By PETER ANDREY SMITH Sweet, salty, sour and bitter — every schoolchild knows these are the building blocks of taste. Our delight in every scrumptious bonbon, every sizzling hot dog, derives in part from the tongue’s ability to recognize and signal just four types of taste. But are there really just four? Over the last decade, research challenging the notion has been piling up. Today, savory, also called umami, is widely recognized as a basic taste, the fifth. And now other candidates, perhaps as many as 10 or 20, are jockeying for entry into this exclusive club. “What started off as a challenge to the pantheon of basic tastes has now opened up, so that the whole question is whether taste is even limited to a very small number of primaries,” said Richard D. Mattes, a professor of nutrition science at Purdue University. Taste plays an intrinsic role as a chemical-sensing system for helping us find what is nutritious (stimulatory) and as a defense against what is poison (aversive). When we put food in our mouths, chemicals slip over taste buds planted into the tongue and palate. As they respond, we are thrilled or repulsed by what we’re eating. But the body’s reaction may not always be a conscious one. In the late 1980s, in a windowless laboratory at Brooklyn College, the psychologist Anthony Sclafani was investigating the attractive power of sweets. His lab rats loved Polycose, a maltodextrin powder, even preferring it to sugar. That was puzzling for two reasons: Maltodextrin is rarely found in plants that rats might feed on naturally, and when human subjects tried it, the stuff had no obvious taste. More than a decade later, a team of exercise scientists discovered that maltodextrin improved athletic performance — even when the tasteless additive was swished around in the mouth and spit back out. Our tongues report nothing; our brains, it seems, sense the incoming energy. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 19867 - Posted: 07.22.2014

Sarah C. P. Williams The wheezing, coughing, and gasping for breath that come with a sudden asthma attack aren’t just the fault of an overactive immune system. A particularly sensitive bundle of neurons stretching from the brain to the lungs might be to blame as well, researchers have found. Drugs that alter these neurons could provide a new way to treat some types of asthma. “This is an exciting confirmation of an idea that’s been around for decades,” says Allison Fryer, a pulmonary pharmacology researcher at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, who was not involved in the new study. An asthma attack can be brought on by a variety of triggers, including exercise, cold temperatures, pollen, and dust. During an attack, a person’s airways become inflamed, mucus clogs their lungs, and the muscles surrounding their airways tighten. Asthma is often considered a disease of the immune system because immune cells go into overdrive when they sense a trigger and cause inflammation. But a bundle of nerves that snakes through the neck and chest, the vagus nerve, has long been suspected to play a role; the cells it contains, after all, control the airway muscles. Studying which cell types and molecular pathways within the thick nerve bundle are involved, though, has been tough—the vagus contains a multitude of different cells that are physically intertwined. Working together at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, neurobiologists Dimitri Tränkner, now at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and Charles Zuker of Columbia University turned to genetics to work out the players. They selectively shut off different sets of the neurons in mice based on which genes each neuron expressed, rather than their physical location. Then, through a series of injections, they gave the animals an egg white allergy that causes asthmalike symptoms. © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 19866 - Posted: 07.22.2014

By DONALD G. MCNEIL Where was I? Sorry — must have nodded off for a decade. Ten years ago, I spent two nights in a sleep lab at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, taking the test for sleep apnea, and wrote about it for Science Times. Back then, “sleep technicians” wired me up like the Bride of Frankenstein: 15 sensors glued or clamped to my scalp, lip, eye sockets, jaw, index finger, chest and legs, two belts around my torso, and a “snore mike” on my neck. As I slept, an infrared camera watched over me. And I ended up spending 23 hours in that hospital bed because the test wasn’t over until you could lie in a dark room for 20 minutes without dozing off. I had such a sleep deficit that I kept conking out, not just all night, but all the next day. So this year, when a company called NovaSom offered to let me try out a new home sleep-test kit that promises to streamline the process, I said yes. In the decade since my ordeal, the pendulum has swung sharply in the direction of the home test, said Dr. M. Safwan Badr, past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, which first recognized home testing for apnea in 2007. Insurers prefer it because it costs only about $300, about one-tenth that of a hospital test, and many patients like it, too. “Lots of people are reluctant to let a stranger watch them sleep,” said Dr. Michael Coppola, a former president of the American Sleep Apnea Association who is now the chief medical officer at NovaSom. Doctors estimate that 18 million Americans have moderate to severe apnea and 75 percent of them do not know it. Home testing is not recommended for those with heart failure, emphysema, seizures and a few other conditions. And because it does not record brain waves as a hospital lab does, a home test can be fooled by someone who just lies awake all night staring at the ceiling. But it’s useful for many people who exhibit the warning signs of apnea, such as waking up exhausted after a full night’s sleep or dozing off at the wheel in bright daylight. And severe apnea can be lethal: starving the brain of oxygen all night quadruples the risk of stroke. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 19865 - Posted: 07.22.2014

