Roxanne Khamsi Gene therapy may one day prevent a hereditary form of childhood blindness, researchers say, following a promising study on chickens with the condition. They say the approach, which delayed the onset of blindness in chickens, might one day protect children from becoming blind as the result of an inherited disease called Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA). Chickens with the disease are normally born blind. But six out of seven of the chickens which underwent the gene therapy technique while still in the egg hatched out with sight, says Susan Semple-Rowland at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, US, who led the study. She and her colleagues focused on mutations in the GUCY2D gene, which is responsible for LCA1 – the most common type of LCA, accounting for up to 20% of cases. In people who carry two faulty GUCY2D genes, the cells at the back of the eye are unable to respond properly to light, and therefore cannot send proper visual signals to the brain. Individuals who suffer from this disorder typically become blind in infancy. Semple-Rowland says that the best animal model for LCA1 is found in chickens bred from others that had naturally acquired mutations in their GUCY2D genes. These chickens are born blind, she says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 8954 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Problems with walking and balance may be the first sign of Alzheimer's disease, say US researchers. A study of 2,288 elderly people found that such physical symptoms were associated with an increased risk of developing dementia. Researchers from the University of Washington said they believed that exercise could help to stall the progression of the disease. Their study appears in Archives of Internal Medicine. Previous research has suggested that exercise may reduce the risk of Alzheimer's - possibly by boosting blood flow to the brain. Researchers monitored patients every two years for signs of physical and mental decline. At the start of the study, none of the participants had any sign of dementia but after six years 319 individuals had developed dementia - 221 of them had Alzheimer's disease. Those with good physical performance scores at the start of the investigation were three times less likely to develop dementia than those with poor scores. The researchers assessed physical function using a variety of tests. The first indicators of future dementia appeared to be problems with walking and balance. A weak hand grip was a later sign. Study leader Dr Eric Larson said: "We were surprised to find that physical changes can precede declines in thinking. (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 8953 - Posted: 05.23.2006

By BENEDICT CAREY The patient, Keith, was a deeply religious young man, disabled by paranoia, who had secluded himself for weeks in one of the hospital's isolation rooms. In daily therapy sessions he said little but was always civil, seemingly pleased to have company and grateful for a cigarette and a light. Until one spring morning, when he wrestled the lighter from his therapist's hand and held it to his own head — igniting his hair. "I grabbed him and was slapping at the flames, and he immediately became passive," said Dr. Thomas H. McGlashan, the man's therapist. "He went limp and pulled a blanket over his head." He added, "That patient, that experience, changed everything for me." In a career that has spanned four decades, Dr. McGlashan, now 64 and a professor of psychiatry at Yale, has with grim delight extinguished some of psychiatry's grandest notions, none more ruthlessly than his own. He strived for years to master psychoanalysis, only to reject it outright after demonstrating, in a landmark 1984 study, that the treatment did not help much at all in people, like Keith, with schizophrenia. Once placed on antipsychotic medication, Keith became less paranoid and more expressive. Without it, he quickly deteriorated. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 8952 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS WADE Researchers taping calls of the putty-nosed monkey in the forests of Nigeria may have come a small step closer to understanding the origins of human language. The researchers have heard the monkeys string two alarm calls into a combined sound with a different meaning, as if forming a word, Kate Arnold and Klaus Zuberbühler report in the current issue of Nature. Monkeys are known to have specific alarm calls for different predators. Vervet monkeys have one call for eagles, another for snakes and a third for leopards. But this seems a far cry from language because the vervets do not combine the calls into anything resembling words or sentences. The putty-nosed monkeys have a "pyow" call meaning there are leopards about and a hacklike sound to warn of the crowned eagle. The "pyow" calls attention to a leopard on the ground. When hearing the "hack" sound, a monkey tends to freeze because movement would betray its position to an eagle. Dr. Arnold and Dr. Zuberbühler, zoologists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, noticed that adult male monkeys in each troupe were combining the "pyow" and "hack" calls. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 8951 - Posted: 05.23.2006

