Histocompatibility Complex

Odour and mating preferences in humans

Two studies found MHC-associated odour preferences, and one study found MHC-dependent mating preferences. First, Wedekind et al. [7] found that women prefer the odour of MHC-dissimilar men. Forty-nine female and 44 male students were typed for their HLA-A, -B and -DR. The men wore a T-shirt for two nights. On the following day, the women were asked to judge the odours of six T-shirts each, and the shirts’ odours were judged as more ‘pleasant’ when they had been worn by men whose MHC genotype was different from that of the judging woman. In contrast, the odours were judged less pleasant when the MHC genotype of the odour-producing males and that of the judging women were similar. This difference in odour assessment was reversed when the women were taking oral contraceptives. Furthermore, the odours of MHC-dissimilar men more frequently reminded the women of their own present or former partners than did the odours of MHC-similar men. Although this is no direct evidence that odour influences mating preferences in humans (but see [16]), this study suggests that the MHC or linked genes influence human mate choice.

Second, Wedekind and Füri [17] tested whether odour preferences are aimed at producing offspring with certain MHC allele combinations (since certain combinations may offer increased resistance against pathogens) or simply increased heterozygosity. The former (but not the latter) possibility would specifically support the parasite hypotheses, since a preference for specific allele combinations that are beneficial under given environmental conditions would not be expected by the inbreeding avoidance hypothesis. The study was also designed to test for gender effects, and to get a first estimate of the amount of variance in pleasantness scorings that is correlated to the MHC. This time, 58 women and 63 men, all typed for their HLA-A, -B and -DR, were asked to score the odours of six T-shirts, worn always by the same two women and four men. The pleasantness scorings correlated again negatively with the degree of MHC similarity between smeller and T-shirt wearer in men and in women who were not using the contraceptive pill (but not in pill users). Depending on the T-shirt wearer, the amount of variance in the scorings of odour pleasantness that was explained by the degree of MHC similarity (=r²) varied between nearly 0 and 23%. The six T-shirt-wearers differed significantly from each other in the degree to which pleasantness scorings correlated to the MHC. There was no significant effect of gender in the correlation between pleasantness and MHC similarity: the highest r² was actually reached with one of the male odours sniffed by male smellers. Men and women who were reminded of their own mate/ex-mate when sniffing a T-shirt had significantly fewer MHC-alleles in common with this T-shirt wearer than expected by chance. This suggests again that the MHC or linked genes influence human mate choice. This study found no significant influence of the MHC on odour preferences when the degree of similarity between T-shirt wearer and smeller was statistically controlled. This negative finding suggests that body odour preferences are mainly influenced by the degree of similarity or dissimilarity at the MHC in the Swiss study population. The observed preferences would increase heterozygosity in the progeny, without producing specific combinations at the MHC. As mentioned above, a more specific choice of particular alleles would have provided strong evidence in favour of the parasite hypothesis, as opposed to the inbreeding avoidance hypothesis. However, this second study did not provide such evidence.

Third, Ober et al. [8] conducted a large study on American Hutterites, a reproductively isolated community of Austrian-German ancestry, and found direct evidence for MHC-disassortative mating preferences. Married couples were less likely to share MHC loci than expected by chance, even after inbreeding taboos were statistically controlled. However, Hedrick and Black [18] did not find such an effect in South Amerindians. Although the latter study had a lower statistical power (the sample size in their field study was much smaller than in the study by Ober et al. [8] while the heterogeneity on the MHC seemed to be larger, and fewer alleles had been analysed), the possibility remains that there might be population differences with respect to mating preferences. A study by Paterson and Pemberton [19] tested for MHC-dependent mate preferences in another mammal, the Soay sheep (Ovis aries). In contrast to the many studies in mice and the studies on humans mentioned above, they could not find any indication of such mate preferences in an unmanaged population on a Scottish island. Their analysis was conservative with respect to their conclusion, and their sample size was large, which strongly suggests that MHC-dependent mate choice is not universal among mammals.

See full text.

Too Much Sitting = Health Hazard

TOO MUCH SITTING CREATES A HEALTH HAZARD

Don't get too comfortable in that chair. Staying in your seat too long, too often could kill you.

Wed Jan 20, 2010 02:45 PM ET | content provided by Maria Cheng, Associated Press

Even if you also exercise regularly, prolonged periods of sitting could be a health risk.
Getty Images

THE GIST:

• Prolonged sitting regularly could lead to obesity, heart disease and more.
• Even those who exercise regularly are at risk.

---

Here's a new warning from health experts: Sitting is deadly.

Scientists are increasingly warning that sitting for prolonged periods -- even if you also exercise regularly -- could be bad for your health. And it doesn't matter where the sitting takes place -- at the office, at school, in the car or before a computer or TV -- just the overall number of hours it occurs.

Research is preliminary, but several studies suggest people who spend most of their days sitting are more likely to be fat, have a heart attack or even die.

In an editorial published this week in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Elin Ekblom-Bak of the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences suggested that authorities rethink how they define physical activity to highlight the dangers of sitting.

While health officials have issued guidelines recommending minimum amounts of physical activity, they haven't suggested people try to limit how much time they spend in a seated position.

"After four hours of sitting, the body starts to send harmful signals," Ekblom-Bak said. She explained that genes regulating the amount of glucose and fat in the body start to shut down.

Even for people who exercise, spending long stretches of time sitting at a desk is still harmful. Tim Armstrong, a physical activity expert at the World Health Organization, said people who exercise every day -- but still spend a lot of time sitting -- might get more benefit if that exercise were spread across the day, rather than in a single bout.

Full Article: http://news.discovery.com/human/sitting-health-hazard.html

Where is the Chinese Food Truck?

I pose to you a question on this cold, snowy winter's day: Wherefore art the Chinese Food truck formerly of 36th and Market street? It appears to have been replaced with a mega-truck peddling greasy sandwiches. In spite of the new array lunch-time options, including the Irie cart with its raw chicken and Powelton pizza's offshoot proffering slices for less than $2 (has anyone given that a go yet?), I want my hot and sour soup today.

Mary, with your insider's ability to get brown rice served with meals, have you any idea where the kind man with mediocre-but-inexpensive meals has gone?

I could really go for an eggroll right now.

The Americanization of Mental Illness.......

By ETHAN WATTERS

Published: January 8, 2010

AMERICANS, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country’s blunders into other cultures. In some circles, it is easy to make friends with a rousing rant about the McDonald’s near Tiananmen Square, the Nike factory in Malaysia or the latest blowback from our political or military interventions abroad. For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

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Alex Trochut

This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places. In some Southeast Asian cultures, men have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer from koro, which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their bodies. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a condition related to spirit-possession beliefs that brings forth dissociative episodes of laughing, shouting and singing.

The diversity that can be found across cultures can be seen across time as well. In his book “Mad Travelers,” the philosopher Ian Hacking documents the fleeting appearance in the 1890s of a fugue state in which European men would walk in a trance for hundreds of miles with no knowledge of their identities. The hysterical-leg paralysis that afflicted thousands of middle-class women in the late 19th century not only gives us a visceral understanding of the restrictions set on women’s social roles at the time but can also be seen from this distance as a social role itself — the troubled unconscious minds of a certain class of women speaking the idiom of distress of their time.

“We might think of the culture as possessing a ‘symptom repertoire’ — a range of physical symptoms available to the unconscious mind for the physical expression of psychological conflict,” Edward Shorter, a medical historian at the University of Toronto, wrote in his book “Paralysis: The Rise and Fall of a ‘Hysterical’ Symptom.” “In some epochs, convulsions, the sudden inability to speak or terrible leg pain may loom prominently in the repertoire. In other epochs patients may draw chiefly upon such symptoms as abdominal pain, false estimates of body weight and enervating weakness as metaphors for conveying psychic stress.”

In any given era, those who minister to the mentally ill — doctors or shamans or priests — inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate. Because the troubled mind has been influenced by healers of diverse religious and scientific persuasions, the forms of madness from one place and time often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another.

That is until recently.

For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness.

