By David Brown Heart surgery can help bring on depression, and depression can worsen heart disease. But the relationship between the two conditions is complicated, murky and indirect, according to experts and numerous research studies. The issue arose with the revelation that publisher and former diplomat Philip Merrill had apparently committed suicide while sailing alone on the Chesapeake Bay this month. It had been assumed that he had drowned after falling overboard. When his body was found Monday with a gunshot wound in the head, Merrill's family noted in a statement that he had undergone "significant heart surgery over a year ago" and was taking "several medications" for his heart. "Over the past four weeks," the statement said, "we observed that his spirit had dimmed. We spoke to him and consulted his physician about it. He was fatigued and unmotivated, a clear departure from his lifelong optimistic outlook and irrepressible spirit." Details of the 72-year-old's medical history were not available. Studies have found that 10 to 30 percent of people who have heart attacks or heart surgery develop depression afterward. Usually the mood disorder appears immediately after the illness or procedure, although occasionally it comes on months later. © 2006 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Depression; Stress
Link ID: 9046 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. The long lives that some former cannibals enjoy before succumbing to a brain-wasting disease suggest that many more humans will eventually die of mad cow disease, scientists said Thursday. But several experts in such illnesses, called prion diseases — which are blamed for killing New Guinea cannibals and British eaters of infected beef — disagreed with that frightening implication of the study, which is to be published Friday in The Lancet, a British medical journal. These experts praised the rigorous work the authors of the report did to confirm that kuru, a disease that once decimated highland tribes in New Guinea, can incubate for 50 years in a few genetically protected people. But the experts said they thought that the findings did not prove that there would be future waves of deaths among people who ate beef from prion-infected cows in the 1980's. "That's a provocative conclusion, but I'm not sure it's totally plausible," said Dr. David Westaway, a prion expert at the University of Toronto. Thus far, only about 160 people, mostly in Britain, have died of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which humans get from cows that had bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 9045 - Posted: 06.24.2010

No one can deny that becoming a dad is a life-changing experience. And despite an increase in sleepless nights and newly acquired diaper-changing duties, most would agree that it's a deeply enriching and positive one. New findings by brain researcher Kelly Lambert, professor and chair of the psychology department at Randolph-Macon College, suggest that fatherhood may change more than just a man's lifestyle – it may actually cause lasting benefits in his brain. Lambert's research on mother rats has provided mounting evidence that motherhood benefits the brain. She found that mom rats do better on learning and memory tests than non-moms, and are also bolder, suggesting that they are protected against the damaging effects of stress. Lambert linked these changes to the flood of hormones that accompany pregnancy and lactation, but as she wrote in Scientific American magazine, even non-mom rats given "foster" pups showed changes in these areas. Lambert got interested in the possibility that the same could be true for rodent dads. Her most recent experiments show that dads actually do outperform bachelors of the same species at locating food and show less stress in new situations, such as when encountering unfamiliar objects. © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9044 - Posted: 06.24.2010

For the first time, researchers have enticed transplants of embryonic stem cell-derived motor neurons in the spinal cord to connect with muscles and partially restore function in paralyzed animals. The study suggests that similar techniques may be useful for treating such disorders as spinal cord injury, transverse myelitis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and spinal muscular atrophy. The study was funded in part by the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). The researchers, led by Douglas Kerr, M.D., Ph.D., of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, used a combination of transplanted motor neurons, chemicals capable of overcoming signals that inhibit axon growth, and a nerve growth factor to attract axons to muscles. The report is published in the July 2006 issue of Annals of Neurology.* "This work is a remarkable advance that can help us understand how stem cells might be used to treat injuries and disease and begin to fulfill their great promise. The successful demonstration of functional restoration is proof of the principle and an important step forward. We must remember, however, that we still have a great distance to go," says Elias A. Zerhouni, Director of the National Institutes of Health.

