Summer is approaching, but that doesn't mean kids should stop using their brains. New research confirms that during the teen years, the brain is ripe for learning new things. Scientists used to think there was a spurt of the production of gray matter, the tissue of the brain responsible for information processing, during the first eighteen months of life, and then a steady decline. But in the late 1990s, brain scientist Jay Giedd discovered a second spurt of gray matter production just before puberty, followed by a period of "pruning" during the teenage years. "The second wave increases throughout childhood, peaks at about age eleven in girls and twelve in boys, and then in the teen years it prunes or thins down," Giedd explains. "The teen brain is particularly active in terms of the growth of connections and pruning back of those connections. It's a very tumultuous time in terms of the brain development story." Now, a new study reveals for the first time the actual sequence of brain development between the ages of five and twenty. Giedd, chief of brain imaging at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and his colleagues at the NIMH and the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), have created a unique time-lapse 3D animation of the maturing brain by using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology to scan the brains of thirteen healthy children and teenagers every two years for ten years. © ScienCentral, 2000-2004.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 5571 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Kenneth J. Bender, Pharm.D., M.A., Psychiatric Times Two advisory committees of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration met in an unusual joint session in February to consider whether antidepressant treatment provokes suicidality in children. At the end of this first of two planned meetings, they recommended that the FDA warn practitioners about this possible risk. The Psychopharmacological Drugs Advisory Committee and the Pediatric Subcommittee of the Anti-Infective Drugs Advisory Committee received summaries of spontaneous drug reports and of experiences in clinical trials with children; called expert witnesses on suicide research; and heard dramatic testimony from families of suicide victims, as well as from those whose children had benefited from antidepressant treatment. According to Russell Katz, M.D., the events identified in the clinical studies by the pharmaceutical manufacturers will be independently reclassified by a group at Columbia University with particular expertise in adolescent suicidality. At a second meeting this summer, the committees may also hear expert testimony on improving prospective assessment and monitoring for suicidality and possibly improving antidepressant clinical trial designs to more clearly ascertain whether benefit outweighs risk. © 2004 Psychiatric Times. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 5570 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Timothy D. Brewerton, M.D. , Psychiatric Times Eating disorders, including anorexia nervosa (AN), bulimia nervosa (BN) and binge-eating disorder (BED), remain one of the most complex and clinically challenging groups of mental disorders in our nomenclature. There are no easy solutions, and the bottom line of this article is that pharmacological agents are not the primary treatment of choice. Although a number of agents have been found in randomized controlled trials to be beneficial, they are by and large insufficient as stand-alone treatments. Space does not allow a comprehensive overview of this topic, but the reader is referred to a recent review by Steinglass and Walsh (2004). In addition, the revised American Psychiatric Association practice guidelines for the treatment of eating disorders (APA, 2000) and the recently released National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) Guidelines (2004) are useful resources regarding the use of drug therapy within the context of a comprehensive treatment approach. No pharmacological agents have ever been shown in double-blind, placebo-controlled trials to significantly improve AN when given outside a structured, inpatient program. Food remains the "drug of choice" for this population, for reasons that will be elaborated below. Of course, administering food in the interest of weight restoration is much easier said than done, given the profound denial and resistance typical of this disorder. There are a handful of drugs found to be statistically better than placebo in randomized controlled trials, but there is little clinical significance of these findings. Lithium (Eskalith, Lithobid) was shown in one controlled trial to be statistically better than placebo in a small group of patients being treated at the National Institute of Mental Health on an intensive, highly structured, specialized treatment unit (Gross et al., 1981). However, the effect was small, and eating disorder specialists generally deem the potential risks of lithium treatment in this population to be far greater than the possible benefits, largely due to the danger of lithium toxicity secondary to dehydration and electrolyte imbalances from starvation, compulsive exercising and/or purging. Another study found amitriptyline (Elavil) statistically better than placebo for patients who are both bulimic and anorexic, while cyproheptadine (Periactin) was better for restricting anorexia (Halmi et al., 1986). However, other studies have had mixed results. © 2004 Psychiatric Times. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 5569 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Paul Mackin, M.D., Ph.D., MRCPsych, and Allan H. Young, M.D., Ph.D., MRCPsych Psychiatric Times May 2004 Vol. XXI Issue 6 Mood disorders are leading causes of both morbidity and mortality. Depressive disorder and bipolar disorder (BD) rank among the leading causes of disability worldwide (Murray and Lopez, 1997). Traditionally, mood disorders were considered to be relapsing and remitting conditions characterized by complete inter-episode recovery, but recent evidence has suggested that even during periods of euthymia, neurocognitive impairments known to be present during mood episodes may still persist (Ferrier and Thompson, 2002). Both Kraepelin (1896) and Freud (1905) regarded endocrinology as potentially important in the causation and treatment of major psychiatric disorders, and the role of dysfunctional endocrine systems in the pathogenesis of mood disorders has been the focus of research for many decades. Poor understanding of the complexity of endocrine systems and their interaction with neural networks, combined with primitive methodology, frustrated early attempts to establish links between endocrine dysfunction and mood disorders (Michael and Gibbons, 1963). More recently, developments in the field of neuroendocrinology have highlighted the significance of endocrine systems in the etiology and pathogenesis of mood disorders. © 2004 Psychiatric Times. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Depression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 5568 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Some of the genes that allow nerve cells and some other types of cells to send elaborate chemical messages to each other appear to have been transferred to animals or their immediate ancestors from bacteria eons ago, according to a study by researchers from the National Library of Medicine and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, both part of the National Institutes of Health. Specifically, the genes contain the information needed to make enzymes, which, in turn are crucial for making the complex molecules that cells use to communicate with each other. These cell-signaling molecules play a role in learning, memory, mental alertness, sleep patterns, and allergic responses. The study was published on the web at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/01689525 and will appear in the July issue of Trends in Genetics. "By studying these enzymes in bacteria, we may be able to get a better idea of how they work in human beings," said the study's first author, Lakshminarayan Iyer, Ph.D., Research Fellow, of the National Center for Biotechnology Information of the National Library of Medicine (NLM).

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5567 - Posted: 06.02.2004

— Renaissance artistic genius Michelangelo may have had Asperger's syndrome, a milder form of autism that causes people to have difficulties with social interaction, experts say. A by-product of Asperger's can be a special talent in a particular area such as art, music or mathematics. The research by U.K. and Irish autism experts, published in the Journal of Medical Biography, argued that Michelangelo met a number of the criteria for Asperger's. "Michelangelo was aloof and a loner," said Dr. Muhammad Arshad, a psychiatrist at the Five Boroughs Partnership in Warrington, northwest England, and Michael Fitzgerald of Trinity College Dublin. "Like the architect John Nash (1752-1835), who also had high-functioning autism, he had few friends," they said, referring to the famed U.K. architect whose imposing Regency buildings and crescents are dotted around London. Copyright © 2004 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 5566 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NewScientist.com news service A major advance towards producing prion-free cows that would be immune to mad cow disease has been made by researchers at companies in the US and Japan. Their principle aim is to make genetically modified cattle that produce pharmaceuticals in their milk. But the companies hope that also making the animals resistant to BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) will reassure consumers. The researchers have now achieved the considerable feat of creating cell lines which have both copies of the cow's PrP gene switched off. The PrP protein can be switched to an infectious state by contact with a mutated prion. This switch causes prion diseases such as BSE in cows and variant Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (vCJD) in humans. Making live animals from these cell lines should be relatively straightforward using cloning techniques similar to those that created Dolly the sheep. The companies say they have no intention of producing prion-free animals destined for human consumption. Instead they want to assuage public fears about pharmaceuticals derived from cow's milk, even though the process used to extract proteins from milk has already been shown to remove prion contamination. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 5565 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alzheimer’s disease could be caused by the deactivation of what are known as “presenilin genes”. Using mice as a model for the study of Alzheimer’s in humans, a scientific team headed by the researcher Carlos Saura, from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, has discovered that when these genes mutate and stop working they cause neuro-degeneration and memory loss, giving rise to what in humans would be Alzheimer’s. The discovery, published in Neuron, is totally unexpected, since up till now it was thought that the alteration that caused Alzheimer’s was exactly the opposite, that is to say, an excess of presenilin activity. Since 1995 it has been known that family hereditary Alzheimer’s is caused mainly by mutations in presenilin genes, but it was thought that the alteration of these genes caused Alzheimer’s due to an increase in their activity. Research by doctor Carlos Saura, of the Neuroscientific Institute (l’Institut de Neurociències (IN)) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, using mice, genetically modified to decrease the activity of presenilin genes, has shown that these genes take part in the process of memory consolidation and neuron survival, but in a different way to that expected. The results, published in the journal Neuron last April, show that the absence of activity of these genes in mice, used as a model for the study of Alzheimer’s in humans, causes symptoms very similar to those observed in persons suffering from Alzheimer’s: progressive memory loss and neuro-degeneration. The authors suggest that mutations in presenilins could be a cause of Alzheimer’s, mainly due to loss of functionality.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 5564 - Posted: 06.24.2010

