Kayla Hounsell · CBC News · Sarah White has always been a 'picky eater' but says the pandemic exacerbated her difficult relationship with food. It ultimately led to a diagnosis of avoidant restrictive food intake disorder. (Eric Woolliscroft/CBC) Sarah White sets a timer to remind herself to eat. She sets it six times a day so that she eats three meals and three snacks. White says she's always been a "picky eater." But when she started working from home, her routine was interrupted and her already difficult relationship with food became dangerous. It ultimately led to an eating disorder diagnosis during the pandemic. "I had all of the time in the world to eat, but I was finding I wasn't eating nearly as much as I should have been," White, 33, said during a physically distanced interview at her Halifax apartment. "It started to feel a lot more serious than it had in the past." There's been an alarming spike in the number of people seeking help for eating disorders. The National Eating Disorder Information Centre says the volume of inquiries to its help line and online chat service has been up 100 per cent during the pandemic. "There's been literature coming out across the world really suggesting that the numbers are skyrocketing and we're trying to understand why that is," said Dr. Jennifer Couturier, principal investigator for the Canadian Consensus Panel for In May, the panel, which consists of clinicians, policymakers, parents and youth, received a $50,000 federal grant to determine how best to treat eating disorders during a pandemic, particularly in children and young adults under 25. Couturier says she feels this age group hasn't received a lot of attention when it comes to research generally. ©2021 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 27729 - Posted: 03.13.2021

Ariana Remmel A gene-silencing technique based on CRISPR can relieve pain in mice, according to a study1. Although the therapy is still a long way from being used in humans, scientists say it is a promising approach for squelching chronic pain that lasts for months or years. Chronic pain is typically treated with opioids such as morphine, which can lead to addiction. “It’s a real challenge that the best drugs we have to treat pain give us another disease,” says Margarita Calvo, a pain physician at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, in Santiago, who wasn’t involved in the research. That’s why the CRISPR-based technique is exciting, she says. Scientists are already evaluating CRISPR therapies that edit a person’s genome as treatments for blood diseases and some forms of hereditary blindness. The new version of CRISPR doesn’t edit genes directly — it stops them from being expressed — and so shouldn’t cause permanent changes, although it’s unclear how long its effects last for. Some studies estimate that a large proportion of the population in Europe and the United States — as high as 50% — experiences chronic pain2,3. This pain can become debilitating over time by limiting a person’s activity and having a negative effect on their mental health. Despite the prevalence of the condition, few options exist for providing long-term relief without side effects. Even so, doctors have been moving away from prescribing opioids owing to addiction risk, and that has pared down their options even further.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 27728 - Posted: 03.13.2021

By Annie Roth A few years ago, Sayaka Mitoh, a Ph.D. candidate at Nara Women’s University in Japan, was perusing her lab’s vast collection of sea slugs when she stumbled upon a gruesome sight. One of the lab’s captive-raised sea slugs, an Elysia marginata, had somehow been decapitated. When Ms. Mitoh peered into its tank to get a better look, she noticed something even more shocking: The severed head of the creature was moving around the tank, munching algae as if there was nothing unusual about being a bodiless slug. Ms. Mitoh also saw signs that the sea slug’s wound was self-inflicted: It was as if the sea slug had dissolved the tissue around its neck and ripped its own head off. Self-amputation, known as autotomy, isn’t uncommon in the animal kingdom. Having the ability to jettison a body part, such as a tail, helps many animals avoid predation. However, no animal had ever been observed ditching its entire body. “I was really surprised and shocked to see the head moving,” said Ms. Mitoh, who studies the life history traits of sea slugs. She added that she expected the slug “would die quickly without a heart and other important organs.” But it not only continued to live, it also regenerated the entirety of its lost body within three weeks. This prompted Ms. Mitoh and her colleagues to conduct a series of experiments aimed at figuring out how and why some sea slugs guillotine themselves. The results of their experiments, published Monday in Current Biology, provide evidence that Elysia marginata, and a closely related species, Elysia atroviridis, purposefully decapitate themselves in order to facilitate the growth of a new body. Although more research is needed, the researchers suspect these sea slugs ditch their bodies when they become infected with internal parasites. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 27727 - Posted: 03.11.2021

