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They're called pro-eating disorder Web sites. And many teens looking
to lose weight -- even those who don't need to -- are logging on to
these communities of individuals who engage in dangerous eating habits.
Yet many parents aren't aware the sites even exist and that their children are visiting them, researchers have found.
"Most parents would not endorse their child leaving the house at
night, walking to an area of town that they themselves had never been
in and meeting people that they themselves had never met," said study
author Dr. Rebecka Peebles, an instructor in adolescent medicine at
Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University School of
Medicine. "And I think that's actually what a lot of kids are doing
online at home from their bedrooms."
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Depression is a tricky thing. For some people, it can hit them all
at once, like a paralyzing wave. But for most it just sneaks up on you.
If you’re like me, you have lots of external reasons to be depressed –
raising a challenging child, coming to terms with that child’s
disabilities and what the future might hold, financial strain due to
the need to quit my job to care for my child, the emotional and
financial burden of a lawsuit with the school system…just to name a few.
So,
I’ve got lots of reasons to be depressed. But my goofy thought patterns
tell me that I can just will myself to be fine. “I’m coping,” I kept
telling myself.
And I was coping…in a near survival mode…and a
nearly numb emotional state. The one thing that was bugging me the most
was my inability to concentrate or to multi-task and accomplish all the
things I used to be able to accomplish in a day. It was as if I was
going in slow motion. And the more I worried about this, the worse it
got.
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Scientists have provided new insight into how a gene
is related to schizophrenia. In a study to be published in the August
17 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Amanda J. Law, Medical
Research Council Fellow and Associate Professor at the University of
Oxford, United Kingdom, and visiting scientist at the National
Institutes of Health (NIH), along with colleagues at NIH describe for
the first time a genetic variation that causes a gene to be
overexpressed in the human brain. These results may provide a new way
to design better drugs to treat schizophrenia.
"Although the exact causes of schizophrenia are
yet to be determined, scientists agree that the disease is in part due
to genetic variations," Law says. "These variations are not simple to
understand because they don't directly disturb the function of
proteins. In our study, we identified some clues as to what goes wrong
with one of these DNA variations."
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Fraternity rushing, new friends
-- most students can't wait to move out from home and go to college.
What's true for a lot of students though is that they do end up
struggling in the process. College can involve prolonged stress and
mental health experts say that constant pressure can up the risk for
depression.
It's the best
time of your life! That's what we're all told. But in all the
excitement of college there can be a darker side.
Take 20-year-old Diana Parrish. Three years ago she started
college with the same dreams as her classmates. But, at the end of her
first semester, something changed.
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Brain areas that control attention were thinnest in
children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) who
carried a particular version of a gene in a study by the National
Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health
(NIMH).
Children
with ADHD who had the 7-repeat version of the dopamine D4 receptor gene
had thinner-than-normal areas in their brain's out mantle, the cerebral
cortex, which normalized during the teen years. This thickening in
areas that control attention paralleled clinical improvement. Composite
3-D MRI scan data for youth, ages 8-16. Colored areas are those in
which cortex thickness varied between ADHD patients and healthy
controls, with brighter colors indicating greater differences. (Credit:
Philip Shaw, M.D., NIMH Child Psychiatry Branch)
However, the areas, on the right
side of the brain's outer mantle, or cortex, normalized in thickness
during the teen years in these children, coinciding with clinical
improvement. Although this particular gene version increased risk for
ADHD, it also predicted better clinical outcomes and higher IQ than two
other common versions of the same gene in youth with ADHD.
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