Most of the genetic risk for autism comes from versions of genes that are common in the population rather than from rare variants or spontaneous glitches, researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have found. Heritability also outweighed other risk factors in this largest study of its kind to date. About 52 percent of the risk for autism was traced to common and rare inherited variation, with spontaneous mutations contributing a modest 2.6 percent of the total risk. “Genetic variation likely accounts for roughly 60 percent of the liability for autism, with common variants comprising the bulk of its genetic architecture,” explained Joseph Buxbaum, Ph.D., of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS), New York City. “Although each exerts just a tiny effect individually, these common variations in the genetic code add up to substantial impact, taken together.” Buxbaum, and colleagues of the Population-Based Autism Genetics and Environment Study (PAGES) Consortium, report on their findings in a unique Swedish sample in the journal Nature Genetics, July 20, 2014. “Thanks to the boost in statistical power that comes with ample sample size, autism geneticists can now detect common as well as rare genetic variation associated with risk,” said Thomas R. Insel, M.D., director of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). “Knowing the nature of the genetic risk will reveal clues to the molecular roots of the disorder. Common variation may be more important than we thought.”

Keyword: Autism; Aggression
Link ID: 19863 - Posted: 07.22.2014

By JAN HOFFMAN As it has for decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week released its annual National Health Interview Survey on the health of Americans. But this year, there was a difference: For the first time, the respondents were asked about their sexual orientation. Of 34,557 adults ages 18 and older, the survey reported, 1.6 percent said they were gay or lesbian. Some critics say the numbers are low, but they fall in the range of other surveys. In the new survey, however, only 0.7 percent of respondents described themselves as bisexual; other studies have reported higher numbers. Adults who identified themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual reported some different behaviors and concerns — for example, more alcohol consumption and cigarette smoking — than those who said they were straight. But it can be difficult to elicit information that many people consider private. The New York Times spoke about such challenges with Gary J. Gates, a demographer at the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, which focuses on law and policy issues related to sexual orientation and gender identity. Some of Dr. Gates’s findings were echoed in the new survey. This interview was edited and condensed. Q.How was this survey conducted? A.Survey takers had a computer that guided them through questions which they asked the respondent in person, and they used flash cards to show them potential answers. Q.Why do you think the figure for bisexuality was lower than in other surveys? A.There is evidence that bisexuals perceive more stigma and discrimination than gay and lesbian people. They are much less likely to tell important people around them that they are bisexual. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 19862 - Posted: 07.22.2014

By HENRY L. ROEDIGER III TESTS have a bad reputation in education circles these days: They take time, the critics say, put students under pressure and, in the case of standardized testing, crowd out other educational priorities. But the truth is that, used properly, testing as part of an educational routine provides an important tool not just to measure learning, but to promote it. In one study I published with Jeffrey D. Karpicke, a psychologist at Purdue, we assessed how well students remembered material they had read. After an initial reading, students were tested on some passages by being given a blank sheet of paper and asked to recall as much as possible. They recalled about 70 percent of the ideas. Other passages were not tested but were reread, and thus 100 percent of the ideas were re-exposed. In final tests given either two days or a week later, the passages that had been tested just after reading were remembered much better than those that had been reread. What’s at work here? When students are tested, they are required to retrieve knowledge from memory. Much educational activity, such as lectures and textbook readings, is aimed at helping students acquire and store knowledge. Various kinds of testing, though, when used appropriately, encourage students to practice the valuable skill of retrieving and using knowledge. The fact of improved retention after a quiz — called the testing effect or the retrieval practice effect — makes the learning stronger and embeds it more securely in memory. This is vital, because many studies reveal that much of what we learn is quickly forgotten. Thus a central challenge to learning is finding a way to stem forgetting. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 19861 - Posted: 07.21.2014

