By Elizabeth Pennisi In hyenas as well as humans, it pays to be born to high-ranking parents. A new study reveals how power is passed down in these matriarchal mammals: Elite hyena cubs cultivate their mom’s friends, who help keep them fed and protected throughout their lives. The work drives home the role moms and dads play in shaping the social world of their children, says Josh Firth, a social networks researcher at the University of Oxford who was not involved with the study. “We tend to think about who we are connected to as a product of our doing, but it’s a product of our parents as well.” Chimpanzees, hyenas, and other social animals live in hierarchical societies. Those at the top eat first, and are typically surrounded by a gang that protects them from other members of their species that try to challenge their status. High rank tends to be inherited, but it’s been unclear how subsequent generations end up with the same type of ruling clan their parents do. Do they recruit their own powerful allies, or inherit them? Erol Akçay, a theoretical biologist at the University of Pennsylvania, and behavioral ecologist Amiyaal Ilany, now at Bar-Ilan University, decided to analyze the work of Kay Holekamp. A behavioral ecologist at Michigan State University, Holekamp’s team had been following the lives of a clan of spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) in Kenya for almost 30 years. Day after day, the researchers have recorded the activity of the hyenas, including their interactions with and proximity to other hyenas, to understand the species’ behavior and ecology. They have also kept track of the pedigrees and social status of each female and its offspring. © 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Aggression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 27912 - Posted: 07.17.2021

Tanya T. Nguyen, M.D., Dilip V. Jeste, M.D. In James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizons, Shangri-La was a magical utopia where people lived well beyond 100 years. But now, less than a century later, it seems we are well on our way to making Hilton’s vision a reality. The US Census Bureau reported in 2020 that the average life expectancy has increased from 47 in 1900 to over 80 years today, while the number of people over age 60 exceeds children under 15 for the first time ever. By 2060, the average lifespan will approach 90 years. Astonishingly, more than half of the babies born today will live to age 100 and beyond, which will make Hilton’s seemingly far-fetched vision come to pass. One might think that people living longer would represent an enormous, thrilling milestone. But unfortunately, aging is rarely perceived that way. The increase in older people—metaphorically termed a “silver tsunami” since the 1980s—has economic implications, including unimaginable healthcare costs. Certain segments of western culture sadly equate aging with such “d” words as degeneration, decline, disability, diseases, dementia, depression, and death. Policy makers and economists are outspoken in their fear that spending money on older people’s care will mean less money for children and younger adults, who represent the future. This attitude—commonly labeled ageism—is analogous to such phenomena as sexism, racism, and bias against certain sexual orientations. Ageism has made many older people feel guilty about living longer and becoming a potential burden. They think—and are encouraged by society to think—that aging is an incurable disease. © 2021 The Dana Foundation.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 27911 - Posted: 07.17.2021

Researchers at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory have imaged an entire mouse brain across five orders of magnitude of resolution, a step which researchers say will better connect existing imaging approaches and uncover new details about the structure of the brain. The advance, which was published on June 9 in NeuroImage, will allow scientists to connect biomarkers at the microscopic and macroscopic level. It leveraged existing advanced X-ray microscopy techniques to bridge the gap between MRI and electron microscopy imaging, providing a viable pipeline for multiscale whole brain imaging within the same brain. “Our lab is really interested in mapping brains at multiple scales to get an unbiased description of what brains look like,” said senior author Narayanan “Bobby” Kasthuri, assistant professor of neurobiology at UChicago and scientist at Argonne. “When I joined the faculty here, one of the first things I learned was that Argonne had this extremely powerful X-ray microscope, and it hadn’t been used for brain mapping yet, so we decided to try it out.” The microscope uses a type of imaging called synchrotron-based X-ray tomography, which can be likened to a “micro-CT”, or micro-computerized tomography scan. Thanks to the powerful X-rays produced by the synchrotron particle accelerator at Argonne, the researchers were able to image the entire mouse brain—roughly one cubic centimeter—at the resolution of a micron, 1/10,000 of a centimeter. It took roughly six hours to collect images of the entire brain, adding up to around 2 terabytes of data. This is one of the fastest approaches for whole brain imaging at this level of resolution.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 27910 - Posted: 07.17.2021

By Emily Anthes Johnson & Johnson’s beleaguered Covid-19 vaccine may be associated with a small increased risk of Guillain–Barré syndrome, a rare but potentially serious neurological condition, federal officials said on Monday. The Food and Drug Administration has added a warning about the potential side effect to its fact sheets about the vaccine. The risk appears to be very small. So far, there have been 100 reports of the syndrome in people who had received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Nearly 13 million doses of the vaccine have been administered in the United States. Here are answers to some common questions about the syndrome and its connection to vaccination. What is Guillain-Barré syndrome? Guillain-Barré is a rare condition in which the body’s immune system attacks nerve cells. It can cause muscle weakness and paralysis. Although the symptoms often pass within weeks, in some cases, the condition can cause permanent nerve damage. In the United States, there are typically 3,000 to 6,000 cases of the syndrome per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is most common in adults over 50. The precise cause of the syndrome is unknown, but in many cases the condition follows another illness or infection, such as the flu. It has also been reported in people with Covid-19. This is not the first vaccine that has been linked to Guillain-Barré, although the risk appears to be tiny. A large swine flu vaccination campaign in 1976 led to a small uptick in the incidence of syndrome; the vaccine caused roughly one extra case of Guillain-Barré for every 100,000 people vaccinated. The seasonal flu shot is associated with roughly one to two additional cases for every million vaccines administered. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 27909 - Posted: 07.14.2021

By Melissa J. Coleman, Eric Fortune A fundamental feature of vocal communication is taking turns: when one person says something, the other person listens and then responds. Turn-taking requires precise coordination of the timing of signals between individuals. We have all found over the past year communicating over Zoom that disruptions of the timing of auditory cues—like those annoying delays caused by poor connections—make effective communication difficult and frustrating. How do the brains of two individuals synchronize their activity patterns for rapid turn-taking during vocal communication? We addressed this question in a recently published paper by studying turn-taking in a specialist, the plain-tailed wren (Pheugopedius euophrys), which sings precisely timed duets. Our findings demonstrate the ability to coordinate relies on sensory cues from one partner that temporarily inhibit vocalizations in the other. These birds sing duets in which females and males alternate their vocalizations, called syllables, so rapidly it sounds as if a single bird is singing. These wrens live in dense bamboo on the slopes of the Andes. To study the neural basis of duet singing, we flew to Ecuador where we loaded up a truck with equipment and drove to a remote field-site called the Yanayacu Biological Field Station and Center for Creative Studies. Much of our equipment required electricity, so we had to bring car batteries for backup and used a six-meter copper rod that we drove into the soft mountain earth for our electrical ground. Our “lab bench” was a door that we placed on two Pelican suitcases. First, we had to catch pairs of wrens, so we hacked through bamboo with machetes and set up mist nets. We then attracted pairs to the nets by playing the duets of wrens. To see how neurons responded during duets, we surgically implanted very small wires into a specific region of the brain, called HVC. Neurons in this region are responsible for producing the song—that is, they are premotor—and they also respond to auditory signals. To transmit the neural signals (i.e., action potentials) to a computer, a small wireless digital transmitter was then connected to the wires. We then had to wait for the birds to sing their remarkable duets. © 2021 Scientific American,

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 27908 - Posted: 07.14.2021

By Michael Pollan After a half century spent waging war on drugs, Americans seem ready to sue for peace. The 2020 elections brought plenty of proof that voters have leapt ahead of politicians in recognizing both the failures of the drug war and the potential of certain illicit drugs as powerful tools for healing. Ballot initiatives in five states — four of them traditionally red — legalized some form of cannabis use. By substantial margins, Oregon passed two landmark drug reform initiatives: Fifty-nine percent of voters supported Measure 110, which decriminalized the possession of small quantities of all drugs, even hard ones like heroin and cocaine. A second proposal, Measure 109, specifically legalized psilocybin therapy, directing the state’s health department to license growers of so-called magic mushrooms and train facilitators to administer them beginning in 2023. In the past two years, a new drug policy reform movement called Decriminalize Nature has persuaded local governments in a half dozen municipalities, including Washington, D.C., to decriminalize “plant medicines” such as psilocybin, ayahuasca, iboga and the cactuses that produce mescaline. Last month, the California State Senate passed a bill that would make legal the personal possession, use and “social sharing” of psychedelics, including LSD and MDMA, a.k.a. Ecstasy or Molly. Political opposition to all these measures has been notably thin. Neither party, it seems, has the stomach for persisting in a war that has achieved so little while doing so much damage, especially to communities of color and our civil liberties. But while we can now begin to glimpse an end to the drug war, it is much harder to envision what the drug peace will look like. How will we fold these powerful substances into our society and our lives so as to minimize their risks and use them most constructively? The blunt binaries of “Just say no” that have held sway for so long have kept us from having this conversation and from appreciating how different one illicit drug is from another. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 27907 - Posted: 07.14.2021

By Jaime Chambers Wiggles and wobbles and a powerful pull toward people — that’s what 8-week-old puppies are made of. From an early age, dogs outpace wolves at engaging with and interpreting cues from humans, even if the dogs have had less exposure to people, researchers report online July 12 in Current Biology. The result suggests that domestication has reworked dogs’ brains to make the pooches innately drawn to people — and perhaps to intuit human gestures. Compared with human-raised wolf pups, dog puppies that had limited exposure to people were still 30 times as likely to approach a strange human, and five times as likely to approach a familiar person. “I think that is by far the clearest result in the paper, and is powerful and meaningful,” says Clive Wynne, a canine behavioral scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe who was not involved in the study. Wolf pups are naturally less entranced by people than dogs are. “When I walked into the [wolf] pen for the first time, they would all just run into the corner and hide,” says Hannah Salomons, an evolutionary anthropologist studying dog cognition at Duke University. Over time, Salomons says, most came to ignore her, “acting like I was a piece of furniture.” But dogs can’t seem to resist humans’ allure (SN: 7/19/17). They respond much more readily to people, following where a person points, for example. That ability may seem simple, but it’s a skill even chimpanzees — humans’ close relatives — don’t show. Human babies don’t learn how to do it until near their first birthday. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2021

Keyword: Evolution; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 27906 - Posted: 07.14.2021

By Gretchen Reynolds Exercise can freshen and renovate the white matter in our brains, potentially improving our ability to think and remember as we age, according to a new study of walking, dancing and brain health. It shows that white matter, which connects and supports the cells in our brains, remodels itself when people become more physically active. In those who remain sedentary, on the other hand, white matter tends to fray and shrink. The findings underscore the dynamism of our brains and how they constantly transform themselves — for better and worse — in response to how we live and move. The idea that adult brains can be malleable is a fairly recent finding, in scientific terms. Until the late 1990s, most researchers believed human brains were physically fixed and inflexible after early childhood. We were born, it was thought, with most of the brain cells we would ever have and could not make more. In this scenario, the structure and function of our brains would only decline with age. But science advanced, thankfully, and revised that gloomy forecast. Complex studies using specialized dyes to identify newborn cells indicated that some parts of our brains create neurons deep into adulthood, a process known as neurogenesis. Follow-up studies then established that exercise amplifies neurogenesis. When rodents run, for example, they pump out three or four times as many new brain cells as inactive animals, while in people, beginning a program of regular exercise leads to greater brain volume. In essence, this research shows, our brains retain lifelong plasticity, changing as we do, including in response to how we exercise. These past studies of brain plasticity generally focused on gray matter, though, which contains the celebrated little gray cells, or neurons, that permit and create thoughts and memories. Less research has looked at white matter, the brain’s wiring. Made up mostly of fat-wrapped nerve fibers known as axons, white matter connects neurons and is essential for brain health. But it can be fragile, thinning and developing small lesions as we age, dilapidations that can be precursors of cognitive decline. Worryingly, it also has been considered relatively static, with little plasticity, or ability to adapt much as our lives change. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 27905 - Posted: 07.14.2021

By Lisa Sanders, M.D. The 22-year-old man struggled to get out of bed. The E.M.T.s were just outside his door, if he could only get there. The previous day he felt that he was coming down with something. Normally he never took naps, but that afternoon, he returned from class feeling completely wiped out and slept long and hard. Yet when he awoke, he felt even worse. Every muscle was sore. He felt feverish. This must be the flu, he told himself. He had the flu shot before starting school that year, but of course no vaccine is 100 percent effective. He spent the rest of that afternoon in bed, too tired and in too much pain to even get up to join his partner for dinner. When he awoke in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, he was so weak and sore he could hardly sit up. He maneuvered to the edge of the bed and, using the headboard, pulled himself to his feet, but his partner had to help him get to the bathroom. Once he was there, the urine he produced was startlingly dark — the color of Coca-Cola. The next day he felt no better. His partner wanted to stay home with him, but he hurried her off to work. It’s just the flu, he assured her. But as the morning wore on, he started to worry. He called his parents, who were both nurses. They were worried too; influenza can be bad. When he got the same message from a doctor back home in New York, he started wondering if he should go to the hospital. He’d never been this sick before. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Muscles; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 27904 - Posted: 07.14.2021

By Veronique Greenwood Captive cuttlefish require entertainment when they eat. Dinner and a show — if they can’t get live prey, then they need some dancing from a dead shrimp on a stick in their tank. When the food looks alive, the little cephalopods, which look like iridescent footballs with eight short arms and two tentacles, are more likely to eat it. Because a person standing before them has to jiggle it, the animals start to recognize that mealtime and a looming human-shaped outline go together. As soon as a person walks into the room, “they all swim to the front of the tank saying, give me food!” said Trevor Wardill, a biologist at the University of Minnesota who studies cuttlefish vision. You may get a squirt of water from a cuttlefish’s siphon if you don’t feed them, though. Alexandra Schnell, a comparative psychologist at the University of Cambridge, recalled some who sprayed her if she was even a little slow with the treats. It’s the kind of behavior that researchers who’ve worked with cuttlefish sometimes remark on: The critters have character. But they do not have the name recognition of their cousins — the octopus and the squid. Even Tessa Montague, a neuroscientist who today studies cuttlefish at Columbia University, hadn’t really heard of them until an aquarium visit during graduate school. “Octopus are obviously part of lots of children’s story books,” she notes. Cuttlefish were not present. During the last week of a course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., though, she heard a talk by Bret Grasse, whom she called a “cephalopod guru.” “He said they have three hearts, green blood and one of the largest brains among invertebrates,” she said. “And they can regenerate their limbs, they can camouflage. Within about 30 seconds, I had basically planned out my entire life. That lunchtime I went to the facility where he was culturing all these animals. My entire scientific career flashed in front of me. I was like, this is it, this is what I’ve been looking for.” © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Intelligence
Link ID: 27903 - Posted: 07.10.2021

By Lizzie Wade They were buried on a plantation just outside Havana. Likely few, if any, thought of the place as home. Most apparently grew up in West Africa, surrounded by family and friends. The exact paths that led to each of them being ripped from those communities and sold into bondage across the sea cannot be retraced. We don’t know their names and we don’t know their stories because in their new world of enslavement those truths didn’t matter to people with the power to write history. All we can tentatively say: They were 51 of nearly 5 million enslaved Africans brought to Caribbean ports and forced to labor in the islands’ sugar and coffee fields for the profit of Europeans. Nor do we know how or when the 51 died. Perhaps they succumbed to disease, or were killed through overwork or by a more explicit act of violence. What we do know about the 51 begins only with a gruesome postscript: In 1840, a Cuban doctor named José Rodriguez Cisneros dug up their bodies, removed their heads, and shipped their skulls to Philadelphia. He did so at the request of Samuel Morton, a doctor, anatomist, and the first physical anthropologist in the United States, who was building a collection of crania to study racial differences. And thus the skulls of the 51 were turned into objects to be measured and weighed, filled with lead shot, and measured again. Morton, who was white, used the skulls of the 51—as he did all of those in his collection—to define the racial categories and hierarchies still etched into our world today. After his death in 1851, his collection continued to be studied, added to, and displayed. In the 1980s, the skulls, now at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, began to be studied again, this time by anthropologists with ideas very different from Morton’s. They knew that society, not biology, defines race. © 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Evolution
Link ID: 27902 - Posted: 07.10.2021