By Kelly Servick Swallowing an oxycodone pill might quiet nerves and blunt pain, but the drug makes other unwanted visits in the brain—to centers that can drive addiction and suppress breathing. Now, a study in mice shows certain types of pain can be prevented or reversed without apparent side effects by silencing a gene involved in pain signaling. If the approach weathers further testing, it could give chronic pain patients a safer and longer lasting option than opioids. “It’s a beautiful piece of work,” says Rajesh Khanna, a neuroscientist who studies pain mechanisms and potential treatments at the University of Arizona. Despite successes of gene therapy against rare and life-threatening disorders, few teams have explored genetic approaches to treating pain, he says. That’s in part because of reluctance to permanently change the genome to address conditions that, although disabling, aren’t always permanent or fatal. But the new approach doesn’t alter the DNA sequence itself and is theoretically reversible, Khanna notes. “I think this study is going to be our benchmark.” A prick of the finger or a punch in the gut causes pain because nerves branching through our bodies reach into the spinal cord to relay messages to the brain. Those messages can persist even after the initial injury has healed, causing chronic pain. To fire their electrical signals, pain-sensing nerves rely on the flow of ions across protein channels in their membranes. One such channel, called Nav1.7, stands out for the remarkable pain disorders that arise when it malfunctions. People with genetic mutations that make Nav1.7 overactive are prone to attacks of burning pain. Those with mutations that deactivate Nav1.7 feel no pain at all. © 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 27726 - Posted: 03.11.2021

By Branko van Hulst, Sander Werkhoven, Sarah Dursto “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” It is an often-used quote, and for good reason. Juliet tragically underestimated the impact of the Montague surname. She was not the first, nor the last, to underestimate the power of the names we give. In psychiatry, handbooks determine which names (or classifications) we give to the difficulties that people face. We use them so that when we say ADHD, schizophrenia or depression, people have a more or less consistent idea of what we mean. Moreover, it enables us to study groups of people with the same classification and learn about treatments and prognostics. However, a severe and often overlooked side effect of this practice is that these names implicitly suggest causality. The classificatory terms we use all refer to disorders that cause symptoms, and therefore suggest that we understand the causes of the problems. Which we do not. At the very least, the term disorder suggests a common causal structure, which goes against all our current knowledge on causal heterogeneity in psychiatry. Moreover, these classifications are applied to individuals and therefore suggest that causes lie mainly with the affected individual. The most common psychiatric handbooks (DSM-5 and ICD-11) are clear on the status of their classifications: they are purely descriptive and are not based on underlying causes. Still, in practice, we say things like “he is inattentive at school because he has ADHD.” It is a circular statement: a child is inattentive because of his inattentiveness. When we say that someone has an attention deficit, we are inclined to look for the cause of the problem. But when we say someone has an attention deficit disorder, we might wrongly assume we have already found the cause. Or, in a milder version, assume the cause to be located somewhere in the (brain of the) individual. © 2021 Scientific American,

Keyword: ADHD; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 27725 - Posted: 03.11.2021

James Doubek By being able to wait for better food, cuttlefish — the squishy sea creatures similar to octopuses and squids — showed self-control that's linked to the higher intelligence of primates. It was part of an experiment by Alex Schnell from the University of Cambridge and colleagues. "What surprised me the most was that the level of self-control shown by our cuttlefish was quite advanced," she tells Lulu Garcia-Navarro on Weekend Edition. The experiment was essentially a take on the classic "marshmallow" experiment from the 1960s. In that experiment, young children were presented with one marshmallow and told that if they can resist eating it, unsupervised, for several minutes, they will get two marshmallows. But if they eat it that's all they get. The conventional wisdom has been that children who are able to delay gratification do better on tests and are more successful later in life. (There are of course many caveats when talking about the human experiments.) To adapt the experiment for cuttlefish, the researchers first figured out the cuttlefish's favorite food: live grass shrimp; and their second-favorite food: a piece of king prawn. Instead of choosing one or two marshmallows, the cuttlefish had to choose either their favorite food or second-favorite food. "Each of the food items were placed in clear chambers within their tank," Schnell says. "One chamber would open immediately, whereas the other chamber would only open after a delay." © 2021 npr

