New findings from a study supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), National Institutes of Health, show that girls and boys who exhibit high levels of risky behaviors have similar chances of developing symptoms of depression. However, gender differences become apparent with low and moderate levels of risky behaviors with girls being significantly more likely than boys to experience symptoms of depression. The study, which incorporates data from almost 19,000 teens, is published in the May 15, 2006 issue of the Archives of Women’s Mental Health. “The burden of illness associated with depression during adolescence is considerable, and psychosocial problems — including substance abuse — are associated with depressive disorders in teens,” says NIDA Director Dr. Nora D. Volkow. “The findings from this study create a more complete picture of commonalities and differences of the risk of depression among boys and girls who engage in risky behaviors, and provide information for healthcare providers to consider as they screen, evaluate, and treat their young patients.” Symptoms of depression include loss of appetite, feeling blue, loss of interest in things that used to be of interest, being bothered by things that previously were not bothersome, and not feeling hopeful about the future. Dr. Martha Waller, of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, and her colleagues provided new findings from teen interviews conducted as part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health in 1995.

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 8926 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi A potent molecule that causes more regeneration of eye nerves than any other known has been found by researchers. The damaged eye nerves of rats that received injections of the protein showed five times better recovery than those that did not. Drugs developed from the newly isolated protein – called oncomodulin – might one day even help heal spinal cord injury in humans. But experts stress that they have not yet tested to see if spinal cells respond to the molecule. Several years ago, Larry Benowitz of the Children’s Hospital Boston, Massachusetts, US, and his colleagues demonstrated that the inflammatory response triggered by eye injury somehow promoted nerve regeneration in that organ. The body usually shuts down nerve regeneration after injury, probably to prevent erroneous re-connections being made, but the eye seems to be an exception in this instance. Nonetheless, isolating the molecule that promoted this healing remained a tough task. Using biochemical methods, researchers separated the proteins produced by immune cells called macrophages, which drive the inflammatory response. They then embarked on the time-consuming task of individually testing each of the isolated proteins on nerve cells in a dish. The cells came from the rat retina, part of the back of the eye that translates light into nerve signals. Among all of the isolated proteins, oncomodulin caused significantly more nerve cell growth than the rest. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Regeneration
Link ID: 8925 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jessica Marshall A new mouse model may help explain exactly what happens in the brain in response to antidepressants like Prozac. The research may hold huge potential for understanding and screening new treatments for depression. And the wide variety of existing treatments may have more in common than was previously thought, the researchers suggest. Prozac (fluoxetine), one of the most common drug treatments for depression, acts by stimulating the growth of new neurons in the brain’s hippocampus. Grigori Enikolopov and his team from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, US, wanted to narrow down which steps in this growth process, called neurogenesis, Prozac was influencing. So the team engineered mice with nuclei in their nerve cells that glow green during neurogenesis. This made it easy to count and compare the number of developing neurons. By tracking other factors associated with different stages of neurogenesis, Enikolopov’s team found that only one step was influenced by Prozac. The drug did not promote neuron growth by stimulating stem cells, but rather by stimulating the division of cells just "downstream" of the stem cell, called amplifying neural progenitor cells, which have already committed to becoming neurons. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Depression; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 8924 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Working mothers with steady relationships are the healthiest women - while housewives are the most likely to be obese, a UK study suggests. Experts followed 1,200 women from 15 to 54 in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health study. Some 23% of those with multiple roles were obese, compared with 38% among the long-term homemakers. The researchers say the findings show the short-term stress of juggling roles is outweighed by long-term benefits. They used data on women taking part in the Medical Research Council's National Study of Health and Development, which tracks the long-term health of British men and women born in 1946. The women's health at 26 and at 54 was assessed using a questionnaire, while details were taken about employment history, marital status, and whether they had children, for every decade from their mid-20s. Their weight and height were also measured at regular intervals. Analysis of the information showed that by the age of 54 women who had been partners, parents and employees were significantly less likely to report ill health than women who did not fulfil all three roles. Women who had been homemakers for all or most of their lives, and had not held down a job, were most likely to say their health was poor, followed by lone mothers and childless women. Thirty-eight per cent of long-term homemakers were obese compared with 23% of working mothers who had had steady relationships. (C)BBC

Keyword: Stress; Obesity
Link ID: 8923 - Posted: 05.15.2006

New mothers with postnatal depression experience poor care and are usually given pills when they should have therapy, a mental health charity says. Mind's snapshot survey of 148 women in England found one in 10 had to wait over a year for treatment. And four-fifths of those admitted to psychiatric wards were separated from their babies. The government's mental health tsar said it was working on improving access to effective care and treatment. Mind said one in six women is known to be affected by mental distress during pregnancy or following childbirth, and 25% of all maternal deaths are linked to mental health problems. Its survey found 75% of the women were given medication, with the remainder offered counselling. Over two-thirds had to wait more than a month for treatment. Ninety per cent of the women said the problems they experienced in accessing care were due to a lack of understanding by health professionals The situation was worst in the north of England. The charity said its key concerns were a lack of mother and baby units - with just 17 in England and Wales, two in Scotland and none in Northern Ireland - poor treatment choice, and lack of training for health professionals leading to diagnosis problems. A spokeswoman added: "Although postnatal depression is publicly recognised, many people, including health professionals, don't recognise it quickly enough as being more than just 'baby blues'. (C)BBC

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 8922 - Posted: 05.15.2006

By MELANIE THERNSTROM Who hasn't wished she could watch her brain at work and make changes to it, the way a painter steps back from a painting, studies it and decides to make the sky a different hue? If only we could spell-check our brain like a text, or reprogram it like a computer to eliminate glitches like pain, depression and learning disabilities. Would we one day become completely transparent to ourselves, and — fully conscious of consciousness — consciously create ourselves as we like? The glitch I'd like to program out of my brain is chronic pain. For the past 10 years, I have been suffering from an arthritic condition that causes chronic pain in my neck that radiates into the right side of my face and right shoulder and arm. Sometimes I picture the pain — soggy, moldy, dark or perhaps ashy, like those alarming pictures of smokers' lungs. Wherever the pain is located, it must look awful by now, after a decade of dominating my brain. I'd like to replace my forehead with a Plexiglas window, set up a camera and film my brain and (since this is my brain, I'm the director) redirect it. Cut. Those areas that are generating pain — cool it. Those areas that are supposed to be alleviating pain — hello? I need you! Down-regulate pain-perception circuitry, as scientists say. Up-regulate pain-modulation circuitry. Now. Recently, I had a glimpse of what that reprogramming would look like. I was lying on my back in a large white plastic f.M.R.I. machine that uses ingenious new software, peering up through 3-D goggles at a small screen. I was experiencing a clinical demonstration of a new technology — real-time functional neuroimaging — used in a Stanford University study, now in its second phase, that allows subjects to see their own brain activity while feeling pain and to try to change that brain activity to control their pain. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 8921 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Marianne Szegedy-Maszak Strange images appear from long-forgotten memories. Or out of nowhere: You're roller-skating on water; your mother flashes by on a trapeze; your father is in labor; a friend dead for years sits down at the dinner table. Here are moments of unspeakable terror; there, moments of euphoria or serenity. Shakespeare wrote, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on," and 300 years later, Sigmund Freud gave the poetry a neat psychoanalytic spin when he called dreams "the royal road to the unconscious." The movies that unfold in our heads some nights are so powerfully resonant they haunt us for days--or inspire us. Mary Shelley dreamed of Frankenstein before she created him on paper; the melody to "Yesterday" came to Paul McCartney as he slept. Everybody dreams--yet no one, throughout history, has fully grasped what the dreaming mind is doing. Are the nightly narratives a message from the unconscious to the conscious mind, as Freud believed? Or are they simply the product of random electrical flashes in the brain? Today, researchers aided by powerful technologies that reveal the brain in action are concluding that both schools of thought hold truth. "This is the greatest adventure of all time," says Harvard psychiatrist and dream researcher J. Allan Hobson. "The development of brain imaging is the equivalent of Galileo's invention of the telescope, only we are now exploring inner space instead of outer space." Mind-brain dance. The dream researchers' new tools, functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, have been used for some time to capture the waking brain at work--making decisions, feeling frightened or joyous, coping with uncertainty. © 2006 U.S.News & World Report,

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 8920 - Posted: 06.24.2010

New research reveals that a mother's touch early in life could trigger a child's future mothering skills. Columbia University neurobiologist Frances Champagne says that previous research across species showed that maternal behaviors are passed down from mother to daughter. "So if your mother held you a lot, you will hold your infants a lot," Champagne says. But she wanted to know whether mothering tendencies are passed on through genetics or experience. Her team studied mother rats that spent time licking and grooming their babies, and others that didn't. Chemical tags can attach to DNA and act like "stop signs" to turn genes off. As she wrote in the journal Endocrinology, without enough licking and grooming, female rats had certain genes turn off, also known as methylation. When a gene is methylated, chemical tags called methyl groups attach to the DNA, preventing the production of certain hormones key to future mothering behaviors, including estrogen and oxytocin, also known as the love hormone. Licked rats had less of these methyl groups attach to the genes, allowing the production of those hormones. These hormones, in turn, affect behavior when these baby rats become mothers themselves. © ScienCentral, 2000-2006

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8919 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Kim Krieger Many molecules have a reverse twin--a mirror-image, but otherwise identical, version of the other. Now, chemists have developed a method to tell these twins apart--and surprisingly, it works similarly to the human tongue. The technique could be particularly useful for the pharmaceutical industry, as opposite twins of the same molecule can have very different effects. The most famous examples of mirror-image molecules are amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Each amino acid has left-handed version and a right-handed one, but life on Earth uses only the left-handed form. Humans can easily taste the difference: left-handed aminos are usually sweet, whereas right-handed aminos tend to be bitter. The tongue tells the two apart with taste receptors that preferentially latch on to either the right- or left-handed version. Without realizing how the tongue works, Eric Anslyn and colleagues at the University of Texas in Austin set out to create a device that could distinguish right- and left-handed amino acids. First, they invented a set of copper-containing compounds that acted as amino acid receptors. Each receptor preferentially latched on to either the left- or right-handed version of a specific amino acid, although they would react with other aminos too, to some degree. The researchers then set up a test array containing numerous rows of amino acid solutions: Each row contained a different amino acid, and each well contained a different type of receptor. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 8918 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Julie Rehmeyer Need a new excuse for why you haven't lost weight? Maybe one that even makes you feel good about yourself? Try this: If you are highly motivated and willing to work hard for what you want, your brain may be making it difficult for you to resist the urge to overeat, a new study has shown. Psychologists have found that people who are prone to obesity tend to be highly motivated by rewards. They go out of their way to get the things they want, are willing to take risks, and are more thrilled than the average person when they succeed. Meanwhile, neuroscientists have found that the need for reward is hardwired into various regions of the brain (ScienceNOW, 16 June 2005). When researchers stimulate these regions in the lab, animals overeat, particularly seeking out sweet and fatty foods. Cognitive neuroscientist John Beaver and colleagues at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, United Kingdom, wondered if the two results were connected; that is, do the brain reward regions of highly motivated people ramp up their activity at the sight of appetizing food more than those of unmotivated people? Using a questionnaire, the team assessed how strongly rewards motivated 14 people, asking volunteers if they would say things like "I go out of my way to get things I want." The researchers then put the volunteers into an fMRI scanner, which measures brain activity, and showed them pictures of pizza, ice cream, and cake. The images lit up the brain's reward centers twice as strongly in highly motivated people as in laid-back people, the team reports in this week's issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 8917 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — Parental roles for at least one fox species are reversed, according to a new study that found bat-eared fox mothers bring home most of the food while dads stay in the den with their offspring and take care of everything from grooming to chaperoning. This seemingly modern arrangement is quite rare in the animal world, since male parental care has been observed in only 5 to 10 percent of all mammal species. The find suggests that male/female cooperation can benefit the young, particularly when parents are monogamous and dedicated to their duties. The study also indicates that insect-eating foxes, such as Otocyon megalotis,along with the Hoary fox from South America and Blanford's fox from the Middle East, may particularly benefit by having "house husbands." Most other fox males bring prey back to the den, but it is hard to cart back a load of insects, so females usually forage on their own. In this case, bat-eared moms have a taste for termites. "Bat-eared foxes probably differ from (the parenting norm) because their termite prey can't be carried back to the den by males, which don't regurgitate, but can only be done so by females in the form of milk," explained Harry William Yorkstone Wright, who authored the study. Copyright © 2006 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8916 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sexual harassment is a burden that females of many species face, and some may go to extreme lengths to avoid it. In a new paper from the June issue of the American Naturalist, Darren Croft (University of Wales) and a research team from the University of Leeds suggest that female guppies, a popular aquarium fish, may risk their lives to avoid too much attention from males. Observing wild population of guppies in the rainforest of Trinidad, the researchers found that female guppies swim in habitats that contain few males – but many predators. "Male guppies spend most of their time displaying to females. But if their courtship displays don't impress the females, males will attempt to sneak mating with them when they aren't looking," says Croft. Male guppies are brightly colored to attract female attention, while female guppies are a dull brown color. The researchers show that female guppies might use this color difference to their advantage, venturing into the deep water where predators lurk. The males' bright coloring also attracts predators, making it too dangerous for them to follow.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 8915 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ANDREW BRIDGES WASHINGTON -- A tablet shown to help more than one in five smokers quit joined the limited number of effective stop-smoking drugs on Thursday, approved by federal regulators. When varenicline goes on sale later this year, it will become the first new prescription drug for smoking cessation approved by the Food and Drug Administration in nearly a decade and only the second stop-smoking drug that is nicotine-free, according to Pfizer Inc. The New York company plans to market the twice-daily tablet, intended for adults only, as Chantix. "It's a welcome new addition. It's like with cancer or heart disease or high blood pressure or diabetes: The more effective treatments you have, the better off patients are," said Dr. Steven Schroeder, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who is active in smoking cessation efforts. Varenicline works in two ways, by cutting the pleasure of smoking and reducing the withdrawal symptoms that lead smokers to light up over and over again. © 2006 The Associated Press

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 8914 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY and GARDINER HARRIS After analyzing data from clinical trials, GlaxoSmithKline has sent letters to doctors warning that its antidepressant drug Paxil appears to increase the risk of suicide attempts in some young adults. The company said it had changed the labeling on the drug to reflect the finding of the study, which analyzed clinical trial data involving some 15,000 people. The study found that reported suicide attempts were rare but significantly more common in adults who took the drug for depression than in those who received placebo pills. The Glaxo researchers reported only one suicide in the trials, a number so small it says nothing about the drug's risk, experts said. In October 2004, the Food and Drug Administration ordered drug companies to place a strong warning on antidepressant labels after studies suggested that some drugs increased suicidal thinking or behavior in children and adolescents. But the Glaxo study — the first by a drug company to find a link between antidepressants and suicidal behavior in adults, experts say — is likely to persuade some skeptics that the risk is real and not confined to minors. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 8913 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By WILLIAM GRIMES "It's not brain surgery." In casual English, that means the task at hand is not complicated. Brain surgeons, like rocket scientists, are presumed to be at the top rung of the intellectual ladder, solving problems of Einsteinian complexity. Think again. Katrina Firlik, a neurosurgeon practicing in Connecticut, deflates that myth right off the bat in "Another Day in the Frontal Lobe," her engaging tour of human brains and the doctors who cut into them. It's neurologists or psychiatrists who are more likely to ponder the deep questions of mind and consciousness. Neurosurgeons, whom Dr. Firlik describes as "part scientist, part mechanic," do manual labor, the hands-on work of opening the skull and cutting out tumors or cysts. Sometimes the work calls for exquisite delicacy. Other times, they're reaching for a mallet and chisel. Good neurosurgeons (who, by the way, spend more time operating on spines than they do on brains) like to keep things simple. Case No. 1 in Dr. Firlik's file is a construction worker who has been shot in the head with a nail gun by his partner and has a two-inch nail in his frontal lobe. The victim is alert and mentally sharp. He feels no pain. In the operating room Dr. Firlik, rolling up her sleeves, drills a circular hole in the skull around the nail head and gently pulls it out along with the nail. After pounding the nail out, she fastens the disc of bone back to his head with titanium plates and screws. Within 24 hours the patient is sent on his way. No harm done. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 8912 - Posted: 05.12.2006

Female fish prefer brightly coloured males because they are easier to see and are in better shape concludes Dutch researcher Martine Maan following her study of fish speciation in the East African Lakes. Environmental variation subsequently leads to differences in preference and eventually to speciation. Evolutionary theory predicts that species can diverge if different females choose different characteristics in males. Yet females often pay attention to traits that reveal something about the quality of a male. As a result, females are likely to share the same preferences. In Lake Victoria cichlid fish, Martine Maan found a solution for this paradox: in different species, different traits reveal male quality. She examined two closely related species, one with blue males and the other with red males. Females prefer males of the right colour, blue or red, and within those categories they choose the most brightly coloured males. They do so for good reasons: brightly coloured males from both species carry fewer parasites and are thus in better condition. Moreover, both species are adapted to different infection risks, which are associated with a difference in water depth and food choice. It is therefore in the females' interest to mate with their own males.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 8911 - Posted: 05.12.2006

Helen Pearson There is a building block of protein that kills hunger in the brain, researchers have shown in experiments with rats. The result backs the idea that altering tiny quantities of particular nutrients in our diets could help fight obesity and disease. The study suggests that rats' brains monitor levels of amino acids, the components of proteins, and use this to judge how much food to eat. The researchers, at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, found that injecting an amino acid called leucine into the brains of hungry rats curbed their appetite: they gained a third less weight over 24 hours than rats that didn't have jabs. The team reports its results in Science1. The discovery implies that traditional thinking about diets — based on monitoring the broader classes of carbohydrates, fats and proteins — is rather crude. Tinkering with our diets more subtly, to include particular cocktails of 'micronutrients' such as amino acids, sugars or fat components, might help to control weight, alter aspects of metabolism and perhaps combat disease. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 8910 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi A new appetite-controlling pathway that responds to molecules found in meat has been discovered in the brain. This brain signal system is triggered by specific amino acids and may lead to new ways of helping obese people lose weight, researchers say. Certain amino acid molecules – the building blocks of proteins – exert powerful control over appetite, according to a new study in rats. Animals given injections of the amino acid leucine, which is found in high-protein meats and grains, gained only about one-third of the weight put on by their control counterparts. Although levels of fats and sugars have been shown to influence the desire to eat, until now no team had demonstrated how protein molecules regulate appetite, the researchers claim. Randy Seeley at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, US, and his colleagues looked at an enzyme called mTOR, which responds to protein molecules and regulates their synthesis within cells. They found that mTOR was highly active in a region of the rat brain called the hypothalamus – a structure that is involved in regulating appetite in both humans and rats. To see whether the mTOR pathway in the hypothalamus responds to amino acids, Seeley injected 1 microgram of leucine directly into the brains of rodents, near the hypothalamus. Over the next day, the rats that received the injection consumed 25 grams of food on average while the control rats consumed 30 g of food. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 8909 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The epic journeys taken by dragonflies searching for warmer climates have been revealed by scientists in the US. The team, led by researchers from Princeton University, found that the insects are capable of flying up to 85 miles (137 km) in a day. Writing in the journal Biology Letters, the group describes how it tracked the movements by attaching tiny radio transmitters to the insects. A scientific posse followed the signals from a receiving aeroplane. Other researchers monitored the insects' progress from the ground. The dragonflies' route took them along the east coast of America towards the warmer south. The data revealed that the dragonflies' migration patterns are strikingly similar to those of songbirds, suggesting there is a strong evolutionary link to their behaviours. "Insects have been around far longer than birds, therefore we suspect that they have been migrating far longer than birds," said Professor David Wilcove of Princeton University and one of the authors of the paper. "It is just possible what we are seeing here are the basic primitive rules of migration and that birds converged on the tricks of the trade," he told Science In Action on the BBC World Service. Billions of common green darner dragonflies (Anax junius) migrate every year but until now hardly anything was known about their routes or strategy. (C)BBC

Keyword: Animal Migration
Link ID: 8908 - Posted: 05.11.2006

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR THE FACTS Most people can spot the telltale signs of a heart attack. But a stroke? Studies show that stroke victims sometimes fail to realize that they have suffered an attack or to seek medical help until crucial hours later. Minor strokes are sometimes dismissed as migraines or fatigue. So when an e-mail message claiming that anyone can diagnose a stroke in three simple steps surfaced recently, it was tantalizing. It claims that an untrained bystander can tell whether people have suffered a stroke by asking them to smile, raise both arms slowly and recite a simple sentence. A small study presented at a meeting of the American Stroke Association in 2003 suggested the test. But because the symptoms of a stroke vary widely, the three-step test can detect some victims but will miss many others, said Dr. Larry Goldstein, the director of the Duke Stroke Center. Some of the more common symptoms of a stroke, for example, are problems seeing, an unusual headache, sudden numbness and trouble with coordination or walking — all of which the three-step test overlooks. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 8907 - Posted: 06.24.2010