Tag Archives: Stanford University

Jun 11 2011

Have dark, negative, depressive thoughts?

Right.

They are unable to turn their attention away, put their thoughts away and because they are not?

They suffer.

[via Medical Xpress] We all have our ups and downs—a fight with a friend, a divorce, the loss of a parent. But most of us get over it. Only some go on to develop major depression. Now, a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests part of the reason may be that people with depression get stuck on bad thoughts because they’re unable to turn their attention away.

People who don’t recover from negative events seem to keep going over their troubles. “They basically get stuck in a mindset where they relive what happened to them over and over again,” says Jutta Joormann, of the University of Miami. She co wrote the new study with Sara Levens and Ian H. Gotlib of Stanford University. “Even though they think, oh, it’s not helpful, I should stop thinking about this, I should get on with my life—they can’t stop doing it,” she says. She and her colleagues thought people with might have a problem with working memory. Working memory isn’t just about remembering a shopping list or doing multiplication in your head; it’s about what thoughts you keep active in your mind. So, Joormann thought, maybe people who get stuck on have problems turning their mind to a new topic.

Joormann and her colleagues recruited 26 people with depression and 27 people who had never had depression. Each person sat in front of a computer and was shown three words, one at a time for a second each. Then, they were told to remember the words either in the order they were presented or in backward order. The computer then presented one of the three words and they were supposed to respond as quickly as they could whether that word was first, second, or third in the list. The faster they were able to give a correct answer, the better they were at thinking flexibly.

People with depression had trouble re-ordering the words in their head; if they were asked to remember the words in reverse order, they took longer to give the correct answer. They had a particularly hard time if the three words had negative meanings, like “death” or “sadness.”

“The order of the words sort of gets stuck in their , especially when the words are negative,” Joormann says. She also found that people who had more trouble with this are also more likely to ruminate on their troubles. She hopes that these findings point towards a way to help people with depression, by training them to turn their minds away from negative thoughts. [Read More]

And in order to do this?

Some people need a physical process that they can DO.

Fear not…

Anguished Repose is working on this problem as we spea–…er, type.

Devising a way, a process, in order for people to physically put their negative thoughts aside until they are better equipped to re-address them/handle them, and see for themselves that in the end?

The negative thoughts that have navigated their life, are no more powerful than a pebble dropped in the bucket of ones life…

They only have the power one gives them.

So the trick is?

Give. Them. Nothing!

Aug 10 2010

What’s next for medical regeration – Organs and limbs?

Recently I have posted some pretty exciting news regarding medical regeneration for bones, heart tissue and spinal nerve connections. Question is, are full organs and limbs next?

Well…

They’re definitely working on it:

Disabling an evolutionary backup plan for protecting against cancer could be part of a future means to regrow lost limbs or regenerate damaged organs.

A protein called ARF, which acts as a fail-safe mechanism to protect against cancer, also prevents regeneration in mammals, a study published August 6 in Cell Stem Cell suggests. ARF backs up Rb, an important anticancer protein, by limiting the ability of mature cells to divide and replicate. But researchers in California have discovered that blocking ARF and Rb allowed mature muscle cells taken from mice to proliferate, something the cells normally cannot do.

The discovery is an important step in learning why mammals, including people, can’t regrow or replace lost limbs and organs the way animals such as salamanders and zebrafish can. Such work may one day lead to new treatments for injuries.


Scientists have known for many years that some animals, including some fish and amphibians, can regenerate organs and limbs, but mammals can’t. Therefore, at some point in evolution, mammals must have acquired proteins that halt regeneration, reasoned researchers led by Helen Blau of Stanford University and Jason Pomerantz of the University of California, San Francisco.

Other studies had shown that inactivating Rb in salamanders could kick off the regeneration process. But in mammalian cells, getting rid of Rb isn’t enough to spur growth, Blau says. That’s because mammal cells have ARF to take over if Rb goes down. Newts, salamanders and zebrafish don’t have the ARF backup system.

“We put two and two together” and deciphered that Rb and ARF could be working together to put the brakes on regeneration, Pomerantz says.