|By Nathan Collins Time, space and social relationships share a common language of distance: we speak of faraway places, close friends and the remote past. Maybe that is because all three share common patterns of brain activity, according to a January study in the Journal of Neuroscience. Curious to understand why the distance metaphor works across conceptual domains, Dartmouth College psychologists used functional MRI scans to analyze the brains of 15 people as they viewed pictures of household objects taken at near or far distances, looked at photographs of friends or acquaintances, and read phrases such as “in a few seconds” or “a year from now.” Patterns of activity in the right inferior parietal lobule, a region thought to handle distance information, robustly predicted whether a participant was thinking about near versus far in any of the categories—indicating that certain aspects of time, space and relationships are all processed in a similar way in the brain. The results, the researchers say, suggest that higher-order brain functions are organized more around computations such as near versus far than conceptual domains such as time or social relationships. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 19860 - Posted: 07.21.2014

By ANN SANNER Associated Press COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A few weeks before their prom king’s death, students at an Ohio high school had attended an assembly on narcotics that warned about the dangers of heroin and prescription painkillers. But it was one of the world’s most widely accepted drugs that killed Logan Stiner — a powdered form of caffeine so potent that as little as a single teaspoon can be fatal. The teen’s sudden death in May has focused attention on the unregulated powder and drawn a warning from federal health authorities urging consumers to avoid it. ‘‘I don’t think any of us really knew that this stuff was out there,’’ said Jay Arbaugh, superintendent of the Keystone Local Schools. The federal Food and Drug Administration said Friday that it’s investigating caffeine powder and will consider taking regulatory action. The agency cautioned parents that young people could be drawn to it. An autopsy found that Stiner had a lethal amount of caffeine in his system when he died May 27 at his home in LaGrange, Ohio, southwest of Cleveland. Stiner, a wrestler, had more than 70 micrograms of caffeine per milliliter of blood in his system, as much as 23 times the amount found in a typical coffee or soda drinker, according to the county coroner. His mother has said she was unaware her son took caffeine powder. He was just days away from graduation and had planned to study at the University of Toledo. Caffeine powder is sold as a dietary supplement, so it’s not subject to the same federal regulations as certain caffeinated foods. Users add it to drinks for a pick-me-up before workouts or to control weight gain. A mere 1/16th of a teaspoon can contain about 200 milligrams of caffeine, roughly the equivalent of two large cups of coffee. That means a heaping teaspoon could kill, said Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency physician at Lenox Hill ?Hospital in New York.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 19857 - Posted: 07.21.2014

Tania Browne As a teenager, I lost my grandfather. But he wasn't dead. He still had his favourite music, he still loved to walk in the woods and name the flowers and plants, and he loved his soap operas. He was alive, but gone. A dignified man, a former aircraft engineer and oil company salesman, reduced to the status of a bewildered toddler lost in a shopping centre. When he died, our family felt an odd mix of relief, then guilt at the relief. The man we loved had left his body years before the body gave out. This was 30 years ago. But while a cure is still far away, two new techniques may at least be able to forewarn us of dementia, and allow us to plan treatment for ourselves or loved ones before any outward symptoms are apparent. According to Alzheimer's Research UK, my experience is currently shared by 24m relatives and close friends of the 800 000 diagnosed dementia sufferers in the UK. In December last year, a G8 summit was told by Alzheimer's Disease International that the worldwide figure was 44m and set to treble by 2050, as the life expectancy of people in middle and lower income countries soars – precisely the countries who have either depleted or non-existent healthcare systems. Dementia is a serious time bomb. “Dementia” covers about 100 conditions, all resulting from large scale brain cell death. People often think that when they're diagnosed they're in the early stages. Yet cell death can be occurring for 10-15 years or more before any outward symptoms occur, and by the time they're diagnosed many dementia patients have already lost one fifth of their memory cells. © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 19856 - Posted: 07.21.2014

