By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. Like creatures battling undersea, pro-life and right-to-die forces are locked in mortal but only intermittently visible combat. The last prominent battle ended almost seven years ago, after the death of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman with brain damage whose feeding tube was removed by court order in the spring of 2005. Since then, all has been quiet on the surface, belying the continuing turmoil in hospitals and courtrooms over what, exactly, marks the end of life. Invariably, the louder the background tumult, the more useful is the quiet, dispassionate narrative. And so one turns to Dick Teresi’s new book with considerable hope: Surely Mr. Teresi, a veteran science journalist, past editor in chief of Science Digest and Omni, will be the ideal guide through those dim purgatories where life and death can be difficult to distinguish. All starts out promisingly enough. An indefatigable researcher and fluid writer, Mr. Teresi provides a good long riff on death past and present, from the Egyptian mummies, dehydrated into “the deadest people on the planet,” to the ever-hopeful terminally ill of our own age, still flossing their teeth and eating healthy meals in hospice care. Mr. Teresi points out that conclusive signs of death have always been subject to debate. All the great civilizations argued about them, with various expert commentators proposing various fail-safe criteria and yet (Mr. Teresi notes with some pleasure) specifying that they themselves should be left unburied for a few days just to avoid any unfortunate mistakes. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16578 - Posted: 03.27.2012

By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. Just when it seems long past time for the age of memoir to be over — just when it seems impossible that any ailing person with literary inclinations could find anything new to say about illness, and the list of not-to-be-missed “patients are people too” books should be closed and locked — yet another book comes along. And despite all the above, no one with even a passing interest in the experience of illness should miss Robert C. Samuels’s “Blue Water, White Water,” a memoir drafted about 30 years ago and published without fanfare a few months ago; it stands head and shoulders above the crowd. The details are slightly obsolete, to be sure: Mr. Samuels endured his many months of dire illness tethered to a respirator back in the 1980s, the Stone Age of modern intensive-care treatment. Nonetheless, his story from the wrong end of the tubes is timeless; the technology may evolve briskly, but the experience changes glacially, if at all. A former beat reporter for The New York World-Telegram & Sun, Mr. Samuels covers his own story like a pro. He was healthy, 44, just returned from a trip around the world in December 1981, when he got out of bed one morning with a weak left leg. He wandered into the local emergency room half convinced he was imagining things. By the next day he was completely paralyzed with a respirator breathing for him: Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune disease, was rapidly and efficiently stripping his motor nerves of their myelin sheathing, short-circuiting them all. Only his eyes still moved a little, from left to right. Nothing was wrong with his brain. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Aggression
Link ID: 16511 - Posted: 03.13.2012

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Surgery for epilepsy is usually seen as a last resort for patients when medications do not work, and it is often delayed for many years after the failure of drug treatment. Now a randomized, controlled trial suggests that surgery as soon as possible after the failure of two antiepileptic drugs is a significantly better approach than continued medical care. Previous studies have shown that patients referred for surgery have had epilepsy for an average of 22 years, and are referred on average more than 10 years after the use of two drugs has failed to stop the seizures. People with continued seizures are at increased risk for drowning and other accidents, depression, progressive loss of memory, and, in younger people, a failure to develop vocational and social skills. Their risk of death is 10 times as high as that of the general population. Researchers studied a group of 38 epilepsy patients, randomly assigning 15 to brain surgery and 23 to continued medical treatment. The surgery involves the removal of a piece of tissue about the size of a walnut from the temporal lobe, the part of the brain just above the ear. The surgery has been performed for many years, but the institution of high-resolution M.R.I. and microsurgical techniques have greatly improved its safety and efficacy. The patients in both groups were similar in age, duration of epilepsy, the number of antiepileptic drugs used and the number of seizures they had had. All had been taking drugs for one to two years without relief. The participants were seen at the study site every three months for two years after the start of the study. A group of specialists who did not know which patients had had surgery evaluated them for seizure type and severity as recorded in patient diaries. The study appears in the March 7 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 16507 - Posted: 03.13.2012