Brain damage occasionally leaps to mind to explain the one-sided treatment that political junkies of all stripes dispense, doling out forgiveness for their idols and contempt for their opponents. But a perfectly-normal part of the brain may play a role in the current "Talk Radio" era of polarized politics, suggests a new study. Imagining how other people will think and act in a given situation is a fairly important skill to have in partaking of a civilization, much less in determining whether someone else is about to run a red light. "This is an important question," says Harvard psychologist Jason Mitchell, who headed the new study. In recent years, neurologists have zeroed in on a region of the brain called the prefrontal cortex as key in the making of judgments about other people, Mitchell and his team report in the study, published in the journal Neuron. To test how this brain region works with politics, the study team asked 15 university students from the Boston area to eyeball two faces, drawn at random from a dating website. The students were informed, again at random, that one of the faces belonged to a person "having liberal sociopolitical views and participating in activities typical of many students at Northeast liberal arts colleges" and the other to a "fundamentalist Christian with conservative political and social views who participated avidly in a variety of events sponsored by religious and Republican organizations at a Midwest university," according to the study. Then they asked the students to judge the two people's likes, dislikes and opinions, as well as their own, in a 66-question survey. The catch was they had to answer the questions inside a Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine that would capture images of their brain at work. The questions ranged from whether the people like to drive home for Thanksgiving, to whether they enjoy foreign films or drive a small car for environmental reasons. The students had three seconds to answer each question. Copyright 2006 USA TODAY

Keyword: Brain imaging; Attention
Link ID: 8950 - Posted: 05.23.2006

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Eighteen years later, people who worked with lead have significant loss of brain cells and damage to brain tissue, according to a new study published in the May 23, 2006, issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study examined 532 former employees of a chemical manufacturing plant who had not been exposed to lead for an average of 18 years. The workers had worked at the plant for an average of more than eight years. The researchers measured the amount of lead accumulated in the workers' bones and used MRI scans to measure the workers' brain volumes and to look for white matter lesions, or small areas of damage in the brain tissue. The higher the workers' lead levels were, the more likely they were to have smaller brain volumes and greater amounts of brain damage. A total of 36 percent of the participants had white matter lesions. Those with the highest levels of lead were more than twice as likely to have brain damage as those with the lowest lead levels. Those with the highest levels of lead had brain volumes 1.1 percent smaller than those with the lowest lead levels. "The effect of the lead exposure was equivalent to what would be expected for five years of aging,"said study author Walter F. Stewart, PhD.

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 8949 - Posted: 06.24.2010

PORTLAND, Ore. – Research conducted at Oregon Health & Science University suggests that contrary to popular belief, the body has more than one "body clock." The previously known master body clock resides in a part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). Researchers at OHSU's Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) have now revealed the existence of a secondary clock-like mechanism associated with the adrenal gland. The research also suggests a high likelihood that additional clocks exist in the body. The study results are printed in the current edition of the journal Molecular Endocrinology. "We're all familiar with the idea that the body has a master clock that controls sleep-wake cycles. In fact, most of us have witnessed the impacts of this clock in the form of jet lag where it takes the body a number of days to adjust to a new time schedule following a long flight," explained Henryk Urbanski, Ph.D., senior author of the study and a senior scientist at ONPRC. "Our latest research suggests that a separate but likely related clock resides in the adrenal gland. The adrenal gland is involved in several important body functions, such as body temperature regulation, metabolism, mood, stress response and reproduction. The research also suggests that other peripheral clocks reside throughout the body and that these clocks are perhaps interconnected." To conduct the research, scientists studied adrenal gland function in rhesus macaque monkeys which is very similar to human adrenal gland function. Specifically, researchers measured gene expression in the adrenal gland of monkeys during a 24-hour period (six times a day, four-hour intervals).