|By Roni Jacobson Last week, nine-year-old Hally Yust died after contracting a rare brain-eating amoeba infection while swimming near her family’s home in Kansas. The organism responsible, Naegleria fowleri, dwells in warm freshwater lakes and rivers and usually targets children and young adults. Once in the brain it causes a swelling called primary meningoencephalitis. The infection is almost universally fatal: it kills more than 97 percent of its victims within days. Although deadly, infections are exceedingly uncommon—there were only 34 reported in the U.S. during the past 10 years—but evidence suggests they may be increasing. Prior to 2010 more than half of cases came from Florida, Texas and other southern states. Since then, however, infections have popped up as far north as Minnesota. “We’re seeing it in states where we hadn’t seen cases before,” says Jennifer Cope, an epidemiologist and expert in amoeba infections at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The expanding range of Naegleria infections could potentially be related to climate change, she adds, as the organism thrives in warmer temperatures. “It’s something we’re definitely keeping an eye on.” Still, “when it comes to Naegleria there’s a lot we don’t know,” Cope says—including why it chooses its victims. The amoeba has strategies to evade the immune system, and treatment options are meager partly because of how fast the infection progresses. But research suggests that the infectioncan be stopped if it is caught soon enough. So what happens during an N. fowleri infection? © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 19855 - Posted: 07.21.2014

Ewen Callaway One could be forgiven for mistaking anomalocaridids for creatures from another world. The spade-shaped predators, which lived in the seas during the Cambrian — the geological era stretching from 541 million to 485 million years ago — had eyes that protruded from stalks and a pair of giant appendages on the sides of their mouths. But three stunningly well-preserved fossils found in China now show that the anomalocaridid brain was wired much like that of modern creatures called velvet worms, or onychophorans. Both anomalocaridids and onychophorans belong to the arthropods, the group of invertebrates that includes spiders and insects and whose brain structures come in three main types. Two of those were already known to be very ancient, and the new fossils, described today in Nature1, suggest that the third type — the neural architecture found in onychophorans — also has changed little over more than half a billion years of evolution. Named Lyrarapax unguispinus, the three fossils reveal creatures that — at 8 centimetres long — are on the small side for anomalocaridids, some of which are thought to have been as long as 2 to 3 metres. But the fossils’ segmented bodies and frontal appendages are pure anomalocaridid, says Nicholas Strausfeld, a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who co-led the study. What really grabbed Strausfeld’s attention was the creature’s brain, preserved flattened like a pressed flower: “I said, ‘Holy shit, that’s an onychophoran brain!’” he recalls. The animal’s frontal appendages are connected to nerve bundles, or ganglia, in front of optic nerves. Both the ganglia and the optic nerves lead to a segmented brain. The layout is an uncanny match to the wiring of the velvet worm’s brain, Strausfeld says: “It’s completely unlike anything else in any other arthropod.” © 2014 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 19851 - Posted: 07.19.2014

