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Steve Bosserman

How Neuroscience Can Help Us Treat Trafficked Youth - Pacific Standard - 0 views

psmag.com/...help-us-treat-trafficked-youth

neuroscience youth "human trafficking"

shared by Steve Bosserman on 04 May 18 - No Cached
  • A common misconception is that these youths are choosing to engage in the commercial sex trade. But as recent advances in neuroimaging techniques help scientists unravel the myriad ways that trauma affects the brain, emerging evidence suggests that brain changes resulting from trauma could make young people more vulnerable to exploiters and less receptive to people trying to help. Rather than making a conscious decision to rebel, these kids are simply doing their best to survive, using the adaptive strategies that their brains developed in response to a perilous world.
  • Though the human brain is adaptable throughout life, adaptability is greatest during childhood, as the developing brain responds to the surrounding environment. Survival is the brain's top priority. Young people growing up in dangerous environments will develop brains that are highly responsive to threat cues. In particular, recent studies show that children who have experienced trauma exhibit drastic changes in their amygdala, an area of the brain wired to identify signs of danger.
  • Besides the amygdala, another brain region affected by trauma is the hippocampus, an area involved with contextual learning and memory. The hippocampus takes context into account, so that a person can appropriately respond to the same cues in different situations. For instance, most people would respond differently to hearing gunfire in a shooting range than they would to hearing gunfire in an airport.
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  • McLaughlin's research shows that youth who have experienced trauma have a smaller hippocampus than those who haven't, and are less able to take context into account when they detect a threat cue. When McLaughlin presented images of faces embedded in real-world scenes to kids, those with a history of trauma exhibited less activity in their hippocampus while viewing angry facial expressions. And when given a memory test afterward, they were less able to remember scenes in which they'd identified people displaying anger.
  • Because the brain remains malleable throughout life, it's never too late to mitigate the effects of trauma, McLaughlin says. There are a variety of evidence-based treatments that have proven effective in alleviating the mental-health consequences of trauma. For example, the technique of cognitive reappraisal, a cornerstone of Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, can help victims better regulate their emotions by changing the way they view a distressing situation. They can try to imagine that the situation is occurring far away from them, or that they are viewing the event from a removed perspective, as though watching a movie screen. When McLaughlin taught such techniques to young people in her lab, they were able to decrease their emotional reactivity as well as their amygdala response to negative stimuli.
Bill Fulkerson

Scientists introduce rating system to assess quality of evidence for policy - 0 views

phys.org/...s-quality-evidence-policy.html

policy quality scientists rating evidence

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 15 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 15 Jun 20
     
    The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the critical need for robust scientific evidence to support policy decisions, such as around the effectiveness of various social distancing measures and the safety of drug therapies. Yet this need arises at a time of growing misinformation and poorly vetted facts repeated by influential sources. To address this gap, a group of scientists led by Kai Ruggeri, a professor at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and James Green, chief scientist at NASA, has introduced a new framework to help set standards for the quality of evidence used in policymaking.
Bill Fulkerson

What the immune response to the coronavirus says about the prospects for a vaccine - 0 views

www.nature.com/...d41586-020-02400-7

coronavirus immune response vaccine

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 18 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 18 Aug 20
     
    Common Cold Study and others like it, while scrambling to understand the human immune response to SARS-CoV-2 using animals and cell cultures, along with the latest molecular techniques. They have catalogued antibody and immune-cell responses with uncommon speed, determined which are likely to be the most effective, and designed vaccines and therapies that, in animal studies and small human studies, provoke at least short-term immune responses. But there is no quick and simple experiment that can firmly determine whether immunity will be effective or lasting. It is just too soon to know.
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