Category: Neuropsychiatric Disease

Checking emails less often shown to reduce stress

On By A.P.In Neuropsychiatric Disease, stressLeave a comment

New research has found that checking email less reduces stress.

It provides further evidence that stepping away from your inbox is a good idea not just for the sake of productivity, but also for the sake of your health.

In an experiment done by Kostadin Kushlev and Elizabeth Dunn, participants were told to change how they dealt with email in two separate weeks.

In one week, a limit was put on the amount they could check email – they were only allowed to check email three times a day.

The other week, they could check their email as much as they liked.

The researchers – from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver – found that in the week when email use was restricted, participants experienced significantly lower daily stress than when they checked email more often.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563214005810

Depression, Behaviour Changes May Start in Alzheimer’s Even Before Memory Changes

On By A.P.In Alzheimer's disease, Dementia, Depression, Medicine, Neuropsychiatric DiseaseLeave a comment

Depression and other behaviour changes may show up in people who will later develop Alzheimer’s disease even before they start having memory problems, according to a study published in the January 14, 2015, online issue of the journal Neurology.

“While earlier studies have shown that an estimated 90% of people with Alzheimer’s experience behavioural or psychological symptoms such as depression, anxiety, and agitation, this study suggests that these changes begin before people even have diagnosable dementia,” said Catherine M. Roe, PhD, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri.

The study looked at 2,416 people aged 50 years and older who had no cognitive problems at their first visit to one of 34 Alzheimer’s disease centres across the country. The participants were followed for up to 7 years. Of the participants, 1,198 people stayed cognitively normal, with no memory or thinking problems, during the study. They were compared with 1,218 people who were followed for about the same length of time, but who developed dementia.

The people who developed dementia during the study also developed behaviour and mood symptoms such as apathy, appetite changes, irritability, and depression sooner than the people who did not develop dementia. For example, 30% of people who would develop dementia had depression after 4 years in the study, compared with 15% of those who did not develop dementia. Those who developed dementia were more than twice as likely to develop depression sooner than those without dementia and more than 12 times more likely to develop delusions than those without dementia.

Dr. Roe said the study adds to the conflicting evidence on depression and dementia.

“We still don’t know whether depression is a response to the psychological process of Alzheimer’s disease or a result of the same underlying changes in the brain,” she said. “More research is needed to identify the relationship between these two conditions.”

http://dgnews.docguide.com/depression-behaviour-changes-may-start-alzheimer-s-even-memory-changes?overlay=2&nl_ref=newsletter&pk_campaign=newsletter

Orthorexia Nervosa – when healthy eating becomes an unhealthy obsession

On By A.P.In eating disorder, Medicine, Neuropsychiatric Disease, orthoxia nervosaLeave a comment

By Sumathi Reddy

The growing interest in eating healthy can at times have unhealthy consequences.

Some doctors and registered dietitians say they are increasingly seeing people whose desire to eat pure or “clean” food—from raw vegans to those who cut out multiple major food sources such as gluten, dairy and sugar—becomes an all-consuming obsession and leads to ill health. In extreme cases, people will end up becoming malnourished.

Some experts refer to the condition as orthorexia nervosa, a little-researched disorder that doesn’t have an official diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, considered the bible of psychiatric illnesses. Often, individuals with orthorexia will exhibit symptoms of recognized conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder or end up losing unhealthy amounts of weight, similar to someone with anorexia.

Researchers in Colorado recently proposed a series of criteria they say could help clinicians diagnose orthorexia. The guidelines, published online in the journal Psychosomatics earlier this year, also could serve as a standard for future research of the disorder, they say.

Ryan Moroze, a psychiatry fellow at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine and senior author of the study, said more research needs to be done to develop a valid screening instrument for orthorexia, determine its prevalence and differentiate it from other more well-known eating disorders.

“There are people who become malnourished, not because they’re restricting how much they eat, it’s what they’re choosing to eat,” said Thomas Dunn, a psychologist and psychology professor at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, Colo., and a co-author of the article.

“It’s not that they’re doing it to get thin, they’re doing it to get healthy. It’s just sort of a mind-set where it gets taken to an extreme like what we see with other kinds of mental illness,” Dr. Dunn said.

Among the proposed criteria: an obsession with the quality and composition of meals to the extent that people may spend excessive amounts of time, say three or more hours a day, reading about and preparing specific types of food; and having feelings of guilt after eating unhealthy food. The preoccupation with such eating would have to either lead to nutritional imbalances or interfere with daily functional living to be considered orthorexia.

Some orthorexia patients are receiving treatments similar to those for obsessive-compulsive disorder. “We’re getting the people who aren’t being treated well under an eating-disorder diagnosis and their disorder is better treated under the OCD dial,” said Kimberley Quinlan, clinical director of the OCD Center of Los Angeles, an outpatient clinic.

The condition seems to start with an interest in living healthy and then, over time, people develop an increased anxiety about eating food that is contaminated or that they deem unhealthy, said Ms. Quinlan. Treatment often involves cognitive behavioral therapy, a type of psychotherapy aiming at behavior modification. “We’ve basically taken a model that we use to treat OCD and applied it to this disorder which is so similar,” she said.

Experts say there is a gray area between striving to eat healthy and going to the extreme, which helps to spur skepticism about orthorexia. “People don’t believe how eating healthy can be a disorder,” said Ms. Quinlan.

Sometimes other illnesses can lead to orthorexia. David Rakel, director of integrative medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, estimated that 10% to 15% of the patients who come in with food allergies and related problems develop an unhealthy fear of particular foods.

Nutritional therapy often involves elimination diets—stopping to eat certain foods to check if they are contributing to an inflammatory condition, Dr. Rakel said. Under the program, the foods are later gradually reintroduced, but some people continue to avoid them. “People are getting so strict with their health choices that they’re not getting the nutrients that they need,” he said.

Some eating-disorder therapists say many of the orthorexia patients they treat also suffer from anorexia. But other experts say orthorexics often aren’t underweight, which can make it difficult to identify them.

“Someone on paper may be perfectly healthy and their blood work is great and their weight is fine but their behavior has become obsessive with food,” said Marjorie Nolan Cohn, a New York City-based dietitian and national spokeswoman for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, a professional organization.

A red flag is when someone’s eating habits are making them avoid social engagements, Ms. Cohn said. “They may not be able to go out to a restaurant with their friends because they don’t know what’s in the food or it’s not cooked in a certain way or what if it’s not organic olive oil?” she said.

Jordan Younger, 24, of Los Angeles, started a popular Instagram and blog last year to post recipes and pictures from her plant-based vegan diet. Then her daily diet became all-consuming.

“I would wake up in a panic thinking, ‘What am I going to eat today?’ ” said Ms. Younger. “I would go to a juice place or Whole Foods or a natural grocery store and would spend so much time in there looking at everything trying to plan out the whole day. It just began to take over my mind in a way that I started to see was unhealthy,” she said.

Ms. Younger, already slim, said she lost 25 pounds on her restrictive diet. Her skin turned orange and she stopped menstruating. In May, she started seeing an eating-disorder specialist and nutritionist who helped her recover.

Now, Ms. Younger said she doesn’t restrict herself from eating anything except for processed food. Her skin has returned to its normal color, her hair has thickened and grown 5 inches and she has put back on her weight.

