Rough Night? The Hangover Should be the Least of Your Worries

In this day and age, alcohol is considered the most abused substance with 51.8 percent of Americans identified as drinkers. That number is even greater when college students are used as the demographic, topping the charts at 69 percent. What's troubling is that half of those students claim to partake in binge drinking. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, this type of drinking pattern is defined as raising the blood alcohol concentration (BAC) over 0.08 percent by consuming upwards of five or upwards of four drinks within two hours by a male or female respectively. Recent studies have shown that such behavior leads to long term effects for the adolescents, effects beyond the dreaded hangover.

Pertaining to those of 18 to 24 years of age, magnetic resonance has shown that the brains of these scholars are still developing. Specifically, changes are made for cognitive improvement through the early 20's and executive functioning is being fine-tuned. Interested in the neurodevelopment of adolescent brains, Magdalena Szymanska, from Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine, has performed longitudinal studies of the effects of binge drinking on adolescent rats. The critters were injected with enough alcohol to reach the respective BAC associated with binging. One month later, as adults, these same rats were shown to have abnormally high levels of corticosterone, a stress hormone equivalent to cortisol found in humans. This hormone is triggered in response to a stressful situation, responsible for that moment of panic when staring at a blank test or when first arriving at a job interview. This phenomenon is associated with the hypothalamic-pituitary-adenal (HPA) axis in the brain in which her research shows that the expression of two hormone peptides, arginine-vassopressin (AVP) and corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), are elevated. These peptides further stimulate the production of cortisol, leading to the results described. Although cortisol is a necessary hormone is maintaining homeostasis, the elevated levels in the HPA axis are correlated with an increased risk of mood disorders such as anxiety and depression later in life.

Interaction of HPA axis in the release of cortisol

To make matters worse, Szymanska further studied the effects of adolescent binge drinking in the offspring of such parents. It is important to note that the offspring were not directly exposed to any level of alcohol in order to determine if the long term effects would be transmitted through parental gametes. It was found that methylation patterns in the expression of the two peptides was affected in the offspring, suggesting an increased expression of CRH and AVP in the next generation. The extent of gene methylation varied between male and female pups, having a greater impact on males. The reason for such sex-specific effects was unknown. However, it can be inferred that the elevation of CRH and AVP predisposes the offspring to developing mood disorders as well. 

Recently, studies from the University of Santiago de Compostela analyzed the effects of adolescent binge drinking on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. 122 university students, of which 62 and 60 were binge-drinkers and nonbinge-drinkers respectively, performed the "Backward Digit Span Test" aimed at measuring verbal working memory. Each student was read a sequence of numbers and then asked to repeat the order in reverse, a task that involves the executive functioning of the prefrontal cortex. Since this region is still undergoing development during the adolescent period, those who engaged in binge drinking scored significantly lower than the control group, further highlighting the lasting effects of the drinking pattern.

Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex

The time spent in college can be considered the most decisive years of your life as you decide what major to pursue and what career path to follow. The combination of the research studies only further adds to the pile of decisions to make. Are the nights of reckless drinking worth the long term developmental effects on the brain and do they justify the impact that may result on your offspring?

 Sources:

Parada, M, M Corral, N Mota, A Crego, Holguín S. Rodríguez, and F Cadaveira. "Executive Functioning and Alcohol Binge Drinking in University Students." Addictive Behaviors. 37.2 (2012): 167-72. Print. 

Sneider JT, Cohen-Gilbert JE, Crowley DJ, Paul MD, Silveri MM. "Differential Effects of Binge Drinking on Learning and Memory in Emerging Adults." Addiction Research and Therapy. S7:006 (2013)

"College Drinking." National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). N.p., 2013. Web. <http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/special-populations-co-occurring-disorders/college-drinking>.

 "Fact Sheets - Binge Drinking." Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 07 Nov. 2012. Web. <http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/binge-drinking.htm>.

"The Physiology of Stress: Cortisol and the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis." DUJS Online. N.p., 3 Feb. 2011. Web. <http://dujs.dartmouth.edu/fall-2010/the-physiology-of-stress-cortisol-and-the-hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal-axis>.

Alcohol and College Students Drinking Fact Sheet." N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.alcohol101plus.org/downloads/CollegeStudents.pdf>

Przybicen-Szymanska MM, Mott NN, Paul CR, Gillespie RA, Pak TR (2011) Binge Pattern Alcohol Exposure during Puberty Induces Long-Term Changes in HPA Axis Reactivity. PLoS ONE 6(4): e18350 doi:10.137/journal.pone.0018350

Recent Study Suggest it's True... Size Does Matter

          What sets apart psychopathic patients aside from nonpsychopath patients? Dr. Newman discussed the “low fear” hypothesis, which attempts to explain psychopathy during our seminar. Previous studies have found that the amygdala plays an important role in psychopathy. This has been determined because studies have found that psychopathic patients have low fear. With the amygdala being responsible for inducing fear, studies have shown that low fear is caused by an amygdala-mediated deficit. The amygdala-mediated deficient causes poor passive avoidance, or in other words an inhibition of punished responses, weak electrodermal activity in response to threat and/or punishment cues, deficits in emotion-modulated startle during picture viewing, deficits in fear conditioning, and reduced amygdala activation. Dr. Newman specifically talked to our class about top-down goal-directed behavior being crucial to the study of psychopathy. Attention mediates the low fear deficits seen in psychopathic patients, especially during goal-oriented tasks.

            A new study, published in May of 2013, has found that the size of the amygdala can play an important role in violent and aggressive behavior from childhood to early adulthood. This research used 56 men who had already been involved in a previous study that involved measuring unsociable and criminal behavior from childhood to early adulthood. About one third of these men had a history of peristent serious violence, about one third had momentary history of serious violence, and about one third had no history of serious violence. After understanding the different levels of violence these men have partaken in, structural MRI imaging was used to measure the amygdalae of each of these men’s brains. The results showed that men with smaller amygdalae were more likely to partake in violent and aggressive behaviors. Men with smaller amygdalae also have been shown to have characteristics that are related to psychopathy.

            This recent study is a great addition to what is already known about the amygdala’s role in psychopathy. This is the first study that has looked at the volume of the amygdala to try to explain psychopathic behavior. From the various research gained over the years, we have learned that several factors come into play regarding psychopathy, and size of the amygdala may be one.

References:

Arehart-Treichel, Joan. "Amygdala Size May Give Clue to Violence Risk." Psychiatric

News. The American Psychiatric Association, 11 July 2013. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.

Larson, Christine L., Arielle R. Baskin-Sommers, Daniel M. Stout, Nicholas L.

Balderston, John J. Curtin, and Douglas H. Schultz. "The Interplay of Attention

and Emotion: Top-down Attention Modulates Amygdala Activation in

Psychopathy." Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 13.2 (2013): n. pag. Springer. Web.

Newman, Joseph P., and Arielle R. Baskin-Sommers. “Early Selective Attention

Abnormalities in Psychopathy: Implications for Self-Regulation.” Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention. By Michael I. Posner. New York: Guilford, 2011. 421-440.

Could You be a Psychopath?

Dr. Joseph Newman is one of the many people who study the neuroscience of psychopaths. Recently, he gave a presentation titled, Integrating psychological and Neuroscience Perspectives on Psychopathy.  In it, Newman discussed that there were more than a single kind of criminal, and that there were several categories that criminals could fit into.  An important focus of the presentation was the Low Fear Hypothesis, a theory that suggests the reasons that psychopaths lack fear and show less emotion is because they have low amygdala activity. 

Fortunately for Dr. Newman, he did not find out that he in fact shared brain similarities to the psychopaths that he studied.  This incident happened to a neuroscientist named James Fallon.  Fallon was studying brain scans that consisted of his own as well as a few of the murderers he studied (2013).  He admits to having several traits that can be seen in psychopaths but has not committed a crime.  This means that while having brain abnormalities that are seen in psychopaths does not guarantee psychopathic behavior. 

References

BBC News - Neuroscientist: 'I discovered I was a psychopath'. (2013, November 27). Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25116826

The Rhythm of Reading

As arts education programs are getting cut, more educators and researchers are coming forward with evidence showing that music training is not only an enjoyable activity for students, but can help improve their reading skills as well.

Nina Kraus described music as a model for learning; many of the skills involved in practicing music are used when reading. From a biological point of view, in both reading and music, the acoustic characteristics of the sound of language and of music are encoded in the same way. Therefore, perhaps training ourselves to attend to some of these characteristics and distinguish between them in music will improve our abilities to do so with language.

