Biological Psychology Links

Regions of the brain are known to differ in people with autism. Red and orange show areas that are thicker or larger, while the blue shows a reduction in size compared with a non-autistic brain. Regions of the brain are known to differ in people with autism. Red and orange show areas that are thicker or larger, while the blue shows a reduction in size compared with a non-autistic brain. (MRC) Autism in adults can be diagnosed using MRI brain scans, British scientists have found. The 15-minute scans were used to identify autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with an accuracy of 90 per cent in 20 people who were previously diagnosed. "Our study offers a 'proof of concept' for describing the complex multidimensional grey matter differences in ASD," Dr. Christine Ecker, a lecturer in forensic and neurodevelopmental sciences at London's Institute of Psychiatry and her co-authors concluded in Wednesday's issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. In the experiment, magnetic resonance imaging scans were reconstructed into 3-D images and analyzed using computer software programmed to spot structural changes in the brain's grey matter by measuring areas that relate to behaviour, language and vision. Changes in shape and thickness point to the disorder. A capability to diagnose ASD based on objective biological tests rather than the current method of relying on personality traits could help identify patients more quickly who need treatment, Ecker said. © CBC 2010

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY If something offers easy answers for not-so-easy questions, you might be reading a popular science book. Malcom Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success, centers around the idea of practicing anything for 10,000 hours to be a genius. SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance discovers that economics explains terrorism and climate change. Sex at Dawn suggests evolution explains straying spouses. And then there's Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine. A research associate at the Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics at Australia's Macquarie University, Fine turns the popular science book formula on its head. Chapter-by-chapter, she introduces ideas about the innate differences between the sexes — "it's all fetal hormones" or "men have better-wired brains" or "brain scans show men's brains light up differently" — and then tartly smacks around the studies supposedly supporting them. In particular, Fine joins critics, such as Nikos Logothetis of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, to argue that brain images constructed from functional magnetic resonance imaging studies, often on just a few dozen people at most, have become the latest way to slap a scientific-sounding paint job on old ideas about women being intrinsically dumber than men. "The main message of the book is that our comforting beliefs about gender — that everything's fair now, that sex inequality should be blamed on 'hardwired' differences between the sexes, and that our failure to rear unisex children just points the same way — just don't bear up to scrutiny," Fine says, by e-mail. Copyright 2010 USA TODAY,

by Graham Lawton and Clare Wilson Why ask people what they think of a product when you can just scan their brains instead? New Scientist explores the brave new world of neuromarketing TAKE A look at the cover of this week's New Scientist magazine (right). Notice anything unusual? Thought not, but behind the scenes your brain is working overtime, focusing your attention on the words and images and cranking up your emotions and memory. How do we know? Because we tested it with a brain scanner. In what we suspect is a world first, this week's cover was created with the help of a technique called neuromarketing, a marriage of market research and neuroscience that uses brain-imaging technology to peek into people's heads and discover what they really want. You may find that sinister. What right does anyone have to try to read your mind? Or perhaps you are sceptical and consider the idea laughable. But neuromarketing, once dismissed as a fad, is becoming part and parcel of modern consumer society. So we decided to take a good look at it - and try it out ourselves. That is how several New Scientist readers ended up in a darkened room in London, wired up to an electroencephalograph (EEG) machine and being shown various magazine cover designs. Our aim - with the help of the European arm of neuromarketing company NeuroFocus, based in Berkeley, California - was to observe their reactions on a level that would not normally be possible. "I've been involved in market research for about 25 years," says Thom Noble, managing director of NeuroFocus Europe. "Every few years a new methodology comes out. Frankly, they're incrementally different. This is transformationally different." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

By GINA KOLATA Will Alzheimer’s disease, a terrible degenerative brain disease with no treatments and no clear guidelines for diagnosis before its end stages, become like heart disease? That might mean early markers of risk, analogous to high cholesterol levels, that predict who is likely to get it. And it might mean drugs that actually prevent it. That is the hope behind new diagnostic guidelines being proposed by the National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer’s Association. In July, when the groups first announced their proposed guidelines, they were met with some skepticism and anger. Why suggest ways of diagnosing the disease before a person even has symptoms? Why tell people they are doomed? And are those early diagnosis guidelines just a sop to pharmaceutical companies so they can start marketing expensive, and perhaps not very effective, new drugs? So the Alzheimer’s Association, with participation from the National Institute on Aging, held a conference call on Wednesday to clarify their position. They wanted, in particular, to explain why they advocated using so-called biomarkers, like scans for amyloid plaque in the brain, a unique feature of Alzheimer’s, and tests of cerebrospinal fluid. Such brain scans are still experimental. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