DR. SING LEE, a psychiatrist and researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, watched the Westernization of a mental illness firsthand. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was busy documenting a rare and culturally specific form of anorexia nervosa in Hong Kong. Unlike American anorexics, most of his patients did not intentionally diet nor did they express a fear of becoming fat. The complaints of Lee’s patients were typically somatic — they complained most frequently of having bloated stomachs. Lee was trying to understand this indigenous form of anorexia and, at the same time, figure out why the.........................

For full article click here.

If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online

By TAMAR LEWIN

Published: January 20, 2010

The average young American now spends practically every waking minute — except for the time in school — using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device, according to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

“At night, I can text or watch something on YouTube until I fall asleep,”

Francisco Sepulveda, 14, said of his smart phone.

Multimedia

Those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices, compared with less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the study was last conducted. And that does not count the hour and a half that youths spend texting, or the half-hour they talk on their cellphones.

And because so many of them are multitasking — say, surfing the Internet while listening to music — they pack on average nearly 11 hours of media content into that seven and a half hours.

“I feel like my days would be boring without it,” said Francisco Sepulveda, a 14-year-old Bronx eighth grader who uses his smart phone to surf the Web, watch videos, listen to music — and send or receive about 500 texts a day.

The study’s findings shocked its authors, who had concluded in 2005 that use could not possibly grow further, and confirmed the fears of many parents whose children are constantly tethered to media devices. It found, moreover, that heavy media use is associated with several negatives, including behavior problems and lower grades.

The third in a series, the study found that young people’s media consumption grew far more in the last five years than from 1999 to 2004, as sophisticated mobile technology like iPods and smart phones brought media access into teenagers’ pockets and beds.

Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Boston who directs the Center on Media and Child Health, said that with media use so ubiquitous, it was time to stop arguing over whether it was good or bad and accept it as part of children’s environment, “like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.”

Contrary to popular wisdom, the heaviest media users reported spending a similar amount of time exercising as the light media users. Nonetheless, other studies have established a link between screen time and obesity.

While most of the young people in the study got good grades, 47 percent of the heaviest media users — those who consumed at least 16 hours a day — had mostly C’s or lower, compared with 23 percent of those who typically consumed media three hours a day or less. The heaviest media users were also more likely than the lightest users to report that they were bored or sad, or that they got into trouble, did not get along well with their parents and were not happy at school.

The study could not say whether the media use causes problems, or, rather, whether troubled youths turn to heavy media use.

“This is a stunner,” said Donald F. Roberts, a Stanford communications professor emeritus who is one of the authors of the study. “In the second report, I remember writing a paragraph saying we’ve hit a ceiling on media use, since there just aren’t enough hours in the day to increase the time children spend on media. But now it’s up an hour.”

The report is based on a survey of more than 2,000 students in grades 3 to 12 that was conducted from October 2008 to May 2009.

On average, young people spend about two hours a day consuming media on a mobile device, the study found. They spend almost another hour on “old” content like television or music delivered through newer pathways like the Web site Hulu or iTunes. Youths now spend more time listening to or watching media on their cellphones, or playing games, than talking on them.

“I use it as my alarm clock, because it has an annoying ringtone that doesn’t stop until you turn it off,” Francisco Sepulveda said of his phone. “At night, I can text or watch something on YouTube until I fall asleep. It lets me talk on the phone and watch a video at the same time, or listen to music while I send text messages.”

Francisco’s mother, Janet Sepulveda, bought his phone, a Sidekick LX, a year ago when the computer was not working, to ensure that he had Internet access for school. But schoolwork has not been the issue.

“I’d say he uses it about 2 percent for homework and 98 percent for other stuff,” she said. “At the beginning, I would take the phone at 10 p.m. and tell him he couldn’t use it anymore. Now he knows that if he’s not complying with what I want, I can suspend his service for a week or two. That’s happened.”

The Kaiser study found that more than 7 in 10 youths have a TV in their bedroom, and about a third have a computer with Internet access in their bedroom.

“Parents never knew as much as they thought they did about what their kids are doing,” Mr. Roberts said, “but now we’ve created a world where they’re removed from us that much more.”

The study found that young people used less media in homes with rules like no television during meals or in the bedroom, or with limits on media time.

Victoria Rideout, a Kaiser vice president who is lead author of the study, said that although it has become harder for parents to control what their children do, they can still have an effect.

“I don’t think parents should feel totally disempowered,” she said. “They can still make rules, and it still makes a difference.”

In Kensington, Md., Kim Calinan let her baby son, Trey, watch Baby Einstein videos, and soon moved him on to “Dora the Explorer.”

“By the time he was 4, he had all these math and science DVDs, and he was clicking through by himself, and he learned to read and do math early,” she said. “So if we’d had the conversation then, I would have said they were great educational tools.”

But now that Trey is 9 and wild about video games, Ms. Calinan feels differently.

Last year, she sensed that video games were displacing other interests and narrowing his social interactions. After realizing that Trey did not want to sign up for any after-school activities that might cut into his game time, Ms. Calinan limited his screen time to an hour and half a day on weekends only.

So last Wednesday, Trey came home and read a book — but said he was looking forward to the weekend, when he could play his favorite video game.

Many experts believe that media use is changing youthful attitudes.

“It’s changed young people’s assumptions about how to get an answer to a question,” Mr. Roberts said. “People can put out a problem, whether it’s ‘Where’s a good bar?’ or ‘What if I’m pregnant?’ and information pours in from all kinds of sources.”

The heaviest media users, the study found, are black and Hispanic youths and “tweens,” or those ages 11 to 14.

Even during the survey, media use was changing.

“One of the hot topics today is Twitter, but when we first went into the field and began interviewing, Twitter didn’t exist,” Ms. Rideout said.

Friends Hospital opens unique unit...........................

Friends Hospital, a 200-year-old psychiatric hospital in Northeast Philadelphia, opened the city’s first recovery-oriented inpatient psychiatric-care unit Friday.

“Recovery-oriented care can drive some of the most remarkable life changes I have ever seen in my 20 years as a clinician,” said Dr. Ken Glass, CEO of Friends. “Recovery from mental illness and addiction is always possible, but it happens most effectively when the patient embraces their program of care and is an active and engaged participant in their treatment. In recovery-oriented care, we make this possible by speaking to the individual’s soul, not just their symptoms.”

In the recovery-oriented care model, patients are helped to reconnect with their community and their families and to develop new hobbies and pursuits. Counseling is supported by former hospital patients, known as peer-support specialists, who have successfully went through the process.

Glass said the movement to recovery-oriented care for the mentally ill and addicted is a departure from traditional models where the focus is on getting the patient stabilized, medicated and discharged.

The goal of Friends Hospital’s 24-bed inpatient recovery-oriented unit is to create a “collaborative, working relationship with each patient” and to have that patient leave with a new life plan that “incorporates continued therapy with each individual’s interests, support systems, hobbies, strengths, community connections, and aspirations.”

Upon admission at Friends, each individual will be assessed to determine whether or not the recovery unit will be the right fit for them. Friends will continue to operate general and specialty units.

Dr. Arthur Evans, director of Philadelphia’s Department of Behavioral Health and Mental Retardation Services, supports the recovery-oriented care model.

“I have long believed that the journey of recovery begins at the point that a person reaches out for help and throughout their journey in the treatment system and beyond,” Evans said. “Inpatient services play a critical role in people’s recovery, and the fact that Friends is taking seriously and responding to the national call to improve recovery outcomes for individuals with behavioral health conditions is commendable. Friends has an incredible opportunity to become a national leader in this area and the department is 100 percent behind these efforts.”

http://philadelphia.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/stories/2010/01/11/daily44.html

http://www.healthnewsdigest.com/news/Mental_Health_430/Friends_Hospital_Opens_Philadelphia_s_First_Recovery-Oriented_Inpatient_Psychiatric_Care_Unit_printer.shtml

DSM spreading like McDonalds

Apparently, the rest of the world is incorporating American ideas of mental illness presentation, and maybe it's not a good thing...

