SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956 from a VAI press release:
A collaborative study from research teams in Sweden, the US and Australia published in Translational Psychiatry shows that suicidal patients have a reduced activity of an enzyme that regulates inflammation and its byproducts.
It is known that people who have attempted suicide have ongoing inflammation in their blood and spinal fluid. Now, a collaborative study from research teams in Sweden, the US and Australia published in Translational Psychiatry shows that suicidal patients have a reduced activity of an enzyme that regulates inflammation and its byproducts.
[...] Currently, there are no biomarkers for psychiatric illness, namely biological factors that can be measured and provide information about the patient's psychiatric health. If a simple blood test can identify individuals at risk of taking their lives, that would be a huge step forward, said [Professor Sophie] Erhardt, a Professor at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the Karolinska Institutet, who led the work along with [Professor Lena] Brundin.
The researchers analyzed certain metabolites, byproducts formed during infection and inflammation, in the blood and cerebrospinal fluid [CSF] from patients who tried to take their own lives. Previously it has been shown that such patients have ongoing inflammation in the blood and cerebrospinal fluid. This new work has succeeded in showing that patients who have attempted suicide have reduced activity of an enzyme called ACMSD, which regulates inflammation and its byproducts.
[Continues...]
[...] The substance that the enzyme ACMSD produces, picolinic acid, is greatly reduced in both plasma and in the spinal fluid of suicidal patients. Another product, called quinolinic acid, is increased. Quinolinic acid is inflammatory and binds to and activates glutamate receptors in the brain. Normally, ACMSD produces picolinic acid at the expense of quinolinic acid, thus maintaining an important balance.
[...] Several of the researchers have indicated that they have business interests, which are recognized in the article.
Having found these results in suicidal patients, the researchers are now trying to find out if this imbalance is also present in those with severe depression. They are also seeking to develop drugs that might activate the ACMSD enzyme and restore the balance between quinolinic and picolinic acids.
The full article is available: "An enzyme in the kynurenine pathway That governs vulnerability to suicidal behavior by regulating excitotoxicity and neuroinflammation" Translational Psychiatry, published online August 2, 2016, doi: 10.1038 / TP.2016.133.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday August 16 2016, @06:18PM
It depends on how becoming the Borg would affect our minds. If we are controlled into taking certain actions, but are forced to watch ourselves take those actions with a desire to change them but an inability to do so, I would choose death. It's horrifying in a "I have no mouth but must scream" sort of way.
If, however, our minds were altered into taking certain actions of our own free will, well it's horrifying from the outside but probably rather pleasant on the inside. The only way I can see that working is if we were in some way made dumb to any negative associations of those actions. But if I am doing things that I want to do, regardless of where that impulse came from, without any negative associations, it is no harm done to me. I have lost the biblical fruit of knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil, and while that is horrifying from the outside it is probably quite pleasant on the inside. Ignorance is bliss, you see, and without that knowledge one approaches an innocence free of the burden of sin. At that point we would be mere agents of the machine, our fate not under our own control, but innocent and pure in and of ourselves. Whether this works out well for us depends entirely upon the benevolence of the machine.
So I guess what it comes down to is what goal the Borg we become will serve. Will it be the harmonization of life on Earth as a way to reduce chaos and conflict, ensuring a stable and fruitful future for life as we know it? Or will it be the fragmentation of humanity into several mindless groups playing out a meaningless power struggle for this world's elite?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?