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----------------------------------------------------------------------- Worrying Out of the Right Mind ----------------------------------------------------------------------- NEW YORK (Reuters) -- For the first time, researchers have mapped out brain activity when people worry about the ordinary problems of daily life, such as whether or not they can pay their bills or how a relative with cancer is faring. The study found -- not surprisingly -- that when people worry, brain activity is greatest on the right side of the brain, the region associated with emotion. The researchers hope the findings will help determine what happens when worrying is out of control -- such as in people with psychiatric disorders who may worry to the extreme about inconsequential problems. "What is the difference between someone with generalized anxiety disorder who worries constantly about nothing in contrast to somebody who worries about whether or not they can make payments?" said Dr. Rudolf Hoehn-Saric, who is scheduled to present the findings Monday at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans. "We were very pleased to find that the right side was more affected because a number of studies have shown that the right hemisphere is more intuitive and emotional and the left side is more analytic," said Hoehn-Saric, director of the anxiety disorders unit at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Often it is problems that are not easily solvable that prompt people to worry, and they often use their emotional brain to come to a decision about worrisome problems, he said. Hoehn-Saric and colleagues used a technique called functional positron emission tomography (PET) to measure blood flow in the brains of 10 patients. The study participants first made short tapes describing their worries, be they financial, job-related or due to a family crisis. Brain activity was recorded when the people listened to the tapes, as well as when they listened to a "control" tape -- one describing a flower auction in Holland. By subtracting the control scan from the "worrying scan," the researchers found that many parts of the brain were stimulated during worry, including the frontal lobe, which governs planning and decision making; the basal ganglia, which processes messages from various parts of the brain; and the cerebellum, which stores frequently repeated "routines" for quick access. "It is not just one area of the brain that is affected -- there are various areas," said Hoehn-Saric. "You have here a complex phenomenon where various parts of the brain have different reactions." Worry can be part of psychiatric disorders: irrational worry is the main symptom of generalized anxiety disorder, in which people worry unnecessarily, and it's also part of phobic disorders, where the patient has an irrational fear of people or places. And worry plays a role in obsessive compulsive disorder, in which people may wash their hands hundreds of times a day because they fear bacterial contamination, or repeatedly perform some other activity. While brain scans have been done on those with psychiatric disorders, such as obsessive compulsive disorder or panic disorders, they have not been done on ordinary people worrying about ordinary problems, according to the Maryland researcher. "We needed to know what happens when a normal person worries so you could compare scans of normal people who are worrying with scans of people with an anxiety disorder," Hoehn-Saric said. "The procedures are too complicated at the present time to use for diagnosis, but this gives us a basis to examine patients with anxiety disorders and see in what way they differ from normal -- everybody worries sometimes, but not everybody has anxiety disorders." By Theresa Tamkins [1997, Reuters Health eLine] <http://www.medscape.com/reuters/tue/t1027-1f.html> ----------------------------------------------------------------------- janet paterson - 50/9 - sinemet/selegiline/prozac - [log in to unmask]