By ROBERT PEAR WASHINGTON, — Four of every 10 patients who undergo weight-loss surgery develop complications within six months, the federal government said Sunday. The number of such surgical procedures has been rising rapidly, along with the incidence of obesity, which now afflicts 30 percent of adults in the United States, health officials said. Obesity surgery is helping thousands of Americans lose weight and reduce the risk of diabetes and other life-threatening diseases, said Dr. Carolyn M. Clancy, director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a unit of the Public Health Service. But she added, “This study shows how important it is for patients to consider the potential complications.” Many of the complications were so serious that patients were readmitted to hospitals or visited emergency rooms within six months. In the procedure, known as bariatric surgery, doctors reduce the number of calories that a person can consume and absorb. One of the more common techniques restricts the size of the stomach and the length of the intestine, where nutrients are absorbed. Federal researchers found that complications from obesity surgery significantly increased costs. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 9166 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Jonathan Haidt, reviewed by James Flint The idea of the "divided self" is nothing new. Forget RD Laing: Buddha compared the experience of being human to that of a trainer (rationality) sitting astride an elephant (animal impulse); Plato to that of a charioteer (the rational mind) trying to control two horses, a noble one pulling to the right and a libidinal one pulling to the left. And of course there's Freud's Victorian version: the mind as buggy in the bucket seat of which "the driver (the ego) struggles frantically to control a hungry, lustful and disobedient horse (the id) while the driver's father (the superego) sits on the backseat lecturing the driver on what he's doing wrong". In the late 20th century these pictures were dismissed by many in the social sciences and replaced with metaphors of information processing and rational consumption, metaphors which in turn reflected the preoccupations of their time. When Jonathan Haidt suggests that we now abandon these and return to the idea of elephant and rider as a template for the workings of the mind, it seems at first blush rather an unpromising start to a book purporting to tell us how to be happy. But unlike so many of the world's purveyors of self-help and lifestyle philosophy, not to mention its economists and computational psychologists, Haidt knows what he's talking about. Thanks to having taught psychology at the University of Virginia for 20 years he has a deep understanding of his subject. He adds to that the distinction of being broadly right. What horses and chariots and elephants with riders draw attention to, he argues, is something that psychologists have only recently begun to realise: "that there are really two information processing systems at work in the mind at all times: controlled processes and automatic processes". © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 9165 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Trends analysis of drug poisoning deaths has helped explain a national epidemic of overdose deaths in the USA that began in the 1990s, concludes Leonard Paulozzi and colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, USA. The contribution of prescription pain killers to the epidemic has only become clear recently. This research is published this week in the journal, Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety. Drugs called "opioids" are frequently prescribed to relieve pain, but if abused they can kill. Over the past 15 years, sales of opioid pain killers, including oxycodone, hydrocodone, methadone and fentanyl, have increased, and deaths from these drugs have increased in parallel. In 2002, over 16,000 people died in the USA as a result of drug overdoses, with most deaths related to opioids, heroin, and cocaine. Opioids surpassed both cocaine and heroin in extent of involvement in these drug overdoses between 1999 and 2002. The situation appears to be accelerating. Between 1979 and 1990 the rate of deaths attributed to unintentional drug poisoning increased by an average of 5.3% each year. Between 1990 and 2002, the rate increased by 18.1% per year. The contribution played by opioids is also increasing. Between 1999 and 2002 the number of overdose death certificates that mention poisoning by opioid pain killers went up by 91.2%. While the pain killer category showed the greatest increase, death certificates pointing a finger of blame at heroin and cocaine also increased by 12.4% and 22.8% respectively.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 9164 - Posted: 07.24.2006

by Emily Anthes • You may fancy yourself a lover of all humanity, but according to a new study out of Princeton University, when confronted with extreme social outcasts, such as drug addicts and homeless people, your brain may unconsciously categorize them as less than human. Neuroimaging research to be published in the October issue of Psychological Science shows that the stereotyping of groups as being sub-human can happen on an unconscious, neurological level, even when a person is not outwardly repulsed. "People spontaneously categorize other people into 'us' and 'them' and they do that within milliseconds of encountering other people," said Princeton psychologist Susan Fiske, a co-author of the study. Social research has shown that people evaluate people unlike them according to two scales: how nice, or warm, they appear and how smart, or competent, they seem. Some social groups are commonly viewed as being low in competence and high in warmth (the elderly), while others are stereotyped as being high in competence but low in warmth (the wealthy). Social groups that are stereotyped as having neither warmth nor competence—like drug addicts—are often judged to be both hostile and stupid. © Copyright 2006 Seed Media Group, LLC.

