A rare genetic disorder is the cause of some strokes in young people, German researchers have said. Scientists in Rostock found 4% of over 700 people aged 18 to 55 years who had a stroke also had Fabry disease. And strokes occurred about a decade earlier in people with the condition, the study presented to the European Stroke Congress in Brussels, found. Experts said the findings only applied to a small number of people but did highlight a treatable cause of stroke. Fabry disease is caused by a missing or faulty enzyme needed by the body to process oils, waxes, and fatty acids. These lipids build up to harmful levels in the eyes, kidneys, nervous system, and cardiovascular system. People with the disease can die prematurely because of renal, cardiac or cerebrovascular complications. But the condition's progress can be slowed using enzyme replacement treatment. Researchers from the University of Rostock carried out genetic screening of over 700 adults suffering from unexplained stroke to see if they had Fabry disease. None had the typical risk factors for stroke, such as smoking or being severely obesity. It was found that nearly 5% of the male stroke patients and just over 2% of the female patients had gene linked to Fabry disease. (C)BBC

Keyword: Stroke; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 8986 - Posted: 05.30.2006

By KATHLEEN McGRORY It was supposed to be a typical ballet class. Cynthia Toussaint, then a senior dance major at the University of California, Irvine, engaged in her usual stretching routine: she raised her left leg to the barre and slowly bent her upper body down to her right knee. For a moment, she delighted in the long stretch. But as she returned to an upright position, she felt a sudden pop in her hamstring. "It felt like a guitar string had been plucked and it had broken," said Ms. Toussaint, who is now 45. An intense burning sensation followed; it felt as if her leg had been doused in gasoline and set on fire, she said. The next day, the college athletics trainer determined that she had pulled her hamstring. But even years later, the pain would not subside. It migrated to her other leg, leaving her bedridden for nearly a decade, and overtook her vocal cords, leaving her temporarily mute. All the while, doctors puzzled over and even doubted her mysterious condition. Ms. Toussaint now knows that she is among an estimated one million Americans living with complex regional pain syndrome, a nerve disorder formerly known as reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome. For patients with the disorder, a trauma as mild as a fractured wrist or a twisted ankle can cause the nerves to misfire, so much so that intense pain messages are constantly sent to the brain. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 8985 - Posted: 05.30.2006

By Ranit Mishori Bariatric surgery -- the stomach-shrinking operation performed to treat obesity -- works, and it is becoming safer all the time. But there's a catch often not understood by those who undergo the procedure: Once they lose the weight the surgery helps them lose, there may be more surgery to come -- surgery that is costlier and riskier and that requires a longer recovery time than the original operation. The reason: excess skin. An obese person who loses weight quickly will lose the fat but not the skin that once enveloped the fat. The arms, thighs, abdomen, breasts, all lose texture and sag. "It's as if a very, very large person all of a sudden had all the air let out, as if [he] were a doll," says Richard A. D'Amico, chief of the Department of Plastic Surgery at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center in Englewood, N.J. The solution: plastic surgery to remove the extra skin, a set of procedures known as body contouring. As bariatric surgery has grown more common (some 144,000 such procedures were performed in the United States in 2004, more than double the number in 2002), D'Amico says, patients seeking body contouring have "started to show up in plastic surgeons' offices in large numbers." Last year more than 68,000 patients underwent body contouring after bariatric surgery, 77 percent more than five years ago, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. © 2006 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 8984 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NEW YORK -- When recalling memories of negative or positive events that helped to shape our identity, such as a break-up or marriage, we tend to downplay the fear, anger or other negative emotions experienced at the time and remember more of the positive emotions, new study findings indicate. "These findings suggest that healthy individuals work to build a positive narrative identity that will yield an overall optimistic tone to the most important recalled events from their lives," write study authors Drs. Michael Conway and Wendy-Jo Wood, both of Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. The findings may also have implications for an individual's mental health. "Mental health is maintained or improved by people's attempts to make sense of their life experiences," Conway told Reuters Health. "People try to see the positive in even very difficult life experiences, and come to downplay, as much as they can, how negative some events were in the past," he explained. © 2002-2005 redOrbit.com.