The team tested the idea by taking muscle cells from mice and temporarily depleting the Rb and ARF inside. Cells that lacked the two cancer guards were able to replicate themselves, while normal muscle cells could not. Further experiments showed that the regenerated cells could incorporate into muscles in the mice. That finding is important because it could mean that if heart cells could be coaxed into regenerating, they might help heal injuries caused by heart attacks.

Making the protein inactivation temporary was also key. If researchers permanently removed the proteins from cells, the cells would form tumors when transplanted into mice.

But the scientists caution that real regeneration of entire limbs or organs is still a long way off. “Growing a whole limb, that’s hugely complicated,” says Blau.


The researchers also have not yet shown that inactivating Rb and ARF can lead to true regeneration — growing an entirely new tissue, says Kenneth Poss, a developmental biologist and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.

“Regeneration is an extremely complex process that I don’t think will boil down to just one cellular event or one molecular event,” he says. In addition to being able to replicate, cells probably also need some guidance about how to reform limbs and tissues. Whether such a guidance system is at work in mammals is unknown.

“I think it will be exciting to see whether they can use these manipulations to enhance regeneration” in mammals, Poss says.

Given how fast news of science in this particular field seems to be advancing these days, I would think that success on THIS more challenging stage of medical regeneration is a lot closer to becoming a reality than anyone is letting on.

So to say all of this fantastic science is merely “exciting“…?

Oh, yes – I would say that is quite the understatement, wouldn’t you?

Aug 8 2010

A regenerative human heart? Scientists are working on it.

What an amazing leap in medicine this is!

Beating heart muscle cells have for the first time been made directly from other heart cells. The breakthrough may enable damaged heart muscle to be repaired by converting the structural cells called fibroblasts into the cardiomyocytes that make the heart beat.

The route from fibroblasts to cardiomyocytes is so direct that no transitory stem cells need to be formed in the process, avoiding the extra step by which many other researchers are trying to create heart cells from patients’ own cells, or from human embryonic stem cells.

“Other teams, including ours, have spent significant effort making cardiomyoctes from stem cells for regenerative purposes,” says Deepak Srivastava of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease in San Francisco.

And just think, we all owe it to this little guy:

“It’s regeneration a la newt,” said Stanford University cell biologist Helen Blau, who performed the feat in an April 5 Cell Stem Cell study.

In most animals, including ourselves, cells stop dividing when they’ve attained their mature, tissue-specific form. Chop off a limb or carve up an organ, and it doesn’t grow back. A few creatures, however, including newts and axolotl salamanders, break those rules. They can regrow new limbs, even organs.

That’s made them the focus of regenerative medicine researchers, who until recently suspected that regenerators had an extra-large supply of stem cells. In biology’s version of alchemy, these cells can take multiple forms — or, in the case of embryonic stem cells, any form.

But newts and salamanders don’t rely on stem cells, at least not exclusively. Instead, their standard, adult-issue tissue cells, supposedly incapable of dividing again, revert to a slightly more immature form, and start dividing again.

In the case of new muscle, “they still know they’re muscle cells. They retain their identity. They make more copies of themselves, and then specialize again,” said Blau.

Now everyone say, “Thank you.”

Have to admit, I love the salamanders smile…

It’s almost like he knows how awesome he is and he’s just waiting on the rest of us to catch up.

What’s not to love about that?

Apr 15 2010

Bioelectricity…The way to go

Stanford University scientists have “wired up” algae to harness a tiny electric current directly from the plant during photosynthesis; an achievement which could lead to the highly efficient generation of bioelectricity with no carbon byproducts, the researchers say. “We believe we are the first to extract electrons out of living plant cells,” said WonHyoung Ryu, whose paper on the work appears in Nano Letters. (Ryu, formerly of Stanford, is now a professor at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea)

So electricity from plants?

Cool idea.

Just one more reason to stay, “Go meat!”

*sniffs*

You know, cause it’s about to be more economical.

I’m just thinking of you.

*winks*