Kelly Servick If you’re a bird enthusiast, you can pick out the “chick-a-DEE-dee” song of the Carolina chickadee with just a little practice. But if you’re an environmental scientist faced with parsing thousands of hours of recordings of birdsongs in the lab, you might want to enlist some help from your computer. A new approach to automatic classification of birdsong borrows techniques from human voice recognition software to sort through the sounds of hundreds of species and decides on its own which features make each one unique. Collectors of animal sounds are facing a data deluge. Thanks to cheap digital recording devices that can capture sound for days in the field, “it’s really, really easy to collect sound, but it’s really difficult to analyze it,” say Aaron Rice, a bioacoustics researcher at Cornell University, who was not involved in the new work. His lab has collected 6 million hours of underwater recordings, from which they hope to pick out the signature sounds of various marine mammals. Knowing where and when a certain species is vocalizing might help scientists understand habitat preferences, track their movements or population changes, and recognize when a species is disrupted by human development. But to keep these detailed records, researchers rely on software that can reliably sort through the cacophony they capture in the field. Typically, scientists build one computer program to recognize one species, and then start all over for another species, Rice says. Training a computer to recognize lots of species in one pass is “a challenge that we’re all facing.” © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 19849 - Posted: 07.19.2014

By ANNA ALTMAN NPR conducted a study about how stressed out we are as a country, and the results, released last week, show that one in four Americans reported feeling stressed in the last month and one in two has experienced a major stressful event in the last year. Smithsonian Magazine, recommending the study, reports that this likely underestimates the actual stress load on Americans: “The survey only measures stress that people are conscious of, NPR explains, but research shows that people can suffer unaware from other forms of stress.” In short, according to Smithsonian, “stress is becoming the national psyche.” So we are barraged with new studies and ideas about stress and how it may be harming us — but many of them are contradictory. Stress can hurt your health, but stressing too much about stress is even worse for your health. Stress can make you sleep badly or it can make you fall asleep. People are most stressed out on Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. And BuzzFeed made a cute video asking whether stress can actually kill you. (“Those under significant stress can have more clogged arteries” and that “can ultimately lead to heart attack.”) Nevertheless, longstanding medical studies do show that chronic stress can lead to anxiety, depression, digestive problems, trouble sleeping, heart disease, weight gain and memory or concentration impairment. Alexandra Drane, a health care consultant, told NPR that those experiencing “toxic stress” were “2.6 times as likely to have diabetes, 2.9 times as likely to have back pain. They were 5 times as likely to be having mental health issues.” Our economy is contributing to the strain, as elevated stress levels often correlate with downturns. In the United States, the Great Recession brought a spike in stress and anxiety. The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index polls more than a thousand people each day and in 2008, the study’s first year, showed the definitive effects of economic hardship on stress and mental well-being. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 19847 - Posted: 07.17.2014

|By Daisy Yuhas At Sunday’s World Cup Final, German soccer player Christoph Kramer knocked his head against an Argentine opponent’s shoulder with such force that Kramer spun to the ground and fell face down. The blow was one of many at this year’s competition, which further fueled a rising debate about concussion, the damages of fútbol versus football and the best response to head injuries. Part of the challenge in understanding these injuries is how varied they can be. Although much attention has gone to severe forms of traumatic brain injury (TBI) such as concussion-induced coma, far more common are the milder impacts that come from falling off a bicycle, a low-speed car accident or taking a weak punch in a fistfight. These injuries may not entail losing consciousness but rather just a brief lack in responsiveness before recovering. Now a group of researchers in the U.K. at Newcastle University, the University of Aberdeen and the University of Edinburgh have released results of a longer-term investigation of individuals who have suffered such first-time, minor head injuries. Their findings hint that the contusions leave a lasting trace in the brain. The team, led by Newcastle imaging physicist Andrew Blamire, scanned the brains of 53 individuals with mild or moderate TBI within two weeks of the injury. They mapped the tracts of fibers connecting brain regions in the patients as well as in 33 healthy subjects. Blamire and colleagues discovered distinct differences between the two groups. “Even in patients with mild injury, you can detect a marker of that injury,” Blamire says. That marker may distinguish mild injuries from more forceful impacts. In cases of severe TBI, brain tissue known as white matter that envelops the tracts deteriorates, effectively mashed by the impact. But Blamire identified an opposite trend in the mild and moderate cases. For these patients, the white matter fibers became even more structured. He and his colleagues hypothesize that this organization may be caused by an inflammatory response in which the brain’s glial cells leap into action, perhaps repairing damage or blocking further injury. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 19845 - Posted: 07.17.2014

