The Blog needed some updating!!

I was kind of sad to have not received any recent PRU Pirate blog posts. A professor brought this article up in my prevention class yesterday, so I thought it would be of interest/quite the conversation piece for many of you!!

Long-Chain w-3 Fatty Acids for Indicated Prevention

of Psychotic Disorders

A Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Trial

G. Paul Amminger, MD; Miriam R. Schäfer, MD; Konstantinos Papageorgiou, MD, et al

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2010;67(2):146-154

Context: The use of antipsychotic medication for the prevention of psychotic disorders is controversial. Long-chain w-3 (omega-3) polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) may be beneficial in a range of psychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia. Given that w-3 PUFAs are generally beneficial to health and without clinically relevant adverse effects, their preventive use in psychosis merits investigation.

Objective: To determine whether w-3 PUFAs reduce the rate of progression to first-episode psychotic disorder in adolescents and young adults aged 13 to 25 years with subthreshold psychosis.

Design: Randomized, double-blind, placebo - controlled trial conducted between 2004 and 2007.

Setting: Psychosis detection unit of a large public hospital in Vienna, Austria.

Participants: Eighty-one individuals at ultra-high risk of psychotic disorder.

Interventions: A 12-week intervention period of 1.2-g/d w-3 PUFA or placebo was followed by a 40-week monitoring period; the total study period was 12 months.

Main Outcome Measures: The primary outcome measure was transition to psychotic disorder. Secondary outcomes included symptomatic and functional changes. The ratio of w-6 to w-3 fatty acids in erythrocytes was used to index pretreatment vs posttreatment fatty acid composition.

Results: Seventy-six of 81 participants (93.8%) completed the intervention. By study’s end (12 months), 2

of 41 individuals (4.9%) in the w-3 group and 11 of 40 (27.5%) in the placebo group had transitioned to psychotic disorder (P = .007). The difference between the groups in the cumulative risk of progression to full-threshold psychosis was 22.6% (95% confidence interval, 4.8-40.4). w-3 Polyunsaturated fatty acids also significantly reduced positive symptoms (P = .01), negative symptoms (P = .02), and general symptoms (P = .01) and improved functioning (P = .002) compared with placebo. The incidence of adverse effects did not differ between the treatment groups.

Conclusions: Long-chain w-3 PUFAs reduce the risk of progression to psychotic disorder and may offer a safe and efficacious strategy for indicated prevention in young people with subthreshold psychotic states.

Trial Registration: clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00396643

Full Text Available at: http://www.eiyh.org.uk/silo/files/fatty-acids-for-indicated-prevention.pdf

I-Dosing...really!?

Skin Color Affects Ability to Empathize with Pain

By Denise Mann

THURSDAY, May 27, 2010 (Health.com) — Humans are hardwired to feel another person’s pain. But they may feel less innate empathy if the other person’s skin color doesn’t match their own, a new study suggests.

When people say “I feel your pain,” they usually just mean that they understand what you’re going through. But neuroscientists have discovered that we literally feel each other’s pain (sort of).

If you see—or even just think of—a person who gets whacked in the foot, for instance, your nervous system responds as if you yourself had been hit in the same spot, even though you don’t perceive the pain physically.

Researchers in Italy are reporting that subtle racial bias can interfere with this process—a finding with important implications for health care as well as social harmony.

“Pain empathy is basically feeling someone else’s pain,” says Carmen Green, MD, a professor of anesthesiology at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, who was not involved in the research. “This paper tells us that race plays a role in pain empathy.”

“White observers reacted more to the pain of white than black models, and black observers reacted more to the pain of black than white models,” says the lead researcher, Alessio Avenanti, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Bologna.

The researchers also showed clips of a needle pricking a hand painted bright purple. Both the Italian and African participants were more likely to empathize with this intentionally strange-looking hand than with the hand of another race, which implies that the earlier lack of empathy was due to skin color, not just difference. “This is quite important, because it suggests that humans tend to empathize by default unless prejudice is at play,” says Avenanti.

The researchers gauged prejudice by testing the participants on how readily they associated good and bad concepts with Italians and Africans. The people who showed a strong preference for their own group in this test also tended to show the least empathy when the hand belonging to the other group was needled, the researchers found.

Although the culture and history of racial bias is somewhat different in Italy than in the U.S., Avenanti suspects the findings would be similar if the same experiment were conducted with Americans.

Empathy is more complex in the real world than in a laboratory. Even so, the study findings suggest that racial differences and prejudice could play a role in some doctor-patient interactions, especially in the treatment of pain or chronic pain.

“A doctor with high racial bias may understand the pain of other-race patients in a more detached or disembodied manner and, in principle, this may contribute to the causes of racial disparities in healthcare,” Avenanti says.

Previous research has shown that doctors tend to empathize more with a patient’s pain—and provide higher-quality care—if they have a history of pain themselves, or if someone close to them has experienced chronic, debilitating pain, Dr. Green says.

