By Andrew Stern CHICAGO (Reuters) - Stroke victims forced to use a weakened or partially paralyzed arm by having their working arm or hand restrained in a sling or mitt recover more quickly, researchers said on Tuesday. In a study of 222 patients, those who underwent "constraint-induced" therapy within three to nine months of their strokes were more capable of performing an array of tasks in follow-up tests than those who were not forced to use their affected arm. Participants in the study were instructed to wear the restraint -- either a sling or a cumbersome mitt -- during waking hours for two weeks. They also underwent physical therapy for several hours on weekdays, during which they wore the restraint. Most had suffered an ischemic stroke, the most common type where blood flow is temporarily blocked to part of the brain. In previous studies, images taken of patients' brains undergoing the constraint therapy showed it stimulated areas that control the stroke-affected arm. The constrained patients scored much higher on physical tests up to a year later when compared with stroke patients who underwent customary rehabilitation. Usually patients undergo some physical therapy, which can be followed by drug treatment and instructions to perform exercises. © 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 9556 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By R. Aidan Martin and Anne Martin It’s twenty past seven on a winter morning. Our research vessel drifts off Seal Island, South Africa. A lone Cape fur seal pup porpoises through the gently rolling swells toward the island. Suddenly, a ton of white shark launches from the water like a Polaris missile, the little seal clamped between its teeth. Framed against purple clouds washed with the orange light of breaking dawn, the shark clears the surface by an astonishing six feet. It hangs, silhouetted in the chill air for what seems an impossibly long time before it falls back into the sea, splashing thunderous spray beneath a gathering mob of seabirds. We and our crew of five student volunteers watch breathlessly as the drama unfolds. Now mortally wounded and lying on its side at the surface, the seal raises its head and weakly wags its left foreflipper. The shark, an eleven-and-a-half-foot male we call Sneaky, circles back unhurriedly and seizes the hapless pup again. He carries it underwater, shaking his head violently from side to side, an action that maximizes the cutting efficiency of his saw-edged teeth. An ominous blush stains the water and the oily, coppery smell of the wounded seal prickles our nostrils. The seal carcass floats to the surface while gulls and other seabirds compete vigorously for its entrails, squawking avian obscenities at one another. Sneaky returns to his meal, and another white shark rises from below—a thirteen-foot male we call Couz. For white sharks (also known as great whites), socializing trumps dining. Sneaky turns his attention to Couz. Is he friend or foe? Of higher or lower rank? © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2006

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 9555 - Posted: 06.24.2010

In the largest, most comprehensive study of its kind to date, researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) showed clinical improvements out to one year when stroke survivors who had lost function in one arm were given a unique, two-week rehabilitation regimen. Steven Wolf, Ph.D., Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at Emory University, led a multi-center team that tested the effects of constraint-induced movement therapy (CIMT) in 222 patients. The study, which is featured in the November 1, 2006 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association,* was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). “This study provides the strongest evidence to date that constraint induced movement therapy can help stroke patients regain lost arm function,” said NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D. “This is welcome news for stroke patients and those who care about them.” Each year, more than 700,000 Americans are hospitalized for stroke, an interruption of blood flow in the brain. Up to 85 percent of survivors have weakness on one side of their body. CIMT involves training the weakened hand and arm through repetitive exercises, while restraining the unaffected hand and arm with a mitt like a boxing glove. The theory behind the hand restraint is that it forces the wearer to use the affected hand and arm.