Greg Gage is on a mission to get kids excited about neuroscience by helping them understand how the brain works — in ways that are extremely memorable. He sells $100 kits that teach how neurons work by putting electricity through cockroach limbs and living cockroaches. One of the most amazing and unexpected experiences I had at the TED conference a couple weeks ago was getting to do one of Gage’s experiments myself. I tracked him down after reading that he was one of 25 invited TED fellows, and before I knew it, I was in a random hallway in the bowels of the convention center, wrestling a squirmy cockroach into my own experiment. First, Gage had me anesthetize a cockroach by dousing it in a glass of ice water, then sever one of its legs (they grow back), plug in a couple of electrodes, and then listen and watch neurons through an app on his iPad. There’s actually a really great video of this same experiment, taken from when Gage performed it for an audience of kids. TED just released it today, as part of its new education initiative. In the video, Gage shows how the living neurons in the cockroach leg can be pulsed with bass from music, and then brings out a live beatboxer on stage to show the cockroach leg dancing to the beat. Read that last sentence again, or just watch the video. It’s pretty crazy. © 2005-2012 Dow Jones & Company Inc.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16503 - Posted: 03.13.2012

Hundreds of Canadian MS patients have gone out of country for a controversial neck vein treatment in recent years. Hundreds of Canadian MS patients have gone out of country for a controversial neck vein treatment in recent years. (CBC) Saskatchewan multiple sclerosis patients hoping to take part in a clinical trial of a controversial treatment may soon get a call from the ministry of health. But only around 10 per cent of those who applied will actually get that call. Deb Jordan, a ministry spokeswoman, said 670 people had signed up as of Thursday, just ahead of the Friday midnight deadline for applications to be part of a two-year, double-blind trial of what has been dubbed liberation therapy. Jordan said patient names will be randomly drawn to determine who will fill 86 spots in the test, which will take place in Albany, N.Y. A successful candidate must be a Saskatchewan resident, under the age of 60 and not had liberation treatment. "Once we verify that information, then the applicant will be forwarded to the folks who are involved in the clinical trial," said Jordan. "I want to also emphasize that the fact that a patient may be drawn does not necessarily mean that they will move on to the clinical trial. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Aggression
Link ID: 16438 - Posted: 02.27.2012

M. Mitchell Waldrop It wasn't quite the lynching that Henry Markram had expected. But the barrage of sceptical comments from his fellow neuroscientists — “It's crap,” said one — definitely made the day feel like a tribunal. Officially, the Swiss Academy of Sciences meeting in Bern on 20 January was an overview of large-scale computer modelling in neuroscience. Unofficially, it was neuroscientists' first real chance to get answers about Markram's controversial proposal for the Human Brain Project (HBP) — an effort to build a supercomputer simulation that integrates everything known about the human brain, from the structures of ion channels in neural cell membranes up to mechanisms behind conscious decision-making. Markram, a South-African-born brain electrophysiologist who joined the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) a decade ago, may soon see his ambition fulfilled. The project is one of six finalists vying to win €1 billion (US$1.3 billion) as one of the European Union's two new decade-long Flagship initiatives. “Brain researchers are generating 60,000 papers per year,” said Markram as he explained the concept in Bern. “They're all beautiful, fantastic studies — but all focused on their one little corner: this molecule, this brain region, this function, this map.” The HBP would integrate these discoveries, he said, and create models to explore how neural circuits are organized, and how they give rise to behaviour and cognition — among the deepest mysteries in neuroscience. Ultimately, said Markram, the HBP would even help researchers to grapple with disorders such as Alzheimer's disease. “If we don't have an integrated view, we won't understand these diseases,” he declared. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 16416 - Posted: 02.23.2012

