amudu

Friday, March 16, 2012

How do mood and emotional arousal affect consumer choices?

When they're in a positive mood, people tend to choose products that match their mood and their level of emotional arousal, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. But crabby, low-energy people will seek products to reverse those states of mind.

"We examine how consumers' choices are affected by the interplay between their level of arousal (i.e., the intensity of a consumer's mood state) and the valence (the direction of their mood state—whether consumers are in a positive or negative mood) of their current affective state," write authors Fabrizio Di Muro (University of Winnipeg) and Kyle Murray (University of Alberta).

Although the vast majority of products, services, and experiences offered for sale are designed to be pleasant, the authors say there is a much greater variance in the level of arousal to which these offerings are designed to appeal. For example, lying on a beach and surfing are both pleasant, but lying on a beach is a low-arousal activity, as opposed to surfing, a high-arousal (intense) experience. And tea and energy drinks are both pleasant, but one is more arousing than the other.

The authors conducted experiments using scents and music to elicit arousal and mood states among participants. Then they measured people's preferences for experiences and products that are perceived to be either low or high arousal.

They found that in addition to regulating mood (positive or negative), consumers also make choices that are consistent with regulating their level of arousal. "For example, people who are feeling relaxed tend to choose relaxing products, whereas those who are feeling excited tend to choose exciting products," the authors write. On the other hand, when consumers are in a negative mood they prefer products that are incongruent with both their level of arousal and their current mood. "For example, people who are in an unpleasant low-arousal mood will tend to choose pleasant high-arousal products, whereas those who are in an unpleasant high-arousal mood will tend to choose pleasant low-arousal products," the authors write.

"In general, we find that people will demonstrate a strong preference for products that make them 'feel better,'" the authors write. "Consumers' product choices will be consistent with pursuing pleasant moods and mitigating unpleasant moods."

More information: Fabrizio Di Muro and Kyle Murray. "An Arousal Regulation Explanation of Mood Effects on Consumer Choice." Journal of Consumer Research: October 2012.

Provided by University of Chicago

"How do mood and emotional arousal affect consumer choices?." March 15th, 2012. http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-mood-emotional-arousal-affect-consumer.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

Spotting mental illness in new mothers

A new on-line tool and DVD developed by University experts to help midwives identify and treat new mothers at risk of severe mental illness has been officially launched by the Chief Nursing Officer for Wales and Honorary Visiting University Professor, Jean White.

Maternal Mental Health: A learning Programme for Midwives, has been designed by the All-Wales Perinatal Mental Health Group led by a team from the University’s Schools of Medicine, Nursing and Midwifery.

Central to the new learning module is all healthcare professionals involved in antenatal and postnatal care asking key questions to help predict, as well as detect, those women at risk of severe mental illness during pregnancy and childbirth.

"Some years ago the World Health Organization proposed that there is no health without mental health," said Dr Ian Jones, School of Medicine, and member of the National Centre for Mental Health (NCMH) hosted by Cardiff University, who led the development of the training module.

"Suicide is a leading cause of maternal death in the UK and it is vital that women at high risk of severe mental illness at this time are identified so that appropriate help can be given to help keep them well.

"The mental health and well-being of women in pregnancy is pivotal to ensuring good clinical, social and psychological outcomes for both mother and baby and provide a healthy start to family life.

"In view of this, it is essential that mental health is a central component of midwifery care – which is the primary motivation in developing this new on-line learning tool," he added.

The module covers a variety of different subject areas including: commonly held beliefs about mental health and pregnancy; characteristics of those women most at risk of severe mental illness; help for health care professionals to ask questions about a person’s mental health in the right way and then how to interpret the answers; and when to refer women for more help.

"By developing this new learning programme our aim is to provide the essentials that midwives and, indeed, all healthcare professionals need to identify those women at risk of severe mental illness in the postnatal period or following pregnancy," according to Grace Thomas, School of Nursing and Midwifery, and Consultant Midwife at the Aneurin Bevan Health Board.

"By providing these essential skills we hope to ensure that women will receive timely advice, referral and treatment and access to skilled appropriate care."

