Word: stressed
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...Jumping and doing track together was really hard on my body,” Reed acknowledged. “I even suffered a stress fracture in my foot...
...this calming, relaxing system is activated by tranquilizers like Valium and the popular sleep drug Ambien, which attach to GABA receptors and act similarly to GABA. But at puberty, female mice experience a 700% increase in an unusual GABA receptor that helps calm the nervous system, except when under stress. In fact, this oddball receptor does the opposite: it responds to one of the body's stress-reducing hormones, THP, by revving up the nerves and raising anxiety. (See how to prevent illness...
Smith and company found that having this abundance of receptors, which recede later in adolescence, interferes with learning. And just as fascinating, a dose of THP reverses the learning deficit. "We are suggesting that mild stress is advantageous to learning in adolescence," she says. (Smith's current study involved only female mice; she plans to look next at males and females to see if there are gender differences on the learning task...
...might this relate to humans? Actually, mild stress has been shown to improve learning in people; too much does the opposite. Smith wonders whether the discovery may help explain certain learning declines, like the drop-off in the ability to learn to speak a foreign language without an accent, which occurs sometime around puberty...
...Kristopher Kaliebe, an assistant professor at Louisiana State University who works with Drell, has telemed equipment set up in his home. Some of his time is spent videoconferencing with patients in a juvenile-detention center who have been diagnosed with such conditions as bipolar disorder, severe depression and posttraumatic stress disorder. "Once the conversation starts," he says, "the kids forget there's a screen between...