KevinMD.com- How positive thinking affects patients with serious illnesses

Check out this post: http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2011/06/positive-thinking-affects-patients-illnesses.html

Trevor W. Robbins on cognition and neurochemicals

Kerri Smith talks to Trevor W. Robbins, volume editor of this year's Neuropsychopharmacology Reviews on cognition, about how the brain mediates our sense of time, the roles of neurochemicals like dopamine and glutamate in brain function and behavior, and how to translate basic findings into therapies for disorders like depression, schizophrenia and ADHD. 

Dendritic Spines Respond to Stress

June 23, 2011 on 16th Annual International "Stress and Behavior" Neuroscience and Biopsychiatry Conference, R.F. Mervis, PhD, from the Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair at the University of South Florida College of Medicine in Tampa, explained that dysmorphic alterations in various dendritic measures include both atrophic and neuroplastic changes that can influence the transfer of information, which in turn will be reflected by changes in learning, memory, or behavior.

The dendritic arbor of a typical neuron makes up over 95% of the volume of the neuron.
Most synapses are directly located on dendritic spines. Therefore, morphologic changes in dendritic branching and spines will sensitively reflect the earliest changes associated with alterations or disruptions of neural circuitry.

Golgi impregnation can evaluate neurons from cortex, hippocampus, cerebellum, striatum and other regions. It yields a picture of dendritic branching (estimated total dendritic length, amount and distribution of dendritic arbor, and complexity of dendritic tree), determines dendritic spine density and configuration, and defines the total branching and spine microcircuitry network for a given cell population and brain region.