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 9554 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Amy Bowles Reyer, Ph.D. Try to imagine that your loved one has become romantically interested in someone else. And then try to envision which scenario would bother you more: (a) learning that your partner has fallen in love with that person or (b) discovering that your partner has had meaningless sex with that person. Obviously, both situations are painful to think about, but chances are one of these bothers you more than the other. And just as likely, your gender has a lot to do with which one causes you the most anguish. Both men and women experience jealousy and according to David Buss, Ph.D., professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Texas, this is both healthy and necessary to the fitness of a faithful relationship. In The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is As Necessary As Love and Sex," Buss describes his survey of women and men in the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Korea and Zimbabwe. The majority of women interviewed were troubled more about a partner's emotional infidelity, while the men were most upset about sexual transgressions. The differing grounds for jealousy between men and women reveal highly adaptive responses for the human species. Since fertilization takes place inside the female body, it is difficult to determine paternity with any real certainty. The ancestral man was therefore unable to know whether he was, in fact, the real father of his children. © 2006 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9553 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Linda Geddes Structural abnormalities in a baby’s brainstem may lie behind about half the cases of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Hannah Kinney and David Paterson at the Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, US, examined the brains of 31 infants who had died of SIDS – also known as cot-death – and compared them to the brains of 10 infants who died of other causes. They found abnormalities in the medulla – the part of the brainstem which regulates breathing, blood pressure, body heat and arousal. SIDS babies had more of the neurons that release the brain chemical serotonin, but fewer receptors for serotonin. Kinney has previously recorded low numbers of serotonin receptors in around a half of SIDS babies. And studies in mice have shown that “pacemaker” cells in the medulla – which prompt gasping and recovery – do not fire when serotonin is taken away (see Infant death link to low serotonin). “It might be that a defect in the medulla’s serotonin system is inhibiting a baby’s ability to gasp,” says Paterson. Only further tests will establish whether pacemaker cells are simply not responding to serotonin, or whether the ability of neurons to release it is turned off, he says. The study also found fewer serotonin receptors in male SIDS cases compared with females, which could help explain why SIDS occurs twice as often in male as female babies. No such difference was found in the number of serotonin-releasing neurons, however. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 9552 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Sandra G. Boodman The programs have catchy names like "Food, Mood and Attitude" and "Full of Ourselves" as well as an ambitious goal: to prevent adolescent eating disorders, which tend to be chronic, difficult to treat and sometimes fatal. But do they work? In the case of one such program -- "Student Bodies," developed by researchers at Stanford University -- a recently published study suggests that the answer is yes. Stanford researchers, who followed 480 female California college students for up to two years, report that the eight-week Internet-based program reduced the development of eating disorders in women at high risk. "This study shows that innovative intervention can work," said Thomas Insel, director of the National Insitute of Mental Health, which funded the study; its findings appeared in the August issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry. Prevention programs for eating disorders have proliferated in the past decade, in part because of the high cost and low success rate of treatment programs. The disorders include a constellation of problems, including anorexia, a pathological fear of gaining weight marked by self-starvation. Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric illness: About 10 percent of patients hospitalized for treatment ultimately die of the disorder. © 2006 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 9551 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By MICHAEL MASON How depressing, how utterly unjust, to be the one in your social circle who is aging least gracefully. In a laboratory at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, Matthias is learning about time’s caprice the hard way. At 28, getting on for a rhesus monkey, Matthias is losing his hair, lugging a paunch and getting a face full of wrinkles. Yet in the cage next to his, gleefully hooting at strangers, one of Matthias’s lab mates, Rudy, is the picture of monkey vitality, although he is slightly older. Thin and feisty, Rudy stops grooming his smooth coat just long enough to pirouette toward a proffered piece of fruit. Tempted with the same treat, Matthias rises wearily and extends a frail hand. “You can really see the difference,” said Dr. Ricki Colman, an associate scientist at the center who cares for the animals. What a visitor cannot see may be even more interesting. As a result of a simple lifestyle intervention, Rudy and primates like him seem poised to live very long, very vital lives. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Obesity
Link ID: 9550 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS WADE Who doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong? Yet that essential knowledge, generally assumed to come from parental teaching or religious or legal instruction, could turn out to have a quite different origin. Primatologists like Frans de Waal have long argued that the roots of human morality are evident in social animals like apes and monkeys. The animals’ feelings of empathy and expectations of reciprocity are essential behaviors for mammalian group living and can be regarded as a counterpart of human morality. Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard biologist, has built on this idea to propose that people are born with a moral grammar wired into their neural circuits by evolution. In a new book, “Moral Minds” (HarperCollins 2006), he argues that the grammar generates instant moral judgments which, in part because of the quick decisions that must be made in life-or-death situations, are inaccessible to the conscious mind. People are generally unaware of this process because the mind is adept at coming up with plausible rationalizations for why it arrived at a decision generated subconsciously. Dr. Hauser presents his argument as a hypothesis to be proved, not as an established fact. But it is an idea that he roots in solid ground, including his own and others’ work with primates and in empirical results derived by moral philosophers. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Emotions
Link ID: 9549 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Emily Singer New research is fundamentally changing our understanding of both addiction and recovery. Dozens of new alcoholism medications are in preclinical or clinical testing; many of them target novel pathways, such as the exaggerated stress response that both humans and animals develop under the influence of alcohol addiction, an amped up version of the typical release of adrenaline and other chemicals when we perceive a threat. But neither new treatments nor existing drugs are making their way to enough patients, says Mark Willenbring, director of the Division of Treatment and Recovery Research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. An antirelapse drug called naltrexone, for example, was approved in the 1990s but is prescribed for only about four percent of those with alcohol dependence. It blocks the brain's reward mechanisms, which are often triggered by drinking. Willenbring is promoting a new system, in which patients are treated by their primary-care doctors in office visits. He says this model will appeal to people who either don't want or don't need lengthy counseling or inpatient programs. Willenbring spoke with Technology Review about what works in treating alcohol addiction. TR: What's the biggest problem with the treatments for alcohol dependence available today? MW: The number-one problem is that so few people with alcohol dependence actually get treatment. Over the lifetime, it's probably fewer than 10 percent.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 9548 - Posted: 10.31.2006

