Drugs widely used to treat Alzheimer's disease have little actual benefit, controversial research suggests. The National Institute for Clinical Excellence recommended in 2001 that cholinesterase inhibitors should be prescribed on the NHS. But a five-year Lancet study by the University of Birmingham concludes that routine prescribing of the drugs is a waste of scarce resources. Alzheimer's experts, however, have challenged the finding. The drugs cost about £1,000 per person per year. In total 565 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease took part in the study. They were given either the cholinesterase inhibitor donepezil (Aricept) or a dummy pill. The main aim of the study was to assess whether donepezil delayed progress of disability or the need for institutional care. The study also looked at the optimal dose and length of treatment, and what effect donepezil has on the mood and behaviour of patients, their ability to undertake daily activities, and whether donepezil relieved the burden on carers. Lead researcher Professor Richard Gray said: "We've known for some time that patients do better on memory tests when they take these drugs but the improvements were small and we wanted to find out whether patients got benefits that really mattered to them - for example, could they go for a walk and find their way home. (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 5709 - Posted: 06.25.2004

By DENISE GRADY The most widely prescribed drug for Alzheimer's disease, Aricept, does not delay the onset of disability or the need for a nursing home, British researchers are reporting today. The researchers say that the drug has "disappointingly little overall benefit" and is not cost-effective, and that better treatments are needed. Experts in the United States are already divided over the usefulness of Aricept and related drugs, and the study is unlikely to end the debate. Most studies have shown that the drugs can produce small improvements in scores on mental tests, but it is not clear whether the gains translate into anything helpful in real life. Even the drugs' staunchest advocates say that they offer modest benefits at best, affording perhaps a short delay in a patient's decline. But when small changes in functioning occur, it may be hard to tell whether they are owing to the drug or to the ups and downs of the disease itself. The new report, being published in today's issue of The Lancet, the British medical journal, is based on a study of 565 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease who were assigned at random to receive either Aricept or a placebo and were then followed for up to three years. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 5708 - Posted: 06.25.2004

Blind, deaf, and hungry, a newborn mouse can't care for itself. Take away its mother, and a pup will scream bloody murder to get help. But if the neuronal receptors that respond to morphine are also taken away, the pup just doesn't seem to care. The finding may shed some light on roots of emotional attachment disorders, as well as drug abuse. The research, reported in the 25 June issue of Science, supports pharmacological evidence from a variety of animals that the opioid reward system helps wee ones bond with others. Opioids are best known as painkillers. They have other effects, too; morphine will turn the shrieks of lonely baby guinea pigs into whimpers. Francesca D'Amato of the CNR Institute of Neuroscience, Psychobiology, and Psychopharmacology in Rome and colleagues tested infant attachment in mouse pups born to parents genetically designed to lack both copies of the ́-opioid receptor gene. First, the researchers removed mom from the living quarters and, 5 minutes later, subjected the pups to a new environment. Normal 8-day-old pups screamed incessantly when placed into a beaker with clean bedding; they screamed about half as much when the beaker contained old fluff that smelled like mom. The mutant mice, though, hardly screamed at all. The lack of screeching was not due to an inability to smell or react to adverse circumstances: When threatening males were near, the mutant pups squealed even more than the normal pups, and all pups freaked comparably when placed in a frigid beaker. In addition, the mutant pups weren't able to discriminate between moms--when given a choice between their own place or a strange mom's nest, all of the normal pups chose their own place. But only a third of the pups lacking the ́-opioid receptor went home. Copyright © 2004 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 5707 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Honeybees can precisely regulate the temperature of their nest – and they do it thanks to genetically determined variations in their individual thermostats. The new research has revealed one of the few known benefits of the high genetic diversity found in honeybee colonies. Maintaining a nest temperature of between about 32°C and 36°C is vital during spring and summer, when eggs are developing and hatching. “If they don’t keep the nest at this temperature, the brood won’t develop properly,” says Julia Jones of the University of Sydney, Australia, who led the work. If the temperature drops too low, the worker bees huddle together around the brood to keep it warm. If it gets too high, they stand at the nest entrance and use their wings to fan out hot air. The new work shows that bees with different fathers start fanning at slightly different temperatures. This stops sudden colony-wide shifts between warming and cooling behaviours, and keeps the temperature in the nest more constant. “It’s been shown before that honeybees with different genotypes have different thresholds for certain things – for instance, they’re attracted to different concentrations of nectar," says Jones. "But this is the first time any benefit has been shown from different behaviour thresholds based on genotype in the bees.” © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5706 - Posted: 06.24.2010