By Laura Sanders Sleep deprivation makes the brain groggy, but as waking hours mount nerve cells grow increasingly jumpy, a new study shows. This amped-up state may explain why seizures and hallucinations can accompany an all-nighter. More generally, the results help clarify what goes wrong in a brain deprived of shut-eye. “It’s an important finding,” says neuroscientist Christopher Colwell of UCLA. “Sleep deprivation is an area of huge interest because most of us do not get enough sleep.” By subjecting six people to a night of sleep deprivation and measuring their brain responses, Marcello Massimini of the University of Milan and colleagues found that people’s brains become more reactive as hours awake accumulate. To look for signs of altered brain function, the team delivered a jolt of magnetic current to the participants’ skulls that kicked off an electrical response in the nerve cells (an effect like the noise made when a hammer strikes a bell). With electrodes on the scalp, the team measured the strength of this electrical response in the frontal cortex, a brain region that’s involved in making executive decisions. After a night of sleep deprivation, participants’ electrical responses were stronger than they were the previous day, the scientists report online February 7 in Cerebral Cortex. This overreaction disappeared after a night’s sleep. The results offer support for a theory of why people sleep: During waking hours, the brain accumulates connections between nerve cells as new things are learned. Sleep, the theory says, sweeps the brain of extraneous clutter, leaving behind only the most important connections. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Sleep; Aggression
Link ID: 16383 - Posted: 02.16.2012

by Catherine de Lange In an unlikely marriage of quantum physics and neuroscience, tiny particles called quantum dots have been used to control brain cells for the first time. Having such control over the brain could one day provide a non-invasive treatment for conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, depression and epilepsy. In the nearer term, quantum dots could be used to treat blindness by reactivating damaged retinal cells. "Many brain disorders are caused by imbalanced neural activity," says Lih Lin at the University of Washington, Seattle. "Manipulation of specific neurons could permit the restoration of normal activity levels." Methods to stimulate the brain artificially already exist, though each has its drawbacks. Deep brain stimulation is used in Parkinson's disease to trigger brain cell activity and prevent the abnormal signalling that causes debilitating tremors, but placing the electrodes required is highly invasive. Transcranial magnetic stimulation can stimulate brain cells from outside the head, but is not highly targeted and so affects large areas of the brain at once. Researchers in optogenetics can control genetically modified brain cells using light but because of these modifications, the technique is not yet deemed safe to use in humans. Lin's team has now come up with an alternative using quantum dots – light-sensitive, semiconducting particles just a few nanometres in diameter. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16382 - Posted: 02.16.2012

Andy Coghlan, reporter Ever wondered what's going on in the brain of a mouse? Now brain cells have been captured sending and receiving signals in high resolution for the first time, essentially showing its brain in action. To make the tiniest anatomical details of neurons visible, Katrin Willig and her team at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, gave mice an extra gene that generates a yellow glow. When their brains were viewed with a special microscope through a glass-sealed window in the skull, the signal junctions in neurons lit up. At these intersections, tiny spines sprout from longer branching fibers, called dendrites, and exchange signals by linking up with spines on neighbouring cells. The movie spans a 20 to 30 minute period, during which a live mouse was anaesthetised. The spines physically move and wobble at the top and base as they form and break connections with neighbouring spines. "There are always connections breaking and forming and it's the natural movement of the spine," says Willig. "It may be the mouse thinking". Brain cells have been imaged in live animals before, but the latest movie is the first to reveal parts of neurons in such fine detail - down to a resolution of 70 nanometers. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 16340 - Posted: 02.04.2012

By Sandra G. Boodman, “Men in Black” was flickering on the screen, and Laura Cossolotto and her husband were enjoying a rare night at the movies in their home town of Centerville, Iowa, when her brother-in-law rushed into the darkened theater. The couple’s third child, 6-month-old Michaela, had just suffered a serious seizure and was at a nearby hospital. As Cossolotto raced to be with the baby, she immediately remembered that Michaela had been running a fever after receiving a vaccine against diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus (DPT) three days earlier. “I thought the shot must have something to do with it,” Cossolotto recalled. “I had three kids, and nothing like this had ever happened, so what else could it have been?” At the hospital, doctors reassured her that Michaela had suffered a febrile seizure, a frightening and usually harmless event they said was unlikely to recur. As a precaution, the baby was admitted for observation. Hours later, after doctors had trouble controlling a second, more severe seizure, the infant was whisked by helicopter to a larger hospital in Des Moines, 100 miles north. That night in July 1997 marked the beginning of a 101 / 2-year ordeal, as more than a dozen specialists in four states tried without success to find an underlying cause for Michaela’s frequent, in­trac­table seizures — and a treatment that would control them before they caused irreparable brain damage or death. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Epilepsy; Aggression
Link ID: 16327 - Posted: 01.31.2012

By Jennifer LaRue Huget Multiple sclerosis has long been understood to be an autoimmune disease in which the body’s immune system, for reasons poorly understood, responds destructively to antigens in the central nervous system. But research published in December in The Quarterly Review of Biology posits a different way of looking at MS. Angelique Corthals, a forensic anthropologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, suggests that MS may result from problems with the way the body metabolizes lipids, or fats in the blood, which in turn cause inflammation and spark a series of damaging events. Corthals, in her lengthy review and analysis of existing research, notes that MS shares that underlying mechanism with atherosclerosis. (“Sclerosis” refers to hardening or scarring such as the build-up of plaque in arteries and the development of plaques in the brain associated with MS.) She concludes that viewing MS in this light helps explain many mysteries that the autoimmune model leaves unanswered, including the role genetics play in MS risk, the environmental elements or pathogens that may trigger disease onset, and the reasons MS strikes twice as many women as men. (Atherosclerosis affects men more commonly than women; Carthals suggests gender differences in lipid metabolism may play a big role in determining who gets which condition.) Because anti-inflammatory drugs such as statins commonly used to fight cardiovascular disease have also been used to treat symptoms of MS, she writes, such drugs may become part of more comprehensive and effective MS treatments than currently exist. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Aggression
Link ID: 16208 - Posted: 01.03.2012

(HealthDay News) -- New research suggests that in addition to the disabling lesions it's known to cause, multiple sclerosis also damages the part of the brain that affects thinking skills, motor function and the senses. "The thalamus is a central area that relates to the rest of the brain and acts as the 'post office,'" study co-author Khader Hasan, an associate professor at University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, said in a university news release. "It also is an area that has the least amount of damage from lesions in the brain, but we see volume loss, so it appears other brain damage related to the disease is also occurring." Hasan and colleagues published their observations in a recent issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. The study authors noted that aging alone can bring about changes in the size of the thalamus region, resulting in some shrinkage after age 70. However, the research team wanted to see if multiple sclerosis (MS) -- which is often associated with the onset of dementia -- accelerates such structural shifts. The radiology researchers used cutting-edge MRI scanning equipment to analyze brain structure in 109 MS patients, compared to 255 healthy men and women. The result: MS patients had greater volume loss in the thalamus region than healthy patients, after accounting for age. And the greater the loss in thalamus volume, the more disabled the patient was, the investigators noted. © 2011 U.S.News & World Report LP

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Aggression
Link ID: 16195 - Posted: 12.31.2011

By LAURIE TARKAN Three years ago, Kristie Salerno Kent, a singer-songwriter, was standing in a security line at the airport on her way home from a gig when her legs went numb. “From the waist down, it felt as though I was trying to walk through a bowl of oatmeal,” said the 38-year-old musician, who has multiple sclerosis. She inched her way to a security officer, who called for a wheelchair and helped remove her shoes and belt to get her through security. Frightened and embarrassed, she was taken to her gate in a wheelchair. Three months later, she experienced another flare-up. While giving a live television interview about a short film she had made on living with M.S., she suddenly lost her ability to speak. “It was as if my mouth was packed with marbles,” she said. “I kept trying to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ to the reporter, but nothing came out that made sense.” The medication she was taking to prevent these attacks was losing its effect, so her doctor suggested she switch to Tysabri, one of the newer, more potent “disease-modifying drugs,” which reduce the severity and frequency of relapses. She also began taking Ampyra, which early last year became the first drug approved to treat any M.S. symptom. She hasn’t had a flare-up since. After decades of basic research on M.S., the last five years have brought a rapid rollout of new and sophisticated drugs that are changing how this disease is managed and offering patients new hope. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 16190 - Posted: 12.27.2011

