ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Smokers often say that smoking a cigarette helps them concentrate and feel more alert. But years of tobacco use may have the opposite effect, dimming the speed and accuracy of a person's thinking ability and bringing down their IQ, according to a new study led by University of Michigan researchers. The association between long-term smoking and diminished mental proficiency in 172 alcoholic and non-alcoholic men was a surprising finding from a study that set out to examine alcoholism's long-term effect on the brain and thinking skills. While the researchers confirmed previous findings that alcoholism is associated with thinking problems and lower IQ, their analysis also revealed that long-term smoking is too. The effect on memory, problem-solving and IQ was most pronounced among those who had smoked for years. Among the alcoholic men, smoking was associated with diminished thinking ability even after alcohol and drug use were accounted for. The findings are the first to suggest a direct relationship between smoking and neurocognitive function among men with alcoholism. And, the results suggest that smoking is associated with diminished thinking ability even among men without alcohol problems.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Intelligence
Link ID: 8023 - Posted: 10.12.2005

Lewis Wolpert All plants and animals, including humans, are essentially societies of cells that vary in configuration and complexity. As Darwin's theory made clear, these multitudinous forms developed as a result of small changes in offspring and natural selection of those that were better adapted to their environment. Such variation is brought about by alterations in genes that control how cells in the developing embryo behave. Thus one cannot understand evolution without understanding its fundamental relation to development of the embryo. Yet "evo devo," as evolutionary developmental biology is affectionately called, is a relatively new and growing field. Sean B. Carroll, as a leading expert both in how animals develop and in how they have evolved, is ideally placed to explain evo devo. His new book on the subject, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom (the title borrows a phrase from Darwin's On the Origin of Species), was written, he says, with several types of readers in mind—anyone interested in natural history, those in the physical sciences who are interested in the origins of complexity, students and educators (of course), and anyone who has wondered "Where did I come from?" Carroll has brilliantly achieved what he set out to do. One of the most striking discoveries of the last half-century has been that, despite the fact that animals differ greatly in appearance, common principles control their development from a single fertilized egg. © Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Evolution
Link ID: 8022 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The unfolding story of how a common version of a gene shapes the efficiency of the brain’s prefrontal cortex — hub of “executive” functions like reasoning, planning and impulse control — and increases risk for mental illness will be told by Daniel R. Weinberger, M.D., at this year’s G. Burroughs Mider Lecture, “Complex Genetics in the Human Brain: Lessons from COMT.” Weinberger will explain why such psychiatric genetics has proven to be a daunting challenge, using as an example the gene that codes for catecho-O-methyltransferase (COMT), the enzyme that breaks down the chemical messenger dopamine. A tiny variation in its sequence results in different versions of the gene. One leads to more efficient functioning of the prefrontal cortex, the other to less efficient prefrontal functioning and slightly increased risk for schizophrenia. New studies are revealing complex interactions between the tiny glitch and other variations within the gene, and with environmental events, such as teenage marijuana use, that may bias the brain toward psychosis. Weinberger is Director of the Genes, Cognition and Psychosis Program at the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health. The program uses brain imaging, post-mortem analysis and molecular approaches to understand how genes work in the brain to produce schizophrenia. See: http://calendar.nih.gov/app/MCalInfoView.aspx?EvtID=11488

Keyword: ADHD; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 8021 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Eating fish at least once a week slows the toll aging takes on the brain, while obesity at midlife doubles the risk of dementia, a pair of studies concluded on Monday. Omega-3 fatty acids contained in fish have been shown to boost brain functioning as well as cutting the risk of stroke, and eating fish regularly appears to protect the brain as people age, the six-year study of Chicago residents said. "The rate of (mental) decline was reduced by 10 percent to 13 percent per year among persons who consumed one or more fish meals per week compared with those with less than weekly consumption," wrote Martha Clare Morris of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. "The rate reduction is the equivalent of being three to four years younger in age," she added in the report published online by the Archives of Neurology. The protective effect from eating fish was evident even after researchers adjusted for consumption of fruits and vegetables. Alzheimer's disease and other causes of dementia are growing problems around the world, particularly in developed countries with aging populations. Copyright © 2005 Yahoo! Inc.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 8020 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A potential new treatment for stroke has taken a major step forward following promising results from the first clinical trial. Researchers at The University of Manchester have shown in laboratory studies that a naturally occurring protein called IL-1ra protects brain cells from injury and death. The team, led by Professor Nancy Rothwell and Dr Pippa Tyrrell, have now reported the results of the first small trial of IL-1ra in patients, which are published in the Journal of Neurology and Neuropsychiatry. "The study was designed to test if IL-1ra is safe in stroke patients and showed promising results," said Professor Rothwell, a world-renowned neuroscientist based in the University's Faculty of Life Sciences. "The trial was a definite step in the right direction and may lead to a full trial to test its effectiveness next year." Stroke is the UK's third biggest killer and the biggest cause of disability, affecting 100,000 people each year. It accounts for 6.5% of total NHS and social services expenditure and there are currently no treatments available. Stroke occurs when vessels supplying blood to the brain become blocked and the brain is starved of oxygen. A core area of the brain dies within minutes but it is the threatened area around this core that the treatment may help to salvage.

Keyword: Stroke; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 8019 - Posted: 10.11.2005

ATLANTA - While changing sex from female to male, the highly social bluebanded goby becomes more aggressive. At the same time, the conversion of testosterone to estrogen slows in the brain, but is unaffected in the changing gonads, according to a Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN) study in the current on-line edition of Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The finding, which suggests the initial stages of sex change in fish are regulated in the brain, could help better explain the biological basis of human sexual identity. Like many fish species, the bluebanded goby switches sex in response to changes in its social environment. In a socially stable group, removal of the dominant male typically results in the dominant female changing sex to fill the void. During this process, the female experiences an array of behavioral changes and the transformation of her sex organs to male. In the study, CBN researcher and Georgia State University biology professor Matthew Grober, PhD, CBN and Georgia State post-doctoral fellow Michael Black, PhD, and researchers Jacques Balthazart, PhD, and Michelle Baillien, PhD, of the Center for Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology at the University of Liege in Belgium, attempted to determine the correlation between behavior and sex hormone conversion in four groups of gobies: a control group of females; a control group of males; dominant females who were beginning to change to males; dominant females who recently changed sex to males.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8018 - Posted: 10.11.2005

St. Paul, Minn. – Looking into our eyes may help doctors predict who is at risk for stroke. A new study found that people with changes in the small blood vessels in their eyes are more likely to later suffer a stroke than people without these signs. The results held true even after researchers took into account traditional risk factors for stroke such as smoking and high blood pressure, according to the study published in the October 11, 2005 issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study involved 3,654 Australians age 49 and older. Researchers took special photographs of the retina of the eyes of the participants and examined them for changes suggestive of small blood vessel damage, or retinopathy. These small vessel changes can be seen in the early stages of the condition, well before eyesight is affected. “The blood vessels in the eyes share similar anatomical characteristics and other characteristics with the blood vessels in the brain,” said Paul Mitchell, MD, PhD, of the University of Sydney in Australia. “More research needs to be done to confirm these results, but it’s exciting to think that this fairly simple procedure could help us predict whether someone will be more likely to have a stroke several years later.”

Keyword: Stroke; Vision
Link ID: 8017 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A brain area presumed to be involved only in co-ordinating movement also controls higher functions, such as vision, mounting evidence suggests. Traditionally, higher mental processing has been seen as the cerebrum's job - the evolutionary newest and largest part of the brain. The cerebellum or "little brain", which sits below the cerebrum, was thought to control balance and movement. A study of brain-injured infants shows this view is too simplistic. The research in Pediatrics looked at 74 babies born prematurely who had varying degrees of brain damage. The Harvard team from the Children's Hospital in Boston used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans to look at the injuries in detail. When there was injury to the cerebrum, the cerebellum also failed to grow to a normal size. When the cerebral injury was confined to one side, it was the opposite half of the cerebellum that failed to grow normally. Similarly, when injury occurred in one cerebellar hemisphere, the opposite side of the cerebrum was smaller than normal, which the researchers said suggested there was an important developmental link between the two parts of the brain. Other work by Dr Catherine Limperopoulos and her colleagues suggests in addition to motor problems, children born with cerebellar injuries have problems with higher cognitive processes such as communication, social behaviour and visual perception. (C)BBC

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 8016 - Posted: 10.10.2005

By Rob Stein, Washington Post Staff Writer With a good night's rest increasingly losing out to the Internet, e-mail, late-night cable and other distractions of modern life, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that too little or erratic sleep may be taking an unappreciated toll on Americans' health. Beyond leaving people bleary-eyed, clutching a Starbucks cup and dozing off at afternoon meetings, failing to get enough sleep or sleeping at odd hours heightens the risk for a variety of major illnesses, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity, recent studies indicate. "We're shifting to a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week society, and as a result we're increasingly not sleeping like we used to," said Najib T. Ayas of the University of British Columbia. "We're really only now starting to understand how that is affecting health, and it appears to be significant." A large, new study, for example, provides the latest in a flurry of evidence suggesting that the nation's obesity epidemic is being driven, at least in part, by a corresponding decrease in the average number of hours that Americans are sleeping, possibly by disrupting hormones that regulate appetite. The analysis of a nationally representative sample of nearly 10,000 adults found that those between the ages of 32 and 49 who sleep less than seven hours a night are significantly more likely to be obese. © 2005 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Sleep; Obesity
Link ID: 8015 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Michael S. Gazzaniga Any child can tell you that some people are smarter than others. But what is the difference between the brain of a Ph.D. student and the brain of the average Joe? If we can figure that out, then a bigger question follows: Is it ethical to turn average Joes into geniuses? Evolutionary theory suggests that if we are smart enough to invent technology that can increase our brain capacity, we should be able to use that advantage. It is the next step in the survival of the fittest. As noted psychologist Corneliu Giurgea stated in the 1970s, "Man is not going to wait passively for millions of years before evolution offers him a better brain." That said, gnawing concerns persist when it comes to artificially enhancing intelligence. Geneticists and neuroscientists have made great strides in understanding which genes, brain structures and neurochemicals might be altered artificially to increase intelligence. The fear this prospect brings is that a nation of achievers will discard hard work and turn to prescriptions to get ahead. Enhancing intelligence is not science fiction. Many "smart" drugs are in clinical trials and could be on the market in less than five years. Some medications currently available to patients with memory disorders may also increase intelligence in the healthy population. Likewise, few people would lament the use of such aids to ameliorate the forgetfulness that aging brings. Drugs that counter these deficits would be adopted gratefully by millions of people. © 1996-2005 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Intelligence; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 8014 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers have found provocative evidence that the brain dysfunction that underlies epilepsy may also determine whether people are at risk for suicide. The study, published online October 10, 2005 in the Annals of Neurology (www.interscience.wiley.com/journal/ana), also suggests that depression and suicide may have different brain mechanisms. "For reasons that are not understood, depression both increases the risk for developing epilepsy and is also common among people with epilepsy who experience many seizures," said lead author Dale C. Hesdorffer, Ph.D., of the Gertrude Sergievsky Center at Columbia University. It has commonly been assumed that the difficulties associated with living with epilepsy could provoke depression, and in some cases, an increased risk of suicide, the authors write. But is harder to explain the opposite findings, that people who develop depression have a higher risk of later experiencing a first seizure. While neuroscientists have postulated overlapping brain systems for depression and epilepsy, this evidence is still preliminary. In the present study, the researchers attempted to define more clearly the relationship between depression, suicide, and epilepsy.

Keyword: Depression; Epilepsy
Link ID: 8013 - Posted: 10.10.2005

A student who had pioneering surgery for epilepsy says her life has turned around since the treatment. Natalie Seed, 21, a forensics student at Lincoln University, had an implant inserted near her collarbone to stimulate a nerve in the neck. By sending regular, tiny pulses of electrical energy to the brain, the device can help prevent a seizure. Natalie, from West Yorkshire, said her seizures had dropped from about 12 a day to two a week since the surgery. "It neutralises the build up of energy in your brain which causes the seizure and is operated magnetically," the student from Featherstone said. "If you swipe a magnet that you carry around with you across the box it gives a higher stimulation instantly that neutralises the seizure and reduce the severity and length of it." One side effect is that her voice gets lower and husky when the magnet is swiped. She was six when she fractured her skull in her school playground - an accident which probably triggered her severe epilepsy. By the age of nine, she was having twelve seizures a day. Almost 456,000 people in the UK suffer from epilepsy, making it the second most common neurological condition after migraines. (C)BBC

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 8012 - Posted: 10.08.2005

By Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post Staff Writer Warnings that drugs such as Prozac, Paxil and Effexor can increase suicidal behavior in some children have resulted in a nearly 20 percent drop in U.S. pediatric prescriptions of the widely used antidepressants and have triggered deep concerns about the quality of current data on psychiatric drugs, doctors and regulators said. The unprecedented fall of what were once considered wonder drugs comes as a series of taxpayer-funded analyses have systematically undermined the claims of industry-funded drug trials, raising thorny questions about the ways in which psychiatric drugs are being tested, marketed and used. No one knows the consequences of such a steep decline in children's drug prescriptions: Critics of the drugs say regulators ought to crack down further, as British health authorities did last month, but many American psychiatrists are worried that reduced access to medications could cause an increase in suicide as a result of untreated depression. As with many disputes over these and other psychiatric drugs, opinions are more readily available than definitive data. The fundamental problem, many experts said, is that there are not enough systematic long-term studies about psychiatric drugs. © 2005 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 8011 - Posted: 06.24.2010

When you spot a celebrity on a magazine cover, your brain recognizes the image in an instant--an effect that seems to occur because of a single neuron. A recent study indicates that our brains employ far fewer cells to interpret a given image than previously believed, and the findings could help neuroscientists determine how memories are formed and stored. Exactly how the human brain works to record and remember an image is the subject of much debate and speculation. In previous decades, two extreme views have emerged. One says that millions of neurons work in concert, piecing together various bits of information into one coherent picture, whereas the other states that the brain contains a separate neuron to recognize each individual object and person. In the 1960s neurobiologist Jerome Lettvin named the latter idea the "grandmother cell" theory, meaning that the brain has a neuron devoted just for recognizing each family member. Lose that neuron, and you no longer recognize grandma. Experts long ago dismissed this latter view as overly simplistic. But Rodrigo Quian Quiroga of the University of Leicester in England and his colleagues decided to investigate just how selective single neurons might be. The team looked at eight patients who each had 64 tiny electrodes implanted in their brains before epilepsy surgery (a procedure to pinpoint the source of their seizures). Many of the electrodes were placed in the hippocampus, an area critical for the storage of long-term memories. © 1996-2005 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 8010 - Posted: 06.24.2010

With, or without us, our world continues to change at an incredible pace. The twentieth century has seen cars getting closer and closer to the supposed futuristic fantasies of the manufacturers of the 1950's; computers that, less than 40 years ago filled a whole office, now sit nicely on each of our desks; scientists are making breakthroughs in fighting diseases that only decades ago hadn't even been identified yet. In order to keep pace with our ever-changing environment we all have to learn to adapt, and as the father of the theory of evolution Charles Darwin declared, adaptation can mean survival. So as a race are we still evolving? It seems that we are. Researchers have shown that mutations, or variants, in two genes thought to regulate brain size have only arisen recently in the long history of evolution of the planet and appear to be spreading quickly in large swaths of the world's population. Armed with this fresh evidence, one researcher argues that our brains are still evolving. "We've caught evolution in action, in the sense that here is a new variant in each one of these two genes that arose very recently," says human geneticist Bruce Lahn, from the University of Chicago and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. "Our findings just added another piece of evidence to the idea of evolution, that as a species we're still evolving, even as a very complex species we're still evolving. We can see that at the level of genes, that is, our genes are still in the process of changing." © ScienCentral, 2000-2005.

Keyword: Evolution; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 8009 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The patient came into the doctor's office in a wheelchair, weighted down by a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, taking medication for the disorder and insisting she was unable to stand or walk. Thirty minutes later, after jogging down the hallway, she strolled out the door. No Parkinson's patient was she. Rather, she was a perfect example of a person with "fear of falling gait," said neurologist and Parkinson's expert Roger Kurlan, M.D., of the University of Rochester Medical Center. Kurlan has seen enough cases of the condition, where a person is so afraid of falling that the mind actually affects the ability to walk, that he wrote about the disorder in the September issue of Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology to cue other physicians about the condition. In the case reported in the journal, Kurlan describes an elderly woman who had an increasingly difficult time walking. The difficulties began shortly after her husband died, when she tripped and fell, breaking a wrist and bruising her leg. Her inability to walk led her doctor to diagnose Parkinson's disease, and she was prescribed the Parkinson's medication levodopa to treat her symptoms. Despite treatment, she ended up in a wheelchair, unable to walk, and she was sent to Kurlan, an expert in movement disorders like Parkinson's. A thorough physical exam turned up nothing abnormal, but the woman refused to try to stand up on her own, even pushing herself down into her chair as Kurlan and a nurse tried to convince her to attempt to stand up. With enough persuasion, though, and with several people available to help her up, the woman finally did rise.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 8008 - Posted: 10.08.2005

Howard Florey Institute scientists in Melbourne have found that fluoxetine (commonly marketed as ProzacŪ) not only improves depression in Huntington's disease, but also improves learning and memory. Dr Anthony Hannan and his team also found that fluoxetine restores the brain's process of neurogenesis - the birth of new neurons - to normal levels, which helps delay the onset of the inherited fatal disease. People with Huntington's disease have progressive motor problems, cognitive deficits (dementia) and psychiatric symptoms (the most common is depression) that usually start to appear in mid-life. There is no cure and death usually results within 10 to 20 years of symptom onset, or faster in the childhood-onset form of the disease. The disease is caused by a mutation in a single gene and when this defective gene is passed from parent to child, 50 percent of the offspring will inherit the disorder, which can be detected by genetic testing. Dr Hannan said this discovery was an important step in developing effective treatments to delay the onset of symptoms and the progression of Huntington's disease. "Now that we've found fluoxetine improves memory problems, or dementia, as well as depression in mice with Huntington's disease, further research can be conducted to see if the drug has the same benefits in humans with the disease," Dr Hannan said.

Keyword: Huntingtons; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 8007 - Posted: 10.07.2005

By Jay Michaelson There was a time when I didn't have a memory. It was the spring of 2001, after I suffered a Grade 3 concussion when a tow truck hit a taxi in which I was riding. For six months, I forgot conversations as soon as they were over, lost track of names and addresses, and often found myself on the street, or the subway, without any idea where I was headed or why. Of course, everyone forgets things: We've all had the experience of walking into the kitchen and then losing track of why we came, or fumbling for the name of someone we've met a dozen times. But this was different. This was a complete erasure of linear time. Every moment was new, without history, and grounded in the past only by the detailed notes I kept for myself. After about six months, the symptoms eventually lifted and my short-term memory returned. I had suffered no retrograde amnesia and should have been back to my "old self." Except that my old self was no longer there. In the six-month space of my memory loss, I had quit my job at the software company I'd founded, unable to keep track of the many meetings, tasks, and personnel of which I was in charge. My longtime girlfriend had left me, prompting me to come to terms with my sexuality and come out to myself and my friends. And fundamentally, something about me had shifted—I had been skeptical, uptight, nervous. But now I was performing poetry at slams, dancing at bonfires in the desert, and traveling to new countries on a whim. At the time, it felt like a rebirth. ©2005 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Depression
Link ID: 8006 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Do you always get what you ask for? A new study finds that when you don't, you might not even notice the difference. Swedish researchers showed a pair of female faces to 120 volunteers for 2 seconds and then asked them to choose which one they thought was more attractive. The researchers then asked the volunteers to explain their choice. The trial was repeated 15 times for each volunteer, using different pairs of faces, but in three of the trials the faces were secretly switched after a decision had been made. Surprisingly, not only were a large number of the volunteers oblivious to the switch when ultimately allowed to take a longer look at their choice, they were actually able to gave detailed explanations for why they preferred the face that, indeed, they had actually rejected. It would be like asking for an apple and then explaining exactly why you wanted the banana you got instead. The researchers call the phenomenon "choice blindness." "She's radiant," gushed one male volunteer about a face he didn't choose. "I would rather have approached her at a bar than the other one. I like earrings!" Another female volunteer said that the face she chose (which in fact she hadn't) looked nicer than the other. © 2005 MSNBC.com

Keyword: Vision; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 8005 - Posted: 06.24.2010

CINCINNATI--Scientists have found that the site in the brain that controls language in right-handed people shifts with aging--a discovery that might offer hope in the treatment of speech problems resulting from traumatic brain injury or stroke. The shift was documented by researchers led by Jerzy Szaflarski, MD, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at the University of Cincinnati (UC) Academic Health Center, and Scott Holland, PhD, professor in the UC departments of biomedical engineering, pediatrics and radiology. Dr. Holland also heads the Pediatric Brain Imaging Research Program at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. Their results will be published in the February 2006 edition of the journal Human Brain Mapping. While the site of language activity in right-handed people is originally the left side of the brain, the researchers report, starting as early as age 5 language gradually becomes a function shared by both sides. Between the ages of about 25 to 67, the site becomes more evenly distributed, until language activity can be measured in both hemispheres simultaneously. This, the researchers say, may explain why young children who have had a large portion of one side of the brain surgically removed often recover completely.

Keyword: Language; Stroke
Link ID: 8004 - Posted: 10.07.2005