Dave Duerson committed suicide at age 50, choosing to shoot himself in the chest so that scientists could look for signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain disease linked to head blows that can culminate in dementia and other symptoms. And just last month, former Atlanta Falcon Ray Easterling, who had sued the NFL for mismanaging players’ concussions, shot and killed himself at age 62.

    Experts interviewed by msnbc.com were mixed in their opinions on whether Seau’s concussions could have led to his apparent suicide. All agreed that there should be more research on the impact of head injuries on the risk for depression and suicide.

    “I think the evidence is very strong in both human and animal studies that repeated concussions that occur very close in time can result in depression and other emotional disorders that can lead to suicide,” said David Hovda, a professor of neurosurgery and director of the University of California, Los Angeles, Brain Injury Research Center. “Whether they are the sole reason for the suicide, I don’t think can be determined.”

    Hovda believes it’s possible that Seau shot himself in the chest so that he, like Duerson, might leave his brain for scientists to study.

    Dr. Douglas Smith was more cautious.

    “There’s beginning to be an assumption that repeated exposure to head injuries can make you suicidal,” said Smith, a professor of neurosurgery and director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s certainly suspicious and something that we should absolutely look into.”               

    But Smith cautioned that people shouldn’t assume that concussions will always lead to permanent brain damage. “There are many highly functioning individuals who have had a series of concussions -- captains of industry, politicians -- who are doing very well,” he said.

    The issue is a lot more murky for Pittsburgh Steelers' team neurosurgeon, Dr. Joseph Maroon, who was quick to point out the high incidence of depression among Americans who haven’t ever had an injury to their brains.

    “Depression is one of the most common diseases that affect people in the United States,” said Maroon, a professor of neurosurgery and the Heindl Scholar in Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh. “Some 10 to 15 percent of American who have not played football will have pathologic depression at some time in their lives. The most commonly prescribed drugs in the United States are antidepressants.

    “Given that, we also know that there may be a relationship in some individuals between multiple blows to the head, or even a single blow to the head, that can result in abnormal and pathological behavior. In an individual case, in this one for instance, from what I’ve read so far, I don’ t think there’s any way you can definitively say that this was directly related to football.”

    Nevertheless, Maroon said, people are taking concussion damage far more seriously these days. “There’s been a major cultural shift in the recognition and appreciation of post-concussive effects,” he said.

    A very emotional Luisa Seau, mother of former NFL player Junior Seau, and his sister Annette, talk to the media.

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  • Feds announce biggest-ever Medicare fraud, totaling $450 million

    By Scott Cohn, CNBC

    Federal prosecutors have charged 107 people, including doctors and nurses, in seven U.S. cities, accusing them of taking part in schemes to cheat the Medicare system out of $452 million through phony billing. Authorities are calling this the largest one-day takedown ever by the government’s Medicare fraud task force.


    At a news conference Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder said they “underscore the Justice Department’s determination to move aggressively in bringing to justice those who would violate our laws and defraud the Medicare program for their personal gain.”

    Read the original story at CNBC.com

    The 107 health care professionals, also including social workers and owners of health care companies, charged Wednesday worked in Miami, Tampa, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles and Baton Rouge.

    The arrests are the latest in a three-year crackdown on health care fraud, which is estimated to cost taxpayers between $80 and $160 billion per year. Authorities recovered a record $4.1 billion last year.

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    The government has also suspended payments to the 52 provider organizations where the individuals worked. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the operation, including the arrests and the cutoffs of payments, are part of an effort to preempt fraud instead of relying on what she called the old “pay and chase” model.

    “Now, we’re analyzing patterns and trends and claims data, instead of just going claim by claim,” Sebelius said.

    Still, court filings allege the defendants were able to carry out their schemes for years.

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    In Baton Rouge, seven people who ran two community mental health centers are accused of submitting more than $225 million in false claims for mental health services in a scheme that began in 2005 and continued through October. This case alone is one of the biggest ever Medicare fraud cases.

    Government officials say the defendants from Baton Rouge rounded up drug addicts, homeless people and the elderly and used them to submit false claims for treatment.

