How bullying affects the structure of the teen brain

The effects of constantly being bullied are more than just psychological. Research now shows that there may be physical structural differences in the brains of adolescents who are regularly victimized, and this could increase the chance that they suffer from mental illness. This is the conclusion of a study in the journal Molecular Psychiatry which is published by Springer Nature. The research was led by Erin Burke Quinlan of King's College London in the UK and is the first to show that chronic peer victimization during adolescence impacts mental health via structural brain changes.

Burke Quinlan and her colleagues analyzed data, questionnaires and brain scans of 682 participants from England, Ireland, France and Germany. These participants were part of the IMAGEN long-term project that assessed the brain development and mental health of adolescents. As part of this project, high resolution brain scans of participants were taken when they were 14 and 19 years old.

At the ages of 14, 16 and 19 these participants also had to complete questionnaires about whether they had been bullied, and to what extent. Overall, the results showed that 36 of the 682 young people were found to have experienced chronic bullying. The data of these participants were compared with those of the others who had experienced less chronic/severe bullying. Changes in brain volume as well as the levels of depression, anxiety and hyperactivity at age 19 were taken into account.

The subsequent findings validate and extend the literature linking peer victimization with mental health problems. But the novel finding is that bullying is linked to decreases in the volume of parts of the brain called the caudate and putamen. These changes were found to partly explain the relationship between high peer victimization and higher levels of general anxiety at age 19.

"Although not classically considered relevant to anxiety, the importance of structural changes in the putamen and caudate to the development of anxiety most likely lies in their contribution to related behaviours such as reward sensitivity, motivation, conditioning, attention, and emotional processing," explains Burke Quinlan.

She says it is worrying that as much as 30 per cent of young people could be victimized in one way or another by their peers, with some having to endure such treatment on an almost daily basis. Burke Quinlan emphasizes that adolescence is not only a time of new experiences and stresses, but also a period of extensive brain development. Therefore, she recommends that every effort should be made to limit bullying before it becomes a severe problem that might lead to changes in a young person's brain and the development of mental health issues.

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Materials provided by Springer. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Erin Burke Quinlan, Edward D. Barker, Qiang Luo, Tobias Banaschewski, Arun L. W. Bokde, Uli Bromberg, Christian Büchel, Sylvane Desrivières, Herta Flor, Vincent Frouin, Hugh Garavan, Bader Chaarani, Penny Gowland, Andreas Heinz, Rüdiger Brühl, Jean-Luc Martinot, Marie-Laure Paillère Martinot, Frauke Nees, Dimitri Papadopoulos Orfanos, Tomáš Paus, Luise Poustka, Sarah Hohmann, Michael N. Smolka, Juliane H. Fröhner, Henrik Walter, Robert Whelan, Gunter Schumann. Peer victimization and its impact on adolescent brain development and psychopathology. Molecular Psychiatry, 2018; DOI: 10.1038/s41380-018-0297-9

Increased motor activity linked to improved mood

Increasing one's level of physical activity may be an effective way to boost one's mood, according to a new study from a team including scientists at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in collaboration with the National Institute of Mental Health Intramural Research Program.

The findings were published online December 12 in JAMA Psychiatry.

The researchers found that increases in physical activity tended to be followed by increases in mood and perceived energy level. This beneficial effect was even more pronounced for a subset of the study subjects who had bipolar disorder. For the study, activity trackers and electronic diaries were used for two weeks in a community sample of 242 (150 women and 92 men) adults, ages 15 to 84, with an average age of 48 years. The sample included 54 people with bipolar disorder.

Mobile assessments in the study included wrist-worn devices that automatically recorded levels of physical movement in real time and electronic diaries that assessed mood and perceived energy levels four times per day for two weeks. These real-time mood and energy levels were rated by study participants on a seven-point analogue scale from "very happy" to "very sad" for mood and from "very tired" to "very energetic" for energy.

"Systems regulating sleep, motor activity and mood have typically been studied independently. This work demonstrates the importance of examining these systems jointly rather than in isolation," says Vadim Zipunnikov, PhD, an assistant professor in the Bloomberg School's Department of Biostatistics, who led the data analyses.

The findings showed that on average a higher activity level at one time-point was associated with improved mood and increased perceived energy at the next time-point during the day. (The daily time-points were personalized according to the person's daily schedule, with one in the morning, at lunchtime, at dinnertime and before bed.) Likewise, increased energy at one time-point was associated with increased activity at the next time-point. Importantly, these associations controlled for the current levels of mood, energy and activity, respectively.

Activity was inversely associated with sleep duration -- more activity tended to be followed by less sleep that night, and more sleep tended to be followed by less activity the next day.

Tracking sleep, activity, mood and energy concurrently was particularly important in people with bipolar disorder because the changes in internal psychological states were strongly influenced by both sleep and physical activity. Many of the current interventions for mood, sleep, and physical activity focus on only one of these systems rather than considering the collective impact across multiple systems.

Bipolar disorder affects nearly three percent of the U.S. adult population; depression is even more common, affecting about eight percent of U.S. adults in a given year. The research team is interested in applying this work to interventions that could offset depressive episodes in people with bipolar disorder.

"This study exemplifies the potential for combining the use of physical-activity trackers and electronic diaries to better understand the complex dynamic interrelationships among multiple systems in a real-time and real-life context," says Dr. Zipunnikov.