ST. THOMAS, U.S. Virgin Islands, /PRNewswire/ -- Legendary biologist Seymour Benzer, whose half century-long career has transformed our understanding of the brain and profoundly influenced generations of scientists, has been selected by an international panel of experts in neuroscience to receive the inaugural 2004 Neuroscience Prize of the Peter Gruber Foundation. Each year the Foundation will present a gold medal and a $200,000 unrestricted cash award to an outstanding scientist who has contributed to fundamental advances in the field of neuroscience. This year's prize will be presented on October 23 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego, California. Born in New York City in 1921, Seymour Benzer received his B.S. in physics from Brooklyn College in 1942 and his Ph.D. in physics from Purdue University in 1947. After beginning his career as a solid-state physicist, he switched to biology in 1949. He was on the faculty of Purdue from 1945 until 1967 when he accepted a professorship at the California Institute of Technology where he is still an active Emeritus professor today. In the early 1960s, after having made several major contributions to the understanding of gene structure and the genetic code, Professor Benzer switched fields again and inaugurated and developed the new and immensely important field of neurogenetics. His deceptively simple approach was based on the premise, confirmed by his subsequent work, that the molecular underpinning of neural function and behavior could be dissected by using ingenious genetic screens to isolate behavioral mutants one gene at a time. Using the fruit fly, Drosophila, he altered one gene after the next and showed that a single gene mutation can give rise to a wide variety of behavioral alterations, including aberrations in courtship, in circadian rhythm, and in memory and learning. These studies have revolutionized the field of behavioral genetics and have shown how, through the genetics of the humble fruit fly, the mysteries of how the human brain develops, functions, and becomes sick can be unraveled. Copyright © 2004 Yahoo! Inc.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5705 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine have demonstrated that the action of a protein called CBP is essential for the stabilization of long-term memory, a discovery that may help children with a rare but debilitating developmental disorder. They found that when the functions of normal CBP is suppressed in adult rodents, the animals had trouble forming long-term memories, suggesting that CBP is required for the formation of long-term memory and that defects in CBP are involved in cognitive dysfunction. Furthermore, the scientists found that they were able to correct this defect by administering a drug that restored CBP's function. "This is significant," says Mark Mayford, Ph.D., an associate professor of cell biology and a member of the Institute for Childhood and Neglected Diseases at Scripps Research. Before moving to Scripps Research four years ago, Mayford was a faculty member at UCSD, where together with another UCSD scientist Edward Korzus, Ph.D., they initiated the research. "There is a link between this molecule and very severe problems in humans," Mayford added, noting that the findings may be significant for children with the rare but severe developmental disorder known as Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome, which causes growth and mental retardation and several anatomical abnormalities. These children have mutations in their CBP genes.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 5704 - Posted: 06.24.2004

CHAPEL HILL -- By combining the results of 22 studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers have found that a specific form of the gene APOE very slightly increases the risk of Parkinson's disease, even though the same gene is protective in Alzheimer's disease. The researchers also found that the APOE-4 form of the gene, which has long been linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer's disease, is not a risk factor in Parkinson's disease. A report of the findings appears this week in the June issue of the journal Neurology. "It basically shows that neurodegenerative diseases may differ in significant risk factors, contrary to prevailing views," said lead author Dr. Xuemei Huang, assistant professor of neurology in UNC's School of Medicine. The gene APOE refers to apoliprotein E, which takes three forms, or alleles: APOE-2, -3 and -4. These and other APO genes transcribe apolipoproteins, protein particles involved in lipid metabolism that shuttle these fatty acids, including cholesterol, through the body. "APOE-4 is a major susceptibility gene for sporadic and familial Alzheimer's disease and has been associated with poor clinical outcome in people with acute head injury and stroke," Huang said. "In the brain, apolipoprotein E-4 may be involved in neuron repair and in the removal of dead cells, so if you have APOE-4, you may be at higher risk of Alzheimer's disease or poor recovery from stroke and brain injury."

