Understanding Memory Loss Linked with Psychosis

That is the title of this article I am writing about. " New research may lead to a solution for the overwhelming side effect of memory loss among people with psychosis.
Although current mediation regimens can control delusions and hallucinations, psychosis’ devastating toll on memory is often a significant impediment to living a normal, high-quality life.

The new University of California, Davis investigation pinpoints potential target areas for treatments to help the more than 3.2 million Americans for whom medication quells the voices and visions, but not the struggle to remember.
The study found that memory is most impaired when people with schizophrenia try to form relationships between items — remembering to also buy eggs, milk, and butter when buying flour to make pancakes — and that this relational encoding problem is accompanied by regionally specific dysfunction in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
People with schizophrenia also have greater difficulty retrieving this relational information even when they can remember the individual items, and this relational retrieval deficit is accompanied by functionally specific dysfunction in a brain area called the hippocampus.
The research appears online in JAMA Psychiatry.  Schizophrenia is well-known for its more florid manifestations, said J. Daniel Ragland, professor of psychiatry in the University of California, Davis School of Medicine and lead author of the study.
'Everyone has had the experience of hearing their name called or phone ring, or that someone is standing beside them. When these events take place initially we experience them as real,' Ragland said. 'What happens in psychosis is that you continue to have the experience, and the feeling becomes more developed, more real, and more intrusive.'" I know I have the memory issue at the store I have to have a list and I have to look at it in the store or I will forget something like if I am making enchiladas I will get everything I think and then forget the tortillas. Also when I was taking math in college my tutor would say he remember everything then when he walks out the door everything is forgotten.
The article goes on to say: "Decades-old medications treat these symptoms effectively. But what remains is often more intractable: memory loss and other cognitive difficulties that make it difficult to perform the activities of daily living.

'People with schizophrenia have difficulty retrieving associations within a context, and this creates a pervasive loss of memory that makes everyday life a challenge,' Ragland said. “You can’t work if you can’t remember the next step in what your boss told you to do.”
'If you’re going to develop a drug or other therapy to improve memory, we found that this frontal and temporal lobe relational memory network may be a target or ‘biomarker’ for treatment development,' he said.
The multi-site functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) study was conducted in approximately 60 male and female patients with schizophrenia who were age matched with unaffected control subjects.
Participants with psychosis were clinically stable, had remained on medication for one month, and were experiencing mild symptoms. Participants were located at University of California, Davis, Washington University in St. Louis, University of Maryland, and Rutgers University.
For the study, participants viewed a series of pictures of everyday objects, and made either an item-specific encoding decision about whether the object was living or non-living, or made a relational encoding decision about whether one of the objects could fit inside of the other during fMRI scanning.
This was followed by an item-recognition task consisting of previously studied objects presented together with never-studied objects. Participants had to assess whether or not the object was previously studied.
Participants also were tested on their associative recognition of which objects were paired together during the relational encoding task. The more severe pattern of relational memory deficits and dorsolateral prefrontal and hippocampal dysfunction was revealed by contrasting the item-specific and relational memory conditions during encoding and retrieval.
In the participants diagnosed with psychosis, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex appeared substantially less activated than in healthy control participants — 28 percent to 30 percent less activated.
Although participants with schizophrenia activated the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex during relational versus item encoding, they failed to activate the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — a finding that is consistent with earlier fMRI studies of attention and problem-solving in individuals with schizophrenia."  This is hard for people with schizophrenia, you want to learn something new for your job and your life and you can never get past a step because your memory does not work it can be frustrating.  My memory of number is excellent besides math and at the store I do not have any real problems in that area. It does take a lot of repetition for me to really grasp something.
The article ends with: "In addition, the study revealed that healthy controls exhibited increased activation in the hippocampus, while activation was significantly reduced in the participants with psychosis for retrieval following relational-memory encoding, but not for retrieval following item memory encoding.
Thus, the hippocampus, which plays a unique role in creating relational memories, joins the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in helping to explain the disproportionate relational memory deficits experienced by people with schizophrenia.
Dr. Cameron Carter, senior author and professor of psychiatry, said that the finding is exciting because it points the way to potential pathways to improve the lives of people with psychosis.
'This shows that the memory problems in people with schizophrenia are not the same as those of people with Alzheimer’s disease,' where the brain region is damaged and deteriorating. “It’s more like those of people with other cognitive deficits, such as ADHD,” said Carter, who is director of the Imaging Research, Behavioral Health and Neuroscience centers at University of California, Davis.
'We now know that, if we’re going to improve memory in people with psychosis we have to improve the functioning of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. And there are many different ways that we can do that, such as through cognitive brain training,' he said.
Carter said that another experimental treatment, called transcranial direct current stimulation, is designed to activate and enhance the function of the brain region.
'This research is directly informing the next steps in our research. And the area that we’ll stimulate will be this one.' 'Twenty or 30 years ago we couldn’t do any of this,” Carter said. “So this is real progress.'"That is where repetition comes in you just keep training the brain by doing exercises. I wrote an article when I was doing those brain exercises they said it is just memory but as you go along and start getting better so does your memory for other things.