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 8948 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — Testosterone may be known as the "male hormone," but researchers have discovered that female rock hyraxes have significantly higher levels of the chemical than their male counterparts. It is the first time an adult female mammal has been found to possess testosterone levels consistently equal to, or higher than, those found in males of the same species. Since female members of the furry, badger-like species often outrank males, the find suggests hormone levels may help determine who's the boss, and who is not. "Testosterone probably contributes to females’ aggression and social rank, along with other androgens as well," said Lee Koren, lead author of the study, which was recently published in the journal Hormones and Behavior. Koren, a researcher in the Zoology Department at Tel Aviv University, Israel, added, "High hormonal levels may also contribute to females’ lack of choosiness in the mating season. Finally, testosterone also acts as a stress hormone." "It is possible that females -- with their roles as mothers, sisters and group leaders -- are, understandably, very stressed," she said. Copyright © 2006 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Aggression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8947 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post Staff Writer Kathleen Delano had suffered from depression for years. Having tried psychotherapy and a number of antidepressant drugs in vain, she resigned herself to a life of suffering. Then she tried Botox, the drug that became a rage a few years ago for smoothing out facial wrinkles. In 2004, her physician injected five shots of the toxin into the muscles between Delano's eyebrows so that the Glenn Dale woman could no longer wrinkle her brow. Eight weeks later, according to a unusual study published this month, her depression had lifted. "I didn't wake up the next morning and say, 'Hallelujah, I am well, I am healed,' " she said in an interview, but she noticed changes. "I found myself able to do the things I hadn't been doing. I feel I broke out of the shackles of depression to be in the mood to go out, to reconnect with people." The pilot study of 10 patients is the first to provide empirical support for what a number of clinicians say they have noticed anecdotally: People who get their furrowed brows eliminated with Botox (botulinum toxin A) often report an improvement in mood. © 2006 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Depression; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 8946 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By TINA KELLEY Who knew there was a noise for this? And not just one noise, but a billionfold chirping, all night long, all spring, all fall, barely audible but as elemental as the grinding of the Earth on its axis. Jeff Wells, an avian ecologist, shared the tiny calls, slightly amplified, at a Nocturnal Bird Migration Concert Friday night at the Prospect Park Audubon Center. A simple high-powered microphone was set up on the center's roof, connected to Dr. Wells' computer, which displayed pictures of birds that migrate through the city at this time of year. He also showed spectrograms, or pictures of their calls as ascending or descending black zigzag ribbons, the audible thumbprint of each species. "I want to let you in on this great secret, a great mystery only a tiny, tiny number of people in the world ever know about," he told a group of about 25 people, his voice hypnotic in its wonderment. "They're all up there in the air, migrating while we sleep, on high highways of wind," said Dr. Wells, the senior scientist at the Boreal Songbird Initiative, a conservation group that tries to protect the endangered boreal, or northern, forest that stretches from Alaska to Newfoundland and is the summer home of three to five billion birds. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Migration; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 8945 - Posted: 05.22.2006

Sleep doesn't get much respect in today's fast-paced, productivity-obsessed society. It's just wasted time, a maintenance task forced on us by our biology. If we could hire someone else to do it for us, or engineer our bodies to require less of it, we surely would. We're so busy that we're now sleeping less per night than ever, and we're neglecting the consequences. Most of us are living in a continual state of sleep-deprivation, and it's making us sick, accident-prone, less intelligent and even less productive than we think. Paul Martin thinks we're a "sleep-sick society," and that it's time we gave sleep the attention it deserves in science, medicine, education and social policy. That thesis is at the heart of Martin's book, which is also an engaging tour of of the art in sleep science. We learn that sleep is more than just a lack of consciousness -- there's as much happening in our brains when we're asleep as when we’re awake. The purpose of all that activity is still somewhat mysterious, though, as sleep science is an immature field compared to our wakeful-mind sciences. The book is filled with information that ranges from basic to esoteric. What's behind circadian rhythms and sleep stages? Why is sleeping while sitting up never as restful as sleeping while horizontal? Is there a real difference between early- and late-risers or are some of us just lazy? How long can you go without sleep before it kills you? Why is "sleeping on it" a sound learning strategy? How do some animals manage to sleep with only half of their brain at a time?

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 8944 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The first evidence monkeys can string "words" together to communicate in a similar way to humans has been found. Putty-nosed monkeys in West Africa share the human ability to combine different sounds to mean different things, according to researchers. St Andrews University, UK, scientists found the creatures, in Nigeria's Gashaka Gumti National Park, used two main call types to warn of predators. But a particular sequence of calls also appeared to mean something else. The scientists identified two call types - "pyows" and "hacks" - which the monkeys use to alert each other to danger; but found a string of pyows warned of a loitering leopard, while a burst of hacks indicated a hovering eagle. A sentence made up of several pyows, followed by a few hacks, told the group to move to safer ground. Dr Kate Arnold, a primate psychologist, discovered the phenomena by playing variations of the calls back to the monkeys to see how they behaved. This showed they could encode fresh information by combining two existing calls, rather than creating a new sound, she said. "These calls were not produced randomly and a number of distinct patterns emerged," she said. "The pyow-hack sequence means something like 'let's go', whereas the pyows by themselves have multiple functions and the hacks are generally used as alarm calls. This is the first good example of animal calls being combined in meaningful ways. (C)BBC

