By Sally Squires Anyone who has tried to lose weight knows that trimming pounds is the easy (or easier) part. Keeping them off is the challenge, as boredom, tempting food and sedentary living erode your resolve. Yet surprisingly few studies have examined how best to maintain weight loss, leaving a missing piece in the anti-obesity puzzle. Now a Brown Medical School study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that the bathroom scale, an emergency diet toolbox and cues from a stoplight might hold the keys to success. The study took a lesson from the National Weight Control Registry, a group of more than 5,000 "successful losers" who have shed at least 30 pounds and kept them off for at least a year. Registry members have trimmed their waistlines in a variety of ways, from cutting calories and boosting exercise on their own to joining groups such as Weight Watchers. One habit they share: regular weigh-ins and then adjustment of food and exercise when pounds start to creep back on. (Successful losers also rarely miss breakfast and get at least an hour a day of physical activity, such as brisk walking.) © 2006 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 9488 - Posted: 06.24.2010

PORTLAND, Ore. - Older women on hormone therapy are more sensitive to negative events, confirming speculation that age-related estrogen loss affects the brain's ability to process emotion, an Oregon Health & Science University study shows. But that sensitivity to negative emotional events, such as viewing a photograph of a dead person, doesn't necessarily mean women taking estrogen remember those events any better. In the study by researchers in the Cognition & Aging Laboratory at the OHSU School of Medicine's Department of Behavioral Neuroscience, hormone therapy in women appears to reverse the age-related loss of arousal to negative emotional events experienced by the elderly. It also points to specific changes in the brain's arousal system, in the regions that process emotion, and intensification of negative emotions. The results were presented today at Neuroscience 2006, the Society for Neuroscience's 36th annual meeting at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. Scientists have suspected a link between sex hormones and emotion. Strengthening this theory is the fact that brain regions tuned for processing emotion and storing emotional memory - the amygdala and hippocampus - also respond to sex hormones and contain hormone receptors. Thus, changes in "emotional enhancement" people experience as they age, including a reduction in the ability to remember negative events, may be modified by age-related loss of sex hormones or hormone therapy.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 9487 - Posted: 10.17.2006

About a third of the women who take Prozac and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) find that the antidepressants dull sexual desire and pleasure. The side effects lead some patients to stop taking the drug. Alternatives to SSRIs, such as those that modulate the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine instead of serotonin, may avoid the sexual problems. But the few studies done on these drugs, chief among them bupropion (Wellbutrin), have generated conflicting results--some found they boosted sexual interest, whereas others found they lowered it. Now the first animal study on bupropion has weighed in, and it suggests that acute doses do not dampen libido. "Given how big a deal all this is, we were surprised to find no animal studies on it," says Skidmore College senior Gabriel Wurzel. "So we did one." Working with Hassan Lopez, professor of psychology at Skidmore, and junior Benjamin Ragen, Wurzel presented a poster session on their study October 15 at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Atlanta. "This is, of course, a first study, and it doesn't address long-term effects," Lopez says of the team's work on rats. "But at least for acute use, it seems to suggest bupropion has a fairly neutral effect." To test the rats' amorous interest, the team used a "runway apparatus." A female test rat was let into one end of a five-foot-long walled runway that ended in a "goal box"--a circular area about 18 inches across with a Plexiglas wall across its middle. © 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Depression
Link ID: 9486 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Anna Salleh, ABC Science Online — Older people accused of being 'blunt' can blame their deteriorating brain for their straight talking, an Australian researcher suggests. Associate Professor Bill von Hippel, a psychologist at the University of New South Wales, says this deterioration means the brain can't properly inhibit older people from saying inappropriate things. "Older adults tend to be more likely to ask about private or personal issues in public than younger adults are," said von Hippel. "And we have suggestive evidence that this is brought about by declines in frontal lobe functioning." He was recently awarded an Australian Research Council grant to investigate the theory and the implications for older people's health. Von Hippel says the stereotype is that people over the age of 65 are more likely to speak their mind because they have earned the right to, and because they are often seen as a source of wisdom. But he says they can lose friends as it can be socially inappropriate. "If I'm asking you about your hemorrhoids in public, even if I don't mean to be mean by doing it, I'm nevertheless humiliating you and I'm not providing you with positive emotional support," he says. Copyright © 2006 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 9485 - Posted: 06.24.2010