Unlocking the Neurobiology of Schizophrenia

That is the title of this article I am writing about. "Summer research in Associate Professor of Neuroscience Tracie Paine’s lab is aimed at understanding the neurobiological changes that underlie the complex, less commonly recognized symptoms of schizophrenia.
May 2015 graduate Daniel Lowes and second-year student Gabriel Hitchcock are working on models to determine whether changes in the GABA neurotransmitter system, a chemical messenger that regulates anxiety, can cause schizophrenia-like changes.
Schizophrenia is a complex, long-term mental illness that interferes with a person’s ability to think clearly, manage emotions, make decisions, and relate to others. The illness is characterized by three classes of symptoms: positive, negative, and cognitive. Positive symptoms are the psychotic behaviors that most people think of when they refer to schizophrenia—hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia. Those symptoms are treated fairly well with currently available medications.
The negative symptoms can include social withdrawal or social isolation, flattened emotional responses, and a lack of self-care and personal hygiene. The cognitive symptoms include deficits in attention, memory, and decision-making. Both categories lack effective treatment, and the severity of these symptoms predicts how well afflicted individuals can live independently and maintain employment.
One current hypothesis suggests that changes in GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) contribute to the negative and cognitive symptoms. This hypothesis is based on the observation that there are a number of changes in GABA system in people with schizophrenia. Despite this, it is not known whether these changes in the GABA system cause the symptoms of schizophrenia. 'Our past research has shown that decreasing GABA function leads to cognitive deficits—specifically, attention and decision-making deficits—and decreases in sociability,' Paine says."I know I have anxiety after schizophrenia I do not know if i had before.  Except when I was waiting for a court case then I did have anxiety. I do not get it as much now but I do get it.  So this is interesting to see what they find out.
The article goes on to say: "The broader goal of Paine’s research, which is supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, is that it will lead to better, more targeted treatments for these symptoms of schizophrenia.
Lowes, who has been working in Paine’s lab since his second year, is continuing the work of his senior honors research project. He has designed a developmental model of schizophrenia to analyze changes in the GABA neurotransmitter.
A native of Parma Heights, Ohio, Lowes has been accepted as a PhD candidate in Columbia University’s pharmacology and molecular signaling program. He says the research and mentoring experience has been critical to shaping his career aspirations in science.
'Dan started at ground zero learning relevant techniques in the lab, and now he’s involved in experiment design, data collection and analysis and co-authoring papers. Gabe is currently learning all the relevant techniques but is pretty independent and is independently collecting all the data for his current experiment. He will become more involved in the experimental design aspects of upcoming experiments,' Paine says."I can only hope that for future people with mental illness that they come farther in treatment and stopping people with mental illness from losing so much if they can figure out what triggers mental illness.
The article ends with: "'Students in my lab get the technical skills—both in animal behavior and molecular analysis—and they learn how to properly execute an experiment with the appropriate controls. I also want students to understand why they’re doing the research, how it fits in the theoretical framework. You get that at Oberlin by working with your research mentor.'
Hitchcock, who is majoring in neuroscience and German, says he was one of those rare incoming students who knew exactly what he wanted to study. 'I discovered that Oberlin has one of the first and best neuroscience programs among liberal arts schools. I auditioned in the Conservatory of Music, but I decided to focus on the sciences.'
Trained as a classical pianist, he takes piano lessons in the conservatory, and he’s a percussionist in the Arts & Sciences Orchestra. This year, he will be editor-in-chief of The Synapse, Oberlin’s student-produced science publication.
Hitchcock is working on a model of schizophrenia using a pharmacological analog of the drug PCP. 'There’s strong data taken from animal studies and observations of people taking PCP that the effect mimics the behaviors of people with schizophrenia,' he says. 'It’s a good model to work from to try to ameliorate the cognitive and negative symptoms.'"That is what I thought when I had schizophrenia the closes to it is pcp that is one awful drug your whole world stops.  The paranoia in schizophrenia though is like cocaine it makes you paranoid.  It makes you wonder why people take theses drugs that mimic schizophrenia.

