Oxytocin may inhibit social phobia

kavin submitted, created time 4 months 5 days (www.news-medical.net)

Swedish and British scientists have shown using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that the hormone oxytocin can inhibit feelings of anxiety in specific individuals. Their discovery might lead to a better understanding and the improved treatment of psychiatric affections in which people feel distressed when meeting others, such as in cases of autism and social phobia.
Oxytocin is a neuropeptide that is secreted by the body during massage, childbirth and breastfeeding to induce a calming, analgesic effect

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MRI may detect brain activity in vegetative patients

007RA submitted, created time 1 year 3 months (www.reutershealth.com)

Using functional MRI, British researchers have detected near-normal brain activity in a second patient who was believed to be in a vegetative state. The researchers suggest that fMRI may provide a way to identify brain activity in patients who otherwise appear to have no consciousness.

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Selective Tuning of the Blood Oxygenation Level-Dependent Response during Simple Target Detection Dissociates Human Frontoparietal Subregions

Reviver submitted, created time 1 year 5 months (www.jneurosci.org)

"Current models of working memory and focal attention converge on the idea of an adaptable global system, distributed across a network of frontal and parietal brain regions. Here, researchers examine how the human frontoparietal network selectively adapts to represent currently relevant information during a simple attentional task: monitoring for a target item in a series of nontargets. Across the entire frontoparietal network, there is selective response to targets, in line with a global system for coding task-relevant inputs

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Threatening a rubber hand that you feel is yours elicits a cortical anxiety response

cappuccion submitted, created time 1 year 6 months (www.pnas.org)

The feeling of body ownership is a fundamental aspect of self-consciousness. The underlying neural mechanisms can be studied by using the illusion where a person is made to feel that a rubber hand is his or her own hand by brushing the person's hidden real hand and synchronously brushing the artificial hand that is in full view. Here we show that threat to the rubber hand can induce a similar level of activity in the brain areas associated with anxiety and interoceptive awareness (insula and anterior cingulate cortex) as when the person's real hand is threatened.

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The Formation of Abnormal Associations in Schizophrenia: Neural and Behavioral Evidence

penguin submitted, created time 1 year 6 months (www.nature.com)

The main finding in this article is that patients with schizophrenia, when exposed to neutral stimuli in a threatening situation, show an abnormal pattern of learning. The aberrant activations and response are consistent with the idea that patients aberrantly assign motivational salience to neutral stimuli, and this process may be one of the aberrations that predisposes them to psychosis.

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Erythropoietin Improves Mood and Modulates the Cognitive and Neural Processing of Emotion 3 Days Post Administration

penguin submitted, created time 1 year 6 months (www.nature.com)

This article show the characterization of the effects of Epo in a clinically depressed group is warranted.

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Mesolimbic Novelty Processing in Older Adults

addict submitted, created time 1 year 8 months (cercor.oxfordjournals.org)

Normal aging is associated with neuronal loss in the dopaminergic midbrain (substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area, SN/VTA), a region that has recently been implicated in processing novel stimuli as part of a mesolimbic network including the hippocampus. The age-related structural degeneration of the mesolimbic system is quantified by using magnetization transfer ratio (MTR) and correlated it with mesolimbic hemodynamic responses (HRs) to stimulus novelty

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