Nearly half of those with Parkinson's face regular discrimination, such as having their symptoms mistaken for drunkenness, a survey suggests. The survey of more than 2,000 people was commissioned by charity Parkinson's UK. One person in 500 people is affected by the condition in Britain. Parkinson's sufferer Mark Worsfold was arrested during last year's Olympics because police thought he looked suspicious. He was detained during the cycling road race in Leatherhead, Surrey, reportedly because he was not smiling - the condition means his face can appear expressionless. Parkinson's is a progressive neurological condition that attacks the part of the brain that controls movement. The main symptoms of Parkinson's are tremors or shaking that cannot be controlled, and rigidity of the muscles, which can make movement difficult and painful. Speech, language and facial expressions can also be affected. Most people who get it are aged 50 or over but younger people can have it too. The survey found that one in five people living with Parkinson's had been mistaken for being drunk, while one in 10 had been verbally abused or experienced hostility in public because of their condition. Around 62% said they thought the public had a poor understanding of how the condition affects people. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 18035 - Posted: 04.15.2013

By IAN LOVETT WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — A potentially deadly strain of meningitis, which has left one resident brain dead, has sent a shiver through the large gay community here, as public health officials have urged residents to be on the lookout for any symptoms of the disease. Although only one case has been confirmed in the area, officials said, the onset follows an outbreak of deadly meningitis among gay men in New York City. At least 22 men have contracted meningitis in New York since 2010, 13 of them this year, and 7 have died. Health officials have not yet determined if there is any connection between the cases in New York and the one here. But the similarities have ignited fears that this case could be an early sign of a bicoastal outbreak. “The lesson we learned 30 years ago in the early days of H.I.V. and AIDS is that people were not alerted to what was going on and a lot of infections occurred that didn’t need to occur,” said John Duran, a West Hollywood city councilman and one of the few openly H.I.V.-positive elected officials in the country. “So even with an isolated case here, we need to sound the alarms, especially given the cases in New York.” In New York, the city health department issued a warning last month, urging all men who regularly have intimate contact with other men to be vaccinated for meningitis. Officials here have thus far been reluctant to do the same. At a news conference on Friday, Dr. Maxine E. Liggins, with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, warned residents to watch for early signs of meningococcal meningitis, including a severe headache and stiff neck. The disease, a bacterial infection of the membrane surrounding the brain and the spinal cord, can be effectively treated with antibiotics if detected early, although it can intensify quickly. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 18034 - Posted: 04.15.2013

Geeta Dayal Earlier this month, Barack Obama unveiled a grand, new U.S. government initiative called BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) that he said would provide “a dynamic picture of the brain in action” and help humanity “better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember.” The brain-mapping effort is set to cost $100-million in 2014, and hundreds of millions more in the years to come. This follows last year’s move in Ottawa to create a Canada Brain Research Fund with up to $100-million in matching funds to the Brain Canada Foundation. For Mr. Obama, it may be a way to put a triumphant stamp on the presidential legacy, but to those familiar with the field, the new program is a question mark. “This sounds like, um, a PR splash,” David Hovda, director of the UCLA Brain Injury Research Center, told National Public Radio. Donald Stein, an Emory University neuroscientist, argued on LiveScience.com that “without specific goals, hypotheses or endpoints, the research effort becomes a fishing expedition.” Mr. Obama compared BRAIN to the Human Genome Project for its potential return on investment. The comparison is also apt on another level: Like genetics in the past decade, neuroscience seems to have reached a peak in the public consciousness. And that’s big business not just for science, but for the media and publishing industries. Peruse bestseller lists during the past few years and you’ll find a host of titles in neuroscience and cognitive or social psychology, from Thinking, Fast and Slow and The Brain That Changes Itself to Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey Into the Afterlife and How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. The well of material is virtually endless – after all, every aspect of the human experience can be tied, somehow, to the brain. As a result, the hype can be bottomless too. Lately a wave of “neuroskeptics” have been calling for more sober second thought. © Copyright 2013 The Globe and Mail Inc

