A wild, wacky week

What a weird, wild and wacky week since my last entry.

The sobriety chat room acquaintance I mentioned there apparently faked her own suicide, for whatever reasons. I made an error in judgment over running a story, or not, and had the news manager of the local radio station question my journalistic integrity the week after someone from the other side of this hot button story did, as if it's the radio station's business what the newspaper writes in the first place. The radio station guy's angry yelling at me provided a stiff test of the anti-anxiety property of my antidepressants. They worked, but it’s like I was drained enough to slide a step or two backwards on the brain/hormonal growth they had provided. Then, I had to call the family of Grimes County’s first Iraq death today.

In between, saw my college and graduate school best friend when he was at a convention in Houston.

Suicide is NOT painless

An online sobriety chatroom friend of mine relapsed with an old crack supplier last week. I had e-mailed her the day after she hooked up with this guy because I hadn't seen her in chats for a while.

Well, she came back to the chat room, and sounded OK.

But she wasn't.

Last night, she slit her wrists and killed herself.

Do not drink or drug no matter what.

NIAAA: Child abuse-alcoholism link

And, this research points up alleys I have wondered about, such as why different people react differently to child abuse, sexual especially. Read the details on this study:

Girls who suffered childhood sexual abuse are more likely to develop alcoholism later in life if they possess a particular variant of a gene involved in the body's response to stress, according to a new study led by researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The new finding could help explain why some individuals are more resilient to profound childhood trauma than others.

"With this study we see yet again that nature and nurture often work together, not independently, to influence our overall health and well-being," says NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D.

"This finding underscores the central role that gene-environment interactions play in the pathogenesis of complex diseases such as alcoholism," adds NIAAA Director Ting-Kai Li, M.D. A report of the study appears in the June 26, 2007 advance online publication of
Molecular Psychiatry.

Previous studies have shown that childhood sexual abuse increases the risk for numerous mental health problems in adulthood. However not all abused children develop such problems, a likely indication that genetic factors also play a role. Recent studies have linked the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene with adverse behavioral outcomes stemming from childhood mistreatment.

"MAOA is an enzyme that metabolizes various neurotransmitters that regulate the body's response to stress," explains first author Francesca Ducci, M.D., a visiting fellow in NIAAA's Laboratory of Neurogenetics in Bethesda, Maryland. DNA variations occur within a regulatory area - the MAOA-linked polymorphic region (MAOA-LPR) — of
the MAOA gene. Two such MAOA-LPR variants occur most frequently and result in high or low MAOA enzyme activity. In a recent study, researchers found that maltreated boys who possessed the low activity MAOA-LPR variant were more likely to develop behavior problems than boys with the high activity variant.

"Our aim was to test whether this low activity variant influences the impact of childhood sexual abuse on alcoholism and antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) in women," says Dr. Ducci.

She and her colleagues analyzed DNA samples from a group of American Indian women living in a community in which rates of alcoholism and ASPD are about six times higher than the average rates among all U.S. women. Childhood sexual abuse is also prevalent in this population, reported by about half of the women in the community, compared with a
U.S. average of 13 percent.


Analyses of MAOA-LPR genotypes in this study revealed that women who had been sexually abused in childhood were much more likely to develop alcoholism and antisocial behavior if they had the low activity variant whereas the high activity variant was protective. In contrast, there was no relationship between alcoholism, antisocial behavior and MAOA-LPR genotype among non-abused women.

"Our findings show that MAOA seems to moderate the impact of childhood trauma on adult psychopathology in females in the same way as previously shown among males," says Dr. Ducci. "The MAOA-LPR low activity allele appears to confer increased vulnerability to the adverse psychosocial consequences of childhood sexual abuse."

Dr. Ducci and her colleagues suggest that the effect of MAOA on the hippocampus, a brain region which is involved in the processing of emotional experience, may underlie the interaction between MAOA and childhood trauma. They note that previous research showed that people with the low activity variant at the MAOA-LPR locus have hyperactivation of the hippocampus when retrieving negative emotional information.

Now, the $64 question is, what medical benefits will result from this? Will we fine-tune new anti-PTSD medications?

Recovery phrases I despise

“That which doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.”

How do you know in advance whether it falls into one camp or another?

“Life is suffering.”

If you’re a good Buddhist, life CAN’T be suffering, because you’re supposed to be in a state of satori. Rather, if the Buddha himself had actually obtained Buddhahood, he would have said, “Life appears to be suffering.”