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Low levels of a brain enzyme could be responsible for aggressive behavior in healthy men

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Are you the kind of guy who portrays the image of ‘an angry young man’? Is everybody running for cover when you are not in a good mood? Is aggression your middle name? If your answer to all the above questions is yes, then you have an enzyme in your body to blame for your behavior.

Conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, this research suggests that lower levels of an enzyme called monoamine oxidase A (MAO A) in the brain is the reason why some healthy men exhibit aggressive behavior.Nelly Alia-Klein presented this work in Washington, D.C. at the 54th annual meeting of the Society for Nuclear Medicine (SNM). Nelly Alia-Klein, an assistant scientist at Brookhaven Lab’s Center for Translational Neuroimaging says,

“Only aggressive personality was related to brain MAO A activity — not other personality dimensions.”

These results come after a neuroimaging research on 27 male volunteers who are healthy and non-violent. In addition, the men were asked to take up a standard personality questionnaire of 240 questions to give the researchers an idea about their personalities. The research makes use of the technique of positron emission tomography (PET) scanning to track and quantify the enzyme in the subjects. The image so recorded during the research has been chosen over many images by the Society for Nuclear Medicine (SNM) for the “2007 Image of the Year”.Nelly Alia-Klein adds,

“If this model of understanding is tested with individuals who actually engage in aggressive or antisocial behavior, such as domestic violence, it could show promise in the future for pharmacological intervention against abnormal aggression.”

This neuroimaging research is quite promising and I hope it goes a long way and inspires many more studies of its kind so that countless secrets and methods of how our brain functions may be revealed.

Image: Learning
Via: Sciencedaily

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