Word: ocd
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Those areas are linked along a circuit," says Dr. Sanjaya Saxena, director of the OCD program at the University of California at San Diego. It's the job of that wiring to regulate your response to the stimuli around you, including how anxious you are in the face of threatening or frustrating things. "That circuit," says Saxena, "is abnormally active in people with OCD...
Saxena, who has conducted extensive scanning research, has even come to recognize the neural fingerprint that distinguishes one less common type of OCD behavior--hoarding--from better-known ones. Hoarders who live alone have been known to crowd themselves into small areas of their home, with clear paths left from sofa to kitchen to bathroom, and the rest piled high with debris. When Saxena scanned the brains of these highly particular people, he found that they had equally particular abnormalities. Instead of hyperactivity in any area, they had reduced activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus, the part of the brain...
ALTHOUGH SCANS CAN TELL YOU THE landscape of the obsessive-compulsive brain, they can't tell you how it got to be that way. As with many other psychological disorders, research is revealing that ocd has a powerful genetic component. Having any blood relative with ocd puts your risk of the disorder at 12%, and while that seems low, it's still more than four times as high as that of the U.S. population as a whole...
...disorder comes to you through the genes, the next job is to determine which ones. A team of investigators at Johns Hopkins University last summer discovered half a dozen areas in the human genome that appear to be linked to the development of OCD. Analyzing 1,008 blood samples from 219 families in which at least two siblings had the disorder, they discovered gene markers at six sites on five chromosomes that appear more frequently in those kids than in family members and other people without OCD. That study did not tease out how those genes do their damage...
...much on hand. Then the signals just keep coming. In the case of the alarm centers in the brain, that means the warning bell just keeps on ringing. "Glutamate has to be taken up quickly because otherwise it becomes toxic to the brain cells," says Vladimir Coric, director of OCD research at Yale University and a leader in studies of the chemical...