Thursday, April 17, 2008

From the Is-there-ANYTHING-they-won't-study-with-functional-imaging file...

In the current issue of J. Neurosci:

Anticipatory Brain Activity in Irritable Bowel Syndrome
Jerry Chen and Udi Blankstein
J. Neurosci. 2008;28 4113-4114

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

In the defense of such research (believe me, it needs defending) - if you're trying to make the case that mental processes can effect change in disease state, this is a reasonable way to go. It is NOT obvious to funding agencies, doctors, or apparently neuroscientists that irritable bowel syndrome might be in part psycho-somatic.

The above is far more interesting and moreover, of some actual practical utility, than e.g. finding that yet another mental function shows up in a surprising, theoretically unmotivated region of frontal cortex.

Cheers!

Greg Hickok said...

I'm not judging the validity or utility of such research, so no need to defend it. I just find the range of topics that are studied using functional imaging to be exceptionally broad. It's also interesting to think about how one would implement some of the activation paradigms...

Bill Idsardi said...

Meghana B. Wadnerkar, Patricia E. Cowell, Sandra P. Whiteside, Speech across the menstrual cycle: A replication and extension study. Neuroscience Letters 408 (2006) 21–24.
Abstract (beginning):
Whiteside et al. [S.P. Whiteside, A. Hanson, P.E. Cowell, Hormones and temporal components of speech: sex differences and effects of menstrual cyclicity on speech, Neurosci. Lett. 367 (2004) 44-47] documented effects of menstrual cycle phase and sex on voice onset time (VOT) in naturally timed speech using whole words. ...