Rachel Hall Napping has long been a symbol of laziness, but actually it is an essential bodily function that improves our memory, creativity, empathy and problem-solving abilities. Sleep scientists say the gold standard for good physical and mental health is making sure you get between seven and nine hours’ sleep every day, but not necessarily all in one go. “Capitalists in the old days told us that we should do 12 to 16 hours of work for them, and then have eight hours to do what we like, so they wanted us to sleep efficiently in a certain window – that’s where the idea of consolidated sleep comes from,” said Till Roenneberg, a professor of chronobiology at the University of Munich. He has been studying civilisations without electricity, and has observed that people often woke up during the night, took a break and went back to sleep. However, Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Why We Sleep, said people who have trouble falling asleep at night should approach naps with caution, and that everyone should avoid napping after 3pm. “If you nap too late in the day it’s a bit like snacking before main meal, it just takes the edge off your sleep hunger at night,” he said. The ideal length, according to the scientists, is 20 to 25 minutes. Any longer and you’ll fall into a deeper sleep cycle, which lasts for about 90 minutes. This means when you wake up you will experience “sleep inertia”, or grogginess. © 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Sleep; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 27965 - Posted: 08.28.2021

Terry Gross Human beings are programmed to approach pleasure and avoid pain. It's an instinct that dates back millions of years, to a time when people needed to actively seek food, clothing and shelter every day, or risk death. But psychiatrist Anna Lembke says that in today's world, such basic needs are often readily available — which changes the equation. "Living in this modern age is very challenging. ... We're now having to cope with: How do I live in a world in which everything is provided?" Lembke says. "And if I consume too much of it — which my reflexes compel me to do — I'm going to be even more unhappy." Lembke is the medical director of addiction medicine at Stanford University and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. Her new book, Dopamine Nation, explores the interconnection of pleasure and pain in the brain and helps explain addictive behaviors — not just to drugs and alcohol, but also to food, sex and smart phones. Lembke says that her patients who are struggling with substance abuse often believe their addictions are fueled by depression, anxiety and insomnia. But she maintains that the reverse is often true: Addictions can become the cause of pain — not the relief from it. That's because the behavior triggers, among other things, an initial response of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which floods the brain with pleasure. But once the dopamine wears off, a person is often left feeling worse than before. "They start out using the drug in order to feel good or in order to experience less pain," Lembke says. "Over time, with repeated exposure, that drug works less and less well. But they find themselves unable to stop, because when they're not using, then they're in a state of a dopamine deficit." © 2021 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 27964 - Posted: 08.28.2021

Jordana Cepelewicz Neuroscientists are the cartographers of the brain’s diverse domains and territories — the features and activities that define them, the roads and highways that connect them, and the boundaries that delineate them. Toward the front of the brain, just behind the forehead, is the prefrontal cortex, celebrated as the seat of judgment. Behind it lies the motor cortex, responsible for planning and coordinating movement. To the sides: the temporal lobes, crucial for memory and the processing of emotion. Above them, the somatosensory cortex; behind them, the visual cortex. Not only do researchers often depict the brain and its functions much as mapmakers might draw nations on continents, but they do so “the way old-fashioned mapmakers” did, according to Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist at Northeastern University. “They parse the brain in terms of what they’re interested in psychologically or mentally or behaviorally,” and then they assign the functions to different networks of neurons “as if they’re Lego blocks, as if there are firm boundaries there.” But a brain map with neat borders is not just oversimplified — it’s misleading. “Scientists for over 100 years have searched fruitlessly for brain boundaries between thinking, feeling, deciding, remembering, moving and other everyday experiences,” Barrett said. A host of recent neurological studies further confirm that these mental categories “are poor guides for understanding how brains are structured or how they work.” Neuroscientists generally agree about how the physical tissue of the brain is organized: into particular regions, networks, cell types. But when it comes to relating those to the task the brain might be performing — perception, memory, attention, emotion or action — “things get a lot more dodgy,” said David Poeppel, a neuroscientist at New York University. All Rights Reserved © 2021