Keyword: Emotions; Brain imaging
Link ID: 9163 - Posted: 06.24.2010

ST. PAUL, Minn. – People with Parkinson disease can be apathetic without being depressed, and apathy may be a core feature of the disease, according to a study published in the July 11, 2006, issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Apathy is a mental state characterized by a loss of motivation, loss of interest, and loss of effortful behavior. In apathy, the mood is neutral and there is a sense of indifference. In depression, the mood is negative and there is emotional suffering. Because apathy and depression share some of the same symptoms, the disorders can be misdiagnosed. “This study shows that it’s important to screen for both apathy and depression so patients can be treated appropriately,” said study author Lindsey Kirsch-Darrow, MS, of the University of Florida in Gainesville. “It will also be important to educate family members and caregivers about apathy to help them understand that it is a characteristic of Parkinson disease. Apathetic behavior is not something the patient can voluntarily control, and it is not laziness or the patient trying to be difficult – it is a symptom of Parkinson disease.” The study compared 80 people with Parkinson disease to 20 people with dystonia, another movement disorder. The researchers hypothesized that apathy would occur more often in people with Parkinson disease, because the disease affects areas of the brain in the frontal cortex that are involved in non-motor activities, whereas dystonia affects areas mainly involved with movement.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Depression
Link ID: 9162 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jaron Lanier Lngwidge iz a straynge thingee. You could probably read that sentence without much trouble. Sentence also not this time hard. You can screw around quite a bit with both spelling and word order and still be understood. This shouldn't be surprising: Language is flexible enough to evolve into new slangs, dialects, and entirely new tongues. In the 1960s, many early computer scientists hoped that human language was a type of code that could be written down in a neat, compact way, so there was a race to crack that code. If you could decipher the code, then a computer ought to be able to speak with people! That approach turned out to be extremely difficult, though. Automatic language translation, for instance, never really took off. In the last five years or so computers have gotten so powerful that it has become possible to shift methods. A program can look for correlations in large amounts of text. Even if it isn't possible to capture all the language variations that might appear in the real world (such as the oddities that I used at the start of this month's column) a sufficiently huge number of correlations eventually yields results. For instance, suppose you have a lot of text in two languages, like Chinese and English. If you start searching for sequences of letters or characters that appear in each text under similar circumstances, you can start to build a dictionary of correlations, even if the correlations don't always fit perfectly into a rigid organizing principle, such as a grammar. © 2005 Discover Media LLC.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 9161 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Eleven-year-old Azjanae Fields used to wake up in the middle of the night feeling like she was choking. "It was scary because I thought I was dying or something," she says. "I didn't know what was wrong with me. I just would wake up choking." The sleeping problems spilled over to the daytime, when she would nod off during class and take naps immediately after returning home from school. Doctors told her that her enlarged tonsils getting in the way of her air supply at night. University of Michigan sleep researcher Ron Chervin says that more subtle symptoms, like snoring, can also signal breathing problems that might be caused by enlarged tonsils. He says that typically children from two to 12 years old don't snore regularly, except when they have a cold. Enlarged tonsils or adenoids, both types of soft tissue around the throat, can cause sleep apnea, a condition when the throat closes, partially or fully, while a person is sleeping. Tonsillectomies, while historically thought of as a procedure just for recurrent infection, are the most common way to treat suspected sleep apnea, according to Chervin. He says prior research also showed a connection between sleep disorders and behavior problems. "Disrupting sleep, which is important for the brain, leads to abnormal behavior during the day," he says. © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 9160 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Mary Beckman If you've ever tried to speak to someone who doesn't share your native tongue, you could probably intuit a bit of what they were saying just by how they said it. Anger, happiness, and even confusion traverse the language barrier quite well. Now a new study shows that emotions aren't the only information that piggybacks on our speech: We subconsciously convey important details about the objects around us just by verbally describing them. Language is largely symbolic--most of the time we use our words to convey ideas. But how we say something can be as important as what we say: "Hey man, nice car!" spoken with enthusiasm carries a much different connotation than when spoken with sarcasm. But can we communicate other information with our speech patterns, such as where the car is or where it's going? To find out, psychologist Howard Nusbaum and colleagues at the University of Chicago asked 24 college students to describe a dot moving across a screen. The students were told to use one of two sentences: "It is going up" or "It is going down." The team found that when students described the dots going up, the pitch of their voice was, on average, 6 hertz higher than that of those describing the dot going down. The same thing happened when another 24 students read the sentences from a computer screen, indicating people change the sound of their voice according to directional information contained within words. In another experiment, the researchers changed the speed of the dots; they found that, when describing the dots, the students spoke faster when the dots moved faster. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 9159 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers have discovered a critical function for a protein involved in spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), the number one genetic killer of children under the age of two. The disease is caused when a key protein loses its ability to promote the survival and vigor of motor neurons. According to the Families of Spinal Muscular Atrophy organization, spinal muscular atrophy affects 1 in 6,000 newborns, causing progressive muscle weakness, wasting, or atrophy as motor neurons degenerate. August is National Spinal Muscular Atrophy Awareness Month. In an article published in the July 21, 2006, issue of the journal Molecular Cell, researchers led by Gideon Dreyfuss, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, report that they now know the identity of a protein that is crucial for recognizing specific RNA molecules needed to process genetic information inside the cell. This process breaks down in people who have SMA. In 1994, researchers discovered that the gene, survival of motor neurons (Smn), is deleted or mutated in people with SMA. This observation strongly suggested that reduced levels of or mutations in the SMN protein cause spinal muscle atrophy. Dreyfuss and his colleagues subsequently showed that the SMN protein is needed by all cells to produce messenger RNA (mRNA). Production of mRNA is a critical step in gene expression, and ultimately, in the production of functional proteins. Specifically, the SMN protein plays a crucial role in the genesis of mRNA from a precursor called pre-mRNA. The conversion of pre-mRNA to mRNA takes place in the cell nucleus during a process called splicing. © 2006 Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 9158 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sharing a bed with someone could temporarily reduce your brain power - at least if you are a man - Austrian scientists suggest. When men spend the night with a bed mate their sleep is disturbed, whether they make love or not, and this impairs their mental ability the next day. The lack of sleep also increases a man's stress hormone levels. According to the New Scientist study, women who share a bed fare better because they sleep more deeply. Professor Gerhard Kloesch and colleagues at the University of Vienna studied eight unmarried, childless couples in their 20s. Each couple was asked to spend 10 nights sleeping together and 10 apart while the scientists assessed their rest patterns with questionnaires and wrist activity monitors. The next day the couples were asked to perform simple cognitive tests and had their stress hormone levels checked. Although the men reported they had slept better with a partner, they fared more badly in the tests, with their results suggesting they actually had more disturbed sleep. Both sexes had a more disturbed night's sleep when they shared their bed, Professor Kloesch told a meeting of the Forum of European Neuroscience. But women apparently managed to sleep more deeply when they did eventually drop off, since they claimed to be more refreshed than their sleep time suggested. Their stress hormone levels and mental scores did not suffer to the same extent as the men. But the women still reported that they had the best sleep when they were alone in bed. Bed sharing also affected dream recall. Women remembered more after sleeping alone and men recalled best after sex. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sleep; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9157 - Posted: 07.20.2006

