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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians make up 2.5 per cent of the Australian population and continue to suffer disproportionately from the consequences of European settlement. The life expectancy for Indigenous Australians is 10 years lower than that of other Australians; the death rates for Indigenous people are twice as high across all age groups; and intentional self-harm was the leading cause of death from external causes for Indigenous males between 2001 and 2005.1 Although definitive national data about the incidence and prevalence of mental health disorders among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians is not available, it is clear there are enormous disparities in mental health outcomes for Indigenous people.



The small, dispersed nature of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations and communities, the lack of infrastructure required to establish and maintain health and well-being in remote communities, the extra-ordinarily high levels of morbidity and mortality, the extreme poverty and disadvantage all pose major challenges to mental health service delivery.


A series of extensive and expensive national enquiries and consultations between 1987 and 1995 reported considerable consensus among a range of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and organizations on several core issues. One is that many mental health professionals have little understanding of Indigenous Australian history, culture, and society, resulting in frequent misdiagnosis and inappropriate treatment. Another is that there is a high level of unmet need for social, emotional, and mental health support. Also Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people perceived mainstream mental health services to be failing them.2



INDIGENOUS CONCEPTS OF SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have drawn an important distinction between the concepts of social and emotional well-being, and non-Indigenous concepts of mental health. According to the Social Health Reference Group, convened by the Australian Government:


“The concept of mental health comes more from an illness or clinical perspective and its focus is more on the individual and their level of functioning in their environment. The social and emotional well-being concept is broader than this and recognizes the importance of connection to land, culture, spirituality, ancestry, family and community, and how these affect the individual.” 3


Mental health and mental illness are seen to come under the umbrella of the broader concept of social and emotional well-being in Indigenous contexts—just one part of a more holistic view of health and well-being. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people maintain that the determinants of contemporary social and emotional well-being have their roots in colonial history and an ongoing disadvantage involving widespread grief, loss, racism, discrimination, adversity, and the transgenerational aftermath of government policies which supported the forcible removal of thousands of Aboriginal children from their parents up until 1970.4


The need to find a way to measure the social and emotional well-being of Indigenous Australians resulted in the development of an interim module of social and emotional well-being, used for the first time in the 2004/05 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey. The results indicated that 27 per cent of Indigenous respondents reported serious psychological distress, and were twice as likely as non-Indigenous Australians to report this.5 As well as being an indicator of poor social and emotional well-being, an emerging body of evidence suggests that serious psychological distress forms part of the causal pathway to the proportion of sickness in an Indigenous locality and mortality risk.6 Modifying the social determinants that lead to serious psychological distress should therefore result in a range of beneficial health outcomes


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better brain tissue petri science
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(HealthNewsDigest.com) - Researchers have studied live cancer cells under the microscope for decades in flat, plastic petri dishes. They offer a good look at the cells, but don’t necessarily tell scientists how the cells interact in humans. To change that, scientists at Ohio State University are working to build better brain tissue in the laboratory that could revolutionize their approach to treating certain types of cancer.

Scientists and engineers at Ohio State’s Comprehensive Cancer Center are using what are called nano-fibers to build better brain tissue to study cancer. The tissue is man-made, but is remarkably similar to tissue that grows naturally in our brains.

The nano-fibers look like tiny white spider webs, but under the microscope they’re the exact size and spacing of human brain tissue. Cancer cells behave more naturally on this material than they do on plastic - giving scientists a more realistic environment to develop drugs that work.

“The behavior of tumor cells in this environment is much more similar to the behavior in the real tumor,” says Mariano Viapiano, PhD, a biologist at Ohio State University.

The 3-D, simulated test surface the nano-particle tissue provides could someday help patients like Samantha Jaglowski. While studying to become a cancer doctor herself, she developed a brain tumor - and her doctor said surgery was her only option.

“He took me to the operating room and spent the next nine hours painstakingly removing this 50 cubic centimeter mass from my brain stem,” Jaglowski says.

Thanks to this new approach, treatments for tumors like Samantha’s may change. Doctors could someday take a biopsy of a tumor, put it in this tissue and try out different medicines on it - all in the lab.

“Those treatments that we are doing are specific for that biopsy, for that patient. That will allow us eventually to determine the best potential treatment for that particular patient,’” says Dr. Viapiano.

This new, 3-D model was designed to help with brain cancer research, but could be adapted to help find treatments for other conditions like Alzheimer’s disease and autism.











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Name of the game is the brain

July 30th 2010 06:24

brain game stores learning selling
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A business that dubs itself the Brain Store should have a capacity to learn. That's why the Mall of America's newest retailer has evolved since its early days.

"We opened in Chicago with a focus on bringing brain-fitness software to the public," said Lindsay Gaskins, co-owner of Marbles: the Brain Store. "But it takes a while for people to understand program-based training. So we decided to complement it with things you hold in your hands and products for social interaction rather than staring at a computer."

That's why the shelves at Marbles, which opened a new store this month, include items such as Smart Mouth, in which players get two letters and have to use them at the beginning and end of a word, and Buckyball, a desk toy with 216 magnets that snap together at the user's whim in unlimited ways.

Games that appeal to all ages and improve memory and reasoning skills have proven relatively recession-proof. Glenn McKee, owner of Twin Cities-based Games by James stores, said products that go "beyond trivia and into deductive logic have been sort of a steady category for us, about 12 to 15 percent of our sales."

Angie Holmstrom, general manager of the Roseville-based wholesaler MindWare, also has seen steady sales for games that build strategy or memory skills. "We sell a lot to stores where an older parent or grandparent is buying something that they can feel good about," she said.

That's true whether they're buying it for themselves, a younger generation, or both.



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Sex Boosts Brain Growth?

July 29th 2010 17:35
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