“With all these different dietary philosophies, there’s a lot more room for orthorexia to develop,” she said. “It makes it really hard to eat if you’re listening to all these theories and it gives eating and food a ton of anxiety when really food should be enjoyable.”

http://online.wsj.com/articles/when-healthy-eating-calls-for-treatment-1415654737

Landmark 20-Year Study Finds Pesticides Linked to Depression In Farmers

On By A.P.In Depression, Kebmodee, Medicine, Neuropsychiatric DiseaseLeave a comment

Earlier this fall, researchers from the National Institute of Health finished up a landmark 20-year study, a study that hasn’t received the amount of coverage it deserves. About 84,000 farmers and spouses of farmers were interviewed since the mid-1990s to investigate the connection between pesticides and depression, a connection that had been suggested through anecdotal evidence for far longer. We called up Dr. Freya Kamel, the lead researcher on the study, to find out what the team learned and what it all means. Spoiler: nothing good.

“There had been scattered reports in the literature that pesticides were associated with depression,” says Kamel. “We wanted to do a new study because we had more detailed data than most people have access to.” That excessive amount of data includes tens of thousands of farmers, with specific information about which pesticides they were using and whether they had sought treatment for a variety of health problems, from pesticide poisoning to depression. Farmers were surveyed multiple times throughout the 20-year period, which gives the researchers an insight into their health over time that no other study has.

Because the data is so excessive, the researchers have mined it three times so far, the most recent time in a study published just this fall. The first one was concerned with suicide, the second with depression amongst the spouses of farmers (Kamel says “pesticide applicators,” but most of the people applying pesticides are farmers), and the most recent with depression amongst the farmers themselves.

There’s a significant correlation between pesticide use and depression, that much is very clear, but not all pesticides. The two types that Kamel says reliably moved the needle on depression are organochlorine insecticides and fumigants, which increase the farmer’s risk of depression by a whopping 90% and 80%, respectively. The study lays out the seven specific pesticides, falling generally into one of those two categories, that demonstrated a categorically reliable correlation to increased risk of depression.

The study doesn’t really deal with exactly how the pesticides are affecting the farmers. Insecticides are designed to disrupt the way nerves work, sometimes inhibiting specific enzymes or the way nerve membranes work, that kind of thing. It’s pretty complicated, and nobody’s quite sure where depression fits in. “How this ultimately leads to depression, I don’t know that anyone can really fill in the dots there,” says Kamel. But essentially, the pesticides are designed to mess with the nerves of insects, and in certain aspects, our own nervous systems are similar enough to those of insects that we could be affected, too. “I don’t think there’s anything surprising about the fact that pesticides would affect neurologic function,” says Kamel, flatly.

Kamel speaks slowly and precisely, and though her voice is naturally a little quavery, she answered questions confidently and at one point made fun of me a little for a mischaracterization I’d made in a question. The one time she hesitated was when I asked what she thought the result of the study should be; it’s a huge deal, finding out that commonly used pesticides, pesticides approved for use by our own government, are wreaking havoc on the neurological systems of farmers. Kamel doesn’t recommend policy; she’s a scientist and would only go so far as to suggest that we should cut down on the use of pesticides in general.

Others are going further. Melanie Forti, of a farmer advocacy group based in DC, told Vice, “There should be more regulations on the type of pesticides being used.” With any luck, this study will lead to a thorough reexamination of the chemical weapons allowed by farmers.

These types aren’t necessarily uncommon, either; one, called malathion, was used by 67% of the tens of thousands of farmers surveyed. Malathion is banned in Europe, for what that’s worth.

I asked whether farmers were likely to simply have higher levels of depression than the norm, given the difficulties of the job — long hours, low wages, a lack of power due to government interference, that kind of thing — and, according to Kamel, that wasn’t a problem at all. “We didn’t have to deal with overreporting [of depression] because we weren’t seeing that,” she says. In fact, only 8% of farmers surveyed sought treatment for depression, lower than the norm, which is somewhere around 10% in this country. That doesn’t mean farmers are less likely to suffer from depression, only that they’re less likely to seek treatment for it, and that makes the findings, if anything, even stronger.