By DENISE GRADY A blood product normally used to treat immune disorders and a type of leukemia may also slow or stop mental decline in people with Alzheimer’s disease, researchers reported yesterday at an Alzheimer’s conference in Madrid. The product is called IVIg (pronounced EYE-vig), for intravenous immunoglobulin, also known as gamma globulin. Made from pooled blood plasma, it is a thick soup of antibodies, the proteins made by the immune system to get rid of unwanted substances. It has been used for 30 years for other diseases and is dripped into a vein like a transfusion. But the findings in Alzheimer’s are based on an experiment involving only eight patients with no comparison group and need to be verified by larger studies, scientists said. “This is not ready for widespread use,” said Dr. Norman R. Relkin, director of the Memory Disorders Program at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. Dr. Relkin and scientific advisers to the Alzheimer’s Association, the presenter of the conference, nonetheless said the results were promising and might lead to new methods of treatment, and to a better understanding of the disease. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 9156 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Kathleen Fackelmann, USA TODAY Middle-age people with prediabetes, high blood pressure and other factors that might increase their risk of Alzheimer's should just say no to that chocolate milkshake and go for a walk instead, according to research out Wednesday. Several studies presented at the 10th International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders this week in Spain add to the evidence suggesting that lifestyle factors might help maintain the brain's mental edge and might protect against Alzheimer's. The worldwide cost of treating the incurable brain disease that afflicts one in 10 people over 65 is estimated at $248 billion, a price tag that will increase as the population gets older, says William Thies of the Chicago-based Alzheimer's Association, which sponsored the meeting. "If we don't deal with this disease, we're going to bankrupt the health care system," he says. He adds that the problem could get worse if Americans don't start paying attention to risk factors such as those identified in a study done by Tulane University in New Orleans. Jeanette Gustat studied 72 men and women who were primarily in their 30s and early 40s. The team took blood pressure readings and drew blood to check for risk factors such as prediabetes, a condition that can lead to full-blown diabetes. The recruits also took a number of cognitive tests. Copyright 2006 USA TODAY,

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 9155 - Posted: 07.20.2006

By Laura Blackburn If a guy wants to smell nice for his lady, a splash of aftershave or cologne usually does the trick. Male lizards take a slightly different approach. They eat vitamins. When it comes to choosing a mate, female animals scope out the healthiest and most fertile males. Sometimes appearance matters most; the colorful tail of a male peacock, for example, attracts predators--so surviving males are judged fit enough to escape their enemies. A male's odor may also tag him as a good catch, but scientist’s aren't as clear on how this works. Evolutionary ecologists José Martín and Pilar López of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid, Spain, wondered if rock lizards could provide an answer. Male Iberian rock lizards (Lacerta monticola) mark their territory with a secretion from their leg glands that contains provitamin D (a precursor to vitamin D). Like humans, lizards need vitamin D for strong bones. Healthy males on a good diet have an abundance of vitamin D and can therefore afford to secrete some of it as provitamin D. Can female lizards pick up on this lavish "spending?" © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 9154 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — We can thank our verbal nature, along with our fingers, for the ability to develop complex number systems, a new study suggests. The study's authors theorize that language and math co-evolved in humans, with language probably emerging just ahead of basic mathematical concepts. “I do not think counting words were among the first words spoken by our species, because their application makes use of a fairly sophisticated pattern of linking that occurred ... relatively late in linguistic evolution,” said Heike Wiese, who authored the study. Wiese, a linguist at the University of Potsdam in Germany, explained to Discovery News that our use of counting words, and numbers in general, likely emerged in four stages. During the first stage, Wiese believes humans began using visual representations — such as symbols or other markings — to correspond with verbal indications of quantity. Among the early evidence for that stage is a 30,000-year-old wolf bone, excavated in the Czech Republic, with notched tallies cut into it. © 2006 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 9153 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi New evidence adds weight to the theory that one of the most deadly forms of brain cancer, called malignant glioma, is caused when stem cells deep within the brain begin to proliferate abnormally, researchers have announced. Special receptors on the surfaces of these cells trigger cancerous cell division in response to a particular growth hormone, the team's experiments in mice reveal. Absence of this hormone caused such tumours to shrink, they discovered, raising hopes for a potential treatment. When diagnosed with malignant gliomas, the sufferer typically has just 14 months to live. There is currently no effective treatment for the fast-spreading illness. Arturo Alvarez-Buylla at the University of California in San Francisco, US, and colleagues conducted post-mortem examinations of the brains of three people without the illness. Chemical tests on nerve stem-cells in a deep region of the brain, known as the sub-ventricular zone, revealed the existence of receptors for a growth hormone known as PDGF on the cell surfaces. The PDGF receptors on these stem cells are the same as those found in cells from malignant brain tumours, comments Charles Stiles of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, US. He says this strengthens the argument that malignant gliomas result when brain stem cells regenerate abnormally. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Glia
Link ID: 9152 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Breastfeeding may be the ultimate natural painkiller for newborn babies. A review of research found that breastfeeding newborns helps relieve the pain from a needle prick used to screen their blood for disease. Breastfed babies appeared to experience less pain than those who were swaddled, given a pacifier, or a placebo. Comfort from a mother's presence may be key. The Cochrane Library review, by Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital, was based on data from over 1,000 babies. The researchers say that breastfeeding could possibly help relieve pain for premature babies who need to undergo many painful intensive care procedures. However, they stress that their study did not test the impact of breastfeeding on the pain associated with repeated procedures. The Mount Sinai team assessed pain by measuring changes in heart and breathing rates, and the length of time a baby cried after receiving the needle prick. The researchers say that the key to the effect of breastfeeding may be that an infant simply draws comfort from the close proximity of its mother. Alternatively, breastfeeding may help to divert attention away from the pain of a needle prick. They also suggest that the sweetness of breast milk may be a factor. Another theory is that breast milk contains a high concentration of a chemical which could ultimately trigger the production of natural painkillers called endorphins. The researchers also found that giving babies a sugar solution seemed to be effective. (C)BBC