The Americanization of Mental Illness

Audiences experience 'Avatar' blues -- not a joke.

By Jo Piazza, Special to CNN

(CNN) -- James Cameron's completely immersive spectacle "Avatar" may have been a little too real for some fans who say they have experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora.

On the fan forum site "Avatar Forums," a topic thread entitled "Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible," has received more than 1,000 posts from people experiencing depression and fans trying to help them cope. The topic became so popular last month that forum administrator Philippe Baghdassarian had to create a second thread so people could continue to post their confused feelings about the movie.

"I wasn't depressed myself. In fact the movie made me happy ," Baghdassarian said. "But I can understand why it made people depressed. The movie was so beautiful and it showed something we don't have here on Earth. I think people saw we could be living in a completely different world and that caused them to be depressed."

A post by a user called Elequin expresses an almost obsessive relationship with the film.

"That's all I have been doing as of late, searching the Internet for more info about 'Avatar.' I guess that helps. It's so hard I can't force myself to think that it's just a movie, and to get over it, that living like the Na'vi will never happen. I think I need a rebound movie," Elequin posted.

A user named Mike wrote on the fan Web site "Naviblue" that he contemplated suicide after seeing the movie.

"Ever since I went to see Avatar I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na'vi made me want to be one of them. I can't stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it," Mike posted. "I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in 'Avatar.' "

Other fans have expressed feelings of disgust with the human race and disengagement with reality.

Full Story: http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/11/avatar.movie.blues/index.html

Always read the Methods sections

Do you know how hard it is to find Flickr shots of people reading journal articles? We'll settle for cute, instead. From KOMUnews via CC

Two Good Reasons To Always Read the Methods Section of a Scientific Paper

Sure, you could skip straight to "Conclusions" and get your soundbite. But if you make a habit of avoiding "Methods and Materials" you will miss out on some classic moments of science humor---both intentional and otherwise.

In my summer reading, I came across two excellent examples...

1) Chicken Soup for the Scientist's Soul (And Lunch)
The Paper: "Chicken Soup Inhibits Neutrophil Chemotaxis In Vitro", in the October 2000 issue of the journal Chest. Authors: Barbara O. Rennard, BA, Ronald F. Ertl, BS, Gail L. Gossman, BS, Richard A. Robbins, MD, FCCP, and Stephen I. Rennard, MD, FCCP.
The Discovery: My friend Jeff, Ph.D., who works for a friendly Environmental Sciences department somewhere in the South, sent me a link to this paper, which attempts to establish a medical explanation for why your Grammy was always feeding you chicken soup at the slightest hint of a sniffle. The authors theorize that chicken soup may have some mild anti-inflammatory effects, which could account for its popularity as folk medicine. In fact, according to the paper, the idea of treating respiratory illness with chicken soup dates at least back to the 12th century C.E., when it was recommended by the Egyptian Jewish physician and philosopher Maimonides.
Which is kind of nifty.
And the team does find some evidence supporting their theory, at least in the lab, where they exposed white blood cells called neutrophils to varying concentrations of chicken soup. Neutrophils play an important role in inflammation and higher concentrations of soup seemed to block them from doing this. You can read the whole paper online.

The funny part? They included the actual chicken soup recipe used in the study under "Methods and Materials". Actual quote from the paper:

Traditional chicken soup was prepared according to a family recipe, which will be referred to as "Grandma's soup" (C. Fleischer; personal communication; 1970).

I haven't tried it yet, but I'm planning on making a batch sometime this fall. The paper says the recipe is "very highly regarded locally" (a claim they back up with a citation).

2) Weekend at Bernie's
The Paper: "Sexual conflict over the duration of copulation in Drosophila montana: why is longer better?", in the June 12, 2009 issue of BMC Evolutionary Biology. Authors: Dominique Mazzi, Jenni Kesäniemi, Anneli Hoikkala and Kirsten Klappert.
The Discovery: I wrote about this research for the National Geographic News Web site. The basic gist: Male D. montana flies get more of an evolutionary benefit from longer sex. Females, meanwhile, do better with a shorter session. The research proved that the female flies had adapted in ways that allowed them to counter males' ability to hold them still. Turns out, the ladies had more control over the length of sex than anyone previously thought.
In my initial interviews, author Kirsten Klappert explained that the team had "incapacitated" the female flies to see how long sex lasted when lady flies had no control. Naturally, my editor and I were curious as to just how this worked.