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Sleep is essential for good health, as we all know. But a new study hints that there may be an easy but unrealized way to augment its virtues: lower the thermostat. Cooler bedrooms could subtly transform a person’s stores of brown fat — what has lately come to be thought of as “good fat” — and consequently alter energy expenditure and metabolic health, even into daylight hours. Until recently, most scientists thought that adults had no brown fat. But in the past few years, scanty deposits — teaspoonfuls, really — of the tissue have been detected in the necks and upper backs in many adults. This is important because brown fat, unlike the more common white stuff, is metabolically active. Experiments with mice have shown that it takes sugar out of the bloodstream to burn calories and maintain core temperature. A similar process seems to take place in humans. For the new study, published in June in Diabetes, researchers affiliated with the National Institutes of Health persuaded five healthy young male volunteers to sleep in climate-controlled chambers at the N.I.H. for four months. The men went about their normal lives during the days, then returned at 8 every evening. All meals, including lunch, were provided, to keep their caloric intakes constant. They slept in hospital scrubs under light sheets. For the first month, the researchers kept the bedrooms at 75 degrees, considered a neutral temperature that would not prompt moderating responses from the body. The next month, the bedrooms were cooled to 66 degrees, a temperature that the researchers expected might stimulate brown-fat activity (but not shivering, which usually begins at more frigid temperatures). The following month, the bedrooms were reset to 75 degrees, to undo any effects from the chillier room, and for the last month, the sleeping temperature was a balmy 81 degrees. Throughout, the subjects’ blood-sugar and insulin levels and daily caloric expenditures were tracked; after each month, the amount of brown fat was measured. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 19844 - Posted: 07.17.2014

by Richard Frackowiak "A GRASS roots effort is under way to stop the project... 'Mediocre science, terrible science policy,' begins the spirited letter..." The year was 1990 and the journal Science was reporting on what it called a "backlash" against the Human Genome Project. Given the furore this past week you could be forgiven for thinking these words were written about another big science initiative: the Human Brain Project (HBP). Less than a year into its planned 10-year lifetime, the project was publicly criticised in an open letter posted online on 7 July, signed by more than 150 scientists. At the time of writing a further 400 individuals have added their names. The Human Genome Project weathered its criticisms and reached its goal in 2003, birthing the entire field of genomics and opening new medical, scientific and commercial avenues along the way. The Human Brain Project will similarly overcome its own teething troubles and catalyse a methodological paradigm shift towards unified brain research that weaves together neuroscience, computing and medicine. The goal of the HBP is a comprehensive understanding of brain structure and function through the development and use of computing tools. This is popularly deemed a "simulation of the whole human brain" but we prefer the analogy "CERN for the brain" (after Europe's premier particle physics lab): a large facility for diverse experiments and sharing of knowledge with a common goal of unlocking the most complex structure in the known universe. This brings me to two of the criticisms in the open letter: the apparent lack of experimental neuroscience and data generation in the HBP, and the emphasis on information and communications technologies (ICT) in what is billed as a neuroscience project. I will address a third criticism regarding funding later on. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 19842 - Posted: 07.17.2014

By Jonathan Webb Science reporter, BBC News After leaders of the billion-euro Human Brain Project hit back at critics, six top neuroscientists have expressed "dismay" at their public response. Last week an open message, signed by over 600 researchers, said the HBP was "not on course", demanding a review. An official reply said HBP members were "saddened" by the protest but Prof Henry Markram, the project's chair, has labelled it a personal crusade. In a letter to Nature, the six authors call for a more "open-minded attitude". They did not sign the original protest letter, but are disappointed by the publicly reported stance of the HBP leadership. "Instead of acknowledging that there is a problem and genuinely seeking to address scientists' concerns, the project leaders seem to be of the opinion that the letter's 580 signatories [now over 600] are misguided," wrote Prof Richard Morris, an eminent neuroscientist from the University of Edinburgh, and five colleagues. The six correspondents describe themselves as "neuroscientists in Europe who care about the success of research projects large and small in our field". Prof Richard Frackowiak, a co-executive director of the HBP, told the BBC he "strongly objects" to the idea that the project leaders were dismissive. "We've taken this extremely seriously," he said. The HBP is one of two flagship technology projects (the other being graphene research) announced in January 2013 by the European Commission (EC). BBC © 2014

