University of Chicago researchers may have found a crucial clue to understanding and ultimately eliminating sudden infant death syndrome, the leading cause of post-neonatal mortality in the United States. Approximately 3,000 infants die each year from the disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the July 8, 2004, issue of the journal Neuron, the researchers describe the specific group of neurons that are responsible for gasping and what happens to these cells when they are deprived of oxygen. Since gasping resets the normal breathing pattern for babies, the scientists suspect that a malfunction in these respiratory pacemakers is the cellular mechanism that leads to SIDS. "This paper sets the groundwork for everything that has to do with breathing," says lead author Jan-Marino Ramirez, an associate professor of organismal biology and anatomy. "We've now defined the players in the system." The study follows a paper published in Nature four years ago in which Ramirez and colleagues showed that the same network of respiratory cells in the brainstem controls different forms of breathing: the sigh, the gasp and normal rhythm.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 5769 - Posted: 07.08.2004

The selective killing of spinal cord neurons in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, occurs when tiny cellular components called mitochondria actively recruit a mutant disease-causing protein into specific neuron cells, according to new research by University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine investigators. Published in the July 8, 2004 issue of the journal Neuron, the findings identify mitochondria as the focus of ALS toxicity and provide the first explanation of how a mutant protein called SOD1 that occurs in all cells in the body is damaging only to specific neuron cells. The result is ALS, a progressive degeneration of motor nerve cells in the spinal cord that leads to wasted muscles and premature death in middle-aged adults. Found in all cells, mitochondria provide cellular energy in their role as the body's power generators. In addition, mitochondria are intricately involved in a process called apoptosis, or programmed cell death, which is the body's normal method of disposing of damaged, unwanted or unneeded cells. "We believe that when the mutant SOD1 binds to mitochondria, it affects the ability of these components to generate cell energy," said the study's senior author, Don Cleveland, Ph.D., a UCSD professor of medicine, neurosciences, and cellular and molecular medicine, and a faculty member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 5768 - Posted: 07.08.2004

Heavy drinking during the teenage years begins taking a serious health toll by the time people are 24 years old. A University of Washington study has found that people who began binge drinking at age 13 and continued throughout adolescence were nearly four times as likely to be overweight or obese and almost 3½ times as likely to have high blood pressure when they were 24 years old than were people who never or rarely drank heavily during adolescence. It also found four distinct patterns or trajectories of binge drinking among teenagers. The study looked at young adult health consequences of adolescent binge drinking – consuming five or more drinks on a single occasion – between the ages of 13 and 18. Previous research has shown that adolescent binge drinking results in a number of immediate negative consequences, including involvement in fatal or injurious automobile accidents and engaging in risky sexual behavior. But little had been known about the effects of adolescent heavy drinking into young adulthood. "In our analysis, we did look at whether people were currently binge drinking at age 24. We controlled for it, along with other factors, such as adolescent drug use, ethnicity, gender and family poverty, and we still saw different patterns of health outcomes depending on which trajectory of binge drinking teenagers followed," said Karl Hill, a co-author of the study and director of the Seattle Social Development Project. "It is the pattern of early and on-going drinking that is the key."

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Obesity
Link ID: 5767 - Posted: 06.24.2010

People who have so-called mini-strokes should be assessed by specialists within days rather than weeks, say doctors. The Royal College of Physicians said this could prevent many people going on to have full strokes. At present, people who have mini-strokes can wait weeks to be assessed by specialist doctors in NHS hospitals. New guidelines from the college suggest they should now be seen within a maximum of seven days. The college also recommends that people who have more than one mini-stroke in a week should be seen by specialists immediately. Mini-strokes, or transient ischaemic attacks (TIAs), occur when bloodflow to the brain is blocked. This can cause eyesight or brain problems. However, unlike full strokes, these symptoms disappear within 24 hours. Overall, 130,000 people in England and Wales have a stroke each year. One in three will die within a month. Another third will never fully recover. (C)BBC