Keyword: Brain imaging; Attention
Link ID: 27963 - Posted: 08.25.2021

Tim Adams For centuries, philosophers have theorised about the mind-body question, debating the relationship between the physical matter of the brain and the conscious mental activity it somehow creates. Even with advances in neuroscience and brain imaging techniques, large parts of that fundamental relationship remain stubbornly mysterious. It was with good reason that, in 1995, the cognitive scientist David Chalmers coined the term “the hard problem” to describe the question of exactly how our brains conjure subjective conscious experience. Some philosophers continue to insist that mind is inherently distinct from matter. Advances in understanding how the brain functions undermine those ideas of dualism, however. Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, is at the leading edge of that latter research. His Ted talk on consciousness has been viewed more than 11m times. His new book, Being You, proposes an idea of the human mind as a “highly evolved prediction machine”, rooted in the functions of the body and “constantly hallucinating the world and the self” to create reality. One of the things that I liked about your approach in the book was the way that many of the phenomena you investigate arise out of your experience. For example, the feeling of returning to consciousness after anaesthesia or how your mother, experiencing delirium, was no longer recognisably herself. Do you think it’s always important to keep that real-world framework in mind? The reason I’m interested in consciousness is intrinsically personal. I want to understand myself and, by extension, others. But I’m also super-interested for example in developing statistical models and mathematical methods for characterising things such as emergence [behaviour of the mind as a whole that exceeds the capability of its individual parts] and there is no personal component in that. © 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Consciousness; Attention
Link ID: 27962 - Posted: 08.25.2021

By Gretchen Reynolds An intriguing new study shows how exercise may bolster brain health. The study was in mice, but it found that a hormone produced by muscles during exercise can cross into the brain and enhance the health and function of neurons, improving thinking and memory in both healthy animals and those with a rodent version of Alzheimer’s disease. Earlier research shows that people produce the same hormone during exercise, and together the findings suggest that moving could alter the trajectory of memory loss in aging and dementia. We have plenty of evidence already that exercise is good for the brain. Studies in both people and animals show that exercise prompts the creation of new neurons in the brain’s memory center and then helps those new cells survive, mature and integrate into the brain’s neural network, where they can aid in thinking and remembering. Large-scale epidemiological studies also indicate that active people tend to be far less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia than people who rarely exercise. But how does working out affect the inner workings of our brains at a molecular level? Scientists have speculated that exercise might directly change the biochemical environment inside the brain, without involving muscles. Alternatively, the muscles and other tissues might release substances during physical activity that travel to the brain and jump-start processes there, leading to the subsequent improvements in brain health. But in that case, the substances would have to be able to pass through the protective and mostly impermeable blood-brain barrier that separates our brains from the rest of our bodies. Those tangled issues were of particular interest a decade ago to a large group of scientists at Harvard Medical School and other institutions. In 2012, some of these researchers, led by Bruce M. Spiegelman, the Stanley J. Korsmeyer Professor of Cell Biology and Medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, identified a previously unknown hormone produced in the muscles of lab rodents and people during exercise and then released into the bloodstream. They named the new hormone irisin, after the messenger god Iris in Greek mythology. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Muscles
Link ID: 27961 - Posted: 08.25.2021

By Katherine Ellison Jessica McCabe crashed and burned at 30, when she got divorced, dropped out of community college and moved in with her mother. Eric Tivers had 21 jobs before age 21. Both have been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and both today are entrepreneurs who wear their diagnoses — and rare resilience — on their sleeves. With YouTube videos, podcasts and tweets, they’ve built online communities aimed at ending the shame that so often makes having ADHD so much harder. Now they’re going even further, asking: Why not demand more than mere compassion? Why not seek deeper changes to create a more ADHD-friendly world? “I’ve spent the last five or six years trying to understand how my brain works so that I could conform, but now I’m starting to evolve,” says McCabe, 38, whose chipper, NASCAR-speed delivery has garnered 742,000 subscribers — and counting — to her YouTube channel, “How to ADHD.” “I think we no longer have to accept that we live in a world that is not built for our brains.” With Tivers, she is planning a virtual summit on the topic for next May. As a first step, with the help of Canadian cognitive scientist Deirdre Kelly, she says she’ll soon release new guidelines to assess products and services for their ADHD friendliness. Computer programs that help restless users meditate and a chair that accommodates a variety of seated positions are high on the list to promote, while error-prone apps or devices will be flagged. Kelly also envisions redesigning refrigerator vegetable drawers, so that the most nutritious food will no longer be out of sight and mind. In the past two decades, the world has become much kinder to the estimated 6.1 million children and approximately 10 million adults with ADHD, whose hallmark symptoms are distraction, forgetfulness and impulsivity. Social media has made all the difference.

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 27960 - Posted: 08.25.2021

By Paula Span Learning your odds of eventually developing dementia — a pressing concern for many, especially those with a family history of it — requires medical testing and counseling. But what if everyday behavior, like overlooking a couple of credit card payments or habitually braking while driving, could foretell your risk? A spate of experiments is underway to explore that possibility, reflecting the growing awareness that the pathologies underlying dementia can begin years or even decades before symptoms emerge. “Early detection is key for intervention, at the stage when that would be most effective,” said Sayeh Bayat, the lead author of a driving study funded by the National Institutes of Health and conducted at Washington University in St. Louis. Such efforts could help identify potential volunteers for clinical trials, researchers say, and help protect older people against financial abuse and other dangers. In recent years, many once-promising dementia drugs, particularly for Alzheimer’s disease, have failed in trials. One possible reason, researchers say, is that the drugs are administered too late to be helpful. Identifying risks earlier, when the brain has sustained less damage, could create a pool of potential participants with “preclinical” Alzheimer’s disease, who could then test preventive measures or treatments. It could also bring improvements in daily life. “We could support people’s ability to drive longer, and have safer streets for everyone,” Ms. Bayat offered as an example. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 27959 - Posted: 08.25.2021

By Carolyn Wilke Frog and toad pupils come in quite the array, from slits to circles. But overall, there are seven main shapes of these animals’ peepholes, researchers report in the Aug. 25 Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Eyes are “among the most charismatic features of frogs and toads,” says herpetologist Julián Faivovich of the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales “Bernardino Rivadavia” in Buenos Aires. People have long marveled at the animals’ many iris colors and pupil shapes. Yet “there’s almost nothing known about the anatomical basis of that diversity.” Faivovich and colleagues catalogued pupil shapes from photos of 3,261 species, representing 44 percent of known frogs and toads. The team identified seven main shapes: vertical slits, horizontal slits, diamonds, circles, triangles, fans and inverted fans. The most common shape, horizontal slits, appeared in 78 percent of studied species. Mapping pupil shapes onto a tree of evolutionary relationships allowed the scientists to infer how these seven shapes emerged. Though uncommon in other vertebrates, horizontal pupils seem to have given rise to most of the other shapes in frogs and toads. All together, these seven shapes have evolved at least 116 times, the researchers say. Pupil shape affects the amount of light that reaches the retina and its light-receiving cells, says Nadia Cervino, a herpetologist also at the Argentine museum. But how the shape influences what animals actually see isn’t well-known. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2021.

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 27958 - Posted: 08.25.2021

By Jonathan Lambert At least 65 million years of evolution separate humans and greater sac-winged bats, but these two mammals share a key feature of learning how to speak: babbling. Just as human infants babble their way from “da-da-da-da” to “Dad,” wild bat pups (Saccopteryx bilineata) learn the mating and territorial songs of adults by first babbling out the fundamental syllables of the vocalizations, researchers report in the Aug. 20 Science. These bats now join humans as the only clear examples of mammals who learn to make complex vocalizations through babbling. “This is a hugely important step forward in the study of vocal learning,” says Tecumseh Fitch, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Vienna not involved in the new study. “These findings suggest that there are deep parallels between how humans and young bats learn to control their vocal apparatus,” he says. The work could enable future studies that might allow researchers to peer deeper into the brain activity that underpins vocal learning. Before complex vocalizations, whether words or mating songs, can be spoken or sung, vocalizers must learn to articulate the syllables that make up a species’s vocabulary, says Ahana Fernandez, an animal behavior biologist at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. “Babbling is a way of practicing,” and honing those vocalizations, she says. The rhythmic, repetitive “ba-ba-ba’s” and “ga-ga-ga’s” of human infants may sound like gibberish, but they are necessary exploratory steps toward learning how to talk. Seeing whether babbling is required for any animal that learns complex vocalizations necessitates looking in other species. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2021.

Keyword: Language; Hearing
Link ID: 27957 - Posted: 08.21.2021

By Priyanka Runwal Brain tissue is innately squishy. Unlike bones, shells or teeth, it is rich in fat and rots quickly, seldom making an appearance in the fossil record. So when Russell Bicknell, an invertebrate paleontologist at the University of New England in Australia, noticed a pop of white near the front of a fossilized horseshoe crab body where the animal’s brain would have been, he was surprised. A closer look revealed an exceptional imprint of the brain along with other bits of the creature’s nervous system. Unearthed from the Mazon Creek deposit in northeastern Illinois, and dating back 310 million years, it’s the first fossilized horseshoe crab brain ever found. Dr. Bicknell and his colleagues reported the find last month in the journal Geology. “These kinds of fossils are so rare that if you happen to stumble upon one, you’d generally be in shock,” he said. “We’re talking a needle-in-a-haystack level of wow.” The find helps fill a gap in the evolution of arthropod brains and also shows how little they have changed over hundreds of millions of years. Soft-tissue preservation requires special conditions. Scientists have found brains encased in fossilized tree resin, better known as amber, that were less than 66 million years old. They have also found brains preserved as flattened carbon films, sometimes replaced or overlaid by minerals in shale deposits that are more than 500 million years old. Such deposits include corpses of ocean-dwelling arthropods that sank to the seafloor, were rapidly buried in mud and remained shielded from immediate decay in the low-oxygen environment. However, the fossilized brain of Euproops danae, which is kept in a collection at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, required a different set of conditions to be preserved. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 27956 - Posted: 08.21.2021

By Christiane Gelitz, Maddie Bender | To a chef, the sounds of lip smacking, slurping and swallowing are the highest form of flattery. But to someone with a certain type of misophonia, these same sounds can be torturous. Brain scans are now helping scientists start to understand why. People with misophonia experience strong discomfort, annoyance or disgust when they hear particular triggers. These can include chewing, swallowing, slurping, throat clearing, coughing and even audible breathing. Researchers previously thought this reaction might be caused by the brain overactively processing certain sounds. Now, however, a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience has linked some forms of misophonia to heightened “mirroring” behavior in the brain: those affected feel distress while their brains act as if they are mimicking the triggering mouth movements. “This is the first breakthrough in misophonia research in 25 years,” says psychologist Jennifer J. Brout, who directs the International Misophonia Research Network and was not involved in the new study. The research team, led by Newcastle University neuroscientist Sukhbinder Kumar, analyzed brain activity in people with and without misophonia when they were at rest and while they listened to sounds. These included misophonia triggers (such as chewing), generally unpleasant sounds (like a crying baby), and neutral sounds. The brain's auditory cortex, which processes sound, reacted similarly in subjects with and without misophonia. But in both the resting state and listening trials, people with misophonia showed stronger connections between the auditory cortex and brain regions that control movements of the face, mouth and throat. Kumar found this connection became most active in participants with misophonia when they heard triggers specific to the condition. © 2021 Scientific American,

Keyword: Hearing; Attention
Link ID: 27955 - Posted: 08.21.2021

by Peter Hess Children born to mothers who take antipsychotic medications during pregnancy do not have elevated odds of autism or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), nor are they more likely to be born preterm or underweight, according to a study released this past Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. Some women with schizophrenia, Tourette syndrome or bipolar disorder take antipsychotic drugs, such as aripiprazole, haloperidol or risperidone. Clinicians have long debated whether women should discontinue these medications during pregnancy out of concern for the drugs’ effects on the developing fetus. But children born to mothers who take antipsychotics during pregnancy and to those who do not take them have similar outcomes, the new work shows. “Our findings do not support a recommendation for women to discontinue their regular antipsychotic treatment during pregnancy,” says senior investigator Kenneth Man, research fellow at the University College London School of Pharmacy in the United Kingdom. Prescribing antipsychotics during pregnancy can help prevent potentially dangerous psychotic episodes and ensure that an expectant mother can take care of herself, says Mady Hornig, associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, who was not involved in the study. “We certainly don’t want to be cavalier about the use of any medication during pregnancy, but one also wants to balance out the implications of not treating.” © 2021 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 27954 - Posted: 08.21.2021

By Jillian Kramer Mice are at their best at night. But a new analysis suggests researchers often test the nocturnal creatures during the day—which could alter results and create variability across studies—if they record time-of-day information at all. Of the 200 papers examined in the new study, more than half either failed to report the timing of behavioral testing or did so ambiguously. Only 20 percent reported nighttime testing. The analysis was published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. West Virginia University neuroscientist Randy Nelson, the study's lead author, says this is likely a matter of human convenience. “It is easier to get students and techs to work during the day than [at] night,” Nelson says. But that convenience comes at a cost. “Time of day not only impacts the intensity of many variables, including locomotor activity, aggressive behavior, and plasma hormone levels,” but changes in those variables can only be observed during certain parts of the diurnal cycle, says University of Wyoming behavioral neuroscientist William D. Todd. This means that “failing to report time of day of data collection and tests makes interpretation of results extremely difficult,” adds Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center staff scientist Natalia Machado. Neither Todd nor Machado was involved in the new study. The study researchers say it is critical that scientists report the timing of their work and consider the fact that animals' behavioral and physiological responses can vary with the hour. As a first step, Nelson says, “taking care of time-of-day considerations seems like low-hanging fruit in terms of increasing behavioral neuroscience research reliability, reproducibility and rigor.” © 2021 Scientific American

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 27953 - Posted: 08.21.2021

By John Horgan In my 20s, I had a friend who was brilliant, charming, Ivy-educated and rich, heir to a family fortune. I’ll call him Gallagher. He could do anything he wanted. He experimented, dabbling in neuroscience, law, philosophy and other fields. But he was so critical, so picky, that he never settled on a career. Nothing was good enough for him. He never found love for the same reason. He also disparaged his friends’ choices, so much so that he alienated us. He ended up bitter and alone. At least that’s my guess. I haven’t spoken to Gallagher in decades. There is such a thing as being too picky, especially when it comes to things like work, love and nourishment (even the pickiest eater has to eat something). That’s the lesson I gleaned from Gallagher. But when it comes to answers to big mysteries, most of us aren’t picky enough. We settle on answers for bad reasons, for example, because our parents, priests or professors believe it. We think we need to believe something, but actually we don’t. We can, and should, decide that no answers are good enough. We should be agnostics. Some people confuse agnosticism (not knowing) with apathy (not caring). Take Francis Collins, a geneticist who directs the National Institutes of Health. He is a devout Christian, who believes that Jesus performed miracles, died for our sins and rose from the dead. In his 2006 bestseller The Language of God, Collins calls agnosticism a “cop-out.” When I interviewed him, I told him I am an agnostic and objected to “cop-out.” © 2021 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 27952 - Posted: 08.18.2021

Natalie Grover Cuttlefish have one of the largest brains among invertebrates and can remember what, where, and when specific things happened right up to their final days of life, according to new research. The cephalopods – which have three hearts, eight arms, blue-green blood, regenerating limbs, and the ability to camouflage and exert self-control – only live for roughly two years. As they get older, they show signs of declining muscle function and appetite, but it appears that no matter their age they can remember what they ate, where and when, and use this to guide their future feeding decisions, said the lead study author, Dr Alexandra Schnell from the University of Cambridge. This is in contrast to humans, who gradually lose the ability to remember experiences that occurred at a particular time and place with age – for instance, what you ate for lunch last Wednesday. This “episodic memory” and its deterioration is linked to the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped organ in the part of the brain near our ears. Cuttlefish, meanwhile, do not have a hippocampus, but a “vertical lobe” associated with learning and memory. In the study, Schnell and her colleagues conducted memory tests in 24 cuttlefish. Half were 10-12 months old (not quite adults) while the rest were 22-24 months old (the equivalent of a human in their 90s), according to the paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. In one experiment, both groups of cuttlefish were first trained to approach a specific location in their tank, marked with a flag, and learn that two different foods would be provided at different times. At one spot, the flag was waved and the less-preferred king prawn was provided every hour. Grass shrimp, which they like more, was provided at a different spot where another flag was waved – but only every three hours. This was done for about four weeks, until they learned that waiting for longer meant that they could get their preferred food. © 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 27951 - Posted: 08.18.2021

Ruth Williams In the days before a newborn mouse opens its peepers, nerve impulses that have been sweeping randomly across the retina since birth start flowing consistently in one direction, according to a paper published in Science today (July 22). This specific pattern has a critical purpose, the authors say, helping to establish the brain circuitry to be used later in motion detection. “I love this paper. It blew my mind,” says David Berson, who studies the visual system at Brown University and was not involved in the research. “What it implies is that evolution has built a visual system that can simulate the patterns of activity that it will see later when it’s fully mature and the eyes are open, and that [the simulated pattern] in turn shapes the development of the nervous system in a way that makes it better adapted to seeing those patterns. . . . That’s staggering.” The thread of this concept may be looped, but to unravel it, Berson says, it helps to think of the mammalian visual system, or really any neuronal circuitry, as being formed by a combination of evolution and life experiences—in short, nature and nurture. We might expect that life’s visual experiences, the nurture part, would begin when the eyes open. But, much like a human baby in the womb practices breathing and sucking without ever having experienced air or breastfeeding, the eyes of newborn mice appear to practice seeing before they can actually see. Motion detection is important enough to mouse survival that evolution has selected for gene variants that set up this prevision training, says Berson. © 1986–2021 The Scientist.

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 27950 - Posted: 08.18.2021

By Gina Kolata Everyone knows conventional wisdom about metabolism: People put pounds on year after year from their 20s onward because their metabolisms slow down, especially around middle age. Women have slower metabolisms than men. That’s why they have a harder time controlling their weight. Menopause only makes things worse, slowing women’s metabolisms even more. All wrong, according to a paper published Thursday in Science. Using data from nearly 6,500 people, ranging in age from 8 days to 95 years, researchers discovered that there are four distinct periods of life, as far as metabolism goes. They also found that there are no real differences between the metabolic rates of men and women after controlling for other factors. The findings from the research are likely to reshape the science of human physiology and could also have implications for some medical practices, like determining appropriate drug doses for children and older people. “It will be in textbooks,” predicted Leanne Redman, an energy balance physiologist at Pennington Biomedical Research Institute in Baton Rouge, La., who also called it “a pivotal paper.” Rozalyn Anderson, a professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who studies aging, wrote a perspective accompanying the paper. In an interview, she said she was “blown away” by its findings. “We will have to revise some of our ideas,” she added. But the findings’ implications for public health, diet and nutrition are limited for the moment because the study gives “a 30,000-foot view of energy metabolism,” said Dr. Samuel Klein, who was not involved in the study and is director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He added, “I don’t think you can make any new clinical statements” for an individual. When it comes to weight gain, he says, the issue is the same as it has always been: People are eating more calories than they are burning. Metabolic research is expensive, and so most published studies have had very few participants. But the new study’s principal investigator, Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, said that the project’s participating researchers agreed to share their data. There are more than 80 co-authors on the study. By combining efforts from a half dozen labs collected over 40 years, they had sufficient information to ask general questions about changes in metabolism over a lifetime. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 27949 - Posted: 08.14.2021

