Neurology Center

Cannabinoid Receptor, Type 1 (CB1) antagonists were supposed to be the next big thing.They're weight loss drugs, and with obesity rates rising and the diet craze showing no signs of abating, that's a large and growing market (...sorry). They worked, at least in the short term, and they were at least as effective as existing pills. They may even have had health benefits over and above promoting weight...

Over the past few years, deep brain stimulation (DBS) has emerged as a promising treatment for severe psychiatric disorders that haven't responded to conventional approaches. A new paper from the University of Florida reports on a trial of DBS in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and unlike most DBS studies, it was placebo-controlled: Deep Brain Stimulation for Intractable Obsessive Compulsive...

Science informs us of about a tricky problem facing Chinese neuroscientists: Fear of MRI Scans Trips Up Brain Researchers.Apparently, many parents are concerned about the possible impact of strong magnetic fields on children, and are unwilling to allow their children to get MRI scanned for research purposes; the article reports on two Chinese neuroscientists who were unable to find healthy children...

When you drink alcohol and get drunk, are you getting drunk on alcohol?Well, obviously, you might think, and so did I. But it turns out that some people claim that the alcohol (ethanol) in drinks isn't the only thing responsible for their effects - they say that acetaldehyde may be important, perhaps even more so.South Korean researchers Kim et al report that it's acetaldehyde, rather than ethanol,...

So the draft of DSM-V is out.If, as everyone says, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is the Bible of Psychiatry, I'm not sure why it gets heavily edited once every ten years or so. Perhaps the previous versions are a kind of Old Testament, and only the current one represents the New Revelation from the gods of the mind?Mind Hacks has an excellent summary of the proposed changes. Bear in mind that...

When you smoke pot, you get stoned.Simple. But it's not really, because stoned can involve many different effects, depending upon the user's mental state, the situation, the variety and strength of the marijuana, and so forth. It can be pleasurable, or unpleasant. It can lead to relaxed contentment, or anxiety and panic. And it can feature hallucinations and alterations of thinking, some of which...

Every day, PubCrawler emails to tell me about the latest papers that match various search terms. It means I never miss a relevant paper, but it also means I get told about an awful lot of irrelevant ones. Sometimes though, the title alone grabs my attention and demands a read. Such as yesterday's Risk assessment of the amnesic shellfish poison, domoic acid, on animals and humans. Shellfish causing...

You've probably heard about Crazy Like Us, the new book by Urban Tribes author Ethan Watters. But you probably haven't bought it yet. You really should.Crazy Like Us is a vivid, humane, and thought-provoking examination of "the globalization of the American psyche" - the process by which, slowly but surely, the world has adopted America's way of thinking about mental illness.*The key to the American...