The team is now exploring how physical activity and sleep interplay with pain, stress and alcohol use through an international consortium, Motor Activity Research Consortium for Health, to increase the generalizability and power of this work.

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Materials provided by Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Kathleen Ries Merikangas, Joel Swendsen, Ian B. Hickie, Lihong Cui, Haochang Shou, Alison K. Merikangas, Jihui Zhang, Femke Lamers, Ciprian Crainiceanu, Nora D. Volkow, Vadim Zipunnikov. Real-time Mobile Monitoring of the Dynamic Associations Among Motor Activity, Energy, Mood, and Sleep in Adults With Bipolar Disorder. JAMA Psychiatry, 2018; DOI: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2018.3546

Excess body weight responsible for nearly 4 percent of cancers worldwide

Policies, economic systems, and marketing practices that promote the consumption of energy-dense, nutrient-poor food, changing behavioral patterns that couple high total energy intake with insufficient physical activity, and human-built environments that amplify these factors are driving a worldwide rise in excess body weight, according to a new report. The report, appearing early online in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, says excess body weight accounted for approximately 3.9% of all cancers worldwide in 2012, a figure that will undoubtedly rise in the coming decades given current trends.

The review, co-authored by investigators at the American Cancer Society, Imperial College London, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, presents global and regional patterns in excess body weight, as well as factors driving the epidemic, a summary of the evidence linking excess body weight to cancer risk, and policy actions that could help address the issue. American Cancer Society scientist Hyuna Sung, Ph.D., is lead author of the report.

The prevalence of excess body weight has been increasing worldwide since the 1970s. In 2016, approximately 40% of adults and 18% of children (ages 5-19 years) had excess body weight, equating to almost 2 billion adults and 340 million children around the globe. The report says the prevalence of excess body weight has increased rapidly in most countries across all population groups. Some of the steepest increases are in low- and middle-income countries, likely the result of the spread of the "Western lifestyle," consisting of energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods alongside reduced physical activity levels.

In 2015, an estimated 4 million deaths were attributable to excess body weight. The worldwide economic impact of illness related to excess body weight is estimated at $2.0 trillion. In 2012, excess body weight accounted for approximately 544,300 cancers, 3.9% of all cancers worldwide, with the proportion varying from less than 1% in low-income countries to 7% or 8% in some high-income Western countries and in Middle Eastern and Northern African countries.

Overweight and obesity has been linked to an increased risk of 13 cancers: cancers of the breast (postmenopausal), colon and rectum (colorectal), corpus uteri, esophagus (adenocarcinoma), gallbladder, kidney, liver, ovary, pancreas, stomach (cardia), and thyroid, as well as meningioma and multiple myeloma. More recently, overweight has been labeled a probable cause of advanced prostate cancer as well as cancers of the mouth, pharynx, and larynx.

National wealth is the most apparent systematic driver of population obesity. The economic transition to a wealthier economy brings with it an environment that precipitate obesity. Each $10,000 increase in average national income is associated with a 0.4 increase in body mass index among adults. However, prosperity is not always correlated with excess body weight; obesity prevalence is quite low in high-income Asian Pacific countries (range, 4%-7%), which is likely a result of adherence to traditional dietary habits, which are conducive to lower calorie consumption, and an active transportation system that usually entails walking as part of daily activity. Meanwhile, the prevalence of obesity is very high in some lower-income countries, such as some Pacific Island nations (range, 40%-65%) and Egypt (43% among women and 24% among men).

Halting the rise in obesity is one of the World Health Organization (WHO)'s nine 2025 targets to address the growing global burden of noncommunicable diseases, including cancer. While the current pace of increasing and existing challenges makes achieving this goal appears unlikely, the WHO says high-priority strategies that should be adopted by governments, industries, and civil societies include population-wide, policy-led interventions to rectify the production, distribution, and marketing of unhealthy foods and changes in the built environment to promote adequate levels of physical activity.

Those interventions include eliminating trans-fats through the development of legislation to ban their use in the food chain; reducing sugar consumption through effective taxation on sugar-sweetened beverages; implementing subsidies to increase the intake of fruits and vegetables; limiting portion and package size to reduce energy intake and the risk of excess body weight; ensuring that urban design incorporates the core elements of residential density, connected street networks that include sidewalks, easy access to a diversity of destinations, and access to public transport; and providing convenient and safe access to quality public open space and adequate infrastructure to support walking and cycling.

"There is emerging consensus on opportunities for obesity control through the multisectoral coordinated implementation of core policy actions to promote an environment conducive to a healthy diet and active living," the authors write. "The rapid increase in both the prevalence of excess body weight and the associated cancer burden highlights the need for a rejuvenated focus on identifying, implementing, and evaluating interventions to prevent and control excess body weight."

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Materials provided by American Cancer Society. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Hyuna Sung, Rebecca L. Siegel, Lindsey A. Torre, Jonathan Pearson‐Stuttard, Farhad Islami, Stacey A. Fedewa, Ann Goding Sauer, Kerem Shuval, Susan M. Gapstur, Eric J. Jacobs, Edward L. Giovannucci, Ahmedin Jemal. Global patterns in excess body weight and the associated cancer burden. CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, 2018; DOI: 10.3322/caac.21499