Keyword: Regeneration; Stem Cells
Link ID: 9043 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Helen Pearson Migraine sufferers might soon be able to block an imminent attack using a device that targets the brain with a powerful magnetic field. The technique, called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), triggers activity in the brain's nerve cells and is already being tested as a way to treat depression. Two small clinical trials have now shown that delivering TMS to the brain in the early stages of a migraine seems to halt it in its tracks. Migraines are crippling headaches that affect around 10% of people in the United States. They are sometime preceded by an 'aura', in which a person sees flashing or shimmering light, blind spots or feels tingling. Yousef Mohammad at Ohio State University Medical Center, Columbus, and his colleagues asked 43 patients to come to the hospital's emergency room when they experienced an aura. Half of them received two short blasts of TMS to the back of the head and half received a placebo blast. After two hours, nearly 70% of the patients who received the TMS reported that they had a mild headache or none at all, compared with 48% of those who received the placebo. Most studies of migraine, like this one, tend to show a very strong placebo effect from a dummy treatment. Mohammad reports his results at the American Headache Society (AHS) meeting in Los Angeles today. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 9042 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Brain cells can be enticed into forming uniform functioning patterns using a nano-engineering trick. The technique could allow the development of sophisticated biological sensors that use functioning brain cells, the researchers say. This type of device would identify a compound - a deadly nerve agent or poison, for example - by measuring its effect on a functioning network of neurons. A team led by Yael Hanein of Tel Aviv University in Israel used 100-micrometre-wide bundles of nanotubes to coax rat neurons into forming regular patterns on a sheet of quartz. The neurons cannot stick to the quartz surface but do bind to the nanotube dots, in clusters of about between 20 and 100. Once attached, these neuron bundles are just the right distance from one another to stretch out projections called axons and dendrites to make links with other clusters nearby. Electrical activity Axons and dendrites carry electrical signals between neurons. The electrical activity of the neural network can easily be measured because carbon nanotubes conduct electricity and so can function as electrodes. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Robotics
Link ID: 9041 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have pinpointed defects in a critical cellular pathway that can lead to the death of dopamine-producing nerve cells and ultimately symptoms of Parkinson's disease. They have also used several animal models of the disease to identify a new way to rescue dying neurons. According to the researchers, the findings offer a promising opportunity for developing new drugs to treat the underlying causes of Parkinson's disease and related neurodegenerative disorders. The research team, which included Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators Susan L. Lindquist and Nancy M. Bonini, published their findings on June 22, 2006, in Science Express, which provides electronic publication of selected Science papers in advance of print. Lindquist is at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and Bonini is at the University of Pennsylvania. Antony Cooper of the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Aaron Gitler, who is in Lindquist's laboratory, were co-lead authors on the paper. Other co-authors were from Purdue University, the University of Alabama, Medical College of Georgia and New York University. The researchers' began their experiments seeking to clarify the role of the protein alpha-synuclein in Parkinson's disease. It had long been known that abnormalities in alpha-synuclein could cause a lethal buildup of the protein in neurons. Researchers also knew that accumulation of alpha-synuclein caused neurodegeneration in animal models of Parkinson's disease, but little was known about alpha-synuclein's normal cellular function or how it contributed to disease. One major problem facing researchers, Lindquist said, was that alpha-synuclein accumulation causes a range of abnormalities, and it was not possible to sort out which were causes and which were effects in Parkinson's disease pathology. © 2006 Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 9040 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY One of the most widely used treatments for the eating disorder anorexia nervosa, the antidepressant Prozac, works no better than dummy pills in preventing recurrence in young women who have recovered from it, researchers are reporting today. The study, the most rigorous to date to test the use of medication for anorexia, should alter treatment for an illness that is often devastatingly chronic and that has a higher mortality than any other psychiatric disorder, experts said. Fewer than a third of the study's participants, who also received regular psychotherapy, remained healthy for a year or more, whether they received drug treatment or not, the study found. An estimated 1 percent of Americans, or about three million people, mostly young women, will at some point suffer from the self-starvation and obsessive anxiety about weight that characterize anorexia, and surveys find that about two-thirds of them receive treatment with Prozac or similar antidepressants, which are considered generally interchangeable. Research suggests that the drugs can be useful in helping people recover from bulimia nervosa, an eating disorder involving bingeing and purging that causes less dramatic weight loss than anorexia. But the new findings put to rest hopes from earlier work that these benefits might carry over to anorexia, experts said. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia; Depression
Link ID: 9039 - Posted: 06.15.2006