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 5766 - Posted: 07.07.2004

The most common form of Alzheimer's disease isn't inherited, and little is known about its causes. Now, researchers have found a handful of DNA mutations that arise more frequently in patients with the disorder. The results bolster earlier suggestions that Alzheimer's is caused partly by deficits in cells' energy plants. Researchers have found some of the genes involved in the familial form of Alzheimer's, which accounts for about 10% of cases and typically strikes people in their 60s, but they've had little success finding genetic glitches associated with the more common, late-onset form. Some evidence has pointed to a lifelong buildup of mutations in the DNA inside mitochondria, the energy-producing organelles inside cells. For example, Douglas Wallace, now at the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues found that a small percentage of Alzheimer's patients carried a specific mutation in their mitochondrial DNA. But that simply couldn't account for the large number of late-onset victims. So they kept up the search. After examining every mitochondrial gene that codes for a protein, to no avail, Wallace's team decided to check for mutations in a short DNA region that regulates expression of mitochondrial genes and helps copy mitochondrial DNA when cells divide. Comparing DNA from the brains of 23 Alzheimer's patients against 40 healthy brains matched for age, the team found one mutation that occurred exclusively in Alzheimer's brains--65% of diseased brains contained this mutation, the team reports online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Other mutations were also more prevalent in Alzheimer's patients. In addition, the team noticed that brains of people who died of Alzheimer's before age 80 harbored a few mutations in many cells, whereas those who died later carried a greater variety of mutations in fewer cells. That suggests that mutations that occur early in life and accumulate in brain cells may heighten the risk of disease. Copyright © 2004 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5765 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Garry Walter, M.D., and Andrew McDonald, M.D. Hollywood has had a long-standing love affair with psychiatry (Gabbard and Gabbard, 1999; Schneider, 1987, 1977). Dating from the first psychiatric film, Dr. Dippy's Sanitarium (1906), almost 500 movies dealing with the specialty have been made. While the film industry has demonstrated a particular fascination for depicting psychotherapy, physical treatments including electroconvulsive therapy have also been featured (McDonald and Walter, 2001; Walter, 1998). Indeed, some of the major psychiatric films--The Snake Pit (1948), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Frances (1982) and Shine (1996)--have prominent convulsive therapy scenes. (See the Table for a selected chronology of films depicting ECT.) Portrayals of ECT reflect and influence public attitudes toward the treatment. For example, in a survey of lay attitudes toward convulsive therapy, the majority of respondents who had seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest were "put off ECT" by the film (O'Shea and McGennis, 1983). In another study, one-third of medical students decreased their support for the treatment after being shown ECT scenes from movies, and the proportion of students who would dissuade a family member or friend from having ECT rose from less than 10% prior to viewing to almost 25% afterward (Walter et al., 2002). So what is the legacy of portrayals that have been so abhorrent, and are there any exceptions to the rule? Electroconvulsive therapy made its film debut in 1948 in Anatole Litvak's Academy Award-winning The Snake Pit, a movie set at Juniper Hill State Hospital. The film follows the path to recovery of Virginia Cunningham (Olivia de Havilland), a young writer who develops a psychosis shortly after marriage. © 2004 Psychiatric Times. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 5764 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by William Kanapaux The underdiagnosis and undertreatment of depression in older adults has been well documented in recent years, and while certain gains have been made over the last decade, researchers say there is much room for improvement. A study appearing in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (2003;51[12]:1718-1728) found that while rates of diagnosis for depression for patients aged 65 and older increased dramatically during the 1990s, "significant disparities by age, ethnicity, and supplemental insurance coverage persist in treatment of those diagnosed." The researchers, led by Stephen Crystal, Ph.D., examined Medicare claims and interview data from 1992 through 1998 for nearly 21,000 recipients aged 65 and older who lived in community settings. They found that depression diagnoses more than doubled by 1998, to 5.8%. However, certain groups were significantly less likely to receive treatment: people aged 75 and older, people of "Hispanic or other" ethnicity, and people without supplemental insurance coverage. Hispanic beneficiaries who were diagnosed with depression received no treatment 43% of the time, compared with 31.9% of elderly white Medicare beneficiaries. People without supplemental insurance received no treatment 50.8% of the time, compared with 31.5% of beneficiaries with extra coverage. And 40.9% of diagnosed beneficiaries who were 80 and older received no treatment, compared with 24.4% of beneficiaries aged 65 to 69. Even in the best of conditions, mental health treatment for late-life depression remains largely inadequate, as indicated by the disproportionate rate of suicide among the elderly. © 2004 Psychiatric Times. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 5763 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Stephen I. Deutsch, M.D., Ph.D., Richard B. Rosse, M.D., Lynn H. Deutsch, D.O., and Judy Eller The majority of the pharmacological mechanisms of action of the current medications for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease (AD) are based on the assumption of a cholinergic deficiency. Indeed, the intactness of cholinergic projections, particularly those arising in the basal forebrain, is crucial for learning and memory. Elderly patients with advanced AD consistently show histopathological evidence of degeneration of cholinergic projection pathways and reduced levels and activity of choline acetyltransferase (ChAT), a biochemical marker of cholinergic neurons. Lesions of cholinergic nuclei (i.e., nucleus basalis magnocellularis and medial septum/diagonal band) that project to the neocortex and hippocampus and administration of centrally acting muscarinic and nicotinic acetylcholine receptor antagonists have been shown to disrupt memory performance in a variety of paradigms in animals (Terry and Buccafusco, 2003). However, biochemical markers of cholinergic neurons, such as the activity of ChAT and acetylcholinesterase (AChE) and levels of vesicular acetylcholine transporter protein, were not reduced in autopsy studies of patients with recently diagnosed mild AD or mild cognitive impairment (Davis et al., 1999; DeKosky et al., 2002). On the surface, these data seem to challenge long-held assumptions about cholinergic dysfunction in AD--especially its early role in AD pathogenesis. © 2004 Psychiatric Times. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 5762 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Senior citizens played an important role in the dramatic spread of human civilisation some 30,000 years ago, a study of the human fossil record has shown. Rachel Caspari at the University of Michigan and Sang-Hee Lee at the University of California at Riverside studied dental fossils belonging to early humans and pre-human species dating back 3 million years. They judged the age of specimens by examining wear to teeth and classified "old" as twice the age of sexual maturity - roughly 30 years. The fossils examined included Australopithecines, who lived up to three million years ago, Homo erectus, a more human-like ancestor that emerged 1 million years ago, as along with Neanderthals and early modern humans, which co-existed some 50,000 years ago. Caspari and Lee found a five-fold increase the number of individuals surviving into old age in the Early Upper Palaeolithic period - around 30,000 years ago. This coincides with an explosive population growth of modern humans and the spread of archaeological artefacts that suggest the development of more complex social organisation. "In the Upper Paleolithic the proportion just skyrocketed," Caspari said. "It was just unbelievable. We didn't expect that." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 5761 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LOUIS B. PARKS Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle Write this down so you won't forget it later. Eating certain berries and vegetables on a regular basis now may keep you from age-related memory problems down the road. Granted, it has not been proved in human studies, but it certainly works for lab rats, which have similar brain components and suffer from age-related memory loss for reasons similar to humans. Now, a study coordinated by University of Houston-Clear Lake researchers shows it might also work in people. And since we are talking about readily available foods such as blueberries, strawberries and spinach, what have we got to lose by hitting the produce aisle? "We have an opportunity to ensure a better and healthier aging," said Pilar Goyarzu of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Goyarzu participated in the research project coordinated by Dr. David Malin of the University of Houston-Clear Lake. Findings are published in an upcoming issue of Nutritional Neuroscience. The researchers used blueberries because their antioxidant properties are believed to counter the damaging effects of free radicals. Free radicals are compounds that are destructively reactive with other compounds, so they can damage important cellular components and contribute to aging.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 5760 - Posted: 07.07.2004