Landmark 20-Year Study Finds Pesticides Linked to Depression In Farmers

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

91 year old Polish woman declared dead and then later wakes up in mortuary

On By A.P.In death, Dementia, Poland, wake-upLeave a comment

A Polish woman who spent 11 hours in cold storage in a mortuary after being declared dead has returned to her family, complaining of feeling cold. Officials say Janina Kolkiewicz, 91, was declared dead after an examination by the family doctor. However, mortuary staff were astonished to notice movement in her body bag while it was in storage. The police have launched an investigation.

Back home, Ms Kolkiewicz warmed up with a bowl of soup and two pancakes. Her family and doctor said they were in shock, according to the website of the Polish newspaper Dziennik Wschodni.

The woman’s niece, in the eastern Polish town of Ostrow Lubelski, summoned the doctor after coming home one morning to find that her aunt did not seem to be breathing or to have a pulse. After examining the woman, the family doctor declared her dead and wrote out her death certificate.

The body was taken to the mortuary and preparations were made for a funeral in two days’ time. “I was sure she was dead,” Dr Wieslawa Czyz told the television channel TVP. “I’m stunned, I don’t understand what happened. Her heart had stopped beating, she was no longer breathing,” Dr Czyz said.

However, the mortuary staff called some hours later to report that the woman was not yet dead, her niece told Dziennik Wschodni. The death certificate has been declared invalid, the newspaper says.

Ms Kolkiewicz told her relatives she felt “normal, fine” after returning home. She is apparently unaware of how near she came to the grave. “My aunt has no inkling of what happened since she has late-stage dementia,” Bogumila Kolkiewicz, her niece, told local media.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30048087

Brain decoder can eavesdrop on your inner voice

On By A.P.In Berkeley, brain, brain-machine interface, California, locked-in syndrome, Medicine, mind reading, neural prosthetics, neurologist, Neurology, Neuron, Neuropsychiatric Disease, Neuroscience, neuroscientist, Science, Technology, University of California1 Comment

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Talking to yourself used to be a strictly private pastime. That’s no longer the case – researchers have eavesdropped on our internal monologue for the first time. The achievement is a step towards helping people who cannot physically speak communicate with the outside world.

“If you’re reading text in a newspaper or a book, you hear a voice in your own head,” says Brian Pasley at the University of California, Berkeley. “We’re trying to decode the brain activity related to that voice to create a medical prosthesis that can allow someone who is paralysed or locked in to speak.”

When you hear someone speak, sound waves activate sensory neurons in your inner ear. These neurons pass information to areas of the brain where different aspects of the sound are extracted and interpreted as words.

In a previous study, Pasley and his colleagues recorded brain activity in people who already had electrodes implanted in their brain to treat epilepsy, while they listened to speech. The team found that certain neurons in the brain’s temporal lobe were only active in response to certain aspects of sound, such as a specific frequency. One set of neurons might only react to sound waves that had a frequency of 1000 hertz, for example, while another set only cares about those at 2000 hertz. Armed with this knowledge, the team built an algorithm that could decode the words heard based on neural activity alone (PLoS Biology, doi.org/fzv269).

The team hypothesised that hearing speech and thinking to oneself might spark some of the same neural signatures in the brain. They supposed that an algorithm trained to identify speech heard out loud might also be able to identify words that are thought.

Mind-reading

To test the idea, they recorded brain activity in another seven people undergoing epilepsy surgery, while they looked at a screen that displayed text from either the Gettysburg Address, John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address or the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty.

Each participant was asked to read the text aloud, read it silently in their head and then do nothing. While they read the text out loud, the team worked out which neurons were reacting to what aspects of speech and generated a personalised decoder to interpret this information. The decoder was used to create a spectrogram – a visual representation of the different frequencies of sound waves heard over time. As each frequency correlates to specific sounds in each word spoken, the spectrogram can be used to recreate what had been said. They then applied the decoder to the brain activity that occurred while the participants read the passages silently to themselves.