Keyword: Emotions; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 8983 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A computer - or any digital system which processes and stores information - knows only two states: "on" and "off". While our brain may not be a computer, the signals of nerve cells can also represent "on" or "off" states, causing the receiving - "post-synaptic" - cells to either propagate the signal or to terminate signal transmission. The orchestrated interplay of stimulating and inhibitory signals is central to the development and functioning of the entire nervous system. If inhibitory neurons are prevented from carrying out their function, this causes major defects early in embryonal development - and these defects can even occur outside the nervous system. These are the results of a study recently published by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Göttingen (Neuron, May 18, 2006). The most common inhibitory transmitters in the mammalian central nervous system are GABA and glycine. Nerve cells can release GABA or glycine where they contact other nerve cells at junctions called synapses. This typically prevents further signal transmission by the post-synaptic cell. Most inhibitory nerve cells release either GABA or glycine. However, some inhibitory nerve cells appear to be "bilingual", releasing a mixture of GABA and glycine. These mixed-release cells are most common during nervous system development and seem to be crucial for normal spinal cord growth. For brain researchers, however, they have proven mysterious.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 8982 - Posted: 06.24.2010

New evidence that individual differences in human sexual desire can be attributed to genetic variations has been revealed by a research group headed by a professor of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The findings are believed to have an impact on people's understanding of their own sexuality as well as to how sexual disorders may come to be treated in the future. An article on the topic appears currently in Molecular Psychiatry online. The study represents the combined efforts of researchers directed by Prof. Richard P. Ebstein, of Herzog Hospital and the head of the Scheinfeld Center for Human Genetics in the Social Sciences of the Psychology Department at the Hebrew University, and a research group headed by Prof. Robert H. Belmaker of the Psychiatry Division of Ben Gurion University of the Negev. The article provides, for the first time, data that common variations in the sequence of DNA impact on sexual desire, arousal and function and lead to differences and diversity of the human sexual phenotype. The implications of these findings are far-reaching, say the researchers, and represent a revolutionary change in the way society, and especially psychology, may come to regard this central element of human behavior.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8981 - Posted: 05.30.2006

Research has confirmed listening to music can have a significant positive impact on perception of chronic pain. US researchers tested the effect of music on 60 patients who had endured years of chronic pain. Those who listened to music reported a cut in pain levels of up to 21%, and in associated depression of up to 25%, compared to those who did not listen. The Journal of Advanced Nursing study also found music helped people feel less disabled by their condition. The patients who took part in the study were recruited from pain and chiropractic clinics. They had been suffering from conditions such osteoarthritis, disc problems and rheumatoid arthritis for an average of six-and-a-half years. Most said the pain affected more than one part of their body, and was continuous. Some listened to music on a headset for an hour every day for a week, while the rest did not. Among those who listened to music, half were able to chose their favourite selections, the rest had to pick from a list of five relaxing tapes provided by the researchers. Researcher Dr Sandra Siedlecki, of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, said: "Our results show that listening to music had a statistically significant effect on the two experimental groups, reducing pain, depression and disability and increasing feelings of power. "There were some small differences between the two music groups, but they both showed consistent improvements in each category when compared to the control group. (C)BBC

