49 posts
The constant ebb and flow of hormones that guide the menstrual cycle don't just affect reproductive anatomy. They also reshape the brain, and a new study has given us insight into how this happens. Led by neuroscientists Elizabeth Rizor and Viktoriya Babenko of the University of California Santa Barbara, a team of researchers tracked 30 women who menstruate over their cycles, documenting in detail the structural changes that take place in the brain as hormonal profiles fluctuate. The results, which are yet to be peer-reviewed but can be found on preprint server bioRxiv, suggest that structural changes in the brain during menstruation may not be limited to those regions associated with the menstrual cycle. "These results are the first to report simultaneous brain-wide changes in human white matter microstructure and cortical thickness coinciding with menstrual cycle-driven hormone rhythms," the researchers write.
Continue Reading.
â Sylvia Plath (via lunamonchtuna)
From heart disease to IUDs: How doctors dismiss womenâs pain
Several studies support the claim that gender bias in medicine routinely leads to a denial of pain relief for female patients for a range of health conditions
One woman was told she was being âdramaticâ when she pleaded for a brain scan after suffering months of headaches and pounding in her ears. It turned out she had a brain tumor. Another was ignored as she cried out in pain during a 33-hour labor. She was supposed to be getting pain medication through her epidural, but it had fallen out. Dozens of women complained of torturous pain as their vaginal walls were punctured during an egg retrieval process. They were told their pain was normal, but, in actuality, they were getting saline instead of anesthesia. These are just some of the stories of women who say their pain and suffering has been dismissed or misdiagnosed by doctors. Although these are anecdotal reports, a number of studies support the claim that women in pain often are not taken as seriously as men.
This year, the Journal of the American Heart Association reported that women who visited emergency departments with chest pain waited 29 percent longer than men to be evaluated for possible heart attacks. An analysis of 981 emergency room visits showed that women with acute abdominal pain were up to 25 percent less likely than their male counterparts to be treated with powerful opioid painkillers. Another study showed that middle-aged women with chest pain and other symptoms of heart disease were twice as likely to be diagnosed with a mental illness compared with men who had the same symptoms. âI was told I knew too much, that I was working too hard, that I was stressed out, that I was anxious,â said Ilene Ruhoy, a 53-year-old neurologist from Seattle, who had head pain and pounding in her ears. Despite having a medical degree, Ruhoy said she struggled to get doctors to order a brain scan. By the time she got it in 2015, a tennis ball-sized tumor was pushing her brain to one side. She needed surgery, but first, she rushed home, hugged her 11-year-old daughter and wrote her a letter to tell her goodbye.
Ruhoy did not die on the operating table, but her tumor had grown so large it could not be entirely removed. Now, she has several smaller tumors that require radiation treatment. She said many of her female patients have had experiences similar to hers. âTheyâre not validated with regards to their concerns; theyâre gaslit; theyâre not understood,â she said. âThey feel like no one is listening to them.â
Doubts about womenâs pain can affect treatment for a wide range of health issues, including heart problems, stroke, reproductive health, chronic illnesses, adolescent pain and physical pain, among other things, studies show. Research also suggests that women are more sensitive to pain than men and are more likely to express it, so their pain is often seen as an overreaction rather than a reality, said Roger Fillingim, director of the Pain Research and Intervention Center of Excellence at the University of Florida. Fillingim, who co-wrote a review article on sex differences in pain, said there are many possible explanations, including hormones, genetics and even social factors such as gender roles. Regardless, he said, âyou treat the pain that the patient has, not the pain that you think the patient should have.â
Women say reproductive health complaints are commonly ignored
Women often cite pain bias around areas of reproductive health, including endometriosis, labor pain and insertion of an intrauterine device, or IUD. When Molly Hill made an appointment at a Connecticut clinic in 2017 to get an IUD, she said she was warned it would be uncomfortable, but she was not prepared for âhorrificâ pain. Hill, now 27 and living in San Francisco, recalled that during the procedure, she began crying in pain and shouted at the doctor to stop. âWeâre almost done,â she said the doctor told her and continued the procedure. âIt was full-body, electrifying, knife-stabbing pain,â she said. After it was done, she said she lay sobbing on the table in physical and emotional pain. âIt felt violating, too, to have that pain that deep in your core where you feel the most vulnerable.â
Studies consistently show that women who have not experienced vaginal birth have much higher pain during IUD insertion compared with women who have given birth. A Swedish study found that among 224 women who had not given birth, 89 percent reported moderate or severe pain. One in six of the women said the pain was severe. Although numbing agents and local anesthetics are available, they are rarely used.