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18033 - Posted: 04.13.2013

Sid Perkins The two-million-year-old remains of a novel hominin discovered in August 2008 are an odd blend of features seen both in early humans and in the australopithecines presumed to have preceded them. A battery of six studies1–6 published today in Science scrutinizes the fossils of Australopithecus sediba from head to heel and yields unprecedented insight into how the creature walked, chewed and moved. Together, the studies suggest that this hominin was close to the family tree of early humans — although it remains controversial whether it was one of our direct ancestors. “We see evolution in action across this skeleton,” says Lee Berger, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. For instance, whereas the creature’s arms are ape-like, its hands and wrists are remarkably like those of humans. And although the hominin’s pelvis is shaped like a modern human's, its torso included a narrow upper rib cage like those found in apes. One of the six studies focused on Au. sediba’s teeth1, comparing 22 different aspects across hundreds of teeth from several other species of australopithecines and thousands of early human teeth. Tooth similarities among the species are more likely to signify common ancestry than independent evolution towards a beneficial design, says Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg, an anthropologist at Ohio State University in Columbus. That's because most of the characteristics the team chose to study, such as the subtle curvature of a portion of the tooth’s surface, are not likely to be evolutionarily useful. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 18027 - Posted: 04.13.2013

By Daisy Yuhas Less than two hundred years ago, schizophrenia emerged from a tangle of mental disorders known simply as madness. Yet its diagnosis remains shrouded in ambiguity. Only now is the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, psychiatrists’ primary guidebook, shedding the outdated, nineteenth-century descriptions that have characterized schizophrenia to this day. "There is substantial dissatisfaction with schizophrenia treated as a disease entity, it's symptoms are like a fever—something is wrong but we don't know what," says William Carpenter, a psychiatrist at the University of Maryland and chair of the manual’s Psychotic Disorder Workgroup. Psychiatrists may discover that this disorder is not a single syndrome after all but a bundle of overlapping conditions. © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 18022 - Posted: 04.11.2013

by Caroline Williams When it comes to making decisions, it seems that the conscious mind is the last to know. We already had evidence that it is possible to detect brain activity associated with movement before someone is aware of making a decision to move. Work presented this week at the British Neuroscience Association (BNA) conference in London not only extends it to abstract decisions, but suggests that it might even be possible to pre-emptively reverse a decision before a person realises they've made it. In 2011, Gabriel Kreiman of Harvard University measured the activity of individual neurons in 12 people with epilepsy, using electrodes already implanted into their brain to help identify the source of their seizures. The volunteers took part in the "Libet" experiment, in which they press a button whenever they like and remember the position of a second hand on a clock at the moment of decision. Kreiman discovered that electrical activity in the supplementary motor area, involved in initiating movement, and in the anterior cingulate cortex, which controls attention and motivation, appeared up to 5 seconds before a volunteer was aware of deciding to press the button (Neuron, doi.org/btkcpz). This backed up earlier fMRI studies by John-Dylan Haynes of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany, that had traced the origins of decisions to the prefrontal cortex a whopping 10 seconds before awareness (Nature Neuroscience, doi.org/cs3rzv). "It's always nice when two lines of research converge and to know that what we see with fMRI is actually there in the neurons," says Haynes. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 18021 - Posted: 04.11.2013

By Suzy Gage When I started my PhD a few years ago, I thought that certain psychological findings were established fact. The next four years were an exercise in disillusionment. If the effects I was seeking to explore were so reliable, so established, why could I not detect them? There is growing interest in the need to improve reliability in science. Many drugs show promise at the design and pre-clinical phases, only to fail (at great expense) in clinical trials. Many of the most hyped scientific discoveries eventually cannot be replicated. Worryingly for science (but somewhat comforting for my self-esteem as a researcher) this may be because many of the conclusions drawn from published research findings are false. A major factor that influences the reliability of science is statistical power. We cannot measure everyone or everything, so we take samples and use statistical inference to determine the probability that the results we observe in our sample reflect some underlying scientific truth. Statistical power determines whether we accurately conclude if there is an effect or not. Statistical power is the ability of a study to detect an effect (eg higher rates of cancer in smokers) given that an effect actually exists (smoking actually is associated with increased risk of cancer). Power is related to the size of the study sample (the number of smokers and non-smokers we test) and the size of the real effect (the magnitude of the increased risk associated with smoking). Larger studies have more power and can detect smaller, more subtle effects. Small studies have lower power and can only detect larger effects reliably. © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 18019 - Posted: 04.11.2013

