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Observing the brain pathway that lowers anxiety

2009-09-24T13:11:00.001+02:00

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Observing the brain pathway that lowers anxiety

via Deric Bownds' MindBlog by mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) on 9/24/09

Kim and Whalen publish an interesting study in the Journal of Neuroscience using diffusion tensor imaging to show that the structural integrity, or strength, of a pathway between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala correlates with lower trait anxiety in individual subjects (the idea being that this pathway allows prefrontal cortex to inhibit amygdala reactivity to anxiety provoking stimuli). The abstract:

Here, we used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and showed that the strength of an axonal pathway identified between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex predicted individual differences in trait anxiety. A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) functional localizer that has been shown to produce reliable amygdala activation was collected in 20 psychiatrically healthy subjects. Voxelwise regression analyses using this fMRI amygdala reactivity as a regressor were performed on fractional anisotropy images derived from DTI. This analysis identified a white matter pathway between the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Individual differences in the structural integrity of this putative amygdala–prefrontal pathway were inversely correlated with trait anxiety levels (i.e., higher pathway strength predicted lower anxiety). More generally, this study illustrates a strategy for combining fMRI and DTI to identify individual differences in structural pathways that predict behavioral outcomes.

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The Top Mobile Websites in your Country

2009-09-24T13:08:00.001+02:00

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The Top Mobile Websites in your Country

via Digital Inspiration - Technology Blog by Amit on 9/24/09

This is a list the 10 most popular mobile websites (in terms of unique visitors) in different countries according to Opera.

INDIA	UNITED STATES	RUSSIA
1. google.com 2. orkut.com 3. yahoo.com 4. facebook.com 5. songs.pk 6. wikipedia.org 7. youtube.com 8. zedge.net 9. peperonity.com 10. waptrick.com	1. google.com 2. facebook.com 3. myspace.com 4. wikipedia.org 5. youtube.com 6. my.opera.com 7. yahoo.com 8. espn.go.com 9. accuweather.com 10. nytimes.com	1. vkontakte.ru 2. odnoklassniki.ru 3. mail.ru 4. yandex.ru 5. google.com 6. wikipedia.org 7. spaces.ru 8. seclub.org 9. rambler.ru 10. waplog.net
CHINA	UNITED KINGDOM	FRANCE
1. kong.net 2. baidu.com 3. google.cn 4. sina.com.cn 5. xiaonei.com 6. qq.com 7. sohu.com 8. hao123.com 9. 163.com 10. taobao.com	1. facebook.com 2. google.com 3. bbc.co.uk 4. live.com 5. yahoo.com 6. wikipedia.org 7. youtube.com 8. bebo.com 9. my.opera.com 10. ebay.co.uk	1. google.com 2. facebook.com 3. live.com 4. lequipe.fr 5. wikipedia.org 6. youtube.com 7. lemonde.fr 8. my.opera.com 9. skyrock.com 10. pagesjaunes.fr
GERMANY	ITALY	INDONESIA
1. google.com 2. wikipedia.org 3. bild.de 4. youtube.com 5. web.de 6. gmx.de 7. sport1.de 8. facebook.com 9. spiegel.de 10. ebay.de	1. google.com 2. facebook.com 3. gazzetta.it 4. youtube.com 5. corriere.it 6. wikipedia.org 7. repubblica.it 8. yahoo.com 9. my.opera.com 10. ebuddy.com	1. facebook.com 2. friendster.com 3. waptrick.com 4. yahoo.com 5. google.com 6. detik.com 7. peperonity.com 8. digg.com 9. wikipedia.org 10. twitter.com

Opera has just released their monthly report on the state of mobile web (also available as PDF) that highlights key trends in mobile web browsing worldwide and also provides a list of most frequently visited websites in different regions of the world.

Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube are hugely popular among mobile users in every region but Twitter is missing probably because smartphone users prefer using standalone apps and not the main Twitter website to tweet.

These reports are based on usage of Opera mobile browsers (Opera Mini and Opera Mobile) that are quite popular on Nokia and BlackBerry handsets but completely excludes the iPhone user-base. Also, Opera reports do not include any adult websites even if any of them makes it to the top 10 list.

The Top Mobile Websites in your Country

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

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Body Knowledge: Red Blood, Blue Veins?

2009-09-24T13:07:00.001+02:00

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Body Knowledge: Red Blood, Blue Veins?

via FitSugar by FitSugar on 9/24/09

There is a common misconception that blood, as it courses through our veins on its return trip back to the heart, is blue.

When you look at your arms you see blue veins, but this is a trick of light, or rather a problem with wavelengths. According to Live Science, light has to penetrate your skin in order for you to actually see your veins, and blue light waves are more successful at this process, making your veins appear blue.

So what does happen to your blood as it moves about your body? Learn the details by reading more.

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Giant Baby Will Not Be Ignored

2009-09-24T12:42:00.001+02:00

An Indonesian woman gave birth to this 19.2 pound bundle of joy, the country's biggest baby ever. Doctors think gestational diabetes is to blame. We think he's just an awesome giant. That other baby doesn't even know what to think.

Users Hate Change

2009-09-24T12:39:00.001+02:00

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Users Hate Change

via Google Blogoscoped by Philipp Lenssen on 9/23/09

Jakob Nielsen argues (his emphasis):

Users don't care about design for its own sake; they just want to get things done and get out. Normal people don't love sitting at their computers. They'd rather watch football, walk the dog – just about anything else. Using a computer probably rates above taking out the trash, though.

When people are visiting websites or using applications, they don't spend their time analyzing or admiring the design. They focus their attention on the task, the content, and their own data or documents.

Thus, people love a design when they know the features and can immediately locate the ones they need. That is, they love a familiar design.

In fact, anytime you release a redesign, prepare for a flood of angry email from customers. It's a law of nature that users hate change, and they'll complain every time you move anything around or otherwise reduce their ability to just do what they've always done.

Nielsen adds, "Having users complain about a redesign doesn't necessarily mean that it's bad; if the new design actually has better usability, people will eventually grow to like it."

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Users Hate Change | Comments]

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For First Time, AIDS Vaccine Shows Some Success in Trials

2009-09-24T12:00:00.001+02:00

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For First Time, AIDS Vaccine Shows Some Success in Trials

via NYT > Home Page by By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. on 9/24/09

A new AIDS vaccine tested in Thailand has protected a significant minority against infection, the first time any vaccine against the disease has even partly succeeded in a clinical trial.

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For First Time, AIDS Vaccine Shows Some Success in Trials

2009-09-24T11:58:00.000+02:00

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For First Time, AIDS Vaccine Shows Some Success in Trials

via NYT > Home Page by By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. on 9/24/09

A new AIDS vaccine tested in Thailand has protected a significant minority against infection, the first time any vaccine against the disease has even partly succeeded in a clinical trial.