In some cases, women have sued physicians for ignoring their pain. Dozens of women sued Yale University claiming that during an egg harvesting procedure at its infertility clinic, they were supposed to be receiving the powerful painkiller fentanyl. But some women were getting only diluted pain medication or none at all, according to lawsuits filed in the state Superior Court in Connecticut. Later, the clinic discovered a nurse had been stealing vials of fentanyl and replacing the painkiller with saline solution. The nurse pleaded guilty last year and was sentenced for tampering with the drugs. One of the plaintiffs, Laura Czar, wrote about her experience for Elle magazine, describing it as âa horrible, gut-wrenching pain,â and told a doctor at the time, âI can feel everything youâre doing.â Despite her protests, the doctor continued. Yale said in a statement that it âdeeply regretsâ the womenâs distress and has âreviewed its procedures and made changes to further oversight of pain control and controlled substances.â
Racial disparities in pain management
For Sharee Turpin, the pain of sickle-cell disease sometimes feels like tiny knives slicing her open. Sickle cell disease is an inherited blood disorder that can cause suffering so severe, its attacks are called âpain crises.â But when Turpin, who is Black, experiences a pain crisis, the 34-year-old does not rush to the ER in Rochester, N.Y. Instead, she combs her hair, mists some perfume and slips on her âSunday bestâ in hopes that the doctors and nurses wonât peg her as a drug seeker, she said. Sometimes, Turpin gets a care team that understands her pain. Other times, she is treated as a bother. âIâve even been told âshut upâ by a nurse because I was screaming too loud while I was in pain,â she said.
Abundant research shows racial bias in pain treatment. A 2016 study found half of white medical students and residents held at least one false belief about biological differences between Blacks and Whites, and were more likely to underestimate Black patientsâ pain. âThe management of pain is one of the largest disparities that we see between Black people and White people in the American health-care system,â said Tina Sacks, an associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley and author of âInvisible Visits: Black Middle-Class Women in the American Healthcare System.â
Labeling women âhystericalâ or blaming psychological causes
Research shows men in chronic pain tend to be regarded as âstoicâ while women are more likely to be considered âemotionalâ and âhystericalâ and accused of âfabricating the pain.â Carol Klay, a 68-year-old from Tampa, had endured years of chronic pain from arthritis, degenerative disk disease and spinal stenosis. During a hospital stay last year, her doctor noted in her medical record that she was crying âhysterically.â Klay said she was crying because she was unable to sit, stand or walk without agony, and the doctor had removed morphine from her cocktail of pain medications. She wonders whether the doctor âwould have called me hysterical if I was a man,â she said. Tampa General Hospital said it could not discuss specific patients, but stated: âPatient treatment plans, including medication orders to reduce pain, are prescribed by multi-disciplinary clinical teams.â Research shows womenâs physical pain is also often attributed to psychological causes.
Jan Maderios, a 72-year-old Air Force veteran from Chipley, Fla., said the trauma of having pain dismissed by doctors has stayed with her for years. She saw about a dozen doctors in the early 1970s for pelvic pain. When clinicians could not identify the cause of her pain, she was referred to a psychiatrist.
