The results of a 2019 Penn State University study examine the results of "resisting relaxation" to avoid anxiety spikes.
- The results of a 2019 Penn State University study explain the effect (and negative impacts) of "relaxation-induced anxiety."
- Experiencing the shifts from relatively calm to high-anxiety can be extremely difficult. In trying to avoid that shift, we allow ourselves to stay in a state of anxiety and relaxation techniques become ineffective.
- New research is finding possible connections between chronic stress and anxiety and structural degeneration of the hippocampus, which leads to impaired functioning of the prefrontal cortex.
Your brain on anxiety
Anxiety directly impacts the amygdala and hippocampus areas of your brain.
Image by GrAl on Shutterstock
Oftentimes "stress" and "anxiety" are used interchangeably, but it's important to note they are two very distinct functions and feelings. Stress is caused by a known source, for example, like when your car breaks down. It can trigger feelings of anger, sadness, or irritability.
Anxiety on the other hand is a feeling of fear, panic, or dread that could very well not have a known trigger. For example, you get in your car on the way to an important meeting and feel on-edge the entire drive. You think you may get into an accident or that your car will break down, when there is no apparent reason why you should be worrying about those things.
Where the confusion happens is that stress oftentimes can trigger anxiety — someone whose body experiences consistent surges of stress hormones is at higher risk of developing an anxiety disorder.
What happens in the brain when you're anxious?
The amygdala: an almond-shaped structure located deep in the brain. It is essentially a "communications hub" between the parts of the brain that process incoming sensory signals and the parts that interpret those signals.
The hippocampus: the part of the brain that encodes threatening events into long-term memories.
Once there is a threat or a perceived threat, your brain releases a surge of chemicals such as cortisol and norepinephrine that give you a natural boost in reflex time, perception and speed. This hormone surge also makes your heart beat faster in order to get more blood and oxygen throughout your body. This is described as "survival mode."
According to Neuroscience Center, this survival mode can be helpful (and is often vital to our survival) but if your body experiences it over and over again, the effects of that chronic stress can take a toll on your physical and mental health: a weakened immune system, weight gain, heart disease, and anxiety disorders, to name a few.
New research (such as the study mentioned above) is finding possible connections between chronic stress and anxiety and structural degeneration of the hippocampus, which leads to impaired functioning of the prefrontal cortex.
The best way to avoid this deterioration is to protect your brain and body from the effects of chronic stress that induces anxiety.
Fear of anxiety can raise anxiety levels, making relaxation techniques ineffective
Experiencing the shifts from relatively calm to high-anxiety can be extremely difficult, but in trying to avoid that shift, many people stop themselves from being able to relax at all.
The results of a 2019 Penn State University study explain the negative impact of "relaxation-induced anxiety," a phenomenon that occurs when people become more anxious during various relaxation exercises.
- Of the 96 participants, 32 people were diagnosed with a general anxiety disorder, 34 were diagnosed with major depressive disorder, and there was a test group of 30 who had neither disorder.
- Researchers led the participants through various relaxation exercises before having them watch videos that could elicit feelings of fear or sadness.
- Participants then answered a list of questions designed to measure how sensitive they were to changes in their mental state.
- This was repeated, and the next survey was designed to measure the participants' anxiety levels through the second relaxation session.
Data from this study shows people with a generalized anxiety disorder were more likely to be sensitive to sharp spikes in emotion. This kind of sensitivity ultimately made them feel anxious during relaxation sessions.
People who struggled with major depressive disorder showed similar results but the effect wasn't as strong, and people without a diagnosis did not show these results.
How to manage anxiety without resisting relaxation
MBIs (mindfulness-based interventions) can be used in combination to combat anxiety.
Photo by file404 on Shutterstock
Being aware of your anxiety is step one.
According to therapist Roger S. Gil, many people have lived in an anxious state for so long that they aren't aware of any other state of being anymore.
"For some people, anxiety is situational. It's normal to feel nervous at the prospect of having to speak in public."
He goes on to explain: "Situational anxiety is one of those things we can only overcome by confronting it. Generalized anxiety is something that can only be coped with by trying to rewrite the pattern of thinking that elicits it."
Regardless of what form your anxiety takes on, there will be ways to cope with it if you understand what effect anxiety is having on you.
Combining various mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) is far more effective than trying one relaxation technique at a time.
According to new research, participants who tailored various self-help practices to suit their individual circumstances and anxieties found them much more beneficial after as little as 5 minutes per day.
Some examples of MBIs include things such as yoga, meditation, progressive muscle relaxation, and guided imagery practices. all of which are more powerful when used in combination with breathing exercises.
Experts explain that in order for these mindfulness techniques to be most beneficial to you, they should be practiced at least once per day.
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Excavation of a triceratops skull in South Dakota.
