 
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on March 3, 2010Â
Cutting-edge research by University of California-Irvine neurobiologists provides the first visual evidence that learning promotes brain health.
Scientists are excited because the finding suggests mental stimulation could limit the debilitating effects of aging on memory and the mind.
Using a novel visualization technique, a research team led by Lulu Chen and Christine Gall found that everyday forms of learning stimulate neuron receptors that help keep brain cells functioning at optimum levels.
These receptors are activated by a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which facilitates the growth and differentiation of the connections, or synapses, responsible for communication among neurons. BDNF is key in the formation of memories.
“The findings confirm a critical relationship between learning and brain growth and point to ways we can amplify that relationship through possible future treatments,†says Chen, a graduate researcher in anatomy & neurobiology.
In addition to discovering that brain activity sets off BDNF signaling at the sites where neurons develop synapses, researchers determined that this process is linked to learning-related brain rhythms, called theta rhythms, vital to the encoding of new memories.
Theta rhythms occurring in the hippocampus involve numerous neurons firing synchronously at a rate of three to eight times per second. These rhythms have been associated with long-term potentiation, a cellular mechanism underlying learning and memory.
In rodent studies, the team found that both unsupervised learning and artificial application of theta rhythms triggered BDNF signaling at synapse creation sites.
“This relationship has implications for maintaining good brain health,†says Gall, a professor of anatomy & neurobiology.
“There is evidence that theta rhythms weaken as we age, and our discoveries suggest that this can result in memory impairment. On the other hand, they suggest that staying mentally active as we age can keep neuronal BDNF signaling at a constant rate, which may limit memory and cognitive decline.â€
Researchers are now exploring whether learning-induced growth signals decrease with age and, if so, whether this can be reversed with a new family of experimental drugs.
Study results appear in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for the week of March 1.
Source: University of California – Irvine
http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/03/03/search-for-knowledge-stimulates-brain-health/11828.html
 
Wednesday, 3rd March 2010.
An American programme that claimed to cure autism breached UK advertising guidelines, a watchdog has ruled.
Adverts for the Autism Treatment Centre of America appeared in regional editions of Metro newspaper, headed “Autism Recovery” and stating: “2 hours to change your child’s life with American autism expert Raun K. Kaufman, himself fully recovered from autism.”
The ad listed dates and venues for a series of free public lectures and three testimonials.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said two readers complained that the ad was misleading because it implied that autism was a curable temporary condition and could be treated in two hours.
The Option Institute and Fellowship (OIF), which ran the programme though the Autism Treatment Centre of America, said it believed a person diagnosed with autism could make a full recovery but did not claim that every autistic person would make a full recovery.
OIF said the claim “2 hours to change your child’s life” was a reference to the duration of the advertised lecture, and they did not believe that consumers would expect the lecture itself to lead to a child’s recovery in two hours.
The ASA upheld the complaints that the advert implied a cure for autism, saying: “Because we had not seen robust scientific evidence to support the claim of recovery from autism, we concluded that the ad was misleading.”
It did not uphold complaints about the two-hour claim, saying readers were likely to understand it referred to the length of the lecture rather than the time it would take for the programme to be effective.
The ASA ruled that the advert must not appear again in its current form.
Source:Â http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5g5mS0x7k-X1Pcq6cOvFWPfJi4T5g
 
3rd March 2010 — A new strategy aims to help adults in England with autism live more independent lives, while boosting public understanding of the condition.
The Department of Health announced last year that it would come up with a policy in response to findings that only 15% of adults with autism are in paid work and that 49% still live at home with parents.
It wants people with autism to have the same access to jobs, education and public services as other people.
Autism affects the way a person communicates and relates to others. It is a lifelong disability, and people with autism have difficulties with everyday social interaction.
Lack of support
The National Autistic Society says there are 300,000 adults with autism in England. Its own research suggests that at least one in three adults with autism are experiencing serious mental health difficulties due to a lack of support.
Last year the government passed the Autism Act which put a duty on the Health Secretary to improve conditions for adults with autism. That law has led to the new strategy called Fulfilling and rewarding lives. It promises a number of measures, including:
- Setting up a new National Autism Programme Board to oversee changes
- An investment of £500,000 towards health and social care training
- Improving job prospects by giving autism awareness training for all Jobcentre Plus Disability Employment Advisers
- Guidance on making public services, buildings, public transport and communication more accessible
- Streamlining the way autism is diagnosed
Phil Hope, the Care Services Minister, says in a statement that it’s unacceptable that people with autism are unable to find work and live independent lives. “I want the autism strategy to be the foundation for change in the way our whole society treats adults with autism. They have a huge contribution to make – shutting them out deprives everyone,†he says.
“First stepâ€: Charity
Mark Lever, chief executive of the National Autistic Society, called the initiative a long awaited “first step†and added, in an emailed statement, that “now the next step will be to translate the strategy into decisive action at a local levelâ€.
Today’s announcement will be followed by statutory guidance for health and social care by the end of the year. The strategy is due to be reviewed in 2013.
The National Autism Society in Scotland has called on the Scottish Government to follow the example of England and develop a national strategy for adults with autism.
Source: http://www.webmd.boots.com/news/20100303/new-autism-strategy-unveiled
NAS Welcomes Adult Autism Strategy For England
Source: National Autistic Society (NAS)
Published Wednesday, 3 March, 2010 – 11:18
The National Autistic Society (NAS) is pleased to welcome the publication of the first ever strategy for improving the lives of adults with autism in England.
Last year, when we achieved the Autism Act 2009, we committed the Government to publishing an Adult Autism Strategy to transform services for adults with autism. The publication of this strategy meets this commitment.
The strategy sets out a number of key actions and recommendations for central Government as well as for local authorities, the NHS and Jobcentre Plus.
In particular, we welcome the following aspects of the strategy.
   * Improved training of frontline professionals in autism.
   * The recommendation to develop local autism teams.
   * Actions for better planning and commissioning of services, including involving people with autism and their parents/carers in this process.
   * Actions for improving access to diagnosis.
   * Leadership structures at national, regional and local levels to support delivery.
   * Proposals for reviewing the strategy to make sure that it is working.
We are particularly pleased that the strategy encourages the development of local teams and the development of local autism partnership boards.
These were key actions that we have been calling for throughout the development of the strategy.
 
By Jen Phillips
More than two years after Mother Jones published a groundbreaking investigation of the Judge Rotenberg Centerto discipline its mentally retarded and autistic students, the federal government is finally looking at the school. The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division says it has opened a “routine investigation” (PDF) of the Rotenberg Center in response to a September 2009 letter signed by 31 disability organizations that contended the school violated Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act. (JRC), a private school in Massachusetts that uses electric shocks
“The initial response of the Department of Justice was that they didn’t believe that they could take action because they didn’t believe they had jurisdiction over privately operated facilities,” wrote Nancy Weiss of the National Leadership Consortium on Developmental Disabilities. “I suggested to them that they consider jurisdiction under the ADA on the basis that people with disabilities are being treated in ways that are neither legal nor would be tolerated if applied to people who do not have disabilities.” Weiss reported that the DOJ couldn’t give her an estimate on how long their investigation would take.
This is far from the first time the Rotenberg Center has come under fire for its controversial punishments, called “aversives” which include food restriction, isolation, and physical restraints. Because some children from District of Columbia attend the residential school, DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee called for an investigation into the center in 2007, and Massachusetts State Senator Brian Joyce has introduced several laws to ban the use of electric shock devices on students. This is not to mention a damning investigation by the New York State Education Department and statements by then-Governor Elliot Spitzer that the school was “wrong” and he would pull New York students if possible. This could be disastrous for the Rotenberg Center as New York state supplies, and funds, many of the school’s out-of-state students. More recently, JRC was fined tens of thousands of dollars for allowing 14 unlicensed clinicians to label themselves “psychologists.” Although the House Education and Labor Committee recently introduced a bill that would ban the use of restraints on students, and another which would establish an abuse reporting system for residential schools which could potentially apply to the Rotenberg Center, this is the first real federal attention the school has received. And while disability rights groups are celebrating the DOJ’s investigation, if the DOJ decides in the JRC’s favor, it will be a major setback. Wrote Weiss, “We can only keep our fingers crossed that this is the first step in righting a long history of wrongs.”
Source: http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/02/school-shock-under-federal-investigation
 
In reports of two new studies, researchers led by Johns Hopkins say they have identified the mechanisms rooted in two anatomical brain abnormalities that may explain the onset of schizophrenia and the reason symptoms don’t develop until young adulthood. Both types of anatomical glitches are influenced by a gene known as DISC1, whose mutant form was first identified in a Scottish family with a strong history of schizophrenia and related mental disorders. The findings could lead to new ways to treat, prevent or modify the disorder or its symptoms.
In one of the studies, published in the March issue of Nature Neuroscience, researchers examined DISC1’s role in forming connections between nerve cells. Numerous studies have suggested that schizophrenia results from abnormal connectivity. The fact that symptoms typically arise soon after adolescence, a time of massive reorganization of connections between nerve cells, supports this idea.
The scientists began their study by surveying rat nerve cells to see where DISC1 was most active. Unsurprisingly, they found the highest DISC1 activity in connections between nerve cells. To determine what DISC1 was doing in this location, the researchers used a technique called RNA interference to partially shut off DISC1 activity. Consequently, they saw a transient increase and eventual reduction in size and number of dendritic spines, spikes on nerve cells’ branch-like extensions that receive input from other nerve cells.
To determine how DISC1 regulates dendritic spine formation, the researchers studied which brain proteins interact with the protein expressed by the DISC1 gene. They identified one, called Kal-7, which earlier studies suggested is critical for proper dendritic spine formation. Further experiments suggested that the DISC1 protein acts as temporary holding place for Kal-7, binding it until it can be released to trigger a molecular cascade that results in dendritic spine formation.
Study leader Akira Sawa, M.D., Ph.D., professor of psychiatry and director of the program in molecular psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, says it is becoming clear that having a defective DISC1 gene might lead to an abnormally small number and size of dendritic spines, which could lead nerve cells to maintain weaker connections with unusually low numbers of neighboring neurons. Such abnormal connectivity has long been seen in autopsied brains from schizophrenia patients.
“Connections between neurons are constantly being made and broken throughout life, with a massive amount of broken connections, or ‘pruning,’ happening in adolescence,” Sawa says. “If this pruning doesn’t happen correctly, it may be one reason for the pathogenesis of schizophrenia,” he adds.
In the second study, published in the Feb. 25 issue of Neuron, Sawa’s team generated a new animal model of schizophrenia by temporarily shutting off the DISC1 gene in mice in the prefrontal cortex, a brain area known to differ in schizophrenic people. The new model allowed them to study other roles for DISC1 in the brain.
The researchers created their novel model by, again, using RNA interference. They injected short pieces of the nucleic acid RNA engineered to shut off the DISC1 gene into cavities in the developing brains of mouse fetuses two weeks after conception. Tests showed that these snippets of RNA migrated into cells in the prefrontal cortex, part of the brain located near the forehead.
This shutoff was temporary, with the gene’s function fully restored within three weeks, or about a couple of weeks after birth. At various times after the gene was reactivated, the scientists examined the animals’ brains and behavior, looking for differences from normal mice.
Sawa’s team found that in the DISC1 shutoff group, nerve cells in the prefrontal cortex that produce dopamine, one of the chemical signals that nerve cells use to communicate, were markedly immature as the animals entered adolescence. Furthermore, the animals showed signs of a deficit of interneurons, nerve cells that connect other neurons in neural pathways.
They also found several behavioral differences between these mice compared to normal mice as the animals entered adolescence. For example, those in the shutoff group reacted more strongly to stimulants, displaying more locomotion than normal mice. Interestingly, these effects were somewhat mitigated when the researchers gave the animals clozapine, a drug used to treat schizophrenia.
Taken together, Sawa says, results of both studies suggest that these anatomical differences, which seem to be influenced by the DISC1 gene, cause problems that start before birth but surface only in young adulthood.
“If we can learn more about the cascade of events that lead to these anatomical differences, we may eventually be able to alter the course of schizophrenia. During adolescence, we may be able to intervene to prevent or lessen symptoms,” Sawa says.
Other Johns Hopkins researchers who participated in the Nature Neuroscience study include Akiko Hayashi-Takagi, Manabu Takaki, Saurav Seshadri, Yuichi Makino, Anupamaa J. Seshadri, Koko Ishizuka, Jay M. Baraban, and Atsushi Kamiya.
Other Johns Hopkins researchers who participated in the Neuron study include Minae Niwa, Atsushi Kamiya, Hanna Jaaro-Peled, Saurav Seshadri, Hideki Hiyama, and Beverly Huang.
 
My wife is a big fan of Bon Jovi, so when I read this article about Bon Jovi’s fact-finding efforts to help better understand homelessness in order to help it through his foundation, I couldn’t help but blog about it.
If you didn’t know, a significant portion of homeless persons have a mental disorder, such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia. It’s hard to know for certain, but research suggests that approximately 2 out of 5 homeless people have a mental health issue.
Bon Jovi wants his foundation to do more to help the homeless:
That’s because this tour in support of Bon Jovi’s latest release, “The Circle,†is also a fact-finding mission. The singer plans on visiting as many homeless shelters and programs as time allows in hopes of getting ideas and inspiration to shape his own work with the Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation, a Philadelphia-based charity that fights homelessness by building affordable housing, establishing community kitchens and cleaning up vacant lots in blighted neighborhoods.
You can’t work on solutions to homelessness until you better understand it. SAMHSA has a great resource page about homelessness, and notes that most, or about 80 percent, exit from homelessness within 2 or 3 weeks. “They often have more personal, social, and economic resources to draw from than people who are homeless for longer periods of time. About 10 percent are homeless for up to 2 months, with housing availability and affordability adding to the time they are homeless.â€
So contrary to the way many of us perceive homelessness, 90 percent of the homeless are not long-term. It is a short-term problem for the vast majority of the homeless.
The Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation has already built more than 150 units of affordable housing in seven cities since 2006. This directly addresses one of the primary problems of the vast majority of homeless people — affordable housing (that’s not crime-ridden). Bon Jovi is a realist and the article notes that the “homeless†are not some homogeneous group of people — different problems that cause or contribute to homelessness will require different solutions.
That’s good, because there are many different problems that need to be address; short-term housing and affordable housing are a good start. But greater access to treatment programs to help the folks with mental health concerns — including alcohol and drug problems — is also needed.
To me, this is a great example of a celebrity using their fame for good in a very pragmatic and helpful manner. I wish more celebrities followed in the footsteps of Bon Jovi.
Read the full article: Bon Jovi’s new tour doubles as a research mission
Source:Â http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/02/27/bon-jovi-rocks-for-the-homeless/
 
Article Date: 01 Mar 2010 – 15:00 PST
Offspring of two parents with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder appear more likely to develop the same illness or another psychiatric condition than those with only one parent with psychiatric illness, according to a report in the March issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
The offspring of two parents with psychiatric illness represent an extremely high-risk group, according to background information in the article. Studying these children permits researchers to assess the risk associated with two sources of genetic predisposition to mental disorders. “Such risks will be of use to genetic counselors to inform personal decisions with regard to marriage, family formation, adoption and health insurance planning,” the authors write.
Irving I. Gottesman, Ph.D., Hon.F.R.C.Psych., of the University of Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis, and colleagues studied a population-based cohort of 2.7 million individuals born in Denmark. The researchers matched records in a general registry of the population with a database of psychiatric admissions. They identified individuals whose parents had both been admitted to psychiatric facilities for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and compared the rate of psychiatric admissions for these individuals to those of offspring with one or no parents admitted to psychiatric facilities.
Rates of schizophrenia were highest among offspring of two parents with schizophrenia. Of the 196 couples who both had schizophrenia, 27.3 percent of their 270 children were admitted to a psychiatric facility, increasing to 39.2 percent when schizophrenia-related disorders were included. This compared with a rate of 7 percent among 13,878 offspring of 8,006 couples in which one parent had schizophrenia and 0.86 percent in 2.2 million offspring of 1 million couples in which neither parent was admitted for schizophrenia.
Similarly, the risk of bipolar disorder was 24.9 percent in 146 offspring of 83 parent couples who were both admitted for bipolar disorder (increasing to 36 percent when unipolar depressive disorder was also included). This compared to a risk of 4.4 percent among 23,152 offspring of 11,995 couples with only one parent ever admitted for bipolar disorder and 0.48 percent in 2.2 million children of 1 million couples with neither parent ever admitted.
When one parent had bipolar disorder and the other had schizophrenia, offspring had a 15.6 percent risk of schizophrenia and an 11.7 percent risk of bipolar disorder.
The risks in this population “are of such a magnitude that they command clinical and national public health attention in countries with health care roughly similar to Denmark’s,” the authors write.
“It is important to keep in mind that the yields from genetic epidemiology and the strategies implemented are applicable to groups of people, not to the individuals themselves,” they conclude. “However, by joining advances in molecular genetics that are adapted for use in epidemiological genetic screening, our kinds of data with the risk groups described might lead to a large and rapid step forward in the understanding of the etiologies of major mental disorders.”
Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2010;67[3]:252-257.
 
Article Date: 01 Mar 2010 – 15:00 PST
Young adults who have used cannabis or marijuana for a longer period of time appear more likely to have hallucinations or delusions or to meet criteria for psychosis, according to a report posted online today that will appear in the May print issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Previous studies have identified an association between cannabis use and psychosis, according to background information in the article. However, concerns remain that this research has not adequately accounted for confounding variables.
John McGrath, M.D., Ph.D., F.R.A.N.Z.C.P., of the Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland, Australia, and colleagues studied 3,801 young adults born between 1981 and 1984. At a 21-year follow-up, when participants were an average age of 20.1, they were asked about cannabis use in recent years and assessed using several measures of psychotic outcomes (including a diagnostic interview, an inventory of delusions and items identifying the presence of hallucinations).
At the 21-year follow-up, 17.7 percent reported using cannabis for three or fewer years, 16.2 percent for four to five years and 14.3 percent for six or more years. Overall, 65 study participants received a diagnosis of “non-affective psychosis,” such as schizophrenia, and 233 had at least one positive item for hallucination on the diagnostic interview.
Among all the participants, a longer duration since the first time they used cannabis was associated with multiple psychosis-related outcomes. “Compared with those who had never used cannabis, young adults who had six or more years since first use of cannabis (i.e., who commenced use when around 15 years or younger) were twice as likely to develop a non-affective psychosis and were four times as likely to have high scores on the Peters et al Delusions Inventory [a measure of delusion],” the authors write. “There was a ‘dose-response’ relationship between the variables of interest: the longer the duration since first cannabis use, the higher the risk of psychosis-related outcomes.”
In addition, the researchers assessed the association between cannabis use and psychotic symptoms among a subgroup of 228 sibling pairs. The association persisted in this subgroup, “thus reducing the likelihood that the association was due to unmeasured shared genetic and/or environmental influences,” the authors continue.
“The nature of the relationship between psychosis and cannabis use is by no means simple,” they write. Individuals who had experienced hallucinations early in life were more likely to have used cannabis longer and to use it more frequently. “This demonstrates the complexity of the relationship: those individuals who were vulnerable to psychosis (i.e., those who had isolated psychotic symptoms) were more likely to commence cannabis use, which could then subsequently contribute to an increased risk of conversion to a non-affective psychotic disorder.”
The findings should encourage further research to elucidate the mechanisms underlying the relationship between psychosis and cannabis use, the authors conclude.
Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2010;67[5]:(doi:10.1001/archgenpsychaitry.2010.6.
 
Excluding badly behaved pupils from school should be abolished because it punishes vulnerable children, a report by a think tank says.
Demos says current exclusion rules, which hand difficult pupils over to local authorities, affect children with special educational needs.
It suggests the child should remain the responsibility of the school.
But the NASUWT teaching union said the report took “a rather simplistic view of a complex problem”.
The report’s author, Sonia Sodha, said the current system only moves problems “out of sight and out of mind”.
The report, supported by the Private Equity Foundation, calls for difficult children to stay on the school register and be put on a tailored programme of support.
Poor results
It says more than three times as much is spent per child on Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) than in mainstream schools. About £15,000 is spent on a full time PRU placement, compared with £4,000 for a place in mainstream secondary schools.
The study, based on statistical analysis and workshops, suggests exclusion also does not solve behavioural problems and is linked to very poor results.
It says government figures show 1% of 15 year olds in PRUs achieved five GCSEs at grades A*-C or equivalent; 11.3% achieved five or more grades A*-G; and 82.1% achieved one or more qualifications.
By comparison, 70% of pupils achieved five A*-C grades at GCSE or equivalent in the general school population.
Over 75% of children who are excluded have special educational needs (SEN) and exclusion rates for children in the middle band of SEN are 17 times higher for children without those particular needs.
Additionally, 27% of children with autism have been excluded from school.
The report makes several recommendations, which include:
• Abolishing the current system of permanent exclusion
• Giving more resources to schools to buy in out-of-school specialist provision for children with behavioural problems at an early stage
• The child should remain the responsibility of the school. Head teachers will still be able to buy in alternative provision for children behaving poorly – but they will remain accountable for their results
• More and better training for teachers on behavioural management in initial teacher training and in on-the-job training
• Local authorities need to play a stronger role in driving up the quality of alternative provision for children who struggle in the classroom
• Schools could spend extra resources to deal with the early signs of behavioural issues
Ms Sodha said other countries did not exclude children in the way the UK does.
‘Destined to fail’
“These figures are shocking and show how badly we are failing to support vulnerable kids. Instead of helping these children we are punishing and then banishing them,” she said.
“The system wastes money because it doesn’t solve the problem – it just moves it out of sight and out of mind.
“It’s crucial that the support stays connected to the school because once kids are excluded they are almost destined to fail.”
But Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, accused the think tank of not fully costing its proposals and effectively “signing a blank cheque on the issue”.
She added: “It is premised on a belief that children and young people are lost to the system when they are excluded.
“There is no evidence for this. If it does occur, then the local authority would not be fulfilling its legal duty to provide full-time education.
“Nothing in the report warrants a conclusion that permanent exclusion should be abolished.”
Ms Keates also said many of the proposals suggested in the report – such as using nurture groups and learning mentors – are already used in schools.
 
Published Monday, 1 March, 2010 – 11:17
Autism campaigners have appealed for disability issues to be included in the first ever Leadership Debates on British Television, during the General Election of 2010. The UK Autism Foundation has called on ITV News, SKy News and BBC News to include the serious concerns of the disability community in the UK in the television debates. History is in the making with leaders Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg facing each other in the first ever Leadership debates in Britain.
Ivan Corea of the UK Autism Foundation said: ‘ I have written to Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg as well as Alistair Stewart of ITV News, Adam Boulton of Sky News and David Dimbleby of BBC News urging them to highlight the concerns of the disability community including the concerns of parents, carers, children and adults with autism and Asperger’s Syndrome, in the televised leadership debates during the General Election. They must not forget the vulnerable,’ he said.
UKAF has been urging Her Majesty’s Government to provide more support for poor families and people with autism and Asperger’s Sundrome in the UK. They maintain that the recession has driven many more disabled people into poverty. Some families are facing re-possessions of their homes. Others are still struggling as a result of the postcode lottery to public services in education, health, specialist speech therapy and respite care. Many have to fight for a few hours of respite care.
There are 8.6 million registered disabled people in the UK, totalling 14% of the population.(DRC) There are over 500,000 people with autism in the United Kingdom – if you add the numbers of parents and carers, you are looking at over a million people touched by autism. They are all voters too.
Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg have been urged by the UK Autism Foundation to spell out their plans for Autism in the General Election.