Keyword: Parkinsons; Alzheimers
Link ID: 5703 - Posted: 06.24.2004

The fat-tailed dwarf lemur has become the first primate proven to hibernate through the winter. The rat-sized lemur curls up in tree holes to slumber through the dry winter season, despite living in tropical Madagascar, where winter temperatures can still exceed 30°C. It spends seven sleepy months living off the fat of its portly tail. But until now its disappearance during the winter had been a matter of speculation, and lab studies had been unable to get the lemurs to hibernate. Kathrin Dausmann at Phillips University, Marburg, Germany, and her colleagues have now proven that the lemurs really do hibernate - and they are the first primates and tropical animals to show this behaviour. The team observed the physiological changes that the lemurs undergo. Unlike other hibernators, the lemurs do not regulate their body temperatures whilst dormant. The temperatures vary widely - by almost 25°C - and are determined by how well or badly the primates' tree holes are insulated. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 5702 - Posted: 06.24.2010

BOSTON - A genetic mutation in "mighty mice" is also found in a German boy with unusually large muscles, scientist say. The four-year-old's muscles are roughly twice as large as other children his age. Researchers found he has an inherited mutation in the myostatin gene, boosting muscle growth and reducing fat. "This is the first evidence that myostatin regulates muscle mass in people as it does in other animals," said Dr. Se-Jin Lee, a professor of molecular biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and a co-author of the study. Naturally bulky cattle such as Belgian Blues also lack myostatin, the researchers have found. Lee's team wants to explore if interfering with myostatin can slow down muscle loss in muscle wasting diseases such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy. About 850 males in Canada have the disease. Seven years ago, Lee's team created mice that are twice as brawny as normal by blocking the mysotatin gene. Both Lee and his university would share in royalties if the research results in any commercial therapies. Copyright © CBC 2004

Keyword: Muscles
Link ID: 5701 - Posted: 06.24.2010

BY JAMIE TALAN Can't keep a tune? You may get to blame your brain. People who can't discriminate between musical tones suffer from amusia, or tone deafness, and Canadian researchers say they have identified a region in the brain they believe is responsible. They are set to deliver preliminary findings today at an international meeting in Montreal on music and the brain. Krista Hyde and her colleagues at the University of Montreal have been scanning the brains of 20 people who've been tone deaf since birth, and have narrowed the hunt to the right auditory cortex, an area of the brain that processes pitch perception. Amusia is no laughing matter, Hyde, a doctoral student, says. Music is such a major element of our culture, she said, that the condition "robs them of their experience of music. ... A beautiful symphony can sound like noise." The researchers suspect that as much as 4 percent of the world's population have a congenital brain abnormality that renders them tone deaf. Others can acquire amusia following head trauma or stroke. Of 100 people who responded to ads seeking people who can't carry a tune, Hyde said only 20 qualified for a true diagnosis of amusia - indicating many who think they're tone deaf instead simply aren't good vocalists. Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 5700 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Smoking cigarettes cuts an average of 10 years off a person's life, a landmark study suggests. But it also shows that quitting at any age reduces the risks of dying from smoking-related diseases. The findings, published in the British Medical Journal, are the culmination of a 50-year study involving 34,439 men. The study, which began in 1951, was the first to confirm the link between smoking and lung cancer exactly 50 years ago. All of those involved in the study were born between 1900 and 1930 and all worked as doctors. They were each asked about their smoking habits at the start of the study in 1951. Researchers contacted them periodically over the next 50 years to see if those habits had changed. They also gathered information on those who died during the period. They have now analysed that data. They found that men who have never smoked lived on average 10 years longer than those who smoked for most of their lives. Men who smoked were at least twice as likely to die before the age of 70 as non-smokers. They were up to three times more likely to die before they were 90 compared to those who never took up the habit. (C)BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 5699 - Posted: 06.23.2004

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR THE FACTS Most Americans relish the thought of sleeping late, and experts have traditionally recommended eight hours of rest each night. But a 2002 study found that getting more than seven hours of sleep each night was associated with a shorter life span. Several studies since then, including one this year by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, also found a link. The 2002 study examined data on more than a million Americans over the age of 30 between 1982 and 1988. The risk of dying in that period climbed as subjects went above seven hours of sleep. Those who averaged eight hours a night, the study found, had a 12 percent increased chance of death. Other researchers have also found that life expectancy declines as sleep falls below seven hours, but not as steeply as it does with eight hours or more, said Dr. Jerome M. Siegel, of the University of California, Los Angeles. Most sleep experts are reluctant to draw conclusions because the findings are based on correlations, which cannot show cause and effect. People who sleep longer may have illnesses that cause fatigue and earlier death. THE BOTTOM LINE Averaging more than seven hours of sleep a night is associated with a shorter life span, though whether poor health or too much sleep accounts for the link is unclear. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 5698 - Posted: 06.23.2004

