ROC Weekly News Bites
Even One Drink Per Day Bad for Your Brain, Online Videos Convincing Teens They Have Mental Disorders, and Cadets on Spring Break Overdose
Here is a recap of some of the top industry-related news stories of the week:
Even a Drink a Day Can Be Bad for Your Health, Says a Study We Desperately Want to Ignore
A new study suggests that even light to moderate drinking is linked to reduced brain volume in otherwise healthy adults.
The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, analyzed data from 36,678 adults across the U.K. participants were healthy and middle aged and older.
Researchers found that the more alcohol people consumed, the more brain matter they appeared to lose. Going from zero to one unit of alcohol, about half a beer or glass of wine, didn’t appear to make a difference. But scientists saw a connection between people who drank two units of alcohol a day and a reduction in brain volume analogous to aging two years.
Brain shrinkage is an inevitable pitfall of aging that we don’t want to speed up. But, according to this study, the brains of people who consume two units of alcohol every day could age more rapidly than people who don’t.
Drinking three units of alcohol a day, which could equate to just two beers, was associated with brain shrinkage equivalent to three-and-a-half years of aging.
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Online Diagnosis Videos Are Convincing Teens They Have Rare Mental Disorders
According to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal, young people are watching a steady stream of TikTok videos about borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, and multiple personality disorder. Teens or young adults who say they have these conditions post the videos, along with self-proclaimed therapists. They often describe the signs and symptoms of these disorders and even encourage viewers to do their own self-evaluations, leading some to believe they also have these mental disorders.
The hashtag #borderlinepersonalitydisorder has 600 million views on TikTok, while the tag #dissociativeidentitydisorder has 700 million. These mental disorders are actually pretty rare. Only 1.4% of the U.S. adult population is estimated to have a borderline personality disorder, and the condition is seldom diagnosed in adolescence because their personalities are still developing. Dissociative identity disorder impacts less than 1% of the population. But their ubiquity on TikTok, and the subsequent mental-health distress they’re inflicting onto teens, is worrying psychologists who say they’ve seen an uptick in young people coming in with self-diagnoses derived from TikTok, which can create treatment challenges and disrupt family relationships.
In light of recent concerns over TikTok’s algorithm and the content it promotes to its predominately young users, the app said it is testing changes to its algorithm that’ll drive users away from ingesting the same type of content. For now, users can select “not interested” on a video if they don’t want to watch more videos with similar content.
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Cadets on Spring Break Overdose at a Broward House, Authorities Say. An Arrest is Made
Six students overdosed with a powder possibly laced with fentanyl in a Wilton Manors home. Four were identified as West Point cadets, the military academy said. On Saturday, a West Point official said that one of the cadets who was hospitalized is an Army football player. The official said another football player at the house was not hospitalized but didn’t specify the sickened player’s condition. Investigators from the Wilton Manors Police Department and Broward County Sheriff’s Office continue investigating this incident and have made an arrest.
Around 5 p.m. Thursday, Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue was called to respond to an overdose situation in the 800 block of Northwest 29th Court, Battalion Chief Stephen Gollan said. When fire rescue arrived at the house, he said there were several people in the front yard and a person inside the home was trying to administer CPR. Gollan said four had taken a substance believed to be cocaine laced with fentanyl and their two friends were exposed to the fentanyl when they tried to give them CPR.
West Point, the nation’s oldest military academy, trains cadets to serve as officers in the U.S. Army. Admittance into the academy requires a nomination from a U.S. House member or U.S. senator.
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