By AMY HARMON Jason Dallas used to think of his daredevil streak — a love of backcountry skiing, mountain bikes and fast vehicles — as "a personality thing." Jason Dallas of Seattle says he believes he is genetically predisposed toward risky behavior like backcountry skiing and mountain biking. Then he heard that scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle had linked risk-taking behavior in mice to a gene. Those without it pranced unprotected along a steel beam instead of huddling in safety like the other mice. Now Mr. Dallas, a chef in Seattle, is convinced he has a genetic predisposition for risk-taking, a conclusion the researchers say is not unwarranted, since they believe similar variations in human genes can explain why people perceive danger differently. "It's in your blood," Mr. Dallas said. "You hear people say that kind of thing, but now you know it really is." A growing understanding of human genetics is prompting fresh consideration of how much control people have over who they are and how they act. The recent discoveries include genes that seem to influence whether an individual is fat, has a gift for dance or will be addicted to cigarettes. Pronouncements about the power of genes seem to be in the news almost daily, and are changing the way some Americans feel about themselves, their flaws and their talents, as well as the decisions they make. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 9038 - Posted: 06.24.2010

LA JOLLA, CA - Wiring the developing brain is like creating a topiary garden. Shrubs don't automatically assume the shape of ornamental elephants, and neither do immature nerve cells immediately recognize the "right" target cell. Abundant foliage, either vegetal or neuronal, must first sprout and then be sculpted into an ordered structure. Neurons extend fibers called axons to target cells in an exuberant manner--some branch to the "wrong" cells while others shoot past their target cells. Axon pieces that went astray degenerate, effectively being "pruned" back. Similarly, when axons are forcibly severed or seriously injured by disease in adults, they die and are removed by degeneration. Scientists have speculated that the same molecular shears used to trim axon branches in injured adult axons also do so during normal developmental pruning. In a forthcoming issue of Neuron, teams at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and Stanford University revise that notion and, in doing so, suggest how nerve function could be preserved after injury. The collaboration began when senior co-authors Liqun Luo, PhD., a professor at Stanford University and Howard Hughes Medical Investigator, and Dennis D.M. O'Leary, a professor in the Salk Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory, co-wrote a review on neurodegeneration. Of O'Leary, Luo says, "When they asked me to write this review I found that half these things were started by Dennis." O'Leary adds, "We had a great time writing the review and it hatched the idea to combine our ideas."

Keyword: Apoptosis; Regeneration
Link ID: 9037 - Posted: 06.15.2006

Researchers are working on ways to reduce the need for animal experiments, but new laws may increase the number of experiments needed That ideal world, sadly, is still some way away. People need new drugs and vaccines. They want protection from the toxicity of chemicals. The search for basic scientific answers goes on. Indeed, the European Commission is forging ahead with proposals that will increase the number of animal experiments carried out in the European Union, by requiring toxicity tests on every chemical approved for use within the union's borders in the past 25 years. Already, the commission has identified 140,000 chemicals that have not yet been tested. It wants 30,000 of these to be examined right away, and plans to spend between €4 billion-8 billion ($5 billion-10 billion) doing so. The number of animals used for toxicity testing in Europe will thus, experts reckon, quintuple from just over 1m a year to about 5m, unless they are saved by some dramatic advances in non-animal testing technology. At the moment, roughly 10% of European animal tests are for general toxicity, 35% for basic research, 45% for drugs and vaccines, and the remaining 10% a variety of uses such as diagnosing diseases. Animal experimentation will therefore be around for some time yet. But the hunt for substitutes continues, and last weekend the Middle European Society for Alternative Methods to Animal Testing met in Linz, Austria, to review progress. © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2006

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 9036 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jim Dryden -- A new study suggests the brain is quickly turned on and "tuned in" when a person views erotic images. This brain map shows differences in reactions to erotic and neutral visual materials. Red zones represent the largest differences, suggesting that circuits in the frontal parts of the brain are particularly sensitive to erotic content and the fastest to detect the difference. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis measured brainwave activity of 264 women as they viewed a series of 55 color slides that contained various scenes from water skiers to snarling dogs to partially-clad couples in sensual poses. What they found may seem like a "no brainer." When study volunteers viewed erotic pictures, their brains produced electrical responses that were stronger than those elicited by other material that was viewed, no matter how pleasant or disturbing the other material may have been. This difference in brainwave response emerged very quickly, suggesting that different neural circuits may be involved in the processing of erotic images. "That surprised us," says first author Andrey P. Anokhin, Ph.D., research assistant professor of psychiatry. "We believed both pleasant and disturbing images would evoke a rapid response, but erotic scenes always elicited the strongest response."