John Pickrell Dung beetle research may be about to boost the cliché about men with flashy sports cars. According to new study, male beetles with the most dramatic and ostentatious sets of horns apparently pay for that with smaller testicles. The research is the first to experimentally demonstrate that investing energy in one mating advantage may come at the expense of another, the researchers claim. Male dung beetles of the genus Onthophagus are noted for the size and diversity of their horns. In some species, these make up 40% of males’ body length. These iridescent beetles use their flashy ornaments to battle against one another and block access to tunnels where they mate with females. The competition does not end there, however, as females often mate with more than one male. In these species, once inside the female, one male's sperm must compete with other males' sperm to fertilise eggs. It is generally thought that the males that produce the most sperm are more likely to achieve a fertilisation so, besides the horns, testicle capacity is important in competition between males too, says Douglas Emlen, who led the research at the University of Montana in Missoula, US. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9483 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi Brief periods of stress can cause a rapid rise in the brain proteins linked to Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study in mice. Just three days of stress caused an abrupt 42% increase in brain proteins thought to cause the disease. The study helps to shed light on why people who experience great stress and anxiety appear more prone to this illness, experts say. Researchers placed four-month-old mice in isolation within small spaces one-third the size of normal cages. The mice stayed in the confined setting – which causes rodents great stress – for three days or as long as three months. During the course of the experiment the animals wore a special headset device, known as a micro-dialysis probe, that periodically extracted brain fluid for analysis. David Holtzman at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, US, and colleagues focused their attention on one molecule in particular: amyloid beta peptide. This molecule is known to contribute to the formation of the amyloid protein tangles and plaques that are the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease. Previous research has linked higher levels of amyloid beta peptide with increased risk of dementia in humans. The team found that mice housed in the confined space for three months had nearly twice as much amyloid beta peptide in their brain fluid than the control mice that stayed in regular cages. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Stress
Link ID: 9482 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Anisa Abid Has anyone ever told you that you have the same expressions as your siblings or parents? You might think you picked that up by hanging around with your family too long. But scientists now say that such family 'signatures' may be genetic. To separate the impact of mimicry from genetic inheritance, scientists at the University of Haifa, Israel, looked at people who were born blind. The authors note that their blind subjects considered it to be a common public misconception that they can learn expressions by touch. The participants said that without a mental model of what a face looks like, it is hard to translate expressions felt through the hands to expressions on their own face. Eviatar Nevo and his colleagues asked their 21 blind participants, along with 30 relatives of these people, to reflect on a particular memory or idea that evoked emotion, and filmed the results. By the end of the interviews they had catalogued 43 different types of facial expressions (several being sequences of expressions), some of which were shared between people. The researchers then had a computer crunch through the facial expressions and attempt to match them up. But because there were so few participants in the trial, they did this in a complex way to improve their statistics. For a given blind person, they divided the remaining participants into two groups at random, and looked to see whether the blind volunteer's facial expression better matched group 1 or group 2. They did this over and over again, dividing the participants into two groups using every possible combination. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Emotions; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 9481 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jim Giles There is growing evidence that suicidal behaviour is a condition is its own right and not just a consequence of other psychiatric disorders, say brain researchers. People who commit suicide show distinct changes in their brain that are independent of any mental illness they may be suffering from, according to studies presented on 15 October at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Atlanta, Georgia. Such work could lead to new tests for suicide risk, say some of those behind the research. They speculate it may also help to explain why a small minority of patients on SSRIs, a common form of anti-depressant that boosts serotonin levels, are more likely to commit suicide. "There is an assumption that people get depressed, get depressed, get depressed....and then finally end it," says Mihran Bakalian of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. "But that is not borne out by the biochemical or psychiatric studies." Bakalian says the idea is becoming firmly established among groups such as his that study suicide, but has yet to filter down to many medical doctors. Data from researchers such as Stella Dracheva, who is based at the Bronx Veterans Affairs Medical Center in New York, are beginning to change that. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 9480 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey ATLANTA — Some people have chocolate on the brain. A new study of people who crave chocolate shows that eating chocolate, or even just looking at a picture of it, turns on pleasure centers in the brains of cravers far more than in people who don't crave the confection. Viewing pictures of chocolate also activates an area of the brain known to be involved in drug addiction. The study, by Ciara McCabe and Edmund Rolls of Oxford University in England, was one of more than 14,000 presentations slated for the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience this week. The meeting draws more than 35,000 brain scientists and doctors each year, making it one of the world's largest scientific gatherings. McCabe gathered seven chocolate cravers and eight non-cravers for her experiment. All of the subjects completed a survey to confirm their chocolate-craving status. The differences were clear. Some people really don't crave chocolate, a fact McCabe — an admitted chocolate craver — finds incredible. She placed the volunteers in a functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, a scanner that measures activity in the brain. McCabe then gave them a taste of liquid chocolate. The cravers and non-cravers registered the taste to the same degree in parts of the brain involved in detecting taste. But people who crave chocolate perceived the taste as more pleasant than did the non-cravers. The difference showed up in the brain scan and in the volunteers' ratings of the experience. Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 9479 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rob Stein Doctors yesterday reported the first evidence that targeted electrical brain stimulation may help head-trauma victims stuck in a state of semiconsciousness, after an experiment apparently restored some of one patient's abilities to function and communicate. Although the technique has been tried on only one patient, the experiment marks an unprecedented step that could lead to a new way to try to coax thousands of patients mired in similar states back toward more awareness, enabling them to function more and interact better with their families and others. "It sounds promising," said James L. Bernat, a neurologist at Dartmouth Medical School who was not involved in the research. "If it turns out to be helpful for other patients, then it certainly would be an important therapy." Thousands of Americans are left unconscious or semiconscious by brain damage. Many go into a coma, in which they are alive but completely unconscious. Some eventually emerge into a vegetative state, in which their eyes open and close but they show no signs of conscious awareness or ability to interact with their environment. The most famous recent example of this was Terri Schiavo, whose case triggered a national debate over the right-to-die issue. © 2006 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 9478 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Lindsay M. Oberman At first glance you might not notice anything odd on meeting a young boy with autism. But if you try to talk to him, it will quickly become obvious that something is seriously wrong. He may not make eye contact with you; instead he may avoid your gaze and fidget, rock his body to and fro, or bang his head against the wall. More disconcerting, he may not be able to conduct anything remotely resembling a normal conversation. Even though he can experience emotions such as fear, rage and pleasure, he may lack genuine empathy for other people and be oblivious to subtle social cues that most children would pick up effortlessly. In the 1940s two physicians--American psychiatrist Leo Kanner and Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger--independently discovered this developmental disorder, which afflicts about 0.5 percent of American children. Neither researcher had any knowledge of the other's work, and yet by an uncanny coincidence each gave the syndrome the same name: autism, which derives from the Greek word autos, meaning "self." The name is apt, because the most conspicuous feature of the disorder is a withdrawal from social interaction. More recently, doctors have adopted the term "autism spectrum disorder" to make it clear that the illness has many related variants that range widely in severity but share some characteristic symptoms. Ever since autism was identified, researchers have struggled to determine what causes it. Scientists know that susceptibility to autism is inherited, although environmental risk factors also seem to play a role. Starting in the late 1990s, investigators in our laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, set out to explore whether there was a connection between autism and a newly discovered class of nerve cells in the brain called mirror neurons. © 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 9477 - Posted: 06.24.2010

