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Friday, 16 August 2013
Wednesday, 14 August 2013
Autism Changes Molecular Structure Of The Brain
Autism is a complex brain disorder that strikes in
early childhood. The disease disrupts a child's ability to communicate and
develop social relationships and is often accompanied by acute behavioral
challenges. In the United States, autism spectrum disorders are diagnosed in
one in 110 children — and one in 70 boys. Diagnoses have expanded tenfold in
the last decade.
For decades, autism
researchers have faced a baffling riddle: how to unravel a disorder that
leaves no known physical trace as it develops in the brain. Now a UCLA study
is the first to reveal how the disorder makes its mark at the molecular level,
resulting in an autistic brain that differs dramatically in structure from a
healthy one. The discovery also identifies a new line of attack for
researchers, who currently face a vast array of potential fronts for tackling
the neurological disease and identifying its diverse causes.
"If you randomly pick 20 people with autism,
the cause of each person's disease will be unique," said principal
investigator Dr. Daniel
Geschwind, the Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Chair in Human
Genetics and a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the David Geffen School of
Medicine at UCLA. "Yet when we examined how genes and proteins
interact in autistic people's brains, we saw well-defined shared patterns. This
common thread could hold the key to pinpointing the disorder's origins."
The research team, led by Geschwind, included
scientists from the University of Toronto and King's College London. They
compared brain tissue samples obtained after death from 19 autism patients and
17 healthy volunteers. After profiling three brain areas previously linked to
autism, the group zeroed in on the cerebral cortex, the most evolved part of
the human brain.
The researchers focused on gene expression — how a
gene's DNA sequence is copied into RNA, which directs the synthesis of cellular
molecules called proteins. Each protein is assigned a specific task by the gene
to perform in the cell. By measuring gene-expression levels in the
cerebral cortex, the team uncovered consistent differences in how genes in
autistic and healthy brains encode information.
The researchers' next step was to identify the common
patterns. To do this, they looked at the cerebral cortex's frontal lobe, which
plays a role in judgment, creativity, emotions and speech, and at its temporal
lobes, which regulate hearing, language and the processing and interpreting of
sounds. When the scientists compared the frontal and temporal lobes
in the healthy brains, they saw that more than 500 genes were expressed at
different levels in the two regions. In the autistic brains, these
differences were virtually non-existent.
Thursday, 8 August 2013
Why Are Some People More Vulnerable Than Others?
Like many other
diseases, vulnerability to addiction is influenced by multiple factors, with
genetic, environmental, and developmental factors all contributing. Genetics
accounts for approximately half of an individual’s vulnerability to addiction,
including the effects of the environment on gene function and expression.
Elements of our
social environments—culture, neighborhoods, schools, families, peer groups— can
also greatly influence individual choices and decisions about behaviors related
to substance abuse, which can in turn affect vulnerability. Indeed, addiction
is a quintessential gene-byenvironment- interaction disease: a person must be
exposed to drugs (environment) to become addicted, yet exposure alone does not
determine whether that will happen—predisposing genes interact with this and
other environmental factors to create vulnerability. In fact, environmental
variables such as stress or drug exposure can cause lasting changes to genes and
their function, known as epigenetic changes, which can result in long-term
changes to brain circuits.
Adding to the
complexity, the contributions of environmental and genetic risk factors may
also vary during the different life stages of childhood, adolescence, and young
adulthood. Adolescence is the period when addiction typically takes hold.
Additionally, because their brains are still undergoing rapid development in
areas that contribute to decision-making, judgment, and risk-taking,
adolescents tend toward immediate gratification over long-term goals. This can
lead to risk-taking, including experimenting with drugs. When coupled with
their increased sensitivity to social or peer influences and decreased
sensitivity to negative consequences of behavior, it is easy to see why
adolescents are particularly vulnerable to drug abuse.
How
Can People Recover Once They’re Addicted?
As with any other
medical disorder that impairs the function of vital organs, repair and recovery
of the addicted brain depends on targeted and effective treatments that must
address the complexity of the disease. We continue to gain new insights into
ways to optimize treatments to counteract addiction’s powerful disruptive
effects on brain and behavior because we now know that with prolonged
abstinence, our brains can recover at least some of their former functioning,
enabling people to regain control of their lives. Brain supplements can help in
this endeavor offering sufficient nutrients and maintaining chemical balance in
the brain. But they must be taken advising medical practitioners.
How Does Addiction Take Hold in the Brain?
Addition is one of
the severe problems seen in the developed countries like United States. How
does addition take hold in the brain? In fact, what changes does it do in the
brain chemicals is associated with the addiction. The rewarding effects of
drugs of abuse come from large and rapid upsurges in dopamine, a neurochemical
critical to stimulating feelings of pleasure and to motivating behavior. The
rapid dopamine “rush” from drugs of abuse mimics but greatly exceeds in
intensity and duration the feelings that occur in response to such pleasurable
stimuli as the sight or smell of food, for example. Repeated exposure to large,
drug-induced dopamine surges has the insidious consequence of ultimately
blunting the response of the dopamine system to everyday stimuli. Thus the drug
disturbs a person’s normal hierarchy of needs and desires and substitutes new
priorities concerned with procuring and using the drug.
Drug abuse also
disrupts the brain circuits involved in memory and control over behavior.
Memories of the drug experience can trigger craving as can exposure to people,
places, or things associated with former drug use. Stress is also a powerful
trigger for craving. Control over behavior is compromised because the affected
frontal brain regions are what a person needs to exert inhibitory control over
desires and emotions.
That is why addiction
is a brain disease. As a person’s reward circuitry becomes increasingly dulled
and desensitized by drugs, nothing else can compete with them—food, family, and
friends lose their relative value, while the ability to curb the need to seek
and use drugs evaporates. Ironically and cruelly, eventually even the drug
loses its ability to reward, but the compromised brain leads addicted people to
pursue it, anyway; the memory of the drug has become more powerful than the
drug itself.
The underlying reason
of any addiction can be severe stress, depression etc. In case if addiction or
while quitting addiction, healthy brain vitamins can help to reduce stress or depression by increasing levels of
certain neurotransmitters. Thus, brain supplements can work better for
addiction or getting rid from addiction.
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