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9035 - Posted: 06.15.2006

Researchers have discovered that Broca's area in the brain--best known as the region that evolved to manage speech production--is a major "executive" center in the brain for organizing hierarchies of behaviors. Such planning ability, from cooking a meal to organizing a space mission, is considered one of the hallmarks of human intelligence. The researchers found that Broca's area--which lies on the left side of the brain about in the temple region--and its counterpart on the right side activate when people are asked to organize plans of action. They said their finding of the general executive function of Broca's area could explain its key role in language production. Importantly, the researchers found that this executive function of these cortical regions was distinct from the organization of temporal sequences of actions. The researchers, Etienne Koechlin and Thomas Jubault of Université Pierre et Marie Curie and Ecole Normale Supérieure, described their experiments in the June 15, 2006, issue of Neuron. In their experiments, the researchers asked volunteers to execute a sequence of button presses when they saw colored squares or letters on a screen. Koechlin and Jubault designed their experiment so that they could precisely distinguish hierarchical planning of tasks from the temporal organization of tasks. The subjects were asked to perform both simple sequences of button presses in response to a stimulus, "simple action chunks," and "superordinate action chunks." Simple action chucks were single motor acts that required sequential action. Superordinate action chunks included "a sequence of categorization tasks, like sorting a deck of playing cards first by color, then by suit, then by rank."

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 9034 - Posted: 06.15.2006

As any gambler knows, the most important decision is where to play. Some flit from table to table, machine to machine and game to game. Others prefer to settle in for the long haul. Now researchers have used those tendencies to probe the function of the human brain as it chooses between the familiar and the unknown. Nathaniel Daw and John O'Doherty of University College London and their colleagues employed slot machines and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how 14 healthy subjects decided between reaping steady profits at a given slot machine or testing the profit potential of a new one. Scientists call the behavior of utilizing a known resource exploitation; the term they give to the behavior of seeking an even better resource is exploration. Although exploitation seems the safe bet, survival can depend on judicious use of exploration. "The desire to select what seems the richest option is always balanced against the desire to choose a less familiar option that might turn out to serve better," Daw explains. "Most people switch between exploring and exploiting seamlessly and this has always made it hard to distinguish between someone who is doing something they know will offer the highest payout and a person who is testing out new options." To so distinguish, the neuroscientists set up four slot machines to pay off at four different average rates. After each trial, these payoffs changed randomly from machine to machine. In order to discover which slot machine paid the most, a given subject would have to try it at the risk of abandoning a higher paying machine. After the tests, the subjects reported occasionally trying different machines to find the highest reward and sometimes sticking with a slot that they thought offered the most. © 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc. All

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 9033 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Ronald Kahn, president of Boston's Joslin Diabetes Center, and his team have identified genes that correlate to where our bodies store fat. He said that, "They're fundamental genes" that are among those that map out how we should grow. He explained that these developmental genes, "tell us that our head should be at one end and that our feet should be at the other ... and these genes also determine both potentially how much fat we have and where that fat is deposited." Kahn says fat location is important in diabetes research because, "Fat that is located in our belly, what we call central obesity, makes us more prone to diabetes than fat located elsewhere in our body, like our hips or thighs." Kahn says it's because, "This fat creates more insulin resistance…[and]…that insulin is the major hormone that controls our blood sugar." Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Kahn says he and his team found this connection by studying fat in both mice and in people. Kahn says, "We're very excited about this insight into obesity and body fat distribution because this is the first time we've ever had a clue as to how these aspects of our body are so fundamentally determined with these early developmental genes." © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 9032 - Posted: 06.24.2010

UPTON, NY -- Ask anyone who has been addicted to drugs and they'll tell you that the mere sight of someone using their drug of choice -- or even people, places, or objects associated with drug use -- can trigger an intense desire for the drug. Using sophisticated brain-imaging techniques at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, scientists from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), Brookhaven Lab, and the University of Pennsylvania have uncovered the brain chemistry that underlies such "cue-induced" craving in cocaine addicts. The work, which appears in the June 14, 2006 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, suggests new targets for medications aimed at treating addiction. "Drug craving triggered by cues, such as the sight, smell, and other sensory stimuli associated with a particular drug like cocaine, is central to addiction and poses an obstacle to successful therapy for many individuals," says NIDA Director Nora D. Volkow, lead author on the study and former Associate Laboratory Director for life sciences research at Brookhaven Lab. "Today we can actually see increases in specific brain activities that are linked to this experience. If we can understand the mechanisms related to cue-induced craving, we can develop more effective treatment strategies to counteract it." Previous research conducted at Brookhaven and elsewhere has shown that all addictive drugs increase the level of dopamine -- a neurotransmitter, or chemical messenger, associated with feelings of reward and pleasure -- in a part of the brain known as the nucleus accumbens.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 9031 - Posted: 06.15.2006