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 8943 - Posted: 05.20.2006

Oxford University has applied to the High Court for an injunction against animal rights protesters who campaign against its biomedical research centre. It says that since building of the £20m centre resumed last November, threats and criminal damage have risen. QC Charles Flint said the injunction was needed to protect staff and students, adding an activist had made "clear threats" against the university. The university wants to extend the exclusion zone around the site. Mr Flint said Robin Webb of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) told the media that student accommodation was a legitimate target. He was also caught on camera showing an undercover journalist how to make a bomb, the QC said. "There can be no dispute whatsoever that the ALF is a criminal and terrorist organisation and there are persons unknown who have taken action in the name of the ALF against the university," he said. Mr Webb's counsel, Stephanie Harrison, applied for an adjournment of the case so he could answer properly. Oxford University already has temporary injunctions that limit when and how protests can take place, and also protect a wide group of university-related people from harassment. It allows a demonstration opposite the site on South Parks Road, on Thursday afternoons, but bans protest activities within the exclusion zone. It says builders have faced threats and disruption and there has been criminal damage at the site since work resumed there in November. (C)BBC

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 8942 - Posted: 05.20.2006

Getting your first pair of reading glasses may not the happiest landmark in your life, but unfortunately it's one of the most inevitable; over 90 percent of people over 40 years of age need help seeing nearby objects. For many this means fumbling around for the reading glasses, or wearing bifocals — and the split-screen view of the world that comes with them — far-focused on the top half, near-focused on the bottom. Now scientists at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences see an alternative: new electronic lenses that can entirely switch focus from near to far with the flick of a switch. They could eventually replace bifocals or reading glasses for people with presbyopia, the age-related decline in vision. "Bifocals make some people dizzy because of the fact that the same lens, different areas of the lens, have different focusing powers. So when they look up or down they go through different lenses," says Nasser Peyghambarian, who heads the research. As he explains, these "electro-active" lenses don't have that problem because the entire lens changes focus, making it feel much more like natural vision. © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 8941 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower Not only did the evolutionary parting of human from chimpanzee ancestors occur more recently than had been indicated by previous data, but it also played out over an extended period during which forerunners of people and chimps interbred. That controversial possibility arises from a new genetic comparison of people, chimps, gorillas, orangutans, and macaque monkeys. Various parts of the human genome diverged from those of chimps at times that span at least 4 million years, concludes a team led by geneticist David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston. A final genetic split, yielding reproductively separate ancestral species of humans and chimps, transpired between 6.3 million and 5.4 million years ago, the scientists report in an upcoming Nature. Most scientists had held that hominids and ancient chimps branched off from a common ancestor roughly 7 million years ago, with no interbreeding. Clues to ancient interbreeding lie on the X chromosome, Reich and his coworkers say. People and chimps exhibit far more similarity on that sex-linked DNA strand than on any of the other 22 chromosomes. Genetic detachment of human ancestors, or hominids, from chimps seems to have occurred on the X chromosome about 1.2 million years later than it did on other chromosomes, the scientists report. Copyright ©2006 Science Service

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 8940 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The deadly human form of mad cow disease, vCJD, may have infected far more people than previously thought, suggests a new study. The assumption that most people are genetically shielded from the devastating disease could be wrong, said the research published on Friday. But it cautions that the evidence for this remains sketchy. Variant Creutzfelt-Jakob disease (vCJD) is linked to eating meat infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as mad-cow disease. A rogue version of a prion protein proliferates in the brain, leading to distressing mental deterioration, loss of motor control, and eventually death. After vCJD was first identified in March 1996, some experts calculated it could inflict a death toll in the tens of thousands, especially in the UK, where the outbreak began. But these calculations were swiftly revised downwards to a few hundred or even fewer when it was realised that the toll was rising far slower than expected. At present, the UK has recorded 161 definite and probable cases of vCJD, six of whom are still alive. One reason for optimism about the potential extent of the vCJD epidemic has been the assumption that it is genetic. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 8939 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The story of human evolution that began when the earliest ancestors of humans and chimpanzees first separated from their common ancestor has taken a new turn with a claim that the epochal event may well have occurred millions of years more recently than the fossil record has long maintained. On top of that, the split of the two lineages was probably far more complex than anyone had thought -- with some of the earliest members of both lines interbreeding again and again before the two species finally separated permanently, according to scientists analyzing the genes of both modern chimps and modern humans. If that controversial claim turns out to be true, the famed fossil skull of the creature nicknamed Toumai -- and dated at roughly 7 million years old -- may have lived long before the final chimp-human split occurred, say researchers at the Broad Institute, a collaborative venture linking the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Toumai (Sahelanthropus tchadensis), discovered five years ago in the desert of Chad by French anthropologists, has until now been considered the earliest known hominid representative in the human lineages that split from a common ancestor of humans and chimps. ©2006 San Francisco Chronicle

