Posts tagged mental disorders
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Dealing with negative thinking
Is it ‘normal’ to think about pushing someone in front of a train or to fantasise about driving your car into oncoming traffic?
The answer is yes says Victoria University of Wellington researcher Dr Kirsty Fraser who graduated with a PhD in Psychology last week.
“It’s common for people to occasionally have those kind of negative thoughts, but then most of us realise it’s a bit ridiculous and move on,” says Dr Fraser.
For some people, however, those negative thoughts may persist, leading to anxiety and depression.
“It’s how we react to, and process, those negative intrusions that can make the difference between brushing them off and developing obsessive compulsive symptoms, such as severe anxiety and depression.
“For example, some people could be so anxious about those kind of thoughts that they go out of their way to avoid catching a train or driving.”
Dr Fraser’s thesis focused on two ways of processing negative thoughts—inflated responsibility (IR) and thought action fusion (TAF), and the way each relates to mental disorders.
“TAF is when you believe that thinking about an action is equivalent to actually carrying out that action, while IR is one of the driving forces behind obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), where you believe you can prevent something happening by what you do or don’t do.
“My research demonstrates that both types of beliefs play important roles in the development and maintenance of psychological symptoms related to anxiety, depression and OCD.”
Dr Fraser’s research also looked at how childhood experiences, critical events in one’s life and religious beliefs could impact upon thoughts.
She surveyed more than 1,000 people and divided them into four groups: undergraduate students, so called ‘normal’ citizens, patients from an anxiety clinic and those with religious and atheist beliefs.
“Overall,” she says, “my research provided strong support for existing theories about the role of cognitive processes in the maintenance of symptoms and distress.”
When Kirsty arrived at Victoria in 2002, she began studying human resources. She took a psychology paper out of interest and “never left”.
“The lecturer was John McDowall, who introduced me to how interesting the subject is. He ended up being my supervisor for my PhD.”
For the past three years, Kirsty has combined doctoral study with teaching a second year psychology paper at Victoria, marking for another tertiary institution and being a full-time mother.
“Now I’m starting to think about other challenges, including possible research positions. I’d like to publish my PhD research and continue lecturing.”
Video: The animation describes the paths of traveling performed by an OCD patient who is about to leave his apartment (left) and by a co-morbid OCD and schizophrenia patient performing the same behavior (right). Black circles indicate the number of acts performed in each location. As shown, the COD patient is mostly stationary, while the schizo-OCD patient travels all over the apartment.
The Difference Between Obsession and Delusion
TAU researchers use a zoological method to classify symptoms of OCD and schizophrenia in humans
Because animals can’t talk, researchers need to study their behavior patterns to make sense of their activities. Now researchers at Tel Aviv University are using these zoological methods to study people with serious mental disorders.
Prof. David Eilam of TAU’s Zoology Department at The George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences recorded patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder and “schizo-OCD” — which combines symptoms of schizophrenia and OCD — as they performed basic tasks. By analyzing the patients’ movements, they were able to identify similarities and differences between two frequently confused disorders.
Published in the journal CNS Spectrums, the research represents a step toward resolving a longstanding question about the nature of schizo-OCD: Is it a combination of OCD and schizophrenia, or a variation of just one of the disorders?
The researchers concluded that schizo-OCD is a combination of the two disorders. They noted that the behavioral differences identified in the study could be used to help diagnose patients with OCD and other obsessive-compulsive disorders, including schizo-OCD.
The taxonomy of mental disorders
"I realized my methodology for studying rat models could be directly applied to work with humans with mental disorders," Prof. Eilam said. "Behavior is the ultimate output of the nervous system, and my team and I are experts in the fine-grained analysis of behavior, be it of humans or of other animals."
The main features of OCD are, of course, obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are recurring and persistent thoughts, impulses, or images that are experienced as intrusive and unwanted and cause marked distress or anxiety. In contrast, compulsions are repetitive motor behaviors, such as counting, that occur in response to obsessions and are performed according to strictly applied rules. Schizophrenia is marked by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, abnormal motor behavior, and diminished emotional expression, among other symptoms.
Eilam and graduate student Anat Gershoni of the Zoology Department and Prof. Haggai Hermesh of TAU’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine set out with Dr. Naomi Fineberg of the Queen Elizabeth II Hospital in England to resolve the controversy. To this end, they recorded and compared videos of diagnosed OCD and schizo-OCD patients performing 10 different mundane tasks, like leaving home, making tea, or cleaning a table. The patients met the criteria of the widely used Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
A matter of space
The researchers found that both OCD and schizo-OCD patients exhibited OCD-like behavior in performing the tasks, excessively repeating and adding actions. But schizo-OCD patients additionally acted like schizophrenics.
