Phil McKenna Insurance companies are helping to popularise a new "truth-telling" industry in the US which uses brain scans to determine whether or not people are lying. But experts are already questioning the ethics and validity of such tests. The trouble began in 2003 when a fire gutted Harvey Nathan’s deli in Charleston, South Carolina. In the aftermath, Nathan fought off police charges of arson, but his insurers’ lingering doubts over his innocence have since tied up a payout that could exceed $200,000. Which is why, last December (2006), Nathan travelled across the US and paid $1500 to have his brain scanned. “We provide a service for people who need to prove they are telling the truth,” says Joel Huizenga, a biologist turned entrepreneur and CEO of No Lie MRI of Tarzana, California. In what amounted to the world’s first commercial lie-detection test using function magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), technicians at No Lie mapped blood flow within Nathan’s brain while he answered a battery of questions about the deli fire and compared the results to control tests during which Nathan was asked to lie. Think of a cardThe differences in the way his brain responded to these tasks appear to confirm his innocence. Huizenga says No Lie is now working with a second client and he expects many more. Another group is planning to launch a similar service in Massachusetts. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 9931 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY The field of psychoanalysis has struggled with a disabling internal conflict in recent years: whether to subject the therapy to rigorous testing, like the process through which new drugs are approved, or to insist that the insights it provides are self-evident and cannot be put under a microscope. This internal debate has raged even as analysis, Freud’s open-ended talking cure, has become increasingly marginalized as a practice. But the ground rules may soon change. Last week, a team of New York analysts published the first scientifically rigorous study of a short-term variation of the therapy for panic disorder, a very common form of anxiety. The study was small, but the therapy proved to be surprisingly effective in a group of severely disabled people. The paper, which appeared in psychiatry’s flagship journal, The American Journal of Psychiatry, is one of the most significant steps in a small but growing effort to study how this so-called psychodynamic therapy works, and for whom. The brand of therapy tested relies on core tenets of analysis, like the search for the underlying psychological meaning of symptoms. But unlike traditional psychoanalysis, it focused on relieving symptoms quickly, and was time-limited. Previous studies of similar approaches have shown some promise for other disorders, like depression. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 9930 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Dave Howard Six heroin addicts agreed to spend the last week in a remote Scottish farmhouse in a trial of a controversial detox treatment involving Neuro-Electric Therapy to the brain. A BBC Five Live reporter has been living in the house to assess how they get on. "Look, can you see it filling up with blood now?" Ronnie is injecting himself with heroin. "I'm pushing it in, I'm pushing it in, I'm pushing it in". Ronnie gets his hit and passes out. David, next to him on the bed, digs into his own arms with a needle, over and over again, trying to find a useable vein. He is becoming increasingly afraid. He is feeling the onset of heroin withdrawal - the dreaded "rattles". He pulls his tourniquet tighter round his arm, and talks about his 14-year-old son. He has told him this is the time he will finally get clean: "Of course, he gives you the eyes. I've heard that before Dad, know what I mean?" It's Friday night. On Saturday morning, Ronnie, David, and four other addicts will become guinea-pigs. They have agreed to take part in a trial of Neuro-Electric Therapy - a controversial addiction treatment that involves having low electrical pulses transmitted into the brain. It is claimed the device can speed up the withdrawal process NET, as it is known, was developed in the 1970s by Scottish doctor, Meg Patterson. It has been used on private patients including rock musicians Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend, from The Who. But three decades later, Dr Patterson's family are still trying to convince a sceptical medical profession it could be a viable treatment for the UK's 360,000 heroin addicts. (C)BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 9929 - Posted: 02.06.2007

By BARNABY J. FEDER Regulators who oversee Medicare said yesterday that they did not think it was reasonable or necessary to begin covering Cyberonics’ implanted electrical stimulator to treat severe depression in patients who had failed with other therapies. The preliminary ruling, in response to a petition Cyberonics filed six months ago, sent the company’s shares down more than 11 percent in trading after the market closed. Earlier, they had risen 96 cents, to $22.55. Cyberonics said it was “extremely disappointed” and urged supporters of the therapy to respond to the agency during the 30-day comment period before a final ruling was issued. Analysts who had predicted Medicare’s decision said that they expected layoffs at the company, which is based in Houston. “There’s a sales force out there now without much to sell,” said Jan D. Wald of A. G. Edwards & Sons. The $15,000 device, called the VNS (for vagus nerve stimulator), is similar to a pacemaker that is implanted in the upper chest and linked to the vagus nerve, which conveys its pulses to the brain. About 2,200 of the devices have been implanted in patients suffering from depression, according to Cyberonics. Many insurers have paid for a few implants. But no major insurer routinely covers the procedure, which costs at least $25,000 at most hospitals. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 9928 - Posted: 06.24.2010

