Mental & Emotional Health

Reading through one of the latest issues of NeuroPsychiatry Review (November 2007, Volume 8, Number 11) I stumbled across a little bit of “News Roundup” about the exposure to mercury though thimerosol-containing vaccines.

There has been quite the controversy about vaccinations due to exposure to mercury, thimerosol. Parents nationwide are concerned about what toys they’re buying their children and what they’re putting into their children’s bodies. There has been a controversy about the connection between autism and mercury exposure, but this review journal says that there is “no casual association.”

The New England Journal of Medicine (September 27 edition) looked at over one thousand children’s neuropsyhological performance between ages seven to ten. Given 42 assessable outcomes, the associations they found were “small and almost equally divided between positive and negative effects.” In fact, the article writes that higher prenatal mercury exposure showing an improvement in language performance. However, there is also the other side showing that exposure in the first four weeks of life (from conception to day 28) results in a lower speech articulation test BUT an improved motor function control.

So, we know that a high amount of mercury exposure is detrimental to humans, but this study is also showing that there might be slight positive benefits to a bit of mercury exposure. Generally though, the Food and Drug Administration recommends that women thinking about becoming pregnant, are currently pregnant or nursing or feeding a young child should avoid swordfish, shark, tile fish, king mackerel & tuna due to high levels of mercury.

On Sunday, I had the opportunity to volunteer with Special Olympics of Oregon for their Regional Swim Meet, and it was not only a fun experience, it made me more aware that even in my darkest times, I’ve got life pretty easy. There were two swimmers who really touched me on Sunday, and I’ve been thinking about them quite a bit since then.

Special Olympics athletes are a wide array of sportsmen & women: I helped swimmers
* of all ages (4 to 71!),
* of both sexes (it seemed to be pretty equally distributed),
* of all abilities (from developmental swimmers who participated in 10m walks across the shallow end to swimmers who swim on their high school swim teams to those who have been to the World Games) and
* of all mental capacities (from swimmers who initiated and then lead entire conversations with me and other volunteers to swimmers who had a hard time forming even basic words).

By 1pm, I thought the highlight of my day was Justin; a young man who was participating in the developmental swimming events. After getting his flotation belt on him (and laughing with him as we realized that it was really cold from being in the pool previously) his coach and I helped him into the pool. Although he was non-speaking, he was obviously nervous. Justin was to swim in lane 3 - the lane furthest from the wall – and getting him down to the right area was almost a 10-minute event. Once in the pool, I spent five minutes on my knees at the edge of the pool encouraging him to move towards me. He used the wall, and it took 10-times longer than it would have taken a fully mentally developed person, but the intense feeling of pride I had in him when he made it to the third piece of blue tape was better than anything I had felt in a long time. The second time Justin got into the pool, he was obviously more comfortable and moved down to his lane in no time. After he collected his awards, I was excited to find him and tell him how proud of him I was. It was really an amazing feeling.

Soon after spending my time with Justin, I met Sarah. Sarah was in two of my escort rows (I spent the day escorting the swimmers from the bullpen to the starting blocks) early in the afternoon and was a quiet girl worried about her diabetes. She told me about her low blood sugar level and how she had dealt with it at a previous swim meet and was worried that it would happen again. I encouraged her to try one lap and if she felt poorly that she should get out. She ended up winning a medal for that race and came back to swim again. After two races, she had a bit of a break before her relay race and so she sat near me and we chatted. Sarah is not only diabetic (two shots of insulin in the morning and evening), she’s a leukemia survivor (five years of remission) and she has a pretty severe mental disability. Once Sarah warmed up to me, she didn’t stop talking. I so much enjoyed talking to her that I was sad she left and I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye. I am hoping to see her at the state meet and be able to talk to her more.

Volunteering is good for the soul, and volunteering with Special Olympics definitely made my soul feel better, and now I have something absolutely positive to think about every time I let myself get down.

mental & emotional health, discussion autism, Special Olympics of Oregon, swimming, swim meet

Machine Means Ends to Sleepless Nights - A device worn on the head could in squeeze the benefit of eight hours’ sleep into just two or three hours. Scientists in the US used a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to induce slow waves - indicative of the deepest phase of sleep and essential for learning ability and mood, in a group of sleeping volunteers. (This story is just for Mad … who has no other name but Mad. I’ve never seen him mad … so it’s all kinda weird to me. /randomness)

The face, not the body, attracts a mate - Body builders and gym buffs, look away now. It appears that the opposite sex is much more interested in your face than your bulging biceps or elegant figure, especially if you’re a man. At least that’s the upshot of the first study to assess how much faces and bodies contribute to someone’s overall attractiveness.

Gut Almighty! - Intuitions, or gut feelings, are sudden, strong judgments whose origin we can’t immediately explain. Although they seem to emerge from an obscure inner force, they actually begin with a perception of something outside—a facial expression, a tone of voice, a visual inconsistency so fleeting you’re not even aware you noticed.

A Frown or A Smile? Children With Autism Can’t Discern - When we have a conversation with someone, we not only hear what they say, we see what they say. Eyes can smolder or twinkle. Gazes can be direct or shifty. “Reading” these facial expressions gives context and meaning to the words we hear. In a report presented May 5 at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Seatlle, researchers from UCLA explained that children with autism can’t do this. They hear and they see, of course, but the areas of the brain that normally respond to such visual cues simply do not respond.

mental and emotional health, sleep, transcranial magnetic stimulation, University of Wisconsin, attraction, body building, working out, attractiveness, University of Western Australia, Psychology Today, intuition, gut feelings, inner force, The Second Brain, Columbia University, Brazilian School of Business and Public Administration, autism, facial expressions, International Meeting for Autism Research, UCLA, visual cues, children

Major Autism Finding article reads;
“The largest study of the genetics of autism ever conducted, involving DNA from almost 1 200 affected families worldwide, has already yielded two important clues to the poorly understood disorder, scientists say.

Discoveries in two areas of the genome - a region on chromosome 11 suspected of having links to autism, and aberrations in a brain-development gene called neurexin 1 - could spur more targeted research, the experts noted.

“That’s the real promise here,” said Autism Genome Project co-researcher Dr Stephen Scherer, director of the Centre for Applied Genomics at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. “When you identify certain genes, you can then develop genetic tests - in some cases prenatal and in some cases postnatal - because early diagnosis is crucial here.”

Closer to a cure?
Genetic discoveries can also further research toward a cure for autism, Scherer said. “When we have this type of knowledge, we can actually think about designing better therapies based on what we know is not happening properly in the [brain] cell. We can try to design things to make it work better,” he explained.

The Autism Genome Project was funded by the US National Institutes of Health and the nonprofit advocacy group Autism Speaks. Its findings were published in the February 18 online edition of Nature Genetics.

Autism remains a real health crisis, with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announcing recently that one in every 150 American 8-year-olds now have some form of autistic spectrum disorder. That number is higher than prior estimates, and the debate rages as to just why the disease might be becoming more prevalent.

Causes remain a mystery
Experts agree that autism’s causes remain cloaked in mystery, although prior research has pointed to a strong genetic component. For example, “there’s about 90 percent concordance [of autism] between identical twins - that’s a significant genetic contribution,” Scherer said.

So, the Autism Genome Project, which took five years to complete, sought to probe much deeper into the DNA driving the disorder. The project involved more than 120 scientists working at 50 institutions in 19 countries. They painstakingly sought out almost 1 200 families worldwide in which at least two members were affected by autism. The scientists then collected DNA samples from family members and analyzed these samples in the most advanced and standardized manner, looking for genomic “commonalities.” Those efforts have met with real success.

“First, we found several regions of the genome, particularly one region on chromosome 11, that seem to be very highly associated with the development of autism,” said Scherer, who is also professor of medicine at the University of Toronto. While prior research had suggested chromosome 11 as a potential hotspot for autism-linked DNA, this study greatly strengthens that view, he said.

The researchers also used cutting-edge technologies to seek out what are known as “copy number variations” - genes that appear not in pairs (as most genes passed down from mom and dad are), but as just a single copy, or as three or more copies.

“We found several regions of the genome - sometimes the same region popping up in unrelated individuals - with 3 or more copies,” Scherer said. “We didn’t see these in the individuals’ parents, so that implies that these regions are harbouring susceptibility genes for autism.”

A smoking gun
One gene in particular, called neurexin 1, appeared in some cases in just one copy. “In one family, both of the children who were autistic actually had that piece missing,” Scherer said. “That’s kind of a smoking gun that the gene is implicated.” It makes intuitive sense that dysfunctional neurexin 1 might play some role in autistic disorders, another expert said.

The neurexin 1 protein and its kin “are very important in determining how properly the brain is wired up from one nerve cell to another, and in the chemical transmission of information from one nerve cell to another,” said Dr Bradley Peterson, a professor of child psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Centre and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, in New York City.

Peterson, who was not involved in the project, said genes that effect early neural growth could be key to autistic disorders, since “the genetic and the non-genetic contributions to autism, by definition, have to exert their effect very early in brain development, either in utero or in the first months or couple of years of life.”

Leads for future research
Still, he and Scherer both stressed that the new study only points to potential leads for future research. Because of the study’s particular methodology, no one finding reached statistical significance, Peterson said. “This is all very strong evidence, and a very good set of leads, but we can’t yet say that we have proved the involvement of these regions in autism,” he said.

Scherer said that, except in very rare instances, there isn’t likely to be a single gene responsible for autism. Instead, a variety of genetic abnormalities may work on each other during development to create some level of autism. And experts don’t discount the potential role of environmental stresses on that mix, either.

“Remember, autism is actually a grab bag of different developmental disorders. And what we show here is that many genes can be involved, and also these copy number variants,” Scherer said. “And could it be that environment is contributing? Absolutely.” One thing is for sure, however: autism research holds more promise now than ever before, the experts said.

“Anybody working out here can use this information now, and it really provides a great path forward as to how we need to do our experiments over the next five years or so,” Scherer said. “We’ve now got all these new candidate genes - the neurexins, the various copy number variants - and we can tackle the problem in a much more focused and organized way.”"

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