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 8980 - Posted: 05.29.2006

By Tom Jackman There are discussions about mental health, debates about dollars, demands for more beds, mostly in general terms at the top of political and policy food chains. Then there is real life -- and real consequences. Check out the first two weeks of this month: May 1: A mentally ill 22-year-old man is convicted of murder for beheading his aunt in Arlington. May 8: A mentally ill 18-year-old man drives into a police parking lot in Fairfax County, fatally shoots two police officers, then is shot and killed by police. May 12: A mentally ill 24-year-old man allegedly stabs his mother to death in Fairfax City, then uses duct tape to seal the bathroom, where her body is found. May 14: A mentally ill 18-year-old man in Anne Arundel County stabs himself, then menaces police and demands that they shoot him, which they eventually do. He dies. The pace of violence hardly surprises those who deal with the mentally ill every day: social workers, police, parents, lawyers. They know how hard it is to get a sick person treatment, how few resources are available, how the money for help has declined. © 2006 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 8979 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By PAUL RAEBURN Three years ago, Mary Beth Towell, a counselor in Canton, Ohio, was assigned to a family in a crumbling neighborhood of dilapidated houses, drug dealers and gangs. Even in that tough neighborhood, this family stood out as desperate. In a single month, child-protective services fielded more than 30 calls from teachers, police officers and others demanding that the children be removed. The mother had bipolar disorder and was a heavy marijuana user. The children's father no longer lived in the home. Two of the girls, 15 and 10, and a boy, 11, were violent and suicidal. They threatened one another with knives and fought viciously. (The remaining child, a 14-year-old girl, was somehow O.K.) Few families in such bad shape survive intact. The children may be sent to residential treatment centers or juvenile corrections facilities. "These programs generate high recidivism rates," says Bart Lubow, director of the program for high-risk young people at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore. And they can cost at least $50,000 a year per child. "That would be O.K. if you were getting a reasonable return on your investment," Lubow says. "But the outcomes are very poor." Stark County in Ohio is trying something different. Towell was part of a team using an innovative antiviolence program called multisystemic therapy, or MST. Developed over the last 30 years by Scott Henggeler, a clinical psychologist and a professor of psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina, it is based on the assumptions that families should remain together and that all of the causes of antisocial behavior should be attacked at once. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 8978 - Posted: 05.29.2006

Researchers have discovered how the widely prescribed drug Prozac acts on the brain to counter depression. A team at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, New York, found the drug triggers production of a type of immature brain cell. They hope their work could aid development of new drugs and therapies for depression, and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. The study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. It has been known for some years that Prozac is likely to relieve the symptoms of depression by somehow causing more brain cells (neurons) to be born in a particular region of the brain called the dentate gyrus. But the origins of these neurons, and how Prozac promotes their existence, have been a mystery until now. The researchers analysed proteins produced by different kinds of cells in the brains of adult mice. This enabled them to track the steps involved in the complex process that converts immature stem cells into mature, specialised neurons. They found that Prozac had a specific effect on the second step of this pathway - it stimulated production of an intermediate form of the cells called ANPs (amplifying neural progenitors). As ANPs eventually go on to form fully-fledged neurons, this ultimately leads to increased neuron numbers in the dentate gyrus. The researchers are now testing other antidepressants and new drugs to establish whether they act in the same way. (C)BBC

Keyword: Depression; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 8977 - Posted: 05.27.2006

By GARDINER HARRIS WASHINGTON, May 26 — Federal drug regulators have approved the first vaccine intended to reduce the risk of shingles in people 60 and older. The vaccine, called Zostavax, is a souped-up version of the chickenpox vaccine. Both chickenpox and shingles are caused by the herpes zoster virus, which is present in almost everyone. The approval was announced on Friday. Zostavax, made by Merck, works by mimicking a shingles attack, but without the pain or blisters that shingles causes. The vaccine strengthens the body's immune response against the virus, reducing the chances of an outbreak, as well as the severity of the disease if it does occur. The science behind the vaccine is relatively simple. Zostavax is roughly equivalent to 14 doses of the pediatric chickenpox vaccine. Nonetheless, Zostavax represents a significant breakthrough, several scientists said. It is the first therapeutic vaccine, meaning it prevents or eases the severity of the problems from an infection that has already occurred. Scientists have been hoping to create such vaccines against cancer and AIDS, but without much success. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 8976 - Posted: 06.24.2010