By Michael Hochman Shy people may be quiet, but there's a lot going on in their heads. When they encounter a frightening or unfamiliar situation--meeting someone new, for example--a brain region responsible for negative emotions goes into overdrive. But new research indicates that shy people may be more sensitive to all sorts of stimuli, not just frightening ones. The findings come courtesy of brain scans of 13 extremely shy adolescents and 19 outgoing ones. Researchers, led by Amanda Guyer, a development psychologist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, placed each child in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and had them play games in which they could win or lose money. The study subjects--who were classified as either shy or outgoing based on psychological testing--were instructed to press a button as quickly as possible after being shown a signal. If they pressed the button in time, they won money, or at least prevented themselves from losing it. Both groups performed similarly, and there was no difference in the activity of their amygdalas--the brain region that governs fear. Shy children, however, showed two to three times more activity in their striatum, which is associated with reward, than outgoing children, the team reports in the 14 June issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. "Up until now, people thought that [shyness] was mostly related to avoidance of social situations," says co-author and child psychiatrist Monique Ernst. "Here we showed that shy children have increased activity in the reward system of the brain as well." © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Stress
Link ID: 9030 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tracy Staedter, Discovery News — A new study could take the mystery out of a horse whisperer’s job. The Equine Vocalization Project is compiling a database of horse talk and behavior in an attempt to correlate nuances in their whinnies with differences in their stress levels. The information could help shed light on the communication styles of other equines, such as donkeys and zebras, and even improve how veterinarians, behaviorists, breeders or other animal handlers relate to horses. "You would like to find that you get a particular whinny for a particular situation," said physicist David Browning, an adjunct professor at the University of Rhode Island, who along with Peter Scheifele, a research associate at the University of Connecticut, announced their project last week at the Acoustical Society of America in Providence, RI. Unlike the monotonal vocalizations of cows, goats, and sheep, horses emit a range of sounds from snorts, blows and sighs to whinnies, which also come in the form of nickers and squeals. Browning’s initial acoustical studies have shown that whinnies have the greatest changes in frequency and could contain information about specific situations. © 2006 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Language; Stress
Link ID: 9029 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Trying to get someone's attention? Looking angry may be the key. The face most likely to stand out in a crowd is an irate one, according to a new study, and men are better than women at picking up the anger that a face conveys. On the other hand, women are more adept at detecting more socially relevant expressions that communicate happiness, sadness, surprise and disgust. "The really interesting effect," said Mark A. Williams, the study's lead author, "is the difference between males and females." Dr. Williams, a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his co-author, Jason B. Mattingley, a psychology professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, set out to measure how efficiently the emotions conveyed by facial expressions are identified in a large group by others. The results appear in the June issue of Current Biology. In the experiment, they showed arrays of human faces to 78 men and 78 women, using photographs displaying angry, fearful, happy, sad, surprised, disgusted or neutral expressions. First, participants were shown a group of four photographs depicting three neutral expressions and one expression that was clearly angry — brow compressed, eyes narrowed, teeth flashing in a menacing grimace. The subjects were asked to pick out, as quickly as they could, the angry face from all the others. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9028 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers at Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, and Ceregene Inc., San Diego, have successfully used gene therapy to preserve motor function and stop the anatomic, cellular changes that occur in the brains of mice with Huntington’s disease (HD). This is the first study to demonstrate that, using this delivery method, symptom onset might be prevented in HD mice with this treatment. Results of the study were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesof the United States, June 13, 2006. “This could be an important step toward a disease modifying therapy,” says co-author Jeffrey H. Kordower, Ph.D., director of the Research Center for Brain Repair at Rush. “We could potentially be stopping the disease process in its tracks, delaying symptoms from ever showing up.” Huntington's disease is an inherited degenerative disease that progressively robs patients of the ability to think, judge appropriately, control their emotions and perform coordinated tasks. HD typically begins in mid-life, between the ages of 40 and 50. There is no effective treatment or cure for this fatal illness that affects 30,000 Americans and places another 75,000 at risk. Kordower says this research, if eventually applied to humans, could help those who have HD or, due to the presence of a genetic test, are known to be destined to get HD. © Rush University Medical Center,

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 9027 - Posted: 06.24.2010