Apparently, it works best if you kill the female flies.

Rather than engaging in insect bondage, the Methods section clarified that the team had gassed female flies to death, propped them up so they appeared alive and interested in sex, and tricked the male flies into necrophilia.

And you thought being detail-oriented was boring.

Schizophrenic mother eats her baby

SAN ANTONIO (AP) — The warning signs were there. Otty Sanchez, a schizophrenic with a history of hospitalizations, wasn't taking medication and was depressed after her son's birth, the boy's father said. A simple request seemed to set her off, alarming him and his family.

Yet, the 33-year-old woman was staying in a house where she had access to samurai swords. Child welfare officials were never called.

POLICE: Woman killed her infant, ate part of brain

Instead, Sanchez's troubles became apparent to authorities when they found her before dawn Sunday screaming that she had killed her baby. Her 3 1/2-week-old son was dismembered in a scene so gruesome that police were left shaken.

"Maybe we missed" warning signs, San Antonio Police Chief William McManus said. "I don't know."

FIND MORE STORIES IN: Andrea Yates | Dena Schlosser

Sanchez was released Tuesday from a hospital where she had been treated for self-inflicted cuts to her torso and an attempt to slice her own throat. The former home health care worker, charged with capital murder, was being held at Bexar County Jail on $1 million bond. Calls to relatives Tuesday were not immediately returned and it was not clear whether Sanchez had an attorney.

Authorities said Sanchez tried killing herself after butchering her newborn son, Scott Wesley Buchholz-Sanchez, with a steak knife and two swords while her sister and two nieces, ages 5 and 7, slept in another room.

Sanchez told police — who described a scene so horrifying that investigators could barely speak to one another — that the devil made her kill, mutilate and eat parts of her only child.

Scott W. Buchholz, the infant's father who met Sanchez six years ago while they were studying to be pharmacists assistants, said he isn't buying it. He said although his girlfriend had postpartum depression and told him a week before the killing that she was schizophrenic, she didn't appear unstable.

He wants prosecutors to pursue the death penalty.

"She killed my son. She should burn in hell," Buchholz, 33, told The Associated Press.

Otty Sanchez's medical history is muddled. A family member said Sanchez had been undergoing psychiatric treatment and that a hospital called looking for her several months ago. Gloria Sanchez, Otty's aunt, said her niece had been "in and out of a psychiatric ward."

In May 2008, Otty Sanchez's mother, Manuela Sanchez, called police after her daughter didn't return from a trip to Austin, saying she was concerned about her daughter's safety. Manuela Sanchez told police she suspected Otty was into drugs and specifically told police she wasn't suffering from any mental issues.

Buchholz, who is himself schizophrenic and takes six anti-psychotic and anti-convulsive medications, said Otty had postpartum depression and had been going to regular counseling sessions after the birth, but refused to take prescription medication for her depression. Still, he said she seemed fine.

"She seemed like a a very caring, loving mother. She held him, she breast fed him. She did everything for him that was nice," he said.

On July 20, Sanchez was taken to the hospital for depression and released less than a day later, Buchholz said. Sanchez told him that she was schizophrenic and was going to live with her parents and sister. Sanchez was arrested at her mother's house, where police found her and the dead infant.

Five days later, on Saturday, Sanchez brought "Baby Scotty" for a visit but stormed out after he asked for a copy of the birth certificate and other documents, Buchholz said. Buchholz called 911 to report that Sanchez stormed out and drove away with the infant without properly restraining him in the car, and deputies investigated it as a disturbance.

The deputy took a report but could do little else, said Bexar County Sheriff Chief Deputy Dale Bennett.

"If this guy had given us an indication that she had postpartum depression, or mental defects she was suffering from, we may have addressed it differently," he said.

