By Stacy Weiner If you and your partner sleep apart, you may be lonely, but you're not alone. According to a 2005 National Sleep Foundation survey, 23 percent of partnered adults frequently sleep solo because of their loved one's snoring, kicking or other sleep problem. That number doesn't include those who bed down apart because of mismatched schedules or desire for different room temperatures, or to let an exhausted spouse avoid a tyke's wake-up calls. And though a small number of couples who opt for separate beds do so to recapture a sense of romance, for most, there's one simple fantasy: some decent rest. In fact, according to the National Sleep Foundation survey of 1,506 adults, disruptive bedmates rob their partners, on average, of 49 minutes of shut-eye each night. Kensington mom Naomi Rivkis has regularly slept apart from her husband throughout their seven-year marriage. As is the case for many spouses, it's her mate's snoring that sends Rivkis scrambling for quieter ground; more than half of snorers report having disturbed someone's sleep. Most of the time Rivkis uses earplugs, but two or three nights a week she needs a break from the uncomfortable contraptions. At first, the 36-year-old said she barely noticed the separation because her husband was in law school and often chose books over bed anyway. Now that sleeping apart is a set pattern, though, she remains unfazed, especially since the couple resolves all conflicts before bedtime. "I don't want it to look to us even slightly like sleeping apart is associated with there being anything wrong," she said. "As long as that's separated out, it's just a physical convenience." © 2006 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 8384 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JANE E. BRODY Patients with debilitating pain from chronic illness, accidents, surgery or advanced cancer have long had problems getting adequate medication to control their pain and make life worth living. Now the federal government, and especially the Drug Enforcement Administration, is working overtime to make it even harder for doctors to manage serious pain, including that of dying patients trying to exit this world gracefully. In an article in the current New England Journal of Medicine titled "The Big Chill: Inserting the D.E.A. into End-of-Life Care," two specialists in palliative care, Dr. Timothy E. Quill and Dr. Diane E. Meier, state that despite some physicians' commitment to treat pain and despite the effectiveness of opioid drugs like OxyContin and morphine, "abundant evidence suggests that patients' fears of undertreatment of distressing symptoms are justified." They continue, "Although a lack of proper training and overblown fears of addiction contribute to such undertreatment, physicians' fears of regulatory oversight and disciplinary action remain a central stumbling block." Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 8383 - Posted: 01.12.2006

Environmental and genetic factors lead to neural tube defects in 1 in every 1,000 births and cause 1 in 20 of every spontaneous abortion. One cause of these defects is the failure of cells within the neural tube to migrate to the middle of the developing neural tube. A study in this week's issue of Nature is the first to report on the molecular mechanism that directs cells to migrate to the correct local within the developing neural tube of vertebrates. Marek Mlodzik, PhD, Professor, Molecular, Cell and Development Biology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine has previously reported that the asymmetrical distribution of specific proteins within neural tissues in fruit flies controls the orientation and migration of cells. Dr. Mlodzik's and Dr. Schier's laboratories have now found that a similar mechanism is at work in vertebrates. During cell division the polarity of a cell is lost. Therefore, the newly formed daughter cells initially lack the information to direct them to migrate to the midline where they are needed for proper neural tube development. The report in Nature is the first to demonstrate that the polarity is restored to the daughter cells after rather than during cell division and to provide the specific molecules involved in restoring polarity.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 8382 - Posted: 01.12.2006

An international team of researchers, led by investigators at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, are zeroing in on a gene that increases risk for Alzheimer's disease. They have identified a region of chromosome 10 that appears to be involved in risk for the disease that currently affects an estimated 4.5 million Americans. "There are a few genes that have been implicated in the development of early-onset Alzheimer's disease, but other than APOE, no genes have been found that increase risk for the more common, late-onset form of the disease," says principal investigator Alison M. Goate, D. Phil., the Samuel and Mae S. Ludwig Professor of Genetics in Psychiatry at Washington University. "The region of DNA identified in our study showed evidence of replication in four independent series of experiments. I haven't seen a putative risk factor show such consistent results since the e4 variant of the APOE gene was identified as a risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer's disease more than 10 years ago." In the January issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, Goate's team of researchers reports results of a scan of more than 1,400 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on chromosome 10 to home in on susceptibility genes for late-onset Alzheimer's disease.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 8381 - Posted: 01.12.2006

Animals do not need a big brain to be able to teach each other, a new study suggests. Animal behaviourists in the UK believe they have found the first evidence of two-way teacher-pupil communication between ants, suggesting that teaching behaviour may have evolved according to the value of information rather than brain size. Some ants use tandem running when foraging. This is when one ant appears to lead another from the nest to a food source by using signals that control the speed and route of the journey. Nigel Franks and Tom Richardson at Bristol University examined tandem running in Temnothorax albipennis ants to see if this was an example of teaching with feedback going from teacher to pupil and vice-versa. The leader’s speed is controlled by frequent taps on its legs and abdomen by the antennae of the follower ant – who appears to stop frequently to learn the route back. Teaching differs from simply broadcasting information in that the teacher must modify their behaviour, at some cost, to assist a naïve observer to learn more quickly. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 8380 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Ranit Mishori One afternoon in 1999, Denise Portis's son Christopher fell and hurt himself badly. But Portis didn't answer his cries. The reason: She couldn't hear him. Since age 27, she'd been living with a profound and progressive hearing loss, its cause unknown. She thought she'd adapted. Then the incident with Christopher "shook my world," the Frederick woman recalls. She already was using two hearing aids, but she knew she needed something else. A while later, she got it: a cochlear implant -- a needle-sized electrode surgically placed under the skin at the base of the skull, behind the ear. Last July, several congressmen and guests of the Congressional Hearing Health Caucus watched a video of the results. As a technician switches on the device, amazement lights up Portis's face. Then Christopher, now 14, said, "Hi, Mom." Portis, 39, bursts into tears. "The last time I really heard him clearly," she recalled later, "he was in kindergarten and he still had a little-boy voice." Growing numbers of Americans appear to be joining Portis in opting for the "bionic solution" to hearing loss. Med-El, one of three leading implant manufacturers, estimates market growth at 15 to 20 percent a year. According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), approximately 13,000 adults and 10,000 children had received implants as of 2002, the last year for which data are available. © 2006 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 8379 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE On a hot summer day 15 years ago in Parma, Italy, a monkey sat in a special laboratory chair waiting for researchers to return from lunch. Thin wires had been implanted in the region of its brain involved in planning and carrying out movements. Every time the monkey grasped and moved an object, some cells in that brain region would fire, and a monitor would register a sound: brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip. A graduate student entered the lab with an ice cream cone in his hand. The monkey stared at him. Then, something amazing happened: when the student raised the cone to his lips, the monitor sounded - brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip - even though the monkey had not moved but had simply observed the student grasping the cone and moving it to his mouth. The researchers, led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma, had earlier noticed the same strange phenomenon with peanuts. The same brain cells fired when the monkey watched humans or other monkeys bring peanuts to their mouths as when the monkey itself brought a peanut to its mouth. Later, the scientists found cells that fired when the monkey broke open a peanut or heard someone break a peanut. The same thing happened with bananas, raisins and all kinds of other objects. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 8378 - Posted: 01.11.2006

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a transitional stage between normal cognition and Alzheimer's disease, exists in two different forms, according to a study published today by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the University of California, Los Angeles in the Archives of Neurology. Using a new imaging procedure that creates 3-D maps of the brain, researchers determined specific areas that had degenerated in people with MCI. Depending on the person's symptoms, more tissue was lost in the hippocampus, a brain area critical for memory and one of the earliest to change in Alzheimer's disease, indicating two different paths of progression to Alzheimer's disease. The finding could lead to better diagnosis and treatment of patients with MCI, perhaps delaying or preventing the onset of dementia. MCI is categorized into two sub-types – currently distinguished based solely on symptoms. Those with MCI, amnesic subtype (MCI-A) have memory impairments only, while those with MCI, multiple cognitive domain subtype (MCI-MCD) have other types of mild impairments, such as in judgment or language, but also have either mild or no memory loss. Both sub-types progress to Alzheimer's disease at the same rate. Until now it was not known if the pathologies of the two types of MCI were different, or if MCI-MCD was just a more advanced form of MCI-A. Researchers found that the hippocampus of the patients with MCI-A was 14 percent smaller than that of the healthy subjects, nearly as great as the 23 percent shrinkage seen in Alzheimer's disease. But, the hippocampus of those with MCI-MCD most resembled that of the controls, showing only 5 percent shrinkage.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 8377 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Lab experiments suggest that a pregnant mother's exposure to certain chemicals in the environment can cause reproductive problems not only for her own children, but also for several more generations of her family. As this ScienCentral News video explains, research with pregnant rats revealed what genetics researchers thought was impossible. One chemical is used in insecticides. The other is a fungicide used on vineyards and orchards. They are known to alter levels of reproductive hormones, but there were no signs — until now — that such chemicals could alter our genes — the DNA code we pass on to our children. "We've made a discovery that has made us sit back and think about some general biology questions in a number of different areas," says biologist Michael Skinner, director of Washington State University's Center for Reproductive Biology. "If disease can be induced by environmental factors, and then subsequently be carried forward to the subsequent generations, then we have come up with potentially a new paradigm for disease development." When Skinner gave high doses of the chemicals to pregnant rats, he discovered sperm count problems in 90 percent of all male descendants over the next four generations. Something he calls a "transgenerational phenomenon." © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 8376 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A team of researchers, led by investigators at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has found that a gene variant for a bitter-taste receptor on the tongue is associated with an increased risk for alcohol dependence. The research team studied DNA samples from 262 families, all of which have at least three alcoholic individuals. The families are participating in a national study called the Collaborative Study of the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA). COGA investigators report in the January issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics on the variation in a taste receptor gene on chromosome 7 called TAS2R16. "In earlier work, we had identified chromosome 7 as a region where there was likely to be a gene influencing alcoholism risk," says principal investigator Alison M. Goate, D. Phil., the Samuel and Mae S. Ludwig Professor of Genetics in Psychiatry at Washington University. "There's a cluster of bitter-taste receptor genes on that chromosome, and there have been several papers suggesting drinking behaviors might be influenced by variations within taste receptors. So we decided to look closely at these taste receptor genes." Because taste receptors tend to vary a lot in the general population, Goate and colleagues had the opportunity to look at a large number of differences in genetic sequences and determine whether certain sequences might influence risk. In this study, they concentrated on TAS2R16, which helps regulate the response to bitter tastes. They found a single base variation in the TAS2R16 receptor gene that seemed to put people at an increased risk for alcoholism. In cell culture experiments, Goate found that the variant receptor produced by this gene was less responsive to bitter compounds.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Drug Abuse
Link ID: 8375 - Posted: 01.11.2006

By Amy R. Coombs As anyone on a new year's diet can attest, gaining weight is much easier than burning it off. Humans aren't the only ones capable of packing on the pounds, however. New research indicates that insects store fat in one of the same ways mammals do. Identifying the fat management pathways insects and mammals have in common may eventually help scientists develop new ways to fight obesity, say the researchers. Fat cells form when a unique class of stem cells make a critical decision: They either become osteoblasts, which develop into bone cells, or preadipocytes, which give rise to fat cells. Exactly which messages tell a stem cell to become a fat cell rather than a bone cell remain a mystery, however. To learn more about the process, Jonathan Graff, a molecular biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, studied a set of genes known to impact development in humans, flies, and many other animals. To see if the set, called the Hedgehog suite, also influences the development of fat cells, Graff and his research team bred mutant flies missing select Hedgehog genes. Flies without the genes were fatter, survived starvation better, and had higher overall levels of lipid and fat related proteins than did flies with an intact gene suite, the team reports this month in Cell Metabolism. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 8374 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, believe they have located a place in the brain where songbirds store the memories of their parents' songs. The discovery has implications for humans, because humans and songbirds are among the few animals that learn to vocalize by imitating their caregivers. In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, David Vicario and Mimi Phan of Rutgers, and Carolyn Pytte of Wesleyan University, report that songbirds store the memory of caregivers' songs in a part of the brain involved in hearing. This suggests the auditory version of the caregiver's song is stored first, and that it may serve to guide the vocal learning process. The paper is titled "Early Auditory Experience Generates Long-Lasting Memories That May Subserve Vocal Learning in Songbirds." "There is independent evidence, notably from work done by Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington in Seattle, that something similar may underlie the acquisition of human speech by infants and, thus, be part of the mechanism that allows kids to learn any human language if they start early enough," Vicario says. Vicario, Phan and Pytte worked with zebra finches, tiny songbirds native to Australia and favored by researchers because they breed well in captivity and all year- round. There are other animals that also learn vocalizations by imitating members of their species – whales, dolphins and parrots, for instance – but they take a long time to mature, are endangered or are too difficult to work with in laboratories.

Keyword: Language; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8373 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Helen Pearson If you're the type to stumble about as though drunk on first getting out of bed, scientists can now back up your behaviour as reasonable. A team has shown that people are as woozy when they wake as they are after drinking several beers. Sleep researchers have long been interested in the symptoms of sluggishness and disorientation that people experience after awakening, which they call sleep inertia. Now they have measured exactly how hopeless our early-morning brains are at carrying out everyday tasks. To do this, Kenneth Wright at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his co-workers looked at the mental handicap caused by sleep inertia, and compared it with the detriment of having stayed up all night. They allowed nine volunteers to enjoy roughly eight hours' nightly slumber for four weeks, the final week taking place in the lab. After a final pleasant night's sleep, they woke each person and immediately, without even a cup of coffee, asked them to calculate a string of sums. A minute after waking, they scored how many problems each one totted up correctly over two minutes. The test was then repeated after 20 minutes and again at regular intervals until the subjects had gone a full 26 hours without sleep. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 8372 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Eric Jaffe "If we find any gross abnormalities in your brain, would you like a radiologist to tell you about it?" Tobias Egner asks me. He is about to wheel me into the dark gullet of an fMRI machine at the Functional MRI Research Center at Columbia University, a leading neuroscience lab where he is a research fellow. I say yes to his question and ask if anyone ever says no. "If you answer no, we cannot do the test," Egner says. He speaks with a soft certainty and a German accent; if this were a movie, he'd be played by Willem Dafoe, a la The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. "Ready to roll?" In the last decade, fMRI (or functional magnetic resonance imaging) has become a premier—and scrutinized—tool of neuroscience. I wanted to see for myself how the technology works. On a visit to Columbia's lab to view an experiment, I mentioned an interest in participating, and two researchers within earshot accepted my offer. I signed on with Egner to become one of about 20 subjects in a study of how the brain manages conflicting information. To me, this means choosing every night at 7 between the Seinfeld rerun on Fox and the one on TBS. To Egner, it means studying how the amygdala, the brain's emotional hub, resolves the millions of emotional conflicts people experience every day. To watch my mind in action, Egner will use the fMRI machine's magnetic coil to scan my brain every two seconds for blood rushes, which show an increase in neural activity. The more common MRI uses magnetic resonance imaging to scan the body for abnormal tissue, in order to diagnose a tumor or an injury. The added "f" for functional means the machine will look at my brain while I perform mental tasks, so it can see which regions are most active. From a control room facing me, Egner will capture the results on a computer. ©2005 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 8371 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Ker Than A new study finds that a cell once believed to serve neurons instead may perform the crucial function of regulating blood flow in the brain. The discovery challenges a basic assumption in neuroscience and could have implications for interpreting brain scans and understanding what occurs during brain trauma and Alzheimer's disease. Oxygen is the main fuel of biological cells. It is transported throughout the body by way of the circulatory system. Not surprisingly, the brain is one of the most voracious consumers of oxygen, and a basic assumption in neuroscience is that the more active a brain region is, the more oxygen (and thus blood) its neurons require. This assumption forms the foundation for sophisticated brain imaging techniques such as PET and functional MRI scans. By scanning the brain while subjects perform certain tasks, scientists have been able to pinpoint specialized brain regions for phenomena such as emotion or language. Star-shaped brain cells called astrocytes were traditionally thought of as housekeeping cells that helped nourish the brain under the direction of the neurons. The new study found that the astrocytes can directly control blood flow without being told. 2006 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Glia; Brain imaging
Link ID: 8370 - Posted: 01.11.2006

By CRAIG SMITH ALBERT Hofmann, the father of LSD, walked slowly across the small corner office of his modernist home on a grassy Alpine hilltop here, hoping to show a visitor the vista that sweeps before him on clear days. But outside there was only a white blanket of fog hanging just beyond the crest of the hill. He picked up a photograph of the view on his desk instead, left there perhaps to convince visitors of what really lies beyond the windowpane. Mr. Hofmann will turn 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a symposium in nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered and that famously unlocked the Blakean doors of perception, altering consciousnesses around the world. As the years accumulate behind him, Mr. Hofmann's conversation turns ever more insistently around one theme: man's oneness with nature and the dangers of an increasing inattention to that fact. "It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature," he said, listing to the right in a green armchair that looked out over frost-dusted fields and snow-laced trees. A glass pitcher held a bouquet of roses on the coffee table before him. "In the big cities, there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are products of humans," he said. "The bigger the town, the less they see and understand nature." And, yes, he said, LSD, which he calls his "problem child," could help reconnect people to the universe. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 8369 - Posted: 01.07.2006

By JR Minkel In 2002 a clinical trial of an experimental Alzheimer's vaccine was halted when a few patients began experiencing brain inflammation, a result of the immune system mounting an attack against the body. Now some researchers claim that inducing a mild autoimmune reaction could actually protect the central nervous system from a spectrum of neurodegenerative conditions, from glaucoma and spinal cord injury to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. "This is a hot-button issue right now," says Howard Gendelman of the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. It all started with glaucoma. Once thought to result primarily from high pressure in the eyeball constricting the optic nerve, the disease has lately come to be seen as a form of neurodegeneration, propagating from the injured optic nerve to healthy cells in the brain. Before monkey studies had demonstrated as much, neuroimmunologist Michal Schwartz of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, observed in the late 1990s that crushing a small portion of a rat optic nerve creates a large zone of sickened cells. She and her team also found that T cells, the immune system's attackers, gathered at these wounds. © 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Regeneration
Link ID: 8368 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Carolyn Gramling Pound for pound, females appear to be better at holding their liquor than males, and now scientists may have found one reason why. A new study in rats suggests that hormone levels in the brain may mediate alcohol's potency, giving females a leg up at certain times during their hormonal cycle. The gender gap in alcohol metabolism is no secret. Women metabolize alcohol more slowly than men and that makes them more susceptible to alcoholic liver disease, heart muscle damage, and brain damage. Rat studies suggest that males and females in their teenage years are equally affected by the equivalent of a stiff drink, but females are less sensitive to alcohol's sedative powers when they become adults. And, given an open "tab," female rats drink more than the males, but their consumption varies across their hormonal cycle. These findings suggest that hormone levels may mediate alcohol's potency, say H. Scott Swartzwelder of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. To examine this link more closely, Swartzwelder and colleagues studied the sedative effects of alcohol by injecting the equivalent of about 20 drinks of alcohol into adolescent and adult rats of both genders and throughout the females' estrous cycle. The researchers then observed how long it took for the rats to stand up on all four feet from a prone position. © 2005 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8367 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Dennis O'Brien Do you generally trust other people? How do you react when you're frightened? Are you faithful to your spouse? The answer to these loaded questions may be tied to a natural chemical known mainly for helping mothers give birth. It's called oxytocin, and it's released by the brain during labor and to stimulate milk during breast feeding. Doctors have used a synthetic version for decades to induce contractions in pregnant women. Researchers also have linked increased levels of the so-called "attachment hormone" to sexual activity and the reaction to a good massage. "It's pretty wild stuff," said Dr. Thomas Insel, an oxytocin expert who is director of the National Institute of Mental Health. Last month, NIMH researchers published research involving 15 men whose brains were scanned after they sniffed oxytocin and then viewed several photos of threatening or frightened faces. The scans recorded two-thirds less activity in their amygdalae - the brain region that registers fear - than a control group that wasn't exposed to oxytocin. Differences were greatest when the men looked at threatening faces, suggesting the hormone plays a key role in regulating fear. © 2006 by The Baltimore Sun.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 8366 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Babies exposed to certain infections shortly before and after birth have a greater risk of cerebral palsy, Australian research suggests. Scientists tested over 1,300 babies, including 443 with cerebral palsy, for viruses, including the herpes group B virus, which can cross the placenta. The British Medical Journal study showed the cerebral palsy risk doubled with exposure to herpes group B virus. Cerebral palsy can cause physical impairments and mobility problems. It results from the failure of a part of the brain to develop before birth or in early childhood or brain damage and affects one in 400 births. The team from the Adelaide Women's and Children's Hospital found exposure to viral infections was common in all newborns - especially if they were born premature. This implied infections before birth may also be linked to pre-term delivery, the researchers said. But the team concluded only exposure to the herpes B virus, which causes chicken pox and shingles, seemed to be linked with cerebral palsy. A different herpes virus, group A, causes common cold sores and genital herpes. However, the researchers added that other factors such as growth restriction, clinical events and genetic susceptibility to infections could be a factor and plan to look at these in further research. (C)BBC

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 8365 - Posted: 01.07.2006