The new module available contains a series of on-line resources including videos and learning materials which can be accessed at any time, helping busy midwives and students to fit their training around their working day, as well as being a valuable resource in group and workshop education sessions.

The Chief Nursing Officer for Wales, Professor Jean White and Honorary Visiting University Professor, has been monitoring the progress of the toolkit and welcomes its on-line accessibility.

Professor White said: "Having a baby is a wonderful experience, but for some mothers it can be an overwhelming one. Asking the right questions could mean the difference between a new mum feeling isolated and alone or receiving the help she needs.

"As an on-line resource, it is invaluable. Students, and indeed midwives and other health professionals with many years of experience, can review this training module and make sure they have the tools and understanding to address an individual mother’s level of need."

Helen Rogers, Royal College of Midwives, Director for Wales, said: "The mental health of pregnant and postnatal women is too often neglected and overlooked, so this initiative is a major and positive step.

"There is a real need to raise awareness of this issue among midwives and other health professionals and this toolkit will go a long way towards achieving this. It is so important that we get the support and services in place for women, because the consequences of failing to do so can be disastrous."

The training module is available to view on-line at: www.beatingbipolar.org/perinataltraining/

Provided by Cardiff University

"Spotting mental illness in new mothers." March 15th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-mental-illness-mothers.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

A new approach to faster anticancer drug discovery

by Biomechanism

Tracking the genetic pathway of a disease offers a powerful, new approach to drug discovery, according to scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine who used the approach to uncover a potential treatment for prostate cancer, using a drug currently marketed for congestive heart failure. Their findings are published in the current online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientist Fechheimer at work in his laboratory. (File Photo)

“The science of genomics – the study of all of the genes in a person and how these genes interact with each other and the environment – has revealed many fundamental aspects of biology, including the mechanisms of diseases like cancer. But it has not yet been truly exploited to find new medicines to treat those diseases,” said Xiang-Dong Fu, PhD, professor of cellular and molecular medicine and senior author of the PNAS paper.

Fu, with colleagues at UC San Diego and elsewhere, describe a unique screening strategy that compares genes associated with specific disease phenotypes (traits) with small molecules capable of intervening with disease-linked gene-expression events. The high-throughput process, capable of analyzing large numbers of genes and drugs simultaneously, emphasizes investigation of the entire genetic pathway of the disease against a large set of internal controls, rather than its limited phenotype or any particular molecular or cellular target.

Historically, drug discovery has been driven by phenotype- or target-based methodologies.

“For 50 years, the standard phenotype approach emphasized the final outcome without worrying about the mechanism,” said Fu. “The process has produced some very good drugs, but researchers often didn’t know exactly how or why the drug worked. Aspirin is an example. It’s been around for more than a century, but we still don’t understand the mechanism in great detail.”

More recently, many drug designers have focused upon targeting particular components of a disease, such as a vital molecule or receptor involved in the pathogenic process. The approach has a stronger, more rational scientific basis, said Fu, but remains beset by two fundamental difficulties: “You can create a drug that disrupts a specific disease target, but you also run the risk of causing unforeseen, adverse side effects that might be worse than the disease. Second, there are many places inside of a cell that are essentially ‘undruggable.’ They are difficult, if not impossible, to intervene with.”

The new approach attempts to avoid these problems by emphasizing investigation of the genetic pathways associated with disease processes and how they might be altered to produce a healthful benefit.

“The idea is to identify the genetic troublemakers associated with a disease and then find a way to contain them, not crush them,” said Fu. “No gene was ever designed to cause disease. The goal is to find new drugs or ways to convert these genes or the affected cells back to a normal state. In many disease paradigms, you don’t want to kill cells. You want to modify them to become healthy again.”

While the idea of conducting multi-target screenings is not new, the technology to do so has been limited. Deep sequencing, said Fu, is ideally suited for the purpose.

To illustrate the efficacy of their high-throughput, gene-sequencing approach, Fu and colleagues applied the strategy to prostate cancer, which sometimes becomes resistant to standard antiandrogen hormone therapy. The scientists found that Peruvoside, a cardiac glycoside, strongly inhibits both androgen-sensitive and androgen-resistant prostate cancer cells without triggering severe side effects. Interestingly, a related cardiac glycoside called Digoxin has been used to treat congestive heart failure. A large epidemiological study found protective effects against prostate cancer on patients treated with Digoxin, compared to control cohorts.

“High-throughput genetic sequencing and screening allows you to look deeply into cells and analyze millions of molecules at the same time. The technology is constantly improving and getting cheaper. We think it’s a promising strategy for drug discovery,” said Fu.

_________

Co-authors include Hairi Li, Dong Wang, Jinsong Qiu, Yu Zhou, UCSD Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine; Hongyan Zhou and Sheng Ding, Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease; Xianqiang Li, Signosis, Inc.; and Michael G. Rosenfeld, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, UCSD Department of Medicine.

Funding for this research came, in part, from the Prostate Cancer Foundation and the National Human Genome Research Institute.

Courtesy University of California – San Diego

Childhood trauma exposure is very common among alcohol-dependent inpatients

Accumulating evidence indicates that childhood trauma experience (CTE) may be an environmental susceptibility factor for a variety of psychiatric disorders, including alcohol dependence (AD). CTE can include sexual, physical, and emotional abuse as well as physical or emotional neglect. New research on single and multiple CTE among AD individuals undergoing inpatient detoxification and treatment has found significant rates of reported CTE among these individuals.

Results will be published in the June 2012 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

"Previous studies have found that alcoholic patients self-report higher rates of physical and sexual abuse in childhood compared to the general population," said Markus Heilig, clinical director at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). "A recent national survey estimated rates of 8.4 percent for physical abuse and 6.0 percent for sexual abuse in the general population. Among alcoholic patients, rates for physical abuse were reported at 24 percent and 33 percent for men and women, respectively, while rates for sexual abuse were reported at 12 percent and 49 percent for men and women, respectively. Importantly, 5.0 percent of men and 23 percent of women experienced both types of abuse, physical and sexual, suggesting that co-occurrence of different abuse types may be important as well."

However, noted Heilig, who is also the corresponding author for the study, much less is known about rates of other types of abuse and neglect, in particular emotional abuse, emotional neglect, and physical neglect.

"Because emotional abuse is difficult to define, and is greatly under-reported compared to physical and sexual abuse, true rates of emotional abuse are unknown," Heilig said. "Many recent studies have linked childhood emotional abuse and neglect to the same long-term consequences as physical and sexual abuse, such as increased rates of depression, anxiety, and even suicide."

Heilig added that he and his colleagues also wanted to look at the effects of experiencing multiple trauma types. "A person who experiences more than one type of abuse or neglect may be more severely affected in the long run and develop more problems later in life," he said. "By looking at a broader range of abuse and neglect types, we were able to investigate these questions."

Heilig and his colleagues examined 196 alcohol inpatients (134 men, 62 women) using structured clinical interviews for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual - Fourth Edition Axis I disorders as well as the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, which measures all five types of abuse or neglect: physical and sexual abuse, emotional abuse, emotional neglect, and physical neglect.

"We had four key findings," said Heilig. "One, patients being treated for AD are likely to have experienced one or more types of childhood abuse and neglect. Two, sexual abuse increases the likelihood of developing anxiety disorders in addition to AD, while emotional abuse increases the likelihood of developing depression. Three, alcoholics who experienced childhood physical abuse may be more likely to have a history of suicide attempts. Four, alcoholics who experienced more than one type of abuse or neglect are especially at risk for developing a psychiatric disorder or for attempting suicide."

"This study clearly shows substantial rates of reported childhood traumatization in treated AD individuals and confirms previously reported clusters of early adversities in the life histories of these patients," observed Willemien Langeland, a freelance trauma researcher at Vrije University in Amsterdam, and at the University of Amsterdam. "From a research standpoint, it is remarkable to see that even within a population of chronic alcoholics in which co-morbid psychiatric disorders are highly prevalent, those individuals with histories of childhood trauma stand out for their degree of psychopathology."

