Emotion Takes Memory on Roller Coaster Ride

TUESDAY, Oct. 28 (HealthDayNews) -- When you remember an emotional event, your memory of it may be very accurate, but you are likely to forget the events that preceded it, researchers report.

"If an emotional event happens, you remember it better. However, this comes at a cost: The cost is that the things that precede the emotional event tend to be remembered much worse," says lead researcher Ray Dolan, a professor of neurology at University College London.

Dolan and his colleagues asked 10 volunteers to study a list of nouns. Each list contained emotionally aversive words such as "murder" or "scream." The subjects were then asked to recall the words on the list.

The researchers found the volunteers remembered the emotionally charged words much better than the other words. In addition, they had significant trouble remembering the words that came immediately before the emotionally charged words.

They also found that among women the effect of emotion-induced amnesia was twice as large as compared with men, according to their report in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (news - web sites).

To determine the neurological basis for this finding, Dolan's team repeated the test with 24 subjects who were given either propranolol, a beta blocker drug that can also reduce anxiety, or a placebo.

They also tried the test on an individual who had damage to the part of the brain called the amygdala. The amygdala is involved in producing and responding to nonverbal signs of avoidance, defensiveness and fear.

The team found that "by blocking the emotional arousal associated with these events you can reverse the process," Dolan says.

Among the subjects who received the drug and the subject with the damaged amygdala, there was no improvement in the memory of the emotionally charged words and no emotional amnesia for the words that came directly before. This indicates that both adrenergic hormones and the amygdala influence emotion-induced amnesia.

Dolan says the implication of these findings is that witnesses to emotionally charged events such as accidents or crimes may have totally incorrect memories of what led up to the event. Therefore, their accounts may be poor or unreliable.

Furthering their research, Dolan's team continues to study how mechanisms of memory can be disrupted. Their goal, Dolan says, is to determine how better memories are created.

"The findings of this study are important because they suggest that the brain mechanisms that we think are important for enhanced memory associated with emotional events are also involved in memory impairment for emotional events," says Dr. Larry Cahill, an assistant professor of neurobiology at the University of California at Irvine and author of an accompanying commentary.

"Right now it is too soon to tell if these findings will have any clinical implications, but they made lead to a better understanding of how emotion affects the mechanisms of memory," he says.

Meditate Away Stress and Fatigue

Studies have shown meditation can be beneficial to your health, says the July issue of Mayo Clinic Women's HealthSource. It can help you relax, slow your breathing and heart rate and decrease muscle tension.

Meditation can also lessen your body's response to adrenaline, which can increase blood pressure and make blood more likely to clot.

Here are some meditation tips:

• Focus on your breathing. Breathe in and out through your nose while paying attention to some aspect of your breathing, such as the pause between breaths.
• Focus on a word, phrase or prayer while you meditate.
• Focus on the moment by becoming aware of physical sensations, sounds and thoughts. Allow them to pass through your mind without judging or getting involved with them.
• Meditate every day. Aim for 20 minutes a day and do it even if you feel you're wasting your time. Return to your focus -- that word, phrase or prayer -- every time your mind starts to wander.

Eventually, you may discover you're able to calm yourself in stressful situations and your meditation may improve your health and well-being.

Studies Sow Doubt Over Hormone Therapy Benefits

BOSTON (Reuters) Wed Aug 6 - Two medical studies released on Wednesday provided more damning evidence that giving female hormones to older women does little to improve their health and may in fact harm it.

The studies found that the treatments do not protect women from heart disease, as doctors once believed, and one of the studies found that giving hormones to women actually increases their risk of heart attack.

Both studies appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, which published a separate piece of research earlier this year suggesting the health risks of estrogen and progestin treatments for older women outweigh the benefits.

In one study in this week's Journal, a research team led by JoAnn Manson of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston found that women taking estrogen and progestin increase their risk of a heart attack by 81 percent in the first year.

The study was the final report of a major government look at long-term use of combined estrogen-progestin treatments.