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    In Houston, owners of four private ambulance companies were accused of billing the system for non-existent or unnecessary runs.

    In Miami, more than 50 professionals were charged with carrying out a $137 million scam involving mental health services and home health care.

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    Other cases involved fraudulent billing for ambulance services, durable medical equipment, psychotherapy and prescription drugs.

    Pete Williams, NBC News’ justice correspondent, contributed to this report.  Follow Scott Cohn on Twitter.

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  • Did a brain injury play a role in Afghan massacre?

    By Sheila Eldred
    Discovery Channel
    Medical details about a staff sergeant, who is in custody for killing 16 Afghan civilians in a violent rampage, suggest he may have had one or more traumatic brain injuries.

    What those kinds of injuries can do to a person's decision-making is not totally certain. But scientists have linked brain trauma to some behavior, including violence.

    A vehicle the accused staff sergeant was in rolled over in Iraq in 2010, a U.S. official told Reuters.

    There is a link between brain injury and violence, according to researchers. And soldiers are at high risk for concussions and traumatic brain injury. Over 30,000 cases were diagnosed in 2011, according to the Department of Defense.

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    "They're in a combat zone; it's a high-risk job," said Jordan Grafman, director of the Traumatic Brain Injury Research Laboratory at the Kessler Foundation in New Jersey.

    David Hovda, director of the Brain Injury Research Center at UCLA and a member of the Department of Defense Health Board, was called to the Pentagon when the percentage of post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury cases rose dramatically in the Army, according to the Washington Post ). 

    Initially, the military psychiatrists and neurologists were upset, arguing that letting soldiers rest after a concussion would be bad medicine, Hovda said.

    Since then, though, the military has begun to pay more attention to the mental injuries of war. "We just deployed three MRI scanners in Afghanistan this year," Hovda said.

    "If [the accused soldier] had a mild TBI, he probably had more than one," Hovda said. "Most individuals don't tell the truth. When the brain's been hurt -- even mildly -- about 80 percent of individuals with mild TBI or a concussion recover in about two weeks."

    Symptoms range from headaches to amnesia to sleep disturbances, anxiety, lack of judgment, and depression.

    "In about 20 percent of individuals, those symptoms don't clear for months -- and we don't know why," Hovda said.

    During that time period, the parts of the brain exposed to the injury become dysfunctional, he said. If the injury involves the frontal lobes of the brain, two things happen:

    First, a loss of executive function. "That's a fancy term for trying to plan things or being able to make decisions," Hovda said.

    Second, people become uninhibited.

    "We have learned how to behave ourselves in public, so we may not shout out expletives in a radio interview or we may not accost someone because we don't like them," Hovda said. "When you have an injury to the frontal lobe, that's gone."

    A study of the aggression pattern of Vietnam veterans shows how the effects of brain injuries often play out. When Grafman and colleagues studied the link between brain damage and aggression in Vietnam war veterans, they turned to the soldiers' wives.

    The reports of increased yelling, throwing things, threats and physical violence were higher in veterans who had brain damage to the frontal lobes (a common area to be injured with a TBI) -- although physical violence was the least common form of aggression.

    "The frontal lobe is a place where we store memories that have to do with appropriate social behaviors in different situations," Grafman said. "If the tissue that stores those memories is damaged, instead of being able to easily retrieve those social rules and memories to guide your controlling behaviors, you're more likely to be dependent upon intact, but more primitive brain structures, which makes an impulsive reaction more likely to provocation."

    Also, Grafman noted, the study analyzed behavior in normal daily life.

    "I don't have any data, and I don't know if anyone does, on aggression in people with brain injuries who have been returned to the combat zone," he said. "Would that increase the likelihood (of aggression) because of the world you're in?"

    Some have suggested a link between post traumatic stress disorder and concussions and mild TBI. Some of the symptoms overlap, but it's probably not a causal relationship, Grafman said.

    "The same situation where you might have received the injury in combat could also increase the likelihood of PTSD," Grafman said. "If people around you are being shot or you are shooting somebody, I can't imagine something more traumatic to experience. But, you can have brain injury and not have PTSD."