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Depression can lead to brittle bones, Israeli scientists found in a new study released on Monday that also suggested anti-depressant drugs could be used to treat osteoporosis. The scientists, at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, said mice that were given drugs to induce behavior similar to human depression suffered from a loss of mass in their bones, mainly their hips and vertebrae. After being given anti-depressants, the bone density of the mice increased, along with their level of activity and social interaction, the scientists said. "The new findings ... point for the first time to depression as an important element in causing bone mass loss and osteoporosis," Hebrew University professor Raz Yirmiya, who took part in the study, said in a statement. Depression activates the "sympathetic nervous system," which responds to impending danger or stress, causing the release of a chemical compound called noradrenaline that harms bone-building cells, the study showed. Anti-depressant drugs block noradrenaline and reverse its negative effects, according to the findings, which will be published this week in the American journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). © 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 9547 - Posted: 06.24.2010

EVANSTON, Ill. -- A new study that takes a rare look at the physiological, social and emotional dynamics of day-to-day experiences in real-life settings shows that when older adults go to bed lonely, sad or overwhelmed, they have elevated levels of cortisol shortly after waking the next morning. Elevated levels of cortisol -- a stress hormone linked to depression, obesity and other health problems when chronic -- actually cue the body on a day-to-day basis that it is time to rev up to deal with loneliness and other negative experiences, according to Northwestern University's Emma K. Adam, the lead investigator of the study. The study, "Day-to-day experience-cortisol dynamics," will be published online the week of Oct. 30 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). "You've gone to bed with loneliness, sadness, feelings of being overwhelmed, then along comes a boost of hormones in the morning to give you the energy you need to meet the demands of the day," said Adam, assistant professor of education and social policy and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. The morning cortisol boost could help adults who went to bed with troubled or overwhelming feelings go out in the world the next day and have the types of positive social experiences that help regulate hormone levels, she said.

Keyword: Stress; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 9546 - Posted: 10.31.2006

Amanda Leigh Haag Elephants possess the highly cerebral ability to recognize their own jumbo reflections in mirrors, scientists have found. Traditionally, only an elite group of animals including humans, chimpanzees and orangutans have been proved to be capable of self-recognition in a mirror. A lone study several years ago also reported that dolphins could recognize their own gaze in a glass1. Researchers have suspected that elephants might possess the capacity for self-recognition and self-awareness because of their highly developed social behaviour. A study reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science documents the evidence for three clever elephants2. "All three showed self-directed behavior in front of the mirror, and thus we were convinced that all three recognized that the mirror image was themselves," says Joshua Plotnik, a doctoral student from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and the lead author on the paper. To study the elephants' behavior, the researchers placed an "elephant-proof, jumbo-sized" mirror, 2.5 metres high by 2.5 metres wide, inside the enclosure of three female Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. The team used a still camera on a roof to observe the animals over a period of five months. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Intelligence
Link ID: 9545 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A gene mutation which affects brain development increases the risk of autism, scientists have suggested. US researchers looked at 1,200 children with the condition. Mutations were more common in children with autism and having the altered gene increased the risk of autism by more than double. Experts said the findings, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were interesting, but needed to be reproduced in other studies. Autism is a developmental disability that affects the way a person communicates and interacts with other people. The MET gene is known to be involved in brain development, regulation of the immune system, and repair of the gastrointestinal system. All of these parts of the body can be affected in children with autism. The researchers, from the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development, found that the mutation did not stop the gene working, but made it less active. The mutation was common in children with autism, and appeared more frequently in families that had more than one child with autism. Overall, this mutation raised the risk of autism by 2.27 times. Writing in PNAS, the researchers said: "Although yet to be identified environmental factors likely contribute to the development of autism, heritability studies suggest that the impact of those factors must be imposed upon individuals genetically predisposed to the disorder. Given the MET gene's known involvement in the development of the higher brain regions, the researchers say their findings could provide leads in pursuing the brain abnormalities that cause autism. (C)BBC