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 19841 - Posted: 07.17.2014

|By Nidhi Subbaraman and SFARI.org A team at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, is set to launch a $40 million clinical trial to explore stem cells from umbilical cord blood as a treatment for autism. But experts caution that the trial is premature. A $15 million grant from the Marcus Foundation, a philanthropic funding organization based in Atlanta, will bankroll the first two years of the five-year trial, which also plans to test stem cell therapy for stroke and cerebral palsy. The autism arm of the trial aims to enroll 390 children and adults. Joanne Kurtzberg, the trial’s lead investigator, has extensive experience studying the effectiveness of cord blood transplants for treating various disorders, such as leukemia and sickle cell anemia. Most recently, she showed that cord blood transplants can improve the odds of survival for babies deprived of oxygen at birth. A randomized trial of the approach for this condition is underway. “To really sort out if [stem] cells can treat these children, we need to do randomized, controlled trials that are well designed and well controlled, and that’s what we intend to do,” says Kurtzberg, professor of pediatrics and pathology at Duke. “We firmly believe we should be moving ahead in the clinic.” Early animal studies have shown that stem cells isolated from umbilical cord blood can stimulate cells in the spinal cord to regrow their myelin layers, and in doing so help restore connections with surrounding cells. Autism is thought to result from impaired connectivity in the brain. Because of this, some groups of children with the disorder may benefit from a stem cell transplant, Kurtzberg says. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism; Aggression
Link ID: 19840 - Posted: 07.16.2014

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR The incidence of stroke in the United States has declined significantly over the past two decades, a new analysis has found. The decreases were apparent in people older than 65, the most common age group for stroke, and were similar in men and women and in blacks and whites. There were decreases in stroke deaths as well, but they were concentrated in younger research participants. The report appeared in JAMA. Researchers followed 14,357 people, ages 45 to 64 at the start of the study, from 1987 to 2011. After accounting for coronary heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, smoking, statin use and other factors, they found that the incidence of stroke decreased by about 50 percent over the period of the study, and stroke deaths by about 40 percent. Smoking cessation and better treatment of hypertension and high cholesterol accounted for part of the decrease, according to the senior author, Dr. Josef Coresh, a professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and improved medical care and more rigorous control of risk factors probably helped as well. Increased diabetes prevalence, on the other hand, contributed to higher risk. “The decrease in stroke also suggests that there’s a decrease in smaller strokes that we may not detect,” he said, “and that would bode well for overall brain health and the potential for decreasing the risk of dementia with aging.” © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 19839 - Posted: 07.16.2014

Associated Press The rate of Alzheimer's disease and other dementias is falling in the United States and some other rich countries - good news about an epidemic that is still growing simply because more people are living to an old age, new studies show. An American over age 60 today has a 44 percent lower chance of developing dementia than a similar-aged person did roughly 30 years ago, the longest study of these trends in the U.S. concluded. Dementia rates also are down in Germany, a study there found. "For an individual, the actual risk of dementia seems to have declined," probably because of more education and control of health factors such as cholesterol and blood pressure, said Dr. Kenneth Langa. He is a University of Michigan expert on aging who discussed the studies Tuesday at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in Copenhagen. The opposite is occurring in some poor countries that have lagged on education and health, where dementia seems to be rising. More than 5.4 million Americans and 35 million people worldwide have Alzheimer's, the most common form of dementia. It has no cure, and current drugs only temporarily ease symptoms. A drop in rates is a silver lining in the so-called silver tsunami - the expected wave of age-related health problems from an older population. Alzheimer's will remain a major public health issue, but countries where rates are dropping may be able to lower current projections for spending and needed services, experts said. © 2014 Hearst Communications, Inc.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 19838 - Posted: 07.16.2014