Word: braine
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...long fascinated researchers. While other manifestations of the illness (an obsession with weight and food, an intense fear of being fat) can be more readily traced to psychological distress, the anorexic's distorted perception of herself has suggested to many a biological abnormality - that something is amiss in the brain itself...
...study by two Sydney researchers, Perminder Sachdev and Naresh Mondraty, has now cast more light on this idea. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) equipment, the pair detected marked differences in brain activity between anorexic women and healthy controls when the two groups looked at photos of themselves. Put simply, confronted with her own image, the anorexic's brain partly shuts down. The implications for our understanding of the illness are significant, argues Mondraty, a psychiatrist at the Peter Beumont Centre for Eating Disorders. Once it's full-blown, he says, anorexia "is not really about societal pressures to be thin...
...recent good fortune to Whannell and Wan, who ushered in the latest iteration of big-screen bloodlust with the first Saw movie in 2004, just as eerie Japanese horror movies like The Ring were peaking. Whannell was a Melbourne, Australia, TV host who thought he had a brain tumor. His film-school buddy, Wan, was unemployed. "I would have done anything to be healthy again," says Whannell, now 29, who, it turned out, was actually just suffering from stress headaches. When he felt better, he wrote the script for Saw, in which a terminally ill cancer patient, Jigsawultimately played...
...wouldn't love an easy explanation for autism, the heartbreaking brain disorder whose rates have been rising sharply and mysteriously over the past 30 years? History has served up many possibilities, beginning with a now discredited theory put forward by psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, who famously attributed the condition to uncaring "refrigerator moms." Today autism is thought to involve a genetic vulnerability that's triggered by an unknown X factor, or factors, in the environment. Recent speculation has focused on pesticides, childhood vaccines and thimerosal, a mercury-based compound that until recently was used to preserve vaccines...
...population--is associated with an increased risk of autism. People with two copies of the gene have twice the average risk of autism. Those with one copy face a slightly increased risk. The gene is intriguing because it codes for a protein that's active not only in the brain--the organ most affected by autism--but also in the immune system and the gastrointestinal tract, both of which can function poorly in many people with autism...