Suicide and depression have both been linked to elevated levels of inflammatory cytokines in the blood and cerebrospinal fluid. A recent study finds that these inflammatory markers are also elevated in the brains of teens ...

At the 2016 meeting of the Society of Biological Psychiatry, researcher Femke Lamers and colleagues presented findings from the Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety. The inflammatory markers interleukin-6 and CRP we...

A recent study suggests that when a mother rat exercises during pregnancy, her offspring will exercise more too. -- In the study, published by Jesse D. Eclarinel and colleagues in The FASEB Journal, pregnant mother rats we...

DNA has several ways of repairing itself. Serious damage, including breaks to both strands of the double helix and problems with replication, prompt a process known as DNA damage repair, or DDR. Researcher Stephen J. Elled...

Evidence is mounting that certain behaviors by parents can leave marks on their sperm or eggs that are passed on to their offspring in a process called epigenetics. In a recent study by researcher Mathieu Wimmer and collea...

A recent study clarified how cognitive behavioral therapy improves symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The participants were 62 adult women. One group had depression, one had PTSD, and the thi...

Many studies have found links between levels of inflammatory molecules in the blood and depression or depressive symptoms. There has been less research about inflammation in the brain and its possible role in depressive il...

One-fifth of children in America grow up in poor families. Poverty can affect development, health, and achievement, and new evidence shows it even affects brain structure. -- New unpublished research suggests that early po...

In a 2015 article in Nature Neuroscience, Stefan Bonn and André Fischer reported that when mice were prompted to use their long-term memory to recognize a specific environment, epigenetic changes occurred in their neurons ...

Microglial activity in the brains of people who are healthy, people at high risk for schizophrenia, and people who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia. -- A 2016 study by Peter S. Bloomfield and colleagues in the Americ...

Mixed depression describes a state of depression accompanied by a few symptoms typically associated with mania. At the 2015 meeting of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders, researcher Roger McIntyre shared some ...

At the 2015 meeting of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders, Ben Goldstein described a study of cognitive dysfunction in pediatric bipolar disorder. Children with bipolar disorder were three years behind in exec...

Repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a treatment for depression in which magnets placed near the skull stimulate electrical impulses in the brain. In a poster presented at the 2015 meeting of the Society of...

It is well established that certain early experiences can affect a person’s risk of developing a mental illness. Adversity in childhood, including abuse or the loss of a parent, is a risk factor not only for diagnosis of a...

There is growing evidence of a link between inflammation of depression. At the 2015 meeting of the Society of Biological Psychiatry, researcher Jeff Meyer summarized past studies on inflammatory markers. These are measurem...

DTI brain scan can show damage to white matter following a concussion. -- Many people suffer problems with mental functioning after an apparent concussion (otherwise known as mild traumatic brain injury, or mTBI) that does...

In a longitudinal study of 1,037 people born in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1972 and 1973, most participants with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adulthood did not have the disorder as children. The study by...

Several genes have previously been implicated in bipolar illness. In a recent study, researchers at the Mayo Clinic, led by Paul Croarkin, compared variations in three genes (CACNA1C, ANK3, and ODZN) across 69 children age...

Both bipolar disorder and unipolar depression often begin in childhood or adolescence, but it can be difficult to distinguish the two using symptoms only. People with bipolar illness may go a decade without receiving a cor...

A new technology is making it possible to view the mammalian brain’s structure and connectivity for the first time. Karl Deisseroth discussed the technology, called CLARITY, at a plenary lecture at the 2014 meeting of the ...

Like cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, patients with bipolar disorder often have memory problems, particularly if they have had many prior episodes. Some memory tips from CancerCare’s Chemobrain Information Series m...

Colleen Hanlon, a researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina, has found that biofeedback can be used to decrease cocaine craving in people with substance abuse problems. In her research, patients were given rea...

New research shows that regular meditation in the form of mindfulness training improves both mood and measures of white matter (axon tract) integrity and plasticity in the anterior cingulate cortex (a key node in the brain...

An article published by Medscape reports that in a recent study by Dr. Joan Luby of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, non-depressed preschool children whose parents showed more nurturing behaviors duri...

Sherwood Brown and colleagues from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center have completed a successful placebo-controlled trial of citicoline for bipolar and unipolar depression with comorbid methamphetamine de...