A rare genetic variant which causes reduced levels of vitamin D appears to be directly linked to multiple sclerosis, says an Oxford University study. UK and Canadian scientists identified the mutated gene in 35 parents of a child with MS and, in each case, the child inherited it. Researchers say this adds weight to suggestions of a link between vitamin D deficiency and MS. The study is in Annals of Neurology. Multiple sclerosis is an inflammatory disease of the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord). Although the cause of MS is not yet conclusively known, both genetic and environmental factors and their interactions are known to be important. Oxford University researchers, along with Canadian colleagues at the University of Ottawa, University of British Columbia and McGill University, set out to look for rare genetic changes that could explain strong clustering of MS cases in some families in an existing Canadian study. They sequenced all the gene-coding regions in the genomes of 43 individuals selected from families with four or more members with MS. The team compared the DNA changes they found against existing databases, and identified a change in the gene CYP27B1 as being important. When people inherit two copies of this gene they develop a genetic form of rickets - a disease caused by vitamin D deficiency. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Aggression
Link ID: 16134 - Posted: 12.10.2011

By Brian Alexander “Laughing seizures” have long been one of the mysteries surrounding epilepsy. During an event, an epileptic suffering a laughing seizure can guffaw, sometimes hysterically, but certainly not because he or she finds anything funny. Now a new study published in the journal Brain, from a team led by Josef Parvizi of Stanford University, has helped clear up some of the mystery. Earlier research traced these events, more formally called gelastic seizures, to abnormal clumps of neurons in the hypothalamus called hamartomas. “The hamartomas start firing on their own and cause the seizures,” Parvizi explained. But exactly where in the hypothalamus are gelastic seizure-related hamartomas located? That answer’s important because the hypothalamus has several regions, or nuclei, that manage input and create output related to a variety of body functions like temperature regulation, sexual behavior and hormone release. Parvizi likens it to a college campus. “Just like a campus, you have different buildings and every department has its own students and own connections,” he said. In looking at 100 cases of children with gelastic seizures who’ve had their brains imaged, Parvizi and his colleagues were able to show that in every case the hamartoma lesions were located in a region known as the mammillary bodies. (They don’t have anything to do with breasts. They just sort of look like breasts and the neuroscientists who first described them were men, so there you go.) © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Epilepsy; Aggression
Link ID: 16111 - Posted: 12.06.2011

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 15969 - Posted: 11.01.2011

By Tina Hesman Saey The spark that ignites multiple sclerosis may come from within. A new study in mice points to normal intestinal bacteria as a trigger for the immune disorder. In patients with multiple sclerosis, the body’s immune system attacks the brain, stripping away a protective sheath called myelin from nerve cells. This causes inflammation that leads to the disease. Although the exact causes of MS are not known, scientists generally agree that a genetic predisposition combines with one or more environmental triggers to set off the attack on the brain. The new study provides evidence that friendly bacteria may be one of those triggers. Mice genetically engineered to develop multiple sclerosis–like symptoms don’t get the disease when raised without any bacteria in their guts, a research team from Germany reports online October 26 in Nature. But germ-free mice that were then colonized with intestinal bacteria quickly developed the disease, the team found. About 80 percent of mice with intestinal bacteria developed MS-like symptoms, but none of the germ-free mice did. The result is not a total surprise. Previous reports had indicated that gut bacteria might be involved in autoimmune disorders such as MS, juvenile diabetes and arthritis, says Simon Fillatreau, an immunologist at the German Rheumatism Research Center in Berlin. “So maybe it was expected, but that it is really such a black-and-white response? Probably not,” says Fillatreau, who was not involved in the study. “It’s very big news.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 15950 - Posted: 10.27.2011