Despite the neural activity from imagined or actual speech differing slightly, the decoder was able to reconstruct which words several of the volunteers were thinking, using neural activity alone (Frontiers in Neuroengineering, doi.org/whb).

The algorithm isn’t perfect, says Stephanie Martin, who worked on the study with Pasley. “We got significant results but it’s not good enough yet to build a device.”

In practice, if the decoder is to be used by people who are unable to speak it would have to be trained on what they hear rather than their own speech. “We don’t think it would be an issue to train the decoder on heard speech because they share overlapping brain areas,” says Martin.

The team is now fine-tuning their algorithms, by looking at the neural activity associated with speaking rate and different pronunciations of the same word, for example. “The bar is very high,” says Pasley. “Its preliminary data, and we’re still working on making it better.”

The team have also turned their hand to predicting what songs a person is listening to by playing lots of Pink Floyd to volunteers, and then working out which neurons respond to what aspects of the music. “Sound is sound,” says Pasley. “It all helps us understand different aspects of how the brain processes it.”

“Ultimately, if we understand covert speech well enough, we’ll be able to create a medical prosthesis that could help someone who is paralysed, or locked in and can’t speak,” he says.

Several other researchers are also investigating ways to read the human mind. Some can tell what pictures a person is looking at, others have worked out what neural activity represents certain concepts in the brain, and one team has even produced crude reproductions of movie clips that someone is watching just by analysing their brain activity. So is it possible to put it all together to create one multisensory mind-reading device?

In theory, yes, says Martin, but it would be extraordinarily complicated. She says you would need a huge amount of data for each thing you are trying to predict. “It would be really interesting to look into. It would allow us to predict what people are doing or thinking,” she says. “But we need individual decoders that work really well before combining different senses.”

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429934.000-brain-decoder-can-eavesdrop-on-your-inner-voice.html

Glen Campbell releases powerful final song and video about his future with Alzheimer’s disease

On By A.P.In Alzheimer's disease, Medicine, music, Neuropsychiatric DiseaseLeave a comment

I’m still here, but yet I’m gone
I don’t play guitar or sing my songs
They never defined who I am
The man that loves you ’til the end
You’re the last person I will love
You’re the last face I will recall
And best of all, I’m not gonna miss you.
Not gonna miss you.
I’m never gonna hold you like I did
Or say I love you to the kids
You’re never gonna see it in my eyes
It’s not gonna hurt me when you cry
I’m never gonna know what you go through
All the things I say or do
All the hurt and all the pain
One thing selfishly remains
I’m not gonna miss you
I’m not gonna miss you

The Country Music Hall of Fame member, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2011, is out with the video for the final song he’ll ever record — “I’m Not Gonna Miss You.” It was recorded in 2013 with producer Julian Raymond.

“I’m still here but yet I’m gone/ I don’t play guitar or sing my songs,” the tune begins as it details his struggles with the disease.

The poignant music video that accompanies it spans Campbell’s career. It contrasts Campbell singing in the studio with home video and clips from throughout his career. There are even images of doctors discussing his brain scans with him.

Because of the progression of the disease, the 78-year-old Campbell was admitted to a special care facility in Nashville in April.

“Sadly, Glen’s condition has progressed enough that we were no longer able to keep him at home,” Campbell’s family said in a statement to Rolling Stone. “He is getting fantastic care and we get to see him every day. Our family wants to thank everyone for their continued prayers, love and support.”

Campbell, who was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2005 and is best known for his hits like “Rhinestone Cowboy” and “Wichita Lineman,” took his Alzheimer’s in stride.

“I just take it as it comes, you know,” Campbell said in a CNN interview in February 2012. “I know that I have a problem with that (forgetfulness), but it doesn’t bother me. If you’re going to have it handed to you, you have got to take it, anyway. So that is the way I look at it.”

In a career that spans five decades, he released his final album “Ghost on Canvas” in 2011 and then went on a farewell tour.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/14/showbiz/glen-campbell-final-song/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

New research may help explain why curiosity promotes better memory

On By A.P.In aged brain, ageing, aging, brain, dopamine, hippocampus, Human Behavior, learning, LiveScience, Medicine, memory, mental concentration, MRI, Neurology, Neuron, Neuropsychiatric Disease, Neuroscience, neuroscientistLeave a comment

Everyone knows it’s easier to learn about a topic you’re curious about. Now, a new study reveals what’s going on in the brain during that process, revealing that such curiosity may give a person a memory boost.

When participants in the study were feeling curious, they were better at remembering information even about unrelated topics, and brain scans showed activity in areas linked to reward and memory.

The results, detailed October 2 in the journal Neuron, hint at ways to improve learning and memory in both healthy people and those with neurological disorders, the researchers said.

“Curiosity may put the brain in a state that allows it to learn and retain any kind of information, like a vortex that sucks in what you are motivated to learn, and also everything around it,” Matthias Gruber, a memory researcher at the University of California, Davis, said in a statement. “These findings suggest ways to enhance learning in the classroom and other settings.”

Gruber and his colleagues put people in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner and showed them a series of trivia questions, asking them to rate their curiosity about the answers to those questions. Later, the participants were shown selected trivia questions, then a picture of a neutral face during a 14-second delay, followed by the answer. Afterward, the participants were given a surprise memory test of the faces, and then a memory test of the trivia answers.

Not surprisingly, the study researchers found that people remembered more information about the trivia when they were curious about the trivia answers. But unexpectedly, when the participants were curious, they were also better at remembering the faces, an entirely unrelated task. Participants who were curious were also more likley than others to remember both the trivia information and unrelated faces a day later, the researchers found.

The brain scans showed that, compared with when their curiosity wasn’t piqued, when people were curious, they showed more activation of brain circuits in the nucleus accumbens, an area involved in reward. These same circuits, mediated by the neurochemical messenger dopamine, are involved in forms of external motivation, such as food, sex or drug addiction.

Finally, being curious while learning seemed to produce a spike of activity in the hippocampus, an area involved in forming new memories, and strengthened the link between memory and reward brain circuits.

The study’s findings not only highlight the importance of curiosity for learning in healthy people, but could also give insight into neurological conditions. For example, as people age, their dopamine circuits tend to deteriorate, so understanding how curiosity affects these circuits could help scientists develop treatments for patients with memory disorders, the researchers said.

http://www.livescience.com/48121-curiosity-boosts-memory-learning.html

7 Very Bizarre (and Very Rare) Psychotic Hallucinations

On By A.P.In Alice-in-Wonderland syndrome, Anxiety, bipolar disorder, brain, Capgras delusion, Caro Lippman, Charles Bonnet syndrome, Clinical lycanthropy, Cotard's Syndrome, delusional infestations, delusional parasitosis, Dementia, Depression, Drugs, Ekbom's syndrome, epilepsy, John Todd, Jules Cotard, Medicine, mental health, mental illness, migraine, multiple sclerosis, neural activity, neurologist, Neurology, Neuropsychiatric Disease, Neuroscience, neuroscientist, Othello syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychiatrist, Psychiatry, Psychosis, seizure, stroke, traumatic brain injury, Walking Corpse SyndromeLeave a comment

brain

The many documented cases of strange delusions and neurological syndromes can offer a window into how bizarre the brain can be.

It may seem that hallucinations are random images that appear to some individuals, or that delusions are thoughts that arise without purpose. However, in some cases, a specific brain pathway may create a particular image or delusion, and different people may experience the same hallucination.

In recent decades, with advances in brain science, researchers have started to unravel the causes of some of these conditions, while others have remained a mystery.

Here is a look at seven odd hallucinations, which show that anything is possible when the brain takes a break from reality.

1. Alice-in-Wonderland syndrome
This neurological syndrome is characterized by bizarre, distorted perceptions of time and space, similar to what Alice experienced in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

Patients with Alice-in-Wonderland syndrome describe seeing objects or parts of their bodies as smaller or bigger than their actual sizes, or in an altered shape. These individuals may also perceive time differently.

The rare syndrome seems to be caused by some viral infections, epilepsy, migraine headaches and brain tumors. Studies have also suggested that abnormal activity in parts of the visual cortex that handle information about the shape and size of objects might cause the hallucinations.

It’s also been suggested that Carroll himself experienced the condition during migraine headaches and used them as inspiration for writing the tale of Alice’s strange dream.

English psychiatrist John Todd first described the condition in an article published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 1955, and that’s why the condition is also called Todd’s syndrome. However, an earlier reference to the condition appears in a 1952 article by American neurologist Caro Lippman. The doctor describes a patient who reported feeling short and wide as she walked, and referenced “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” to explain her body image illusions.

2. Walking Corpse Syndrome
This delusion, also called Cotard’s Syndrome, is a rare mental illness in which patients believe they are dead, are dying or have lost their internal organs.

French neurologist Jules Cotard first described the condition in 1880, finding it in a woman who had depression and also symptoms of psychosis. The patient believed she didn’t have a brain or intestines, and didn’t need to eat. She died of starvation.

Other cases of Cotard’s syndrome have been reported in people with a range of psychiatric and neurological problems, including schizophrenia, traumatic brain injury and multiple sclerosis.

In a recent case report of Cotard’s syndrome, researchers described a previously healthy 73-year-old woman who went to the emergency room insisting that she was “going to die and going to hell.” Eventually, doctors found the patient had bleeding in her brain due to a stroke. After she received treatment in the hospital, her delusion resolved within a week, according to the report published in January 2014 in the journal of Neuropsychiatry.

3. Charles Bonnet syndrome
People who have lost their sight may develop Charles Bonnet syndrome, which involves having vivid, complex visual hallucinations of things that aren’t really there.

People with this syndrome usually hallucinate people’s faces, cartoons, colored patterns and objects. It is thought the condition occurs because the brain’s visual system is no longer receiving visual information from the eye or part of the retina, and begins making up its own images.

Charles Bonnet syndrome occurs in between 10 and 40% of older adults who have significant vision loss, according to studies.

4. Clinical lycanthropy
In this extremely rare psychiatric condition, patients believe they are turning into wolves or other animals. They may perceive their own bodies differently, and insist they are growing the fur, sharp teeth and claws of a wolf.

Cases have also been reported of people with delusional beliefs about turning into dogs, pigs, frogs and snakes.

The condition usually occurs in combination with another disorder, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or severe depression, according to a review study published in the March issue of the journal History of Psychiatry in 2014.

5. Capgras delusion
Patients with Capgras delusion believe that an imposter has replaced a person they feel close to, such as a friend or spouse. The delusion has been reported in patients with schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, advanced Parkinson’s disease, dementia and brain lesions.

One brain imaging study suggested the condition may involve reduced neural activity in the brain system that processes information about faces and emotional responses.

6. Othello syndrome
Named after Shakespeare’s character, Othello syndrome involves a paranoid belief that the sufferer’s partner is cheating. People with this condition experience strong obsessive thoughts and may show aggression and violence.

In one recent case report, doctors described a 46-year-old married man in the African country Burkina Faso who had a stroke, which left him unable to communicate and paralyzed in half of his body. The patient gradually recovered from his paralysis and speaking problems, but developed a persistent delusional jealousy and aggression toward his wife, accusing her of cheating with an unidentified man.

7. Ekbom’s syndrome
Patients with Ekbom’s syndrome, also known as delusional parasitosis or delusional infestations, strongly believe they are infested with parasites that are crawling under their skin. Patients report sensations of itching and being bitten, and sometimes, in an effort to get rid of the pathogens, they may hurt themselves, which can result in wounds and actual infections.