People who are lonely are twice as likely to develop Alzheimer's disease, a large US study has suggested. The findings come from a study of more than 800 elderly patients, who were followed over a four-year period. Social isolation has already been shown to be linked to dementia but this is the first time researchers have looked at how alone people actually felt. Writing in Archives of General Psychiatry, the researchers said the reason for the link was not yet clear. Study leader Professor Robert Wilson and colleagues assessed participants loneliness by asking people to rate from one to five whether they agreed with certain statements related to loneliness on an annual basis. Questions posed to those being studied included "I experience a general sense of emptiness" and "I often feel abandoned". People in the study were also assessed for signs of dementia and Alzheimer's disease. And autopsies were carried out on 90 patients who died during the study to look for certain physical signs associated with Alzheimer's disease such as deposits of protein outside and around nerve cells. The team found that the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease increased by 51% for each point of the loneliness score. Those with the highest loneliness score of 3.2 had about 2.1 times the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease compared to those with a low score of 1.4. When the researchers factored in social isolation, such as if people had a small social network, the results did not change significantly. However there was no association between loneliness and the brain pathology associated with Alzheimer's disease. (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers; Emotions
Link ID: 9927 - Posted: 02.06.2007

By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D. When have you ever heard of a therapist telling a patient that he is mean or bad? Probably never. It’s not fashionable in our therapy-friendly nation, where people who behave obnoxiously are assumed to have a treatable psychiatric problem until proven otherwise. Nothing in the human experience is beyond the power of psychiatry to diagnose or fix, it seems. But even for me, an optimist and a proponent of therapy, things have gotten a little out of hand. Not long ago, one of my psychiatric residents called in distress about a patient who was demanding a different therapist. “This guy is in my office shouting at me and telling me how bad I am,” the resident said. Sure enough, the patient in question was very hostile and demeaning in talking about this young doctor. Jabbing his finger in the air, he told me how unsympathetic my resident was and how rude the staff at the front desk had been. “This kid doesn’t know the first thing about treating patients,” he said with derision. He clearly meant to hurt and humiliate his new doctor in front of a supervisor. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Emotions
Link ID: 9926 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE The recent news about smoking was sensational: some people with damage to a prune-size slab of brain tissue called the insula were able to give up cigarettes instantly. Suppose scientists could figure out how to tweak the insula without damaging it. They might be able to create that famed and elusive free lunch — an effortless way to kick the cigarette habit. That dream, which may not be too far off, puts the insula in the spotlight. What is the insula and how could it possibly exert such profound effects on human behavior? According to neuroscientists who study it, the insula is a long-neglected brain region that has emerged as crucial to understanding what it feels like to be human. They say it is the wellspring of social emotions, things like lust and disgust, pride and humiliation, guilt and atonement. It helps give rise to moral intuition, empathy and the capacity to respond emotionally to music. Its anatomy and evolution shed light on the profound differences between humans and other animals. The insula also reads body states like hunger and craving and helps push people into reaching for the next sandwich, cigarette or line of cocaine. So insula research offers new ways to think about treating drug addiction, alcoholism, anxiety and eating disorders. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 9925 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Andrew Stern CHICAGO (Reuters) - Depression, severe mental illness and loneliness are linked to illnesses such as heart disease and dementia, according to several studies published on Monday. The exact connections between a dysfunctional mind and a malfunctioning body remains an ongoing question, but at least one of three sets of researchers writing in the Archives of General Psychiatry said several factors may be at work. Dr. Jesse Stewart, formerly of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, found a correlation between depression and hardening of the arteries in his three-year study of 324 men and women who averaged 60 years old. The arteries of those who were most depressed had narrowed twice as much as those who were least depressed, the study found. Hardening of the arteries can be a precursor to a heart attack or stroke and may occur because of a malfunctioning nervous system in depressed people, Stewart wrote. Depression may also upset the body's regulation of glands that release chemicals governing energy level and growth, and alter the functioning of cells responsible for blood clotting. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Depression; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 9924 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi Female butterflies become sexually promiscuous in the presence of a bacterium that fatally targets the male offspring of their species, a new study shows. However, the few males that survive become fatigued by the increased sexual demands of the females, and so release fewer sperm in each mating. The unexpected findings could shed light on how the insect species can survive when there are only a few males available, the researchers say. Greg Hurst at University College London in the UK, and colleagues, captured and studied Hypolimnas bolina butterflies from various islands in South Asia and the Pacific. On some of the islands these butterflies suffer from a type of Wolbachia bacteria that specifically kills their male embryos. Other islands, meanwhile, remain free of the bacteria. About 25 female butterflies were captured from each of the various islands, which were dissected in search of empty “sperm packages”. Female butterflies receive a tiny ball of sperm each time they mate and store its empty casing inside them for the rest of their life. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 9923 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Heidi Ledford For one group of African fish, incest is not only a way of life — it may also be a boon. Given a choice, the cichlid Pelvicachromis taeniatus, often found in aquariums, prefers to mate with siblings nearly three times out of four. And males who shacked up with their sisters spent more time guarding their fry and less time fighting with their mate than unrelated couples. The end result was happy families and healthy kids. This runs against the usual view that inbreeding harms offspring by bringing harmful mutations together. While a normal copy of a gene can sometimes mask a mutation, offspring that inherit two mutated copies lack any such protection. This can make inbred offspring less able to survive or reproduce. But Timo Thünken and his collaborators at the University of Bonn in Germany found that inbred and outbred P. taeniatus had the same growth and survival rates. These results, together with recent studies in birds and other fish, suggest that the popularity of inbreeding in the animal kingdom may have been underestimated, Thünken says. In the wild, single P. taeniatus females seek out males that have claimed a good cave to live in. After a mate is selected, couples are largely monogamous and both parents take turns guarding the cave against predators. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 9922 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi Wisdom in old age depends on a fresh supply of new brain cells, a study in mice suggests. When mature mice learn a new task, their newly generated brain cells are three times more active than their old ones, the researchers found. The findings add to a growing body of evidence that the adult brain needs a steady addition of new cells to maintain its mental faculties. Paul Frankland at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and colleagues injected a group of mice with a chemical agent that stains only those cells born in the animals’ brains at the time of injection. One week later, the team taught some of the mice how to navigate through a maze, before sacrificing them to analyse the cells in a region of the brain called the hippocampus, which is key to learning and memory. In stages, the rest of the mice also underwent this paired process of learning and hippocampal examination at increasing time intervals from the initial injection. Frankland’s team analysed the rodents’ stained hippocampal cells for key proteins – evidence that the cells were active and forming the new neural connections vital for learning. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 9921 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY The beautiful and deeply religious Madame de Tourvel is so distraught after cheating on her husband in the 1782 novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” that she blacks out the betrayal altogether, arriving at a convent with no idea of what had brought her there. Soon the horror of the infidelity rushes back, in all its incriminating force. More than two centuries later, she has become part of a longstanding debate about whether the brain can block access to painful memories, like betrayals and childhood sexual abuse, and suddenly release them later on. In a paper posted online in the current issue of the journal Psychological Medicine, a team of psychiatrists and literary scholars reports that it could not find a single account of repressed memory, fictional or not, before the year 1800. The researchers offered a $1,000 reward last March to anyone who could document such a case in a healthy, lucid person. They posted the challenge in newspapers and on 30 Web sites where the topic might be discussed. None of the responses were convincing, the authors wrote, suggesting that repressed memory is a “culture-bound syndrome” and not a natural process of human memory. Madame de Tourvel “is the closest we got to a winner,” said Dr. Harrison Pope, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard and the lead author of the paper. But her amnesia, he said, was too brief to qualify. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Stress
