Stressing Fitness

The human brain never stops adapting to its environment in a quest to formulate what the mind perceives based on what the eyes see, according to a new study. The research adds credence to the notion that adult brains can be retrained following trauma or surgery or even from the effects of aging or eye misalignment, says Jan Brascamp, a research associate working with Randolph Blake, Centennial Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. Details appear in the July 29 issue of Current Biology.

More Americans with psychiatric conditions are being treated with drugs alone compared with a decade ago, while "talk therapy" -- either by itself or in combination with medication -- is on the decline, a new study finds.

The results, reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry, are based on data from two government health surveys conducted in 1998 and 2007.Over that period, the percentage of Americans who said they'd had at least one psychotherapy session in the past year remained steady -- at just over 3 percent in both 1998 and 2007.However, among Americans receiving any outpatient mental health care, the proportion being treated with drugs alone rose from 44 percent in 1998 to 57 percent in 2007.Meanwhile, combined treatment with drugs and psychotherapy declined from 40 percent to 32 percent, and the use of psychotherapy alone slipped from 16 percent in 1998 to about 10 percent in 2007.National spending on psychotherapy also declined -- from an estimated total of $11 billion in 1998 to $7 billion in 2007. Overall spending on mental health care remained fairly steady, however -- at $15.4 billion in 1998 and $16 billion in 2007- suggesting an increase in the proportion of mental health spending devoted to drug therapies.

"Mental health care," he said, "is evolving in a way that means more people are receiving treatment, but are not necessarily getting the most effective therapy."

Children whose mothers were exposed to certain types of pesticides while pregnant were more likely to have attention problems as they grew up, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday. The study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, adds to evidence that organophosphate pesticides can affect the human brain.

A tenfold increase in pesticide metabolites in the mother's urine correlated to a 500 percent increase in the chances of ADHD symptoms by age 5, with the trend stronger in boys.

Teenagers who are overweight, get little exercise, or smoke may be more likely than their peers to have recurrent headaches, researchers reported Wednesday.

Norwegian researchers found that among nearly 6,000 13- to 18-year-olds they assessed, those who were overweight, sedentary or who smoked were more likely to report suffering recurrent headaches in the past year -- including both migraines and common tension-type headaches.

analyzed data on more than 8,600 adults aged 20 or older who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted between 1988 and 1994.

common allergies and heart disease frequently paired up

there was a 2.6-fold increased risk of heart disease with wheezing and a 40 percent increased risk with rhinoconjunctivitis, compared to no allergies. The association was mainly seen in women younger than age of 50.

A study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and the University of Oxford supports the widespread belief that stress may reduce a woman's chance of becoming pregnant. The study is the first of its kind to document, among women without a history of fertility problems, an association between high levels of a substance indicative of stress and a reduced chance of becoming pregnant.

The researchers found that, all other factors being equal, women with high alpha-amylase levels were less likely to conceive than were women with low levels, during the fertile window -- the six days when conception is most likely to occur.

Children of depressed parents are two to three times as likely to have major depression. Maternal depression in particular has been shown to have serious effects on development, primarily through an absence of responsiveness — the parent’s conscious and consistent mirroring and reciprocity of an infant’s gaze, babble and actions. “Depressed mothers often respond to their babies from the beginning in ways that dampen their enthusiasm and joy,” says Alicia Lieberman, a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. This is problematic, as 10 to 20 percent of mothers go through depression at some point, and 1 in 11 infants experiences his mother’s depression in the first year.

Many researchers, particularly those with medical training, are eager to identify some kind of a “biologic marker” to make diagnosis scientifically conclusive. Recent studies have looked at the activity of cortisol, a hormone the body produces in response to stress. In preschoolers who have had a diagnosis of depression, as in depressed adults, cortisol levels escalate under stressful circumstances and then fail to recover with the same buoyancy as in typical children.

But in adults, cortisol reactivity can be an indication of anxiety. Other research has found that in young children, anxiety and depression are likewise intertwined. At Duke, Egger found that children who were depressed as preschoolers were more than four times as likely to have an anxiety disorder at school age. “Are these two distinct but strongly related syndromes?” asks Daniel Pine of the N.I.M.H. “Are they just slightly different-appearing clinical manifestations of the same underlying problem? Do the relationships vary at different ages? There are no definitive answers.”

Inflammation is known to be boosted by stressful situations. But when yoga experts were exposed to stress (such as dipping their feet in ice water,) they experienced less of an increase in their inflammatory response than yoga novices did.

Yoga focuses on deep breathing and controlling breathing, which may slow down the body's "fight or flight" response — the body's reaction to stress, Kiecolt-Glaser said.

Yoga also involves meditation, which helps people learn to pay attention to how they are feeling. So yoga experts may be more aware of their stress and better able to control their response to it.

Exercises that look like pilates or yoga routines are in. And the traditional bane of the new private, the long run, has been downgraded. This is the Army’s new physical-training program, which has been rolled out this year at its five basic training posts that handle 145,000 recruits a year. Nearly a decade in the making, its official goal is to reduce injuries and better prepare soldiers for the rigors of combat in rough terrain like Afghanistan.

“What we were finding was that the soldiers we’re getting in today’s Army are not in as good shape as they used to be,” said Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, who oversees basic training for the Army. “This is not just an Army issue. This is a national issue.”