âYou start to doubt yourself after so many medical experts tell you thereâs nothing wrong with you,â she said. After a hysterectomy in 1976, Maderios learned that fibroid tumors in her uterus had been the source of her pain. She said learning her pain was real â and physical â âmade all the difference in the world.â
Why womenâs pain complaints often arenât taken seriously
During a 33-hour labor with her first child in 2011, Anushay Hossain, 42, of D.C., opted for epidural pain relief but said she still felt it all â every contraction, every cramp and every dismissal of her pain by her medical team. The doctor reassured her that she was getting the maximum dosage of pain medication.
In fact, she wasnât getting any at all. She said her epidural had slipped out. By the time the error was caught, she was shaking uncontrollably and in need of an emergency Caesarean section, she said. âThereâs a pain gap, but thereâs also a credibility gap,â said Hossain, author of âThe Pain Gap: How Sexism and Racism in Healthcare Kill Women.â âWomen are not believed about their bodies âperiod.â
This pain gap may stem, in part, from the fact that women have historically been excluded from medical research. It wasnât until 2016 that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) required sex to be considered as a biological variable in most studies it funded. âWeâre making progress,â said David Thomas, special adviser to the director of NIHâs Office of Research on Womenâs Health. âBut we do have a long way to go because thereâs this whole institutional approach to doing research â pain and beyond â where it tends to be male-focused.â
Nearly 95 percent of U.S. medical school students said instruction on sex and gender differences in medicine should be included in curriculums, according to a 2015 survey. But only 43 percent said their curriculum had helped them understand those differences and only 34.5 percent said they felt prepared to manage them in a health-care setting.
âIt is changing, but itâs changing very slowly,â said Janice Werbinski, immediate past president of the American Medical Womenâs Association and chair of the mentorship committee of the associationâs Sex and Gender Health Collaborative.
How women can advocate for better pain care
It took decades to solve the mystery of Maureen Woodsâs chronic pain. Woods, 64, of Myersville, Md., started having joint pain in her teens and, over the years, told dozens of doctors her pain was âdebilitating,â she said. Some told her it was all in her head. In 2017, she was diagnosed with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder often causing loose joints, dislocations and chronic pain. She said women who are not being heard should keep advocating for themselves. âYou have to go with your gut â something is wrong and I need to find a doctor who can figure it out,â she said. Marjorie Jenkins, dean of the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville, urged women against feeling pressured to accept an âeverything is normalâ non-diagnosis. âIf your provider does not appear to be listening to you or believing what youâre saying, then you need a new provider,â Jenkins said. âYou are the client, you are the customer and you are the owner of your health.â
Women can also take a family member, friend or other support person who can corroborate their stories, said Alyson McGregor, an emergency medicine professor at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville and author of the book âSex Matters: How Male-Centric Medicine Endangers Womenâs Health and What We Can Do About It.â Particularly in emergency departments, she said, there can be an inherent bias. âThereâs this assumption that women are emotional and theyâre anxious and that thatâs the main issue,â she said.
Sylvia Plath, from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Story from the Washington Post here, non-paywall version here.
Washington Post stop blocking linksharing and shit challenge.
"The young woman was catatonic, stuck at the nursesâ station â unmoving, unblinking and unknowing of where or who she was.
Her name was April Burrell.
Before she became a patient, April had been an outgoing, straight-A student majoring in accounting at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. But after a traumatic event when she was 21, April suddenly developed psychosis and became lost in a constant state of visual and auditory hallucinations. The former high school valedictorian could no longer communicate, bathe or take care of herself.
April was diagnosed with a severe form of schizophrenia, an often devastating mental illness that affects approximately 1 percent of the global population and can drastically impair how patients behave and perceive reality.
âShe was the first person I ever saw as a patient,â said Sander Markx, director of precision psychiatry at Columbia University, who was still a medical student in 2000 when he first encountered April. âShe is, to this day, the sickest patient Iâve ever seen.â ...
It would be nearly two decades before their paths crossed again. But in 2018, another chance encounter led to several medical discoveries...
Markx and his colleagues discovered that although Aprilâs illness was clinically indistinguishable from schizophrenia, she also had lupus, an underlying and treatable autoimmune condition that was attacking her brain.
After months of targeted treatments [for lupus] â and more than two decades trapped in her mind â April woke up.
The awakening of April â and the successful treatment of other people with similar conditions â now stand to transform care for some of psychiatryâs sickest patients, many of whom are languishing in mental institutions.
Researchers working with the New York state mental health-care system have identified about 200 patients with autoimmune diseases, some institutionalized for years, who may be helped by the discovery.
And scientists around the world, including Germany and Britain, are conducting similar research, finding that underlying autoimmune and inflammatory processes may be more common in patients with a variety of psychiatric syndromes than previously believed.
Although the current research probably will help only a small subset of patients, the impact of the work is already beginning to reshape the practice of psychiatry and the way many cases of mental illness are diagnosed and treated.
âThese are the forgotten souls,â said Markx. âWeâre not just improving the lives of these people, but weâre bringing them back from a place that I didnât think they could come back from.â ...
The medical team set to work counteracting Aprilâs rampaging immune system and started April on an intensive immunotherapy treatment for neuropsychiatric lupus...
The regimen is grueling, requiring a month-long break between each of the six rounds to allow the immune system to recover. But April started showing signs of improvement almost immediately...
âIâve always wanted my sister to get back to who she was,â Guy Burrell said.
In 2020, April was deemed mentally competent to discharge herself from the psychiatric hospital where she had lived for nearly two decades, and she moved to a rehabilitation center...
Because of visiting restrictions related to covid, the familyâs face-to-face reunion with April was delayed until last year. Aprilâs brother, sister-in-law and their kids were finally able to visit her at a rehabilitation center, and the occasion was tearful and joyous.
âWhen she came in there, you wouldâve thought she was a brand-new person,â Guy Burrell said. âShe knew all of us, remembered different stuff from back when she was a child.â ...
The family felt as if theyâd witnessed a miracle.
âShe was hugging me, she was holding my hand,â Guy Burrell said. âYou might as well have thrown a parade because we were so happy, because we hadnât seen her like that in, like, forever.â
âIt was like she came home,â Markx said. âWe never thought that was possible.â
...After Aprilâs unexpected recovery, the medical team put out an alert to the hospital system to identify any patients with antibody markers for autoimmune disease. A few months later, Anca Askanase, a rheumatologist and director of the Columbia Lupus Center,who had been on Aprilâs treatment team, approached Markx. âI think we found our girl,â she said.
When Devine Cruz was 9, she began to hear voices. At first, the voices fought with one another. But as she grew older, the voices would talk about her, [and over the years, things got worse].
For more than a decade, the young woman moved in and out of hospitals for treatment. Her symptoms included visual and auditory hallucinations, as well as delusions that prevented her from living a normal life.
Devine was eventually diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which can result in symptoms of both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. She also was diagnosed with intellectual disability.
She was on a laundry list of drugs â two antipsychotic medications, lithium, clonazepam, Ativan and benztropine â that came with a litany of side effects but didnât resolve all her symptoms...
She also had lupus, which she had been diagnosed with when she was about 14, although doctors had never made a connection between the disease and her mental health...
Last August, the medical team prescribed monthly immunosuppressive infusions of corticosteroids and chemotherapy drugs, a regime similar to what April had been given a few years prior. By October, there were already dramatic signs of improvement.
âShe was like âYeah, I gotta go,ââ Markx said. ââLike, Iâve been missing out.ââ
After several treatments, Devine began developing awareness that the voices in her head were different from real voices, a sign that she was reconnecting with reality. She finished her sixth and final round of infusions in January.
In March, she was well enough to meet with a reporter. âI feel like Iâm already better,â Devine said during a conversation in Markxâs office at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where she was treated. âI feel myself being a person that I was supposed to be my whole entire life.â ...
Her recovery is remarkable for several reasons, her doctors said. The voices and visions have stopped. And she no longer meets the diagnostic criteria for either schizoaffective disorder or intellectual disability, Markx said...
