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Next
Event
Friday, October 24, 2008, 07:00 PM: Life Extension with Jerry Emanuelson
Jerry will be talking about his 25+ year experience with life extension treatments, including hormone injections, his longevity doctor, what treatments to ask a doctor for, how to find and guide a doctor, an interesting example of the 'medical priesthood vs. empowered patient' conflict as more healthcare treatments are about prevention/enhancement, getting his DNA scanned with deCODEme and opensourcing his genome on the SNPedia.com, and more.
More...
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Depression
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It's long been known that experiencing control over a stressor immunizes a rat from developing a depression-like syndrome when it later encounters stressors that it can't control. Now, scientists have unraveled the workings of the brain circuitry that inoculates against such hard knocks -- the circuitry of resilience. Control not only activated the brain's executive hub, the prefrontal cortex, but also altered it so that it later activated even when the stressor was not controllable.
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Nine years ago, Rusty Gage shattered a neuroscience dogma when he showed human brains give birth to new neurons. Today, a company is eager to take those findings to the clinic. The compound, now called BCI540, seemed to promote neurons with reasonable potency and was not toxic to cells.
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Researchers are now better able to predict which patients will respond to treatment for depression through the presence of genetic markers. McMahon examined the effects of polymorphisms (common differences in DNA sequences) of 68 genes on treatment effectiveness and incidence of side effects. Analysis of the data showed that polymorphisms in a gene that regulates serotonin was positively associated with treatment outcome. McMahon concluded that individuals who carried two copies of the polymorphism associated with response were 18% more likely to respond to treatment than those who did not.
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Deborah Lin will use a genetic transfer approach to study the link between a natural peptide in the brain called NYP, its ability to stimulate neurogenesis (new brain cell growth) and its potential anticonvulsive and antidepressant effect.
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People who are looking to ease depression may have a new treatment option--marriage.
A recent study suggests that marriage provides a greater psychological boost to depressed people than to happy people, even if the marriage is so-so.
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Disagreements over whether drugs to combat depression are worth taking. Antidepressants have long been the source of controversy. Amphetamines were widely used as an antidote to neurotic depression into the 1960s, until such “pep pills” came to be seen as doing more harm than good. Similar worries are now engulfing today's antidepressants, like Prozac and Paxil, which are among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world. Two new studies have stirred things up: one warning that antidepressants do not help most people very much, and the other gushing that they are a marvellously cheap way to save lives.
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Depression only happens in the subcortex, the feeling part of the brain according to Curtiss. There is never any depression in the neocortex, the thinking part of the brain. Her book teaches you to switch from one brain system to the other. Easy mind exercises thoughtjam depressive focus. Then, neuronal activity sparks up in the neo-cortex powering down the depression in the subcortex.
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