By WALT BOGDANICH When Alain Reyes’s hair suddenly fell out in a freakish band circling his head, he was not the only one worried about his health. His co-workers at a shipping company avoided him, and his boss sent him home, fearing he had a contagious disease. Only later would Mr. Reyes learn what had caused him so much physical and emotional grief: he had received a radiation overdose during a test for a stroke at a hospital in Glendale, Calif. Other patients getting the procedure, called a CT brain perfusion scan, were being overdosed, too — 37 of them just up the freeway at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, 269 more at the renowned Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and dozens more at a hospital in Huntsville, Ala. The overdoses, which began to emerge late last summer, set off an investigation by the Food and Drug Administration into why patients tested with this complex yet lightly regulated technology were bombarded with excessive radiation. After 10 months, the agency has yet to provide a final report on what it found. But an examination by The New York Times has found that radiation overdoses were larger and more widespread than previously known, that patients have reported symptoms considerably more serious than losing their hair, and that experts say they may face long-term risks of cancer and brain damage. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

By GINA KOLATA A small company with a new brain scan for detecting plaque, the hallmark physical sign of Alzheimer’s disease, presented its results on Sunday at an international conference in Hawaii, and experts who attended said the data persuaded them that the method works. Until now, the only definitive way to diagnose Alzheimer’s has been to search for plaque with a brain autopsy after the patient dies. Scientists hope the new scanning technique, described June 24 in The New York Times’s series “The Vanishing Mind,” will allow doctors to see plaque while the patient is still alive, improving diagnosis and aiding research on drugs to slow or stop plaque accumulation. Neurologists have known about plaques ever since Alzheimer’s disease was first described in 1906. They are microscopic bumps made up of a protein, amyloid beta, appearing on the surface of the brain in areas involved with learning and memory. They are so characteristic of Alzheimer’s that they are required for a definitive diagnosis of the disease. Of course, doctors do not wait for a brain autopsy to diagnose Alzheimer’s. They use memory tests and evaluations of patients’ reasoning and ability to care for themselves. Yet with autopsy, even doctors at leading medical centers have been wrong as often as 20 percent of the time: people they said had Alzheimer’s did not have plaque. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

By GINA KOLATA Dr. Daniel Skovronsky sat at a small round table in his corner office, laptop open, waiting for an e-mail message. His right leg jiggled nervously. A few minutes later, the message arrived — results that showed his tiny start-up company might have overcome one of the biggest obstacles in diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease. It had found a dye and a brain scan that, he said, can show the hallmark plaque building up in the brains of people with the disease. The findings, which will be presented at an international meeting of the Alzheimer’s Association in Honolulu on July 11, must still be confirmed and approved by the Food and Drug Administration. But if they hold up, it will mean that for the first time doctors would have a reliable way to diagnose the presence of Alzheimer’s in patients with memory problems. And researchers would have a way to figure out whether drugs are slowing or halting the disease, a step that “will change everyone’s thinking about Alzheimer’s in a dramatic way,” said Dr. Michael Weiner of the University of California, San Francisco, who is not part of the company’s study and directs a federal project to study ways of diagnosing Alzheimer’s. Still, the long tale behind this finding shows just how difficult this disease is and why progress toward preventing or curing it has been so slow. Ever since Alzheimer’s disease was described by a German doctor, Alois Alzheimer, in 1906, there was only one way to know for sure that a person had it. A pathologist, examining the brain after death, would see microscopic black freckles, plaque, sticking to brain slices like barnacles. Without plaque, a person with memory loss did not have the disease. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Currently, mind-robbing disease only diagnosed at autopsy MSNBC NEWS SERVICES — A new imaging agent that homes in on the gummy plaques and tangles that jam up the brains of Alzheimer’s patients has allowed doctors to see the disease in a living person for the first time, researchers said Wednesday. The mind-robbing disease, which is always fatal and has no cure, can now only be definitively diagnosed by looking at the brain after a patient has died. IN THE NEW study, the researchers were able to view the messy clumps of dead cells in the brains of nine living Alzheimer’s patients. The finding means that Alzheimer’s, which affects 4 million Americans and millions more around the world, may be diagnosed in the early stages, when treatments might be able to do some good, said Jorge Barrio of the University of California Los Angeles, who helped lead the study. MSNBC Terms and Conditions © 2002

