One year ago: traumatic experiences linked to disease

One year ago I wrote about a study that linked trauma during childhood to increased risk for certain diseases later in life. The study in question was done in humans and I compared that research paradigm with the cruel experiments done on animals to imitate child abuse and neglect.

By comparison, other perhaps less creative and certainly less compassionate people try to create animal "models" of child abuse and neglect by subjecting baby animals to maternal deprivation or by purposefully taking healthy babies and putting them with aggressive adults. If the baby animals used in these terrible experiments survive, they suffer from a range of physical and psychological pathologies, conditions that are rarely acknowledged or treated. The outcome has many similarities to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Studies that explicitly examine post-traumatic symptoms in elephants, chimpanzees and other animals only serve to bolster this claim.

Revisit the original story to read more about the trauma-disease link.

Trauma in early life, disease in later life

Dogs may be responding to psychological seizures, not epilepsy seizures

This caught my attention today. Two new studies out on people who have a "seizure dog." Some dogs can be trained to detect seizures in advance of their occurrence, other seizure dogs stay with the person during a seizure, presumably to provide support or safety.

Fewer than half the people in the study actually had epilepsy, but instead suffered from psychological seizures. The lead investigator noted that failure to diagnose the nature of the seizures was a serious problem. Psychological seizures are not responsive to epilepsy medications, for example.

So why do people who have psychogenic seizures wind up with seizure detection dogs? How? The investigator suggested that people with psychological seizures may seek out service animals for support.

The really interesting part comes from commentary by an independent neurologist here in Seattle. Michael Doherty MD wondered if the psychological seizures could be a response to cues from the dogs. The question of how the presence of a seizure dog affects seizure activity is interesting. Is it higher or lower?

In the end, I am concerned about this because of the potential for exploitation of the dogs who "accidentally" become caregivers to people with psychiatric conditions, and then are not properly monitored and have no support for the burdens they shoulder. Certainly better screening and access to mental health services for the people are part of the answer.

Dogs may be responding to psychological seizures, not epilepsy seizures

Bored to distraction

The barren environment of the laboratory is associated with a number of physical and psychological pathologies among animals used in laboratory experiments. New Scientist recently reported on a lethal experiment ("Bored monkeys make for stupid monkeys" 11/19/05) demonstrated how "standard" and "enriched" environments affected adult monkeys' brains. I think that "bored" is, at best, an understatement for what these animals experienced, but I suppose word choice is the sort of thing that comes with editorial power.

I simply had to respond to the fact that the ethical implications of such experiments were sidestepped in an opinion piece printed in the most recent issue: Bored to distraction.

Baby monkeys only allowed to see world through "keyholes"

Many people have heard of Harry Harlow's infamous maternal deprivation experiments performed more than 50 years ago. Babies were taken from their mothers to live with inanimate substitutes that abused (monster mothers who caused pain) or neglected ("dolls" of sorts that did nothing at all) them to the detriment of their physical and mental health. Imagine, if you can, that on top of this cruel legacy of deprivation, the babies were also subjected to experiments - nearly blinded, poked and prodded. Would you be surprised to know that these were experiments done recently and not in the 50s?


Citation: Smith EL 3rd, Kee CS, Ramamirtham R, Qiao-Grider Y, Hung LF.Peripheral vision can influence eye growth and refractive development in infant monkeys. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2005 Nov;46(11):3965-72.

Summary of the experiment: 15 baby monkeys were taken from their mothers and raised in a lab nursery. The infants were forced to wear helmets with experimental lenses. 12 monkeys had lenses with openings of just 4 (n=6) or 8 mm (n=6), i.e. “keyholes” that would effectively “white out” all peripheral vision. The helmets were put on at 3 weeks of age (that’s when they got out of their incubators) and worn until five months of age.

After the helmets were taken off, a laser was used to damage the center of the retina in one eye of 7 monkeys. All 12 keyhole monkeys had abnormal vision. 9 of 12 keyhole monkeys had extreme vision problems (outside 90th centile). For reasons that the authors could not explain, one became extraordinarily far sighted – the opposite of what is expected. Farsightedness develops when the entire eye is blurred (i.e. when there isn’t even a clear "keyhole").

There were 21 control babies who did not have to wear a helmet or have an eye damaged by a laser, but they were taken from their mothers.

Funding acknowledged in the article: National Eye Institute Grants R01 EY03611, and P30 EY70551, the Vision Cooperative Research Centre Sydney, Australia, the Greeman-Petty Professorship, and the UH Foundation

Since 2000,the National Eye Institutes have paid over 2 million dollars for these cruel experiments.

Institutional Affiliations: All authors claim joint affiliation.

• College of Optometry, University of Houston, Houston, Texas USA
• Vision Cooperative Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Sad Simians (Depressed to Death)

We've all heard the cliche about dying from a broken heart. For some monkeys, it's not a cliche at all. It's the result of a lifetime of suffering in captivity - isolated from friends and family and surrounded by individuals who are enemies who cause fear, pain distress and suffering. Others don't appear to care one way or the other. Some of those individuals are other monkeys - and some of them are the humans involved in the experiments.


Citation:
Shively, C. A., Register, T. C., Friedman, D. P., Morgan,T. M., Thompson,J., and Lanier, T. (2005). Social stress-associated depression in adult female cynomolgus monkeys (Macaca fascicularis). Biol Psychol 69:67-84.

Summary of experiment:
Female monkeys were put into unnatural social groups intended to induce extreme depression in some animals. The social stress was devastating.

"Over the course of the experiment, 56% of the monkeys in the highest quartile of depression died (5/9), whereas there were only one (11%) or two (22%) deaths in each of the other quartiles. Thus, behavioral depression was associated with increased mortality..."

*Only one or two deaths*? In a setting where proper nutrition is supposedly provided, there are no predators or natural disasters, and veterinary care is readily available, what could the mortality rate be? Apparently there are some very serious risks for morbidity and mortality in this lab.


Institutional affiliations:
Wake Forest University School of Medicine

Funded by:
National Institute of Mental Health
National Institute of General Medical Sciences
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation