Couples with fertility problems are three times more likely to have a child with serious conditions like autism and cerebral palsy, research suggests. The extra risk is likely to be caused by health problems that make it difficult for these couples to conceive in the first place, scientists believe. Fertility treatments, such as IVF, may contribute too, an American Society for Reproductive Medicine meeting heard. But the experts stressed the overall risk was still relatively low. They said couples should be counselled about the risks and encouraged to improve their health before undergoing fertility treatment. Professor Mary Croughan, who led the University of California research on 4,000 women and their children aged up to six years, explained those with fertility problems were also more likely to have other health problems, such as heart disease and diabetes, and were more at risk of pregnancy and labour complications. She said: "What has caused them to be unable to conceive goes on to cause problems. It is as if a brick wall has stopped you becoming pregnant. Treatment allows you to climb over the wall, but it is still there and it goes on to cause problems." Her team found the risk of five conditions - autism, mental retardation, cerebral palsy, seizures and cancer - was 2.7 times higher among the children born to 2,000 women who experienced fertility problems than among those born to the 2,000 women who did not have difficult conceiving. For autism alone, the risk was four times higher. Moderate developmental problems such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, learning disabilities or serious sight or hearing disorders were also 40% more common in the children born to the couples who struggled to start a family.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 9536 - Posted: 10.26.2006

COLUMBUS , Ohio – In the long run, a drink or two a day may be good for the brain. Researchers found that moderate amounts of alcohol – amounts equivalent to a couple of drinks a day for a human – improved the memories of laboratory rats. Such a finding may have implications for serious neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, said Matthew During, the study's senior author and a professor of molecular virology, immunology and cancer genetics at Ohio State University . “There is some evidence suggesting that mild to moderate alcohol consumption can protect against diseases like Alzheimer's in humans,” said During. “But it's not apparent how this happens.” He and his colleague, Margaret Kalev-Zylinska, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, uncovered a neuronal mechanism that may help explain the link between alcohol and improved memory. “We saw a noticeable change on the surface of certain neurons in rats that were given alcohol,” During said. “This change may have something to do with the positive effects of alcohol on memory.” The researchers presented their findings at the annual Society for Neuroscience conference in Atlanta.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 9535 - Posted: 06.24.2010

CLEVELAND -- Having a child with bottled up emotions isn't a good thing. Psychologists from Case Western Reserve University have found that the range of emotions that children use in play can be used as an indicator of how emotionally charged their memories will be. Emotions--whether positive or negative--in play offer important information to people working with children about how able they will be at expressing the emotional side of their memories. Accessing emotional memories is important for adjusting to traumas experienced. Many children are unable to start talking about their emotions or memories with someone new, but watching children play can help child therapists and others working with children gauge how open children might be to talking about the emotions associated with past memories, according to Sandra Russ, Case professor of psychology. She has been studying the emotional side of play and how play benefits children for more than 20 years. Russ, with Ethan D. Schafer, discusses this discovery in the Creativity Research Journal article, "Affect in Fantasy Play, Emotion in Memories, and Divergent Thinking." In the past, this link between emotions in play therapy and emotions in memories was observed but had not been formally studied in children.

Keyword: Emotions; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 9534 - Posted: 10.26.2006

Combining data from years of laboratory work with the power of bioinformatics, researchers have created a map that helps explain how the brain generates the assortment of specialized proteins it needs to process information. The map, created by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator Robert B. Darnell and colleagues at The Rockefeller University, describes the rules that govern the activity of a protein called Nova. By regulating a process called alternative splicing, Nova helps brain cells produce a set of proteins involved in communication at synapses, or the junctions between neurons. The new study, published October 25, 2006, in an advance online publication of the journal Nature, furthers understanding of a process that, when not properly regulated, can lead to cancer, neurologic diseases, or other ailments. Limited to the same set of genes that encode the instructions for all cells in the body, brain cells rely heavily on alternative splicing to generate the protein diversity they need to function properly. The process, at work in all cells in organisms ranging from fruit flies to humans, chooses bits and pieces of an RNA copy of a gene, piecing segments together to form a blueprint for the precise protein that is needed. Using alternative splicing to assemble different patterns, a single gene can give rise to multiple — sometimes thousands — of proteins. Scientific interest in alternative splicing has grown in recent years, in part because the phenomenon helps explain how humans can be so complex despite having a genome that is surprisingly similar in size to that of simpler organisms, like flies and worms. © 2006 Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 9533 - Posted: 06.24.2010