New research with monkeys has yielded insight into the neural machinery that animals, and possibly humans, use to mentally represent the value of one action over another. Scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) have determined the strategy by which the brain calculates the value of potential behavioral choices as those values change over time with new experience. Their studies, said the cognitive neuroscientists who conducted the research, help in understanding the mysterious process by which animals and humans process sensory input to decide on actions that yield the greatest advantage. The researchers, led by HHMI investigator William Newsome at the Stanford University School of Medicine, published their findings in the June 18, 2004, issue of the journal Science. “Researchers who study behavior regard decision-making as a critical link between the classic fields of the study of perception and the study of motor output,” said Newsome. “Sensory information comes into the brain, and somewhere that information is evaluated and decisions get made about what's out there. For example: Is it a predator? Is it a prey? Is it food or another object?” © 2004 Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 5759 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By MARY DUENWALD Everybody hurts sometimes, and when in pain, most people reach for one of three remedies available on the drugstore shelf: acetaminophen (Tylenol), ibuprofen (Motrin or Advil) and aspirin. These painkillers are the three top-selling over-the-counter drugs, taken by one in five Americans at least once a week. Their sales in the United States totaled $3.2 billion in the last year, according to ACNielsen. People take pain pills not only for headaches but for arthritis pain, fevers and sore backs, among other ailments - and they think they know what they are doing. According to one survey, only a third of people who take drugstore painkillers bother to read the package directions; 64 percent said they were unconcerned about side effects. But many doctors find this level of confidence alarming. Aspirin and other anti-inflammatories can cause bleeding ulcers, raise blood pressure and cause scarring in the esophagus, while acetaminophen, in too-large amounts, can injure the liver. People who take small daily doses of aspirin to prevent heart disease should be especially careful about piling on more pain relievers, which might in some cases cause side effects or interfere with aspirin's heart-saving effects, doctors say. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 5758 - Posted: 07.06.2004

By BONNIE ROTHMAN MORRIS Mention anorexia or bulimia, and what comes to mind is a skin-and-bones teenager caught in a ferocious struggle to be thin. But doctors say they are seeing a disturbing trend: a growing group of women in their 30's, 40's and 50's who have eating disorders. Most have husbands, children, jobs and aging parents. They live with their secret while trying to manage the other aspects of their lives. Lori Varecka, 44, said she hid her bouts of starving and purging from her husband, her mother and her three children for more than two decades. But by 1997, what Mrs. Varecka was hiding was plain to see: At 5 feet 7 inches, she weighed 94 pounds. That year, she admitted to her doctor that she was ill. Eventually, she also told her family. In some cases, experts say, older women with eating disorders know something is wrong, but they do not give a name to their problem. Some feel ashamed to have an illness normally associated with teenagers. "Women feel so invalid. They feel that they should grow up," said Dr. Margo Maine, an eating disorders expert in Hartford and the author of a coming book on midlife eating disorders, "The Shape We're In: Overcoming Women's Obsessions with Weight, Food and Body Image." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 5757 - Posted: 07.06.2004

By DENISE GRADY They are the building blocks of flab, the wages of cheesecake, the bloated little sacks of grease that make more of us - more than we can fit into our pants. Scorned and despised, they are sucked out surgically by the billions from bulging backsides, bellies and thighs. But they are not without admirers. "Fat cells are beautiful cells to look at," said Dr. Philipp E. Scherer, an associate professor of cell biology and medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. "I've been working with them for 10 years and I still enjoy looking at them." On a recent afternoon at his laboratory, Dr. Scherer slipped a Petri dish of fat cells under a microscope and showed a visitor how strikingly they caught the light and reflected it. Magnified, the cells became a field of glittering rings. A mature fat cell, or adipocyte, contains a huge, clear droplet of fat that takes up nearly the entire cell and shoves the nucleus aside, squashing it up against the membrane so that the cell appears empty. But it's actually a shining sea of fat, stored as molecules of triglyceride. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 5756 - Posted: 07.06.2004

BY FLOYD SKLOOT Since 1990, when she published "A Natural History of the Senses," Diane Ackerman has continued to explore how intimate human experience defies rational explanation. "A Natural History of Love" appeared in 1994. Next came "Deep Play" (1999), an account of human creativity and our need for transcendence, and "Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden" (2001), about the way gardening elevates our souls. What fascinates Ackerman in these books is the pervasive mystery of nature, despite the increasing depth of our scientific knowledge. Her approach is to select a topic that is in its essence ineffable, then gather information about it from the worlds of science and evolutionary theory, literature, myth, popular culture and personal experience, and lavish her findings with elaborately worked, poetic prose. Her intention is to say the unsayable. Here, for instance, is Ackerman defining memory in her newest book, "An Alchemy of Mind," which considers the human brain and consciousness from her customarily impressionistic mix of perspectives: "An event is such a little piece of time and space, leaving only a mind glow behind like the tail of a shooting star. For lack of a better word, we call that scintillation memory." She is a grand, erudite synthesizer, positioning herself at the place where knowledge ends and reporting back to us in the language of lyric. "I believe consciousness is brazenly physical," she tells her readers, "a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive. But I also sense the universe is magical, greater than the sum of its parts." This is not the way things sound in neuroscience journals or philosophy of mind papers. Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5755 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News — A fly's taste might be much like ours, with the difference that the insect perceives bitter tastes much more accurately, genetic research of the fruit fly's tasting cells suggests. A study of the Drosophila fruit fly's labial palps — the fly's equivalent of a tongue — has revealed that specialized cells on the insect's main taste organ respond to sweet and bitter taste much like the human tongue. "A remarkable convergence of anatomical as well as molecular features of gustatory systems between mammals and insects appear to emerge from our studies," Hubert Amrein, assistant professor of genetics at Duke University Medical Center, Durham, N.C., and lead author of the study, wrote in the journal Current Biology. While in mammals taste receptors (the protein switches that trigger the nerve cells to send signals to the brain in response to food items or other chemicals) are limited to the tongue, in flies they are mounted on bristles found all over the body, including legs and wings. Copyright © 2004 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 5754 - Posted: 06.24.2010