ATLANTA, GA -- People addicted to cocaine have an impaired ability to perceive rewards and exercise control due to disruptions in the brain's reward and control circuits, according to a series of brain-mapping studies and neuropsychological tests conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. "Our findings provide the first evidence that the brain's threshold for responding to monetary rewards is modified in drug-addicted people, and is directly linked to changes in the responsiveness of the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain essential for monitoring and controlling behavior," said Rita Goldstein, a psychologist at Brookhaven Lab. "These results also attest to the benefit of using sophisticated brain-imaging tools combined with sensitive behavioral, cognitive, and emotional probes to optimize the study of drug addiction, a psychopathology that these tools have helped to identify as a disorder of the brain." Goldstein's experiments were designed to test a theoretical model, called the Impaired Response Inhibition and Salience Attribution (I-RISA) model, which postulates that drug-addicted individuals disproportionately attribute salience, or value, to their drug of choice at the expense of other potentially but no-longer-rewarding stimuli -- with a concomitant decrease in the ability to inhibit maladaptive drug use.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 9476 - Posted: 10.16.2006

Atlanta, - The neurotransmitter dopamine continues to be released for nearly an hour after neurons are stimulated, suggesting the existence of secondary mechanisms that allow for sustained availability of dopamine in different regions of the brain including areas critical for memory consolidation, drug induced plasticity and maintaining active networks during working memory, according to a University of Pittsburgh study being presented today at the 36th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, held at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. Determining the mechanisms that cause what is being called "post-stimulus activated release" and how they maintain dopamine levels could have important implications for understanding and treating neurological and psychiatric disorders caused by an imbalance of dopamine function including schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Tourette's syndrome, Parkinson's disease and addiction. According to Bita Moghaddam, Ph.D., professor of neuroscience and psychiatry, who led the study, in addition to its clinical benefits, post-stimulus activated release can be used to explain how brief events that activate neurons for short periods of time can influence brain function long after the events. For example, it can be used to explain how smelling freshly baked cookies could evoke childhood memories of spending time with a beloved grandparent, leading a person to reminisce long after the smell is gone and take the unplanned or impulsive action of baking or buying cookies.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 9475 - Posted: 10.16.2006

Kerri Smith The battle of the sexes continues to rage — right down to the level of our genes. A gene has now been discovered that, when mutated, turns girls into boys. The finding advances, but also complicates, our understanding of how sex is determined by our genes. In people, almost all men carry two different sex chromosomes (XY) and women are XX. But there are some (extremely rare) exceptions to this rule. It is possible to have XX men, for example. This female-to-male sex reversal almost always happens when a certain gene called SRY, usually carried on the Y chromosome, accidentally ends up on the X chromosome inherited from the father. Other genes have been found to muddle up sexual identity, making the resulting child neither fully male nor fully female. But in most cases of anatomically complete XX men — who have functional testes, but without a Y are infertile — SRY is involved. For this reason, it has long been called the gene that defines 'maleness'.1 ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9474 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Ayla Arslan When we look at a banana, does our brain tell us it looks yellow, even if it isn't? A recent study shows that it does. Psychologists at the University of Giessen, Germany, report in Nature Neuroscience that our perception of an object's colour depends on our memory of its typical colour. Karl Gegenfurtner and his co-workers showed their subjects digitized images of fruit, presented in random colours against a grey background. They then asked observers to adjust the colour of the fruit on the computer screen until it too was grey. But the volunteers had a hard time doing this. With a picture of a banana, for example, they would adjust the colour to be slightly too blue when trying to achieve grey, as if compensating for a perception of yellow that wasn't really there (blue is opposite yellow on the colour wheel). At the point at which the banana was truly achromatic, volunteers thought it still looked a bit yellow. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 9473 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi Prozac can make “adolescent” hamsters more aggressive towards their cage-mates, despite the antidepressant drug producing the opposite effect in adult hamsters, making them calmer. The new findings may help explain why certain antidepressants appear to cause irritability and other abnormal behaviours in teenagers. Kereshmeh Taravosh-Lahn at the University of Texas at Austin, US, and colleagues gave injections of the drug fluoxetine (sold in pill form as Prozac) to pubescent and mature hamsters. They injected either a low dose (10 milligrams per kilo of body weight) or a high dose (20 milligrams per kilo body weight), while other hamsters received a placebo. The researchers then introduced a smaller, same-sex hamster into the cage of each experimental hamster and filmed all the fights between the two rodents that were initiated by the subject animals. None of the fights resulted in the skin-breaks or injury to the animals, the researchers stress. As expected, the pubescent hamsters on a higher dose of drug appeared calmer, initiating about 65% fewer attacks than those on placebo. But surprisingly, those on the lower dose of antidepressant became more aggressive, initiating 40% more fights than those on placebo. Watch a short movie of the aggression in action. Adult hamsters on either dose of the drug initiated fewer fights than those on placebo. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Aggression; Depression
Link ID: 9472 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Regions of the brain may not communicate with each other as efficiently as they should in people with autism, research suggests. US scientists used sophisticated scans to examine connections in the cerebral cortex - the part of the brain that deals with complex thought. They found evidence of abnormal patterns of brain cell connection in people with autism. The research was presented at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. In some parts of the cortex brain cells made too many connections, and in other parts not enough. Lead researcher Dr Michael Murias, from the University of Washington, said: "Our findings indicate adults with autism show differences in coordinated neural activity, which implies poor internal communication between the parts of the brain." The researchers analyzed electroencephalography (EEG) scans from 36 adults, half of who had autism. The EEGs, which measure the activity of hundreds of millions of brain cells, were collected while the people were seated and relaxed with their eyes closed for two minutes. The researchers found people with autism particularly showed abnormal patterns of brain cell connection in the temporal lobe, which deals with language. They argue that the abnormal patterns suggest inefficient and inconsistent communication inside the brains of people with autism. Dr Marius said their work might lead to a way to spot autism at an earlier stage. (C)BBC

