Hello All,
**Triathlon may be doomed. **
It appears a cure for OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) is on the horizon.
Also Triathletes themselves are not to be blamed for OCD – the cause is genetic.
Cheers,
Neal
Excerpts:
A research team studying brain signals in mice accidentally stumbled upon what could be an important discovery that could lead to understanding and successfully treating obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The finding identifies a new potential target for treating the psychological syndrome, which affects some 2.2 million Americans and is characterized by symptoms including anxiety and excessive behavior such as repeated hand washing and pulling out one’s own hair.
Researchers at Duke University Medical Center made the discovery after deleting a gene in mice while studying neuronal communication in the striatum, a structure in the midbrain that plays a role in information processing, decision making and movement. They had set up 24-hour video surveillance of the critters in their cages after the animals developed skin lesions on their heads and necks four to six months after their birth.
“These mice stay by themselves and are grooming themselves all the time,” says Guoping Feng, an assistant professor of neurobiology at Duke and co-author of a report on the findings published in Nature.
………
The current treatment for OCD, which only works in about 50 percent of the cases, includes giving patients certain selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Prozac, which improve the transmission of the neurotransmitter serotonin in synapses.
Feng and his colleagues administered the drug for six days to the perpetually self-grooming animals, during which time their obsessive behavior attenuated and their anxiety abated. “It’s very interesting that serotonin has some effect on these mice,” he says, noting that the neurotransmitter may also modulate the activity of glutamate in neighboring synapses.
“Of course, we cannot say whether the mice have obsessive thoughts, but in my opinion this does not detract in a major way from the model,” says Ann Graybiel, a professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The field urgently needs models of complex genetic disorders. The obsessive compulsive-spectrum disorders have been particularly difficult to study because of the complexity and variety of symptoms and syndromes and apparent high incidence of their co-morbidity.”
Steven Hyman, a neurobiologist at Harvard Medical School, concurs that the model may be incomplete, but notes that this is a solid first step. “Despite these reservations,” he writes in an editorial accompanying the report in Nature, this study “gives us a compelling clue that the compulsive behavior associated with this condition is due to a synaptic abnormality in these neural loops.”