Buchholz said he may have told the deputy Sanchez was depressed, but that he wasn't sure.

While schizophrenia generally develops in men in their late teens and early 20s, women tend to develop the illness, marked by abnormal impressions of reality, later in life.

Most new mothers suffer from postpartum blues as hormones shift after a pregnancy and they're fatigued handling a new baby. But as many as one-fifth suffer from the more serious postpartum depression, which includes symptoms like despair and failing to eat or sleep.

Postpartum psychosis is far rarer, affecting only about one woman in 1,000. Women with postpartum psychosis have delusions, frequently involving religious symbols and a desire to harm their newborn, said Richard Pesikoff, a psychiatry professor at the Baylor College of Medicine.

He testified in the second trial of Andrea Yates, the high-profile case of a Houston-area mother found not guilty by reason of insanity after drowning her five children. Similar to Sanchez's claim that the devil told her to kill her son, Yates told authorities Satan was inside of her and she was trying to save her children.

"The most common part of postpartum psychosis is the delusional thinking," said Pesikoff. "Often but not always, it encompasses some type of religious thought. God is telling you to do something. The devil is telling you to do something."

Women with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are at particularly high risk for developing postpartum psychosis.

For women with schizophrenia who are not taking medication, the risk of developing psychosis is 50% or higher, said Lucy Puryear, another psychiatrist who was involved in the Yates case.

If a mother is diagnosed with psychosis, she should immediately be hospitalized and separated from the child, Puryear said.

Some psychiatrists will tell women with schizophrenia not to have children because of the high risks, but she said with medication and treatment, "it's possible to have a child and have a good outcome."

While Sanchez could face trial, other similar cases — including that of Yates and Dena Schlosser, a Plano woman who said she sliced off her baby's arms because she wanted to give the baby to God — have ended with juries finding the women not guilty by reason of insanity.

FULL STORY at: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-07-28-decapitated-baby_N.htm?csp=34

The Washington Post: Dual Disorders Rarely Treated Properly

Dual Disorders Rarely Treated Properly

VIDEO

He Didn't Need to Die, He Just Needed to Get Better

The parents of Danny Watt, who died in April 2008, describe their son's struggles with mental illness and the treatment they believe failed him.

» LAUNCH VIDEO PLAYER

By Tom Jackman

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 28, 2009


Danny Watt once leapt from a moving train. He hurtled through the windshield of a rolling car. Got pummeled by drug dealers. Overdosed. Swallowed rat poison. Tried to hang himself.

In his tumultuous 21 years, Danny Watt danced with death in the most amazing, horrible ways. In the end, two college students spotted him facedown in the cold, murky water of the C&O Canal one afternoon in April 2008. The medical examiner said Danny had drowned.

It was an end that Danny's parents, Bobby and Mary Watt of Reston, had struggled to stave off for many years. But after refinancing their house three times to put their son in every substance abuse and mental health program imaginable, after going to countless meetings and hearings and hospitals and jails, after badgering every possible person in Fairfax County who might help them, they could not save Danny.

"We just went through so much for so long," said Mary Watt, breaking into tears. "We tried and tried for so many years, fighting, only to lose."

Danny Watt was a walking symbol of a phenomenon called co-occurring disorders, or dual diagnosis, which is estimated to affect 7 million adults in the United States. These people are both seriously mentally ill and abusing drugs or alcohol. About half of all adults who are seriously mentally ill are also thought to be addicted. The mental health community calls this "self-medication." The federal government estimates that 90 percent of people with co-occurring disorders do not get the treatment they need.

Danny's death shows how hard it can be to treat people with co-occurring disorders and why so many die young.

Full Story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/27/AR2009072702248.html

Jani's at the mercy of her mind

The parents of a 6-year-old schizophrenic search for help against daunting odds for a patient so young and a case so severe.

By Shari Roan
June 29, 2009



It's been a rough week. A few days ago, at UCLA's Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, 6-year-old Jani toppled a food cart and was confined to her room. She slammed her head against the floor, opening a bloody cut that sent her into hysterics. Later, she kicked the hospital therapy dog.