"Our findings demonstrate that childhood emotional abuse is nearly as prevalent among alcoholic patients as physical and sexual abuse," said Heilig, "which is important because it helps to show that emotionally abused children, like those that have been physically or sexually abused, can develop behavioral and other health problems in adulthood. For example, we show that alcoholics who were emotionally abused may be more likely to have co-morbid depression and PTSD, and thus these individuals may be more difficult to treat than those without these disorders. In addition, we also found that alcoholics who experienced more than one type of CTE in childhood are even more at risk for a broad range of psychiatric disorders and for suicide attempts. We call this a 'dose-response' relationship, which means that with each increase in the number of CTE types experienced – the 'dose' – the likelihood of developing a psychiatric disorder – the 'response' – also increases."

Both Heilig and Langeland believe that clinicians need to take greater care when assessing prior life experiences in AD patients. "These highly co-morbid patients reporting cumulative exposure to traumatic stress in childhood are often seen in routine practice," observed Langeland. "These findings point to the importance of a more systematic trauma assessment in alcohol-treatment services. And I also urge clinicians to address alcohol use at every clinical encounter with children and adolescents that have been identified as victims of childhood trauma, as early interventions in abused children might improve their psychological as well as medical health."

"Members of the public shouldn't take lightly the potential effects of emotional abuse in childhood or in any life stage," said Heilig. "Just because there may not be visible physical scars does not mean that no lasting damage has been done."

Provided by Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research

"Childhood trauma exposure is very common among alcohol-dependent inpatients." March 15th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-childhood-trauma-exposure-common-alcohol-dependent.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

A wandering mind reveals mental processes and priorities

Odds are, you're not going to make it all the way through this article without thinking about something else.

In fact, studies have found that our minds are wandering half the time, drifting off to thoughts unrelated to what we're doing – did I remember to turn off the light? What should I have for dinner?

A new study investigating the mental processes underlying a wandering mind reports a role for working memory, a sort of a mental workspace that allows you to juggle multiple thoughts simultaneously.

Imagine you see your neighbor upon arriving home one day and schedule a lunch date. On your way to add it to your calendar, you stop to turn off the drippy faucet, feed the cat, and add milk to your grocery list. The capacity that allows you to retain the lunch information through those unrelated tasks is working memory.

The new study, published online March 14 in the journal Psychological Science by Daniel Levinson and Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Jonathan Smallwood at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science, reports that a person's working memory capacity relates to the tendency of their mind to wander during a routine assignment. Lead author Levinson is a graduate student with Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry, in the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the UW–Madison Waisman Center.

The researchers asked volunteers to perform one of two simple tasks – either pressing a button in response to the appearance of a certain letter on a screen, or simply tapping in time with one's breath – and compared people's propensity to drift off.

"We intentionally use tasks that will never use all of their attention," Smallwood explains, "and then we ask, how do people use their idle resources?"

Throughout the tasks, the researchers checked in periodically with the participants to ask if their minds were on task or wandering. At the end, they measured each participant's working memory capacity, scored by their ability to remember a series of letters given to them interspersed with easy math questions.

In both tasks, there was a clear correlation. "People with higher working memory capacity reported more mind wandering during these simple tasks," says Levinson, though their performance on the test was not compromised.

The result is the first positive correlation found between working memory and mind wandering and suggests that working memory may actually enable off-topic thoughts.

"What this study seems to suggest is that, when circumstances for the task aren't very difficult, people who have additional working memory resources deploy them to think about things other than what they're doing," Smallwood says.

Interestingly, when people were given a comparably simple task but filled with sensory distractors (such as lots of other similarly shaped letters), the link between working memory and mind wandering disappeared.

"Giving your full attention to your perceptual experience actually equalized people, as though it cut off mind wandering at the pass," Levinson says.

Working memory capacity has previously been correlated with general measures of intelligence, such as reading comprehension and IQ score. The current study underscores how important it is in everyday situations and offers a window into the ubiquitous – but not well-understood – realm of internally driven thoughts.

"Our results suggest that the sorts of planning that people do quite often in daily life – when they're on the bus, when they're cycling to work, when they're in the shower – are probably supported by working memory," says Smallwood. "Their brains are trying to allocate resources to the most pressing problems."

In essence, working memory can help you stay focused, but if your mind starts to wander those resources get misdirected and you can lose track of your goal. Many people have had the experience of arriving at home with no recollection of the actual trip to get there, or of suddenly realizing that they've turned several pages in a book without comprehending any of the words.

