Category: Neurofeedback

The brains of teenage girls who engage in serious forms of self-harm, including cutting, show features similar to those seen in adults with borderline personality disorder, a severe and hard-to-treat mental illness, a new study has found.

Reduced brain volumes seen in these girls confirms biological – and not just behavioral – changes and should prompt additional efforts to prevent and treat self-inflicted injury, a known risk factor for suicide, said study lead author Theodore Beauchaine, a professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.

This research is the first to highlight physical changes in the brain in teenage girls who harm themselves.

The findings are especially important given recent increases in self-harm in the U.S., which now affects as many as 20 percent of adolescents and is being seen earlier in childhood, Beauchaine said.

“Girls are initiating self-injury at younger and younger ages, many before age 10,” he said.

Cutting and other forms of self-harm often precede suicide, which increased among 10- to 14-year-old girls by 300 percent from 1999 to 2014, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During that same time, there was a 53 percent increase in suicide in older teen girls and young women. Self-injury also has been linked to later diagnosis of depression and borderline personality disorder.

In adults with borderline personality disorder, structural and functional abnormalities are well-documented in several areas of the brain that help regulate emotions.

But until this research, nobody had looked at the brains of adolescents who engage in self-harm to see if there are similar changes.

The new study, which appears in the journal Development and Psychopathology, included 20 teenage girls with a history of severe self-injury and 20 girls with no history of self-harm. Each girl underwent magnetic resonance imaging of her brain. When the researchers compared overall brain volumes of the 20 self-injuring girls with those in the control group, they found clear decreases in volume in parts of the brain called the insular cortex and inferior frontal gyrus.

These regions, which are next to one another, are two of several areas where brain volumes are smaller in adults with borderline personality disorder, or BPD, which, like cutting and other forms of self-harm, is more common among females. Brain volume losses are also well-documented in people who’ve undergone abuse, neglect and trauma, Beauchaine said.

The study also found a correlation between brain volume and the girls’ self-reported levels of emotion dysregulation, which were gathered during interviews prior to the brain scans.

Read more: https://news.osu.edu/brain-changes-found-in-self-injuring-teen-girls/

Since the last decade or so, we have been witnessing an upsurge in neurological problems such as strokes, Parkinson’s disease, diabetic neuropathy, and motor neuron diseases in our society. An alarming concern is that these problems have started affecting people at a younger age. Worldwide, neurological disorders are associated with higher rates of morbidity and mortality which in turn inflict higher cost of rehabilitation upon the sufferers. Given the topography, changing life style and the stressors, Kashmiris , per se, have a strong affinity toward neurological problems.
A belief that still dominates the clinical decision making of most healthcare professionals is that the recovery from neurological disorders is strictly a time bound phenomenon and to expect it happen after a set time frame, is unrealistic. Research has nullified it and suggests that brain can modify itself at any point in time provided the treatment is channelized in a right direction.
Unfortunately, we all come across a chunk of people who have fallen prey to such dogmas and live a lifeless life. Another chunk of the patient population is suffering because of its contentment with regard to the menial and irrelevant improvements. Needless to mention, it is the acumen of a skilled neuro-physiotherapist that determines the potential of rewiring of central nervous system connections essential for recovery. The concept of recovery has changed over a period of time; earlier, recovery was perceived as patients’ ability to achieve nominal and insignificant improvements that would enable them to come out of bed and walk a few steps. On the contrary, recovery now is tantamount to movements with a purpose in order to help patients regain functions, and eventually fulfill their social responsibilities.
Rehabilitation of patients with neurological problems is a high cost affair with huge financial and social costs. Soon after a person gets afflicted with a neurological disorder, besides the patient, the family members start bearing the brunt of the disease. Research reports reveal that the caregivers of neurologically impaired patients are exposed to a high level of stress which affects their productivity and, in turn, compromises the role they play in society. Recovery from neurological disorders, being relatively slower, demands close supervision and assistance from family members. In the meantime family members start dedicating their time and money towards the rehabilitation of the patient. Moreover, with modern family systems, every ailing person does not enjoy the luxury of extended social support and, eventually a number of impediments start emerging in the path of recovery.
In a nutshell, neurological problems not only affect patients but pose a massive challenge to family members too. The best strategy to cope up with the neurological problems is to facilitate patients’ functional independence as rapidly as possible that will eventually offload the family members to a greater extent.
Neurorehabilitation has undergone timely refinements to ensure best possible and evidence based care to patients. Modern day Neurorehabilitation uses approaches that emphasize minimizing compensations to ensure complete functional recovery. Functional independence is its essence and a neuro-physiotherapist proves to be an apt resource to deliver the best in order to achieve the short-term and long-term functional milestones. People in the valley have a limited knowledge of neuro-physiotherapy and the role a neuro-physiotherapist plays. A neuro-Physiotherapist, being a responsible member of healthcare team, plays a vital role right from the onset of a neurological problem to the stage of community rehabilitation of a patient.
Since Physiotherapists are movement science experts, fellow medical professionals and patients’ families can’t afford taking a neuro-Physiotherapist’s consultation and advice for granted. An insignificant problem, if left unaddressed, can have devastating repercussions later. For instance, a trivial fault in the shoulder after stroke/brain injury can affect a patient’s ability to drink and eat with the hand. Therefore, physiotherapy consultation from the outset remains crucial in determining a patient’s functional outcomes and ignoring it is at one’s peril.
Physiotherapists too need to be well versed in the latest developments in the field of neuro-physiotherapy to ensure quality care delivery. A neuro-Physiotherapist can make best use of treatments methods such as Constraint Induced Movement Therapy (CIMT), Virtual Reality (VR), Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES), Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation (PNF), Neurodevelopmental Treatment (NDT), Motor Relearning Programme (MRP), Task Specific Training, Partial Body Weight Support Treadmill Training (PBWSTT), and Robotics and so on. In order to achieve set functional objectives, neuro-physiotherapists equipped with the magic wand will surely help patients impart quality to their lives.