Link ID: 9920 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By John Bohannon Love is not a pretty thing in the chimpanzee world. Male chimps frequently and brutally beat females, sometimes using branches as weapons. According to a new study, the belligerent behavior is meant to police girls' wandering eyes. Chimps don't believe in monogamy. Instead, they live in a free-love commune where anyone can mate with anyone else. Only a few females are in estrus and capable of conception at any given time; the rest are suckling infants. As a result, competition for the available ladies is intense. The leading explanation for male-on-female chimp aggression is that it is a form of sexual coercion: It's in a male's interest to punish female promiscuity to increase the chance that her babies will be his. But the evidence for this theory has been lacking. Male-on-female violence could simply be the result of disputes over food resources, for example, or it may just be a spillover from male-male aggression. To get behind the bullying behavior, a team led by Martin Muller, a biological anthropologist at Boston University in Massachusetts, pooled 7 years of observations of a group of wild chimps in Uganda. The researchers meticulously recorded every push and slap, along with every tryst and pregnancy. Swabbing urine from leaves allowed them to measure glucocorticoid hormones, an indicator of stress. Male chimps didn't just beat up on females at random, the researchers conclude. Those that bore the worst of the attacks not only had far more sex--and most often with the males that beat them--but were also the most fecund, with twice the average odds of a sexual encounter resulting in pregnancy. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Aggression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9919 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nathan Seppa Mad cow disease and other brain disorders stemming from prion proteins have long resisted cure. Now, in a test in mice, a prion disease caught early has been reversed. Prions—misfolded versions of a natural protein called PrP—trigger normal PrP to misfold in the same way. Over time, prion infection kills so many neurons that the brain becomes riddled with holes. In the new study, neurologist Giovanna R. Mallucci of the Institute of Neurology in London and her colleagues tested whether shutting off the prions' supply of PrP could alter the course of disease. They worked with genetically engineered mice that make PrP only for the first 9 weeks of life and normal mice that make PrP indefinitely. The researchers infected both groups, shortly after birth, with prions that cause scrapie in sheep. At 8 weeks of age, mice in both groups showed cognitive deficits. For example, mice normally spend more time exploring unfamiliar sets of objects than known ones. But the infected mice spent the same time examining strange or familiar arrangements of blocks, indicating that the animals had forgotten familiar arrangements. The mice also lost some of their natural inclination to gather food pellets. ©2007 Science Service.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 9918 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Fluctuations in sex hormone levels during women’s menstrual cycles affect the responsiveness of their brains’ reward circuitry, an imaging study at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has revealed. While women were winning rewards, their circuitry was more active if they were in a menstrual phase preceding ovulation and dominated by estrogen, compared to a phase when estrogen and progesterone are present. “These first pictures of sex hormones influencing reward-evoked brain activity in humans may provide insights into menstrual-related mood disorders, women’s higher rates of mood and anxiety disorders, and their later onset and less severe course in schizophrenia,” said Karen Berman, M.D., chief of the NIMH Section on Integrative Neuroimaging. “The study may also shed light on why women are more vulnerable to addictive drugs during the pre-ovulation phase of the cycle.” Berman, Drs. Jean-Claude Dreher, Peter Schmidt and colleagues in the NIMH Intramural Research Program report on their functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study online during the week of January 29, 2007 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Reward system circuitry includes: the prefrontal cortex, seat of thinking and planning; the amygdala, a fear center; the hippocampus, a learning and memory hub; and the striatum, which relays signals from these areas to the cortex. Reward circuit neurons harbor receptors for estrogen and progesterone. However, how these hormones influence reward circuit activity in humans has remained unclear.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 9917 - Posted: 06.24.2010

In humans, a dearth of the neurotransmitter dopamine has long been known to play a role in Parkinson's disease. It is also known that mutations in a protein called parkin cause a form of Parkinson's that is inherited. Now, UCLA scientists, reporting in the Jan. 31 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience, have put the two together. Using a new model of Parkinson's disease they developed in the simple Drosophila (fruit fly), the researchers show for the first time that a mutated form of the human parkin gene inserted into Drosophila specifically results in the death of dopaminergic cells, ultimately resulting in Parkinson's-like motor dysfunction in the fly. Thus, the interaction of mutant parkin with dopamine may be key to understanding the cause of familial Parkinson's disease — Parkinson's that runs in families. Conventional wisdom has held that parkin is recessive, meaning that two copies of the mutated gene were required in order to see the clinical signs of Parkinson's disease. But the researchers, led by George Jackson, M.D., Ph.D., UCLA associate professor of neurology and senior scientist at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, wanted to see if they could get the protein to act in a dominant fashion, so they put only one copy of the mutation into their fly model. The result was the death of the neurons that use dopamine, the neurotransmitter long implicated in Parkinson's disease. "We put the mutant parkin in all different kinds of tissues and in different kinds of neurons, and it was toxic only to the ones that used dopamine," Jackson said. "No one's shown this degree of specificity for dopaminergic neurons."

