Too much gaming may disturb pleasure levels of the gamer

Too much gaming may disturb pleasure levels of the gamer

A new study found that teenagers, who play video games may enlarge their brains’ pleasure centres. Dr Simone Kuhn of Charite University Medicine in Berlin and a large team of European collaborators looked at 154 Berlin school children who were all aged 14
and also played video games.

 The children were split into two groups: infrequent video gamers, who played on average about 4 hours per week, and frequent gamers, who played about 21 hours a week on average. When the children underwent an MRI scan, the researchers found that a region
of the brain called the ‘ventral striatum’ had more grey matter in the frequent video gamers.

 “The ventral striatum is usually associated with everything that brings pleasure”, said Kuhn. Kuhn think that playing the video games makes the pleasure centre grow bigger.

 “We are doing another study now to look at that. We are training adults who have never used video games to use them for two months, and then looking to see whether that brain area gets larger,” she explained.

The findings were reported in the journal Translational Psychiatry this week. Nearly 220 million people are infected annually with dengue across the globe. In India, over a million people are hit annually by the disease which is considered to be a major
factor for mortality among children.

“The institute is currently developing a non-infectious dengue vaccine based on the Hepatitis B vaccine technology,” the expert said. The research process will be focusing on developing a tetravalent vaccine – which will be able to fight all four dengue
serotypes, the expert said.

The four-day symposium, which started Monday, is focused on developing vaccines to fight infections responsible for high mortality, including dengue, chikungunya, malaria and HIV-AIDS.

In order to bring this strategy one step closer to the patient, Dr. Kremer and his team developed a monoclonal antibody against PTHrP — a molecule that mimics the antibodies produced as part of the immune system’s response to invaders, which is widely used
in cancer treatment.

Researchers were able to stop the growth of human breast tumors implanted in animal models and their metastatic spread, paving the way for clinical trials in the near future.

“This opens the door to treatment of patients with a more aggressive type of breast cancer who are not responsive to standard treatment,” says Dr. Kremer.

“I see a potential for better treatment of the disease and improvement in quality of life for a very significant number of patients.”

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Posted by Hassan Ali on Nov 18 2011. Filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry