Jacqueline Ruttimann Aquatic 'dead zones', oxygen-depleted areas throughout the world's waterways, are not only suffocating marine life but may also be transforming female fish into males. There are about 150 significant oxygen-starved patches of water throughout the world, according to a recent United Nations report1. The most notorious is the Gulf of Mexico, in which the dead zone is approximately 20,000 square kilometres, roughly the size of New Jersey. The oxygen deprivation can be caused by fresh river water sitting above denser salt water, capping it and preventing air from reaching the waters below. The biggest cause, however, is agricultural and industrial run-off of fertilizers and fossil-fuel waste. The nitrogen and phosphorus in these materials cause population bursts of algae and marine creatures called phytoplankton; and when these blooms die they are decomposed by oxygen-consuming bacteria. A burst in activity by these microbes robs the water of oxygen. Such areas are well-known problem spots for the survival of aquatic life, but now it seems the lack of oxygen is having another unexpected effect: tinkering with the sex hormones of fish. "The problem is much bigger than we thought," says ecotoxicologist Rudolf Wu of the City University of Hong Kong, China, whose article in the current issue of Environmental Science and Technology2 shows that hypoxia can cause gender bending. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 8866 - Posted: 06.24.2010

People born in the spring or early summer face an increased risk of suicide, UK researchers suggest. A study of 26,916 suicides in England and Wales found babies born in April, May or June had a 17% higher risk of suicide than those born in the autumn. The team suggested the increased risk reflected the fact that more people with alcoholism, depression and mood disorders are born in these months. The research is published in the British Journal of Psychiatry. Scientists have established seasonal birth trends for a number of diseases including some cancers, heart disease and brain tumours. Other research has found more patients with schizophrenia, brain degenerating disease Alzheimer's, epilepsy and sleep disorder narcolepsy are born in December than any other month. Equally, mental illnesses like depression and mood disorders and alcohol dependence are more frequent among those born during the spring and summer. And 10% of suicides in England and Wales occur among people with these disorders. The joint team from St Helen's and Liverpool University and the Institute of Child Health at University College London wanted to see whether there was a link between the two. They analysed information on all deaths from suicide and undetermined injury reporter between 1979 and 2001 in what they say is the biggest study of any possible link to suicide of this kind. (C)BBC

Keyword: Depression; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 8865 - Posted: 05.02.2006

By Sandra G. Boodman What non-drug treatments work to combat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)? It's a question more parents are asking doctors, prompted by new concerns about the safety of medicines used to treat a problem that affects an estimated 4.4 million American children. In the past three months, two advisory committees of the Food and Drug Administration have recommended that warning labels on ADHD drugs, most of them stimulants such as Ritalin, be strengthened because of their possible links to rare cardiac problems and vivid hallucinations often involving snakes or bugs. Concerns about misuse and overprescription of ADHD drugs, many of them chemical cousins of amphetamines, are not new. But hope that the common neurobehavioral disorder could be effectively treated without medication was dealt a severe blow seven years ago when a landmark study of nearly 600 school-age children found that medications were the most effective treatment. That study, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, also found that the best outcomes, measured by parental satisfaction and some academic standards, were the result of "combination" treatment: medications that reduce hyperactivity and improve concentration, and behavior therapy to address some of the more subtle symptoms, such as difficulty with organizational and social skills. © 2006 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 8864 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JAMES GORMAN When it comes to bees making decisions, my question is whether the bee or the hive is the individual. I didn't come up with this question out of the blue, although the blue is actually where most of my ideas come from. The blue is one of my best sources. This question, however, came from reading American Scientist. In the current issue there's an article titled "Group Decision Making in Honey Bee Swarms," by Thomas D. Seeley of Cornell, P. Kirk Visscher at the University of California, Riverside, and Kevin M. Passino at Ohio State. After Dr. Seeley and colleagues present their findings — which I'll get to — they suggest that humans could learn something about group decision making from the bees. The bees, it seems, almost always make good decisions. Groups of humans have a bit more trouble, or as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, in "Beyond Good and Evil," according to the article, "Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups." Dr. Seeley is a bit more cheery than Nietzsche. I suppose that's not a very high bar, but he writes that groups can make good decisions, and that the success of bees could offer humans some guidance. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 8863 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BARRON H. LERNER, M.D. When the woman, having experienced her fourth miscarriage, visited her physician, he gave her a surprising diagnosis: psychosomatic abortion. That is, she had lost the fetuses because of stresses in her life, particularly concerns about her religious affiliation and her husband's unwillingness to help out at home. The doctor's recommended treatment? A series of vitamins, abstaining from sexual intercourse in future pregnancies and, most notably, psychotherapy, intended to explore childhood conflicts and other anxieties. The patient, according to her physician, Dr. Carl T. Javert, an obstetrician at Cornell University Medical College, subsequently had three successful pregnancies. The diagnosis and the treatment fit the era in which they occurred. It was the early 1950's, and the field of psychosomatic medicine — based on the notion that many diseases have their origins in emotional distress — was in its heyday. Was Dr. Javert onto something or was he hopelessly misguided? Do his psychosomatic theories retain any currency today? Throughout history, many doctors and patients have posited that emotions influence health. But it was not until the middle of the 20th century that efforts to prove an association accelerated. A driving force behind psychosomatic medicine was Dr. Franz Alexander, a Hungarian-born psychiatrist trained in the teachings of Freud. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 8862 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By CARL ZIMMER The warbles and rattles of a starling seem innocuous enough. But starlings are now the object of a fierce debate about the nature of language. The debate is over what, if anything, the results mean for human language. Some scientists believe that the findings offer new clues to how it evolved. Others dismiss the notion. Human language is unique in the world of animal communication. Humans can convey an infinite range of ideas with a limited vocabulary, because they are not limited to strings of disconnected sounds. Humans can generate meaning by combining words in various ways, building them into clauses and inserting those clauses into sentences. It is possible to come up with all sorts of rules for stringing symbols together. In the 1950's, Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Teachnology ranked classes of rules by their power. A very simple rule might call for one word always to be followed by another word. Dr. Chomsky argued that the rules that govern language must be more powerful. At the very least, they must let people embed smaller groups of words in larger ones again and again — a process sometimes called recursion. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 8861 - Posted: 06.24.2010

SAN FRANCISCO--A new study indicates that cognitive and behavioral problems that underlie attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, are due to a complex interplay of genes and the environment. The Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center study is the first to examine how genes, toxins and gender interact to shape ADHD. "This study shows that certain groups of children have an increased sensitivity to environmental exposures," says Tanya Froehlich, M.D., a physician at Cincinnati Children's and the study's lead author. "More studies like this one are needed to help set exposure standards that adequately protect the most susceptible members of society." The study will be presented at 10:15 a.m. Pacific time Monday, May 1, at the annual Pediatric Academic Societies meeting in San Francisco. The Cincinnati Children's researchers examined the impact of lead exposure on executive function ÿ the ability to plan and organize activities and behaviors. Executive function is impaired in individuals with ADHD. They particularly wanted to determine whether lead's effects are influenced by an individual's underlying genetic and biological make-up, including the impact of gender and variations in the DRD4 dopamine receptor gene. The DRD4 receptor helps regulate brain levels of dopamine, a chemical in the brain that is essential for attention and cognition, and variations in DRD4's composition have been linked to ADHD.

Keyword: ADHD; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 8860 - Posted: 05.02.2006

SANTA CRUZ, CA--A new study of side-blotched lizards in California has revealed the genetic underpinnings of altruistic behavior in this common lizard species, providing new insights into the long-standing puzzle of how cooperation and altruism can evolve. The study, led by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, offers the first evidence in vertebrates of an important theoretical concept in evolutionary biology known as "greenbeard" altruism. "This reflects a major breakthrough in our understanding of how cooperative behavior arises from genes," said Barry Sinervo, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCSC and first author of a paper describing the new findings. The paper will be published in the May 9 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and is currently available in the online early edition of PNAS. The paper describes unrelated male lizards that form cooperative partnerships to protect their territories. These partnerships are often mutually beneficial, enabling both partners to father more offspring than they would on their own. Under some circumstances, however, one male in the pair may have few or no offspring as a result of protecting its partner from the aggressive intrusions of other lizards. This type of cooperation, in which one individual bears all the costs and another unrelated individual receives the benefits, is called "true altruism." These lizards have an annual life cycle, so this behavior may spell the end of the altruistic male's lineage.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 8859 - Posted: 05.02.2006

Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University(OHSU) have found that melatonin, a naturally occurring brain substance, can relieve the doldrums of winter depression, also known as seasonal affective disorder, or SAD. The study is publishing online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. The study was led by Alfred Lewy, M.D., Ph.D., an internationally recognized pioneer in the study of circadian (24-hour) rhythm disturbances, such as those found in air travelers and shift workers, as well as in totally blind people. Lewy and his colleagues in the OHSU Sleep and Mood Disorders Lab set out to test the hypothesis that circadian physiological rhythms become misaligned with the sleep/wake cycle during the short days of winter, causing some people to become depressed. Usually these rhythms track to the later dawn in winter, resulting in a circadian phase delay with respect to sleep similar to what happens flying westward. Some people appear to be tracking to the earlier dusk of winter, causing a similar amount of misalignment but in the phase-advance direction. Symptom severity in SAD patients correlated with the misalignment in either direction. The treatment of choice for most SAD patients is bright light exposure, which causes phase advances when scheduled in the morning. Because patients know when they are exposed to bright light, however, there is a considerable placebo response associated with it. Melatonin can also cause phase advances, but it has to be taken in the afternoon. The Lewy team used afternoon melatonin to test if it was more antidepressant than melatonin taken in the morning, which causes phase delays.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 8858 - Posted: 05.02.2006

By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — Coffee made out green, unroasted coffee beans promotes weight loss, according to a new study on compounds that are naturally present in the beans. The discovery mirrors earlier research on green tea, which was found to slightly increase metabolism and to speed up the body's ability to burn fat. Green coffee appears to have a more potent effect. "If a human consumes one kilogram per day of food (2.2 pounds) containing 10 grams (.35 ounce) of green coffee bean extract for 14 days, the increase in body weight may be suppressed by 35 percent," said lead author Hiroshi Shimoda. Shimoda, who is a scientist at the Oryza Oil & Fat Chemical Company, Limited, in Aichi, Japan, told Discovery News that consuming regular, roasted coffee will not lead to much, if any, direct weight loss. He and his colleagues determined that there are two key types of compounds in unroasted coffee beans. The first is caffeine. The second is chlorogenic acid and its related compounds. Heating destroys the acids. "Chlorogenic acid is stable and normal at room temperature, but it is unstable at high temperatures," Shimoda explained. "Normally, coffee beans are roasted at a temperature of around 240 to 250° Celsius (464-482 degrees Fahrenheit). Roasting leads to decomposition of chlorogenic acid and forms brown aromatic Maillard reactants." Copyright © 2006 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 8857 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Ronald Kotulak Scientists are still a long way from figuring out what women and men really want, but they are getting a lot closer to understanding what makes their brains so different. That women and men think differently has little to do with whether they are handed dolls or trucks to play with as infants. After all, when infant monkeys are given a choice of human toys, females prefer dolls and males go after cars and trucks. The differences, researchers are beginning to discover, appear to have a lot more to do with how powerful hormones wire the female and male brain during early development and later in life. Among the newest findings: A previously unknown hormone appears to launch puberty's sexual and mental transformation; growth hormone is made in the brain's memory center at rates up to twice as high in females as in males; and the brain's hot button for emotions, the amygdala, is wired to different parts of the brain in women and men. Scientists hope the findings may help explain such mysteries as why females are often more verbal, more socially empathetic, more nurturing and more susceptible to depression, while males tend to be more aggressive, more outdoorsy, more focused on things than people and more vulnerable to alcohol and drug addiction. Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 8856 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A vaccine has been developed which may be able to fight the most aggressive form of brain tumour, scientists say. US researchers say their vaccine increased survival times for the 23 glioblastoma multiforme patients they tested it on by at least 18 months. Only four patients went on to die from the cancer, the study to be presented at a meeting of experts in the US said. A larger trial of the jab, which works by targeting a protein thought to drive the tumour's spread, is now planned. It uses an artificial form of the protein, which is found on the outside of 30-50% of tumours, to alert the immune system to its presence and attack it. The brain is tricked into thinking the protein, known as EGFRvIII, is foreign, and fighter cells in the immune system are sent in. Amy Heimberger, assistant professor of neurosurgery at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas, said the vaccine was an easy-to-use "off-the-shelf" treatment that could potentially help half of all patients with glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). She said results from the trial showed the vaccine significantly delays the progression of tumours until the cancer finds a new way to grow. But when tumours did grow again they did not display the EGFRvIII protein which led researchers to conclude that the vaccine had worked. Professor Heimberger said: "This is a proof of concept, and optimal use of the vaccine may be with chemotherapy to further retard progression. "Still, this is exciting because people have been trying to use immunotherapy against gliomas for a long time." (C)BBC

Keyword: Glia
Link ID: 8855 - Posted: 05.01.2006

By BENEDICT CAREY In recent years, psychiatric researchers have been experimenting with a bold and controversial treatment strategy: they are prescribing drugs to young people at risk for schizophrenia who have not yet developed the full-blown disorder. The hope is that while exposing some to drugs unnecessarily, preemptive treatment may help others ward off or even prevent psychosis, sparing them the agonizing flights of paranoia and confusion that torment the three million American who suffer schizophrenia. Yet the findings from the first long-term trial of early drug treatment, appearing today in The American Journal of Psychiatry, suggest that this preventive approach is more difficult to put into effect — and more treacherous — than scientists had hoped. Daily doses of the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa, from Eli Lilly, blunted symptoms in many patients and lowered their risk of experiencing a psychotic episode in the first year of treatment, the study found. But the drug also caused significant weight gain, and so many participants dropped out of the study that investigators could not draw firm conclusions about drug benefits, if any. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 8854 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Mike Rudin A new six-part BBC series, starting this week, looks at the newest research from around the world to find out what could it be that makes us happy. We all want to be happy but the problem has always been that you can't measure happiness. Happiness has always been seen as too vague a concept, as Lord Layard, Professor of Economics at the LSE and author of "Happiness - lessons from a new science" points out. There is a problem with the word happiness. When you use the word happy, it often has the sort of context of balloons floating up into the sky or something frivolous." Now scientists say they can actually measure happiness. Neuroscientists are measuring pleasure. They suggest that happiness is more than a vague concept or mood; it is real. Social scientists measure happiness simply by asking people how happy they are. It is argued that what a person says about their own happiness tends to tally with what friends or even strangers might say about them if asked the same question. Most people say they are fairly happy. The leading American psychologist Professor Ed Diener from the University of Illinois, told The Happiness Formula that the science of happiness is based on one straightforward idea: "It may sound silly but we ask people 'How happy are you 1-7, 1-10? And the interesting thing is that produces real answers that are valid, they're not perfect but they're valid and they predict all sorts of real things in their lives." (C)BBC

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 8853 - Posted: 05.01.2006

New Haven, Conn.--For young people who clearly seem to be developing early signs of schizophrenia, treatment with the antipsychotic drug olanzapine appears to lower or delay the rate of conversion to full-blown psychosis, according to an article by a Yale School of Medicine researcher in the May issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry. The findings are preliminary since 60 patients began the study and 17 completed it. Despite the long recruitment period and multiple study sites, participation was limited by the low incidence of pre-psychotic, or "prodromal," symptoms in the general population. Schizophrenia affects about one percent of the population, or three million people, and is one of the most disabling medical disorders. "Delay of the onset of the most severe symptoms of schizophrenia appears to have occurred because of the early recognition and treatment of these persons," said Robert Freedman, M.D., editor-in-chief of The American Journal of Psychiatry. "This enabled them to be better connected with treatment and to cope better with this devastating illness." The study, "The Prevention Through Risk Identification, Management, and Education (PRIME)," was conducted in two U.S. cities and two Canadian cities during 1998-2003. Senior author of the study was Thomas McGlashan, M.D., professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 8852 - Posted: 05.01.2006

Researchers from the Divisions of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School have found in a double-blind placebo-controlled clinical study, that melatonin, taken orally during non-typical sleep times, significantly improves an individual’s ability to sleep. This finding is particularly important for rotating or night-shift workers, travelers with jet lag and individuals with advanced or delayed sleep phase syndrome. The findings appear in the May 1, 2006 issue of the journal Sleep. Melatonin is a hormone produced by the body at night in darkness, which helps the brain determine day and night to help regulate sleep cycles and circadian timing. Retinal light exposure inhibits the release of the hormone. Millions of Americans take melatonin supplements to improve their sleep, yet the results of prior studies on the efficacy of melatonin as a sleep-promoting agent have been mixed, according to the Agency of Healthcare Research and Quality, which carried out an extensive review of this topic two years ago. The present study, conducted at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, sought to address this question. Thirty-six participants (21 men and 15 women), between the ages of 18 and 30 with no significant past or current medical disorders, sleep disorders, or psychological disorders were chosen for the study from a pool of applicants. © Rush University Medical Center,

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 8851 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JENNIFER MEDINA ALBANY, — A California neuroscientist and biologist whose research of fruit flies found genetic links to human behavior was awarded the $500,000 Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, the country's largest award in the field. The winner, Dr. Seymour Benzer, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology, began his pioneering research in neurological sciences in the 1960's, laying a foundation for generations of researchers who came after him, the judges said in their announcement on Friday. Dr. Benzer, now 84, is known for challenging the widespread belief that human behavior was shaped largely by outside forces. "Behavior can be dissected by manipulation," Dr. Benzer said at news conference at an Albany hotel. "Take your choice, you can start with genetic structure and make enormous differences in the environment." He said he became intrigued with the topic when his second daughter was born and he noticed remarkable differences from his first daughter. "I wondered, 'Are my wife and I doing things that differently?' " Dr. Benzer said. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 8850 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Staying focused in a world full of ticking clocks, clicking keyboards, and beeping smoke detectors is not as easy as you might think. Our brains have to decide what information is important enough to be introduced into our conscious minds and filter out all the rest. In other words, it has to know to tune out the sound of that crinkling paper and keep streaming in the words you're trying to read. If you've ever tried reading with a dripping faucet in the background, you probably know that sometimes this process doesn't always work perfectly. "All of us can be annoyed by something like that at times, but most of us are able to block such things out," says Monica Fabiani, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Illinois. But Fabiani has shown that how successful we are at ignoring background information might actually be connected to how old we are. In a recent study, she showed that people over seventy years of age have a tougher time tuning out such distractions. Fabiani and her team at the Beckman Institute used a new brain imaging technique known as EROS. Fabiani and her husband Gabriele Gratton are pioneering the use of EROS, which has some distinct advantages over other imaging methods. © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Keyword: Attention; Alzheimers
Link ID: 8849 - Posted: 06.24.2010

It kind of looks like a motorcycle helmet from the future; divided into sections with colored stripes, drilled full of holes, and stuck full of fiber optic cables. But don't be fooled -- it's actually a new brain imaging technique. Cognitive neuroscientists at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, Gabriele Gratton and Monica Fabiani call it EROS and explain that it works by using harmless beams of light. EROS stands for event related optical signal. It's optical because it uses light reflections and it's event-related because the signals it produces mirror events in the brain. So how can light give you an accurate picture of what's happening in the brain? "Even though we are not transparent, light does penetrate into tissue," Fabiani explains. So just like pressing a red laser pointer against your finger makes it glow red, shining light on your scalp also makes your brain give off faint reflections. As reported in "Scientific American Mind" magazine, EROS catches these reflections to create a picture of the activity in brain cells, or neurons. Gratton and Fabiani explain that each fiber optic cable going into the helmet is either a light source or a detector. The helmet holds them in place directly on the scalp so that they touch the skin in between hairs. When the light sources are turned on, the light diffuses through the head and ultimately reflects back, getting picked up by the detectors on the way out. © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 8848 - Posted: 06.24.2010

GLEN OAKS, NY -- Psychiatric researchers at The Zucker Hillside Hospital campus of The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research have uncovered evidence of a gene that appears to influence intelligence. Working in conjunction with researchers at Harvard Partners Center for Genetics and Genomics in Boston, the Zucker Hillside team examined the genetic blueprints of individuals with schizophrenia, a neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by cognitive impairment, and compared them with healthy volunteers. They discovered that the dysbindin-1 gene (DTNBP1), which they previously demonstrated to be associated with schizophrenia, may also be linked to general cognitive ability. The study is published in the May 15 print issue of Human Molecular Genetics, available online today, April 27. "A robust body of evidence suggests that cognitive abilities, particularly intelligence, are significantly influenced by genetic factors. Existing data already suggests that dysbindin may influence cognition," said Katherine Burdick, PhD, the study's primary author. "We looked at several DNA sequence variations within the dysbindin gene and found one of them to be significantly associated with lower general cognitive ability in carriers of the risk variant compared with non-carriers in two independent groups." The study involved 213 unrelated Caucasian patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 126 unrelated healthy Caucasian volunteers. The researchers measured cognitive performance in all subjects. They then analyzed participants' DNA samples. The researchers specifically examined six DNA sequence variations, also known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), in the dysbindin gene and found that one specific pattern of SNPs, known as a haplotype, was associated with general cognitive ability: Cognition was significantly impaired in carriers of the risk variant in both the schizophrenia group and the healthy volunteers as compared with the non-carriers.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Intelligence
Link ID: 8847 - Posted: 04.29.2006