Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine have found that that a low dose of aspirin or similar painkillers, equivalent to the dose a human would take for a headache, can interfere with the wiring of the developing brain. Male baby rats exposed to aspirin, either in the womb or by nursing, have lower-than-normal sex drives when they grow up. "The pregnant rat was exposed to aspirin in her water for the last week of pregnancy and the first week of breast-feeding," explains Margaret McCarthy professor of physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. "This is a time of heightened sensitivity of the brain to determine if it's going to become male or female. When we raised those male pups to adulthood, they showed what we would call a mildly impaired sexual behavior." Scientists have known for a long time that aspirin and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs stop pain and inflammation by blocking the body's production of a group of signaling molecules called prostaglandins. But nobody knew that prostaglandins might be involved in regulating sex behaviors. McCarthy and her colleague Stuart Amateau found that by blocking prostaglandin production, the aspirin actually changed the rats' brain wiring in a region that's also involved in controlling human sex behaviors. They reported their findings in the June 2004 issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience. © ScienCentral, 2000-2004.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5656 - Posted: 06.24.2010

CHICAGO – Eating fruit may help protect against the development of age-related maculopathy (ARM), an eye disease that can cause blindness, according to an article in the June issue of The Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. According to information in the article, ARM is the leading cause of vision loss among people 65 and older. Because there are no effective treatments for ARM, prevention of this eye disease is important. Antioxidant vitamin and mineral supplementation has been found to help protect against ARM. In a recent study, supplementation with high-doses of vitamins C and E, beta carotene and zinc delayed the progression of ARM. Eunyoung Cho, Sc.D., of Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, and colleagues examined the effect of antioxidant vitamins and carotenoids (compounds responsible for the red, yellow and orange pigments found in some fruits and vegetables) as well as fruits and vegetables on the development of ARM among 77,562 women and 40,866 men. The women were part of the Nurses' Health Study, and the men were participants in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. Participants were at least 50 years old at the beginning of the study with no diagnosis of ARM. Women were followed for up to 18 years, and men were followed for up to 12 years.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 5655 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The initial trial of a controversial method for treating spinal cord injuries within two weeks of an accident suggests it may be partly successful. More patients recovered some sensation and movement than would normally be expected, the company behind the trial claims. Independent experts say the results look promising, but caution that with just 16 people treated so far, it is too early to draw any conclusions. Some worry that the technique is risky and could cause serious problems in the long term. The method involves extracting immune cells from a patient's blood, "activating" them by incubating them with skin cells, and then injecting the cells directly into the damaged spinal cord. This must all be done within 14 days of the injury, so even if larger trials confirm its benefits, the method will not help the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide with existing injuries. The technique is being developed by ProNeuron Biotechnologies of Los Angeles, California, which has just submitted results from the first 10 patients for publication. All patients fell into the most severe spinal injury category, called ASIA-A. This is defined as having no sensation or ability to move below the site of injury. Normal sensation and movement is defined as ASIA-E. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 5654 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Testosterone damps pain sensation in males. LAURA NELSON It will come as no surprise to some... men are less sensitive than women, at least to pain. Researchers have found that the male hormone testosterone masks feelings of discomfort. They believe that such tolerance effects may help men to maintain their stamina in fights, when testosterone levels are high. "If men are less sensitive to pain, there is more willingness to fight and participate in further fights," says Michaela Hau, an animal physiology and behaviour scientist at Princeton University, New Jersey, and lead author of the study. The research team gave testosterone implants to male sparrows and measured their reaction times to pain. Testosterone allowed the birds to tolerate discomfort for longer periods, suggesting that the hormone somehow disguises pain. They determined the normal pain threshold of male sparrows by dangling one of their legs in a beaker of hot water and varying the temperature. "We measured how long it took for the bird to retract its leg," says Hau. The quicker the birds removed their legs, the more pain they were presumably feeling. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 5653 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Eight-limbed creatures have a favourite. MICHAEL HOPKIN Most octopuses have a favourite arm, zoologists have discovered. This is the first time they have been found to show any bias when choosing which of their eight limbs is right for the job. The creatures use their trusty first-choice appendage when exploring a new nook or cranny, says Ruth Byrne of the University of Vienna in Austria. She presented the discovery on Sunday at the annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society in Oaxaca, Mexico. In terms of skill, octopus arms are created pretty much equal. "All eight arms are capable of the same tasks," Byrne told the meeting. "There's hardly any specialization." This had prompted experts to suspect that the creatures simply use whichever arm is handiest. Indeed, one of their preferred hunting strategies is to jump on top of a rock and curl all of their arms underneath, grabbing whatever they find. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Laterality
Link ID: 5652 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Adults often struggle trying to learn a second language, but the process may not be as tedious and slow as commonly believed. University of Washington researchers who followed college students learning first-year French have found that the students' brain activity was clearly discriminating between real and pseudo-French words after only 14 hours of classroom instruction. At the same time, however, the students performed at 50-50 levels when asked to consciously choose whether or not the stimuli were real French words. In addition, the researchers found that as the students had more exposure to French, the difference in brain response to words and pseudo words became larger. The study, which is one of the first to look at how fast second-language words are learned and how the brain responds to words with increasing experience with the new language, was published June 13 in the on-line edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience. The research team was headed by Judith McLaughlin, a UW research scientist, and Lee Osterhout, an associate professor of psychology. "Age and reduced brain plasticity are the classic reasons usually given for difficulty in learning a second language. But almost all thinking about this concerns syntax and grammar, while word learning has been ignored," Osterhout said. "Our results clearly show there are aspects of a second language that can be learned quickly and with amazing ease. A number of our subjects told us they hadn't been studying that hard because the course had just begun or because they were taking French to simply fulfill their language requirement. What's remarkable, considering those factors and that the language wasn't being taught in an immersion environment, was that we saw this rapid change in brain activity."