Poets and songwriters will be devastated to hear it: The eyes don't smile after all. Neither do they sadden, according to new research using Mona Lisa's portrait. Those two emotions are the domain of the mouth, it turns out. Similar research could help pinpoint other emotions, or help determine the brain defects in people with visual problems such as the inability to recognize faces. Human facial expressions are subtler than they look, and it's hard to determine the source of emotional information. One technique researchers have used is to show volunteers parts of a face and ask what emotion they see. A different technique allows expressions to "evolve" on an image, allowing researchers access to the whole expression at once. To determine what features make people look happy or sad, visual neuroscientists Christopher Tyler and Leonid Kontsevich of the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco evolved expressions on The Mona Lisa. The researchers added noise to her ambiguous expression, making the image look like a fuzzy TV screen, then asked subjects to rate her emotion on a four-point scale of happy to sad. The researchers then averaged all of the noisy images in each category of emotion, revealing the subtleties in the facial features needed to spell out happiness or sadness. To determine whether the eyes and the mouth worked together to evoke emotion, the team laid the composite happy or sad noise on just the upper or lower half at a time. Overlaying the mouth half caused Mona to grin or frown, but overlaying the eyes conveyed no emotion. The researchers replicated the finding with a photograph of a woman with an ambiguous expression. "The eyes are well-known to be the window on the soul, so we expected to see an effect of the eyes," says Tyler. Instead, the eyes might express intensity, he speculates. "Perhaps they are the window on the spirit." Visual psychophysicist Richard Murray of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia is also surprised. In addition to learning about expressions, "we can use this technique on people with visual deficits to determine what's going wrong in their brain," he says. --MARY BECKMAN Copyright © 2004 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 5697 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Cameron Walker for National Geographic News With 66.3 million fathers in the United States, neckties may be flying out of the store this week in anticipation of Father's Day. It's a great time to appreciate Dad for years of service—teaching you to drive a stick, helping you buy your first home, or even showing you how to work a Windsor knot on your very own tie. But there are a slew of lesser-known fathers in the animal kingdom with intensive parenting skills of their own. "The whole point for the parents is to get at least two offspring to survive," said Ed Matheson, an ichthyologist (fish zoologist) at the Florida Marine Research Institute in St. Petersburg. And for some species, the male's the one that helps his young—and the genes they're carrying—safely weather the often dangerous path toward adulthood. Once the female hip-pocket frog, an Australian species also known as the marsupial frog, lays up to 20 white eggs, her work is done. According to Frank Lemckert, a research scientist for the State Forests of New South Wales, Australia, the female then "heads off to do whatever she wants to do, perhaps finding a mate and laying more eggs" the male gets day care duty. Over a period of several days, the male frog watches the eggs hatch into tiny tadpoles. Then the male takes a seat right in the middle of the new tadpoles. The tadpoles wriggle along their father's back until they reach two tiny slots that open into the male's hip pouches. © 2004 National Geographic Society. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5696 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Older women using estrogen-alone hormone therapy could be at a slightly greater risk of developing dementia, including Alzheimer's disease (AD), than women who do not use any menopausal hormone therapy, according to a new report by scientists with the Women's Health Initiative Memory Study (WHIMS). The scientists also found that estrogen alone did not prevent cognitive decline in these older women. These findings from WHIMS appear in the June 23/30, 2004, Journal of the American Medical Association*. "These studies further support last year's recommendations that menopausal hormone therapy should not be used to prevent cognitive decline or dementia in older postmenopausal women," stated Judith A. Salerno, MD, MS, Deputy Director of the National Institute on Aging (NIA). "Women should follow the Food and Drug Administration's recommendation that those who want to use menopausal hormone therapy to control their menopausal symptoms should use it at the lowest effective dose for the shortest time necessary." The latest findings were reported by WHIMS Principal Investigator Sally A. Shumaker, PhD, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, and her colleagues at the 39 study sites. This research was funded by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, which manufactures Premarin™, the conjugated equine estrogens used in this trial, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 5695 - Posted: 06.23.2004

Early humans evolved the anatomy needed to hear each other talk at least 350,000 years ago. This suggests rudimentary form of speech developed early on in our evolution. The conclusion comes from studies of fossilised skulls discovered in the mountains of Spain. A team of Spanish and US researchers used CT scans to measure the bones and spaces in the outer and middle ears of five specimens, thought to belong to Homo heidelbergensis. This species is thought to be a relative of the ancestral line leading to neanderthals. The team worked out how well the hearing apparatus they found could respond to sounds of various frequencies. The hominids' ears would have been sensitive to frequencies between two to four kilohertz, the range most important for understanding human speech. Chimpanzees' ears are relatively insensitive at those frequencies. Their ears are most strongly attuned to sounds peaking at either one kHz or eight kHz. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 5694 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Virtual reality appears to dramatically change how the brain physically registers pain, not just how people subjected to pain perceive the incoming signals, according to a new study by a group of University of Washington researchers. The work, which used a specialized type of magnetic resonance imaging to track pain-related brain activity, showed drops of as much as 97 percent in such activity in some brain centers. The study marks the first time that scientists have documented a link between virtual reality and pain reduction in terms of an actual physiological response. "What this study shows is that virtual reality is not only changing the way people interpret the incoming pain, it is changing the actual activity in the brain," said Hunter Hoffman, director of the VR Analgesia Research Center at the UW's Human Interface Technology Laboratory, a facility affiliated with the university's College of Engineering. The paper appears in the current issue of the journal NeuroReport. The findings support those of an earlier study by Hoffman and Dave Patterson, a psychologist and pain expert at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, in which patients were asked to rate their levels of pain while being treated for severe burns, both with and without virtual reality. Patients immersed in a virtual world during the often-excruciating therapy reported a 40-percent to 50-percent drop in pain.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 5693 - Posted: 06.23.2004

Study shows that the brain codes information unconsciously for basic eye movements Temporary rapidly induced blindness has provided evidence that an older, primitive part of the brain plays a role in processing visual information unconsciously. This finding by researchers at Houston's Rice University was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online this week (www.pnas.org). For the study, six volunteers with normal vision underwent more than 600 trials in which they had to look at a target placed at varying locations on a computer screen. For half of the trials, the participants were asked to move their eyes to the location of the target, and their eye movements were measured electronically. For the other half, the participants were asked to press a button that corresponded with the location of the target on-screen. During the trials, the researchers sometimes tried to distract them with an item shown on the center of the screen. Response time was recorded for each trial. Prior to the tests, the researchers mapped each participant's visual cortex – the area at the back of the brain that processes what the eye sees – with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a harmless noninvasive technique using brief magnetic pulses. When applied to the visual cortex, TMS induces temporary, reversible blindness lasting only a fraction of a second.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 5692 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Kimberly W. Moy, Globe Correspondent Two years ago Mark Rocheford of suburban Minneapolis had a stroke that damaged his memory, paralyzed his left side and left him partially blind. Rocheford, now 56, underwent extensive rehabilitation within months of his stroke, but, as of April, his left hand was still ''pretty much useless." Frustrated, Rocheford volunteered to be part of an experimental ''homework" program for stroke patients. He spent up to four hours a day playing a computer game designed to get him to exercise his left hand. In two weeks of game-playing, he made as much progress as in the previous two years, regaining the ability to point, grab the handle of a pulley exercise system, and touch each finger to his thumb. ''He showed me all the stuff he could do, and I was amazed," said Rocheford's 21-year-old daughter Erin, who observed her father during weekend breaks from college. The program is part of a small but growing trend in health care to harness home computers to supplement regular visits with a therapist or a counselor. Home-based computer therapy programs are now under design across the country to help stroke victims, people with psychological problems, and disabled children, among others. © 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke; Regeneration
Link ID: 5691 - Posted: 06.24.2010

More people die of lung cancer than of colon, breast, and prostate cancers combined, making it the leading cause of cancer death for both men and women. Currently, there are no approved screening tests for lung cancer in the U.S. "One of our greatest challenges as pulmonary physicians is trying to identify [the] subset of smokers who are likely to develop lung cancer," says Avrum Spira, pulmonary physician at Boston University Medical Center. "If you look at the statistics, roughly 10 to 15% of people who smoke will develop lung cancer over their lifetime. There's no way to identify that 10 or 15 percent that are on their way to developing lung cancer." With the goal of finding preventative measures, Spira and his team compared the DNA in cells scraped from the windpipes of 75 smokers, former smokers, and nonsmokers. His study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that smoking causes damage at the genetic level, permanently altering several genes associated with tumors and cancer. "No one knows the exact genetic…damage that ultimately leads to lung cancer," Spira says. "What is known is that toxins in the environment—cigarette smoke being the principle one, but there are others, including asbestos and radon—are inhaled, go into the lung tissue…and they actually induce mutations in some of the DNA. The cells…change the way they look under the microscope, and eventually they start growing out of control—that is, the ability to control the division of the cell is lost," he says. "A single cell actually undergoes enormous expansion and grows within the lung and eventually leads to the demise of the patient." © ScienCentral, 2000-2004.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5690 - Posted: 06.24.2010