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 8938 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Humans show remarkable foresight. From storing food to carrying tools, we can imagine, prepare for and, ultimately, steer the course of the future. Although many animals hoard food or build shelters, there is scant evidence that they ponder the long-term ramifications of their actions or the future more generally. But new research hints that our ape brethren may share our ability to think ahead. Nicholas Mulcahy and Josep Call of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig tested whether our closest great ape relative--the bonobo--and our most distant--the orangutan--share our ability to plan for the future. The researchers first trained five bonobos and five orangutans to use a tool to get a fruit treat from a mechanical apparatus. They then blocked access to the treat but allowed the apes to handle suitable and unsuitable tools for the task before ushering them into a waiting room for an hour. After that hour, they were brought back into the first room and, if they had brought the right tool, they could use it to get the treat. The apes both took a suitable tool out of the test room and brought it back in with them after the waiting period significantly more often than predicted by chance. A female orangutan named Dokana proved particularly adept, completing the task successfully in 15 out of 16 attempts. Even when the delay time was extended through the night--14 hours--Dokana succeeded in garnering the tool and the fruit more than half of the time. A bonobo named Kuno did even better with the long delay than the short one, completing the task in eight out of 12 attempts. © 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 8937 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katherine Unger The battle of the sexes is a bit lopsided when it comes to illegal drugs. Men have higher rates of addiction to stimulants such as methamphetamine, and they're also more likely to suffer brain damage from "meth" use. Now researchers have shown that amphetamine inspires males to release up to 3 times more dopamine than women release. That could help explain sex differences in all kinds of diseases associated with dopamine release--including Parkinson's and schizophrenia--and could lead to sex-specific treatments. Often referred to as a "pleasure molecule," dopamine is released by the brain's striatum as a reward for everything from eating chocolate to having sex. It's also intimately linked with drug use: The high from dopamine helps keep addicts hooked. Previous studies have found that male mice release more dopamine after amphetamine injection than their females counterparts do, indicating that dopamine may play a role in the addiction disparity seen between men and women. To test the theory, neuroendocrinologist Gary Wand and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, recruited 28 men and 15 women who didn't take drugs and were psychologically normal. They got a baseline reading of available dopamine receptors in their brains by injecting subjects with saline mixed with a radioactive chemical that binds to dopamine receptors and found no difference in available receptors between men and women. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8936 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Understanding the meaning behind a person's posture or body movement comes easily to many people and helps guide how we react to others socially. But people with schizophrenia, even those who have mild to moderate symptoms and take medications, are not fluent in understanding body language, according to a University of Iowa-led study that included investigators Nirav Bigelow, Ph.D., Sergio Paradiso, M.D., Ph.D., and Nancy C. Andreasen M.D., Ph.D. The results appear in the April 2006 issue of Schizophrenia Research. Previous studies conducted by Paradiso and Andreasen showed that patients with schizophrenia have trouble deciphering emotion from human facial expressions. However, it was not well understood whether this perception problem extended to other socially relevant clues, said Sergio Paradiso, the study's corresponding author and assistant professor of psychiatry in the UI Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine. "As we interact with people, we make judgments that we're not consciously aware of," Paradiso said. "If we see a coworker hunched over and don't see his face, we may approach him cautiously because we think something might be wrong and perhaps we can help. We don't see the face, but we glean information from the body language. People with schizophrenia are not as good at extracting this kind of information to guide their social interactions."

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 8935 - Posted: 05.19.2006