“Now we are understanding that if you see someone as being more like you, you can empathize with their pain better,” she says. “Race, age, gender, and class probably play a role in how we assess and treat patients with pain.”

So does that mean that, say, an African American with low back pain should seek out only doctors who are African American?

Not necessarily. Dr. Green says it’s more important to find a doctor who actively listens to you and asks questions.

“If you feel you are not heard, or that your pain complaints are not being taken seriously, you can and should see another doctor,” she says.

article at: http://news.health.com/2010/05/27/skin-color-pain-empathy/2/

CALVIN KLEIN COLOGNE ATTRACTS WILD CATS AND OTHER ANIMALS

(this isn't necessarily psychology-related, but I had to share...)

Analysis by Jennifer Viegas
Tue Jun 8, 2010 12:15 PM ET

Designers often advertise that their perfume and cologne products drive sniffers wild. But I think even Calvin Klein himself might be surprised to learn that his cologne, Obsession for Men, attracts jaguars, pumas and other wildlife, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society.

(Jaguar caught sniffing Calvin Klein Obsession for Men; Credit for all images: WCS)

The WCS has just admitted that its researchers have been using the popular cologne to draw animals in front of remote cameras set up in the wilderness.

The cameras are triggered by an infra-red beam, permitting candid shots of animals as they come by to investigate.

One place where this technique is now being used is at the Maya Biosphere Reserve, one of the largest protected areas in Central America. Animal experts there are trying to estimate populations of elusive jaguars.

Pat Thomas, General Curator of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx Zoo, came up with the unusual cologne-attractant technique. He settled on Calvin Klein Obsession for Men after discovering that the zoo's tigers, snow leopards and cheetahs were drawn to it more than any other commercially produced scent.

The big cats rubbed, sniffed, pawed, and otherwise thoroughly enjoyed the designer cologne.

“Calvin Klein Obsession for Men clearly passes the sniff test among the WCS Bronx Zoo’s big cat population,” said Thomas. “More importantly, this work is a great example of how The Wildlife Conservation Society’s Living Institutions and Global Conservation Programs work together to save wildlife and wild places.”

As predicted, the cologne is doing a great job at attracting jaguars to the hidden camera setup.

The images show individual jaguars lingering around a cloth treated with the cologne and repeatedly sniffing it. One pair of jaguars even shows some very rarely seen mating behavior, so the smell seems to turn these animals on.

"Jaguars are highly elusive creatures and for years WCS researchers struggled to develop more effective methods for estimating how many jaguars were in the forest, hidden amongst the ancient Maya temples,” said Roan McNab, WCS Guatemala Country Director. “Now, due to the fact that jaguars love Obsession for Men, WCS field conservationists are getting more precise estimates of jaguar populations.”

Based on the photos released by the WCS, the cologne also attracts pumas, ocelots, tapirs, peccaries and coatis.

Citation: http://news.discovery.com/animals/calvin-klein-cologne-attracts-wild-cats-and-other-animals.html

Coffee, pointless? Maybe

If you’re in the habit of drinking coffee everyday before work/school/whatever, you know the power that little mug of acrid brown soup wields over you. At least, you think you do. Researchers at Bristol University found 379 volunteers, from the stimulant-naive to self-described caffeine addicts — some of whom claimed that their brains “could not function” without their first cup. After feeding some of the volunteers regular coffee while the rest drank decaf placebos, they tested the range of attentiveness, anxiety, memory, and vigilance of the 379 participants. For the coffee-drinking veterans, the first cup only brought them to a normal level of alertness.

The researchers suspect that, for routine coffee drinkers, the first cup of only reverses the persistent effects of overnight caffeine withdrawal. Of course, isn’t increasing perceived alertness the same as increasing alertness? How does one differentiate between the two without tricky brain-scanning technology? Technology unused by this research team. To further compound these doubts, Dr Euan Paul, executive director of the British Coffee Association, responded to the research:

“There is an overwhelming wealth of evidence showing that caffeine does increase alertness levels by acting as a stimulant on the central nervous system by prompting the release of adrenaline. This effect is not only found with subjects in a low state of alertness such as night- shift workers, or those who wake-up early in the morning, but is additionally found in subjects who already have a high state of alertness.”

Your move, Bristol research team.

Gesturing when you Talk Means You're Smarter?

Posted Wednesday, December 23, 2009 2:35 PM

Smart People Gesture More When They Talk–So Will Kids Be Smarter if They Gesture?

Ashley Merryman and Po Bronson

There's an exciting report in next month's issue of Intelligence. That study, when combined with earlier work from the University of Chicago, suggests that there may be an entirely new way to develop the brain's reasoning ability.

In the Intelligence study, researchers had 28 teenagers come to a lab at Berlin's Humboldt University. In order to minimize the possible variables, the invited teens were all quite similar–all boys about 17 years old, same socioeconomic backgrounds and similar schools. They also had about the same level ofcrystallized intelligence, that being the mental ability to apply rules they've already learned to new situations.