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This is Your Brain on Coke. So What? [Drugs]

2009-09-24T11:55:00.001+02:00

Medicine,Science

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This is Your Brain on Coke. So What? [Drugs]

via Gawker by Andrew Belonsky on 9/23/09

Ever had a good laugh over those "this is your brain on drugs" commercials? Well, stop. It's no laughing matter, buddy, because now scientists can prove that cocaine changes your brain forever. But that's nothing compared to video games.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o54ikTsaLsE&feature=player_embedded

Because the fascination with cocaine's many ills knows no bounds, researchers Ashwin Mohan and Sandeep Pendyam have been looking into how the drug warps one's mind. And now they've found it: cocaine causes an excessive build-up of the some chemical called glutamate around synaptic nerve ends.

Our model showed that the glutamate transporters, a protein present around these connections that remove glutamate, are almost 40 percent less functional after chronic cocaine usage. This damage is long lasting, and there is no way for the brain to regulate itself. Thus, the brain structure in this context actually changes in cocaine addicts.

Alright, but what does that mean? We're not entirely sure, but a little pseudoscientific research tells us that exorbitant amounts of glutamic acid in the brain can be associated with nasty things like strokes and autism. While the doctors hope this brain-scan finding will help develop new recovery methods for coke heads, this information will almost certainly be used to scare kids away from drugs. That's a valiant mission, but we wonder whether attentions could be diverted elsewhere.

About 2 million people say they use cocaine on a regular basis. Meanwhile, 1 in 10 American kids are "addicted" to video games. If we were being conservative, we would put that at about 5 million people. According to the fascinating, frightening book iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, video games also change the way people's minds work — and in a much more frightening way: they can "stunt" frontal lobe development and lead to permanent, self-absorbed immaturity. Eek!

Basically, there could be an army of perpetual teenagers running this country one day. We know coke heads are annoying, but they're nothing compared to teenagers, God's greatest mistake.

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Spacecraft see 'damp' Moon soils

2009-09-24T11:45:00.001+02:00

By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News

A surprising amount of water has been found to exist in the Moon's soil.

Data from three spacecraft, including India's Chandrayaan probe, shows that very fine films of H20 coat the particles that make up the lunar dirt.

The quantity is tiny but could become a useful resource for astronauts wishing to live on the Moon, scientists say.

"If you had a cubic metre of lunar soil, you could squeeze it and get out a litre of water," explained US researcher Larry Taylor.

The rock and soil samples returned by the Apollo missions were found to be ever so slightly "damp" when examined in the laboratory, but scientists could never rule out the possibility that the moisture got into the samples on Earth.

Now a remote sensing instrument on Chandrayaan-1, India's first mission to lunar orbit, has confirmed that the signal was real.

Two other spacecraft to look at the Moon - Nasa's Deep Impact probe and the US-European Cassini satellite - back up Chandrayaan.

Both collected their Moon data long before Chandrayaan was launched (in the case of Cassini, 10 years ago), but the significance of what they saw is only now being realised.

The quantity of water is seen to increase the closer the observations are made to the poles.

Water ice

Scientists suspect the water is created in the soil in an interaction with the solar wind, the fast-moving stream of particles that constantly billows away from the Sun.

Harsh space radiation triggers a chemical reaction in which oxygen atoms already in the soil acquire hydrogen nuclei to make water molecules and the simpler hydrogen-oxygen (OH) molecule.

The amounts are small, say researchers, but boost the notion that astronauts based on the Moon could use it as a resource.

"If it is a little or a lot, it's easy enough to split into hydrogen and oxygen and then you have rocket fuel," said Professor Taylor, a University of Tennessee researcher working on Chandrayaan.

The Indian Moon mission was launched late last year but has already stopped working due to a fault. Nevertheless, the Indian space agency (Isro) will consider the water discovery a major triumph and a vindication of its endeavours.

A Nasa probe is due to impact the Cabeus A crater near the Moon's south pole next month to see if it can kick up sufficient soil so that another satellite and Earth-based telescopes can detect the presence of water in the dusty plume.

Researchers say the latest water results give them confidence that the experiment performed by the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission, known as LCROSS, could have a positive result.

They speculate that the water seen elsewhere on the lunar surface may migrate to the slightly cooler poles, much as water vapour on Earth will be drawn to a cold surface and condense.

This cold sink effect could result in vast quantities of water being retained in permanently shadowed craters in the form of ice, especially if it has being supplemented by water delivered comets.

Nasa's Lunar Prospector probe in the 1990s saw a strong hydrogen signal in the far north and south. Some scientists on the mission suggested there could be up to 300 million tonnes of water-ice buried in crater soils that never see sunlight.

Chandrayaan made its observations using a US-provided instrument, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, or M3 for short.

The M3 assessed the nature of lunar soils by analysing the way that light from the sun was reflected off the surface.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/8272144.stm

Trial HIV vaccine cuts infection

2009-09-24T11:42:00.001+02:00

Developing an HIV vaccine has proved difficult

An experimental HIV vaccine has for the first time cut the risk of infection, researchers say.

The vaccine - a combination of two earlier experimental vaccines - was given to 16,000 people in Thailand, in the largest ever such vaccine trial.

Researchers found that it reduced by nearly a third the risk of contracting HIV, the virus that leads to Aids.

It has been hailed as a significant, scientific breakthrough, but a global vaccine is still some way off.

The study was carried out by the US army and the Thai government over seven years on volunteers - all HIV-negative men and women aged between 18 and 30 - in some of Thailand's most badly-affected regions.

The vaccine was a combination of two older vaccines that on their own had not cut infection rates.

Half of the volunteers were given the vaccine, while the other half were given a placebo - and all were given counselling on HIV/Aids prevention.

Participants were tested for HIV infection every six months for three years.

The results found that the chances of catching HIV were 31.2% less for those who had taken the vaccine - with 74 people who did not get the vaccine infected and 51 of the vaccinated group infected.

'Encouraging'

"This result is tantalisingly encouraging. The numbers are small and the difference may have been due to chance, but this finding is the first positive news in the Aids vaccine field for a decade," said Dr Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet medical journal.

"We should be cautious, but hopeful. The discovery needs urgent replication and investigation."

Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said: "For the first time, an investigational HIV vaccine has demonstrated some ability to prevent HIV infection among vaccinated individuals.

"Additional research is needed to better understand how this vaccine regimen reduced the risk of HIV infection, but this is certainly an encouraging advance for the HIV vaccine field."

The findings were hailed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/Aids (UN/Aids).

They said while the results were "characterised as modestly protective... [they] have instilled new hope in the HIV vaccine research field".

Some 33 million people around the world have HIV.

Google Wave: You need to pay attention to this. - Jason Kolb re: the Future...

2009-09-24T11:31:00.001+02:00

technology

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Google Wave: You need to pay attention to this. - Jason Kolb re: the Future of the Internet

via www.jasonkolb.com on 9/24/09

Why is this so interesting?

XMPP. In case you haven't noticed, I'm a big fan.

XMPP is so versatile that if it becomes widely adopted it will be to the Internet what HTTP was: a platform for new types of applications. And where HTTP as a platform is a server-centric model, XMPP is capable of peer-to-peer communication.

Remember what happened when everyone got HTTP clients (they're called browsers :) ? The Internet exploded. Well, if everyone gets a full-fledged XMPP client I think you can expect roughly the same thing to happen.

One of the most fascinating features of XMPP is the way things are addressed. EVERYTHING is addressable over the network. You can talk directly to ANYTHING, and ANYONE. I can't stress how big of a shift that would be from the current model. It's HUGE. I wrote a whole series of posts on this a few years ago, and it's just as exciting now as it was then.

Let's take a step back and think about this for a second. I'll probably do another post just on the addressing scheme at some point because it's so key, but it's worth a brief recap.

Right now I cannot send text directly to your instant message account (unless you're using an XMPP-based client), I have to send the message to your IM server which relays the message to you.
I cannot send audio directly to your phone, the phone company has to route it there.
I cannot share a picture directly with your Facebook account, I have to sent it to Facebook first to be carried on to you.
I can't send a file directly to you, I have to put it on a share or email it to you.

(Not to mention the fact that these are all disconnected, you can't combine these into a single message stream. XMPP addresses that problem very nicely, as the wave client shows.)

XMPP removes these intermediaries from the network. Social networks and proprietary transports no longer have an exclusive license to deliver content, the clients talk directly to one another.

Do you see the difference? There are no longer social networks or any other type of networks required to relay the communication, we are now down to exactly 3 components:

Clients
Storage
Applications

Of course there is always the underlying dumb pipes that transport the data, but from a functional perspective the network has been normalized out of importance.

Clients can be whatever we need them to be. It can be the Google wave client, it can be your phone, it can be a desktop app. These will evolve over time, but the Google client is a fantastic starting point, certainly light years ahead of anything else that's available today.

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DEMO: Cortera Measures Business Credit With Community Ratings

2009-09-24T11:01:00.001+02:00

Business

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DEMO: Cortera Measures Business Credit With Community Ratings

via TechCrunch by Jason Kincaid on 9/24/09

When it comes to dealing small businesses, the last thing you want is for the company you're working with to renege on a transaction after you've contributed your half. Sending multiple invoices may be enough to annoy them into submission, but if that doesn't work the legal fees and time involved with taking them to court usually isn't worth it. Cortera, a new site that launched yesterday at DEMO Fall, is looking to help businesses avoid this kind of dispute.

Cortera can be thought of as a Yelp for business credit, offering reviews on large and small businesses alike that have been submitted by the community. In other words, it can help you figure out if a company you're thinking of dealing with is going to pay you in a timely fashion, or if it's run by deadbeats who should be avoided.

Up until now, the business credit market has been dominated by one major player: Dun & Bradstreet. But Cortera says that D&B fails to properly address small businesses, which account for a large percentage of America's GDP. So Cortera has built out a database that includes not just the large companies that are D&B's bread-and-butter, but also countless smaller ones that previously have been neglected.

The site's members can use a review system much like the ones you'll find on Yelp and Amazon to share their experiences with companies on the site, and paid members can also see key data like a company's annual spending budget and supplier volume. Cortera offers one-off reports for as little as $3, and also has monthly plans beginning at $29 a month.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0

TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

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Equinox Sunset

2009-09-24T10:59:00.001+02:00

Photo

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Equinox Sunset

via Astronomy Picture of the Day on 9/24/09

Equinox Sunset
Credit & Copyright: Tamas Ladanyi (TWAN)

Explanation: Often inspiring, or offering a moment for contemplation, a sunset is probably the most commonly photographed celestial event. But this uncommonly beautiful sunset picture was taken on a special day, the Equinox on September 22. Marking the astronomical change of seasons, on that day Earth dwellers experienced nearly 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness (an equal night). Reflected in the calm waters of Lake Balaton with a motionless sailboat in silhouette, the Sun is setting due west and heading south across the celestial equator. In the background lies the Benedictine Archabbey of Tihany, Hungary.

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FeedDemon 3 is now available for Download

2009-09-24T10:48:00.001+02:00

Technology

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FeedDemon 3 is now available for Download

via Digital Inspiration - Technology Blog by Amit on 9/24/09

The final release of FeedDemon 3 is now available for download on bradsoft.com. Here are some good reasons why you should install FeedDemon 3.0 on your Windows PC.

Google Reader - FeedDemon 3 can automatically sync your feeds, items tags and shared items with Google Reader.

In simple English, it means that if you read a feed inside Google Reader, it won't show up as "unread" in FeedDemon and vice-versa. Similarly, if you attach a tag or text note to some item in Google Reader, it would appear in FeedDemon as well.

Twitter Integration – As I have noted before, FeedDemon is awesome twitter client. It can convert short URLs into original links, the hashtags in tweets are automatically converted in smart hyperlinks and you can also reply to particular tweet via FeedDemon.

The best part is that you subscribe to password-protected Twitter Timeline feeds in FeedDemon and this is something you cannot do in Google Reader.

Sharing Options – FeedDemon 3 includes more beautiful icons and the Share icon will now put that article in your Google Reader's shared items list.

Alternatively, you may use the "Share with Note" option to add your your own comment to the story before sharing it online.

Search Feeds - With FeedDemon 3, you can enter a keyword phrase and directly subscribe to search results for the phrase in popular search engines like Twitter, Bing, Techmeme, Flickr, etc.

Other than these new features and visual enhancements, FeedDemon 3.0 definitely feels faster than the previous version (FeedDemon 2.8).

FeedDemon 3 is free but ad-supported software. You can buy a $10 license via PayPal to get rid of the ads displayed in lower left corner.

FeedDemon 3 is now available for Download

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

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Unprofessional Online Content By Medical Students

2009-09-24T10:29:00.001+02:00

medical

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Unprofessional Online Content By Medical Students

via Dr Shock MD PhD by Dr Shock on 9/23/09

60% of Medical Schools in the US participated in an anonymous electronic survey to assess online posting of unprofessional content by medical students.
Of these schools 60% (47/78) reported incidents of students posting unprofessional online content.

Sexual-Relational Content. Provocative photographs of students, requesting inappropriate friendships with patients on Facebook
Negative comments on specific medical schools using profanity or other disparaging language in reference to specific faculty, courses or rotations
Intoxication or substance abuse, e.g. videos depicting intoxication
Patient privacy at risk, e.g. blog posts with enough detail that could possibly identify patients.

Only 38% of the respondents reported that they had institutional policies that broadly covers student posted online content. However, most of these policies does not mention online content explicitly.

Certain examples such as comments on certain programs or institutions is hard to call unprofessional because they could fall under the freedom of speech. Also students public behaviors that could be seen as unprofessional during their free time has been present even before the Internet. The Internet can enhance the distribution of these "unprofessional outings" of medical students which gives them an extra responsibility.

An Institutional Policy and educating them about these dangers is vital, what do you think?

Chretien, K., Greysen, S., Chretien, J., & Kind, T. (2009). Online Posting of Unprofessional Content by Medical Students JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 302 (12), 1309-1315 DOI: 10.1001/jama.2009.1387

Negative attitude in medical students towards patients with Mental Illness A recent study published in Medical Education demonstrated that...
Frequent and influential exposure of medical students to pharmaceutical marketing In this recent study most of the third year...
Medical Students Socially Segregated from Others You should warn starting medical school students of the...

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What’s Your Personality Like?