Keyword: Evolution; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 27724 - Posted: 03.11.2021

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre The famed stallion Black Beauty felt joy, excitement, and even heartbreak—or so he tells us in the 1877 novel that bears his name. Now, scientists say they’ve been able to detect feelings in living animals by getting them straight from the horse’s mouth—or in this case, its head. Researchers have devised a new, mobile headband that detects brain waves in horses, which could eventually be used with other species. “This is a real breakthrough,” says Katherine Houpt, a veterinary behaviorist at Cornell University who was not involved with the work. The device, she says, “gets into the animals’ minds” with objectivity and less guesswork. Ethologist Martine Hausberger had the idea while investigating whether stressed horses had a harder time learning to open a sliding door over a food box. (Spoiler alert: They do.) Hausberger, of the University of Rennes, noticed some of the animals—specifically, those living in cramped spaces—were paying less attention to the lessons. Were they depressed? An electroencephalogram (EEG) could theoretically pick up on such a mental state. Scientists have used the devices, which record waves of electrical impulses in the brain, since the early 1900s to study epilepsy and sleep patterns. More recently, they’ve discovered that certain EEG waves can signal depression, anxiety, and even contentedness in humans. EEG studies in rodents, farm animals, and pets, meanwhile, have revealed how they react to being touched by a human or undergoing anesthesia. But so far, no one had found a way to record brain waves in animals while they move around. © 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 27723 - Posted: 03.11.2021

By Laura Sanders A century ago, science’s understanding of the brain was primitive, like astronomy before telescopes. Certain brain injuries were known to cause specific problems, like loss of speech or vision, but those findings offered a fuzzy view. Anatomists had identified nerve cells, or neurons, as key components of the brain and nervous system. But nobody knew how these cells collectively manage the brain’s sophisticated control of behavior, memory or emotions. And nobody knew how neurons communicate, or the intricacies of their connections. For that matter, the research field known as neuroscience — the science of the nervous system — did not exist, becoming known as such only in the 1960s. Over the last 100 years, brain scientists have built their telescopes. Powerful tools for peering inward have revealed cellular constellations. It’s likely that over 100 different kinds of brain cells communicate with dozens of distinct chemicals. A single neuron, scientists have discovered, can connect to tens of thousands of other cells. Yet neuroscience, though no longer in its infancy, is far from mature. Today, making sense of the brain’s vexing complexity is harder than ever. Advanced technologies and expanded computing capacity churn out torrents of information. “We have vastly more data … than we ever had before, period,” says Christof Koch, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute in Seattle. Yet we still don’t have a satisfying explanation of how the brain operates. We may never understand brains in the way we understand rainbows, or black holes, or DNA. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2021.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 27722 - Posted: 03.06.2021

By Cathleen O’Grady People who take tiny amounts of LSD, “magic mushrooms,” and related drugs report a range of benefits, from more creativity to improved psychological well-being. But do these microdoses—typically less than 10% of the amount that causes a true psychedelic experience—actually benefit the mind? That’s been a hard question to answer. Placebo-controlled trials are tricky to pull off, because psychedelics are so tightly regulated. Now, researchers have come up with a creative workaround: They’ve enlisted microdosing enthusiasts to hide their drugs in gel capsules and mix them up with empty capsules. The upshot of this “self-blinding” study: Microdosing did lead to improvements in psychological well-being—but so did the placebo capsules. “The benefits are real,” says lead author Balázs Szigeti, a neuroscientist at Imperial College London. “But they are not caused by the pharmacological effects of microdosing.” The findings, however, are “the least interesting thing about this study,” says Noah Haber, a study design specialist at Stanford University. The “very, very clever” method of self-blinding pushes the boundaries of what can be investigated using randomized placebo controls, he says. Getting the new study off the ground wasn’t easy. Obtaining ethical approval to enroll psychedelic-taking volunteers was a “long and difficult process,” Szigeti says. And then he had to go out and find those volunteers, which he did by reaching out to microdosing communities, giving talks at psychedelic societies, and holding an “ask me anything” discussion on Reddit. Szigeti eventually garnered more than 1600 sign-ups, but once potential participants realized they’d have to procure their own psychedelics, interest ebbed, and only 246 ended up in the experiment. © 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 27721 - Posted: 03.06.2021