Preliminary findings released last summer showed that women taking the treatment had an increased risk of breast cancer (news - web sites), heart attacks and stroke after five years of use. The study of 16,608 women was ended early once the dangers of hormone treatment became apparent.

Researchers said the latest findings mean that most women who are taking the hormones should stop, and those who have reached menopause should not start.

"Overall, the risk of treatment outweighed the benefits during 5.6 years of treatment," they concluded in their study.

The only remaining reason for prescribing the treatment is to relieve the symptoms of menopause, the Manson team said.

Drugmaker Wyeth, which says its drug Prempro makes up nearly half the market of combined estrogen-progestin treatments, said the study contained "no new findings" regarding the heart attack data initially published last year.

Wyeth said in a statement that while estrogen-plus-progestin therapy should not be used to prevent cardiovascular disease, it remained a "valuable treatment" for the relief of moderate to severe menopausal symptoms.

The second study, led by Howard Hodis of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, found that the arteries of 150 women taking hormone supplements clogged just as rapidly as 76 getting a placebo.

For years, conventional medical wisdom asserted that replacing the estrogen lost after menopause protected against heart disease because the treatment often lowered "bad" cholesterol levels and increased the amount of "good" cholesterol.

That produced a "nearly unshakable belief in the benefits of hormone therapy" in the absence of a real test of the treatment, said David Herrington and Timothy Howard of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Even when studies, beginning in 1998, revealed there was no benefit, the belief was so ingrained the findings were heavily criticized and dismissed, Herrington and Howard wrote in an analysis in the Journal.

They said this case illustrates that animal tests and observational studies are no substitute for studies that use placebos and include large numbers of people.

Diet Cuts Cholesterol as Well as Drug

The diet containing natural plant sterols found in plants, vegetables, fruits, almonds and vegetable oils, and viscous fibers found in oats, barley and psyllium, was credited with reducing "bad" cholesterol levels by 29 percent over four weeks in a group of 16 subjects.

Another group of study participants who took a daily dose of 20 milligrams of the drug lovastatin lowered their cholesterol levels by a comparable 31 percent over four weeks, and a third group on a low-fat diet cut their cholesterol by 8 percent.

The findings suggested that patients with high cholesterol try a dietary approach for six to 12 weeks before turning to cholesterol-lowering drugs, Dr. James Anderson, of the University of Kentucky in Lexington, wrote in an editorial accompanying the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

"Dietary management is an essential part of the treatment for lipid disorders, although adherence to strict and intensive dietary interventions requires motivation by patients, encouragement by physicians, and, perhaps, counseling by dietitians and nutrition experts," Anderson wrote.

High cholesterol is a known risk factor for cardiovascular disease, and statins have been shown to reduce the risk of mortality from heart-related illnesses by up to one-third.

Study author David Jenkins wrote: "Using the experience gained, further development of this approach may provide a potentially valuable dietary option for cardiovascular disease risk reduction in primary prevention."

Yes, Stress Does Make Acne Worse

There are a lot of anecdotal stories about stress making acne worse, but few clinical studies have looked at this, Dr. Alexa B. Kimball, from Stanford University in California, told Reuters Health. "Frankly, we started our study with the goal of debunking this myth," she added.

"There are a number of good studies that show pretty clearly that acne causes stress," Kimball noted. But when she and her associates reviewed the medical evidence, she said, "We were somewhat surprised to see that no one had actually proven the reverse was true."

The researchers therefore studied 22 college students whose acne severity and stress levels were evaluated during examination and non-examination periods. The results are published in the Archives of Dermatology.

Both acne severity and stress levels went up during examination periods. Moreover, after taking into account factors such as sleep patterns and diet, the team found that the more stress levels increased, the worse acne became.

Based on the findings, Kimball said, doctors may "want to consider adjusting a patient's acne regimen when stressful periods are expected." Also, as students have a lot on their minds during exam time, they should be especially reminded to take their medication during such periods.

SOURCE: Archives of Dermatology, July 2003.

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