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 9544 - Posted: 10.30.2006

A genetic link to the symptoms of schizophrenia has been found, according to researchers. An Edinburgh University team found people carrying a variant of a gene called neuregulin had a higher chance of developing psychotic symptoms. The findings, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, could possibly point to new treatments. The study followed 200 young people, all at a high risk of developing schizophrenia, for 10 years. Schizophrenia is known to run in families, and all of the volunteers had two or more relatives with the condition. And being aged between 16 and 25 at the start of the study, they were on the cusp of the period when symptoms were most likely to develop. To investigate why some people go on to develop the condition and why others do not, the researchers carried out interviews, brain scans, psychological tests and genetic analysis. They discovered participants who carried a variation of the neuregulin gene were much more likely to develop psychotic symptoms associated with schizophrenia, such as paranoia or hearing voices, than those without the gene variant. Brain scans also revealed those carrying the variant gene were more likely to show abnormal brain activity in the frontal and temporal regions - areas often associated with schizophrenia. Other studies have found the gene variant is involved with switching on and off a gene associated with brain development. Dr Jeremy Hall, lead researcher on the paper, based at the division of psychiatry, Edinburgh University, said: "These major mental illnesses have really been for a very long time a big black box in terms of what is causing them - it is not that long ago that people thought you got schizophrenia because you had a bad mother. And treatments have not advanced a lot over the last 50 years. (C)BBC

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 9543 - Posted: 10.30.2006

DALLAS –- A test using cultured cells provides an effective way to screen drugs against Huntington's disease and shows that two compounds – memantine and riluzole – are most effective at keeping cells alive under conditions that mimic the disorder, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers report. "These drugs have been tested in a variety of Huntington's disease models and some HD human trials and results are very difficult to interpret," said Dr. Ilya Bezprozvanny, associate professor of physiology and senior author of the study, available online and published in today's issue of Neuroscience Letters. "For some of these drugs conflicting results were obtained by different research groups, but it is impossible to figure out where the differences came from because studies were not conducted in parallel. "We systematically and quantititatively tested the clinically relevant drugs side-by-side in the same HD model. That has never been done before," said Dr. Bezprozvanny. Huntington's disease is a fatal genetic disorder, manifesting in adulthood, in which certain brain cells die. The disease results in uncontrolled movements, emotional disturbance and loss of mental ability. The offspring of a person with Huntington's have a 50 percent chance of inheriting it. More than 250,000 people in the United States have the disorder or are at risk for it. There is no cure, but several drugs are used or are being tested to relieve symptoms or slow Huntington's progression.

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 9542 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times Shikari is listening -- listening to tones being generated by a computer. Her small, rounded ears perk up as each tone is sounded. When the 12-year-old, 550-pound polar bear hears a tone, she has been trained to press her nose on a pad. Through the bars, researcher JoAnne Simerson gives her a tasty, brownish morsel called "omnivore chow." It's all for science -- and for oil and gas drilling. Shikari and her twin sister, Chinook, are part of the first study of polar bear hearing. The project began in September at San Diego Zoo, in cooperation with SeaWorld. With the oil and gas industries looking to explore and expand drilling activity in Alaska, researchers want to discover what the noise from such exploration would do to polar bears, particularly females who are pregnant or nursing cubs. Funding for the study, up to $60,000, comes from BP, formerly known as British Petroleum. The Louisiana conservation group Polar Bears International acted as middleman for the grant. Although the hearing study is being underwritten by the oil industry, researchers say they are not taking sides in the hot issue of expanding oil drilling in Alaska. The findings will be printed in a scientific journal late next year. ©2006 San Francisco Chronicle

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 9541 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Susan Milius Gary Gerald studies animal movement, so when two female brown snakes in the lab had babies, he wanted to see them in motion. He watched them crawling on a solid surface, then moved the youngsters to water in a modified gutter. But the system didn't work as planned for the newborn snakes. "I would pick the little guys up and drop them right in the water, and right when I dropped them, they flipped upside down. They stayed motionless. Their bodies were rigid so if you touched one part, they'd spin like if you touch a stick floating on the water," says Gerald. He concluded that this was a new example of an animal feigning death. Baby brown snakes (Storeria dekayi) are the latest addition to the long list of animals that practice some form of the strategy scientists call extreme immobility. Gerald, a physiological ecologist at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, described his findings in August at the annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society. The list of animals that play possum includes not only the Virginia opossum, of course, but also some 21 snake species and plenty of other creatures as different as bison on the prairies and brittle stars in the oceans. Many of these animals freeze when a predator appears, and standard wisdom maintains that predators lose interest in prey that doesn't move. Yet some biologists now question that truism and are looking for a fuller explanation for the roles that feigned death might play in animal interactions. ©2006 Science Service.

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 9540 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Susan Milius Scientists have officially unveiled the DNA code of the western honeybee, the first genome to be sequenced for an animal with ultrastratified societies. The bees are among the select species in which a few individuals reproduce while others in the colony raise the young and do the chores. The honeybee genome, the whole sequence of its DNA building blocks, shows some patterns that fit old ideas of social living plus some patterns that demand new thinking, reports the consortium of bee-genome researchers. The scientists report the genome's highlights in the Oct. 26 Nature. More than 40 other analyses also appeared in journals including Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Genome Research. "The sequencing of the honeybee genome is unquestionably a historic event," comments Ben Oldroyd, a bee specialist at the University of Sydney in Australia. The honeybee's genome is the fifth to be sequenced among insects, says Gene Robinson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a founding member of the bee consortium. Geneticists first did the lab fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, and have since published reports on another fruit fly species, the malaria mosquito, and the silkworm. ©2006 Science Service.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 9539 - Posted: 06.24.2010

DAVIS—It’s all about “the birds and the bees.” And now, “the silkworm moths and the fruit flies.” A chemical ecologist and a genetics researcher at the University of California, Davis, have joined forces to trick fruit flies into thinking that silkworm moths are potential mates. Groundbreaking research in the labs of chemical ecologist Walter Leal and genetics researcher Deborah Kimbrell shows that genetically engineered fruit flies responded to the silkworm moth scent of a female. The practical implications of the findings could be widespread. Methods that can attract or repel insects have important applications for agricultural pests and medical entomology. The research could lead to designing better chemicals to attract insects and designing better chemicals to suppress insect communication. That is because insects communicate or smell through their antennae. Many insect species, including silkworm moths, release sex pheromones or chemical signals to attract a mate. “Silkworm moths utilize smell more strongly than any other senses,” said Leal, professor and chair of the Department of Entomology. “Moths keep on the trail of a scent until they find a female.” “We got a very clear response,” he said. “Our electrophysiological recordings and direct stimulation testing showed that the transgenic fruit flies definitely responded to the moth pheromone.” © 2006, The Regents of the University of California.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 9538 - Posted: 06.24.2010

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—What makes a bee a he or a she? Three years ago, scientists pinpointed a gene called csd that determines gender in honey bees, and now a research team led by University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Jianzhi "George" Zhang has unraveled details of how the gene evolved. The new insights could prove useful in designing strategies for breeding honey bees, which are major pollinators of economically important crops—and notoriously tricky to breed. The findings of Zhang and collaborators appear in a special issue of Genome Research devoted to the biology of the honey bee. The issue will be published online and in print Oct. 26, coinciding with the publication of the honey bee genome sequence in the journal Nature. Scientists have long known that in bees—as well as wasps, ants, ticks, mites and some 20 percent of all animals—unfertilized eggs develop into males, while females typically result from fertilized eggs. But that's not the whole story, and the discovery in 2003 of csd (the complementary sex determination gene) helped fill in the blanks. The gene has many versions, or alleles. Males inherit a single copy of the gene; bees that inherit two copies, each a different version, become female. Bees that have the misfortune of inheriting two identical copies of csd develop into sterile males but are quickly eaten at the larval stage by female worker bees. © 2005 The Regents of the University of Michigan

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9537 - Posted: 06.24.2010