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    "We made a DVD for soldiers on what a concussion is, and how it makes it more dangerous to your buddies and the civilian population," Hovda said. "You might be making decision on airstrikes that require seconds to make. And if your brain is compromised, you're not going to do very well and could really hurt someone."

    There is some good news, however. Most people who experience concussions and mild TBI do not turn violent. And most brain injuries can be managed through cognitive behavior therapy and/or medication, and help from family, Grafman said. 

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  • Shock therapy mystery closer to being solved

    By Rachael Rettner
    MyHealthNewsDaily

    While "shock therapy" has been used in psychiatry for more than 70 years, researchers had little idea how the controversial treatment worked to treat depression. Now, scientists say they may have solved the mystery.

    The therapy, which provides electrical stimulation to the brain and is extremely effective in treating severe depression, appears to affect how brain areas communicate with each other. It relieves "over-communication" in the brain that may make it difficult for people with depression to think and concentrate, said study researcher Jennifer Perrin, a mental health researcher at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

    "We believe we’ve solved a 70-year-old therapeutic riddle," said study researcher Ian Reid, a psychiatrist at the university.

    By understanding how the treatment, properly known today as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), works, researchers may one day be able to replace it with something that has a lower risk of side effects, but is just as effective, Perrin said. However, such a replacement treatment is a long way off, she said.

    Electroconvulsive therapy, first used in the 1930s, involves placing electrodes on the forehead and passing electrical currents through the brain in order to induce a seizure lasting from 30 to 60 seconds. In the early years of the therapy, patients were not given anesthesia, and high levels of electricity were used.

    Today, the therapy is safer because patients receive anesthesia and electricity doses are much more controlled, according to the Mayo Clinic. Still, the treatment can impair short-term memory and, in rare cases, cause heart problems.  

    ECT is one of the most effective treatments in psychiatry  — 75 to 85 percent of patients who receive it recover from their symptoms, Reid said. That compares with about 40 percent of depression patients who recover after treatment from their primary care physician, Reid said.

    Currently, ECT is used only in patients who are severely depressed and at risk for suicide, or patients who have not responded to other treatments, Reid said.

    In the new study, the researchers scanned the brains of nine severely depressed patients, before and after they received ECT, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Patients typically received eight treatments, and the final brain scan was performed about one week after the last treatment, Perrin said. All patients had previously failed to respond to antidepressants, but were successfully treated with ECT.

    The researchers examined the brains so-called "functional connectivity," or internal communication pattern, Perrin said.

    The treatment appeared to turn down an overactive connection between brain regions responsible for mood and emotion and those responsible for thinking and concentrating, the researchers said. Perrin likened the mechanism to dialing down a stereo that's too loud.

    Recently, researchers have proposed depression may be due to a hyper-connectivity, or over-communication between the brain regions implicated in the new study's results.

    "For the first time, we can point to something that ECT does in the brain that makes sense in the context of what we think is wrong in people who are depressed," Reid said.

    Researchers may be able to test the effectiveness of existing or new treatments for depression by seeing how well they relieve this hyper-connection, Perrin said.

    The study brings us a step closer to understanding exactly how ECT works, said Dr. Laura Gilley-Hensley, of the University of Utah Neuropsychiatric Institute, who was not involved in the study. However, there is still the question of how an electrical stimulus would lead changes in the brain's connectivity, Gilley-Hensley said.

    In addition, we don't know why ECT works so much better than antidepressants, which have also been shown to reduce brain connectivity, Gilley-Hensley said.

    Future studies may lead to finding more precise doses of ECT to further reduce the risk of side effects and the time it takes for treatment to work, Gilley-Hensley said. Brain connectivity levels could be used as a way to see if patients are responding to the treatment, she said.

    The findings will be published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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  • Facebook takes a toll on your mental health

    By Stephanie Pappas
    LiveScience

    Facebook's initial public offering of stock is likely to make a lot of developers and designers of the site very wealthy. But for many users, frequent Facebooking may not be so beneficial.

