It’s that time of the year again, when we pull together our top picks for mental health and psychology stories in the news in the past year. There’s no magic to our choices, we’re just looking for stories that you believe had the biggest positive or negative impact in this area. For instance, last year the passage of the mental health parity law here in the U.S. was the biggest mental health news story of 2008. One example for this year might’ve been the debate we had surrounding what I thought was a pretty sensible law about postpartum depression. You can take a look at last year’s Year in Review to get a feel for what we’re looking for here.
Note your top picks in the comments and we’ll review those and the ones on our own list to come up with our big list for the year. If you had a favorite blog entry from the past year, we’d love to hear about that too in the comments!
The Year in Review will be published in December.
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
One Comment to
“Year in Review: Your Picks”
Here is my pick for a top story in psychology:
Events during the early life of rodents have been shown to have a marked effect on mental and physical health in adulthood. In particular mood and cognitive abilities can be adversely altered following prolonged periods of infant-mother separation. Animals experiencing such a maternal deficit during their early days later suffer from extreme hypersensitivities to certain stress-inducers. The recently published work of one group at the Max-Planck Institute Of Psychiatry in Germany has now drawn a direct link between such behavioral anomalies and the methylation state of well-defined regions of DNA.
More specifically, infant-mother separation caused a reduction in methylation of enhancers for the Adrenocorticotropin (AVP) hormone gene increasing the expression of AVP and ultimately disturbing brain endocrine hormone function. The resulting phenotypic changes were remarkable- a significant loss of memory and decreased mobility. Encouragingly these changes could be partially reversed using AVP receptor agonists- a finding that could have important medical ramifications given that these same enhancer regions are to be found across species including humans.
“This is the first study to depict a molecular mechanism by which stress early in life can cause effects later in life” noted McGill University epigeneticist Moshe Szyf in an interview with The Scientist magazine. The so-called hypomethylation of the AVP enhancer region was specific to an area of the brain that is intimately involved in stress related hormone release. The Max-Planck group further characterized the methylation enzymes, notably a protein by the name of MeCP2, whose activities have been irreversibly impacted.
Chris Murgatroyd, Alexandre V Patchev, Yonghe Wu, Vincenzo Micale, Yvonne Bockmühl, Dieter Fischer, Florian Holsboer, Carsten T Wotjak, Osborne F X Almeida & Dietmar Spengler (2009) Dynamic DNA methylation programs persistent adverse effects of early-life stress, Nature Neuroscience, published online 8 November 2009; doi:10.1038/nn.2436
Jef Akst (2009) Early Stress Alters Epigenome, The Scientist, Posted on 8th November, See http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/56139/
Join the Conversation! Post a Comment:
Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 20 Nov 2009