Where the teens differed was in their fluid intelligence (Gf), the ability to reason their way through entirely new novel situations. Some teens were high in fluid intelligence; others were average. (Most neuroscientists believe that the reasoning ability captured in Gf is the sign of true brilliance.)

The researchers asked the teens to look at a series of complex geometric images; their task was to discern patterns between the images. Once the teens had done that, the researchers videotaped the boys as they explained how they'd solved the problems. A month later, the boys returned to the lab for a structural MRI scans of their brains.

The boys higher in fluid intelligence did better at the image task. And, fascinatingly, when verbally describing their problem-solving, the higher Gf boys also used hand-gestures to explain their answers. They used their fingers to form the rectangles and triangles they'd seen. They wiggled their hands back and forth, their digits reenacting how the boys mentally manipulated the images during the task. Compared to the boys with average Gf, the high Gf group used more than four times the number of hand gestures during their explanations.

Then, the researchers analyzed the teens' brain scans, especially "Broca's area"–what is considered to be the root of language comprehension. For the boys who were higher in Gf and gestured more, the cortices of their brains were thicker in Broca's area.

If this all seems like odd brain trivia–smarter people gesture more when they talk–it has the potential to be much more than that.

University of Chicago professor Susan Goldin-Meadow is one of the world's leading researchers on gesture. She has proven that gestures aren't just mere unconscious flapping of the hands. Gesturing isn't even just about communicating from one person to the next. (Goldin-Meadow discovered that if you put blind-from-birth people in a room together for a conversation, they still gesture to one another.)

Instead, Goldin-Meadow and her team have shown that gesturing actually facilitates people's ability to reason. You can even teach a child a new method of problem-solving, simply by teaching that kid a new gesture.

That's exactly what Dr. Susan Wagner Cook was able to do. A former graduate student in Goldin-Meadow's lab, Cook spent her days at nearby elementary schools.

There's a common stumbling block for kids in math: equivalence. Knowing how to solve a problem such as 3 + 4 + 2 =__ + 7. Sure, it looks easy to you, but, in the third and fourth grades, a lot of kids will quickly put a "9" in the blank. Some are perplexed as to the presence of the "+7," but others don't even notice it's there.

So Cook divided third and fourth graders (none of whom could correctly solve an equivalence problem) into three groups. All the kids were taught to solve the problems. But one group was given a phrase to say aloud to help guide them. They were told to say, “I want to make one side equal to the other side."

Cook didn't tell the second group of kids to say anything. Instead, she told the second group to make a strange hand gesture as they solved the problem–they were to wave their hands on both sides of the equation as they totaled the sum. The third set of kids was taught to say the phrase and make the wave gesture.

Immediately after the training, the kids were tested to see how much they had learned. All of them had improved their ability.

Then, four weeks later, the children were in their regular classrooms when the teachers surprised them with a pop quiz of equivalence problems. Disaster struck. Of the kids taught to say the instructional phrase, 90 percent had forgotten how to solve the problems.

Amazingly, more than 90 percent of the kids who used the gesture in their training remembered how to solve the problems. Making the gesture helped encode the memory for long-term retrieval.

"You'd think that their minds were twice as occupied," observed Goldin-Meadow. But rather than overloading their brains with competing thoughts, the gesture supported their learning.

To make this more perplexing and mysterious (and cool): Goldin-Meadow's team believes the specific gestures used don't matter. They've repeated the experiment with different kids and different gestures. Making a gesture that’s symbolically relevant improves the result, but the results are still very good no matter what.

Truthfully, Goldin-Meadow hasn’t completely determined what’s driving this strange phenomenon. But her chief theory is that gesturing "lightens the mental load" of learning: it lessens learning's demands because the gesturing somehow engages other parts of the brain in the problem-solving.

Perhaps ideas just aren't as cumbersome, because of the motion-memory link. For example, researchers have found that when a person hears words describing a body's motion (e.g., "kick"), that triggers activity in the parts of the brain associated with that motion. Still other scholars have shown that it's easier to remember speech events when a gesture accompanied the speech. Goldin-Meadow can get kids to recall more details of a story, if she asks them to use gestures when they repeat the tale.

Now think back to that new finding in Intelligence: kids with higher fluid intelligence gesture more–and they have thicker brain cortices in Broca's area.

It's too early to come up with any definite explanations for the intelligence-brain-structure-gesture relationship. But the German scientists are well-aware of Goldin-Meadow and Cook's success in gesture-training. So the neuroscientists are considering the possibility that, when kids frequently produce certain gestures, it may affect their brain development. Thus, use of gestures wouldn't just help a child problem-solve in that moment. It could also lead to better overall cognitive performance and higher fluid intelligence.

In a few years, we may be able to help a child learn–even change his IQ–with just a wave of the hand.

Will the real Walter Matweychuk please stand up?