Comments on: Early childhood stress is associated with elevated herpes antibodies

By: Debbie Thurman

Debbie Thurman — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:33:47 +0000

Warren, I have not looked into neuro-emotional technique in several years. Clearly, it is in the holistic realm of quackery to the thinking of some. My husband calls the doctor who performed that little demo on me “Dr. Chicken Bones.” LOL. He also does other interesting things to his patients.
One of my daughters received some cranio-sacral therapy for a back injury when she was a young teenager. It involves a therapist manipulating the body to take advantage of its electro-magnetic field — the hands are supposed to “close the circuit” and facilitate healing. I got interested in such stuff when I read Candace Pert’s “Molecules of Emotion.” She speaks of the body’s innate “intelligence” and the information feedback loop, which I suppose could account for any relevance in the neuro-emotional thing.
I don’t think these theories or practices are any less controversial than things I have been subjected to in psychiatrist’s offices and that go on every day in traditional medicine. I also find orthomolecular medicine and its applications to mental health to be quite interesting. The pharmaceutical companies have a lock on psychiatry. Small wonder many people would be ignorant of alternative therapies.

By: Warren

Warren — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 13:47:32 +0000

carole – thanks for the link – haven’t been able to look at it but I will.
The UCLA study is ongoing and will be enlightening as will be the Sanders study which is (as I understand it) in press somewhere. Won’t be long…

By: Warren

Warren — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 13:46:05 +0000

4-5% is the effect size which is an estimate of how much variation between two groups is explained by the abuse. There is much unaccounted for in explaining why one person goes one way and another the other way. There is much overlap between the two groups and abuse does not help much make the discrimination. So we are not talking about an increase in probability.

By: Drowssap

Drowssap — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 20:44:00 +0000

Warren

For a man, however, it is less clear. While the new study found a significant association, the effect size was about 4-5% – moderate but not to the degree that I would say sexual abuse was a necessary condition for the outcome of SSA.

Abuse/neglect lowers the immune system of children and assuming that SSA can be triggered by a common childhood infection I would say that a 4% to 5% increase sounds about right. I don’t know if anybody has ever looked into it but I wonder if boys from broken homes show a tiny uptick in the numbers who have SSA. It would probably be less than abused/neglected kids but it might show up too.
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Another good one might be to see if there was a slight increase in SSA among men who suffered chronic illness is an infant or toddler. Premature babies might be the perfect test.

By: carole

carole — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 19:30:48 +0000

Warren,
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-origins-of-suicidal-brains&page=2
Perhaps you’ve already read this, but if not I thought I’d give the link. It’s an article that examines the possible roots of suicide–suicide victims have an abnormal distribution of GABA receptors as compared with non-depressed people who died of other causes. The researchers argue that their gene expression was epigenetic and they offer the hypothesis that these people had early life experiences that led to the methylation, thus the problems with protein synthesis. (I do wonder how they know this since these people were not examined when they were born. In other words, how do we know these genes were not methylated much earlier?)
The article also refers to another link I gave weeks ago, the McGill university study about how the genes of suicide victims who suffered abuse in childhood were more likely to be methylated than the genes of those who were were not abused and have not committed suicide. (Unfortunately, in that study nothing was said about the genes of those who were abused in childhood and who hadn’t commited suicide.)
This also reminds me of the current SSA UCLA study that is examining if there is a link between SSA and methylation of genes.