More than half of the 185,000 amputations in the U.S. each year are a result of diabetes, a disease that plagues an estimated 20.8 million Americans -- seven percent of the population -- and is on the rise. Diabetic neuropathy, nerve damage that causes a loss of sensation in the hands and feet, can allow small injuries to go unnoticed and become severely infected. Tight control of blood sugar can keep neuropathy at bay, but there is no cure. "There are a variety of medications that are available now that can help with the pain but unfortunately, there's nothing available to help with numbness or prevention of nerve damage," says diabetes specialist Mark Kipnes, MD, director of the Diabetes and Glandular Disease Research Clinic in San Antonio, Texas. But now Kipnes is leading the first human testing of a new drug that might prevent or even reverse such damage. Designed by researchers at Sangamo Biosciences, it uses a natural protein that turns on the patient's own gene for helping nerve growth. As the researchers wrote in the journal "Diabetes," tests on diabetic rats showed that repeated treatments with the drug led to increasingly improved nerve function. © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Keyword: Regeneration; Obesity
Link ID: 8975 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Janet Raloff Erin Chesky was a sleep-troubled teen, typical of many. Despite going to bed early each night, this honor roll student struggled to doze off—sometimes lying awake until 3 a.m. Each morning, she fought equally hard to wake up at 5:30, in time to eat breakfast and catch the school bus. Forever tired, "I was like a zombie," she recalls. Last fall, a sleep specialist examined the 17-year-old from Colonie, N.Y. He diagnosed her with delayed sleep-phase syndrome, a condition in which the body's internal clock fails to synchronize appropriately with Earth's day-night cycle, which changes a few minutes each day. From birth, Erin and her siblings were night owls. When Erin turned 15 however, her biological clock really got off-kilter, triggering insomnia that threatened her schoolwork. Her mom recognized the affliction; it had struck her at the same age. For such teens, adhering to class schedules can be "like swimming upstream," says psychologist Paul Glovinsky of the Capital Region Sleep and Wake Disorders Center at St. Peter's Hospital in Albany, N.Y. Some teens fail to make it to school on time, or at all, 30 or more days a year. Copyright ©2006 Science Service

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sleep
Link ID: 8974 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower Henry was headed for serious trouble. The 15-year-old provoked an endless series of fights at school and frequently bullied girls. Teachers regularly suspended him for his classroom disruptions. Older students taunted Henry in the hallways by calling him a sexual pervert or jeered him for having been held back in kindergarten. At home, his father browbeat and denigrated the boy, while his mother cried and muttered about how sick Henry had become. Henry liked violent video games. He downloaded information from a Web site on how to make pipe bombs and drew pictures of gory deaths of people who mistreated him. The boy openly expressed jealousy of the attention lavished on the youths in Columbine, Colo., who in 1999 fatally shot 12 of their classmates and a teacher and then committed suicide. In 2001, Henry's life took a fortunate turn. At his high school principal's insistence, he and his parents sought psychotherapy from Stuart W. Twemlow of the Menninger Clinic in Houston. In individual and family sessions, psychiatrist Twemlow zeroed in on the boy's fury at his parents and his tendency at school to view himself as a passive victim who needed to strike back at evil tormenters. Copyright ©2006 Science Service

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 8973 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Drinking alcohol every day protects against heart disease in men but not in women, Danish research shows. A study of 50,000 people found that men who drank daily had a 41% reduced risk of coronary heart disease compared with a 7% drop in men who drank once a week. In women, the risk of heart disease fell by a third with a weekly drink but did not fall further in daily drinkers. Experts warned the results, published in the British Medical Journal, should not be used to justify heavy drinking. Previous research has shown that moderate alcohol intake is associated with a lower risk of heart disease, but up until now most studies have been in men. Men and women aged 50-65 who took part in this study were questioned on their drinking behaviour and then followed for an average of six years. Women drank an average of five and a half drinks a week, and men consumed 11. In men, the risk of heart disease fell significantly with increased frequency of drinking - with men who drank a little every day having the lowest risk. But for women, although drinking on at least one day a week was associated with a 36% reduced risk of heart disease compared to those who drank more rarely, the risk was the same whether women had one drink a week or drank moderately each day. The researchers said how much women drank may be more important for protection against heart disease than how often they drank. (C)BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8972 - Posted: 05.26.2006