"It's almost like your attention was so absorbed in the mind wandering that there wasn't any left over to remember your goal to read," Levinson says.

Where your mind wanders may be an indication of underlying priorities being held in your working memory, whether conscious or not, he says. But it doesn't mean that people with high working memory capacity are doomed to a straying mind. The bottom line is that working memory is a resource and it's all about how you use it, he says. "If your priority is to keep attention on task, you can use working memory to do that, too."

Levinson is now studying how attentional training to increase working memory will affect wandering thoughts, to better understand the connection and how people can control it. "Mind wandering isn't free – it takes resources," he says. "You get to decide how you want to use your resources."

Provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison

"A wandering mind reveals mental processes and priorities." March 15th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-mind-reveals-mental-priorities.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

Smartphones can aid people with schizophrenia

Psychiatry is employing smartphone technology as an innovative tool in the assessment and treatment of schizophrenia and other serious mental illness. Prominent in this endeavor is Dror Ben-Zeev, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth Medical School and director of the Thresholds-Dartmouth Research Center in Chicago.

Ben-Zeev and his colleagues evaluated a range of approaches, including the use of mobile phones to gather information about patients' symptoms, moods, and medication use. The phones could then be used to deliver real-time, real-world interventions, such as prompts to take medication or engage in healthy behaviors like diet, exercise, or stress-reducing activities.

"We are using the technology that is already in your pocket to create a completely new medium for psychotherapeutic intervention," says Ben-Zeev. "You can have therapy with you and accessible to you whenever and wherever you have the need, potentially anywhere in the world."

As guest editor for a special issue of the Schizophrenia Bulletin, Ben-Zeev presents a set of four papers coauthored by a series of international colleagues. The papers are geared toward the increasing numbers of researchers who are leveraging smartphones and cellphones to provide mental health services. The articles are now available online with print publication set for spring 2012.

Ben-Zeev acknowledges that some mental-health practitioners may doubt the ability of the mentally ill to make productive use of this technology. To counter this perception, Ben-Zeev and his associates recently conducted a survey of 1,600 Chicago individuals under treatment for serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder.

"We showed that 70 percent of the people had cellphones and used them for calling, texting, and for accessing the Internet," he remarks. "It's not quite up to the 94 percent of people in the U.S. overall but I think that these results are going to be very surprising to many who expect much less from people with serious mental illness."

The goal of the special issue papers, according to Ben-Zeev, is to stimulate discussion of potential opportunities where mobile technologies can enhance the study of psychotic illnesses and to encourage researchers and clinicians to be creative in employing these technologies.

The first of the four papers is a general review by international experts that includes concrete guidelines and practical suggestions for future studies. Editor Ben-Zeev also alludes to "expert insights and shared collective experiences [that] will undoubtedly be useful to investigators who are unfamiliar with mobile technology study design, hardware and software requirements, and statistical approaches necessary to successfully analyze the rich data that are characteristic of these paradigms."

The remaining three papers in the series are empirical studies that demonstrate the utility of technology in psychiatry, each highlighting the use of three successive generations of technology. The first study report begins with preprogrammed wristwatches that signal people to respond to paper questionnaires. The second had people using personal digital assistants (PDAs) to complete on-screen questionnaires periodically when prompted, and the last employed cellphones that delivered text messages requiring self-monitoring responses.

In addition to the call to action implicit in the special issue papers, Ben-Zeev and his Chicago coworkers are putting "boots on the ground," as he says. He is partnering with community agencies and working with psychiatric rehabilitation centers and people in treatment. As a result, his research is simultaneously providing a clinical service.

"This is not your typical model," states Ben-Zeev. "Usually the research is conducted in an academic medical center, and then there is a transition back to real settings which may take a really long time. We are bypassing that by developing the paradigm here to begin with, getting feedback from both providers and consumers. I think that's the strength of what we are doing."

Provided by Dartmouth College

"Smartphones can aid people with schizophrenia." March 15th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-smartphones-aid-people-schizophrenia.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

Some people may be more susceptible to alcohol-induced fragmentary blackouts

Alcohol's effects on memory range from mild deficits to alcohol-induced blackouts. That said, very little research has been carried out on memory impairments among individuals who have experienced alcohol-induced blackouts. A new study of neural activation during a contextual-memory task among individuals with and without a history of alcohol-induced fragmentary blackouts demonstrates individual differences in how alcohol impacts memory.

