Scientific American Topic - Anxiety and Panic Disorders

Fearless Youth: Prozac Extinguishes Anxiety by Rejuvenating the Brain

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:44:00 EST

Once adult lab mice learn to associate a particular stimulus--a sound, a flash of light--with the pain of an electric shock, they don't easily forget it, even when researchers stop the shocks. But a new study in the December 23 issue of Science shows that the antidepressant Prozac (fluoxetine) gives mice the youthful brain plasticity they need to learn that a once-threatening stimulus is now benign. The research may help explain why a combination of therapy and antidepressants is more effective at treating depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than either drugs or therapy alone. Antidepressants may prime the adult brain to rewire faulty circuits during therapy.

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MIND Reviews: Learning to Breathe: My Year-long Quest to Bring Calm to My Life

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 08:00:00 EST

Learning to Breathe: My Year-long Quest to Bring Calm to My Life by Priscilla Warner. Free Press (Simon & Schuster), 2011

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Heal Thyself: Internet-Based Self-Help for Social Phobia Shows Promise

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 08:00:00 EST

Treating social phobia without personal contact between patient and therapist--or without any therapist involvement at all--could be viewed as ironic, but two recent studies suggest that it works. Self-guided online therapy may offer relief for a wide range of disorders.

The first study, published in the October 2010 issue of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry , found that self-guided, Internet-based cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) reduced social phobia symptoms in most of the participants. The Internet CBT program consisted of eight online lessons with components similar to those used in face-to-face CBT: education about symptoms and treatment, instruction on how to challenge the negative thoughts and core beliefs that maintain social phobia, preparation for dealing with physical symptoms of panic, graded exposure to social situations, and techniques for relapse prevention.

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Of Tics and Compulsions: Brain Imaging Teases Apart Tourette's and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:00:00 EST

On the surface, Tourette’s syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) seem to have little in common. Tourette’s is characterized by repetitive involuntary facial or vocal tics, whereas OCD sufferers have all-consuming thoughts and overwhelming urges to perform certain actions. But 50 to 70 percent of people with Tourette’s also have OCD, and recent studies suggest that the same genetic roots may underlie both conditions [see “ Obsessions Revisited ,” by Melinda Wenner Moyer; Scientific American Mind , May/June 2011]. Now a new study published in Neurology may help scientists further understand how the disorders overlap and differ by revealing several key differences in the brain activity of Tourette’s patients with and without OCD.

Andrew Feigin and his colleagues at North Shore LIJ Health System in Manhasset, N.Y., scanned the brains of 12 unmedicated Tourette’s patients--some of whom also had OCD--and 12 healthy subjects using positron-emission tomography, which reveals patterns of brain activity. Compared with healthy controls, those who had Tourette’s exhibited more activity in the premotor cortex and cerebellum, regions that handle motor control, and less activity in the striatum and orbitofrontal cortex, areas involved in decision making and learning. These findings support the idea that the symptoms of the disorder may arise from the brain’s inability to suppress abnormal actions using decision-making skills.

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The Changing Mental Health Aftermath of 9/11--Psychological "First Aid" Gains Favor over Debriefings

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 08:00:00 EST

Just watching television footage of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was enough to cause clinically diagnosable stress responses in some people who did not even live near the attacks--let alone the millions of people who did .

Like many other major disasters, 9/11 brought with it a host of psychological repercussions, one of the most severe of which has been post-traumatic stress disorder . PTSD is characterized by trouble sleeping, difficulty controlling anger, losing interest in activities, flashbacks, emotional numbness and/or other symptoms . If not treated, it can be debilitating.

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What happens in the brain when we experience a panic attack?

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 09:00:00 EST

What happens in the brain when we experience a panic attack? --Davide Razzoli, Italy

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Legacy of Mental Health Problems from Iraq and Afghanistan Wars Will Be Long-Lived

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 13:00:00 EST

As Operation Enduring Freedom, the war on terror in Afghanistan, winds down and some 33,000 U.S. servicemen and servicewomen return from overseas in the next year, a plan announced by President Obama on June 22, the psychological issues that veterans face back home are likely to increase. [More]

A New Look at Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (preview)

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 10:00:00 EST

One day 12-year-old Elizabeth McIngvale became obsessed with the number 42, which happened to be her mother’s age at the time, 11 years ago. When she washed her hands, she had to turn the sink on and off 42 times, get 42 pumps of soap and rinse her hands 42 times. Sometimes she decided that she actually needed to do 42 sets of 42. When she dressed, she put her right leg in and out of her pant leg 42 times, then the left. Even getting up from a chair took 42 attempts. She was afraid that if she did not follow her self-prescribed ritual, something terrible would happen to her family--they might die in a car accident, for instance. “Everything I did was completely exhausting and grueling,” she recalls. “I was probably doing 12 to 13 hours a day of rituals.”

McIngvale was diagnosed with obsessive- compulsive disorder (OCD), a psychiatric illness that afflicts 2 to 3 percent of Americans, not all of them as severely as McIngvale. Individuals with OCD experience debilitating recurrent and persistent thoughts, or obsessions, which they try to suppress or eliminate with rituals, known as compulsions. Compared with people who have other anxiety or mood disorders, adults with OCD are more likely to be single and unemployed. In fact, OCD is among the 10 most disabling medical and psychiatric conditions.

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Treating Tourette's: Histamine Gene May Be Behind Some Tic Disorders

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 07:00:00 EST

Tourette’s syndrome is most pronounced in children. The physical and vocal tics, which can alienate kids from peers, are difficult to treat. First-line drugs are limited in their efficacy, whereas more effective antipsychotics have many potential long-term side effects, including weight gain and movement disorders. Investigators may be moving closer to a new treatment option involving drugs that already exist.

Last year researchers identified a new gene mutation associated with the disorder. Known mutations have only explained a small number of Tourette’s cases, so the investigators, led by Matthew State, co-director of the Yale Neurogenetics Program, studied a rare family in which the father and his eight children all had Tourette’s. In these family members, the gene involved in the production of histamine in the brain was shorter than normal, generating lower levels of the compound, which is involved in inflammatory response. State believes these lower levels can cause tics, and he is looking for this and further histamine-related mutations in other people with Tourette’s.

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The Neuroscience of True Grit (preview)

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 10:50:00 EST

In fall 2009 Jeannine Brown Miller was driving home with her husband after a visit with her mother in Niagara Falls, N.Y. She came upon a police roadblock near the entrance to the Niagara University campus. Ambulance lights flashed up ahead. Miller knew her 17-year-old son, Jonathan, had been out in his car. Even though she couldn’t make out what was happening clearly, something told her she should stop. She asked one of the emergency workers on the scene to check whether the car had the license plate “J Mill.” A few minutes later a policeman and a chaplain approached, and she knew, even before they reached her, what they would say.

The loss of her son--the result of an undiagnosed medical problem that caused his sudden death even before his car rammed a tree--proved devastating. Time slowed to a crawl in the days immediately after Jonathan’s death. “The first week was like an eternity,” she says. “I lived minute by minute, not even hour by hour. I would just wake up and not think beyond what was in front of me.”

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