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"Motherhood really can change the mother, which is something we often overlook. And we forget about examining the neurobiology of maternal mental health and maternal mental illness , particularly anxiety," says behavioral neuroscientist Jodi Pawluski of University of Rennes 1 in France, who co-authored the paper with Joseph Lonstein of Michigan State University and Alison Fleming of the University of Toronto at Mississauga. Overall, fMRI studies show that neural activity in women with PPD compared to people with major depression who had not given birth involves distinct patterns for new mothers with PPD. For instance, the amygdala is usually hyperactive in anxious and depressed people, but for the women with PPD, the amygdala can actually be less activated. PPD is now listed as "perinatal depression," a subset of major depression, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the text which sets industry standards for diagnosing mental ...

Scott Langenecker, affiliate professor of psychology and psychiatry within the College of Illinois School of Drugs. Credit score: Picture courtesy of College of Illinois at Chicago A purposeful MRI mind scan could assist predict which sufferers will reply positively to antidepressant remedy, in response to a brand new research printed within the journal  Mind . Researchers on the College of Illinois at Chicago and the College of Michigan carried out fMRI scans on sufferers with main depressive dysfunction who had been to start antidepressant remedy. These sufferers who present extra communication inside two mind networks once they made a mistake whereas performing an assigned cognitive process had been much less probably to answer antidepressant treatment. The 2 networks are the error detection community -- which engages when somebody notices they've made a mistake -- and the interference processing community, which prompts when deciding what info to give attent...

"Our study is one of the first to locate possible damage of bipolar disorder in specific subfields within the hippocampus," said Bo Cao, Ph.D., first and corresponding author and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth. "This is something that researchers have been trying to answer. The theory was that different subfields of the hippocampus may have different functions and may be affected differently in different mood disorders, such as bipolar disorder and major depression disorder." Cao hopes the study, which was funded in part by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), will pioneer future research on details within the hippocampus as a marker for precise diagnosis and positive treatment response of bipolar disorder. Approximately 6 million Americans suffer from bipolar disorder. Bipolar I disorder is characterized by mood changes that can swing from a high-energy, manic st...

In a report published in the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Journals Library, the researchers showed that there is significant evidence to demonstrate that acupuncture provides more than a placebo effect. Professor of Acupuncture Research, Hugh MacPherson, working with a team of scientists from the UK and US, brought together the results of 29 high quality clinical trials focused on patients treated with acupuncture and standard medical care. In the majority of these trials, patients with chronic pain treated with acupuncture and standard medical care were tested against those who were provided with standard medical care alone, such as anti-inflammatory drugs and physiotherapy. The trials involved approximately 18,000 patients diagnosed with chronic pain of the neck, lower back, head, and knee. The report shows that the addition of acupuncture compared to standard medical care alone significantly reduced the number of headaches and migraine attacks and reduced t...

Results from a new study are showing that children receive the same beneficial effect from being active. We're talking about moderate to vigorous physical activity that leaves kids sweaty or out of breath. Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and NTNU Social Research have followed hundreds of children over four years to see if they could find a correlation between physical activity and symptoms of depression. Healthy to roughhouse Researchers examined just under 800 children when they were six years old, and conducted follow-up examinations with about 700 of them when they were eight and ten years old. Physical activity was measured with accelerometers, which served as a kind of advanced pedometer, and parents were interviewed about their children's mental health. "Being active, getting sweaty and roughhousing offer more than just physical health benefits. They also protect against depression," says Tonje Zahl, a PhD candi...

According to data analyzed for 93,668 women aged 50 to 79 years who were enrolled in the Women's Health Initiative Observational Study, short sleep duration (defined as fewer than 7 to 8 hours per night) was associated with lower odds of sexual satisfaction. Of the participants, 56% reported being somewhat or very satisfied with their current sexual activity, and 52% reported partnered sexual activity within the last year. Insomnia prevalence was 31%. The Menopause article "Association of sleep disturbance and sexual function in postmenopausal women" describes how the relationship between sleep length and quality with sexual satisfaction remained even after adjusting for other possible causes of sleep deprivation, including depression and chronic disease. This relationship, however, did vary across age groups. Older women, for example, were less likely to be sexually active if they slept fewer than 7 to 8 hours per night compared with younger women. In fact, women age...

"The fact that we could see these connectivity patterns in the brain at birth helps answer a critical question about whether they could be responsible for early symptoms linked to depression and anxiety or whether these symptoms themselves lead to changes in the brain," said Cynthia Rogers, MD, an assistant professor of child psychiatry. "We have found that already at birth, brain connections may be responsible for the development of problems later in life." Initially, Dr. Rogers and her team set out to identify differences in functional brain connectivity -- the coordination of activity across different parts of the brain -- between babies born prematurely and others born at full term. They conducted functional MRI scans in 65 full-term newborns and 57 premature infants born at least ten weeks early. The latter were scanned on or near their due dates. The researchers looked for differences in the connectivity patterns across various regions of the brain hopi...

Health professionals know that mental health issues in parents can lead to long-term cognitive, health and behavioral troubles in their children. Researchers reviewed published data from 10 countries. Among parents of children with critical congenital heart defects, researchers found: Up to 30 percent had symptoms consistent with a diagnosis of PTSD, with more than 80 percent showing significant symptoms of trauma; 25 percent to 50 percent reported elevated symptoms of depression , anxiety or both; and 30 percent to 80 percent reported experiencing severe psychological distress; In comparison, the prevalence of PTSD in the U.S. general population is 3.5 percent, with 18 percent meeting criteria for any anxiety disorder in the last year, and 9.5 percent meeting criteria for any mood disorder. Researchers say the study is a first step to draw more attention to this overlooked group of parents whose mental health is often taxed by coping with their children's medical appoin...

The researchers have found young adult Indigenous people they tested show impaired secretion of the stress hormone cortisol and that their biological stress response is linked to the racial discrimination they experience. Professor Zoltan Sarnyai led the team of scientists from the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine at JCU. In their study published in the journal  Scientific Reports , the team showed for the first time that the biologically important 'morning rise' of cortisol that prepares us to effectively deal with the daily hassles and stresses of life is missing in otherwise healthy Indigenous young adults. Dr Sarnyai said cortisol concentration in the blood should be within a certain range. "Too little or too much of it is dangerous for health. We can't tell why it is low in this case. One possible explanation is that previous stress, early traumatic events or even traumas of the past generation may have impaired the negative feedback...

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again!" This saying is drummed into us from a young age, when our tower of building blocks keeps collapsing or we just can't get the hang of riding a bicycle. Perseverance is praised and we are told that only with the right motivation will we be able to achieve the aims we have set ourselves. "That may hold true in many areas of life, such as work, sport or the family," says Prof. Klaus Rothermund of Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany). But an over-ambitious life plan can also prove to be a trap, adds the Professor of General Psychology. This is the case when the goals pursued are unattainable. "Some people develop depression as a result of such futile efforts," says Rothermund. The fact that the goal remains unattainably distant, however hard a person tries, makes them experience helplessness and suffer from a loss of control. However, this must not inevitably be a psychological dead-end. De...