Jani normally likes animals. But most of her animal friends -- cats, rats, dogs and birds -- are phantoms that only she can see. January Schofield has schizophrenia. Potent psychiatric drugs -- in doses that would stagger most adults -- seem to skip off her. She is among the rarest of the rare: a child seemingly born mentally ill.

She suffers from delusions, hallucinations and paroxysms of rage so severe that not even her parents feel safe. She's threatened to climb into an oven. She's kicked and tried to bite her little brother. "I'm Jani, and I have a cat named Emily 54," she says, by way of introduction. "And I'm Saturn-the-Rat's baby sitter."

FULL STORY

Do Your Research...(tsk tsk)

Spectacular Planet...

Mars: The Red Planet is about to be spectacular!

Mars


The Red Planet is about to be spectacular!

This month and next, Earth is catching up with Mars in an encounter that
will culminate in the closest approach between the two planets in
recorded history. The next time Mars may come this close is
in 2287. Due to the way Jupiter's gravity tugs on
Mars and perturbs its orbit, astronomers can only be
certain that Mars has not come this close to Earth
in the Last 5,000 years, but it may be as long as
60,000 years before it happens again.

The encounter will culminate on August 27th when
Mars comes to within 34,649,589 miles of Earth and
will be (next to the moon) the brightest object in
the night sky. It will attain a magnitude of -2.9
and will appear 25.11 arc seconds wide. At a modest
75-power magnification


Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye.
Mars will be easy to spot. At the
beginning of August it will rise in the east at 10p.m.
and reach its azimuth at about 3 a.m.

By the end of August when the two planets are
closest, Mars will rise at nightfall and reach its
highest point in the sky at 12:30a.m. That's pretty
convenient to see something that no human being has
seen in recorded history. So, mark your calendar at
the beginning of August to see Mars grow
progressively brighter and brighter throughout the
month.


NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN

Monkey Research...

Workers may be more productive if allowed to surf the Internet

A University of Melbourne study found that workers who engage in ‘Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing’ (WILB) are more productive than those who don’t. “People who do surf the Internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office - are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t,” the author says. This is because “short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a days work, and as a result, increased productivity.”

Summary of study

Some CITS students and affiliates recently completed a chapter on the topic of destructive use of communication technologies in the workplace which includes a survey of similar research.

Flanagin, A. J., Pearce, K., & Bondad-Brown, B. (in press). The destructive potential of electronic communication technologies in organizations. In P. Lutgen-Sandvik & B. Davenport-Sypher (Eds.), The destructive side of organizational communication: Processes, consequences, and constructive ways of organizing. Mahwah, NJ: Routledge/LEA.

Wednesday’s Lunchtime Poll

Eight PRU Pirates were asked the question: How little do you think you could spend on food, in a week, and still consume pretty much everything you needed/wanted? [This includes groceries, dining out, beverages, and snacks]

Responses were given in the form of single estimates and ranges, and varied dramatically; the lowest estimate provided was $30 compared to the highest at $120.

On average, the Pirates collectively estimate being able to spend $72.50 on everything they consume over the course of an average week.

Thank you to everyone who participated!

Blue Lazers to cure Schizophrenia?

Blue Laser Could Lead to Autism Cure

Eric Bland, Discovery News

Triggering Brain Waves | Discovery News Video

April 29, 2009 -- Lasers could one day cure, or at least aid in the search for drugs that treat diseases ranging from autism to schizophrenia, according to two new studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University and published in the online issue of the journal Nature.

A blue laser shined into a live mouse brain triggered gamma waves, which are a kind of brain wave necessary for concentration and cognition that people with autism and schizophrenia often lack.

"There are lots of theories about why [gamma wave oscillation] is impaired," said Li-Huei Tsai, a professor at MIT and a co-author on one of the Nature papers.

"This is the first proof that a specific set of neurons are responsible for gamma waves."

Whole story: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/04/29/brain-autism-laser.html

Japanese "Suicide Forest"

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/03/19/suicide.forrest.japan/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

Another teenage fad...

Vodka Soaked Tampons