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 5651 - Posted: 06.15.2004

New Haven, Conn. -- The principal active ingredient in marijuana causes transient schizophrenia-like symptoms ranging from suspiciousness and delusions to impairments in memory and attention, according to a Yale research study. Lead author D. Cyril D'Souza, M.D., associate professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, said the study was an attempt to clarify a long known association between cannabis and psychosis in the hopes of finding another clue about the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. "Just as studies with amphetamines and ketamine advanced the notion that brain systems utilizing the chemical messengers dopamine and NMDA receptors may be involved in the pathophysiology in schizophrenia, this study provides some tantalizing support for the hypotheses that the brain receptor system that cannabis acts on may be involved in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia," he said. "Clearly, further work is needed to test this hypothesis." D'Souza and his co-researchers administered various doses of delta-9-THC, the main active ingredient in cannabis, to subjects who were screened for any vulnerability to schizophrenia. Some subjects developed symptoms resembling those of schizophrenia that lasted approximately one half hour to one hour. These symptoms included suspiciousness, unusual thoughts, paranoia, thought disorder, blunted affect, reduced spontaneity, reduced interaction with the interviewer, and problems with memory and attention.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 5650 - Posted: 06.15.2004

Implications for future treatment of cerebral palsy and epilepsy An existing drug already approved by the FDA may protect newborns from brain injury and long-term neurologic problems caused by excitotoxicity, or over-activation of neurons, report two NIH-funded studies from Children's Hospital Boston. The drug, topiramate, is currently approved to control seizures in adults and in children over age 3, but the findings may provide the basis for a protective therapy that could be given to babies immediately after traumatic birth events that compromise the brain's blood and oxygen supply. Such events can cause long-term neurologic abnormalities that underlie serious conditions like cerebral palsy and epilepsy. Premature infants, who are surviving in greater numbers, are especially vulnerable to excitotoxicity. When the brain's blood and oxygen supply are compromised, a condition known as hypoxia-ischemia, the chemical glutamate accumulates in brain tissues. Glutamate binds to receptors on neurons and over-activates them, causing the brain cells to die. The Children's Hospital researchers, led by Dr. Frances Jensen, have found that the neurons of premature infants and other newborns have more glutamate receptors than the adult brain, making them very vulnerable to excitotoxic brain injury from hypoxia-ischemia. In two studies, they investigated whether compounds that block a certain type of glutamate receptor, known as AMPA, can dampen the harmful effects of excitotoxicity in the immature brain.

Keyword: Epilepsy; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 5649 - Posted: 06.15.2004

Scientists have shown that there is a degree of truth in the old adage that love is blind. They have found that feelings of love lead to a suppression of activity in the areas of the brain controlling critical thought. It seems that once we get close to a person, the brain decides the need to assess their character and personality is reduced. The study, by University College London, is published in NeuroImage. The researchers found that both romantic love and maternal love produce the same effect on the brain. They suppress neural activity associated with critical social assessment of other people and negative emotions. The UCL team scanned the brains of 20 young mothers while they viewed pictures of their own children, children they were acquainted with, and adult friends. The team found that the patterns of brain activity were very similar to those identified in an earlier study looking at the effects of romantic love. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Brain imaging
Link ID: 5648 - Posted: 06.14.2004

A vaccine which can help cocaine addicts break their addiction has been developed by a UK pharmaceutical company. Trials carried out in the US showed almost half of those given the TA-CD vaccine, developed by Xenova, were able to stay of the drug for six months. The vaccine does not stop the craving for cocaine, but will stop addicts experiencing a high when they take it. The company says this prevents the people becoming re-addicted. In the study, the TA-CD vaccine was compared with a dummy version. David Oxlade, chief executive of Xenova, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "This is the third study in the US that we are reporting on today, and it shows that almost half the addicts were able to stay cocaine-free for six months. "That is a quite remarkable position." (C)BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 5647 - Posted: 06.14.2004