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 9916 - Posted: 06.24.2010

What is the self? How does the activity of neurons give rise to the sense of being a conscious human being? Even this most ancient of philosophical problems, I believe, will yield to the methods of empirical science. It now seems increasingly likely that the self is not a holistic property of the entire brain; it arises from the activity of specific sets of interlinked brain circuits. But we need to know which circuits are critically involved and what their functions might be. It is the "turning inward" aspect of the self — its recursiveness — that gives it its peculiar paradoxical quality. It has been suggested by Horace Barlow, Nick Humphrey, David Premack and Marvin Minsky (among others) that consciousness may have evolved primarily in a social context. Minsky speaks of a second parallel mechanism that has evolved in humans to create representations of earlier representations and Humphrey has argued that our ability to introspect may have evolved specifically to construct meaningful models of other peoples minds in order to predict their behavior. "I feel jealous in order to understand what jealousy feels like in someone else" — a short cut to predicting that persons behavior. Here I develop these arguments further. If I succeed in seeing any further it is by "standing on the shoulders of these giants". Specifically, I suggest that "other awareness" may have evolved first and then counterintutively, as often happens in evolution, the same ability was exploited to model ones own mind — what one calls self awareness. I will also suggest that a specific system of neurons called mirror neurons are involved in this ability. Finally I discuss some clinical examples to illustrate these ideas and make some testable predictions. Copyright © 2007 By Edge Foundation, Inc

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 9915 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Karen Heyman Were it not for our brain's ability to sense time--even on the millisecond scale--Morse code would sound like one long beep. Now researchers are uncovering the first clues into how this mental clock works, even when we're not sending a telegraph. For decades, neuroscientists believed the brain had a specific region dedicated to keeping track of time. Recently, this view has begun to change. Instead of a single internal chronometer, many researchers now believe that the natural firings of neurons throughout the brain may give us our ability to sense the passage of time. Exactly how this works, however, has remained a mystery. To probe the inner workings of our mental clock, University of California (UC), Los Angeles, neuroscientist Dean Buonomano and Uma Karmarkar, now a post-doctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, focused on an idea called state-dependency. The concept goes like this: Imagine you are dripping red paint into a can of white paint. The first drop falls into pure white paint, but with each successive drop, the red paint enters a pinker and pinker solution. Buonomano and Karmarkar hypothesized that something similar goes on in the brain. When you hear the first "beep" of Morse code, for example, a specific set of neurons fire. This causes the brain to be in a different state than it was before it heard the sound. As a result, when the next beep sounds, the brain clicks into another state. Keeping track of the differences between these states allows the brain to mark time, the team showed in a computer model that replicates neuron interactions. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Attention; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 9914 - Posted: 06.24.2010

(PHILADELPHIA) – Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have shown that impaired function and loss of synapses in the hippocampus of a mouse form of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is related to the activation of immune cells called microglia, which cause inflammation. These events precede the formation of tangles – twisted fibers of tau protein that build up inside nerve cells – a hallmark of advanced AD. The researchers report their findings in the February 1 issue of Neuron. “Abolishing the inflammation caused by the accumulation of the tau protein might be a new therapy for treating neurodegenerative disorders,” says senior author Virginia Lee, PhD, Director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research. “This work points the way to a new class of drugs for these diseases.” In addition, the immunosuppressant FK506 diminishes neuron loss and extends the life span of the transgenic Alzheimer’s mice. Normally only 20 percent of these mice survive by one year. With FK506, 60 percent of the mice were alive by one year. Lee and colleagues developed their mouse model about four years ago, an improvement on their first tau mouse developed seven years ago. This model is unique in that it more closely mirrors human Alzheimer’s because it shows more and consistent tangles in the hippocampus than other mouse models. © 2007, The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 9913 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Out-of-control binge eating is a widespread eating disorder in the US, and more common than anorexia and bulimia combined, according to the first national survey of such disorders. Binge eating afflicts 3.5% of US women and 2.0% of men at some point in their lives, the survey of more than 9000 people revealed. By comparison, it found that 0.9% of women and 0.3% of men reported having suffered from anorexia nervosa – a disorder characterised by an obsessive desire to be thin. And 1.5% of women and 0.5% of men reported the condition of bulimia, in which binge eating is followed by self-induced vomiting or the use of laxatives. "The most striking finding is the emergence of binge eating as a major public-health problem," says study leader James Hudson of Harvard’s McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, US. Binge eating is defined as occurring when people cannot stop from eating well beyond the point of being full at least twice a week. Hudson believes it is a chronic and persistent condition in the US that is under-reported and under-diagnosed. Researchers say that this type of bingeing is contributing to a rise in obesity. "I suspect that the connection that we have drawn in this study is just the tip of the iceberg of the problem of out-of-control eating and its relationship to obesity," Hudson says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 9912 - Posted: 06.24.2010