by Sara Reardon The Brain Activity Map project launched recently by President Obama – and funded to the tune of $100 million in the US budget announcement earlier this month – highlights the need for research that focuses both on how individual neurons work and the ways that different regions of the brain work together as a unit. Looking at individual neurons requires slicing up brains into thin sections. However, this damages the axons – the arms that protrude from neurons to make connections with other cells – making it difficult to see exactly how brain cells link up. A few microscopic techniques can focus light deep into the intact brains of dead animals to study its structure without damaging the axons, but much of this light is scattered away by the fatty lipid membranes that surround individual cells, making the technique less than perfect. Now Kwanghun Chung, Karl Deisseroth and their team at Stanford University in California have developed a technique that provides a clearer picture. First, they remove the brain from a mouse and infuse it with a see-through gel that collects in the neurons' lipid membranes. As the gel solidifies, it takes the shape of the membranes and creates a matrix that holds the cells' proteins, DNA and RNA in place. Then the team adds a second chemical that dissolves the lipids, leaving a transparent brain made out of gel that retains the brain's proteins, DNA and RNA in their original positions. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18018 - Posted: 04.11.2013

By JAMES GORMAN Scientists at Stanford University reported on Wednesday that they have made a whole mouse brain, and part of a human brain, transparent so that networks of neurons that receive and send information can be highlighted in stunning color and viewed in all their three-dimensional complexity without slicing up the organ. Even more important, experts say, is that unlike earlier methods for making the tissue of brains and other organs transparent, the new process, called Clarity by its inventors, preserves the biochemistry of the brain so well that researchers can test it over and over again with chemicals that highlight specific structures and provide clues to past activity. The researchers say this process may help uncover the physical underpinnings of devastating mental disorders like schizophrenia, autism, post-traumatic stress disorder and others. The work, reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature, is not part of the Obama administration’s recently announced initiative to probe the secrets of the brain, although the senior author on the paper, Dr. Karl Deisseroth at Stanford, was one of those involved in creating the initiative and is involved in planning its future. Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which provided some of the financing for the research, described the new work as helping to build an anatomical “foundation” for the Obama initiative, which is meant to look at activity in the brain. Dr. Insel added that the technique works in a human brain that has been in formalin, a preservative, for years, which means that long-saved human brains may be studied. “Frankly,” he said, “that is spectacular.” © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18017 - Posted: 04.11.2013

A rat with some human genes could provide a better way to test Alzheimer's drugs. The genetically modified rat is the first rodent model to exhibit the full range of brain changes found in Alzheimer's, researchers in The Journal of Neuroscience. "It's a big step forward" for drug development, says , a program director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, or NINDS, which helped fund the work. "The closer the model is to the human condition in representing the disease, the more likely the drug will behave and cure the way it would in humans." In recent years, drug companies have developed several Alzheimer's drugs that seemed to work in animals, but with the disease. A lack of good animal models for Alzheimer's may be one reason for those failures, researchers say. For the past couple of decades, Alzheimer's researchers have relied primarily on mice that carry human gene mutations that cause people to get the disease in their 40s or 50s. Like people, these mice develop so-called amyloid plaques in their brains. But that's where the similarity ends. In people with Alzheimer's, after plaques appear, huge numbers of brain cells die. That's never happened in mice, despite lots of genetic tinkering, Corriveau says. So researchers began to consider a different rodent model: the rat. "Rats are 4 [million] to 5 million years closer evolutionarily to humans," Corriveau says, which means their brains are more like ours. ©2013 NPR

Keyword: Alzheimers; Aggression
Link ID: 18016 - Posted: 04.11.2013

by Tanya Lewis, The lip-smacking vocalizations gelada monkeys make are surprisingly similar to human speech, a new study finds. Many nonhuman primates demonstrate lip-smacking behavior, but geladas are the only ones known to make undulating sounds, known as "wobbles," at the same time. (The wobbling sounds a little like a human hum would sound if the volume were being turned on and off rapidly.) The findings show that lip-smacking could have been an important step in the evolution of human speech, researchers say. "Our finding provides support for the lip-smacking origins of speech because it shows that this evolutionary pathway is at least plausible," Thore Bergman of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and author of the study published today (April 8) in the journal Current Biology,said in a statement. "It demonstrates that nonhuman primates can vocalize while lip-smacking to produce speechlike sounds." NEWS: Lip Smacks of Monkeys Prelude to Speech? Lip-smacking -- rapidly opening and closing the mouth and lips -- shares some of the features of human speech, such as rapid fluctuations in pitch and volume. (See Video of Gelada Lip-Smacking) Bergman first noticed the similarity while studying geladas in the remote mountains of Ethiopia. He would often hear vocalizations that sounded like human voices, but the vocalizations were actually coming from the geladas, he said. He had never come across other primates who made these sounds. But then he read a study on macaques from 2012 revealing how facial movements during lip-smacking were very speech-like, hinting that lip-smacking might be an initial step toward human speech. © 2013 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Language; Aggression
Link ID: 18014 - Posted: 04.10.2013