    According to three new studies, Facebook can be tough on mental health, offering an all-too-alluring medium for social comparison and ill-advised status updates. And while adding a friend on the social networking site can make people feel cheery and connected, having a lot of friends is associated with feeling worse about one's own life.

    The thread running through these findings is not that Facebook itself is harmful, but that it provides a place for people to indulge in self-destructive behavior, such as trumpeting their own weaknesses or comparing their achievements with those of others.

    Take status updates. Most people know that their Facebook friends tend to craft these online-wall memos on what they're up to in a way that puts their lives in the best light, said Mudra Mukesh, a doctoral candidate in marketing at the Instituto de Empresa in Madrid. But when it comes down to actually using the site, reading other people's status updates still makes Facebookers feel worse. [Facebook's Global Reach (Infographic)]

    In research presented earlier this month at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychologists (SPSP) in San Diego, Mukesh and her co-author Dilney Goncalves found that when people think about the last time someone asked to friend them on Facebook, they get a boost in feelings of belonging and social connectedness ­— the kind of feeling that makes people "sing 'Kumbaya,'" Mukesh told LiveScience.

    But once you've collected all those friends, viewing their status updates is a downer, Mukesh said. When asked how they felt about their place in life and their achievements, people with lots of Facebook friends gave themselves lower marks if they'd just viewed their friends' status updates, compared with people who hadn't recently surfed the site.

    For people with just a few friends, viewing status updates wasn't a problem.

    "A small number of friends means a low probability of viewing others showing off," Mukesh said. For people with lots of friends, though, the Facebook Newsfeed turns into a parade of good news about other people's live: promotions, engagements, weddings and new babies. Even if someone knows intellectually that people use Facebook to show off, Mukesh said, all of this information can make them feel worse about their own achievements or lack thereof. [10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life]

    (In Mukesh's study, 354 friends was the cut-off point for when participants started to feel bad about viewing status updates. But that's not a universal number, she cautioned, just the number that applied given the statistics of her sample.)

    In another study presented at the SPSP conference, researchers at the University of Houston surveyed college students and found that time spent on Facebook is linked to depressive symptoms. That doesn't mean Facebook causes depression, but that depressed feelings and lots of Facebooking tend to go hand in hand, for whatever reason. For young men, the study found, the link seemed to be a tendency to compare oneself with others.

    "It appears as if males, when they socially compare themselves on Facebook, they tend to experience depression systems," study researcher and University of Houston doctoral student Mai-Ly Nguyen told LiveScience.

    In this case, Facebook seems to be a new medium for men to compete with one another, Nguyen said. Outside the digital realm, men often compare themselves with one another, she said. It may be that women more often use the site to connect with one another and men to compete with one another.

    Some people, however, don't use their Facebook status updates to pump themselves up. Instead, they complain.

    People with low self-esteem view Facebook as a safer place to express themselves than in face-to-face interactions, according to new research published in the March issue of the journal of Psychological Science. All this venting may actually alienate friends.

    Researchers led by Amanda Forest of the University of Waterloo in Ontario collected recent status updates from 117 participants who also reported their average time spent on Facebook and answered questions to reveal their self-esteem levels. Some statuses were chipper, such as "[Poster] is lucky to have such terrific friends and is looking forward to a great day tomorrow!" Others wallowed in bad news: "[Poster] is upset b/c her phone got stolen :@."

    Next, the researchers had another group of participants read the status updates and rate how much they liked the person who wrote each. Unsurprisingly, people responded more positively to posters whose updates were positive.

    Of course, you'd expect friends to be a little more caring than strangers. So the researchers set up another experiment in which they collected recent status updates from 98 undergraduates and also asked the students to submit the number of likes and number of comments on each.

    It turned out that for users with high self-esteem, a negative post garnered more responses than a positive one, presumably because those people's friends were concerned about the out-of-character update. For users with low self-esteem, though, negative posts seemed to exhaust friends: They got few responses.