Today, Devine lives with her mother and is leading a more active and engaged life. She helps her mother cook, goes to the grocery store and navigates public transportation to keep her appointments. She is even babysitting her siblingsâ young children â listening to music, taking them to the park or watching âFrozen 2â â responsibilities her family never would have entrusted her with before her recovery.
While it is likely that only a subset of people diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychotic disorders have an underlying autoimmune condition, Markx and other doctors believe there are probably many more patients whose psychiatric conditions are caused or exacerbated by autoimmune issues...
The cases of April and Devine also helped inspire the development of the SNF Center for Precision Psychiatry and Mental Health at Columbia, which was named for the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, which awarded it a $75 million grant in April. The goal of the center is to develop new treatments based on specific genetic and autoimmune causes of psychiatric illness, said Joseph Gogos, co-director of the SNF Center.
Markx said he has begun care and treatment on about 40 patients since the SNF Center opened. The SNF Center is working with the New York State Office of Mental Health, which oversees one of the largest public mental health systems in America, to conduct whole genome sequencing and autoimmunity screening on inpatients at long-term facilities.
For âthe most disabled, the sickest of the sick, even if we can help just a small fraction of them, by doing these detailed analyses, thatâs worth something,â said Thomas Smith, chief medical officer for the New York State Office of Mental Health. âYouâre helping save someoneâs life, get them out of the hospital, have them live in the community, go home.â
Discussions are underway to extend the search to the 20,000 outpatients in the New York state system as well. Serious psychiatric disorders, like schizophrenia, are more likely to be undertreated in underprivileged groups. And autoimmune disorders like lupus disproportionately affect women and people of color with more severity.
How many people ultimately will be helped by the research remains a subject of debate in the scientific community. But the research has spurred excitement about the potential to better understand what is going on in the brain during serious mental illness...
Emerging research has implicated inflammation and immunological dysfunction as potential players in a variety of neuropsychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia, depression and autism.
âIt opens new treatment possibilities to patients that used to be treated very differently,â said Ludger Tebartz van Elst, a professor of psychiatry and psychotherapy at University Medical Clinic Freiburg in Germany.
In one study, published last year in Molecular Psychiatry, Tebartz van Elst and his colleagues identified 91 psychiatric patients with suspected autoimmune diseases, and reported that immunotherapies benefited the majority of them.
Belinda Lennox, head of the psychiatry department at the University of Oxford, is enrolling patients in clinical trials to test the effectiveness of immunotherapy for autoimmune psychosis patients.
As a result of the research, screenings for immunological markers in psychotic patients are already routine in Germany, where psychiatrists regularly collect samples from cerebrospinal fluid.
Markx is also doing similar screening with his patients. He believes highly sensitive and inexpensive blood tests to detect different antibodies should become part of the standard screening protocol for psychosis.
Also on the horizon: more targeted immunotherapy rather than current âsledgehammer approachesâ that suppress the immune system on a broad level, said George Yancopoulos, the co-founder and president of the pharmaceutical company Regeneron.
âI think weâre at the dawn of a new era. This is just the beginning,â said Yancopoulos."
-via The Washington Post, June 1, 2023
A 2013 study in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology found that among more than 750,000 women, about 46% removed their ovaries at the time of hysterectomy whereas 54% didnât. Even premenopausal women who preserve their ovaries during a hysterectomy are at increased risk of dementia and heart disease but less so, according to multiple studies.
The health risks associated with the removal of ovaries are significant.
Rocca was co-author of a 2021 Jama Network Open study that found that women under 46 who removed both of their ovaries with or without a hysterectomy had an increased risk of mild cognitive impairment and performed worse on cognitive tests 30 years later compared with women who didnât undergo the procedure.
Another study Rocca co-wrote found that women who had ovaries removed before age 50 faced higher risks for several conditions years later, including heart disease and osteoporosis.
Other studies have linked the procedures to an increased risk of dementia, Parkinsonâs disease and accelerated aging.