Dr. Kraus discussed several skills that are important both in reading and in music. The first is response consistency, or the ability of neurons to fire in synchrony. The next skill is the ability to distinguish between important sounds and sounds to tune out in the background. It has been shown that children with dyslexia struggle with this particular skill. A third skill is using the patterns of sound and its rhythm to determine what information is meaningful.

A researcher in Germany, Iris Rautenberg, also looked at this last skill. In this study, a group of 159 German-speaking school children were divided into three groups. The first group received nine months of musical training, the second group received nine months of visual arts training, and the third group did not receive any training. At the end of the nine-month period, the students who received musical training had improved reading abilities, measured by their accuracy and prosody (their rhythm, stress, and intonation). However these improvements were only linked to improved rhythmic skills, not their ability to distinguish between different pitches and melodies. It would be interesting to see if this study would get the same results for different languages that do not emphasize timing as much as German does.

This study did not specifically look at students with dyslexia, though both Dr. Kraus and Dr. Rautenberg discuss implications for dyslexia in their work. This could be a future direction for continued research on the benefits of music education.

Kraus, N., & Chandrasekaran, B. (2010). Music training for the development of auditory skills. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(8), 599-605.

Rautenberg, I. (2013). The effects of musical training on the decoding skills of German‐speaking primary school children. Journal of Research in Reading.

Don't Flinch before you vote

Hey what’s that?

            Did you flinch by chance? In some studies the way you react to pictures may be an indicator of what political party that you fall into.  Dr. Wendell’s lecture we found that in general conservatives react to stimuli like blood or infected cuts more than liberals. In fact conservatives show more “activation on their  right amygdala, which is linked with reward, fear, and risky decisions, whereas the liberals experienced more activity in the left posterior insula, which processes emotion.”(Pappas, 2013). In viewing their facial expressions conservatives often show distress in their facial reactions where liberals almost seemed apathetic. Wendell presented an experiment where subjects viewed thirty regular images like fruit and faces but mixed in were 3 images that are kept secret to the public because of a need to maintain their shock factor. Wendell was able to show us a few images one that stuck in my mind was the cut filled with maggots. He discussed that  those who paid more attention to the threatening images were most likely to be conservative. Liberals by comparison reacted less to these stimuli.

So I think what I vote?

But does this means that I am doomed to ride the red tails of the republican party? Well maybe and maybe not in general these people show activity in how they think but this doesn’t mean that it determines what they think. In the report by Pappas, the brain functions of liberals and conservatives were analyzed and although they concluded that “no difference in the amount of risk people of each political persuasion were willing to take on during a gambling game. But the way the brain processed risk worked differently between the groups.” So although the brains would go through different processes they ultimately would result in the same result. So even though some individuals who are squeamish and dislike change can be categorized as a conservative they don’t necessarily need to be conservatives.

Works cited

Pappas, Stephanie. "Brain Scans Can Predict Your Political Ideology." LiveScience.com. N.p.,

19 Feb. 2013. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.

The Many Benefits of an Active Lifestyle

It's no surprise that exercising is good for the entire body. Its benefits range from reducing fat and cholesterol levels to alleviating depression, and newer benefits of exercising are just coming to light. Dr. Art Kramer from the University of Illinois talked at Loyola University Chicago about the benefits of an active lifestyle. One of the topics Dr. Kramer emphasized was that the age at which one starts exercising is not important. He used the example of Olga Kolteko, a 91 year old Olympic track and field star who did not start exercising until she was in her 70s. She now holds 23 world records. In his own project, even those who had never exercised before showed steady improvement in their overall health. He briefly touched on the potential impact of exercise and its role in reducing symptoms of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease. 

One publication by a team of scientists out of the University of Tsukuba in Japan, shed light on another benefit of exercising which could have underlying links to explain why exercising can relieve symptoms of Parkinson's Disease as well as Alzheimer's Disease. The project focused on studying the relationship between exercise and levels of glycogen in rat brains. Glycogen stores are used as a source of energy in the brain. In their study, the scientists used male rats and measured brain glycogen levels before and after the rats were subject to moderate-intensity running on a treadmill. 

Their testing showed that prolonged activity caused a significant loss of glycogen, especially from areas like the frontal cortex and the hippocampus. After each session on the treadmill, the rats were fed and their glycogen levels were remeasured. The results indicated that the brain had overcompensated and the glycogen levels after exercise were 60 percent higher than before their workout. Interestingly, these high levels of glycogen were temporary if the rats were not subject to exercise on a routine basis, falling to baseline levels after 24 hours. In rats that ran for four weeks or more on a regular basis, however, the higher levels of glycogen levels became increasingly permanent. The more active rats had consistently higher levels of glycogen in their brains compared to the control rats that did not exercise. 

These findings indicate that regular exercise can improve brain metabolism and increase the amount of available energy stores in the brain. More studies will need to be done before determining whether the increase in brain metabolism can explain the relief in symptoms of neurodegenerative diseases. But in the meantime, one thing is certain: exercise helps not only maintain one's body but also the mind. 

References: 

Grierson, Bruce. "The Incredible Flying Nonagenarian." Newyorktimes.com. The New York Times, 25 Nov. 2010. Web. 12 Dec. 2013.

Reynolds, Gretchen. "How Exercise Fuels the Brain." Newyorktimes.com. The New York Times, 22 Feb. 2012. Web. 12 Dec. 2013.

Stem Cell Research Poses Great Possibilities in Degenerative Diseases

What do we want to accomplish in our lives? Have you found your passion? Hui Ye, a neurobiology professor at Loyola University Chicago begins his presentation talking about how he floated on throughout his life until he had to decide what to do with it after college. He mentioned that he finally found a subject which caught his interest. Professor Ye found his passion in doing research in tumor suppression in rats because he wanted to learn more about neuronal degenerative diseases. He begins his presentation by defining the word galvanotaxis: when cells move in an electric field by response. Professor Ye says that the problem with recently added stem cells is that they do not necessarily migrate to the targeted area so by exposing the induced stem cells to an electrical field, it provides a possible solution to this problem. The magnetic field causes the stem cells to migrate and morph. Professor Ye hopes of accurately moving these stem cells to the target areas of degenerative neurons in order to restore the function of these neurons.

His researched consisted of two cases that involved the testing of rats. In the first one, they injected stem cells into the spinal cord to form oligodendrocytes to form myelin sheaths in order to conduct neural passageways again. But unfortunately it was very difficult to accomplish this task because of scar tissue. Another issue was not being able to track the stem cells after they were injected into the spinal cord, so in order to force the stem cells to form at a certain area, they must first be detected once injected inside. The second case consisted of finding out that neuroblasts are located in a certain area that can tell us about the nature of how neuroblasts communicate. Just to clarify, a neuroblast is an embryonic cell from which nerve fibers originate. By learning how neuroblasts work, one can compare their function to stem cells and figure out how to make them work as well. Professor Ye's current work is figuring out how to push the stem cells through scar tissue in order to pinpoint the exact injured area by whole cell patching. He reports an experiment where the stem cell was placed in a petri dish and left alone for an hour with the magnetic field turned on. He told us of his hypothesis which states that the reduction of calcium will promote actin polymerization to help it move. The migration of the cell in an electric field is due to the calcium mediated cell cytoskeleton change. Through Professor Ye's hard work, he can hopefully be able to accomplish the task of moving the stem cells to the injured location of a neuron in order to restore that tissue and help defeat the degenerative disease.

I came across an article titled, "Parents hire own researchers to tackle rare, fatal disease," where parents whose son, Ethan, has GAN (Giant axonal neuropathy) are very supportive of the research put forth towards finding a cure for this disease. The disease damages the neural pathways affecting the muscles of the victim and claiming them by early adulthood. The article is a very interesting read that tells the story of parents who have funded researchers to hopefully raise awareness of GAN since the amount of people affected by it are only 25-30 in the world. The dedication coming from the parents and researchers reminded me of how Professor Ye found his interest in figuring out the damaged neurons and how to build new ones using stem cells. I have a feeling that stem cells do pose a great possibility in restoring damaged cells' functions that could help find cures for many degenerative diseases, but there is still a lot to learn in the role of stem cells and how to manipulate them exactly. Ethan's mom has a lot of faith in science and has dedicated herself to learning about the field to better inform herself. She states, "You can never tell where the next lead is going to come from…what will start you down the path to the next miracle."

Sources:


http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-05-23/health/ct-met-warrior-moms-0523-20120523_1_rare-disorders-proteins-mary-dunkle/2