    "Indeed, [low-self-esteem users'] friends rewarded their posts with more validation and attention the more positive they were, perhaps trying to encourage this atypical behavior," Forest and her colleagues wrote.

    The takeaway of all this work is not to dump your Facebook account — the site has its benefits, some psychological. But researchers suggest being mindful about your online social life, just as most people are about friends in the real world.

    "You have to be careful," said University of Houston psychologist Linda Acitelli, who advised Nguyen on the social comparison study. "I think parents, especially if they have teenage kids, need to be monitoring how much time they spend on Facebook."

    Because Facebook provides more opportunities to peer into others' lives, it helps to keep Facebook pitfalls in mind, according to the Instituto de Empresa's Mukesh. She found that reminding people in the moment of what they already know ­— that people brag on Facebook — can ease the self-recriminations that come with hearing about friends' accomplishments.

    "At the end of the day, have more friends, there's no problem with that. Just be sure to remember that when you start feeling crappy about your life, think about the fact that you have a large number of friends and that increases your probability of viewing more ostentatious information," Mukesh said. "So, it's not you, it's them."

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  • New Alzheimer's criteria would change diagnosis for millions

    By Rachael Rettner
    MyHealthNewsDaily

    Almost everyone currently diagnosed with a mild form of Alzheimer's disease would be downgraded to not having the condition, if new proposed criteria for the diagnosis of cognitive problems were applied, a new study shows.

    Instead, people diagnosed as having "very mild" and " mild" Alzheimer's disease would be reclassified as having mild cognitive impairment (MCI), which is currently recognized as an intermittent stage between the normal loss of mental function that comes with age and the development of dementia.

    The new criteria broaden the definition of mild cognitive impairment, and this will cause confusion when doctors try to diagnose MCI and Alzheimer's, said study researcher Dr. John Morris, a professor of neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

    Moreover, the new criteria highlight the fallacy of thinking about MCI and Alzheimer's as different entities, Morris said.

    "[The] idea that there is an MCI stage, distinct from very early Alzheimer's disease, is artificial," Morris said. "It really is the same disease process."

    Instead of widening the criteria so more people are diagnosed with MCI, researchers should do the opposite — try to figure how to winnow down the group of patients with MCI to find those who will go on to develop Alzheimer's disease, Morris said. In fact, if a patient's memory and thinking troubles are due to early Alzheimer's, and not due to depression or medication use, "We can just call it very early Alzheimer's disease. There's no need to have this distinction," Morris said.

    The report is published online today in the Archives of Neurology.

    Previously, mild cognitive impairment was defined as a decline in cognitive function — which could include memory and language problems — that do not interfere with everyday activities.

    But the new criteria, proposed by the National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer's Association, state that people with MCI have "independence in functional activities."

    This could mean that, as long as a person can do everyday activities by themselves, they would be classified as having MCI, even if they had mild problems with activities such as shopping, paying bills and cooking, Morris said. (In fact, having mild problems with such activities is a criterion for dementia, Morris said.)

    To assess what the impact of the new criteria would be on patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, Morris analyzed information from 17,535 people who had been classified as having normal cognition, MCI or Alzheimer's disease. Participants were classified based on how well they could function performing a variety of activities, including preparing meals and taking mediation.

    The results showed 99.8 percent of patients currently diagnosed with very mild Alzheimer's disease, and 92.7 percent of those diagnosed with mild Alzheimer's disease, would be reclassified as having MCI based on the revised criteria.

    Considering about 2.5 million people have very mild Alzheimer's disease, the findings suggest that, very roughly, about 2.2 million people could be reclassified as having MCI (although this calculation is speculative), Morris said.

    William Thies, chief medical and scientific officer at the Alzheimer's Association, said the proposed criteria for MCI are less than a year old, and experts will likely continue to discuss and tweak them in the years to come.

    "We are really now working on trying to identify exactly where people will fit in the continuum of Alzheimer's disease," Thies said.

    Thies agreed the disease is a continuous process, and said you could likely not tell the difference between someone with the most severe case of MCI and someone with the mildest case of Alzheimer's disease.

