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The human medial (reward-related, OFC13) and lateral (non-reward-related, OFC47/12) orbitofrontal cortex networks that present totally different practical connectivity in sufferers with melancholy. Credit score: Picture courtesy of College of Warwick Understanding of the bodily root of melancholy  has been superior, because of analysis by the College of Warwick, UK, and Fudan College, China. The examine exhibits that melancholy impacts the a part of the mind which is implicated in non-reward -- the lateral orbitofrontal cortex -- in order that victims of the illness really feel a way of loss and disappointment related to not receiving rewards. This space of the mind, which turns into lively when rewards will not be obtained, can be related with the a part of the mind which is concerned in a single's sense of self, thus probably resulting in ideas of non-public loss and low vanity. Despair can be related to decreased connectivity between the rew...

"Our preliminary data demonstrates that collaboration between specialties under one roof is vital to managing patients who suffer from diseases associated with memory loss," said Joe Verghese M.B.B.S., chief, Department of Geriatrics and director, Montefiore Einstein Center for the Aging Brain. "We also discovered that the presence of all three specialties has helped improve identification of under diagnosed conditions like depression, and enabled more proactive interventions for patients and their families. Based on our initial success, we plan to add additional services like nutritional assessments, cognitive rehabilitation and quantitative mobility assessments to improve the overall health and well-being of all of our patients." At the Center for the Aging Brain, patients receive neuropsychological testing as well as comprehensive geriatric and neurological assessments and diagnosis, services that might not be available in other geriatric clinics or primary c...

"No previous research has considered how the mental and physical well-being of children who have spent time in foster care compares to that of children in the general population," said study co-author Kristin Turney, UCI associate professor of sociology. "This work makes an important contribution to the research community by showing for the first time that foster care children are in considerably worse health than other children. Our findings also present serious implications for pediatricians by suggesting that foster care placement is a risk factor for health problems in childhood." Published online Oct. 17 (Eastern time) ahead of print in  Pediatrics , the large-scale study is the first to offer health comparisons based on a nationally representative sample of U.S. children. Turney and co-author Christopher Wildeman, associate professor of policy analysis & management at Cornell University, analyzed data from the 2011-2012 National Survey of Children'...

Depression is often viewed as a common medical  disorder like measles -- one either has it or one doesn't. As a result, diagnosis is generally followed by assigning specific treatment options. But unlike physical disorders where blood tests or other objective tests enable a reliable diagnosis, there are no such measures to determine whether someone is depressed. Instead, researchers and clinicians query patients about symptoms that are indicative of depression, such as sadness, suicidal ideation and sleep problems. If a person has many depression symptoms, she is considered depressed. Heterogeneity In his study, Fried used a content analysis to investigate the symptom overlap of 7 rating scales of symptoms that are commonly used in depression research. One of the scales is the Hamilton Rating Scale of Depression, which contains 17 predominantly physical depression symptoms like paralysis, weight loss and psychomotor retardation. Another is the Beck Depression Inventory, which...

"There are subtle differences in individual genes, and these differences are enriched in sets of genes involved in specific cell processes in the brain tissue of people with a variety of severe mental disorders," says Sarven Sabunciyan, Ph.D., assistant professor of pediatrics and researcher in the Stanley Division of Developmental Neurovirology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "It was striking to us that we could identify the broad functional overlaps, knowing there is a lot of variability among individuals with mental disorders." "It is important to show what these seemingly disparate diseases have in common, not only to learn more about them, but because common deficits could suggest similar treatment strategies," says Miranda Darby, Ph.D., a research fellow in Sabunciyan's laboratory and the first author on the study. A report on the work was published online Sept. 13 in  Translational Psychiatry . For the study, the rese...

"Labor pain matters more than just for the birth experience. It may be psychologically harmful for some women and play a significant role in the development of postpartum depression," said Grace Lim, M.D., director of obstetric anesthesiology at Magee Women's Hospital of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and lead investigator on the study. "We found that certain women who experience good pain relief from epidural analgesia are less likely to exhibit depressive symptoms in the postpartum period." The researchers controlled for factors already known to increase the risk for postpartum depression, including pre-existing depression and anxiety, as well as post-delivery pain caused by tissue trauma during childbirth. After accounting for these factors, the study found that in some women, labor pain was still a significant risk factor for postpartum depression symptoms. And therefore, alleviating this pain might help reduce the risk for postpartum depres...