By Marc Kaufman The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer. The new findings "were against our expectations," said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years. "We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use," he said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect." Federal health and drug enforcement officials have widely used Tashkin's previous work on marijuana to make the case that the drug is dangerous. Tashkin said that while he still believes marijuana is potentially harmful, its cancer-causing effects appear to be of less concern than previously thought. Earlier work established that marijuana does contain cancer-causing chemicals as potentially harmful as those in tobacco, he said. However, marijuana also contains the chemical THC, which he said may kill aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous. © 2006 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 8971 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by David Ng I'm always drawn to the early episodes in a season of "American Idol." They're entertaining, as guilty pleasures tend to be, but also intriguing in a way that speaks to my scientific curiosity. I'm referring to the multitude of contestants that perform, umm...shall we say, dissonantly—meaning they are seriously out of tune, even awful. What's especially interesting is that often these same contestants are completely ignorant of this fact, sometimes defiantly so. As a scientist, I feel compelled to seek an explanation somewhere in the scientific literature. Fortunately, music is something that's ubiquitous in all human cultures, geographically and historically. Consequently, there is a lot of research out there—although regrettably, a lot of it tends to use an upsetting amount of science jargon. We should be grateful that album liner notes do not contain sentences like: Thanks go to the "physiological studies in monkeys [that] suggest that roughness may be represented in the primary auditory cortex by oscillatory neuronal ensemble responses phase-locked to the amplitude-modulated temporal envelope of complex sounds." A significant chunk of this literature focuses on the concept of pitch, a subjective quality, depending entirely on the listener's perception of a musical note. Likewise, this inherently also involves the notion of frequency, the cold empirical measure equating a note to the number of vibrations per second it produces. Pitch differs from frequency in the same way the statement, "That's a nice sounding A" differs from the statement, "It's emitting at 440 Hz." © Copyright 2006 Seed Media Group, LLC.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 8970 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A young Australian scientist has made an important discovery about how brain cells communicate. This finding is central to understanding all brain function – from laying down memory to being able to walk The groundbreaking research has been published in the latest edition of world-leading journal Nature Neuroscience. Victor Anggono, a PhD student at the Children's Medical Research Institute (CMRI), set out to identify the molecular partners of a key protein called dynamin, and how their partnership allows neurons to send messages . The result was astounding. A protein called syndapin, previously thought to have no major role in nerve communication, was proven to be the molecule that simultaneously works with dynamin to allow the transmission of messages between nerve cells. The brain functions by sending chemical messages between nerves. The messages, or neurotranmsitters, are held in tiny packages at the nerve terminal where they are released to send a signal. The packages then return to the cell and are re-filled so that brain function can continue. In collaboration with researchers from the University of Edinburgh further studies have revealed that by blocking the interaction of these two proteins nerve communication shuts down.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 8969 - Posted: 06.24.2010

EAST LANSING, Mich. – Although most of us cringe at the sound of the words “parasitic worms,” it’s a fact that some of these creatures are actually good for us. At Michigan State University, researcher Linda Mansfield is part of a national team of scientists investigating the role that parasites can play in treating inflammatory bowel disease, or IBD, in humans. Her research is part of a more than $10 million National Institutes of Health grant supporting the Food and Waterborne Diseases Integrated Research Network of laboratories launched by the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Some researchers argue that improved hygiene throughout the developed world may be responsible for inflammatory bowel disease, as well as a whole range of autoimmune disorders. According to this "hygiene hypothesis," immune systems require exposure to infections of all sorts early in life in order to develop sufficiently. Intriguingly, inflammatory bowel disease, which has two forms – Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis – is virtually unknown in the developing world, while it is increasing dramatically in developed societies. When people from developing countries move to developed ones, their incidence of the disease tends to increase. © 2006 Michigan State University Division of University Relations

Keyword: Stress; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 8968 - Posted: 06.24.2010

It takes time – between three and 12 months – before a new type of therapy for treatment-resistant depression starts to benefit patients, according to new preliminary brain scan research that confirms earlier observations by psychiatrists about vagal nerve stimulation. Saint Louis University, working in collaboration with Washington University School of Medicine, conducted a pilot study of brain scans of a small group of depressed patients who received vagal nerve stimulation after failing other therapies. Positron emission tomography (PET) scans showed significant changes in brain activity starting three months after vagal nerve stimulation treatment began. These changes continued to evolve over the course of the next 21 months. These changes in brain scans appear to "roughly parallel" the significantly delayed effects that psychiatrists observed in improvement in mood. "The effects come after a significant period of treatment time," said Charles Conway, M.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry at Saint Louis University School of Medicine and the lead investigator of a vagal nerve stimulation research project conducted between 2000 and 2004. Psychiatrists are not used to such a long time lag before a treatment begins to be effective, he added.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 8967 - Posted: 06.24.2010