David Schmidt, a geology professor at Westminster College, had just arrived in the South Dakota Badlands in summer 2019 with a group of students for a fossil dig when he received a call from the National Forest Service. A nearby rancher had discovered a strange object poking out of the ground. They wanted Schmidt to take a look.
"One of the very first bones that we saw in the rock was this long cylindrical bone," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "The first thing that came out of our mouths was, 'That kind of looks like the horn of a triceratops.'"
After authorities gave the go-ahead, Schmidt and a small group of students returned this summer and spent nearly every day of June and July excavating the skull.
Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
"We had to be really careful," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "We couldn't disturb anything at all, because at that point, it was under law enforcement investigation. They were telling us, 'Don't even make footprints,' and I was thinking, 'How are we supposed to do that?'"
Another difficulty was the mammoth size of the skull: about 7 feet long and more than 3,000 pounds. (For context, the largest triceratops skull ever unearthed was about 8.2 feet long.) The skull of Schmidt's dinosaur was likely a Triceratops prorsus, one of two species of triceratops that roamed what's now North America about 66 million years ago.
Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
The triceratops was an herbivore, but it was also a favorite meal of the Tyrannosaurus rex. That probably explains why the Dakotas contain many scattered triceratops bone fragments, and, less commonly, complete bones and skulls. In summer 2019, for example, a separate team on a dig in North Dakota made headlines after unearthing a complete triceratops skull that measured five feet in length.
Michael Kjelland, a biology professor who participated in that excavation, said digging up the dinosaur was like completing a "multi-piece, 3-D jigsaw puzzle" that required "engineering that rivaled SpaceX," he jokingly told the New York Times.
Morrison Formation in Colorado
James St. John via Flickr
The Badlands aren't the only spot in North America where paleontologists have found dinosaurs. In the 1870s, Colorado and Wyoming became the first sites of dinosaur discoveries in the U.S., ushering in an era of public fascination with the prehistoric creatures — and a competitive rush to unearth them.
Since, dinosaur bones have been found in 35 states. One of the most fruitful locations for paleontologists has been the Morrison formation, a sequence of Upper Jurassic sedimentary rock that stretches under the Western part of the country. Discovered here were species like Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Allosaurus, to name a few.
Triceratops illustration
| Credit: Nobu Tamura/Wikimedia Commons |
As for "Shady" (the nickname of the South Dakota triceratops), Schmidt and his team have safely transported it to the Westminster campus. They hope to raise funds for restoration, and to return to South Dakota in search of more bones that once belonged to the triceratops.
Studying dinosaurs helps scientists gain a more complete understanding of our evolution, illuminating a through-line that extends from "deep time" to present day. For scientists like Schmidt, there's also the simple joy of coming to face-to-face with a lost world.
"You dream about these kinds of moments when you're a kid," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "You don't ever think that these things will ever happen."
In recent years, our team at Iowa State University has found a way to make pigs an even closer stand-in for humans. We have successfully transferred components of the human immune system into pigs that lack a functional immune system. This breakthrough has the potential to accelerate medical research in many areas, including virus and vaccine research, as well as cancer and stem cell therapeutics.
Existing biomedical models
Severe Combined Immunodeficiency, or SCID, is a genetic condition that causes impaired development of the immune system. People can develop SCID, as dramatized in the 1976 movie “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble." Other animals can develop SCID, too, including mice.
Researchers in the 1980s recognized that SCID mice could be implanted with human immune cells for further study. Such mice are called “humanized" mice and have been optimized over the past 30 years to study many questions relevant to human health.
Mice are the most commonly used animal in biomedical research, but results from mice often do not translate well to human responses, thanks to differences in metabolism, size and divergent cell functions compared with people.
Nonhuman primates are also used for medical research and are certainly closer stand-ins for humans. But using them for this purpose raises numerous ethical considerations. With these concerns in mind, the National Institutes of Health retired most of its chimpanzees from biomedical research in 2013.
Alternative animal models are in demand.
Swine are a viable option for medical research because of their similarities to humans. And with their widespread commercial use, pigs are met with fewer ethical dilemmas than primates. Upwards of 100 million hogs are slaughtered each year for food in the U.S.
Humanizing pigs
In 2012, groups at Iowa State University and Kansas State University, including Jack Dekkers, an expert in animal breeding and genetics, and Raymond Rowland, a specialist in animal diseases, serendipitously discovered a naturally occurring genetic mutation in pigs that caused SCID. We wondered if we could develop these pigs to create a new biomedical model.
Our group has worked for nearly a decade developing and optimizing SCID pigs for applications in biomedical research. In 2018, we achieved a twofold milestone when working with animal physiologist Jason Ross and his lab. Together we developed a more immunocompromised pig than the original SCID pig – and successfully humanized it, by transferring cultured human immune stem cells into the livers of developing piglets.
