BIDDEFORD, Maine — A University of New England researcher plans to investigate how bad memories get entrenched in the brains of young people, and how those grow into sometimes-debilitating anxiety disorders in adolescents.
The potentially groundbreaking work becomes possible with the announcement this week that the National Institutes of Health has provided the Biddeford-based UNE $404,000 in grant money for the project. According to a university news release, the National Institute of Mental Health reports that 25 percent of individuals between the ages of 13 and 18 suffer from anxiety disorders, and 6 percent are considered “seriously affected.”
The university goes on to relate that nearly 40 million carry the anxiety disorders into adulthood. With his research, assistant psychology professor Michael Burman hopes to study the early development of the limbic system, which controls emotions and memory formation, and find the young neurological triggers that grow into anxiety disorders among teens.
“Although the neural systems involved in adult fear and anxiety are well studied, how these systems develop and contribute to the occurrence of lifelong anxiety is not well understood,” Burman said in a statement released by the university.
The grant will cover three years of research by Burman and a team of two undergraduate assistants.
Burman told the Bangor Daily News on Friday the team will seek to find, through rodent testing, how and when the limbic system develops as well as whether there are particularly impressionable times during that development when bad memories can predispose individuals to anxiety disorders later in life.
“Are there critical periods of development where a fearful memory or traumatic memory would be worse, or are there periods where those memories go away because those [brain] functions are not fully formed yet?” Burman said.
The $404,000 in funding comes from a National Institutes of Health “Academic Research Enhancement Award” grant.
It took (far) long enough, but leave the poor RATS alone.
Trauma-based limbic response reality has been known – at least to some “alternative” i.e., REAL health “care” providers – for over 30 years, (that I know of) – but not to the corporate (mainstream) pharmaceutical-shill-doktors.
It’s a relatively simple “fight-or-flight-or-freeze” response that is triggered in the (limbic system’s) amygdalae – two small brain regions located about an inch behind each eye. This is an evolution of the “reptillian brain” … which dates VERY far back in human development, even before developement of the (far more modern) mamillian and ‘frontal’ regions of the brain.
ALAS that the medical industry has been -So- notoriously slow and even particularly -resistant- to responding in some -functional- manner to such human “health” needs.
Thus, medical “insurance” will not pay for such simple and inexpensive assistance, because it is not “permitted” science … it’s not a product manufactured and marketed by the corporate machines which dominate (so-called) “modern”, health “care”.
This is precisely -why- I very often call them (dok-tors), the: “instead-of-healing” industry … i.e. that bunch of: Licensed Drug Pushers … in my direct … experience.
And, SO we wonder why there is this massive epidemic of addictive drug abuse and related crimes – even MURDER – like those pictured in orange pajamas, almost daily in the Bangor Daily News.
There is some published material, scant, but available, from the likes of Dr. Alice Miller, John Bradshaw, Gary Craig, T.S. Lingo, Tim Phizackerley. These involve “alternative” treatment work (on People – not Rat-Research-experiments)
Go Figure.
I suppose it is better that $404,000 goes to rat torture than to war, but is there anyone who doesn’t know how traumatic events become hard-wired in humans?
This is good for the lab rat business, of course, and it keeps researchers working, which is good, but I’m rather certain that rats do not live like humans. But what will the “fix” be anyway, once they, again, prove their research.
Good luck!
When the $404,000.00 is gone -send some grad students to the Granite State for non- returnable bottles. Then conduct another rat study on the anxiety associated with being arrested for that offense. I didn’t suffer from childhood anxiety until I read this story.
You got to be kidding? What happend to good old fashion therapy?