An hour from now, will you remember reading this? It all depends on proteins in your brain called NMDA receptors, which allow your neurons to communicate with each other. Jon W. Johnson, University of Pittsburgh associate professor of neuroscience, and former Pitt graduate student Anqi Qian, now of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, have discovered how different types of NMDA (N-methyl-d-aspartate) receptors perform varied functions. Their findings are published in the current issue of the Journal of Neuroscience in a paper titled "Permeant Ion Effects on External Mg2+ Block of NR1/2D NMDA Receptors." Communication between cells in the brain depends on specialized molecular receptors that conduct charged particles, or ions, between the outside and inside of cells. Ions also modify how receptors work. In this paper, Johnson and Qian studied the effects of ions on receptors and found them to vary between different types of receptor molecules. They used computer modeling to show that variation in how ions interact with receptors combined with variation in the structure of receptors is responsible for specialization of receptor function. "This research helps explain how evolution accomplished a critical goal: producing receptor proteins with finely tuned properties that help optimize brain function," said Johnson.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 9532 - Posted: 10.25.2006

By Faye Flam, Inquirer Staff Writer When scientists pooled dozens of studies of sex differences last year, they found that while we're quite different on the playground and somewhat different in the bedroom, we're surprisingly similar in the classroom and the boardroom. Those results showed men, on average, can throw a baseball farther, are more open to one-night stands, and masturbate more often, says University of Wisconsin psychologist Janet Hyde, who led the project. She says the notion that women are more emotional and men more logical and mathematical is mostly stereotype. And now a new study released in Friday's issue of the journal Science shows how stereotypes can be self-reinforcing. Psychologists from the University of British Columbia found that the mere suggestion of genetic inferiority, true or not, can make you perform worse on tests. The researchers gave several hundred women a math test made up of SAT and GRE-type problems. They also included a fake verbal test in which they embedded two different messages. Half the subjects got the message that men outperform women by 5 points because there are genes on the Y chromosome that facilitate math. The other half read that men perform better because teachers favor boys in math classes. Both messages were fabrications, says Steven Heine, co-author of the study. When they tallied the scores, the women who got the genetic message scored significantly worse than the ones who got the environment message.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9531 - Posted: 10.25.2006

Sometimes hunting down the best mate can backfire. The theory of sexual selection posits that choosy females seek out mates with elaborate antlers or splashy plumage, for example, because these traits might signify good genes that will lead to hearty offspring. But researchers report that top-breeding fruit flies of both sexes produced worse-breeding descendents, primarily because the mating prowess of each parent did not translate to offspring of the opposite sex. The result supports the idea that some genes can be good for one gender but bad for the other, which may limit the power of sexual selection. In theory, sexual selection should weed out the less useful genes over time, but animals are nonetheless extremely variable in their genes, notes evolutionary geneticist Adam Chippindale of Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. One reason could be that the same genes are beneficial to one sex but harmful to the other, resulting in a genetic tug-of-war. If true, males or females that have high "fitness" (generate lots of offspring) compared with their counterparts would produce relatively unfit offspring of the other sex. "There could be kind of a dark side to 'good' genes," Chippindale says. Despite some experimental signs of such fitness reversals, researchers had not tested the effect thoroughly in the lab. To identify a reversal, Chippindale and his colleague Alison Pischedda raised multiple lines of male and female Drosophila melanogaster, some of high fitness and others of low fitness. The researchers then mated the flies in all possible combinations and measured their progeny’s reproductive success. As predicted, flies that found fit mates got a bum deal: Sons of fit mothers were 11 percent less fit than those of unfit moms, and daughters of fit dads were 7 percent less fit than their counterparts. © 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 9530 - Posted: 06.24.2010