For a typical OCD patient in the study, the task of leaving home involved standing in one place and repeatedly checking the contents of his pockets before finally taking his keys and cell phone and going to the door. In contrast, a typical schizo-OCD patient traveled around the apartment — switching the lights in the bathroom on and off, then taking his keys and phone to the door, going to scan the bedroom, then taking his keys and phone to the door, going to empty the ashtray, then taking his keys and phone to the door and so on. A typical healthy person would simply pick up his keys and phone and walk out.
Overall, the researchers found that the level of obsessive-compulsive behavior was the same in OCD and schizo-OCD patients. This suggests that both types of patients had the difficulty shifting attention from one task to another that helps define OCD. The schizo-OCD patients, though, did more divergent activity over a larger area than did OCD patients. This suggests that the schizo-OCD patients were continuously shifting attention, which happens in schizophrenia but not OCD.
"While the obsessive compulsive is obsessed with one idea; the schizophrenic’s mind is drifting," said Eilam. "We found that this is reflected in their paths of locomotion. So instead of tracking the thoughts of the patients, we can simply trace their paths of locomotion."
Eilam plans to conduct research comparing repetitive behavior in OCD and autism patients.
NSF-funded Superhero Supercomputer Helps Battle Autism
'Gordon,' a supercomputer with unique flash memory, helps identify gene-related paths to treating mental disorders
When it officially came online at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) in early January 2012, Gordon was instantly impressive. In one demonstration, it sustained more than 35 million input/output operations per second—then, a world record.
Input/output operations are an important measure for data intensive computing, indicating the ability of a storage system to quickly communicate between an information processing system, such as a computer, and the outside world. Input/output operations specify how fast a system can retrieve randomly organized data common in large datasets and process it through data mining applications.
The supercomputer’s record-breaking feat wasn’t a surprise; after all, Gordon is named after a comic strip superhero, Flash Gordon.
Gordon’s new and unique architecture employs massive amounts of the type of flash memory common in cell phones and laptops—hence its name. The system is used by scientists whose research requires the mining, searching and/or creating of large databases for immediate or later use, including mapping genomes for applications in personalized medicine and examining computer automation of stock trading by investment firms on Wall Street.
Commissioned by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2009 for $20 million, Gordon is part of NSF’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, or XSEDE program, a nationwide partnership comprising 16 high-performance computers and high-end visualization and data analysis resources.
"Gordon is a unique machine in NSF’s Advanced Cyberinfrastructure/XSEDE portfolio," said Barry Schneider, NSF program director for advanced cyberinfrastructure. “It was designed to handle scientific problems involving the manipulation of very large data. It is differentiated from most other resources we support in having a large solid-state memory, 4 GB per core, and the capability of simulating a very large shared memory system with software.”
Last month, a team of researchers from SDSC, the United States and the Institute Pasteur in France reported in the journal Genes, Brain and Behavior that they used Gordon to devise a novel way to describe a time-dependent gene-expression process in the brain that can be used to guide the development of treatments for mental disorders such as autism-spectrum disorders and schizophrenia.
The researchers identified the hierarchical tree of coherent gene groups and transcription-factor networks that determine the patterns of genes expressed during brain development. They found that some “master transcription factors” at the top level of the hierarchy regulated the expression of a significant number of gene groups.
The scientists’ findings can be used for selection of transcription factors that could be targeted in the treatment of specific mental disorders.
"We live in the unique time when huge amounts of data related to genes, DNA, RNA, proteins, and other biological objects have been extracted and stored," said lead author Igor Tsigelny, a research scientist with SDSC as well as with UC San Diego’s Moores Cancer Center and its Department of Neurosciences.
"I can compare this time to a situation when the iron ore would be extracted from the soil and stored as piles on the ground. All we need is to transform the data to knowledge, as ore to steel. Only the supercomputers and people who know what to do with them will make such a transformation possible," he said.
Mammalian brain knows where it’s at
A new study in the journal Neuron suggests that the brain uses a different region than neuroscientists had thought to associate objects and locations in the space around an individual. Knowing where this fundamental process occurs could help treat disease and brain injury as well as inform basic understanding of how the brain supports memory and guides behavior.
“Understanding how and where context is represented in the brain is important,” said study senior author Rebecca Burwell, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brown University. “Context, or the place in which events occur, is the hallmark of episodic memory, but context is more than a place or a location. This room, for example, has a window, furniture, and other objects. You walk into a room and all that information helps you remember what happened there.”
Pinpointing where the brain puts together objects and places to form a context could also matter for treating traumatic brain injuries or neuropsychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia and depression, that involve that part of the brain, said Burwell, who is also affiliated with the Brown Institute for Brain Science.
“We know that contextual representations are disrupted in mental disorders, particularly schizophrenia and depression,” Burwell said. “Individuals with these disorders have trouble using context to plan actions or choose appropriate behaviors.”