Ed Yong Every autumn, millions of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) converge on a small cluster of Mexican mountains to spend the winter. They have journeyed for up to 4,000 kilometres from breeding grounds across eastern North America. And according to a study, they accomplish this prodigious migration without ever knowing where they are relative to their destination. The monarchs can use the position of the Sun as a compass, but when Henrik Mouritsen, a biologist at the University of Oldenburg in Germany, displaced them by 2,500 kilometres, he found that they did not correct their heading. “People seemed to assume that they had some kind of a map that allowed them to narrow in on a site a few kilometres across after travelling several thousands of kilometres,” he says. Now, “it is clear that they don’t”. His results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. For more than five decades, scientists have teamed up with amateurs to tag and monitor free-flying monarchs, creating a database of their migrations. When Mouritsen analysed these records, he realized that the monarchs tend to spread out over the course of their migration. Their distribution was a good fit with the predictions of a mathematical model that assumed that the monarchs were flying with just a compass, rather than a compass and a map. Mouritsen also captured 76 southwesterly flying monarchs from fields near Guelph in Ontario, Canada, and transported them 2,500 kilometres to the west, to Calgary in the Canadian province of Alberta. He placed the butterflies in a “flight simulator” — a plastic cylinder that kept them from seeing any landmarks except the sky — and tethered them to a rod that let them point in any direction without actually flying away. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Animal Migration
Link ID: 18013 - Posted: 04.10.2013

By PAULA SPAN The long list of roles Margaret Thatcher played during her 87 years — potent politician, free-market evangelist, labor antagonist, dominant global leader — includes the one she never publicly discussed: person with dementia. The stroke that killed her on Monday was not her first. Mrs. Thatcher suffered several small strokes more than a decade earlier, canceled all her speaking engagements in 2003 and largely withdrew from public life. Even before the strokes, her daughter, Carol, wrote in a 2008 memoir, she was losing cognitive ground, repeating questions and showing other signs of confusion. Heartbreakingly, she often forgot that her beloved husband, Denis, had died of cancer in 2003. “I had to keep giving her the bad news over and over again,” her daughter wrote. “Every time it finally sank in that she had lost her husband of more than 50 years, she’d look at me sadly and say, ‘Oh’, as I struggled to compose myself. ‘Were we all there?’ she’d ask softly.” At the time, members of her mother’s political circle and other British commentators denounced Carol Thatcher for invading her mother’s privacy and, supposedly, diminishing her dignity. The criticism arose again in some quarters last year, when Meryl Streep won an Oscar for her portrayal of Mrs. Thatcher’s dementia in “The Iron Lady.” © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 18012 - Posted: 04.10.2013

by Dr. Tyeese Gaines African-Americans with a particular gene are twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease in old age as those without it, says a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. This finding is a result of the largest database search for Alzheimer’s genes among African-Americans. “Until now, data on the genetics of Alzheimer’s in this patient population have been extremely limited,” said Dr. Richard Mayeux, chair of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center and senior author of the study. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia — a brain disease that affects memory, personality and the ability to reason. At age 65, only one percent of people have Alzheimer’s, yet over 80 years of age, it increases to 30 percent. A gene called APOE is associated with one in every five cases of Alzheimer’s – known to be a major genetic risk factor for whites and blacks. Yet, in this new research, Mayeux and his team identified an additional gene variant linked to a doubled risk in African-Americans alone, called ABCA7. “ABCA7 is the first major gene implicated in late-onset Alzheimer’s among African-Americans,” said Dr. Christine Reitz, assistant professor of neurology and lead author of the study. To reach this conclusion, researchers examined samples from nearly 6,000 African-American men and women collected between 1989 and 2011 – 2,000 had a diagnosis of probable Alzheimer’s disease and the other 4,000 had no cognitive difficulty. “Although this is a very significant finding, it does not change much for the everyday African-American male or female,” says Rick Kittles, PhD, a human genetics expert who has traced the ancestry of more than 100,000 African-Americans. “There is still much work to do [to] determine how exactly this gene plays a role in Alzheimer’s disease.” ©2013 NBCUniversal