“Between 1995 and 2008, the proportion of potential recruits who failed their physicals each year because they were overweight rose nearly 70 percent,”

“Exercise is a form of stress,” she pointed out. So is social isolation. Each, independently, induces the release of stress hormones (primarily corticosterone in rodents and cortisol in people). These hormones have been found, in multiple studies, to reduce neurogenesis. Except after exercise; then, despite increased levels of the hormones, neurogenesis booms. It’s possible, Dr. Stranahan said, that social connections provide a physiological buffer, a calming, that helps neurogenesis to proceed despite the stressful nature of exercise. Social isolation removes that protection and simultaneously pumps more stress hormones into the system, blunting exercise’s positive effects on brainpower.

One nationwide study in the months following the attacks found that 4% of Americans were suffering from 9/11-related posttraumatic stress disorder, including a whopping 11.2% of New Yorkers.

The emotional health of college freshmen — who feel buffeted by the recession and stressed by the pressures of high school — has declined to the lowest level since an annual survey of incoming students started collecting data 25 years ago. In the survey, “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010,” involving more than 200,000 incoming full-time students at four-year colleges, the percentage of students rating themselves as “below average” in emotional health rose. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who said their emotional health was above average fell to 52 percent. It was 64 percent in 1985. Every year, women had a less positive view of their emotional health than men, and that gap has widened.

n any given day participants with both depression and heart disease were nearly five times more likely to die than their healthy peers. Depression alone doubled mortality risk, and heart disease increased risk by only two thirds.

at least 20 percent of the 17 million Americans with heart disease also suffer from depression

According to the American Psychological Association, a whopping 75 percent of people in the United States feel stressed out. Almost half of us eat unhealthy because of it; 47 percent of us can't sleep because of it; it makes one in three of us depressed; and for 42 percent of us, it has gotten worse in the last year. There is so much making us anxious these days -- from big-picture problems like uncontrollable oil spills and a still-soft economy to garden-variety job, relationship, money, you-name-it woes -- that it's easy to think of chronic stress as the new normal.

the latest research reveals that revving up your body with exercise may be the most effective antidote. In lab studies, when scientists at Princeton put animals on a six-week aerobic conditioning program, then compared their brain cells with those of a group that remained sedentary, they found that the "brains on exercise" morphed over time into a biochemically calm state that remained steady even when the subjects were under stress. The nonexercising group's brain cells continued to react strongly to anxiety-inducing situations. This breakthrough discovery has scientists now saying that cardio workouts may actually remodel the brain to make it more resistant to stress hormones.

Stress has been cited frequently as a factor in autoimmune diseases, including alopecia areata.

Martin Paulus, professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego, studies anxiety's effects on decision-making. "Under certain circumstances anxious people are more sensitive in detecting potentially bad outcomes associated with choices. They do avoid harm, so, as a consequence, it may be useful to be anxious," he says.

Paulus and his team have found that anxious people tend to take a "bottom-up" approach to life—their emotional reactions to events are stronger, while their ability to reason and intellectually interpret events is weaker. "Chronically anxious peoples' brains experience everything as aversive," he says. Less anxious people, in contrast, take more of a "top-down" approach—the rational parts of their brain take over when they experience something potentially anxiety inducing, and they essentially talk themselves into not getting worked up.

People with a history of heart disease who are prone to negative thinking, gloom, and inhibition -- a personality profile known as Type D (for "distressed") -- are nearly four times more likely to experience heart attack, heart failure, heart rhythm disorders, death, and other negative outcomes compared to heart patients with a different personality profile, the study found.

"There is a clear connection between heart risk and psychological risk factors, and those people who have this personality and lack social support have higher risk of health problems,"

Type D personalities are "characterized by negative emotions like anxiety, frustration, and anger, and at the same time score high on social inhibition, meaning that they are less likely to disclose emotions," Denollet says.

Researchers at Oregon Health and Science University scanned the brains of nine healthy, normal-weight  subjects in the minutes after each got an infusion of equal volumes of glucose, of fructose and of saline. The brain scans aimed to capture activity in a relatively small swath of the human brain in and around the hypothalamus, which plays a key but complex role in setting appetite levels and directing production of metabolic hormones. The researchers, led by Dr. John Purnell, found that "cortical control areas"--broad swaths of gray matter that surrounded the hypothalamus -- responded quite differently to the infusion of fructose than they did to glucose. Across the limited regions of the brain they scanned, Purnell and his colleagues saw that glucose significantly raised the level of neural activity for about 20 minutes following the infusion. Fructose had the opposite effect, causing activity in the same areas to drop and stay low for 20 minutes after the infusion. Saline--the control condition in this trial--had no effect either way.

Between 1988-94 and 2005-06, the percentage of teens with hearing loss jumped by about a third, from 15% of 12-to-19-year-olds to 19.5%.

Diet and nutrition, as well as exposure to toxins, might be factors. Living in poverty is also associated with greater risk of hearing loss among youngsters, as children in lower-income families may not be getting adequate nutrition to support proper development of the auditory system.

Difficulty in hearing among youngsters has been linked to slower language development, poorer performance in school and lower self-esteem. And because social skills are dependent on language, previous studies have found that even slight hearing loss in elementary and high school students can result in progressively lower scores on communication tests and greater anxiety.

Eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables and low in saturated fats can significantly lower the risk of heart attack for people with mildly elevated blood pressure, Johns Hopkins University researchers say.

The diet they examined — called the DASH diet (dietary approaches to stop hypertension) — was designed to lower blood pressure and cholesterol. In this new study, it reduced the risk of heart attack by almost 20%, the researchers said.

The diet also calls for reducing fats, red meat, sweets and sugary beverages, and replacing them with whole grains, poultry, low-fat dairy products, fish and nuts.