Researchers say PET scans can help diagnosis, treatment ANN ARBOR, MI – Even though Alzheimer's disease takes a terrible toll on the memories and lives of millions of adults each year, doctors often face great uncertainty when trying to diagnose it in living people. Several other diseases can mimic the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, and only an autopsy can confirm a diagnosis for certain. The lack of a definitive Alzheimer's test didn't matter so much in the past, but in recent years new drugs and therapies have been shown to slow the spiral of memory loss and behavior changes that Alzheimer's patients face. A good new diagnostic test could help patients get help early -- and make the most of their remaining years. That's why University of Michigan Health System researchers and others are so excited about a kind of medical imaging that they think can tell Alzheimer's disease apart from other disorders. By looking at the brain with a special camera, they hope to give patients a more definitive diagnosis while they can still do something about it.

For women, it seems, sex is a big turn-off, reveals a brain scanning study. It shows that many areas of the brain switch off during the female orgasm - including those involved with emotion. “At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings,” says Gert Holstege of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. His team recruited 13 healthy heterosexual women and their partners. The women were asked to lie with their heads in a PET scanner while the team compared their brain activity in four states: simply resting, faking an orgasm, having their clitoris stimulated by their partner’s fingers, and clitoral stimulation to the point of orgasm. The results of the study are striking. As the women were stimulated, activity rose in one sensory part of the brain, called the primary somatosensory cortex, but fell in the amygdala and hippocampus, areas involved in alertness and anxiety. During orgasm, activity fell in many more areas of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, compared with the resting state, Holstege told a meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development in Copenhagen on Monday. In one sense the findings appear to confirm what is already known, that women cannot enjoy sex unless they are relaxed and free from worries and distractions. "Fear and anxiety levels have to go down for orgasm. Everyone knows this but we can see it happening in the brain," he explains. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

SAN DIEGO, Calif.—A team of Johns Hopkins researchers developed a new radiotracer—a radioactive substance that can be traced in the body—to visualize and quantify the brain’s cannabinoid receptors by positron emission tomography (PET), opening a door to the development of new medications to treat drug dependence, obesity, depression, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease and Tourette syndrome. Discovery of the [11C]JHU75528 radioligand, a radioactive biochemical substance that is used to study the receptor systems of the brain, “opens an avenue for noninvasive study of central cannabinoid (CB1) receptors in the human and animal brain,” explained Andrew Horti, assistant professor of radiology at Johns Hopkins Medicine, Baltimore, Md. He explained that there is evidence that CB1 receptors play an essential role in many disorders including schizophrenia, depression and motor function disorders. “Quantitative imaging of the central CB1 using PET could provide a great opportunity for the development of cannabinergic medications and for studying the role of CB1 in these disorders,” added the co-author of “PET Imaging of Cerebral Cannabinoid CB1 Receptors with [11C]JHU75528.” Cannabinoid receptors are proteins on the surface of brain cells; they are most dense in brain regions involved with thinking and memory, attention and control of movement. The effects of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary psychoactive compound in marijuana, are due to its binding to specific cannabinoid receptors located on the surface of brain cells. “Blocking CB1 receptors presents the possibility of developing new, emerging medications for treatment of obesity and drug dependence including alcoholism, tobacco and marijuana smoking,” said Horti. © 2006 SNM