2009-09-18T09:24:00.004+02:00

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What’s Your Personality Like?

via World of Psychology on 9/17/09

An important part of improving one's life, searching for happiness, and even helping us with mental health issues or our relationships in life is self-discovery. The more you know about yourself — your preferences, your way of thinking, your way of looking at the world — the more you can actually go ahead and make changes in your life. If you're a big question mark to yourself, it's lot more difficult to start to improve those areas of your life that you'd like to improve upon.

For years now, Psych Central and other websites have offered online personality quizzes and tests that help give you some insight into your personality. And while these work well for what they can say about you, they don't always give you as much information as you might like. They also don't always present the information in a manner that makes it immediately clear what your strengths and weaknesses are, or what are really the most important aspects of your personality. After all, it's fine to say you're "introverted." But while some introverts define their life by this characteristic, others lead a more balanced life where introversion is just a small component of their personality.

So today I'm pleased to introduce Personality Patterns, an application we're bringing to you in conjunction with our partners over at Signal Patterns. Signal Patterns is a company that develops psychology-based web applications that help individuals improve their lives, with a great team of individuals that includes over 20 PhDs. That's a lot of brain power!

Personality Patterns allows you to discover the top 10 traits out of 45 different personality traits that describe what you're all about. But instead of just telling you about these traits, the test shows you these traits in an interactive, colorful graph that is far more informative than a boring narrative. It takes about 10 minutes to take.

You can also — if you choose — share your results with others online, and see how your friends compare with you on many of these personality traits. You can also embed a Personality Patterns Badge on your Facebook page or blog.

The test — like every service we provide at Psych Central — is completely free. Try it out for yourself today! And let us know what you think about it in the comments below. Thanks!

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Test Selects Best Depression Medication

2009-09-16T06:36:00.000+02:00

A new UCLA study may signify a breakthrough for improved use of antidepressants. Currently, a variety of depression medications are available but clinicians can only learn through trial and error as to which one works best.

This means that for a majority of individuals, the first drug prescribed often does not work and it may take months to figure out the best medication.

Now, based on the final results of a nationwide study led by UCLA, clinicians may be able to accurately predict within a week whether a particular drug will be effective by using a non-invasive test that takes less than 15 minutes to administer.

The test will allow physicians to quickly switch patients to a more effective treatment, if necessary.

The study, called the Biomarkers for Rapid Identification of Treatment Effectiveness in Major Depression, or BRITE-MD, measured changes in brain-wave patterns using quantitative electroencephalography (QEEG), a non-invasive, computerized measurement that recognizes specific alterations in brain-wave activity.

These changes precede improvement in mood by many weeks and appear to serve as a biomarker that accurately predicts how effective a given medication will be. The study results appear in two articles published in the September issue of the journal Psychiatry Research.

Nine sites around the country collaborated on the study, which enrolled a total of 375 people who had been diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD). Each individual was given a baseline QEEG at the beginning of the trial and then prescribed the antidepressant escitalopram, commonly known as Lexapro, one of a class of drugs known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors that are commonly prescribed for depression.

After one week, a second QEEG was taken. The researchers examined a biomarker called the antidepressant treatment response (ATR) index — a specific change in brain-wave patterns from the baseline QEEG.

Subjects were then randomly assigned to continue with escitalopram or were given a different drug. A total of 73 patients who remained on escitalopram were tracked for 49 days to see if their results matched the prediction of the ATR biomarker. The ATR predicted both response and remission with an accuracy rate of 74 percent, much higher than any other method available. The researchers also found that they could predict whether subjects were more likely to respond to a different antidepressant, bupropion, also known as Wellbutrin XL.

“Until now, other than waiting, there has been no reliable method for predicting whether a medication would lead to a good response or remission,” said Dr. Andrew Leuchter, professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA and lead author of the study.

“And that wait can be as long as 14 weeks. So these are very exciting findings for the patient suffering from depression. The BRITE results are a milestone in our efforts to develop clinically useful biomarkers for predicting treatment response in MDD.”

Major depressive disorder is a leading cause of disability, costing society in excess of $80 billion annually; approximately two-thirds of these costs reflect the enormous disability associated with the disorder. An estimated 15 million people in the United States experience a depressive episode each year, and nearly 17 percent of adults will experience major depression in their lifetime.

“BRITE study results suggest that the ATR biomarker could potentially provide the greatest clinical benefit for those patients who might be receiving a medication that is unlikely to help them,” Leuchter said.

“Our results suggest that it may be possible to switch these patients to a more effective treatment quickly. This would help patients and their physicians avoid the frustration, risk and expense of long and ineffective medication trials.”

Leuchter noted that research has shown that depression patients who do not get better with a first treatment experience prolonged suffering, are more likely to abandon treatment altogether and may become more resistant to treatment over time.

“So the benefits to the individual and to society are enormous,” he said.

An added benefit of the biomarker test, according to Leuchter, is that it is non-invasive, painless and fast — about 15 minutes — and only involves the placement of six electrodes around the forehead and on the earlobes.

Source: UCLA

5 Simple Exercises for Managing Anxiety

2009-09-16T06:23:00.001+02:00

Even as I love the autumn season, it is full of anxiety for me.

I start to mourn the ending of summer when I hear the cicadas grow louder the last two weeks of August and when I feel the crispness in the air at that time, which brings less sunlight and longer nights. Then the back-to-school craze: buying shoes, supplies, backpacks, etc. and trying to catch up on the homework we didn’t do during June and July. By the time I make it to the parent-teacher conferences in early September, when I hear about all the things I’m supposed to be doing with the kids, I’m well into panic mode.

Yesterday my therapist and I talked about a few coping exercises to keep my anxiety from disabling me this time of year.

1. Pick a sound or object to be your Xanax.

My therapist looks up to the clouds. They calm her down in traffic or whenever she feels anxious. For me it’s the water. I don’t now if it’s because I’m a Pisces (fish), but the water has always calmed me down in the same way as Xanax, and since I don’t take the latter (as a recovering alcoholic, I try to stay away from sedatives), I need to rely on the former. So I just downloaded some “ocean waves” that I can listen to on my iPod when I feel that familiar knot in my stomach.

2. Repeat: “I am good enough.”

My therapist reminded me this morning that even if I don’t meet other people’s standards or my own, I am good enough for myself. And that’s all that really matters. So whenever I feel the pinch of anxiety when I don’t have time to call back a friend or send a response to an email or write the blog post that I said I’d write, I should remind myself that I am good enough for me.

3. Take it one minute at a time.

One cognitive adjustment that helps relieve anxiety is reminding myself that I don’t have to think about 2:45 pm when I pick up the kids from school and how I will be able to cope with the noise and chaos when I’m feeling this way, or about the boundary issue I have with a friend–whether or not I’m strong enough to continue putting myself first in that relationship. All I have to worry about is the very second before me. If I am successful at breaking my time down that way, I usually discover that everything is fine for the moment.

4. Pay attention to your breath.

Another easy exercise to ground yourself in the moment and manage anxiety is to concentrate on your breath–and move it ever so gradually from your chest to your diaphragm–because the extra oxygen will send a message to your prefrontal cortex that every thing is just fine even though the fear center of the brain (the amygdala) doesn’t think so at all.