Keyword: Alzheimers; Aggression
Link ID: 18010 - Posted: 04.10.2013

By Tara Haelle New evidence is confirming that the environment kids live in has a greater impact than factors such as genetics, insufficient physical activity or other elements in efforts to control child obesity. Three new studies, published in the April 8 Pediatrics, land on the import of the 'nurture' side of the equation and focus on specific circumstances in children's or teen's lives that potentially contribute to unhealthy bulk. In three decades child and adolescent obesity has tripled in the U.S., and estimates from 2010 classify more than a third of children and teens as overweight or obese. Obesity puts these kids at higher risk for type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, sleep apnea, and bone or joint problems. The variables responsible are thought to range from too little exercise to too many soft drinks. Now it seems that blaming Pepsi or too little PE might neglect the bigger picture. "We are raising our children in a world that is vastly different than it was 40 or 50 years ago," says Yoni Freedhoff, an obesity doctor and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa. "Childhood obesity is a disease of the environment. It's a natural consequence of normal kids with normal genes being raised in unhealthy, abnormal environments." The environmental factors in these studies range from the seemingly minor, such as kids' plate sizes, to bigger challenges, such as school schedules that may keep teens from getting sufficient sleep. But they are part of an even longer list: the ubiquity of fast food, changes in technology, fewer home-cooked meals, more food advertising, an explosion of low-cost processed foods and increasing sugary drink serving sizes (pdf) as well as easy access to unhealthy snacks in vending machines, at sports games and in nearly every setting children inhabit—these are just a handful of environmental factors research has linked to increasing obesity, and researchers are starting to pick apart which among them play bigger or lesser roles in making kids supersized. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Obesity; Aggression
Link ID: 18009 - Posted: 04.10.2013

Matt Kaplan By making noise that could potentially expose them to predators, young pied babblers get their parents to give them more attentions. Begging loudly has long been viewed as an offspring’s way of saying “I’m hungry”. But in predator-filled environments, these squawks can put young birds in harm's way, and may be a form of blackmail that forces parents to pay attention and feed the youngsters more than they might otherwise. The discovery comes from a three-year analysis of a well-studied community of pied babbler (Turdoides bicolor) in the Kalahari Desert of South Africa1. Alex Thompson of the University of Cape Town and colleagues from Britain and Australia, spent more than 200 hours observing the animals in the wild and recorded more than 3,000 incidents of parents feeding fledglings. Thompson and his team noted that fledglings were fed an average of 0.12 grams of food per minute when on the ground and away from cover, but just 0.03 grams per minute when begging from the safety of the trees. Furthermore, when the birds were played an audio recording of alarm calls indicating that a ground predator was in the vicinity, parents more than doubled the amount they gave to ground-based youngsters, but made no compensation for those in the trees. Fascinated, the team speculated that the young, which were slower than adults to respond to the alarm calls and cannot escape as quickly from danger, were intentionally putting themselves into a dangerous situation when hungry to force their parents to pay attention and feed them. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 18008 - Posted: 04.10.2013

By KATIE HAFNER While undressing for bed one night in 2009, Susan Spencer-Wendel noticed that the muscles in her left palm had disappeared, leaving a scrawny pile of tendons and bones. Her right hand was fine. She let out a yelp and showed the hand to her husband, who told her to go to the doctor. She was 42. Ms. Spencer-Wendel then entered a protracted period of denial. Adopted as an infant in Florida, she traveled from her home in West Palm Beach to find blood relatives living in Cyprus, who confirmed that there was no family history of her worst fear: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., the relentless disease that lays waste to muscles while leaving the mind intact. In June 2011, a doctor in Miami gave her a definitive diagnosis of A.L.S., smiling “like he was inviting me to a birthday party,” she writes in “Until I Say Goodbye: My Year of Living With Joy.” Patients with A.L.S., which is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, typically live no more than four years after the onset of symptoms. There is no cure. Ms. Spencer-Wendel thought she had prepared herself fully — that she would burst off the starting block like a sprinter to greet her fate. Instead, when she heard the news, “I dropped my head for the start ... and began to cry.” Her heart-ripping book chronicles what she did immediately after her diagnosis: she decided to embrace life while death chased her down. Instead of letting the world close in on her, she resolved to travel as far and as wide for as long as she could. She went to the Yukon with her best friend, Budapest with her husband, and the Bahamas with her sister. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 18007 - Posted: 04.09.2013