Partial quote. Just got this as a little news alert and itâs something I think about semi frequently because of my job. Really under discussed and kind of wild
Sylvia Plath // Fyodor Dostoyevsky
love elizabeth s.
The pursuit of a cure for Alzheimer's disease is becoming an increasingly competitive and contentious quest with recent years witnessing several important controversies. In July 2022, Science magazine reported that a key 2006 research paper, published in the prestigious journal Nature, which identified a subtype of brain protein called beta-amyloid as the cause of Alzheimer's, may have been based on fabricated data. One year earlier, in June 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration had approved aducanumab, an antibody-targeting beta-amyloid, as a treatment for Alzheimer's, even though the data supporting its use were incomplete and contradictory.
Continue Reading.
Sylvia Plath, from Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices [ID in alt text]
- đđđđ đđđđŁđđđđđ đ.
Around 8% of human DNA is made up of genetic sequences acquired from ancient viruses. These sequences, known as human endogenous retroviruses (or Hervs), date back hundreds of thousands to millions of years â with some even predating the emergence of Homo sapiens. Our latest research suggests that some ancient viral DNA sequences in the human genome play a role in susceptibility to psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder. Hervs represent the remnants of these infections with ancient retroviruses. Retroviruses are viruses that insert a copy of their genetic material into the DNA of the cells they infect.
Continue Reading.
Joan Didion writes, in On Keeping a Notebook, that the purpose of keeping a notebook, or a journal for that matter, isnât because you simply want keep a personal record of things; but because you want to remember the person you were at that specific moment. we write things down on our notebook/journal/diary (whichever one of those you keep) because we want to remember. we want to remember what specific people meant to us on a particular day or hour. or minute. we want to remember our first impression of something (or of doing that something), possibly of someone, too. sometimes we think weâll âalways rememberâ important events: âIâll make a mental note of thatâ etc etc. but in reality everything is fleeting. so Didion says write it down. keep a journal. that way, people, places, and certain events will always be there in case you ever want to come back to them sometime in the future. but also so that they donât ever haunt you.
The purest form of love is consideration. When someone thinks about how things would make you feel. Pays attention to detail. Holds you in regard when making decisions that could affect you. In any bond, how much they care about you can be found in how much they consider you
The exact nature of long COVID is still coming to light, but we just got some of the best evidence yet that this debilitating condition stems from a brain injury. Using high-resolution scanners, researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford have shown microscopic, structural abnormalities in the brainstems of those recovering from COVID-19. Signs of brain inflammation were present up to 18 months after first contracting the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Continue Reading.
space & the brain are like the two final frontiers
we know just enough to know we know nothing
there are radically new theories all. the. time. and even just in my research assistant work i've been able to meet with, talk to, and work with the people making them
it's such a philosophical science
potential to do a lot of good in fighting neurological diseases
things like BCI (brain computer interface) and OI (organoid intelligence) are soooooo new and anyone's game - motivation to study hard and be successful so i can take back my field from elon musk
machine learning is going to rapidly increase neuroscience progress i promise you. we get so caught up in AI stealing jobs but yes please steal my job of manually analyzing fMRI scans please i would much prefer to work on the science PLUS computational simulations will soon >>> animal testing to make all drug testing safer and more ethical !! we love ethical AI <3
collab with...everyone under the sun - psychologists, philosophers, ethicists, physicists, molecular biologists, chemists, drug development, machine learning, traditional computing, business, history, education, literally try to name a field we don't work with
it's the brain eeeeee
fatima aamer bilal, from moony moonless skyâs âi am your mould, but the shape of you is true absence, leaving me purposeless.â
[text id: and is this not treason? / my soul belongs far more to you than it does to me.]
â Noor Unnahar, Instagram account "noor_unnahar"
[TEXT ID: / [Lemons] / My father's mother loved lemons. Years after her passing, / we run out of everything, but never / lemons. / Nothing else shelters grief / better than memory. / It's my father way of saying, / even in your absence, you will be / cared by me. / END ID]