It’s unknown what causes these delusions, but studies have linked the condition with structural changes in the brain, and some patients have improved when treated with antipsychotic medications.

http://www.livescience.com/46477-oddest-hallucinations.html

Psychedelic mushrooms put your brain in a “waking dream,” study finds

On By A.P.In Anxiety, Depression, mental health, mental illness, Neuropsychiatric Disease, psychedelic, psychedelic renaissance, psychiatrist, Psychiatry, Psychological Medicine, Psychological Science, psychologist, psychology, Steven Weihing1 Comment

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Psychedelic mushrooms can do more than make you see the world in kaleidoscope. Research suggests they may have permanent, positive effects on the human brain.

In fact, a mind-altering compound found in some 200 species of mushroom is already being explored as a potential treatment for depression and anxiety. People who consume these mushrooms, after “trips” that can be a bit scary and unpleasant, report feeling more optimistic, less self-centered, and even happier for months after the fact.

But why do these trips change the way people see the world? According to a study published today in Human Brain Mapping, the mushroom compounds could be unlocking brain states usually only experienced when we dream, changes in activity that could help unlock permanent shifts in perspective.

The study examined brain activity in those who’d received injections of psilocybin, which gives “shrooms” their psychedelic punch. Despite a long history of mushroom use in spiritual practice, scientists have only recently begun to examine the brain activity of those using the compound, and this is the first study to attempt to relate the behavioral effects to biological changes.

After injections, the 15 participants were found to have increased brain function in areas associated with emotion and memory. The effect was strikingly similar to a brain in dream sleep, according to Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, a post-doctoral researcher in neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London and co-author of the study.

“You’re seeing these areas getting louder, and more active,” he said. “It’s like someone’s turned up the volume there, in these regions that are considered part of an emotional system in the brain. When you look at a brain during dream sleep, you see the same hyperactive emotion centers.”

In fact, administration of the drug just before or during sleep seemed to promote higher activity levels during Rapid Eye Movement sleep, when dreams occur. An intriguing finding, Carhart-Harris says, given that people tend to describe their experience on psychedelic drugs as being like “a waking dream.” It seems that the brain may literally be slipping into unconscious patterns while the user is awake.

Conversely, the subjects of the study had decreased activity in other parts of the brain—areas associated with high level cognition. “These are the most recent parts of our brain, in an evolutionary sense,” Carhart-Harris said. “And we see them getting quieter and less organized.”

This dampening of one area and amplification of another could explain the “mind-broadening” sensation of psychedelic drugs, he said. Unlike most recreational drugs, psychotropic mushrooms and LSD don’t provide a pleasant, hedonistic reward when they’re consumed. Instead, users take them very occasionally, chasing the strange neurological effects instead of any sort of high.

“Except for some naïve users who go looking for a good time…which, by the way, is not how it plays out,” Carhart-Harris said, “you see people taking them to experience some kind of mental exploration, and to try to understand themselves.”

Our firm sense of self—the habits and experiences that we find integral to our personality—is quieted by these trips. Carhart-Harris believes that the drugs may unlock emotion while “basically killing the ego,” allowing users to be less narrow-minded and let go of negative outlooks.

It’s still not clear why such effects can have more profound long-term effects on the brain than our nightly dreams. But Carhart-Harris hopes to see more of these compounds in modern medicine. “The way we treat psychological illnesses now is to dampen things,” he said. “We dampen anxiety, dampen ones emotional range in the hope of curing depression, taking the sting out of what one feels.”

But some patients seem to benefit from having their emotions “unlocked” instead. “It would really suit the style of psychotherapy where we engage in a patient’s history and hang-ups,” Carhart-Harris said. “Instead of putting a bandage over the exposed wound, we’d be essentially loosening their minds—promoting a permanent change in outlook.”

Thanks to Steven Weihing for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/07/03/psychedelic-drugs-put-your-brain-in-a-waking-dream-study-finds/