By DOUGLAS QUENQUA The French geneticist Jérôme Lejeune discovered more than 50 years ago that Down syndrome is caused by the presence of an extra copy of chromosome 21. But to this day it has remained a mystery why that results in impaired physical and cognitive development. Now researchers at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute think they have found a clue. The scientists, who were investigating Alzheimer’s disease, found that mice that lacked a protein known as SNX27 had many of the same learning and memory defects as mice with Down syndrome. Looking at the brains of people with the syndrome, the researchers discovered that they, too, lacked SNX27. While chromosome 21 is not directly involved in SNX27 production, it does encode a regulator — miR-155 — that inhibits production. According to the study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, levels of miR-155 in the brains of people with Down syndrome correlate almost exactly with the decrease in SNX27. “In the brain, SNX27 keeps certain receptors on the cell surface — receptors that are necessary for neurons to fire properly,” said the study’s senior author, Huaxi Xu, in a statement released by the institute. “So in Down syndrome, we believe lack of SNX27 is at least partly to blame for developmental and cognitive defects.” To test their findings, Dr. Xu’s team introduced more SNX27 to mice with Down syndrome. As they expected, the mice showed immediate improvements in cognitive function and behavior. Now the researchers are investigating molecules that might increase production of SNX27 in the human brain. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Aggression
Link ID: 18002 - Posted: 04.09.2013

By Linda Carroll, Kate Snow and Meghan Frank, NBC News As a little girl, Bonnie Ihme had big plans. Bright and artistically talented, she dreamed of becoming an architect. But the older she got, the more distant that dream seemed. By third grade, school had become a struggle. She felt easily distracted and found it impossible to focus in class. Eventually she abandoned her plan to be an architect. Ihme got married, had two kids and began cleaning houses and helping her husband with his business. But even that simpler life felt impossibly difficult. The Michigan mom had trouble keeping track of all the threads of her life. She’d send her kids to school without sneakers on gym day. She’d forget to bring library books back. She felt more overwhelmed than ever before. “I really would try hard to pull it all together,” Ihme told NBC’s Kate Snow in an interview airing on Rock Center Friday. “But when … you’re late for a Christmas concert that your daughter was really looking forward to going to and we get there and her class is walking back to the classroom and the tears in her eyes… you try harder.” Ihme saw history repeating itself in her 10-year-old son, Jacob, who began struggling with school, just as she had. Jacob would spend hours doing his homework, only to forget to bring it to school the next morning. Ihme’s heart ached for her son. © 2013 NBCNews.com

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 18001 - Posted: 04.08.2013

Steve Connor Fear may be felt in the heart as well as the head, according to a study that has found a link between the cycles of a beating heart and the likelihood of someone taking fright. Tests on healthy volunteers found that they were more likely to feel a sense of fear at the moment when their hearts are contracting and pumping blood around their bodies, compared with the point when the heartbeat is relaxed. Scientists say the results suggest that the heart is able to influence how the brain responds to a fearful event, depending on which point it is at in its regular cycle of contraction and relaxation. Sarah Garfinkel, a researcher at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, said: “We demonstrate for the first time that the way in which we process fear is different dependent on when we see fearful images in relation to our heart.” The study, to be presented today at the British Neuroscience Association Festival in London, tested the fear response of 20 healthy volunteers as they were shown images of fearful faces while connected to heart monitors. “Our results show that if we see a fearful face during systole – when the heart is pumping – then we judge this fearful face as more intense than if we see the very same fearful face during diastole – when the heart is relaxed,” Dr Garfinkel said. “From previous research, we know that if we present images very fast then we have trouble detecting them, but if an image is particularly emotional then it can ‘pop’ out and be seen. © independent.co.uk

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 17999 - Posted: 04.08.2013