5. Learn from it.

Anxiety doesn’t have to be triggered by an event, but it certainly can motion some adjustment that you need to make in your life. My anxiety says that I am doing too much, once again. Over the summer I forgot about my fragile chemistry and attempted to work full time and take care of the kids full time until, in August, I was going on fumes. What adjustments do I need to make? Bite off less professionally and invest more energy into finding good help for the kids and housework. Because I can’t do it all.

What about you? What techniques do you use when you feel anxious?

Creative Drawings

2009-09-16T06:04:00.002+02:00

on the move again ( sketch)

2009-09-16T05:17:00.004+02:00

http://www.anopensketchbook.com/2009/08/on-move-again.html

How I deal with mental breakdowns — Jayme

2009-09-16T04:51:00.002+02:00

This piece is written by my dear friend Jayme, at Rayne’s World. I have been linking to this piece for over a year and a half. I link to it in comments on other blogs and I repeatedly reference it here on this blog. It’s linked to on my about page as a story of recovery as well. This blog entry from Rayne’s World, I believe, is indisputably my favorite blog post of all times from any blog anywhere. It is certainly the most profoundly meaningful and memorable to me.

So now as I ask for guest writers I thought I’d ask Jayme if I could repost her piece here and she graciously said yes.

Jayme is an incredible human being who was institutionalized for 20 years and experienced all the profound dehumanization that goes with that. She tells her story here. I think the number of people with a history like hers that end up escaping the system is very very few. But that is what Jayme did and she did it with such awesomeness and grace and complete transcendence. She is one of my biggest inspirations and she is always there for me when I need an ear even though she is now working more than full-time running The Peer Wellness Center in Georgia. She is also one of the most genuinely happy human beings I’ve encountered. We’re talking someone with real, solid, good mental health whose very life and expression is contagious.

The reason this piece means so much to me is because it is in essence the meditation I practice much of the time. For me now it’s not just emotional stuff I must embrace and accept, but also the gross physical pain, discomfort and debilitation that I also try to meditate on deeply.

Here are Jayme’s words of wisdom:

As most of you already know, I refuse to take any medications for mental illness, even though every doctor I’ve seen has stated that I need to be on medications for the rest of my life. That is why I no longer see doctors. So what do I do in a crisis situation? How do I deal with the symptoms? This question was asked the other day, and I realized that I needed to write a blog post about it. My answer is highly unconventional, yet I feel it’s long overdue.

Before I answer, let me describe the symptoms I experience. I hate the word “symptoms” by the way because they are simply human experiences, yet for this post I’ll use the term because it is the psychiatric term used in diagnosing specific, unwonted human experiences.

Depression. When I get depressed, I can’t get out of bed. I have no motivation to do anything. All I can do is cry and think about dying. Life has no meaning whatsoever. I find no joy in any activity, and even lying in bed is painful. There is no escape. Nothing helps. I can’t tolerate any social situation, and I don’t answer the phone or the door. It’s a miracle I am still alive today because suicide is the most comforting thought I carry. It allows me a sense of power amidst all the powerlessness that depression brings.

Anxiety. When I am feeling anxious, life becomes overwhelming. I cannot handle noise or movement. It makes me want to scream and lash out and stop the chaos in any way possible. I feel jumpy and desperate and totally out of control. When I get this way, I can truly identify with the person who goes on a shooting spree. That is hard to admit, but it is so true. Again, that fantasy allows me a sense of power amidst the powerlessness that anxiety brings.

Dissociation. Dissociation, for me, is very similar to being in a state of shock. Everything around me becomes surreal. It’s like I’ve been thrust into another reality where nothing is like it was before. Think of a time when you first heard the news of a loved one’s unexpected death. That is similar to what dissociation is like for me, except there was no death. Also, my memory gets really bad, and time becomes warped and distorted.

Those are my three primary experiences and symptoms that have been diagnosed by psychiatrists since 1982. The actual diagnoses vary, depending on the psychiatrist, and some of them include Major Depression, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, PTSD, and the list goes on. I’ve also been diagnosed with illnesses that have nothing to do with the symptoms I described. You see, once I got into the system, I developed other behaviors simply from the side effects from the medications I was given or from trying to survive in a psychiatric hospital or day program. These added behaviors were diagnosed with things like Chronic Undifferentiated Schizophrenia, Borderline Personality Disorder, Schizo Affective Disorder, and the list goes on.

These are the reasons I do not believe in the existence of mental illness. The system simply can’t get it right, most likely due to the fact that there are no scientific tests for any mental illness. Psychiatrists — and NAMI — will tell you that brain scans show differences in the brain chemistry of people with these illnesses, but hey, they failed to stop the medications before scanning the brains. Those scans are of chemically-altered brains! Other explanations are possible, too, like childhood trauma, which is the most prevelant occurance in people who have been diagnosed with a mental illness. But this whole brain-chemistry topic is for another post. It gets pretty involved.

So what do I do when those symptoms occur that I described above?

I embrace them. I honor them for what they are and I feel them for all they are worth. If I am depressed, I feel the depression as if I were being paid to describe to someone what depression is like. I describe it as I am feeling it. I don’t try to distract myself from it the way everyone advises me to do. I hear things like “Take a walk, call a friend, go out with friends, exercise, do anything except feel the depression, you are only dwelling on it and it will make things worse, and for godssake don’t isolate!” I used to feel so guilty for not being able to follow their advice. Not anymore! I will dwell on my depression. I will isolate. I will remove myself from all of society and I will treat myself to whatever my heart desires. That usually means isolating and wallowing in depression and crying my heart out for no reason. There is movement in crying! There is healing. I cry as deeply as my body will allow, and the exhaustion that follows is the most healing experience of all. And “healing” does not mean that the depression is over. It may be around for a while, and that is okay. It is not something that needs to be healed. Depression is simply another human experience, and by god, I am going to experience it!

So what happens when you stop trying to cure depression? The only thing constant is change, and that includes depression. It is always temporary, and you can count on it.

Allowing depression to run its natural course ultimately allowed me to become a more compassionate and empathetic human being than I ever was before. These traits are priceless and eternal. No SSRI could ever accomplish that. Not even close.

Intolerance for noise and movement peaked when I lived in the downtown high rise. The chaos was constant, and my cockatiel Jake added to the chaos every day. I was nearly at the point of hurting that precious little bird, and that’s when I realized I absolutely had to find a way to cope with my anxiety. So I began paying attention to the chaos, soaking it in, refusing to try and make it go away, no longer believing that I would find peace if it all stopped. I said “Bring it on!” and I meant it. I observed myself experiencing the chaos and knew that I was safe in the midst of it. It is an amazing, transformational process of surrender, which has far greater value than anything Xanax can offer.

This method also worked with Dissociation. The diagnosis used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder. If I have other personalities inside of me, why not get to know them and embrace them and learn from them? They are there for a reason, and they are me! I could write a whole post on this subject alone (and maybe I will), but trying to fight off any aspect of myself, whether it is depression, anxiety, or multiple personalities, is only denying myself yet another human experience. I refuse to do that anymore. I have a right to experience being human because I am human!

So, what really happens when I embrace all these symptoms rather than fix (mask) them through psychiatric “treatments”? Hmmmm…. well, I very rarely have any of these symptoms anymore, and when I do, they don’t last nearly as long. To be honest, I can’t remember details of their recurrences anymore because they don’t stand out like they used to. They are no longer “bad” or “horrible” in my mind or my experience, so why make a note of them? It’s like having a rainy day. Who cares? It just happens. Anyway, my goal was never to make the symptoms go away. It just happened.

Probably the greatest benefit of using this method is the lack of fear and guilt I now have toward any of these symptoms creeping into my life.

I truly believe I am on to something here.

I also use this method for other things that are uncomfortable, like quitting smoking. I didn’t use any distractions like gum or exercise whenever I would have a craving, which was constant in the beginning. I felt the craving, even invited it. And of course the cravings subsided. I have no desire to smoke anymore, but if the desire creeps in, I take the time to feel it and embrace it. Feelings can’t kill you, but smoking can.

One more thing…

What about the individual who experiences these symptoms yet is unable to embrace them without becoming a danger to herself or others?

This is the primary use, in my opinion, for medication — on a temporary basis. Just to get through the crisis. The greatest atrocity of the mental health system is dooming a human being to taking powerful, mind-altering drugs for the rest of her life.

This is what keeps me up at night. This is what fuels my passion as an advocate

Will Hall’s recovery story

2009-09-16T04:33:00.000+02:00

Since I was a child I’ve struggled with extreme emotions, voices, and powerful out of body experiences. I remember falling to the ground once in third grade, writhing in agony because I believed something was grabbing my back. I saw cartoons projected on the ceiling, and my fear was sometimes so strong I became mute. I often hid away, alone, overwhelmed and unable to describe what was going on.

I carried all this hidden within me my whole life, going from therapist to therapist but never feeling safe enough to really talk about what was happening. My first experience with psychiatry was when I was referred to a doctor at age 24. I left after one visit with a prescription for Prozac and a handful of free samples. At first Prozac was like the best cup of coffee I had ever had, I was being very productive, getting up early, and really feeling “better than well.” But then I had a manic reaction. I was suddenly acting very differently at work, wearing weird clothes, and getting into loud arguments with the people around me. It was the first time anything like this had ever happened, and it was absolutely terrifying. My doctor and therapist didn’t warn me, and nobody got me off the Prozac when the manic reaction started: it took me years to even realize that the drug was the cause. As a result of this manic side effect and the shame of how I acted, I ended up leaving work, a career position in an environmental organization and my first big job out of college. I lost all my colleagues, friends, and professional contacts, and started spiraling down into poverty.

At age 26, I hit a breaking point, and wandered the streets of San Francisco all night hearing angry voices telling me to kill myself. I ended up in the locked unit of public psychiatric ward in San Francisco. I was never asked if I wanted to go to the hospital, or given options or support in figuring out what to do. I was just observed for several hours in a clinic, and then they announced that I couldn’t leave. I was told I was a danger to myself and that it was for my own good, but like so many people it was really being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I begged them not to lock me up, because I didn’t want to lose my two jobs. I kept saying Please let me go so I can go to work, please, I can make a no harm contract, I don’t want to miss work. But I ended up losing those jobs.

When I arrived at the hospital, it was like a prison. The chaos and violence, the crowding and screams were terrifying. Throughout the night police brought in anyone fitting the ‘mental’ description and dumped us all together. In my vulnerable and fragile emotional state the impact of this pandemonium was devastating. I was in shock from fear.

That began a year-long stay in the public mental health system. I needed help, but instead I was treated like a disobedient child with a broken brain, punished and controlled, including more than two months in a locked unit. I went from being a human being to being a mental patient. I was put in restraints – not because anything I did but they said it was just for transporting me to the hospital. After being restrained I had nightmares that I was being raped, and I still have flashback reactions to anything that reminds me of that experience. During the time I was in the system I was locked in an isolation cell, threatened with being strip-searched, given more than a dozen different drugs, and subjected to patronizing group therapy that never acknowledged what was really going on.

I spent several months taking a very powerful ‘anti-psychotic’ tranquilizer drug called Navane, used to treat schizophrenia. It completely changed my personality and denied me the most basic sense of who I was; it made me stupider, slower, fatter, and also, because of the side effects, at times more desperate and suicidal. At one residential facility I was at, a man had killed himself right before I arrived. A patient who was his friend told me why: he was having severe side effects from his meds and no one was listening to him. The meds were why he jumped off the roof and killed himself, not mental illness. When I was on medication it was impossible to know how much of my pain was the medication, not the problems I had to begin with.

I have photos of that time, and the look in my eyes is totally different, not me, a different person. I was basically a zombie, but I was being docile so they considered it recovery. Today I worry that I might have some lingering side effects from the Navane and other drugs I took, including twitching in my body, memory disturbances, and worsened panic. There could be other long term damage that I may never be able to sort out and recognize.

My father is Korea War veteran and an electroshock survivor from hospitalizations in the 40s and 50s; he was subjected to what amounts to torture by doctors, at the request of my grandfather to punish him for acting out as an adolescent. My father’s emotional scars from this directly affected me and the rest of my family, because he never got adequate help and carried around severe trauma all during my childhood. When my own psychiatrists found out that my father had been in mental hospitals too, they used this to try to convince me my problems were genetic brain malfunctions correctable by medications. Not once did they ever ask me about my own childhood experiences of trauma, or make the connection of how this might be behind my difficulties. Only later, after researching things on my own and discovering the writing of Robert Whitaker and others, did I learn that there is no solid science behind blaming genetic predispositions and chemical imbalances, and that childhood trauma can play a big role in what gets labeled as ‘mental illness.’

After more than two months locked up the doctors said they had tried everything. What they meant was they had tried all the different medications they could think of. They said that when nothing else helps, electroshock is needed. I desperately wanted to get better, so I considered agreeing to go ahead with it. My father had told me of his bad experience with electroshock and how it harmed his memory: he keeps a quote from the author Ernest Hemingway above his desk, and I knew that Hemingway had killed himself after receiving electroshock. At the hospital they told me it was completely safe and effective and had no negative side effects.

But then I got very lucky. I was there involuntarily because I was considered to be a danger to myself and unable to take care of myself. A social worker came and suddenly announced that they were releasing me immediately. She said the public insurance that was paying for my stay had run out. So overnight I went from being too sick to let go, to being discharged. I ended up in a homeless shelter that was violent and run down, but being out of the locked ward instantly lifted my depression.
The testing they did in the hospital led them to give me a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, a form of schizophrenia. The humiliation of being labeled schizophrenic threatened to become a self-fulfilling prophecy: in the hospital, shelters, group homes and programs I was put in I was being socialized into being a mental patient. I was encouraged to see myself as a broken invalid, to forget my strengths and instead focus on my weaknesses and vulnerabilities as evidence of being a defective human being. I learned to fear what was inside me as signs of my ‘disorder,’ and to turn over authority of my mind and experience to doctors and therapists. Everything became a symptom. I remember telling my hospital psychiatrist I was reading existentialism and Marxist philosophy, and later I found out he had put this down in my medical record as a form of bizarre behavior. My ‘treatment plan’ instructed me to give up my passion for activism and organizing. When I tried to talk about my sexuality and being bisexual, they told me that my feelings were part of my disorder.

Because of all this, today I live with ongoing and very realistic fear of misunderstanding and stigma. I have to hide my psychiatric history from most people in my life. Once you’ve revealed your history to someone and then they treat you as less than a full human being for it, fearing you or acting differently towards you, you learn to keep your history hidden. This means a life in the shadows, a second class citizenship, a sense of not being part of the human community. Try living with that and see if you start to feel paranoid.

Today I have stayed out of the hospital for more than 14 years. I got off medication and learned about nutrition and changed my diet. I have to avoid milk, caffeine, and sugar, which directly cause my anxiety and symptoms to worsen. Of course, in the hospital every meal included milk, caffeine, and sugar. I took classes in yoga and meditation and began to see an acupuncturist. I do a lot of things to promote my own mental health, but I learned absolutely none of it in the mental health system. The mental health system was completely useless to my mental health.

I also watch for early warning signs of problems, and have wellness tools to support myself, such as regular exercise and paying close attention to my sleep patterns. I also began to consider the spiritual aspects of what I was going through, listening to the voices I heard and exploring their meaning. At one point back in San Francisco, for example, I heard a loud voice telling me I had to do yoga or I would die. It was frightening, but I realized it was like the voice of an angry parent or guardian looking out for me. So that voice is why I began to practice yoga.

I might be different than most people around me, but being different also means being creative and sensitive. I stopped seeing myself as a broken person with no chance for recovery. Most importantly, I reached out to other people who had also been diagnosed as mentally ill, and we began supporting each other in discovering our own pathways to healing. For too long I had been trying to do this all on my own. Having people around me who believed in my recovery was crucial.

It took me ten years before I could start researching and doing activism on these issues, without being overcome with fear and traumatic memories; today I still can be overwhelmed when I try to read books about the mental health system. When I moved to Northampton I was very fortunate to meet Oryx Cohen, a psychiatric abuse survivor who had been diagnosed as bipolar. There was no group run by and for people with severe mental illness labels themselves — everything was run by the mental health system. No one was talking about psychiatric abuse, it was as if it didn’t exist. So we co-founded the Freedom Center together.

Today we have a free weekly yoga class, a weekly support group, a writing group, a radio show, an acupuncture clinic, we do advocacy for people facing abuses, and have regular community events – you can find out more by checking out our website www.freedom-center.org. You can also read people’s stories on our Speak Out pages of our website, including stories of other people recovering without medication.

We learned that the protection and advocacy system, the human rights officers, the DMH complaints system – it might be better than it was twenty years ago, but the system is still failing to protect people’s basic rights. We’ve advocated around full blown medical malpractice, where staff are ignoring major side effects and the client ends up in a coma or with tardive dyskinesia brain damage, and nothing happens when complaints are filed.

So we do what we can. We have helped people fight forced drugging, helped people avoid hospitalization, helped work for phone access, told people about drug side effects their doctors didn’t, helped people locked up get basic rights like access to dental care, organized against drug overmedication, connected people with low-cost alternative health care, and done whatever we could to help and advocate for people. We’ve done all this as volunteers and with a shoestring budget. We also work with mental health staff and professionals. We welcome them to join us as allies and supporters, because we understand that staff are in this profession because they care about people, and that often they are trapped in institutions they want to change.
Freedom Center’s work is controversial, and people sometimes stereotype us as being anti-drugs. We are pro-self determination and pro-choice. We don’t tell people what to do or tell people to stop taking drugs. Many people who are part of the Freedom Center take psychiatric medications. We help people find out for themselves what works best for them, because only you can determine what helps you. We help people get off drugs slowly and carefully, but only if that is what they want to do. And we call for accurate, honest information about psychiatric drugs so people can make a truly informed choice. Right now the system is not giving people accurate information about drugs or about mental illness or helping them explore coming off if they want to. To meet people’s needs for guidance around medication, we recently published the Harm Reduction Guide To Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs, available for free online and also translated into Spanish. The Guide counsels people to make their own decisions, balancing the usefulness some people find in psych drugs with the dangers that can also come from them, in a harm reduction approach to meet people where they are at.

We also want to make sure people have access to alternatives. The whole system is focused on drugging people and downplaying how harmful drugs can be, and there are few real alternatives offered. Right now the mental health system is playing custodian to people in the Northampton community who are so medicated they are visibly stiff and blunted – you see some of these folks walking down the street year after year. We need to be honest that medicating people into submission is a failure, that options are needed and it is wrong to just watch people deteriorate from side effects. We need more funding for social supports, for therapy, and for alternative health care choices.

I recently saw a video from England, and I was completely surprised to see a public mental health client meet with a body worker who was giving her regular massages as part of her treatment. People say we’re somehow being unrealistic to expect that people in mental health crises should have access to alternative health care, such as massage and bodywork – but they are in fact already beginning to do it in other countries. Mental health is part of a broken health care system that in the US that needs to be completely overhauled, and alternative treatments and holistic prevention should be part of that as an option for people. In countries that use a lot less drugs than we do, the recovery rates are higher.

Freedom Center is also opposed to forced treatment. We have had involuntary hospitalization, restraints, seclusion, and forced drugging happen to us, and we know for ourselves how violent and damaging force can be. There are alternatives, and we need to start funding them and using them. Voluntary programs work better, cost less, and don’t run the risk of traumatizing people, which drives them away from services. Forced treatment is based on denying people equal rights under the law. Everyone in society has the right to refuse medical treatment, even if doctors say it is going to harm them to do so, such as cancer patients who can refuse treatment. But psychiatric patients are routinely denied the basic right of choice. Today there is funding for wars and corporate bail-outs but not for voluntary mental health care, and many people even end up in the criminal justice system because that is all society is funding.

As I’ve grown stronger and healthier, I was inspired to dedicate myself to helping others make it through the ordeal I survived. I joined the coordinator collective of The Icarus Project, a growing community of people living beyond the medical perspective and exploring creativity, activism, and spirituality. I started hosting a weekly radio show syndicated through Pacifica, Madness Radio. And after moving to Portland Oregon to attend graduate school I have begun organizing a Hearing Voices network here. Though many people find good support from doctors and medications, growing numbers around the world are calling for alternatives to the mainstream “one size fits all” approach to mental health. Freedom Center represents a living example of that alternative, and I hope you will start to hear more stories from people like me who have found our own unique ways to heal.

This story was used by Permission of Will Hall and the Freedom Center

Chocolate Saves Your Teeth

2009-09-15T09:24:00.001+02:00

Really, the polyphenolen in cocoa inhibit the growth of bacteria responsible for the creation of plaques. Polyphenolen from cocao significantly reduce biofilm formation and acid production by these bacteria. The acid production from sucrose was significantly inhibited resulting in a reduction of localized demineralization. . Be aware that chocolate not only contains cacao but also fat and sugar each with their own effects on weight and caries.

The formation of dental plaque, which plays an important role in the development of caries and periodontal disease in humans, could be initiated by several strains of oral streptococci, a kind of bacteria.
There are two roads from carbohydrates to caries pictured in the next figure. The formation of dental plaque leads to localized demineralization due to the accumulation of acids.

Chocolate contains polyphenolen The health benefits of polyphenols include antioxidant, anticancer, and anti-inflammatory effects. We previously discussed underlying mechanisms of cardioprotective properties of chocolate. But how do they protect against dental caries?

In animal research it has been shown that cocoa polyphenols inhibit the growth of bacteria responsible for the creation of plaques. Polyphenolen from cocao significantly reduce biofilm formation and acid production by these bacteria. The acid production from sucrose was significantly inhibited resulting in a reduction of localized demineralization.

This antibacterial effect of polyphenolen from coca is shared with coffee and green tea.

But hold on, these are mostly animal data, the effect of green tea is based on a larger body of evidence than coffee and cocoa. There is still a long way to go, to quote the authors of this review

The effectiveness of polyphenols from these beverages as anti-cariogenic agents needs to be confirmed by larger in vivo studies carried out on different age-groups, and in different geographical areas. Further research on anti-cariogenic activity of cocoa, coffee, and tea could open a promising avenue of applications, since they are relatively safe, have taste and odor largely appreciated and could be used at a reasonable cost in the preparation of specific anti-cariogenic remedies.

Hoping for chocolate tooth paste, and you?

Facebook Fan Check Application Not a Virus, But Avoid the “Fixes” [ALERT]

2009-09-15T09:18:00.000+02:00

Last week, we reported on the supposed “Facebook Fan Check Virus,” which allegedly spreads malware via Facebook. The app itself promises to tell you who your top Facebook friends are, based on how much they engage with your profile.

As initially suspected, Facebook has confirmed that the app itself isn’t a virus, though this thread on the app’s fan page suggests that it is rather buggy. To that end, Facebook also tells us that they’ve “disabled some of its functionality due to other concerns.”

Nonetheless, the viral spread of misinformation via status updates (likely originating with the virus creators) is leading people to search Google, where many links to malware still exist as malicious sites promise “fixes” that actually install a virus onto the user’s computer.

The bottom line seems to be there’s not much to see here, but don’t (a) be duped into downloading a “fix” for a virus that doesn’t exist or (b) install what appears to be a buggy application that Facebook has at least some issues with.

President Obama Calls Kanye West a “Jackass”

2009-09-15T09:14:00.000+02:00

Did President Obama call Kanye West a “jackass”? It would appear that he certainly did, when asked about Sunday night’s incident at MTV’s Video Music Awards in an off-the-record interview.

The interview was apparently conducted by CNBC, but the revealing tweet came from ABC’s Terry Moran, and read “Pres. Obama just called Kanye West a “jackass” for his outburst at VMAs when Taylor Swift won. Now THAT’S presidential.”

The tweet was quickly deleted, but much like Google, which caches web pages, Twitter search does not immediately remove deleted tweets, so Moran’s remark is still visible.

ABC has since apologized for the incident in a statement obtained by Politico, but the story could turn into an important one when it comes to Twittering White House reporters. While as far as off-the-record Presidential comments go this one is rather insignificant, the leak sets a very bad precedent. Expect to hear more about this incident in coming days.

HOW TO: Use Facebook’s @Mentions Status Tagging

2009-09-15T09:04:00.001+02:00

As you may know, Facebook rolled out its planned new feature that lets you “tag” other users in your status updates earlier today.

It’s very similar functionality to @replies on Twitter, and most folks will be pretty familiar with how it works and why you’d want to use it. Still, there are some differences to note, and some may appreciate a basic walkthough of how the new feature works.

Facebook’s version of the feature, like Twitter, also uses the @ symbol to invoke. However instead of having to simply know or remember the person’s username you’d like to tag, Facebook will generate an auto-suggest dropdown based on what you’ve typed after the @ symbol:

This is a nice touch considering that the scope of Facebook’s status tagging feature goes beyond just being able to tag your friends. You can also tag pretty much anything you’re connected to in the Facebook universe: companies, brands, artists and shows — anything that has a Facebook Page. You can also tag events and groups you’re a part of.

Once the item you’re wanting to tag appears in the list, all you have to do is click on it to select it and include a linked version of that entity in your status update:

Unlike Twitter, the @ symbol won’t actually remain as a part of your update; it’s merely the syntax that invokes the tagging feature itself. Instead, the full name of the person, page, event or group you tagged is now contained in your status update, contextually linked to its actual page. When your friends see your status update, they’ll be able to click on any of those links to find out more and possibly friend, fan, join or attend whatever you linked to:

Here’s an example of using a status update to tag an event:

And here’s the result after I’ve selected the correct event I want to tag in the update:

One complaint we have about the new feature is that it only works in your status updates, or if you post to someone else’s wall using the Share widget on their page. That means you can’t tag anyone inside of comments, which to us — and probably most other folks who are used to Twitter’s implementation of this feature — seems like a “missing” feature. It doesn’t really matter where the conversation is happening, and I may have occasion to want to tag something inside a discussion thread just as frequently as I might in a status update.

Apparently we’re not the only ones who have griped about this already, because Facebook’s Randy Zuckerberg mentioned in a spot on CNN today that a lot of folks had been requesting tagging within comments. She said Facebook is now considering that, and “it may happen.” We’ll be keeping a close eye on it of course, and will let you know if and when we hear about tagging coming to comments as well.

Otherwise, as you can see, the new status tagging feature is fairly easy to use, and could help direct you and your friends more easily to other content around Facebook they might also like. However, we don’t see too many of our friends making use of it quite yet — have you been making any use of the new status tagging feature yet? Have you noticed your friends making use of it? Share your experience so far in the comments.

Crop Circles: Google Logo Mystery Deepens

2009-09-15T08:54:00.001+02:00

Looks like Google is at is again with another mysterious logo unveil. They sent out a tweet with the latitude and longitude 51.327629, -0.5616088 and a twitpic with a new “crop circles”-themed logo. The logo also appears to be the logo for the Google homepage on September 15th, as many users report seeing it on the company’s homepage.

The latitude and longitude that were tweeted out correspond to Surrey, England, where one enterprising soul noticed a “flying saucer” sighting by a family car on the 15th, back in 1985.

Check out the logo and let us know what you think. It also appears the “l” in the logo has gone missing this time, whereas last time it was the “o” — it seems like an alien abduction theme of some sort is brewing, but what is the big picture here? Anybody have any guesses?

Compare The Old and the New Google, Side By Side

2009-09-15T08:15:00.002+02:00

Remember Google Caffeine? It’s the new Google search engine that’s going to replace the old one. We’ve tested it thoroughly, and while we’ve seen some signs of improvement, the change is far from dramatic.

The test version of Caffeine has been available on www2.sandbox.google.com for about a month, but now we’ve found a simple site that lets you compare the results between the old (current) Google engine and Caffeine. There are no options to speak of, just a search box and two sets of results, but you don’t really need much more for a quick test.

As far as the results go, the changes still seem rather subtle, but one has to admit that Google Search is functioning quite well as it is, so it’s hard to expect dramatic improvements in this area.