Rebecca Hersher Big bodies are good for cold places. That's the gist of a foundational rule in ecology that has been around since the mid-1800s: Animals that live in colder places tend to have larger bodies, especially birds and mammals that need to regulate their body temperatures. For example, some of the largest whale and bear species have evolved in the coldest reaches of the planet. The rule applies broadly to modern humans too. Populations that evolved in colder places generally have bigger bodies. That's also true of human ancestors, a new study finds. The research offers conclusive evidence that human body size and climate are historically connected. In general, our ancient relatives got much larger as they evolved. "Over the last million years, you see that body size changes by about 50% and brain size actually triples, which is a lot," explains Andrea Manica, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Cambridge. "And there have been all sorts of theories about what might have underpinned those two big changes in size." Article continues after sponsor message Manica and a team of paleontologists and climate scientists in Germany and the United Kingdom set out to test one of those theories: that the local climate was driving brain and body growth. They examined about 300 fossils of human ancestors collected in Europe, Asia and Africa, and they used the same basic climate data that scientists use to predict future climate change to estimate instead temperature and precipitation over the last million years. © 2021 npr

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 27901 - Posted: 07.10.2021

By Rebecca Robbins The Food and Drug Administration on Friday called for a federal investigation of the process that led to the approval of a new drug for Alzheimer’s disease that has spurred sharp criticism from lawmakers and the medical community. In a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services’ independent Office of the Inspector General, the F.D.A.’s acting commissioner, Dr. Janet Woodcock, acknowledged the scrutiny the agency has faced about the approval process for the drug, which is known as Aduhelm and has a $56,000 annual price tag. She pointed to interactions between representatives from the drug’s developer, Biogen, and the agency, saying some “may have occurred outside of the formal correspondence process.” “To the extent these concerns could undermine the public’s confidence in F.D.A.’s decision, I believe it is critical that the events at issue be reviewed by an independent body,” Dr. Woodcock wrote. She noted that the review should look at whether any of the communication between the agency’s staff and Biogen’s representatives violated F.D.A. rules. Dana Conti, a spokesman for Biogen, said the company “will, of course, cooperate with any inquiry in connection with a possible review of the regulatory process.” It is unusual for the agency to request an investigation into its own staff’s decision-making process for an individual drug approval. The move is likely to intensify the controversy that has surrounded Aduhelm. The F.D.A. approved it a month ago, overriding the fierce objections of its own independent advisers and many other scientists, who said there was insufficient evidence to know whether the drug was effective. On Thursday, the F.D.A. moved to narrow its recommendation about who should receive the drug. After originally recommending it for all Alzheimer’s patients, the agency’s new guidelines say it should be prescribed only to people with mild cognitive problems. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 27900 - Posted: 07.10.2021

Michael Marshall Since the beginning of the pandemic, researchers have been trying to understand how the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 affects the brain.Credit: Stanislav Krasilnikov/TASS/Getty How COVID-19 damages the brain is becoming clearer. New evidence suggests that the coronavirus’s assault on the brain could be multipronged: it might attack certain brain cells directly, reduce blood flow to brain tissue or trigger production of immune molecules that can harm brain cells. Infection with the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 can cause memory loss, strokes and other effects on the brain. The question, says Serena Spudich, a neurologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, is: “Can we intervene early to address these abnormalities so that people don’t have long-term problems?” With so many people affected — neurological symptoms appeared in 80% of the people hospitalized with COVID-19 who were surveyed in one study1 — researchers hope that the growing evidence base will point the way to better treatments. Breaking into the brain SARS-CoV-2 can have severe effects: a preprint posted last month2 compared images of people’s brains from before and after they had COVID-19, and found loss of grey matter in several areas of the cerebral cortex. (Preprints are published without peer review.) Early in the pandemic, researchers speculated that the virus might cause damage by somehow entering the brain and infecting neurons, the cells responsible for transmitting and processing information. But studies have since indicated3 that the virus has difficulty getting past the brain’s defence system — the blood–brain barrier — and that it doesn’t necessarily attack neurons in any significant way.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Learning & Memory
Link ID: 27899 - Posted: 07.08.2021

Elena Renken For decades, neuroscientists have treated the brain somewhat like a Geiger counter: The rate at which neurons fire is taken as a measure of activity, just as a Geiger counter’s click rate indicates the strength of radiation. But new research suggests the brain may be more like a musical instrument. When you play the piano, how often you hit the keys matters, but the precise timing of the notes is also essential to the melody. “It’s really important not just how many [neuron activations] occur, but when exactly they occur,” said Joshua Jacobs, a neuroscientist and biomedical engineer at Columbia University who reported new evidence for this claim last month in Cell. For the first time, Jacobs and two coauthors spied neurons in the human brain encoding spatial information through the timing, rather than rate, of their firing. This temporal firing phenomenon is well documented in certain brain areas of rats, but the new study and others suggest it might be far more widespread in mammalian brains. “The more we look for it, the more we see it,” Jacobs said. Abstractions navigates promising ideas in science and mathematics. Journey with us and join the conversation. Some researchers think the discovery might help solve a major mystery: how brains can learn so quickly. The phenomenon is called phase precession. It’s a relationship between the continuous rhythm of a brain wave — the overall ebb and flow of electrical signaling in an area of the brain — and the specific moments that neurons in that brain area activate. A theta brain wave, for instance, rises and falls in a consistent pattern over time, but neurons fire inconsistently, at different points on the wave’s trajectory. In this way, brain waves act like a clock, said one of the study’s coauthors, Salman Qasim, also of Columbia. They let neurons time their firings precisely so that they’ll land in range of other neurons’ firing — thereby forging connections between neurons. All Rights Reserved © 2021

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 27898 - Posted: 07.08.2021

By Elizabeth Pennisi Almost 200 years ago, the renowned U.S. naturalist John James Audubon hid a decaying pig carcass under a pile of brush to test vultures’ sense of smell. When the birds overlooked the pig—while one flocked to a nearly odorless stuffed deer skin—he took it as proof that they rely on vision, not smell, to find their food. His experiment cemented a commonly held idea. Despite later evidence that vultures and a few specialized avian hunters use odors after all, the dogma that most birds aren’t attuned to smell endured. Now, that dogma is being eroded by findings on birds’ behavior and molecular hardware, two of which were published just last month. One showed storks home in on the smell of freshly mowed grass; another documented scores of functional olfactory receptors in multiple bird species. Researchers are realizing, says evolutionary biologist Scott Edwards of Harvard University, that “olfaction has a lot of impact on different aspects of bird biology.” Forty years ago, when ethologist Floriano Papi proposed that homing pigeons find their way back to a roost by sniffing out its chemical signature, his colleagues scoffed at the idea. They pointed out that birds have several other keen senses to guide them, including sight and, in the case of pigeons and some other species, a magnetic sense. “By then, biological textbooks already stated unequivocally that birds have little to no sense of smell, and many people still believe it—even scientists,” says Danielle Whittaker, a chemical ecologist at Michigan State University. © 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Evolution
Link ID: 27897 - Posted: 07.08.2021

Yuki Noguchi Health conditions exacerbated by obesity include heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer, according to the CDC. Researchers say the newly approved drug Wegovy could help many who struggle with obesity lose weight. adamkaz/Getty Images When a promising new drug to treat obesity was approved by the Food and Drug Administration for sale in the U.S. last month, it was the first such treatment to gain approval since 2014. In clinical trials, weekly injections of semaglutide — or Wegovy, as it's been branded — helped people drop an average of 15% of their body weight. That's an average of about 34 pounds over 16 months, before their weight plateaued — roughly triple what's achieved with other drugs on the market. At least as important, Wegovy raised none of the alarm bells with the FDA or obesity doctors that it might trigger serious side effects of the sort some people experienced by taking fen-phen or other previous medical treatments for obesity. But with a price tag for Wegovy of $1,000 to $1,500 a month, a big question remains: Will insurers cover its significant cost for the millions such as Marleen Greenleaf who might benefit? Greenleaf grew up on the island of Trinidad, where her family paid little heed to what they ate and paid a high medical price, she says: "My husband has diabetes, my sister has diabetes, my brother has diabetes." Since then, she's tried — and failed — at numerous diets, says Greenleaf, now 58 and an administrator at a charter school in Washington, D.C. Then, in 2018, she signed up for the clinical trial of a new drug — a once-weekly shot that changes the way her brain signals hunger. © 2021 npr

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 27896 - Posted: 07.08.2021

By Laura Sanders A brush with death led Hans Berger to invent a machine that could eavesdrop on the brain. In 1893, when he was 19, Berger fell off his horse during maneuvers training with the German military and was nearly trampled. On that same day, his sister, far away, got a bad feeling about Hans. She talked her father into sending a telegram asking if everything was all right. To young Berger, this eerie timing was no coincidence: It was a case of “spontaneous telepathy,” he later wrote. Hans was convinced that he had transmitted his thoughts of mortal fear to his sister — somehow. So he decided to study psychiatry, beginning a quest to uncover how thoughts could travel between people. Chasing after a scientific basis for telepathy was a dead end, of course. But in the attempt, Berger ended up making a key contribution to modern medicine and science: He invented the electroencephalogram, or EEG, a device that could read the brain’s electrical activity. Berger’s machine, first used successfully in 1924, produced a readout of squiggles that represented the electricity created by collections of firing nerve cells in the brain. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2021.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 27895 - Posted: 07.08.2021

By Paula Span Dr. Kenneth Koncilja, a geriatrician at the Cleveland Clinic, saw the announcement from the Food and Drug Administration on June 7, on Twitter: The agency had approved Aduhelm (aducanumab), the first drug to treat Alzheimer’s disease to be approved in nearly 20 years. The calls from patients’ spouses and family members began within the hour, and have not stopped. “I was shocked at how fast the word spread — ‘Hey, is this something we can use? When can we get it?’” Dr. Koncilja recalled. “There’s a mix of excitement, anxiety and desperation.” His first call that morning came from Joan Morehouse, 78, who has been caring for her 71-year-old husband, James, in their home in North Perry, Ohio, since his Alzheimer’s diagnosis four years ago. She has watched him get lost on familiar drives and forget their grandchildren’s names. When her brother and her son both emailed her a news article about the F.D.A. action, she recalled, “I said, ‘Oh, my God, my prayers have been answered.’” It fell to Dr. Koncilja to explain the complexities: That Aduhelm is not yet widely available. That protocols determining which patients qualify have yet to be developed. That the clinical trial data was ambiguous and that the drug might bring no noticeable improvements in daily life. That its side effects include brain swelling and bleeding. And that its maker, Biogen, estimates the annual cost of monthly intravenous infusions at $56,000, plus expensive scans and tests. “It’s a more difficult question than I’ve ever had before,” Dr. Koncilja said. Patients ask him how their lives will change, “and I don’t know how to answer.” © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 27894 - Posted: 07.08.2021

By Jane E. Brody I was doing research and interviews on bipolar disorder when notices appeared in my Brooklyn neighborhood about a 21-year-old man who had been missing for a week. He was described as “bipolar” and “may be experiencing a manic episode.” It took me back nearly seven decades when the state police in Texas called my father to say they had found his brother, my favorite uncle, wandering on a highway. How he got there from Brooklyn we never learned. He had apparently suffered a psychotic break and ended up in a New York State mental hospital that administered electric shock treatments but did little else to help him re-enter society effectively. Not until decades later did he receive a correct diagnosis of manic depression, now known as bipolar disorder. Characterized by extreme shifts in mood, “manic-depressive illness” was officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in 1952. But it would be many years before an effective treatment, the drug lithium, which acts on the brain to help stabilize debilitating episodes of severe mania and depression, was available to help my brilliant uncle resume a reasonably normal life. Bipolar disorder typically runs in families, with different members experiencing symptoms to a greater or lesser degree. If a parent has the disorder, a child’s risk can rise to 10 percent. My uncle’s only child displayed some minor behavioral characteristics of bipolar disorder, like very rapid speech and frenetic activity, but was able to complete two advanced degrees, marry, be a parent and succeed in an intellectually demanding career. Bipolar disorder is most often diagnosed in the later teen years or young adulthood, affecting some 4 percent of people at some point in their lives. But in recent decades, diagnosis of the disorder has soared in children and adolescents, although some experts believe the condition is overdiagnosed or overtreated with potent psychiatric drugs. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 27893 - Posted: 07.06.2021