Along with aiding efforts to study addicted smokers, a new drug that attaches only to areas of the brain that have been implicated in nicotine addiction may help studies of people battling other disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia. Developed by UC Irvine Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center scientists, the new drug – Nifrolidine – is a selective binding agent that identifies specific areas of the brain responsible for decision-making, learning and memory. Lead researcher Jogeshwar Mukherjee, UCI associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior, developed Nifrolidine to measure a subtype of nicotine receptors in the living brain by using an imaging technique, positron emission tomography, more commonly known as PET scans. After proving the drug’s effectiveness, Mukherjee believes the drug will have implications for other conditions, as well. Study results appear in the January issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine. “Nifrolidine is suited to provide reliable, quantitative information of these receptors and may therefore be very useful for future human brain imaging studies of nicotine addiction and other clinical conditions in which these brain regions have been implicated,” Mukherjee said. © Copyright 2002-2005 UC Regents

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Alzheimers
Link ID: 6692 - Posted: 06.24.2010

New Haven, Conn.--Smoking marijuana is associated with increased risk of many of the same symptoms as smoking cigarettes--chronic bronchitis, coughing on most days, phlegm production, shortness of breath, and wheezing, according to a Yale study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. In addition, marijuana smoking may increase risk of respiratory exposure by infectious organisms, such as fungi and molds, since cannabis plants are contaminated with a range of fungal spores, said Brent Moore, assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine and lead author of the study. "Because more than two million adult Americans are heavy marijuana smokers, these risks represent a potentially large health burden," Moore said. "Marijuana smokers use more medical services for respiratory problems, and these demands are likely to increase as the population of heavy marijuana smokers ages." The findings were based on 6,728 questionnaires completed by adult men and women, 20 to 59 years old, in 1988 and 1994. The data was from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and was thought to provide the broadest snapshot to date of marijuana use and its effect on the lungs in a sample of U.S. citizens.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 6691 - Posted: 01.13.2005

Canada has found its third cow infected with BSE - bringing the number of native mad cows detected in North America to four. All of the infected cows detected so far were born in Alberta, Canada, where a clinical case of BSE was found in an imported British cow in 1993. This raises the question of whether the infection might have been limited to the province by chance, or whether other regions of the continent are just not looking hard enough to find infected cattle. In particular, the US surveillance programme has come under criticism. The most recently discovered infected cow was born in March 1998 - seven months after feeding beef remains to cattle was banned. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) says it was probably infected by feed made just before the ban. It was detected as part of Canada's surveillance programme which, like the one in the US, focuses on "high risk" cattle, those found dead or "downers" unable to stand. Experience in Europe has shown that these cattle are much more likely to have BSE than apparently healthy ones. The programme - which discovered the country's first case in May 2003 - found another Alberta-born mad cow in December 2004, this one born just before the 1997 feed ban. The sole case found so far in the US, in December 2003, was a downer born and probably infected in Alberta. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 6690 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Hopkin Bottlenose dolphins are clever, sociable beasts that feed in packs. But a study carried out off the coast of Florida has revealed another layer of complexity in their hunting: group members have specialized jobs that they stick to time and time again. Cooperative hunting is fairly widespread among animals and is found, for example, in chimpanzees, colobus monkeys and Harris' hawks. But the phenomenon of specific jobs for individuals, like the different positions in a football team, is much rarer, say Stefanie Gazda and her colleagues, who studied the dolphins off Florida's remote Cedar Key. Gazda and her colleagues watched two groups of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), one always consisting of three individuals and the other ranging from two to six members. During group hunts, one dolphin always took the role of 'driver', harrying shoals of small fish towards a waiting cordon of 'barrier' dolphins, then herding them up to the surface. The researchers identified individual dolphins by examining their fin markings, and observed at least 60 group hunts for each pack. Both groups had a particular individual who took the driver role in every single group hunt, the researchers report in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B1. ©2005 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 6689 - Posted: 06.24.2010