After Susan Zilber's father died from Alzheimer's disease she wanted to know if she'd share his fate. "Information is key to figuring out how you're going to deal with something," she says. "That's part of who I am, and I think that I'd be able to deal with it. I'd rather know than not know." The problem is, there isn't a single test for Alzheimer's. Now, researchers have developed new software, called HipMask, that can potentially assess a person's risk for cognitive impairment by scanning of a tiny brain area called the hippocampus, which is known to be affected in the early stages of Alzheimer's. When applied to patient PET and MRI scans taken over the course of a longitudinal study of Alzheimer's, the software proved to be 85 percent accurate in predicting who would get the disease nine years before patients showed symptoms. "What we are trying to do is to find the measure that would predict decline from normal aging to Alzheimer's disease," explains Lisa Mosconi, a brain researcher at New York University School of Medicine's Center for Brain Health. "It looks like the hippocampus is particularly involved in early Alzheimer's disease, so by studying how the hippocampus [is working] in Alzheimer's patients — or in Alzheimer's patients it's actually not working — we can probably find a predictor for Alzheimer's disease." © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Alzheimer’s disease researchers may be able to reduce the time and expense associated with clinical trials, according to early results from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), a public-private research partnership organized by the National Institutes of Health. Preliminary results from ADNI show how it might yield improved methods and uniform standards for imaging and biomarker analysis, so these techniques can be employed in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease. These first findings will be presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference on the Prevention of Dementia being held in Washington, D.C., June 9-12. The ADNI study observes and tracks changes in normal individuals, in people with mild cognitive impairment — a condition which often precedes Alzheimer’s — and in people with Alzheimer’s. Researchers will use PET (positron emission tomography) and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans to track changes in the brain, laboratory analyses of cerebrospinal fluid and blood to study biomarkers, and clinical interviews to track cognitive performance over time. ADNI is expected to improve neuroimaging and biomarker measures and consequently allow faster and more efficient evaluation of potential therapies for Alzheimer’s. The $60 million, five-year study began recruiting in early 2006, and today about 800 older people at 58 sites in the United States and Canada participate in the effort.

It seems simple. We get hungry and we eat. But eating is much more complex than that, and scientists are only starting to understand the many factors that regulate eating behavior. One of these factors is stomach expansion that sends signals to the brain resulting in feelings of fullness. Nuclear medicine physician Gene-Jack Wang and colleagues at Brookhaven National Laboratory wanted to find out why it takes different volumes of food to satisfy different people. This is where the water balloons come in. The researchers asked 18 healthy volunteers with body mass indices (BMI) ranging from 20 (low/normal weight) to 29 (extremely overweight/borderline obese) to swallow a balloon connected to a water tube. The balloon assembly is actually a plain-end, non-lubricated latex condom securely connected to a tube with unwaxed dental floss. In order to make it easier to swallow, volunteers were first asked to put small plastic mouthpieces coated with a numbing lidocaine gel in their mouths. The volunteers then rinsed the back of their tongues with more lidocaine. Then the subjects swallowed the balloon, which ended up in their stomachs. The tube was taped to their cheeks. Before asking any volunteers to try the procedure, each of the scientists themselves tried swallowing the balloons and having it filled with water. While the brain activity of volunteers was monitored using functional magnetic imaging (fMRI), the scientists filled the balloons first with about one cup (250 ml) of body-temperature water, and then with about two cups (500 ml). A normal adult stomach can hold about 750 ml. As Wang explains, scientists knew that people respond differently to different volumes of food. © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

By BENEDICT CAREY The outer layer of the brain, the reasoning, planning and self-aware region known as the cerebral cortex, has a central clearinghouse of activity below the crown of the head that is widely connected to more-specialized regions in a large network similar to a subway map, scientists reported Monday. The new report, published in the free-access online journal PLoS Biology, provides the most complete rough draft to date of the cortex’s electrical architecture, the cluster of interconnected nodes and hubs that help guide thinking and behavior. The paper also provides a striking demonstration of how new imaging techniques focused on the brain’s white matter — the connections between cells, rather than the neurons themselves — are filling in a dimension of human brain function that has been all but dark. In previous studies, scientists have used magnetic resonance imaging to identify peaks and valleys of neural activity when people are doing various things, like making decisions, reacting to frightening images or reliving painful memories. But these studies, while provocative, revealed virtually nothing about the underlying neural networks involved — about which brain regions speak to one another and when. Previous estimates of network structure, based on such imaging, have been sketchy. The new findings, while not conclusive, give scientists what is essentially a wiring diagram that they can test and refine. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