    But Thies said he does not think the new criteria will create much confusion. They are intended to be used by experts in the field, some of whom have already been thinking of MCI in the manner described by the new criteria. And others who are very conservative when it comes to diagnosing people with Alzheimer's disease likely won't change their ways, he said.

    Thies also said the field should move toward identifying which patients with MCI are actually in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. This could be done once there are well defined biomarkers for the condition, Thies said.

    While the field is moving toward this goal, it will likely be a while before biomarkers are routinely used by doctors to diagnose patients, he said.

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  • How books, puzzles may help ward off Alzheimer's

    By MyHealthNewsDaily staff
    MyHealthNewsDaily

    Doing puzzles and reading books have been linked with a decreased risk of Alzheimer's disease, and a new study may explain why — it reduces the accumulation of harmful proteins in the brain.

    In the study, older adults who said they engaged in mentally stimulating activities throughout their lives had fewer deposits ofbeta-amyloid, the hallmark protein of Alzheimer's. The findings were true regardless of the participants' gender or years of education.

    The findings suggest that cognitive therapies that stimulate the brain may slow the progression of the disease, if applied before symptoms appear, said study researcher William Jagust, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley's Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute.

    The researchers note Alzheimer's is a complex disease that likely has more than one cause. In addition, other lifestyle factors not accounted for in the study may influence the link.

    The study is published online today (Jan. 23) in the journal Archives of Neurology.

    Plaques in the brains

    An estimated 5.4 million Americans live with Alzheimer's disease, and between 2000 and 2008, deaths from the disease increased by 66 percent.

    In the study, the researchers asked 65 healthy, cognitively normal adults ages 60 and over (the participants' average age was 76) to rate how frequently they participated in such mentally engaging activities as going to the library, reading books or newspapers, and writing letters or email. The questions focused on various points in life from age 6 to the present.

    The participants also completed tests to assess memory and other cognitive functions, and received positron emission tomography (PET) scans using a new compound that was developed to visualize the amyloid protein.

    The brain scans of the older adults were compared with those of 10 patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and 11 healthy people in their 20s.

    The researchers found a significant association between higher levels of cognitive activity over a lifetime and lower levels of in the PET scans. Older adults with the highest reported amounts of cognitive activity over a lifetime also possessed levels of amyloid comparable to young people. In contrasts, older adults with the lowest reported amounts of cognitive activity possessed amyloid levels comparable to patients with Alzheimer's disease.

    Lifetime activity matters

    The researchers did not find a strong connection between amyloid deposits and levels of current cognitive activity alone.

    "What our data suggests is that a whole lifetime of engaging in these activities has a bigger effect than being cognitively active just in older age," said study researcher Susan Landau, also of UC Berkeley. ]

    However, the researchers said there was no downside to stimulating the brain later in life.

    The researchers note that the buildup of amyloid can also be influenced by genes and aging — one-third of people age 60 and over have some amyloid deposits in their brain — but how much reading and writing one does is under each individual's control.

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  • All that stress is shrinking your brain, new study finds

    By Rita Rubin

    Everyone knows stress can cause headaches and sleepless nights. But a new study suggests it can actually shrink your brain.

    We’re not talking run-of-the-mill stressors here, like a looming deadline or a missed bus.

    “These are bad things happening, like a relationship breakup, loss of a loved one, being held at gunpoint,” says Yale neurobiologist Rajita Sinha, senior author of the new report.

    Simply feeling stressed-out was not linked to gray matter shrinkage. But feeling stressed-out combined with a history of stressful life events was.  In particular, stress was linked to markedly less gray matter than expected in a part of the prefrontal cortex that regulates emotion and self-control, not to mention blood pressure and blood sugar.

    That shrinkage might serve as a red flag about a greater risk of chronic diseases such as high blood pressure as well as psychiatric disorders, according to the researchers. And maybe it’s already affecting brain function in the healthy individuals she studied, Sinha says.

    In other words, the stresses of modern life are far more complicated than what our ancestors experienced. “You can say stresses are a part of life, so what’s the big deal?” Sinha says. But it is a big deal, she adds, because there’s extensive evidence that stress has contributed to the rise in chronic diseases.

    Most human research about the impact of stress on brain structure has focused on patients with stress-related psychiatric disorders such as addiction and anxiety, according to the authors. Those studies have found decreased volume in the frontal lobe, considered the center of emotion control and personality.

    But studies of the cumulative effects of stress on the brains of healthy people are rare, Sinha’s team writes in a paper published online this week in Biological Psychiatry.

    The study enrolled 103 health adults ages 18 to 48. Researchers conducted structured interviews with the volunteers to collect information about stressful life events and subjective feelings of chronic stress.

    The scientists then used MRI to scan the volunteers’ brains.

    Whose brains shrunk more, men’s or women’s? You might think you know the answer, but the researchers don’t, because they didn’t have enough women to compare the sexes.

    The take-home message, Sinha says, is that the better you cope with stress -- take a walk, call a friend -- the better off your brain will be.

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  • Working moms are healthier, happier, study finds

    By MyHealthNewsDaily

    Mothers who have jobs are healthier than those who are not employed, at least when their children are very young, a new study finds.

    Working mothers in the study were less depressed and reported better overall health than moms who stayed at home with their young children, though this benefit of working did not extend into children's school years.

    There was no difference between the health of mothers who worked part time and those who worked full time, the researchers said.
    Stay-at-home moms may be more socially isolated than working moms, which might increase their chances of being depressed, the researchers said. Stay-at-home moms might also be under more stress as a result of being at home with their children all day. This stress may be relieved somewhat when their children start school, which may explain why the link disappeared when children entered preschool.

    The study is published in the December issue of the Journal of Family Psychology

    The results are based on interviews, starting in 1991, with 1,364 mothers from Arkansas, California, Kansas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin. Researchers interviewed women throughout their children's infancy, preschool years and into elementary school.

    The researchers defined working part time as working one-to-32 hours per week. About 25 percent of mothers were employed part time during the study period, although mothers moved in and out of part-time work. Mothers reported whether they experienced symptoms of depression and rated their overall health as "poor," "fair," "good" or "excellent."

    Live Poll

    Moms, do you work outside the home or stay home?

    View Results
    • 170647
      I work full time.
      63%
    • 170648
      I work part time.
      12%
    • 170649
      I'm a stay-at-home mom.
      25%

    VoteTotal Votes: 4918

    The mothers also answered questions about conflicts between their work and family lives, and how involved they were in their child's schooling.

    Working moms reported fewer symptoms of depression and were more likely to rate their health "excellent," compared with nonemployed mothers, according to the study.

    Mothers working part time tended to report less conflict between work and family than those working full time, the researchers said.

    Mothers employed part time reported being just as involved in their child's schooling as stay-at-home moms, and more involved than moms who worked full time. In addition, mothers working part time provided more learning opportunities for their toddlers than stay-at-home moms and moms working full time, the researchers said.

    Couples' emotional intimacy did not appear to be affected by the mothers' employment status: the level of emotional understanding between partners was similar for working moms and stay-at-home moms.

    The findings in the study held even after the researchers took into account factors that could have influenced the results, including the mother's education and certain personality traits.

    The researchers noted they examined the mother's well-being in relation to one child only, and additional siblings should be considered in future studies. 
     

    Moms, how does this finding line up with your own experience? Tell us on Facebook.

     

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  • Working moms multitask way more than dads -- and hate it

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    Working moms multitask about 10 hours a week more than working dads, a new study finds. When women multitask, it often centers on taking care of the kids and doing housework, while men are more likely to multitask by socializing and doing self-care.

    By Joan Raymond

    It's 7 p.m. You're e-mailing your boss, doing the dinner dishes, checking your 10-year-old's homework, and trying to calm your angry 3-year-old, who is screaming like a howler monkey. You'd like to scream, too. At your husband, who thinks everything is just fine.

    According to a new study published in the December issue of the journal American Sociological Review, working moms not only multitask more frequently than working dads but also experience more negative emotions.

    “The mother-nurture-care concept is part of our social unit,” says co-author and sociologist Barbara Schneider of Michigan State University. “That’s not a bad thing, but the pressures of everyday life have made it very difficult.”

    The study participants were part of the 500 Family Study, which collected data from 1999 to 2000 in eight urban and suburban communities to find out how middle-class families balance family and work obligations.

    The researchers found that working moms spend 48.3 hours per week, or about 40 percent of their waking hours, doing the multitask shuffle, compared to dads, who spend 38.9 per week doing two or more things at once.

    Moms are more likely to get stuck with labor-intensive housework or childcare activities, while dads generally multitask by talking to several people at once or performing self-care. Dads are also more involved in kids' recreational activities.

    While multitasking is generally a positive experience for dads, moms feel stressed and conflicted when they multitask at home as well as in public places, mostly due to the type of activities performed, which could leave them open to scrutiny and judgment.

    To help ease the strain, the authors suggest sharing the load by getting dad more involved in the mundane aspects of home and child care.

    “Simply doing things together as a family in the context of the home can go a long way,” says Schneider.

    Although the study did not look at the current situation of these families, there’s no reason to think things have improved, says University of Notre Dame sociologist Elizabeth Aura McClintock. For example, among dual-income married couples working 35 or more hours a week, men's median weekly housework hours increased in the 1970s to about 5 hours per week, but have not changed much since then.

    Today’s economic climate is also likely taking a toll.

    “Families are stressed,” says Schneider. “With resources it was tough; imagine what it’s like now when there are probably fewer resources due to layoffs and rising expenses.”

    Moms, how do you juggle everything? Tell us on Facebook.

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  • Key to easing a painful memory? Dream about it

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    Dreams can serve as your brain's personal psychotherapist by helping process bad memories, experts say.

    By Linda Carroll

    Ever since the dawn of humanity, people have wondered about the purpose of dreams. We’ve imbued these mental meanderings with all sorts of powers, from forecasting the future to providing a window into the soul.

    But scientists say they now know what dreams are for: they sooth the sting out of troubling memories. And when dreams don’t do their job, horrific memories can take over a person’s life, as they do with PTSD, a new study suggests.

    Matthew Walker and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, found that the brain uses dreams to strip the emotional content from memories of painful events.

    Here’s how the researchers think it works. During dream, or REM, sleep, our brain chemistry changes, leaving us with lower levels of stress hormones. While we’re in this quieter state, the brain mulls over what happened and then files away the memory – but with less emotion attached.

     So, when everything works right, when we later recall these events we’ll remember what happened, but less of the pain associated with them.

    Walker and his colleagues tested their theory in an intriguing, but simple, experiment.

    The researchers asked 35 healthy volunteers to lie in a brain scanner while looking through a series of 150 images, which ranged from bland to emotionally jarring. One image might show a tea kettle, for example, while another might show the aftermath of a horrific car accident. As they were looking at the images, the volunteers were asked to rate the emotional intensity of what they were viewing.

    Half the volunteers looked at the images in the morning, while the other half looked at the images just before bedtime. Twelve hours later the volunteers were asked once again to look at and to rate the images while being scanned. This meant that half the volunteers had a night’s sleep in between scans.

    What the second set of scans and ratings showed was telling. Volunteers who had slept through the night rated the horrific photos as far less emotionally charged – and their brain scans showed a much lower level of activity in the amygdala, a brain region central to emotional processing.

    It’s like dreams become the brain’s psychotherapist, Walker explains. Just as we can benefit from reviewing disturbing events in the safety of a therapist’s office, our brain benefits from processing these same types of events in the quieter dream state.

    Walker suspects that the system short-circuits in PTSD sufferers because their brains are  constantly charged up even during dreams. And research in veterans with PTSD appears to bear this out, Walker says. When veterans with PTSD are given medications that knock back a neurotransmitter that keeps the brain in an excited state, sleep appears to improve symptoms of the disorder.

     “We’re hoping to provide the mechanism by which that drug has its effect,” Walker says.  

    What types of things do you dream about? Tell us on Facebook.

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