High numbers of future deaths in the UK from the human form of mad cow disease are unlikely, researchers have said. The Imperial College team calculate there will be around 70 future deaths. They say the worst case scenario could see another 600 deaths, but that this is unlikely. The research, which appears in the Journal of the Royal Society, said thousands of people could carry vCJD, but show no symptoms. The higher forecast is based on the possibility that people from different genetic subgroups could be affected by vCJD. So far, people of only one genetic subgroup, which accounts for 40% of the population, have been affected. There have been 148 deaths from new-variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) since the condition was first seen in 1995. Research pointed to eating meat contaminated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) as the cause. Over the last decade, scientists have been working to evaluate what the full extent of the vCJD epidemic will be. Deaths have been declining from their peak of 28 in 2000 to nine last year. But researchers who tested 12,674 appendix and tonsil samples found three showed signs of apparent vCJD, indicating around 3,800 people could ultimately be affected. However, only one of the three positive samples actually matched those taken from people who had been diagnosed with the clinical disease. Interpretation of the other two samples was less certain because they did not look like scientists expected them to. (C)BBC

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 6688 - Posted: 01.12.2005

By BENEDICT CAREY Tne mislaid credit card bill or a single dangling e-mail message on the home computer would have ended everything: the marriage, the big-time career, the reputation for decency he had built over a lifetime. So for more than 10 years, he ruthlessly kept his two identities apart: one lived in a Westchester hamlet and worked in a New York office, and the other operated mainly in clubs, airport bars and brothels. One warmly greeted clients and waved to neighbors, sometimes only hours after the other had stumbled back from a "work" meeting with prostitutes or cocaine dealers. In the end, it was a harmless computer pop-up advertisement for security software, claiming that his online life was being "continually monitored," that sent this New York real estate developer into a panic and to a therapist. The man's double life is an extreme example of how mental anguish can cleave an identity into pieces, said his psychiatrist, Dr. Jay S. Kwawer, director of clinical education at the William Alanson White Institute in New York, who discussed the case at a recent conference. But psychologists say that most normal adults are well equipped to start a secret life, if not to sustain it. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6687 - Posted: 01.12.2005

CORVALLIS, Ore. - The next time you're at a party with the love of your life, don't spend a lot of time trying to identify other couples in love - chances are, you aren't very good at it. Golfers may be able to identify a sweet swing, and runners admire a lengthy stride in others, but a new study has found that when it comes to identifying couples in love, no one is worse than - well, couples in love. "Love is truly blind," said Frank J. Bernieri, professor and chair of the Department of Psychology at Oregon State University and one of the authors of the study. "People in the study who had the longest relationships, were immersed in reading romance novels and spent lots of time watching romantic movies just loved this research. They all were quite confident of their ability to identify others in love. "And without exception," he added, "they were, by far, the least accurate in their assessment." The study was just published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior. Bernieri co-authored the paper with lead investigator Maya Aloni, who was an honors undergraduate at the University of Toledo when Bernieri was on the faculty there. She is now at State University of New York-Buffalo pursuing graduate studies.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6686 - Posted: 01.12.2005

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A genetically unusual population of ants is changing some of the fundamental ways researchers think about insect colonies. Social insects, like ants and bees, thrive on the caste system – a precise division of duties among colony members. In most of these societies, environment is thought to influence whether larvae develop into queens or sterile female workers, said Steve Rissing, a professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at Ohio State University. But in a new study, Rissing and his colleagues found some genetically odd colonies of harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex), that don't seem to abide by the traditional rules of caste development. They found that genetics – not environment – determines the fate of a developing ant, and consequently the role it will play in the colony. The researchers report their findings in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology. The team was led by Sara Helms Cahan, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Vermont. A typical ant colony includes one queen and, in the case of harvester ants, hundreds or thousands of sterile female workers (worker ants are always female and, with a few exceptions, sterile. Soldier ants are larger versions of workers.) During her lifetime, which can last as long as 20 or 30 years, a queen produces mainly worker eggs.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 6685 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JAMES GORMAN My infatuation with the amygdala has led me to wonder where aphasia and amusia overlap, a subject that neurologists have been investigating for many years. Damage to the brain can interfere with spoken language - aphasia. But it can also harm the ability to hear and produce melody. All this goes on in some part of the temporal lobe, not the amygdala, which is an almond-size structure in the brain (the word comes from the Greek for almond) that is involved with fear, emotion, sexuality and other aspects of humanity that lie below or behind the conscious mind. But this is off the point. I am infatuated with the word "amygdala," not the brain structure, although I suppose the meaning and the science contribute to the word's appeal. But I like its sound, you might say its musicality. And that has made me wonder about how speech and music overlap. For example, can a word be an earworm? An earworm is a tune that lodges itself in the brain and will not be moved. Songs like "It's a Small World" or "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" can become earworms. In a different class, "Lā ci darem la mano," from Mozart's "Don Giovanni," might insinuate itself into every waking moment, although it seems wrong to compare such a lovely aria to an invertebrate. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Hearing
Link ID: 6684 - Posted: 01.11.2005