CHICAGO – The activity of a brain enzyme known to affect mood may be decreased in teens who commit suicide, according to an article in the July issue of The Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. According to the article, approximately 30,000 people die of suicide in the United States annually, and suicide is the second leading cause of death among teenagers. While there is some understanding about the psychological and psychosocial factors associated with teenage suicide, little is known about neurobiological factors that may contribute to teenage suicide. An enzyme in the brain called protein kinase C (PKC) has been linked with mood disorders, and it is the target of some mood-stabilizing drugs. Ghanshyam N. Pandey, Ph.D., of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and colleagues investigated whether there was any link between changes in PKC and teenage suicide. The researchers examined the brains of 17 teenage suicide victims and compared them to 17 brains of teenagers without psychiatric illness who did not commit suicide as their cause of death (control subjects). The brains were obtained from the Brain Collection Program of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, in collaboration with the Medical Examiner's Office of the State of Maryland). PCK activity was measured from samples of PKC taken from each brain.

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 5753 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Getting stressed now and again may be good for your health, research suggests. A short burst of stress, such as that caused by sitting an exam, may strengthen your body's immune system. But long-term stress, such as living with a permanent disability, may render you less able to fight infections, say the study authors. Dr Suzanne Segerstrom and Dr Gregory Miller report their findings in the journal Psychological Bulletin. Scientists have known for some time that stress can have a negative effect on the body. Now the American and Canadian pair from the University of Kentucky and the University of British Columbia say some psychological stress can be good for you. They looked at about 300 scientific papers published on the subject, involving almost 19,000 people. Stressful situations that lasted only short periods appeared to tap into the primeval 'fight or flight' response, which dates back to when early man was threatened by predators. This response benefited the person by boosting their body's natural front-line defence against infections from traumas such as bites and scrapes. But long-term anxiety had the opposite effect. (C)BBC

Keyword: Stress; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 5752 - Posted: 07.05.2004

University of Iowa researchers have shown for the first time that gene therapy delivered to the brains of living mice can prevent the physical symptoms and neurological damage caused by an inherited neurodegenerative disease that is similar to Huntington's disease (HD). If the therapeutic approach can be extended to humans, it may provide a treatment for a group of incurable, progressive neurological diseases called polyglutamine-repeat diseases, which include HD and several spinocerebellar ataxias. The study, conducted by scientists at the UI Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine and colleagues at the University of Minnesota and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), appears in the August issue of Nature Medicine and in the journal's advanced online publication July 4. "This is the first example of targeted gene silencing of a disease gene in the brains of live animals and it suggests that this approach may eventually be useful for human therapies," said senior study author Beverly Davidson, Ph.D., the Roy J. Carver Chair in Internal Medicine and UI professor of internal medicine, physiology and biophysics, and neurology. "We have had success in tissue culture, but translating those ideas to animal models of disease has been a barrier. We seem to have broken through that barrier."

Keyword: Huntingtons; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 5751 - Posted: 07.05.2004

Clear patterns emerge outlining greater damage from chronic stress WASHINGTON — Psychologists have long known that stress affects our ability to fight infection, but a major new “meta-analysis” – a study of studies – has elucidated intriguing patterns of how stress affects human immunity, strengthening it in the short term but wearing it down over time. The report appears in the July issue of Psychological Bulletin, which is published by the American Psychological Association. Major findings are three-fold. First, the overlapping findings of 293 independent studies reported in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1960 and 2001 – with some 18,941 individuals taking part in all -- powerfully confirm the core fact that stress alters immunity. Second, the authors of the meta-analysis observed a distinctive pattern: Short-term stress actually “revs up” the immune system, an adaptive response preparing for injury or infection, but long-term or chronic stress causes too much wear and tear, and the system breaks down. Third, the immune systems of people who are older or already sick are more prone to stress-related change. Psychologists Suzanne Segerstrom, PhD, of the University of Kentucky, and Gregory Miller, PhD, of the University of British Columbia, analyzed the results of the nearly 300 studies by sorting them into different categories and statistically evaluating relationships. For example, the five stressor categories included: © 2004 American Psychological Association

Keyword: Stress; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 5750 - Posted: 06.24.2010