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 9151 - Posted: 07.19.2006

Scientists know that children of women who smoke during pregnancy can develop hearing-related cognitive deficits. For the first time, researchers believe they have evidence that not only implicates nicotine as the culprit, but also shows what the substance does to the brain to cause these deficits. In a study using rats, Raju Metherate, associate professor of neurobiology and behavior, and colleagues from UC Irvine, showed that nicotine exposure during the equivalent of a human’s third trimester led to hearing-related cognitive problems. This is the first time a study has demonstrated this causal link. Further tests then revealed that the probable cause of the deficits was damage to the receptors in the brain that are sensitive to nicotine, which seems to occur when humans or animals are exposed to the substance during development. The study appears this week in the early online issue of the European Journal of Neuroscience. Children with auditory processing deficits can have a number of hearing-related problems. They may have difficulty understanding speech in a noisy environment, not understand information that is presented verbally, and may not be able to tell the difference between similar sounds. © Copyright 2002-2006 UC Regents

Keyword: Hearing; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 9150 - Posted: 06.24.2010

(Baltimore, MD) -- Differences in the way men and women perform verbal and visuospatial tasks have been well documented in scientific literature, but findings have been inconsistent as to whether men and women actually use different parts of their brains. This inconsistency has been attributed to many factors, including variability in the tasks used in studies and failure to match study participants on performance equivalency. But a new study published in the journal Brain and Language, which accounted for and corrected these methodological factors, confirmed that men and women do indeed use different parts of their brains when processing both language and visuospatial information. At a time when 37% of boys score below basic levels on standardized academic tests, compared to 15% of girls (National Center for Education Statistics) and the rate of ADHD in boys in twice that of girls (Centers for Disease Control), this study provides a solid benchmark to use in comparing whether underlying sex differences also exist in all children. Such an inquiry can pave the way towards understanding the extent to which sex differences are developmental, sociological and/or hormonal and which differences may become more, or possibly less, distinct with age. The study, led by Dr. Laurie Cutting and research scientist Amy Clements, both of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study thirty adult participants while performing language and visuospatial tasks. Distinct differences were evident between male and female participants.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Laterality
Link ID: 9149 - Posted: 07.19.2006

Ian Sample, science correspondent Autistic men have striking abnormalities in a region of the brain that deals with social skills, according to research published today. Detailed maps of autistic men's brains show they have substantially fewer neurons than expected in a region called the amygdala, which plays a major role in understanding others' actions and emotions. The finding adds weight to a theory put forward by some scientists that stunted development in the amygdala gives rise to autism. Further research is needed, however, to confirm whether the lack of neurons is a direct cause of autism, or is merely a consequence of it. Scientists at the University of California, Davis studied the brains of 19 dead men, nine of whom had autism. Using a technique called stereological analysis, they were able to count the numbers of neurons in different parts of the men's brains and compare them. The researchers found abnormally low numbers of brain cells in the almond-shaped amygdala and a structure known as its lateral nucleus. "This is the first quantitative evidence of an abnormal number of neurons in the autistic amygdala," said David Amaral, who led the research, which appears in the Journal of Neuroscience. © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 9148 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY Resigning yourself to old age may produce the very mental lapses that most people fear will strike them in their golden years. In a paper appearing in the current issue of the journal Social Cognition, psychologists report that men and women in late middle age underperformed on a standard memory test when told they were part of a study including people over age 70. Inclusion with an older group — an indirect reminder of the link between age and memory slippage — was enough to affect their scores, especially for those who were most concerned about getting older, the authors concluded. Researchers refer to this self-undermining as a stereotype effect, and they have documented it in many groups. In studies, women perform less well on math exams after reading that men tend to perform better on them. Similarly, white men perform less well when they are told that they are competing in math against Asian students. People over 65 also slump on memory tests when they are reminded of the link between age and mental decline. The new study, financed by the National Institute on Aging, is the first to show the effect so clearly in a borderline group, experts say — middle age is certainly not young, but it is well short of “senior.” Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 9147 - Posted: 06.24.2010