NEW YORK, NY, Nearly 60 percent of children whose parents and grandparents suffered from depression have a psychiatric disorder before they reach their early teens, according to a new study by researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI). This is more than double the number of children (approx. 28 percent) who develop such disorders with no family history of depression. The study, published in the January issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, is the first to follow three generations of high-risk families and has taken more than two decades to complete. The CUMC/NYSPI research team began studying 47 first generation family members in 1982; then interviewed 86 of their children several times as they grew into adulthood. The team has collected data from 161 members of the third generation, whose average age is 12. Results found that most of the prepubescent grandchildren with a two-generation history of depression developed anxiety disorders that developed into depression as they aged into adolescence. This trend was also found when the researchers previously followed the children's parents through adolescence and adulthood.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 6683 - Posted: 01.11.2005

(Philadelphia, PA) – Cocaine dependence is a major public health problem affecting thousands of people around the globe. Despite years of active research there are still no approved medications for the treatment of this life-shattering addiction. Researchers are now hopeful that may soon change based on the results of a controlled study done at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. The study's findings can be found in the January issue of Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology and on-line at www.neuropsychopharmacology.org. Penn investigators have identified Modafinil – a wake-promoting agent approved for the treatment of narcolepsy – as a possible medicinal treatment for cocaine dependence. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, researchers found Modafinil promoted cocaine abstinence in treatment-seeking outpatients. Modafinil was also shown to blunt cocaine-induced euphoria in a prior study conducted by the same research group, perhaps explaining its clinical advantage. "If confirmed by further investigation, this could be the breakthrough we have been waiting for," says Charles Dackis, MD, Chief of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center – Presbyterian, and the study's principal investigator. "Cocaine is capable of destroying not only the lives of those addicted, but also those around them," adds Dackis. "An effective treatment for cocaine addiction would help those most vulnerable in our society to overpower their addiction and regain control in their lives." The trial was conducted at Penn's Treatment Research Center between 2002 and 2003.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 6682 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — Females among many insects and animals, including humans, enjoy receiving gifts during courtship, but a new study on flies reveals that males can woo their intendeds with worthless, fake love tokens, even if such cheating is otherwise undocumented for the species. By the time the female fly realizes her lover is a cheapskate and beats him off with her wings, the male already has mated with her and leaves with his faux present to find another partner. For the study, researchers studied the dance fly Rhamphomyia sulcata. Although other, similar, flies are known to give their partners token gifts, males among this fly species usually bestow females with nutritious food gifts, such as big, juicy bugs, before mating. To see if even these spoiled females would fall for a fake, the scientists substituted the real food gifts with tiny bits of bugs or full-sized cotton balls, which resemble the fluffy, wind-blown seed tufts that cheating male flies often present to females. Copyright © 2005 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6681 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A voicemail system that labels messages according to the caller's tone of voice could soon be helping people identify which messages are the most urgent. The software, called Emotive Alert, is designed by Zeynep Inanoglu and Ron Caneel of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US. It might be installed at the phone exchange or in an intelligent answering machine, where it will listen to incoming messages and send the recipient a text message along with an emoticon indicating whether the message is urgent, happy, excited or formal. It works by extracting the distribution of volume, pitch and speech rate - the ratio of words to pauses - in the first 10 seconds of each message, and then comparing them with eight stored "acoustical fingerprints" that roughly represent eight emotional states: urgent or not urgent; formal or informal; happy or sad; excited or calm. The fingerprints were created by "learning" software, which was fed hundreds of snippets from old voicemail messages that had been assigned emotional labels by the researchers. In use, the software looks for the acoustical fingerprint that is closest to the characteristics of the voice message and sends the recipient the corresponding emoticon. It also sends a text message indicating the two best-matching emotional labels. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 6680 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Hopkin Zoologists have answered the intriguing question of why swordfish keep their eyes warm while the rest of the body remains resolutely cold-blooded: it's all the better to see their prey with. Heat-assisted eyes work more than ten times faster than those cooled to the coldest deep-sea temperatures of around 3 ēC, report Kerstin Fritsches of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and her colleagues. This increased 'temporal resolution' helps swordfish to catch dinner in the inky depths. Researchers already knew that swordfish (Xiphias gladius) can selectively warm their eyes and brains. The fish have a specially adapted heating organ in the muscle next to their tennis-ball-sized eyes, which can raise temperatures in the surrounding tissue some 10-15 ēC above that of the water in which the fish is swimming. But heating takes a lot of energy, and until now experts were confused as to why the swordfish goes to the trouble. Heat is lost around 3,000 times more quickly to water than to air, and of the 25,000 or so species of bony fish, only 22 - including swordfish, marlin, tuna and some sharks - have been found to possess any kind of heating mechanism. ©2005 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 6679 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Serious gamblers demonstrate a similar pattern of brain activity to people who are addicted to drugs, a new study has suggested. The researchers from Hamburg, Germany, said this showed gambling was also a form of addiction. They said the parts of the brain which are active when people feel rewarded, curbing activity, are less so in those who take drugs or gamble to excess. The research is published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. In the study, the brains of 12 compulsive gamblers and 12 non-gamblers were monitored using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they played a simple card guessing game. Players had to choose one of two face-down cards. If the card came up red, they won one euro. It was found that the ventral striatum, a part of the brain that signals reward, was less active in the pathological gamblers even though both groups won and lost the same amount of money. Reduced activity in the area is recognised as a hallmark of drug addiction. The researchers suggest the explanation could be that people with such addictions cannot maintain the amount of the brain chemical dopamine - which produces feelings of satisfaction and pleasure - which they need in the ventral striatum, through everyday life. Instead, they need stronger triggers - such as drugs or excessive gambling - to compensate. (C)BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 6678 - Posted: 01.10.2005

Rats can tell the difference between Dutch and Japanese, suggests a new study. But it is not because some spy agency has bioengineered them to eavesdrop on conversations in Tokyo or Amsterdam. They are simply recognising the difference in rhythmic properties of the languages, says Juan Toro, a neuroscientist at the University of Barcelona in Spain, whose study is part of an effort to trace the origins of the skills that humans use to analyse speech. Human infants are extremely sensitive to the rhythmic regularities of language, which researchers think may help infants to break sound into patterns they can decipher as words. Earlier experiments showed that both tamarin monkeys and human infants can discriminate between Dutch and Japanese - two languages with rhythmic content that differs greatly. Toro's team trained rats to recognise either Dutch or Japanese - by pressing a lever in response to a short sentence - and then exposed them to sentences they had not heard before, in both languages. They found that the rats responded significantly more often to the language they had been trained in - as long as the sentences were computer-synthesised or both languages were spoken by the same person. However, the rats could not tell the difference if the sentences were played backwards or were spoken by different people. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language; Hearing
Link ID: 6677 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Whether it's sipped from sleek stemware or a tin can, the alcohol in any type of cocktail, wine, beer, or hard liquor, for some people, is highly addictive. More than 17 million Americans already know this too well. They either abuse alcohol or have graduated to become alcoholics and have lost control of their drinking. Alcoholics have powerful cravings for the drug that typically overtake their ability to stop drinking on their own, even in the face of devastating consequences. Excess alcohol can ruin a person's health, family life, and career. Until recently, little could be done to help keep problem drinkers from consuming alcohol except for counseling programs, which can be costly and do not always work. Thanks, however, to discoveries on the chemistry of alcohol's effects, some biology-based treatments are now available and even more help is on the way. The research is leading to: An increased understanding of how various systems in the brain contribute to alcoholism. A wider range of treatment options for individuals with alcohol problems. A major step in medication development occurred in recent years when scientists discovered evidence that alcohol acts on several chemical systems in the brain to create its alluring effects. In the mid-1990s, the drug naltrexone, which targets one of these systems, termed the opioid system, was approved as a treatment for alcoholism. It's thought that alcohol's effects on the system may produce the euphoric feelings that make a person want to drink again. Naltrexone can block this reaction and helps cut cravings for alcohol in some alcoholic individuals. Copyright © 2004 Society for Neuroscience

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 6676 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Information Will Come From Clinical Trials By Marc Kaufman, Washington Post Staff Writer The world's four main pharmaceutical trade groups announced yesterday that they will publish far more data about clinical drug trials than now required by law. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association, along with industry groups in Europe, Japan and some developing nations, said they will begin posting expanded information about new and ongoing trials by summer. American companies are required by law to provide information on clinical trials dealing with life-threatening diseases, but the groups said yesterday they are now committed to going beyond that requirement and will provide information about trials for all diseases. "Patients and physicians have asked pharmaceutical companies to make available information about all clinical trials, not just some trials, and make that information more accessible," PhRMA President Billy Tauzin said. "We're doing this because our industry recognizes that sometimes what the law requires doesn't give patients all they need." © 2005 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 6675 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Babies should get their Z's on their backs, most pediatricians advise parents. Beyond that, preventing Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS—the number one cause of death in children under the age of one—has remained a mystery that researchers believe they may have finally cracked. Nino Ramirez, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, says that after nearly ten years spent unraveling the secrets of mouse nerve cells called pacemaker neurons he may have found the missing link that explains why some babies fall to SIDS. Ramirez and his team differentiated between two types of pacemaker cells active in the mouse brainstem that appear to control breathing—one group depends on calcium channels to operate and the other on sodium channels regulated by serotonin, a brain chemical known to influence mood. The latter held particular interest for Ramirez since prior research showed that babies who died of SIDS had serotonin deficits in brain areas that controlled breathing. "The idea with the serotonin is as follows," he explains. "It's present within the nervous system and these nerve cells are sitting in a soup of this serotonin. They need this…in order to generate this intrinsic ability to burst." That bursting triggers the respiratory system to gasp, which resets breathing. In healthy babies gasping kicks in when they start losing oxygen, but SIDS babies respond differently to plummeting oxygen levels. "We know from studies done in Germany and also from studies done in St. Louis that gasping is disturbed in these children" Ramirez explains. © ScienCentral, 2000- 2005.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 6674 - Posted: 06.24.2010

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- University of Florida stem cell scientists reported today (Jan. 3) that they have prevented blindness in mice afflicted with a condition similar to one that robs thousands of diabetic Americans of their eyesight each year. Writing in the current issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers describe for the first time the link between a protein known as SDF-1 and retinopathy, a complication of diabetes and the leading cause of blindness in working-age Americans. Scientists explain how they used a common antibody to block the formation of SDF-1 in the eyeballs of mice with simulated retinopathy, ending the explosive blood vessel growth that characterizes the condition. Researchers effectively silenced SDF-1’s signal to activate normally helpful blood stem cells, which become too much of a good thing within the close confines of the eyeball. “SDF-1 is the main thing that tells blood stem cells where to go,” said Edward Scott, an associate professor of molecular genetics at the UF Shands Cancer Center and director of the Program in Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at UF’s College of Medicine. “If you get a cut, the body makes SDF-1 at the injury site and the repair cells sniff it out. The concentration of SDF-1 is higher where the cut occurs and it quickly dissipates. But the eye is such a unique place, you’ve got this bag of jelly -- the vitreous -- that just sits there and it fills up with SDF-1. The SDF-1 doesn’t break down. It continues to call the new blood vessels to come that way, causing all the problems.”

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 6673 - Posted: 06.24.2010