By Teresa Carr In the fall of 2016, sex therapist and researcher Leonore Tiefer shuttered the New View Campaign, an organization she had founded to combat what she refers to as “the medicalization of sex” — essentially, the pharmaceutical industry’s efforts to define variations in sexuality and sexual problems as medical issues requiring a drug fix. For 16 years, the group had fought against industry’s involvement in sex research, including its push for a drug to boost women’s sex drives. New View hosted conferences and its members penned papers and testified before the United States Food and Drug Administration. The campaign was prominently featured in an 80-minute documentary called Orgasm Inc, and promoted a clever (if off-pitch) video advising women to “throw that pink pill away,” a reference to the female-libido drug flibanserin (Addyi), which was seeking FDA approval at the time. New View counted some successes: The FDA didn’t approve an allegedly libido-boosting testosterone patch for women, on the grounds that the patch’s slim benefits didn’t outweigh its risks, and the FDA twice rejected flibanserin for the same reason. But in August 2015, the agency reversed itself and approved the so-called pink Viagra. “I felt we’d said everything we had to say,” said Tiefer of ending the campaign. Advocates predicted FDA approval would be sought for additional women’s libido drugs, but the group felt there was nothing they could do to stop it. “However many more drugs were going to come down the pike,” said Tiefer, “it was just going to be more of the same.”

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 27948 - Posted: 08.14.2021

By Virginia Hughes In the 1960s, the drug was given to women during childbirth to dampen their consciousness. In the 1990s, an illicit version made headlines as a “date rape” drug, linked to dozens of deaths and sexual assaults. And for the last two decades, a pharmaceutical-grade slurry of gamma-hydroxybutyrate, or GHB, has been tightly regulated as a treatment for narcolepsy, a disorder known for its sudden sleep attacks. Now, the Food and Drug Administration has approved the drug for a new use: treating “idiopathic hypersomnia,” a mysterious condition in which people sleep nine or more hours a day, yet never feel rested. Branded as Xywav, the medication is thought to work by giving some patients restorative sleep at night, allowing their brains to be more alert when they wake up. It is the first approved treatment for the illness. But some experts say the publicly available evidence to support the new approval is weak. And they worry about the dangers of the medication, which acts so swiftly that its label advises users to take it while in bed. Xywav and an older, high-salt version called Xyrem have a host of serious side effects, including breathing problems, anxiety, depression, sleepwalking, hallucinations and suicidal thoughts. GHB “has serious safety concerns, both in terms of its abuse liability and its addictive potential,” said Dr. Lewis S. Nelson, the director of medical toxicology at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. An estimated 40,000 people in the United States have been diagnosed with idiopathic hypersomnia, but Dr. Nelson said that many more people with daytime drowsiness might wind up with this diagnosis now that it has an F.D.A.-approved treatment. The disorder’s hallmark symptoms — sleep cravings, long naps and brain fog — overlap with many other conditions. The more people who take the drug, the more opportunity for abuse. “The potential for the scope of use to expand is very real,” Dr. Nelson said. “So that is concerning to me.” © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 27947 - Posted: 08.14.2021

By Katherine Ellison ADHD — the most common psychiatric disorder of childhood —  lasts longer for more people than has been widely assumed, according to new research. “Only 10 percent of people really appear to grow out of ADHD,” says the lead author, psychologist Margaret Sibley, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “Ninety percent still struggle with at least mild symptoms as adults — even if they have periods when they are symptom free.” The study challenges a widely persistent perception of a time-limited condition occurring mostly in childhood. Indeed, one of the earliest names for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder was “a hyperkinetic disease of infancy,” while its most common poster child has long been a young, White, disruptive male. Previous research has suggested the condition essentially vanishes in about half of those who receive diagnoses. But in recent years, increasing numbers of women, people of color and especially adults have been seeking help in managing the hallmark symptoms of distraction, forgetfulness and impulsivity. By the most recent estimates, 9.6 percent of children ages 3 to 17 have been diagnosed with ADHD. Yet researchers report that only 4.4 percent of young adults ages 18 to 44 have the disorder, suggesting that if the new estimates are valid, there may be some catching up to do. Sibley’s paper paints a picture of an on-again, off-again condition, with symptoms fluctuating depending on life circumstances. © 1996-2021 The Washington Post

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 27946 - Posted: 08.14.2021