Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0020505 (hyperphagia)
 6,116 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Students from six colleges and universities in five states in the U.S. (New York, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Texas, and Nevada) were surveyed concerning their gambling behavior and the rate of pathological gambling. Type of gambling varied by state, with students in the northeast and Nevada gambling more than students in Oklahoma and Texas. Over 90% of males and 82% of females had gambled. One third of the males and 15% of females gambled once a week or more. Rates of pathological gambling ranged from 8% in New York to 4% in Nevada. The incidence of pathological gambling was high among males, Hispanics, Asians, and Italian-Americans (compared with among other whites), students with non-traffic arrests, those with parents who have gambling problems, and those who abuse alcohol and other drugs. Pathological gambling was only weakly correlated with age, religion, lower grade point average in school, overeating, living in neighborhoods that are "poorer than most," family income, and parental drug use. It was not correlated with academic year in college, marital status, parental occupation, parental alcohol, and bulimic behavior. The implications of the findings for further research and social policy are discussed.
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PMID:Gambling and pathological gambling among university students. 180 75

As adult humans, we are continuously faced with decisions in which proper weighing of the risk involved is critical. Excessively risky or overly cautious decision making can both have disastrous real-world consequences. Weighing of risks and benefits toward decision making involves a complex neural network that includes the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), but its role remains unclear. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation studies have shown that disruption of the DLPFC increases risk-taking behavior. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) allows upregulation of activity in the DLPFC, and we predicted that it might promote more cautious decision making. Healthy participants received one of the following treatments while they performed the Balloon Analog Risk Task: (1) right anodal/left cathodal DLPFC tDCS, (2) left anodal/right cathodal DLPFC tDCS, or (3) sham tDCS. This experiment revealed that participants receiving either one of the bilateral DLPFC tDCS strategies adopted a risk-averse response style. In a control experiment, we tested whether unilateral DLPFC stimulation (anodal tDCS over the right or left DLPFC with the cathodal electrode over the contralateral supraorbital area) was sufficient to decrease risk-taking behaviors. This experiment showed no difference in decision-making behaviors between the groups of unilateral DLPFC stimulation and sham stimulation. These findings extend the notion that DLPFC activity is critical for adaptive decision making, possibly by suppressing riskier responses. Anodal tDCS over DLPFC by itself did not significantly change risk-taking behaviors; however, when the contralateral DLPFC was modulated with cathodal tCDS, an important decrease in risk taking was observed. Also, the induced cautious decision-making behavior was observed only when activity of both DLPFCs was modulated. The ability to modify risk-taking behavior may be translated into therapeutic interventions for disorders such as drug abuse, overeating, or pathological gambling.
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PMID:Activation of prefrontal cortex by transcranial direct current stimulation reduces appetite for risk during ambiguous decision making. 1755 93

Delay discounting describes the devaluation of a reinforcer as a function of the delay until its receipt. Although all people discount delayed reinforcers, one consistent finding is that substance-dependent individuals tend to discount delayed reinforcers more rapidly than do healthy controls. Moreover, these higher-than-normal discounting rates have been observed in individuals with other behavioral maladies such as pathological gambling, poor health behavior, and overeating. This suggests that high rates of delay discounting may be a trans-disease process (i.e., a process that occurs across a range of disorders, making findings from one disorder relevant to other disorders). In this paper, we argue that delay discounting is a trans-disease process, undergirded by an imbalance between two competing neurobehavioral decision systems. Implications for our understanding of, and treatment for, this trans-disease process are discussed.
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PMID:Excessive discounting of delayed reinforcers as a trans-disease process contributing to addiction and other disease-related vulnerabilities: emerging evidence. 2238 32

Reward-related stimuli come to acquire incentive salience through Pavlovian learning and become capable of controlling reward-oriented behaviors. Here, we examined individual differences in anticipatory activity elicited by reward-related cues as indicative of how animals attribute incentive salience to otherwise neutral stimuli. Since adult rats can signal incentive motivation states through ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) at around 50-kHz, such calls were recorded in food-deprived rats trained to associate cues with food rewards, which were subsequently devalued by satiation.We found that the extent to which animals developed conditioned anticipatory activity to food cues while food deprived determined the level of cue-induced appetitive USVs while sated. Re-exposure to reward cues after a free-testing period reinstated USVs, invigorated reward seeking and consumption, and again, increases in calling occurred only in animals with high levels of cue-induced anticipatory activity. Reward-experienced rats systemically challenged with the catecholamine agonist amphetamine or with the dopamine receptor antagonist flupenthixol showed attenuated responses to these drugs, especially for USVs and in subjects with high levels of cue-induced anticipatory activity. Our results suggest that individuals prone to attribute incentive salience to reward cues showed heightened reward-induced USVs which were reliably expressed over time and persisted despite physiological needs being fulfilled. Also, prone subjects seemed to undergo particular adaptations in their dopaminergic system related with incentive learning. Our findings may have translational relevance in preclinical research modeling compulsive disorders, which may be due to excessive attribution of incentive salience to reward cues, such as overeating, pathological gambling, and drug addiction.
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PMID:Individual differences in anticipatory activity to food rewards predict cue-induced appetitive 50-kHz calls in rats. 2599 80