For years, the advice of psychologists and mothers alike has been to express your emotions in order to achieve a balanced mental state. This might bring up some problems when your anxiety is going to make that presentation look shoddy, but hey, it's better to show emotions than be like Spock, right? Not quite. A new hypothesis on the issue of emotional expression is that we're actually better off being flexible about how much we show our feelings – neither letting it all out nor keeping it all in. In order to test this hypothesis, George Bonanno of Columbia University's Teachers College compared college students' distress to their ability to control their expression of emotions in a study to be published in the July issue of Psychological Science, a publication of the American Psychological Society. Soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks, he measured New York City college freshmen's psychological distress at the attacks as well as the transition to college life, and had them participate in a procedure that had them demonstrate heightened, suppressed, and normal levels of emotion. A year and a half later, the subjects came back and Bonanno once again measured their distress. Bonanno found that the students who were the least distressed after one and a half years were the same students who were able to both express and suppress their emotions on command. He also found these students to be better adjusted. So maybe a little bit of suppression is healthy once in a while, just like a little bit of emoting is healthy once in a while. The key, according to Bonanno's study, is to know when to let it show.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 5563 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JANE E. BRODY Sex education in American middle and high schools has taken on new meaning. At institutions that accept government money, teachers must advocate abstinence until marriage as the only certain way to prevent unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, and may not mention contraception except to point out the failure rates of various methods. On its face, this may seem perfectly logical, because if a teenager refrains from sexual activity, it is highly improbable that either pregnancy or an S.T.D. can result. But is the policy realistic? Experts who have spent decades studying teenage sexual activity have gathered ample evidence to refute the basic premise of abstinence-only sex education. They say this approach is not adequate to protect youngsters from unwanted pregnancies and disease. "There is nothing in any peer-reviewed scientific journal to suggest that teaching abstinence-only is effective in getting teens to delay sexual activity," said one expert, Cynthia Dailard, a lawyer and senior public policy associate at the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization devoted to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights. In contrast, Ms. Dailard has reported, considerable evidence shows that sex education promoting abstinence, but also providing information on the benefits of contraception for those who do not remain abstinent, does delay the start of sexual activity. Such programs also reduce the incidence of teenage pregnancies and S.T.D.'s, she has found. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5562 - Posted: 06.01.2004

Dolphin DNA Shows Dads Leave Home By Heather Catchpole, ABC Science Online — The first use of genetic testing to study dolphin social behavior shows males are not the homebodies once thought, new Australian research shows. Male dolphins swim away from home to reduce the chance of inbreeding, and competition with relatives for food and sex. Luciana Moeller and Luciano Beheregaray from Sydney's Macquarie University published their research in the latest issue of the journal Molecular Ecology. Their research contradicted earlier studies on dolphins off the coast of Florida and in Shark Bay in Western Australia, which showed males and females were loyal to the place they were born. The researchers studied bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) resident at Port Stephens and Jervis Bay, about 200 kilometers north and south of Sydney respectively. They took small biopsy samples from the dolphins and used the same genetic testing technique used in human paternity testing to see which dolphins were related. The genetic tests showed that females were more closely related to the rest of the group than the males. Copyright © 2004 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Migration
Link ID: 5561 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Brain scans show how sights and smells evoke the past. Michael Hopkin Marcel Proust reflected that "the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, ready to remind us... the immense edifice of memory". It's a familiar phenomenon: a single smell or sound has the power to conjure up entire scenes from the past. Now a British-led group of neuroscientists has come up with an explanation. The key, the researchers claim, is that memories relating to an event are scattered across the brain's sensory centres but marshalled by a region called the hippocampus. If one of the senses is stimulated to evoke a memory, other memories featuring other senses are also triggered. This explains why a familiar song or the smell of a former lover's perfume has the power to conjure up a detailed picture of past times, says Jay Gottfried of University College London's Department of Imaging Neuroscience, who led a recent study of memory retrieval. "That's the beauty of our memory system," he says. "Imagine a nice day on the beach. The smell of sun lotion, the friends you were with, the beer you were drinking; any of these could trigger memories of the whole thing." © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Attention
Link ID: 5560 - Posted: 06.24.2010

MIAMI -- Rats with spinal cord injuries regained 70 percent of their normal walking function with a three-part treatment hailed as a breakthrough in paralysis research at the University of Miami School of Medicine. The study at the university's Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, to be published on Monday in the June issue of the journal Nature Medicine, produced results "by far greater than what we've seen in anything else," said the principal researcher, Dr. Mary Bartlett Bunge. "It opens up a potential new avenue of treatment for human spinal cord injury," said Bunge, who declined to speculate when human trials might be attempted. The spinal cord carries messages between the brain and the muscles through a network of nerve cells. Normally, chemical signals prevent those nerves from regrowing, resulting in paralysis when the network is severed by an injury. Regrowing nerve cells and reconnecting them is the holy grail of spinal cord research. © Copyright 2004, Lycos, Inc.

Keyword: Regeneration; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 5559 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Debra Sherman CHICAGO (Reuters) - A 44-year-old architect endured impotence and gastrointestinal disorders as he tried for more than two years to find out which medicine could cure his depression. His own brain might provide the answer. The Chicago resident, who has given up his search, is one of millions of people who might benefit from technology that allows scientists to peer inside patients' brains in hopes of cutting down the arduous process of evaluating antidepressants. Scientists can use at least three methods -- positron emission topography (better known as PET), functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), or electroencephalogram (EEG) -- to study the brain and its functions. Aspect Medical Systems Inc. has developed a system based on the EEG, which records the firing of brain cells, blood flow and other activity, to gauge the effectiveness of antidepressants. The Newton, Massachusetts, company's device, developed with the University of California at Los Angeles, is a disposable strip of electrodes that affixes to the forehead and feeds electronic signals into a monitor. It measures activity in the frontal lobe, where depression often manifests itself. Copyright © 2004 Yahoo! Inc.

Keyword: Depression; Brain imaging
Link ID: 5558 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Cells derived from the inside of a tooth might someday prove an effective way to treat the brains of people suffering from Parkinson's disease. A study in the May 1 issue of the European Journal of Neuroscience shows dental pulp cells provide great support for nerve cells lost in Parkinson's disease and could be transplanted directly into the affected parts of the brain. The study's lead author is Christopher Nosrat, an assistant professor of biological and materials sciences at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. This is not the first test of stem cells as a therapy for Parkinson's disease-type illnesses, known as neurodegenerative diseases, but Nosrat noted that it is the first to use post-natal stem cells grown from more readily available tooth pulp in the nervous system. Using dental pulp has other advantages besides its availability, Nosrat said. The cells produce a host of beneficial "neurotrophic" factors, which promote nerve cell survival.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Stem Cells
Link ID: 5557 - Posted: 05.31.2004

Talk of the Nation audio on NPR A new study in rats shows that taking aspirin during pregnancy reduces the libido of male offspring. Guests: Margaret M. McCarthy, Ph.D. *Professor, Program in Neuroscience and the Department of Physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 5556 - Posted: 05.31.2004

Sex offenders could be made to take lie detector tests, as part of Home Secretary David Blunkett's plans to keep closer tabs on them. But while the polygraph is for some a truth serum, to others it's a big fib. It's an almost mythical machine, a bundle of wires and metal with the ability to read minds. On the surface, the lie detector could solve a myriad of problems. Cheating husband? Dishonest employee? Potential terrorist? Just hook them up to the polygraph and let science be the judge. A polygraph machine can't actually tell what a person is thinking, of course. But it does measure heart rate and blood pressure, respiratory rate and sweatiness. It's through these responses that the examiner determines whether a subject is answering truthfully. While some praise the polygraph for the investigative latitude it provides, critics say there is no magic bullet, and that all too often the lie detector gets it wrong. "The polygraph is the translation of a mythological device into a technological idiom," says Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Sciences told the Boston Globe. (C)BBC

