Mindframe

As if depressed or anxious people needed another thing to worry about, a new study from UC San Francisco suggests that depression and anxiety may be as bad for the health as smoking or obesity. First author Dr. Andrea Niles and senior author Dr. Aoife O’Donovan of the UCSF Department of Psychiatry and the San Francisco VA Medical Center examined the records of 15,000 adults over four years. Of that sample, 16% were found to be noticeably depressed or anxious. Compared to their non-depressed, non-anxious counterparts, those 16% of respondents were 65% more likely to have a heart condition, 64% more likely to have had a stroke, 50% more likely to have high blood pressure, and a whopping 87% more likely to have arthritis. (They were not found to be at greater risk for cancer, but that’s not much of a silver lining, considering.) Clearly, depression and anxiety are not a simple bad mood, or a weakness of character, but a serious medical condition. Clearly, something mu...

  Science news is full of what certainly sound like promising new studies featuring lab mice or lab rats as the test subjects. New treatments are assessed, and psychological truths are mined. Reading about this research, it’s easy to feel like we are witnessing the first steps of something big, something impactful. However, you are not a mouse (we assume). If you have ever read a conclusion from a mouse behavior study and wondered at the exact practical implications to your life, it turns out you had a pretty good point. For instance, more than 80% of medical treatments tested on animals—usually mice—fail when tested on people. Mice are cheap, easy to genetically modify, and we share 99% of our genes, but that one percent holds some crucial differences, especially when it comes to neuroscience research. For example, mice lack a dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is involved with human learning, memory, and cognition. It’s hard to model, let’s say, a mental illne...