During early fetal development, immune cells develop within the liver, providing an opportunity to introduce human cells. We inject human immune stem cells into fetal pig livers using ultrasound imaging as a guide. As the pig fetus develops, the injected human immune stem cells begin to differentiate – or change into other kinds of cells – and spread through the pig's body. Once SCID piglets are born, we can detect human immune cells in their blood, liver, spleen and thymus gland. This humanization is what makes them so valuable for testing new medical treatments.
We have found that human ovarian tumors survive and grow in SCID pigs, giving us an opportunity to study ovarian cancer in a new way. Similarly, because human skin survives on SCID pigs, scientists may be able to develop new treatments for skin burns. Other research possibilities are numerous.
The ultraclean SCID pig biocontainment facility in Ames, Iowa. Adeline Boettcher, CC BY-SA
Pigs in a bubble
Since our pigs lack essential components of their immune system, they are extremely susceptible to infection and require special housing to help reduce exposure to pathogens.
SCID pigs are raised in bubble biocontainment facilities. Positive pressure rooms, which maintain a higher air pressure than the surrounding environment to keep pathogens out, are coupled with highly filtered air and water. All personnel are required to wear full personal protective equipment. We typically have anywhere from two to 15 SCID pigs and breeding animals at a given time. (Our breeding animals do not have SCID, but they are genetic carriers of the mutation, so their offspring may have SCID.)
As with any animal research, ethical considerations are always front and center. All our protocols are approved by Iowa State University's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and are in accordance with The National Institutes of Health's Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals.
Every day, twice a day, our pigs are checked by expert caretakers who monitor their health status and provide engagement. We have veterinarians on call. If any pigs fall ill, and drug or antibiotic intervention does not improve their condition, the animals are humanely euthanized.
Our goal is to continue optimizing our humanized SCID pigs so they can be more readily available for stem cell therapy testing, as well as research in other areas, including cancer. We hope the development of the SCID pig model will pave the way for advancements in therapeutic testing, with the long-term goal of improving human patient outcomes.
Adeline Boettcher earned her research-based Ph.D. working on the SCID project in 2019.
Christopher Tuggle, Professor of Animal Science, Iowa State University and Adeline Boettcher, Technical Writer II, Iowa State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Volcano erupting lava, volcanic sky active rock night Ecuador landscape
How can modern technology help warn us of impending volcanic eruptions?
One promising answer may lie in satellite imagery. In a recent study published in Nature Geoscience, researchers used infrared data collected by NASA satellites to study the conditions near volcanoes in the months and years before they erupted.
The results revealed a pattern: Prior to eruptions, an unusually large amount of heat had been escaping through soil near volcanoes. This diffusion of subterranean heat — which is a byproduct of "large-scale thermal unrest" — could potentially represent a warning sign of future eruptions.
For the study, the researchers conducted a statistical analysis of changes in surface temperature near volcanoes, using data collected over 16.5 years by NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites. The results showed that eruptions tended to occur around the time when surface temperatures near the volcanoes peaked.
Eruptions were preceded by "subtle but significant long-term (years), large-scale (tens of square kilometres) increases in their radiant heat flux (up to ~1 °C in median radiant temperature)," the researchers wrote. After eruptions, surface temperatures reliably decreased, though the cool-down period took longer for bigger eruptions.
"Volcanoes can experience thermal unrest for several years before eruption," the researchers wrote. "This thermal unrest is dominated by a large-scale phenomenon operating over extensive areas of volcanic edifices, can be an early indicator of volcanic reactivation, can increase prior to different types of eruption and can be tracked through a statistical analysis of little-processed (that is, radiance or radiant temperature) satellite-based remote sensing data with high temporal resolution."
Although using satellites to monitor thermal unrest wouldn't enable scientists to make hyper-specific eruption predictions (like predicting the exact day), it could significantly improve prediction efforts. Seismologists and volcanologists currently use a range of techniques to forecast eruptions, including monitoring for gas emissions, ground deformation, and changes to nearby water channels, to name a few.
Still, none of these techniques have proven completely reliable, both because of the science and the practical barriers (e.g. funding) standing in the way of large-scale monitoring. In 2014, for example, Japan's Mount Ontake suddenly erupted, killing 63 people. It was the nation's deadliest eruption in nearly a century.
In the study, the researchers found that surface temperatures near Mount Ontake had been increasing in the two years prior to the eruption. To date, no other monitoring method has detected "well-defined" warning signs for the 2014 disaster, the researchers noted.
The researchers hope satellite-based infrared monitoring techniques, combined with existing methods, can improve prediction efforts for volcanic eruptions. Volcanic eruptions have killed about 2,000 people since 2000.
"Our findings can open new horizons to better constrain magma–hydrothermal interaction processes, especially when integrated with other datasets, allowing us to explore the thermal budget of volcanoes and anticipate eruptions that are very difficult to forecast through other geophysical/geochemical methods."