Source: https://kashmirreader.com/2018/10/24/how-neuro-physiotherapy-imparts-quality-to-life/

Summary: A new study reports when certain brain areas react more strongly to food rewards than financial rewards, children are more likely to overeat, even if they are not hungry or overweight.

Source: Penn State.

The reason why some people find it so hard to resist finishing an entire bag of chips or bowl of candy may lie with how their brain responds to food rewards, leaving them more vulnerable to overeating.

In a study with children, researchers found that when certain regions of the brain reacted more strongly to being rewarded with food than being rewarded with money, those children were more likely to overeat, even when the child wasn’t hungry and regardless of if they were overweight or not.

Shana Adise, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vermont who led the study while earning her doctorate at Penn State, said the results give insight into why some people may be more prone to overeating than others. The findings may also give clues on how to help prevent obesity at a younger age.

“If we can learn more about how the brain responds to food and how that relates to what you eat, maybe we can learn how to change those responses and behavior,” Adise said. “This also makes children an interesting population to work with, because if we can stop overeating and obesity at an earlier age, that could be really beneficial.”

Previous research on how the brain’s response to food can contribute to overeating has been mixed. Some studies have linked overeating with brains that are more sensitive to food rewards, while others have found that being less sensitive to receiving food rewards makes you more likely to overeat.

Additionally, other studies have shown that people who are willing to work harder for food than other types of rewards, like money, are more likely to overeat and gain weight over time. But the current study is the first to show that children who have greater brain responses to food compared to money rewards are more likely to overeat when appealing foods are available.

“We know very little about the mechanisms that contribute to overeating,” Adise said. “The scientific community has developed theories that may explain overeating, but whether or not they actually relate to food intake hadn’t yet been evaluated. So we wanted to go into the lab and test whether a greater brain response to anticipating and winning food, compared to money, was related to overeating.”

For the study, 59 children between the ages of 7 and 11 years old made four visits to the Penn State’s Children’s Eating Behavior Laboratory.

During the first three visits, the children were given meals designed to measure how they eat in a variety of different situations, such as a typical meal when they’re hungry versus snacks when they’re not hungry. How much the children ate at each meal was determined by weighing the plates before and after the meals.

On their fourth visit, the children had fMRI scans as they played several rounds of a game in which they guessed if a computer-generated number would be higher or lower than five. They were then told that if they were right, they would win either money, candy or a book, before it was revealed if they were correct or not.

The researchers found that when various regions of the brain reacted more to anticipating or winning food compared to money, those children were more likely to overeat.

“We also found that the brain’s response to food compared to money was related to overeating regardless of how much the child weighed,” Adise said. “Specifically, we saw that increased brain responses in areas of the brain related to cognitive control and self control when the children received food compared to money were associated with overeating.”

Adise added that this is important because it suggests there may be a way to identify brain responses that can predict the development of obesity in the future.

Kathleen Keller, associate professor of nutritional sciences, Penn State, said the study — recently published in the journal Appetite — backs up the theory that an increased brain response in regions of the brain related to rewards is associated with eating more food in a variety of situations.

“We predicted that kids who had an increased response to food relative to money would be the ones to overeat, and that’s what we ended up seeing,” Keller said. “We specifically wanted to look at kids whose brains responded to one type of a reward over another. So it wasn’t that they’re overly sensitive to all rewards, but that they’re highly sensitive to food rewards.”

Keller said the findings give insight into how the brain influences eating, which is important because it could help identify children who are at risk for obesity or other poor eating habits before those habits actually develop.

“Until we know the root cause of overeating and other food-related behaviors, it’s hard to give good advice on fixing those behaviors,” Keller said. “Once patterns take over and you overeat for a long time, it becomes more difficult to break those habits. Ideally, we’d like to prevent them from becoming habits in the first place.”

Source: NeuroScience