Duncan Graham-Rowe The first drug to show signs of not just halting multiple sclerosis (MS), but actually reversing the nerve damage caused by the condition, has taken a significant step towards clinical approval. The results of a phase III trial, presented on 22 October at the 5th Joint Triennial Congress of the European and Americas Committees for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis, in Amsterdam, found that 78% of patients treated with the monoclonal antibody alemtuzumab remained free from relapse after two years — and half the relapse rate of one of the standard therapies, interferon β-1a (marketed as Rebif, among other names). However, alemtuzumab did not perform quite as well as it had in earlier trials1. There was some evidence that it had reversed damage to nerves, but the result was not statistically significant, says Alasdair Coles, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, UK, and the UK chief investigator of the Comparison of Alemtuzumab and Rebif Efficacy in Multiple Sclerosis (CARE-MS) I trial. Coles told the meeting that magnetic resonance imaging showed that subjects taking alemtuzumab had also lost less brain volume than those taking Rebif, a proxy measure for overall tissue damage. "Alemtuzumab has eliminated the loss of brain tissue," he says. Just 8% of patients taking alemtuzumab experienced a worsening in disability according to standard measures, in comparison with 11% taking Rebif. There was no statistical difference between the two groups, but Coles puts this down to Rebif performing better than expected. "The patients recruited in this trial showed very little worsening of disability," he says. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 15947 - Posted: 10.25.2011

Multiple sclerosis might be connected to a lack of steroids in the brain, Alberta researchers have found. MS attacks the brain and spinal cord, causing inflammation and damage that can lead to paralysis and sometimes blindness. In the September issue of the journal Brain, neurologist Dr. Chris Power of the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton and his colleagues describe a new potential avenue for treating MS. There are some drugs related to neurosteroids that are actively in clinical trials, Dr. Chris Power said.There are some drugs related to neurosteroids that are actively in clinical trials, Dr. Chris Power said. CBC The discovery centres on neurosteroids, which help brain cells to talk, grow and repair themselves. The findings open up a brain process "that we might be able to direct so that we can prevent damage and maybe even repair the damaged brain," Power said Wednesday. Brains of people who died with multiple sclerosis showed lower levels of neurosteroids, the researchers found. The team believes that by replacing neurosteroids, it might be possible to alleviate symptoms or even prompt recovery, based on the results of their test tube and mouse modeling studies. "We've actually jumped the queue a little bit because there are some drugs related to neurosteroids that are actively in clinical trials," Power said. "This certainly provides fertile ground." © CBC 2011

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Aggression
Link ID: 15828 - Posted: 09.22.2011

People with schizophrenia are six times more likely to develop epilepsy, says a study which finds a strong relationship between the two diseases. Writing in Epilepsia, researchers in Taiwan say this could be due to genetic, neurobiological or environmental factors. The study followed around 16,000 patients with epilepsy and schizophrenia between 1999 and 2008. An epilepsy expert says it is an interesting and convincing study. The study used data from the Taiwan National Health Insurance database and was led by researchers from the China Medical University Hospital in Taichung. They identified 5,195 patients with schizophrenia and 11,527 patients with epilepsy who were diagnosed during the nine years period. These groups of patients were compared to groups of the same sex and age who did not have either epilepsy or schizophrenia. The findings show that the incidence of epilepsy was 6.99 per 1,000 person-years in the schizophrenia patient group compared to 1.19 in the non-schizophrenia group. The incidence of schizophrenia was 3.53 per 1,000 person-years for patients with epilepsy compared to 0.46 in the non-epilepsy group. Previous studies had suggested a prevalence of psychosis among epilepsy patients. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 15815 - Posted: 09.19.2011