By LEE JENKINS In the four-tenths of a second it takes for a 101-mile-an-hour fastball to fly from the pitcher’s hand to home plate, the San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds sizes up the seams and gauges the spin, projects where the ball is headed and decides what he wants to do with it. One night this season, Bonds used this sliver of time to plant his right foot, jackhammer his hips and thrust his hands so violently that he got completely around on the triple-digit baseball and yanked the ball out of the stadium, about 60 feet foul. Around SBC Park in San Francisco, fans seemed torn between applauding the blow and debating it. In a press-box seat, one reporter said to another, “Steroids can’t do that.” And, inevitably, the response rang out: “How do you know?” Such is the interchange defining a sport divided — between those who speculate about the role of steroids in every game, and those in awe over a Bonds blast or some utility infielder’s opposite-field home run. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 5646 - Posted: 06.24.2010

People are woefully bad at recalling details of their own traumatic experiences. When military personnel were subjected to threatening behaviour during mock interrogations, most failed to identify the questioner a day or so later, and many even got the gender wrong. The finding casts serious doubt on the reliability of victim testimonies in cases involving psychological trauma. Numerous studies have questioned the accuracy of recall of traumatic events, but the research is often dismissed as artificial and not intense enough to simulate real-life trauma. Other studies have suggested that intense, personal experiences might produce near photographic recollection, something that prosecutors and juries in legal cases often assume. But some researchers think this is an illusion. "People come away from these experiences feeling they will never forget what happened," says Gary Wells, an expert on eyewitness testimony at Iowa State University in Ames, "but they confuse that with thinking they remember the details." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Stress
Link ID: 5645 - Posted: 06.24.2010

WASHINGTON — Most will agree that two heads are better than one in solving problems. The same logic may be true for language and retaining cognitive processes as we age. Being fluent in two languages seems to prevent some of the cognitive decline seen in same-age monolingual speaking persons, according to the findings of a study appearing in this month’s journal of Psychology and Aging. It is established that learned knowledge and habitual procedures (crystallized intelligence) hold up well as people age, said lead author Ellen Bialystok, Ph.D., of York University, but abilities that depend on keeping one’s attention on a task (fluid intelligence) actually decline as people get older. But in her study, Bialystok found that those who have been bilingual most of their life were better able to manage their attention to complex set of rapidly changing task demands as measured by an experimental task – The Simon Task – that purposely distracts the test takers. Three studies compared the performance of a total of 104 monolingual and bilingual middle-aged (30-59 year olds) and 50 older adults (60-88 year olds) on the Simon Task. The Simon task measures reaction time without the subjects having to be familiar with the content, and it measures aspects of cognitive processing that decline with age, according to the study. © 2004 American Psychological Association

Keyword: Language; Alzheimers
Link ID: 5644 - Posted: 06.24.2010

University College London experts have shown how the brain subconsciously remembers details around past dangers. Writing in Nature, they say blocking this system could help treat pain by interrupting such a brain process. Researchers said volunteers could not recall details of a test which had led to them getting a mild electric shock. But activity in the brain revealed that they had correctly logged the data by using a series of complicated computations. Fourteen patients were given a half-hour test while lying in a functional magnetic resonance brain scanner - tests were done by researchers at the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience at UCL. They were shown a series of abstract pictures followed by a one-second electric shock - equivalent to a pin-prick. When the tests were completed many of the volunteers could not recall the sequence of images. But the scanner revealed that two key areas, the ventral striatum and part of the cerebral cortex, were working together to figure out what was coming next. Dr Ben Seymour, who led the research, said: "If we showed a square followed by a circle followed by the painful shock this part of the brain could soon learn to predict that the circle was bad news. "However, after a while, it would learn that the square wasn't that good either, as it was followed by the circle. "By recording these chains of events, the brain was able to set early alarm bells ringing in the volunteer." (C)BBC

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 5643 - Posted: 06.13.2004

Genes which play a key role in keeping our minds sharp gradually begin to turn off as we age, research has found. Scientists at the Children's Hospital in Boston hope the discovery could lead to new ways to preserve brain function and ward off Alzheimer's disease. They used a sophisticated screening technique to analyse brain samples from 30 people aged 26 to 106 at post-mortem. The research is published in the journal Nature. Lead researcher Professor Bruce Yankner said: "We found that genes that play a role in learning and memory were among those most significantly reduced in the ageing human cortex. "These include genes that are required for communication between neurons." Gene activity was assessed by measuring the amount of proteins that they produce. Protein levels were reduced in older individuals - and changes seemed to start for some in their 40s. However, the rate of deterioration seemed to vary between individuals. (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5642 - Posted: 06.13.2004