We all know pollution can affect our health, but now scientists say the toxins we're exposed to could also affect our children and even our grandchildren. Washington State University researchers found that exposing pregnant rats to certain pesticides caused a big increase in numerous diseases for at least the next four generations. Michael Skinner and his colleagues first reported in 2005 that giving high doses of vinclozolin to pregnant rats caused male infertility that was passed down to subsequent generations. But that study only looked at effects in relatively young offspring. But as they report in two new papers in the journal Endocrinology, when Skinner's team followed the generations of rats for much longer, they saw plenty of other effects, including breast tumors, prostate disease, kidney disease, immune abnormalities and premature aging. All of these changes took place without any changes in the rats' DNA code. Chemical tags can attach to DNA and act like "stop signs" to turn genes off. Instead, these rapid and dramatic changes are "epigenetic"-- the result of chemical stop signs turning certain genes on or off due to environmental factors. "This is one of the first transgenerational effects of an environmental toxicant identified," Skinner wrote, "and the first indication that epigenetic mechanisms can permanently alter the germ-line and genetic traits of all subsequent generations and progeny of an exposed individual." © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 9529 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Lindsey Tanner, Associated Press — New research on vegetables and aging gives mothers another reason to say "I told you so." It found that eating vegetables appears to help keep the brain young and may slow the mental decline sometimes associated with growing old. On measures of mental sharpness, older people who ate more than two servings of vegetables daily appeared about five years younger at the end of the six-year study than those who ate few or no vegetables. The research in almost 2,000 Chicago-area men and women doesn't prove that vegetables reduce mental decline, but it adds to mounting evidence pointing in that direction. The findings also echo previous research in women only. Green leafy vegetables including spinach, kale and collards appeared to be the most beneficial. The researchers said that may be because they contain healthy amounts of vitamin E, an antioxidant that is believed to help fight chemicals produced by the body that can damage cells. Vegetables generally contain more vitamin E than fruits, which were not linked with slowed mental decline in the study. Vegetables also are often eaten with healthy fats such as salad oils, which help the body absorb vitamin E and other antioxidants, said lead author Martha Clare Morris, a researcher at the Rush Institute for Healthy Aging at Chicago's Rush University Medical Center. © 2006 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 9528 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Molecules which could help treat cancer, heart disease and other serious conditions have been discovered by Aberdeen University researchers. Scientists have identified the molecule found in the eye which prevents blood vessels from forming in the cornea. They said understanding what inhibits the growth of blood vessels could help with the development of new drugs. It could also lead to new therapies for treating eye diseases and different types of eye injuries. The research was carried out by the Aberdeen team and colleagues at the Medical College of Georgia and the University of Kentucky in the US. Dr Martin Collinson, senior lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, said the molecule was an "amazing finding". He added: "The cornea is widely used by scientists who hope to study how blood vessels grow or how to inhibit the growth of new blood vessels. This knowledge will help to treat diseases like cancer, heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, stroke and eye disorders like macular degeneration. " (C)BBC