By Lisa Sanders, M.D. The voice on the phone was kind but firm: “You need to go to the emergency room. Now.” Her morning was going to be busy, replied the 68-year-old woman, and she didn’t feel well. Could she go later today or maybe tomorrow? No, said Dr. Benison Keung, her neurologist. She needed to go now; it was important. As she hung up the phone, tears blurred the woman’s already bad vision. She’d been worried for a while; now she was terrified. She was always healthy, until about four months earlier. It was a Saturday morning when she noticed that something seemed wrong with her right eye. She hurried to the bathroom mirror, where she saw that her right eyelid was drooping, covering the top half of the brown of her iris. On Monday morning, when she met her eye doctor, she was seeing double. Since then she’d had tests — so many tests — but received no answers. The woman walked to the bedroom where her 17-year-old granddaughter was still asleep. She woke her and asked for help getting dressed. Her hands were too weak for her to button her own clothes or tie her shoes. When she was completely dressed, she sent the girl to get her mother. She would need a ride to the hospital. She hadn’t been able to drive since she started seeing double. The events of the past few months had left the woman exhausted. First, she had seen her eye doctor. He took one look at her and told her that she had what’s called a third-nerve palsy. The muscles of the face and neck, he explained, are controlled by nerves that line up at the top of the spine. The nerve that controlled the eyelid, called the oculomotor nerve, was the third in this column. But he didn’t know what was affecting it or how to fix the problem. She needed to see a neuro-ophthalmologist, a doctor who specialized in the nerves that control the eyes. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 27720 - Posted: 03.06.2021

By Erin Garcia de Jesus A whiff of catnip can make mosquitoes buzz off, and now researchers know why. The active component of catnip (Nepeta cataria) repels insects by triggering a chemical receptor that spurs sensations such as pain or itch, researchers report March 4 in Current Biology. The sensor, dubbed TRPA1, is common in animals — from flatworms to people — and responds to environmental irritants such as cold, heat, wasabi and tear gas. When irritants come into contact with TRPA1, the reaction can make people cough or an insect flee. Catnip’s repellent effect on insects — and its euphoric effect on felines — has been documented for millennia. Studies have shown that catnip may be as effective as the widely used synthetic repellent diethyl-m-toluamide, or DEET (SN: 9/5/01). But it was unknown how the plant repelled insects. So researchers exposed mosquitoes and fruit flies to catnip and monitored the insects’ behavior. Fruit flies were less likely to lay eggs on the side of a petri dish that was treated with catnip or its active component, nepetalactone. Mosquitoes were also less likely to take blood from a human hand coated with catnip. Insects that had been genetically modified to lack TRPA1, however, had no aversion to the plant. That behavior — coupled with experiments in lab-grown cells that show catnip activates TRPA1 — suggests that insect TRPA1 senses catnip as an irritant. Puzzling out how the plant deters insects could help researchers design potent repellents that may be easier to obtain in developing countries hit hard by mosquito-borne diseases. “Oil extracted from the plant or the plant itself could be a great starting point,” says study coauthor Marco Gallio, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2021

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Evolution
Link ID: 27719 - Posted: 03.06.2021

By Veronique Greenwood Sign up for Science Times: Get stories that capture the wonders of nature, the cosmos and the human body. In the warm, fetid environs of a compost heap, tiny roundworms feast on bacteria. But some of these microbes produce toxins, and the worms avoid them. In the lab, scientists curious about how the roundworms can tell what’s dinner and what’s dangerous often put them on top of mats of various bacteria to see if they wriggle away. One microbe species, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, reliably sends them scurrying. But how do the worms, common lab animals of the species Caenorhabditis elegans, know to do this? Dipon Ghosh, then a graduate student in cellular and molecular physiology at Yale University, wondered if it was because they could sense the toxins produced by the bacteria. Or might it have something to do with the fact that mats of P. aeruginosa are a brilliant shade of blue? Given that roundworms do not have eyes, cells that obviously detect light or even any of the known genes for light-sensitive proteins, this seemed a bit far-fetched. It wasn’t difficult to set up an experiment to test the hypothesis, though: Dr. Ghosh, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put some worms on patches of P. aeruginosa. Then he turned the lights off. To the surprise of his adviser, Michael Nitabach, the worms’ flight from the bacteria was significantly slower in the dark, as though not being able to see kept the roundworms from realizing they were in danger. “When he showed me the results of the first experiments, I was shocked,” said Dr. Nitabach, who studies the molecular basis of neural circuits that guide behavior at Yale School of Medicine. In a series of follow-up experiments detailed in a paper published Thursday in Science, Dr. Ghosh, Dr. Nitabach and their colleagues establish that some roundworms respond clearly to that distinctive pigment, perceiving it — and fleeing from it — without the benefit of any known visual system. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 27718 - Posted: 03.06.2021

Linda Geddes Four scientists who discovered a key mechanism that causes migraines, paving the way for new preventive treatments, have won the largest prize for neuroscience in the world, sharing £1.1m. The Lundbeck Foundation in Denmark announced on Thursday that the British researcher Peter Goadsby, Michael Moskowitz of the US, Lars Edvinsson of Sweden and Jes Olesen of Denmark had won the Brain prize. Speaking at a press briefing ahead of the announcement, Goadsby, a professor of neurology at King’s College London, said: “I’m excited that migraine research is getting this award and that migraine – this disabling problem that is a brain disorder – is being recognised in an appropriate way.” Formally known as the Grete Lundbeck European brain research prize, the annual award recognises highly original and influential advances in any area of brain research. The award ceremony will take place in Copenhagen on 25 October, where the prize will be presented by Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark. The prize-winning research revolves around unpicking the neural basis of migraine, a crippling neurological condition characterised by episodes of throbbing head pain, as well as nausea, vomiting, dizziness, extreme sensitivity to sound, light, touch and smell. It affects about one in seven people globally and is about three times more common in women than men. In the UK, it is estimated that migraines result in the loss of 25m work or school days each year at an economic cost of £2.3bn. © 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 27717 - Posted: 03.06.2021

By Elizabeth Pennisi For a glimpse of the power of sexual selection, the dance of the golden-collared manakin is hard to beat. Each June in the rainforests of Panama, the sparrow-size male birds gather to fluff their brilliant yellow throats, lift their wings, and clap them together in rapid fire, up to 60 times a second. When a female favors a male with her attention, he follows up with acrobatic leaps, more wing snaps, and perhaps a split-second, twisting backflip. “If manakins were human, they would be among the greatest artists, athletes, and socialites in our society,” says Ignacio Moore, an integrative organismal biologist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. As biologists have understood since Charles Darwin, such exhibitionism evolves when females choose to mate with males that have the most extravagant appearances and displays—a proxy for fitness. And now, by studying the genomes of the golden-collared manakin (Manacus vitellinus) and its relatives, researchers are exploring the genes that drive these elaborate behaviors and traits. Last month at the virtual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, Moore and other researchers introduced four manakin genomes, adding to two already published, and singled out genes at work in the birds’ muscles and brains that may make the displays possible. © 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 27716 - Posted: 03.06.2021

By Jake Buehler You might be able to do a mean celebrity impression or two, but can you imitate an entire film’s cast at the same time? A male superb lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae) can, well almost. During courtship and even while mating, the birds pull off a similar feat, mimicking the calls and wingbeat noises of many bird species at once, a new study shows. The lyrebirds appear to be attempting to recreate the specific ecological soundscape associated with the arrival of a predator, researchers report February 25 in Current Biology. Why lyrebirds do this isn’t yet clear, but the finding is the first time that an individual bird has been observed mimicking the sounds of multiple bird species simultaneously. The uncanny acoustic imitation of multispecies flocks adds a layer of complexity to the male lyrebird’s courtship song yet unseen in birds and raises questions about why its remarkable vocal mimicry skills, which include sounds like chainsaws and camera shutters, evolved in the first place. Superb lyrebirds — native to forested parts of southeastern Australia — have a flair for theatrics. The males have exceptionally long, showy tail feathers that are shaken extensively in elaborate mating dances (SN: 6/6/13). The musical accompaniment to the dance is predominantly a medley of greatest hits of the songs of other bird species, the function of which behavioral ecologist Anastasia Dalziell was studying via audio and video recordings of the rituals.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 27715 - Posted: 02.28.2021

By Matt Richtel Texas has one of the most restrictive medical marijuana laws in the country, with sales allowed only by prescription for a handful of conditions. That hasn’t stopped Lukas Gilkey, chief executive of Hometown Hero CBD, based in Austin, Texas. His company sells joints, blunts, gummy bears, vaping devices and tinctures that offer a recreational high. In fact, business is booming online as well, where he sells to many people in other states with strict marijuana laws. But Mr. Gilkey says that he is no outlaw, and that he’s not selling marijuana, just a close relation. He’s offering products with a chemical compound — Delta-8-THC — extracted from hemp. It is only slightly chemically different from Delta 9, which is the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. And that small distinction, it turns out, may make a big difference in the eyes of the law. Under federal law, psychoactive Delta 9 is explicitly outlawed. But Delta-8-THC from hemp is not, a loophole that some entrepreneurs say allows them to sell it in many states where hemp possession is legal. The number of customers “coming into Delta 8 is staggering,” Mr. Gilkey said. “You have a drug that essentially gets you high, but is fully legal,” he added. “The whole thing is comical.” The rise of Delta 8 is a case study in how industrious cannabis entrepreneurs are pulling apart hemp and marijuana to create myriad new product lines with different marketing angles. They are building brands from a variety of potencies, flavors and strains of THC, the intoxicating substance in cannabis, and of CBD, the nonintoxicating compound that is often sold as a health product. With Delta 8, entrepreneurs also believe they have found a way to take advantage of the country’s fractured and convoluted laws on recreational marijuana use. It’s not quite that simple, though. Federal agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration, are still considering their options for enforcement and regulation. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 27714 - Posted: 02.28.2021

By Elizabeth Anne Brown Forget the soul — it turns out the eyes may be the best window to the brain. Changes to the retina may foreshadow Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, and researchers say a picture of your eye could assess your future risk of neurodegenerative disease. Pinched off from the brain during embryonic development, the retina contains layers of neurons that seem to experience neurodegenerative disease along with their cousins inside the skull. The key difference is that these retinal neurons, right against the jellylike vitreous of the eyeball, live and die where scientists can see them. Early detection “is sort of the holy grail,” said Ron Petersen, director of Mayo Clinic’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging. By the time a patient complains of memory problems or tremors, the machinery of neurodegenerative disease has been at work probably for years or decades. Experts liken it to a cancer that only manifests symptoms at Stage 3 or 4. When patients begin to feel neurodegenerative disease’s impact on their daily life, it’s almost too late for treatment. Catching the warning signs of neurodegenerative disease earlier could give patients more time to plan for the future — whether that’s making caregiving arrangements, spending more time with family or writing the Great American novel. In the longer term, researchers hope the ability to notice brain changes before symptoms begin could eventually lead to early treatments more successful at slowing or stopping the progress of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, since no such treatment is currently available. The hope is that “the sooner we intervene, the better we will be” at preventing cognitive impairment, Petersen said © 1996-2021 The Washington Post

Keyword: Alzheimers; Parkinsons
Link ID: 27713 - Posted: 02.28.2021

By Kim Tingley The brain is an electrical organ. Everything that goes on in there is a result of millivolts zipping from one neuron to another in particular patterns. This raises the tantalizing possibility that, should we ever decode those patterns, we could electrically adjust them to treat neurological dysfunction — from Alzheimer’s to schizophrenia — or even optimize desirable qualities like intelligence and resilience. Of course, the brain is so complex, and so difficult to access, that this is much easier to imagine than to do. A pair of studies published in January in the journal Nature Medicine, however, demonstrate that electrical stimulation can address obsessive-compulsive urges and symptoms of depression with surprising speed and precision. Mapping participants’ brain activity when they experienced certain sensations allowed researchers to personalize the stimulation and modify moods and habits far more directly than is possible through therapy or medication. The results also showed the degree to which symptoms that we tend to categorize as a single disorder — depression, for example — may involve electrical processes that are unique to each person. In the first study, a team from the University of California, San Francisco, surgically implanted electrodes in the brain of a woman whose severe depression had proved resistant to other treatments. For 10 days, they delivered pulses through the electrodes to different areas of the brain at various frequencies and had the patient record her level of depression, anxiety and energy on an iPad. The impact of certain pulses was significant and nuanced. “Within a minute, she would say, ‘I feel like I’m reading a good book,’” says Katherine W. Scangos, a psychiatrist and the study’s lead author. The patient described the effect of another pulse as “less cobwebs and cotton.” © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 27712 - Posted: 02.28.2021

by Charles Q. Choi Blood levels of proteins associated with the autism-linked gene PTEN could influence the course of the condition, according to a new study. Tests measuring these molecules could also help clinicians diagnose autism and other neurological conditions, and chart their trajectories, the researchers say. “We might be able to make useful clinical predictions about outcomes that can help to tailor interventions earlier and to help patients and families plan for what is needed,” says lead investigator Thomas Frazier, professor of psychology at John Carroll University in University Heights, Ohio. The PTEN gene encodes a protein that suppresses tumors and also influences the connections between neurons. Mutations in PTEN are linked not only to benign tumors and several types of cancer, but also to autism and macrocephaly, or an unusually large head. Much remains unknown, however, about why PTEN mutations can affect people with and without autism differently. For example, PTEN mutations are often associated with impaired mental function in autistic people but not as often in non-autistic people, whose traits can vary widely. In the new study, Frazier and his colleagues examined how the mutations affect blood levels of not just PTEN protein, but also the proteins it interacts with. Molecular links: The team assessed the blood levels of various proteins — as well as intelligence quotient (IQ) and other factors related to mental function — in 25 autistic and 16 non-autistic participants with PTEN mutations and macrocephaly, all about 9 years old on average. The researchers also examined 20 participants, about 14 years old on average, with autism, macrocephaly and no PTEN mutations. © 2021 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 27711 - Posted: 02.28.2021

By Andreas von Bubnoff The world is getting fatter. More than 40 percent of U.S. adults are obese — almost three times more than in 1980. One reason for this weight gain is Americans are consuming more: National figures suggest an increase of about 200 daily calories between the early 1970s and 2010. Another is more snacking. In 2010, U.S. adults ate about 20 percent more of their daily calories as snacks than they did 50 years ago. But there is more to rising obesity rates than endless grazing. What also matters is timing, some experts believe. We eat when we shouldn’t, and don’t give our bodies a long enough break in between. We didn’t evolve to eat day and night, says neuroscientist Dominic D’Agostino of the University of South Florida. Until the dawn of agriculture about 12,000 years ago, we subsisted on hunting and gathering and often had to perform those activities with empty bellies. “We are hard-wired,” D’Agostino says, “to undergo periodic intermittent fasting.” What’s more, people are now eating at times of the day when historically they would have been asleep, says Satchin Panda, a circadian biologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., who co-wrote an overview on the timing of eating in the 2019 Annual Review of Nutrition. For thousands of years, he says, our nightly fast probably started much earlier than in these times of late-night television. Although the research is still mixed, the timing of eating seems to matter for body weight and health. Studies suggest significant potential benefits from fasting every other day or so — or, on a daily basis, eating only when we would normally be awake, within a window of 12 hours or fewer — a practice known as time-restricted eating. © 1996-2021 The Washington Post

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 27710 - Posted: 02.28.2021