Sheep can recognise emotions in facial expression, not only in their species but also in humans, researchers say. Researchers at Cambridge University have discovered sheep prefer smiling or relaxed human faces, over angry or stressed ones. Neuroscientist Dr Keith Kendrick and his team believe the findings may offer insights into some human conditions. Three years ago, the team found sheep could recognise 50 individual sheep faces and remember them for two years. "Sheep are able to recognise faces that differ by less than 5% so we thought perhaps they could recognise emotions which are much more subtle," Dr Kendrick said. "It turns out they can, both human, smiling versus angry; and sheep, stressed versus calm." Scientists presented the sheep with two doors they could push open to gain food. On one would be a picture of a smiling human or a happy sheep, on the other an angry human or a stressed out sheep. "They vastly preferred to press the smiling human or the animal that has just had a meal and is feeling all right with life," said Dr Kendrick. (C)BBC

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 5641 - Posted: 06.13.2004

Paul Brown In December 2003, the U.S. Department of Agriculture discovered a case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), often called mad-cow disease, in a dairy cow from Washington state. The news was more than a little disturbing to the American cattle industry. The mad-cow scare had previously devastated the cattle business in the few countries where BSE had been reported, especially Great Britain and Canada. The Canadian cattle industry has yet to recover from the discovery of BSE in a single cow on an Alberta farm in May of last year. A 400-kilogram cow that used to fetch 500 Canadian dollars on the open market now sells for as little as 79 Canadian cents—less than the price of a fast-food burger. The economic fallout is, of course, a consequence of the discovery in 1996 that mad-cow disease could cross the species barrier to inflict human beings with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). This disease is characterized by a progression of psychiatric and neurological symptoms that culminate in death, usually a year or two after the onset of the first indications of illness. As of May 2000, a total of 155 cases of vCJD had been identified: 144 in Great Britain (where the outbreak began), 6 in France, 1 in Ireland, and 1 in Italy. Additional single victims in Hong Kong, Canada and the U.S. were infected in the U.K., where they had been residing during the years of peak risk, in the late 1980s or early 1990s. The extraordinary commercial and public-health consequences of BSE, as well as the near-global distribution of products derived from cattle, have generated a considerable amount of attention from industry, government and the general public. As a result, there is a daunting volume of information—not all of it reliable—surrounding the nature of mad-cow disease. © Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 5640 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower On a European television broadcast 2 years ago, a border collie named Rico wowed viewers by correctly retrieving items from an array of children's toys at the request of one of his German owners. For example, if instructed to "get the panda," that's what the black-and-white canine brought back. Julia Fisher, a psychologist at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and two of her colleagues watched Rico's performance with keen interest. In ensuing experiments with the dog, they found that he recognizes the names of about 200 objects and learns names for new items as well as 3-year-old children have been reported to do. "Our results support the view that rapid word learning by toddlers is mediated by simple cognitive building blocks that are present in another species," Fisher says. The dog's word-learning skill is as good as chimpanzees' and parrots', the researchers conclude in the June 11 Science. Copyright ©2004 Science Service.

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 5639 - Posted: 06.24.2010

German Pet's Vocabulary Stuns Scientists By Rob Stein, Washington Post Staff Writer A series of careful studies concluded that the energetic German house dog has a stunningly large vocabulary of about 200 words and can even do something scientists thought only humans could do: figure out by the process of elimination that a sound he has never heard before must be the name of a toy he has never seen before. That feat, described in today's issue of the journal Science, suggests that dog owners who claim their pets understand what they are saying and are trying to respond may have been right all along. "Maybe this is the Albert Einstein of dogs. Or maybe this is something that other dogs can do, too," said Julia Fischer, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who helped test Rico. "We just don't know. We need to find out." While many species can be trained to recognize the names of objects, what makes Rico unusual is that he knows so many words, can puzzle out the names of new objects on the first try and weeks later is surprisingly good at remembering what he learned, the researchers said. © 2004 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 5638 - Posted: 06.24.2010

PEOPLE are woefully bad at recalling details of their own traumatic experiences. When military personnel were subjected to threatening behaviour during mock interrogations, most failed to identify the questioner a day or so later, and many even got the gender wrong. The finding casts serious doubt on the reliability of victim testimonies in cases involving psychological trauma. Numerous studies have questioned the accuracy of recall of traumatic events, but the research is often dismissed as artificial and not intense enough to simulate real-life trauma. Other studies have suggested that intense, personal experiences might produce near photographic recollection, something that prosecutors and juries in legal cases often assume. But some researchers think this is an illusion. "People come away from these experiences feeling they will never forget what happened," says Gary Wells, an expert on eyewitness testimony at Iowa State University in Ames, "but they confuse that with thinking they remember the details."

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Stress
Link ID: 5637 - Posted: 06.11.2004