By GINA KOLATA This is a story about M.R.I.’s, those amazing scans that can show tissue injury and bone damage, inflammation and fluid accumulation. Except when they can’t and you think they can. I found out about magnetic resonance imaging tests when I injured my forefoot running. All of a sudden, halfway through a run, my foot hurt so much that I had to stop. But an M.R.I. at a local radiology center found nothing wrong. That, of course, was what I wanted to hear. So I spent five days waiting for it to feel better, taking the anti-inflammatory drugs ibuprofen and naproxen, using an elliptical cross-trainer, and riding my road bike with its clipless pedals that attach themselves to my bicycling shoes. By then, my foot hurt so much I had to walk on my heel. I was beginning to doubt that scan: it was hard to believe nothing was wrong. So I went to the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York for a second opinion from Dr. John G. Kennedy, an orthopedist who specializes in sports-related lower-limb injuries. And there I had another M.R.I. It showed a serious stress fracture, a hairline crack in a metatarsal bone in my forefoot. It was so serious, in fact, that Dr. Kennedy warned that I risked surgery if I continued activities like cycling and the elliptical cross-trainer, which make such injuries worse. And I had to stop taking anti-inflammatory drugs, since they impede bone healing. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

The National Institutes of Health Blueprint for Neuroscience Research is launching a $30 million project that will use cutting-edge brain imaging technologies to map the circuitry of the healthy adult human brain. By systematically collecting brain imaging data from hundreds of subjects, the Human Connectome Project (HCP) will yield insight into how brain connections underlie brain function, and will open up new lines of inquiry for human neuroscience. Investigators have been invited to submit detailed proposals to carry out the HCP, which will be funded at up to $6 million per year for five years. The HCP is the first of three Blueprint Grand Challenges, projects that address major questions and issues in neuroscience research. The Blueprint Grand Challenges are intended to promote major leaps in the understanding of brain function, and in approaches for treating brain disorders. The three Blueprint Grand Challenges to be launched in 2009 and 2010 address: * The connectivity of the adult, human brain * Targeted drug development for neurological diseases * The neural basis of chronic pain disorders Scientists have studied the relationship between the structure and function of the human brain since the 1800s. Some parts of the brain serve basic functions such as movement, sensation, emotion, learning and memory. Others are more important for uniquely human functions such as abstract thinking. The connections between brain regions are important for shaping and coordinating these functions, but scientists know little about how different parts of the human brain connect.

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO - People with a family history of Alzheimer's disease often have clumps of a toxic protein in their brains even though they are perfectly healthy, researchers said on Monday. They said the findings could lead to new ways to identify people most likely to develop Alzheimer's disease, when there is still time to do something about it. "The hope is to one day be able to diagnose very clearly the Alzheimer's disease process before any symptoms occur, when the brain is still healthy. Then the treatments would have the best chance of success," said Lisa Moscone of New York University Langone Medical Center, whose study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team wants to continue to follow the people in the study to see whether they develop dementia, and they want to replicate the findings in a much larger study. Several teams have been working on better ways to detect early-stage Alzheimer's disease in hopes of developing drugs that can fight it before it causes too much damage. Current treatments cannot reverse the course of Alzheimer's, a mind-robbing form of dementia that affects more than 26 million people globally. Copyright 2010 Reuters.

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO - A study of brain scans has confirmed the role of several genes linked with Alzheimer's disease, and turned up two others that are worth exploring, U.S. researchers said Monday. A team at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston used magnetic resonance imaging or MRI scans to study changes in brain structures — such as the size of the hippocampus and amygdala — in 700 healthy volunteers and Alzheimer's patients. They used computer programs to sort through the genetic sequences of the 700 volunteers to see which gene mutations are most linked with these changes. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here The study turned up a known offender — the APOE4 gene — as the most strongly linked with the disease, but it also confirmed three other genes — CLU, CRI, PICALM — that have been more recently linked with Alzheimer's. And they fingered two others — BIN1 and CNTN5 — which have been suspected, but not strongly linked with Alzheimer's. While the findings are preliminary, "they may help prioritize targets for future genetic studies," Drs. Alessandro Biffi and Christopher Anderson of Massachusetts General and the Broad Institute wrote in the Archives of Neurology. Copyright 2010 Reuters.

By Celia Hall, Medical Editor After decades of inconclusive research, doctors believe they may have found out why people stammer. Research from Germany shows that persistent developmental stammering, which develops in childhood, can result from an abnormality in the left side of the brain. Dr Martin Somner and colleagues of the universities of Hamburg and Göttingen say in The Lancet that this results in a disconnection of the speech-related area of the cortex. © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002.

Links for keyword: Brain imaging