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 9471 - Posted: 10.15.2006

By ABBY ELLIN IT’S almost impossible to turn on the television and not glimpse Suzanne Somers smiling back at you. In the last week, she has appeared on the “Today” show, “The View” and “Entertainment Tonight.” She has chatted with Martha Stewart and bonded with Bill O’Reilly. She is not discussing the war in Iraq, nor offering opinions on the Mark Foley scandal. Her latest book, “Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones,” hit stores on Oct. 10, and Ms. Somers is simply doing what celebrities do these days: selling. She happens to be good at it. The actress made the ThighMaster a household product and, of the 13 books she has written, 7 have been best sellers. If history — and a good marketing plan — has anything to do with it, “Ageless” may just be her eighth. It is a paean to bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, a controversial treatment for menopausal women that she dubs “the juice of youth.” “I had bone loss 10 years ago — I restored it with bioidenticals,” Ms. Somers, who turns 60 on Monday, said in a telephone interview from Houston, where she was speaking before a group of 1,100 pharmacists. They also recharged her libido, she said, reduced her depression, and rejuvenated her hair, skin and body. (In February 2001, National Enquirer photographed her leaving a plastic surgery clinic, and she subsequently admitted to having had liposuction on her upper back and hips.) The book, though, has raised the hormone levels of at least seven medical doctors. The doctors — three of whom are quoted in the book — generally support the concept of bioidentical hormone therapies but say that too little research has been done to assure that they are safe. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9470 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Brain research will get a boost tomorrow (14 October) as CSIRO launches in the United States its HCA-Vision nerve cell analysis software at Neuroscience 2006 in Atlanta, Georgia, the world's largest conference for brain researchers. HCA-Vision is based on a proprietary mathematical method, patented by Australia’s CSIRO, for automatically tracing and measuring lines in complex images. With up to 40,000 delegates expected, the conference will be an ideal focus for the software’s international launch. Dr Pascal Vallotton, Leader of Biotech Imaging at CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences says there are few images more complex than the intricate, web-like branches of nerve cells photographed down a microscope. HCA-Vision allows researchers to reliably measure significant features of cells' appearance as they change in response to drugs, biochemicals or diseases like dementia. “A version of the software for 3D images is under development and will provide 'another dimension' of detail for researchers about nerve cell change.”“Benchmarking studies have shown that the software can do this one hundred times faster than a person using manual tracing methods can,” said Dr Vallotton.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 9469 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Atlanta ( — They may be black and white, but new research at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Zoo Atlanta shows that giant pandas can see in color. Graduate researcher Angela Kelling tested the ability of two Zoo Atlanta pandas, Yang Yang and Lun Lun, to see color and found that both pandas were able to discriminate between colors and various shades of gray. The research is published in the psychology journal Learning and Behavior, volume 34 issue 2. “My study shows that giant pandas have some sort of color vision,” said Kelling, graduate student in Georgia Tech’s Center for Conservation Behavior in the School of Psychology. “Most likely, their vision is dichromatic, since that seems to be the trend for carnivores.” Vision is not a well-studied aspect of bears, including the giant pandas. It has long been thought that bears have poor vision, perhaps, Kelling said, because they have such excellent senses of smell and hearing. Some experts have thought that bears must have some sort of color vision as it would help them in identifying edible plants from the inedible ones, although there’s been little experimental evidence of this. However, one experiment on black bears found some evidence that bears could tell blue from gray and green from gray. Kelling used this study’s design as the basis to test color vision in Zoo Atlanta’s giant pandas. ©2006 Georgia Institute of Technology

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 9468 - Posted: 06.24.2010