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 5555 - Posted: 05.29.2004

By William H. Calvin Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain—and How It Changed the World by Carl Zimmer Free Press, 2004, $26.00 The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought by Gary Marcus Basic Books, 2004; $26.00 IF ANY ORGAN COULD CLAIM to be the seat of feeling and intellect, surely it was the heart. Until three centuries ago, that seemed a fact too obvious to contest. Unlike other organs, you can feel your heart pounding away inside you. If you start thinking exciting thoughts, it beats even faster. If it stops beating, you are animated no more. And so the heart seemed to be the seat of the soul. “Soul” was the name for what animated something, what gave it goals and the ability to make things happen. Just as people now distinguish hardware from software, anatomy from physiology, brain from mind, nouns from verbs, and form from function, it was once commonplace to distinguish body from soul. Besides The Soul, philosophers also believed in various “little souls,” which made the bodily organs into something more than meat. The stomach’s soul, for instance, was said to attract food down from the mouth. Once seventeenth-century science began to realize the heart is just a humble pump, it was as if the soul had suddenly fled the chest like a restless ghost to lodge itself in the head. Today we physiologists would point out that the “little soul” animating an organ is simply its function, which arises from the emergent properties of a “committee” of cells. And we would suggest that the big, catchall Soul is one of the brain’s higher functions. Copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2004

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5554 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Can the behaviorist's insistence on distinguishing animal from human cognition be reconciled with evolutionary continuity? By Frans B. M. de Waal Do Animals Think? by Clive D.L. Wynne Princeton University Press, 2004; $26.95 Intelligence of Apes and Other Rational Beings by Duane M. Rumbaugh and David A. Washburn Yale University Press, 2003; $35.00 IF YOUR DOG DROPS A TENNIS BALL in front of you and looks up at you with tail wagging, do you figure she wants to play? How naive! Who says dogs have desires and intentions? Her behavior is merely the product of reinforcement: she has been rewarded for it in the past. Many scientists have grown up with the so-called law of effect, the idea that all behavior is conditioned by reward and punishment. This principle of learning was advocated by a dominant school of twentieth-century psychological thought known as American behaviorism. The school’s founders, John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, were happy to explain all conceivable behavior within the narrow confines of what Skinner called “operant conditioning.” The mind, if such a thing even existed, remained a black box. In the early days, the behaviorists applied their doctrine in equal measure to people and other animals. Watson, for instance, to demonstrate the power of his methods, intentionally created a phobia for furry objects in a human baby. Initially “little Albert” was unafraid of a tame white rat. But after Watson paired each appearance of the rat with sharp noises right behind poor Albert’s head, fear of rats was the inevitable outcome. Even human speech was thought to be the product of simple reinforcement learning. The behaviorists’ goal of unifying the science of behavior was a noble one—but alas, outside academia the masses resisted. They stubbornly refused to accept that their own behavior could be explained without considering thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Don’t we all have mental lives, don’t we look into the future, aren’t we rational beings? Eventually, the behaviorists caved in and exempted the bipedal ape from their theory of everything. Copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2004

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 5553 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nathan J. Emery Intelligence of Apes and Other Rational Beings. Duane M. Rumbaugh and David A. Washburn. xvii + 326 pp. Yale University Press, 2003. $35. How can you tell whether an animal is intelligent? Perhaps this is an impossible question to answer for species as different from us as honeybees and fish, but what about our closest relatives, the great apes? Shouldn't their cognitive abilities be easier to comprehend because of our anatomical and genetic similarities? Or does the degree of similarity cause biases in our thinking that may cloud our understanding? Ever since Darwin, biologists have been interested in the minds of these animals. But we are still far from discovering the real similarities and differences between ape and human intelligence—despite a wealth of important recent research, some of which is documented in Intelligence of Apes and Other Rational Beings, by Duane M. Rumbaugh and David A. Washburn. There are two ways to approach the investigation of mental ability in primates. Comparative psychologists conduct laboratory tests of learning, memory and problem solving. In the first half of the 20th century, Robert Yerkes in the United States and Wolfgang Köhler in Europe were among the first to confront apes with problems whose solution required complex cognitive skills (how to traverse a maze, for example, or to obtain food that they cannot grab directly). Yerkes and Köhler wanted to determine whether apes had the mental equipment to solve such problems and to find out whether in attempting a solution they would employ the same processes or psychological mechanisms as humans. © Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 5552 - Posted: 06.24.2010