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 9527 - Posted: 10.24.2006

Before you request a paternity test, spend a few minutes looking at your child’s eye color. It may just give you the answer you’re looking for. According to Bruno Laeng and colleagues, from the University of Tromso, Norway, the human eye color reflects a simple, predictable and reliable genetic pattern of inheritance. Their studies1, published in the Springer journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, show that blue-eyed men find blue-eyed women more attractive than brown-eyed women. According to the researchers, it is because there could be an unconscious male adaptation for the detection of paternity, based on eye color. The laws of genetics state that eye color is inherited as follows: 1. If both parents have blue eyes, the children will have blue eyes. 2. If both parents have brown eyes, a quarter of the children will have blue eyes, and three quarters will have brown eyes. 3. The brown eye form of the eye color gene (or allele) is dominant, whereas the blue eye allele is recessive. It then follows that if a child born to two blue-eyed parents does not have blue eyes, then the blue-eyed father is not the biological father. It is therefore reasonable to expect that a man would be more attracted towards a woman displaying a trait that increases his paternal confidence, and the likelihood that he could uncover his partner’s sexual infidelity. Eighty-eight male and female students were asked to rate facial attractiveness of models on a computer. The pictures were close-ups of young adult faces, unfamiliar to the participants. The eye color of each model was manipulated, so that for each model’s face two versions were shown, one with the natural eye color (blue/brown) and another with the other color (brown/blue). The participants’ own eye color was noted.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 9526 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By DENISE GRADY When he learned in 1995 that he had Alzheimer’s disease, William Utermohlen, an American artist in London, responded in characteristic fashion. “From that moment on, he began to try to understand it by painting himself,” said his wife, Patricia Utermohlen, a professor of art history. Mr. Utermohlen’s self-portraits are being exhibited through Friday at the New York Academy of Medicine in Manhattan, by the Alzheimer’s Association. The paintings starkly reveal the artist’s descent into dementia, as his world began to tilt, perspectives flattened and details melted away. His wife and his doctors said he seemed aware at times that technical flaws had crept into his work, but he could not figure out how to correct them. “The spatial sense kept slipping, and I think he knew,” Professor Utermohlen said. A psychoanalyst wrote that the paintings depicted sadness, anxiety, resignation and feelings of feebleness and shame. Dr. Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies artistic creativity in people with brain diseases, said some patients could still produce powerful work. “Alzheimer’s affects the right parietal lobe in particular, which is important for visualizing something internally and then putting it onto a canvas,” Dr. Miller said. “The art becomes more abstract, the images are blurrier and vague, more surrealistic. Sometimes there’s use of beautiful, subtle color.” Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 9525 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By CLAUDIA WALLIS Strange things happen when you apply the statistical methods of economics to medical science. You might say you get dismal science, but that's a bit glib. You certainly get some strange claims — like the contention of three economists that autism may be caused by watching too much television at a tender age. It gets stranger still when you look at the data upon which this argument is based. The as yet unpublished Cornell University study, which will be presented Friday at a health economics conference in Cambridge, Mass., is constructed from an analysis of reported autism cases, cable TV subscription data and weather reports. Yes, weather reports. And yet, it all makes some kind of sense in the realm of statistics. And it makes sense to author Gregg Easterbrook, who stirred the blogosphere this week with an article about the study on Slate, provocatively (and perhaps irresponsibly) titled "TV Really Might Cause Autism." The alarming rise in autism rates in the U.S. and some other developed nations is one of the most anguishing mysteries of modern medicine — and the source of much desperate speculation by parents. In 1970, its incidence was thought to be just 1 in 2,500; today about 1 in 170 kids born in the U.S. fall somewhere on the autism spectrum (which includes Asperger's Syndrome), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some of the spike can be reasonably attributed to a new, broader definition of the disorder, better detection, mandatory reporting by schools and greater awareness of autism among doctors, parents and educators. Still, there's a nagging sense among many experts that some mysterious X-factor or factors in the environment tip genetically susceptible kids into autism, though efforts to pin it on childhood vaccines, mercury or other toxins haven't panned out. Genes alone can't explain it; the identical twin of a child with autism has only a 70% to 90% chance of being similarly afflicted. Copyright © 2006 Time Inc

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 9524 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nothing focuses the mind's eye like an erotic picture, according to the results of a new study. Even when such pictures were actively canceled out, subliminal images of female nudes helped heterosexual men find the orientation of a briefly shown abstract shape. Such nudity-driven focusing worked almost as well for women, as long as the image accorded with their sexual preference. Cognitive neuroscientist Sheng He of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues gathered groups of heterosexual men, heterosexual women, homosexual men and bisexual women numbering 10 each. Each viewed special images pointed directly at each individual eye. The researchers could cancel out vision of one eye's image by presenting a specific high contrast image to the other eye. Such an image, called a Gabor patch, consists of a series of contrasting lines that form an abstract--and visually arresting--shape. "Normally, the two eyes look at the same image. They don’t have any conflict," he explains. "We create a situation where the two eyes are presented with two images, and then they will have binocular competition. One image is high contrast [and dynamic], the other is static. You basically just see the dynamic image." Into the canceled out image slot, the researchers slipped an erotic image; for example, a naked woman displayed for a heterosexual man. To ensure that subjects did not consciously detect the invisible image, they were asked to press a specific key if they noticed any difference between the left and right images. Over the course of 32 trials, men were significantly better at detecting the orientation of Gabor patches when they appeared in the slot formerly occupied by an invisible image of a nude woman. © 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Attention; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9523 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A University of California, San Diego study has for the first time identified brain cells that influence whether birds of a feather will, or will not, flock together. Led by James Goodson, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, and detailed in this week's early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research demonstrates that vasotocin neurons in the medial extended amygdala respond differently to social cues in birds that live in colonies compared to their more solitary cousins. Vasotocin neurons appear, according to the study, to selectively promote positive affiliation. The gregarious species also have greater numbers of the neurons and their baseline activity is about twice as high, putting the birds in a kind of perpetual "social mood." "These findings," Goodson said, "address the fundamental question of sociality: Why are some animal species highly social while others seem to have little or no tolerance for others? "And while the observations were made in birds, they should apply to many other animals, including humans, since the cells are present in almost all vertebrates and the brain circuits that regulate the basic forms of social behavior are strikingly similar," he said.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9522 - Posted: 10.24.2006

By Greg Miller Have you ever wished you could turn up the gain on your brain, getting just a little more juice right before a tough exam or a big experiment? Scientists have now managed such a feat in rats, boosting their performance on a memory test by electrically stimulating a region deep inside their brains. The technique is unlikely to ever be performed on healthy humans, but the researchers say it may prove useful for people who've suffered strokes or other brain injuries. Deep brain stimulation has been used for years to treat people with Parkinson's disease. More recently, researchers have reported encouraging results for treating depression (Science, 4 March 2005, p. 1405), and just last week a team reported a promising case study in which a man in a minimally conscious state recovered some mobility and responsiveness (ScienceNOW, 16 October). Yet very little is known about how deep brain stimulation works. That's changing through work on lab animals. A team led by neurologist and neuroscientist Daniel Herrera at Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City implanted electrodes into the central thalamus of rats. This brain region is thought to help mediate arousal and is the region surgeons targeted in the minimally conscious patient. After stimulating the rats' central thalamus for 30 minutes, Herrera and colleagues found that two genes--one linked to neural activity and the other linked to cellular mechanisms of learning--had become more active in the rats' brains, including in the cerebral cortex and hippocampus. The stimulated rodents also explored more than unstimulated rats did and performed substantially better on an object-recognition test, Herrera and colleagues report online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 9521 - Posted: 06.24.2010

PITTSBURGH—Using a new form of brain imaging known as diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), researchers in the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University have discovered that the so-called white matter in the brains of people with autism has lower structural integrity than in the brains of normal individuals. This provides further evidence that the anatomical differences characterizing the brains of people with autism are related to the way those brains process information. The results of this latest study were published in the journal NeuroReport. The scientists used DTI — which tracks the movement of water through brain tissue — to measure the structural integrity of the white matter that acts as cables to wire the parts of the brain together. Normally, water molecules move, or diffuse, in a direction parallel to the orientation of the nerve fibers of the white matter. They're aided by the coherent structure of the fibers and a process called myelination, in which a sheath is formed around the fibers that speeds nerve impulses. The movement of water is more dispersed if the structural integrity of the tissue is low — i.e., if the fibers are less dense, less coherently organized, or less myelinated — as it was with the participants with autism in the Carnegie Mellon study. Researchers found this dispersed pattern particularly in areas in and around the corpus callosum, the large band of nerve fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. "These reductions in white matter integrity may underlie the behavioral pattern observed in autism of narrowly focused thought and weak coherence of different streams of thought," said Marcel Just, director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging and a co-author of the latest study.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 9520 - Posted: 06.24.2010

KINGSTON, Ont. -- Queen's University researchers have discovered that seeking out the most attractive mate may be unhealthy for any offspring. Using a "virtual fruit fly dating game", Biology professor Adam Chippindale and graduate student Alison Pischedda have found that mating with a "fit" partner actually leads to dramatically lower rates of reproductive success in the next generation. The research also raises questions about how masculine and feminine traits may be expressed through genes. The findings, published in the November edition of PLoS Biology, suggest quite a twist on evolutionary thinking: On average, the lowest quality couple produced the best offspring while the highest quality pair produced the worst offspring. The Queen's research team measured the inheritance of "fitness" (quality and number of offspring) using samples of low-and-high-fitness males and a separate set of low-and-high-fitness females to uncover what occurs as a result of sexual selection, the Darwinian process by which organisms compete for, and choose, their mates. In some traditional models, sexual selection is the search to provide offspring with 'good genes' to increase their reproductive success.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 9519 - Posted: 10.24.2006

By Cordelia Rayner With a recent survey suggesting almost 50% of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder have been excluded at some point, parents face difficult choices. Up to one in 20 children have ADHD, which affects concentration and can cause them to be disruptive. Many are being put on medication but unions warn that some schools cannot meet their medical needs. And American scientists have raised concerns about the widespread use of ADHD medications. A recent survey by the National Attention Deficit Disorder information and support service found the exclusion rate for children with ADHD was 10 times higher than that of those without. Some parents have told the BBC they were told to give their children medication or keep them at home, and that they often felt they were being denied a proper education. The National Association of Head Teachers spokesperson, Jan Myles, said: "It's the system that fails the child but all too often the blame is laid at the door of the school. "A lot of heads I'm talking to on a daily basis are exhausted with trying to implement different strategies that are not working." One mother, Linda Sheppard, is taking her local authority to the European Court of Human Rights to gain her son the educational support she claims he needs. Ms Sheppard removed her son from his school because she says they were unable to offer him adequate support in the classroom. Continual exclusions from school trips and other activities caused his well-being to plummet and by the time he was seven he threatened suicide, she says. (C)BBC

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 9518 - Posted: 10.23.2006

Listening to loud music with earphones on portable digital music players such as iPods for more than 90 minutes a day can damage your hearing, a new U.S. study suggests. The study indicates a typical person can safely listen to an iPod for 4.6 hours per day at 70 per cent volume using stock earphones, said Cory Portnuff, a doctoral researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder and co-author of the study. "Damage to hearing occurs when a person is exposed to loud sounds over time," he said Thursday. "The risk of hearing loss increases as sound is played louder and louder for long durations, so knowing the levels one is listening to music at, and for how long, is extremely important." The study of 100 doctoral students found that people who listened to music at 80 per cent of volume capacity should stick to under 90 minutes a day, said Brian Fligor, the study's co-author and an audiologist at Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School. "If a person exceeds that on one particular day and happens not to use their headphones for the rest of the week, they're at no higher risk," Fligor told Reuters. "I'm talking about someone who's exceeding 80 per cent for 90 minutes day after day, month after month, for years." Copyright © CBC 2006

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 9517 - Posted: 06.24.2010