Results will be published in the June 2012 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

"Prior research had shown that individuals who experienced alcohol-induced blackouts were more likely than those who had not experienced blackouts to exhibit memory impairments when intoxicated," said Reagan R. Wetherill, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego and corresponding author for the study. "Our study is the first examination of neural activity during a contextual-memory task among individuals with a history of alcohol-induced blackouts."

"Blackouts have been widely regarded as an important warning signal of problem drinking for many decades now," observed Bryan Hartzler, a research scientist at the University of Washington's Alcohol & Drug Abuse Institute. "But some people may mistakenly equate the term 'alcohol blackout' with only a more extreme experience of memory loss where one 'loses time' for a period during which the brain essentially just stops making memories. Fragmentary blackouts are less severe than that, in that just portions of one's experience are forgotten and can be recalled via use of retrieval cues. However, fragmentary blackouts have also been shown to be much more prevalent, at least among young adults. The current study's inclusion of functional magnetic resonance imaging technology provides a direct, powerful means to examine underlying biological correlates of this more common type of alcohol-induced blackout."

Wetherill and her colleagues used data from a larger, longitudinal study of alcohol use and behavioral risks to examine 24 individuals (12 males, 12 females) with (n=12) and without (n=12) a history of fragmentary blackouts. All participants completed a block design contextual memory task across 48 functional magnetic resonance imaging sessions, with and without alcohol, during which task performance and brain hemodynamic activity were measured.

Wetherill explained that the block design contextual memory task involves a study phase and a test phase. During the study phase, images are shown with a cue question such as "living or nonliving?," followed by a brief rest, then different images are shown with a different cue question such as "pleasant or unpleasant?" After several "blocks" of images are shown, the test phase has participants recall the images and cue questions, adding an additional image that was never shown. Wetherill said this task is designed to assess a person's ability to remember contextual information like the cue question when presented with a previous experience like a specific image.

"Our study's findings suggest that some people are more likely to experience alcohol-induced blackouts than others due to the way alcohol affects brain activity in areas involved in self-monitoring, attention, and working memory," said Wetherill.

"Through use of imaging technology, this study has made the really intriguing finding that the unique patterns of blood flow and neural activity seen in persons prone to experience those amnestic phenomena emerged only after they became intoxicated," said Hartzler. "That finding, taken together with results from prior research on fragmentary blackouts, suggests there are salient individual differences in how alcohol impacts memory, and that those differences can be identified by both behavioral and neurophysiological markers."

"Alcohol intoxication attenuated recollection-related brain activity in the right frontopolar cortex, which is a brain region involved in 'multitasking,'" said Wetherill. "Later, when sober, individuals with a history of blackouts showed slightly impaired recollection and attenuated brain activity in prefrontal and posterior parietal brain regions typically involved in attention, inhibitory processing, decision-making, and working memory. Thus, alcohol appears to affect a person's ability to multitask, and also affects some people's ability to engage brain areas required for encoding and remembering previous experiences."

"Irrespective of the specific type of alcohol-related memory loss involved, if one is experiencing blackouts it is an important signal that negative personal and health consequences are more likely to occur," said Hartzler. "Not fully recalling one's life experiences, particularly those that occur while one is intoxicated, creates a state of vulnerability where the chances increase for the individual to incur all kinds of problems."

Wetherill agreed. "Given that approximately 40 percent of college students experience alcohol-induced blackouts and, in some cases, later discover they engaged in unwanted/risky sex, drove, or other complex behaviors, our findings highlight the fact that alcohol impairs brain functioning and some people may be more vulnerable to alcohol's effects than others," she said. "In other words, just because your friend may be able to drink a certain number of drinks and appear to be functioning fine, it does not mean that you or everyone else can."

Provided by Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research

"Some people may be more susceptible to alcohol-induced fragmentary blackouts." March 15th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-people-susceptible-alcohol-induced-fragmentary-blackouts.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek