PSYCHIATRY:
Cutting Words May Scar Young Brains
Parents who ridicule, humiliate, or belittle their children may
be causing them serious and permanent brain damage. New research from Martin
Teicher and colleagues, published in the Feb. 1 issue of Biological Psychiatry, pinpoints
this damage by applying an imaging technique that maps the fiber pathways in
the brain. The images suggest that verbal abuse damages neural pathways in regions
responsible for regulating emotions and processing language. Though parental
verbal abuse has only recently been recognized as harmful, evidence is mounting
that it may be as injurious as forms of abuse previously thought to be more severe.
PUBLIC
HEALTH: New Look at Classic Study Shows Overemphasis on Individual-level
Data
A lot of what we know about what makes us sick and what keeps us well
comes from following large groups of individuals over time. These studies
reveal telling associations between disease and individual characteristics,
such as diet, smoking, exercise and genes. But where people live also
matters—and sometimes may matter more than who they are, according
to S.V. Subramanian and his co-authors in a paper published online
Jan. 28 in the International Journal of Epidemiology. The
study revisits the profoundly influential statistics paper at the root
of the big epidemiological datasets that populate 21st century science.
PATHOLOGY:
Pattern of Brain Activity Signals Danger of Schizophrenia
Motivated by the hope that they can pull people back from the brink of
schizophrenia, Larry Seidman (right), Anthony Giuliano, and colleagues
have been studying the earliest stage of schizophrenia, the prodromal
phase. Seidman, along with Heidi Thermenos, and colleagues have gone
back even earlier and are looking at the brains of people who do not
display symptoms but are at high risk for the disease. They have found
that a constellation of brain regions involved in self-reflection is
unusually active in people with schizophrenia and, to a lesser extent,
in those at risk for the disease. The findings appear in the Jan. 27
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Copyright 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College