Mild Jolt to Brain Can Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia Patients

That is the title of this article I am writing about. " Applying mild electrical stimulation to the brains of schizophrenia patients has been found to improve certain aspects of cognition, according to a new study by psychologists at Vanderbilt University. Specifically, the small jolt allows patients to recognize recent errors and to make the appropriate corrections just as a healthy person would.
One of the core symptoms of schizophrenia is poor cognitive control. This means that patients often have difficulties with working memory, attention, focus, and error-monitoring. Error-monitoring can be measured by “post-error slowing”– the nearly undetectable pause that healthy people take after making a mistake, such as a typo, in order to avoid doing it again. 'It has been known for decades that error-monitoring is reduced in individuals with schizophrenia,” said Dr. Sohee Park, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Psychology, who contributed to the research. “This impairment has been extremely difficult to remediate.' In an earlier study, lead author Robert Reinhart, a graduate student in psychology, was able to improve post-error slowing in healthy people by applying a very safe, low-voltage electric current — transcranial direct stimulation, or tDCS — to the medial-frontal cortex (a brain region involved in cognitive control). He wanted to see if people with schizophrenia could benefit as well." It sounds like it would be good.  I would like to hear from some that have used this to see if it brings about results. I do know it has been used for sometime but do not know the results of it.
The article goes on to say: " For the study, participants performed a challenging cognitive control task while wearing EEG monitors. 'We saw a beautiful burst of low-frequency activity [from the medial-frontal cortex] right after someone made a mistake,' said Reinhart. 'But it was deficient in our patients with schizophrenia.'  In healthy subjects, these theta waves were steady and synchronized, but in those with schizophrenia, the waves were weak and disorganized, suggesting that they were having more difficulty processing the mistake.  The participants' outer behavior also reflected the scan findings: The healthy subjects slowed down by a few milliseconds when they made a mistakes and did better in the next round, while patients with schizophrenia did not.  After the electrical stimulation, the picture was dramatically different.  The mild jolts to the scalp significantly improved the strength and synchrony of the brain waves in both groups but most notably in those with schizophrenia.  'We found that medial-frontal stimulation resulted in normalization of patients' post-error slowing such that their performance was identical to that of healthy control subjects at baseline,' the researchers wrote.  'The global burden of schizophrenia is greater that that of untreated AIDS, metastatic cancer or severe dementia,' said Park.  'The results of our study clearly indicate that it is possible to restore error-monitoring with tDCS.'" What about long term memory. I know that fixing mistakes is a big deal also.  If you can remember that you made the mistake then correct it the next time that would be great.
The article ends with: "The findings have important implications for treatment. 'Cognitive deficits in people with schizophrenia are treated with drugs, without significant success,' Park added. 'But I want to emphasize that there is much work to do before we can be certain that tDCS can be used as a treatment.  We need to work out why and how these changes occur, how long these effects last and whether there are no other consequences.' The researchers also warn that the tDCS systems used in research or the clinic shouldn't be confused with consumer devices that deliver current to the brain. 'In the laboratory, tDCS is conducted in a controlled environment, and the safety of specific tDCS protocols are approved by institutional ethics review boards,' Reinhart said.  No one should try to replicate the research themselves." Why and how these changes occur.  That is something I hope they find out soon.  It seems like everything takes time no matter what it is.

Structural Brain Abnormalities Linked to Schizophrenia

That is the title of the article I am writing about. "A collaborative international study has discovered that individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia often have smaller brain regions than people without mental illness. The finding provides a clue into how the condition may develop and respond to treatment. In the study, scientists at more than a dozen locations across the United States and Europe analyzed brain MRI scans from 2,028 schizophrenia patients and 2,540 healthy controls.
The findings, which experts believe will help to advance improved understanding of the mental disorder, appear in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. The work was the product of the Enhancing Neuroimaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis project (ENIGMA), from the Schizophrenia Working Group. The Group is co-chaired by Dr. Jessica Turner, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Georgia State University, and Dr. Theo van Erp, assistant research professor in psychiatry at the University of California, Irvine." This is very interesting because it can find out why I lose some of the knowledge I had before this disease.  Maybe they can find out and stop it from happening this could really help.
The article goes on to say: "'This is the largest structural brain meta-analysis to date in schizophrenia, and specifically, it is not a meta-analysis pulled only from the literature,' said Turner.  'Investigators dug into their desk drawers, including unpublished data to participate in these analyses.  Everyone performed the same analyses using the same statistical models, and we combined the results. We then identified brain regions that differentiated patients from controls and ranked them according to their effect sizes.'  The team found individuals with schizophrenia have smaller volume in the hippocampus, amygdala, thalamus, nucleus, accumbens, and intracranial space controls, and larger pallidum and ventricle volumes.  The study demonstrates that collaborative data analyses can be used across brain phenotypes and disorders.  This approach encourages analysis and data-sharing efforts to further understanding of severe mental illness." Does it have anything to do with negative symptoms.  What does it cause and what medicines can come about because of this?
The article ends with: "The ENIGMA collaborations include working groups for others disorders such as bipolar disorder, attention deficit, major depression, autism and addictions, who are all doing these same analyses.  Researchers say the next step is to compare the effects across disorders, to identify which brain region is the most effected in which disorder, and to determine the effects of age, medication ,environment, and symptom profiles across these disorders. 'There's the increased possibility, not just because of the massive data sets, but also because of the collaborative brain power being applied here from around the world, that we will find something real and reliable that will change how we think about these disorders and what we can do about them,' Turner said." I really hope there is something that comes of this. I have questions such as do they find people who are about to be diagnosed with schizophrenia to see if the medications is causing this shrinking of the areas?  Can they stop it from happening.  What does it have to do with people taking medications and still having problems with this disease?

How learning and memory may be improved in schizophrenia

That is the title of this article I am writing about. "Institute-supported PhD student Natalie Matosin has been working on finding molecules in the brain that are altered in schizophrenia in order to identify new drug targets with the potential to improve the cognitive and negative symptoms associated with the disorder. Along with her supervisors, Dr Kelly Newell and Dr Francesca Fernandez, she has been looking specifically at a receptor in the brain, the metabotropic glutamate receptor 5, or mGluR5.
Together with NeuRA scientists, Dr Samantha Fung and Professor Cyndi Shannon Weickert, Ms Matosin and her team assessed the levels of mGluR5 in the postmortem brains of people that had schizophrenia, and found that in the frontal cortex and hippocampus there were greater numbers of the receptor mGluR5. Since these changes are in brain regions involved in learning and memory, this led our researchers to believe that these changes in mGluR5 might be contributing to the poor cognitive functioning seen in many people with schizophrenia." This sounds promising if it can help with memory and help with negative symptoms that would be great. Learning it was harder with this illness than when I did not have it even thought I feel I had symptoms of this illness growing up.
The article ends with: "In trying to understand why this receptor was expressed abnormally in schizophrenia brains, Ms Matosin, Dr Francesca Fernandez and the team worked with the Australian Schizophrenia Research Bank and Associate Professor Melissa Green to better understand whether the dysregulation of the mGluR5 receptor might originate in the mGluR5 gene. They found markers within the gene that are associated with schizophrenia in men, and a complex relationship with measures of cognitive functions such as working memory and measures of IQ, which differently affect men and women with schizophrenia. This supports the idea that mGluR5 is involved in the development of cognitive dysfunction, particularly memory and learning, in people with schizophrenia.
'mGluR5 represents a valuable new drug target to treat the cognitive deficits in people with schizophrenia,” says Ms Matosin. “It’s likely that because every schizophrenia sufferer is an individual with their own set of symptoms and causes, that it will work only in a subset of people with schizophrenia. Therefore future studies will need to find a way to identify this subset, so that they can benefit from mGluR5-based treatments.'" That it will only work with certain people of this illness I believe.  My memory of numbers is still working good. I practice working on my memory so I do not know if I lose any or not. I just know that numbers I have always been great with.