Researchers have discovered a genetic mutation associated with an inherited form of motor neuron disease in which symptoms first appear in childhood or young adulthood. The finding is slated for publication in the American Journal of Human Genetics. In studying families affected by the disease, researchers detected a mutation in the Senataxin gene. Although this gene's exact function is unknown, scientists think the normal Senataxin gene may play a role in how cells rid themselves of faulty genetic messages during RNA processing, according to Dr. Craig Bennett, University of Washington (UW) research assistant professor of pediatrics, Division of Genetics and Developmental Medicine. The mutation may make it difficult for motor neuron cells to clear out mistakes made during encoding of DNA, and thereby contribute to the degeneration of these nerve cells. The disease studied is a rare type of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Patients with this type of ALS have mild symptoms, a slow progression of muscle weakness, a normal life span, and relatives with the same disorder. In contrast, most ALS disorders appear in middle age or later life and cause paralysis and death within a few years. Only 10 percent of ALS disorders run in families; the rest appear sporadically. ALS claimed the life of baseball star Lou Gehrig, and is often called Lou Gehrig's disease.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease ; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5329 - Posted: 04.20.2004

By NANCY WARTIK It's only a short step from feeling angry to feeling angry at someone, especially if that person is of a different social group, sex or ethnicity. At least that is what psychologists who are investigating the link between emotions and prejudice are finding. In a study that measured how emotional states affected views of outsiders, the researchers, from Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, found that anger increased the likelihood of a negative reaction to members of a different group and that sadness or a neutral emotion did not. The study will appear in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science. Taken together with other research, the findings suggest that prejudice may have evolutionary roots, having developed as a quick, crude way for early humans to protect themselves from danger. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 5328 - Posted: 04.20.2004

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE Not long after scientists invented machines that could peer inside people's heads, they began finding huge surprises. The brain's gray matter, or cortex, is normally a crumpled-up sheet of highly uniform cells, arranged in six layers. All human brains, it was thought, followed this design. Yet in the last decade, detailed pictures of human cortices have revealed anatomies reminiscent of a painting by Dalí. Some people walk around with gray matter full of nodules or with cortical layers that are upside down. Others have a double cortex, with two sheets of gray matter instead of one. Still others have cortices that are shrunken or smooth or that poke holes in the brain's casing, flowing like lava, outside the brain cavity. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 5327 - Posted: 04.20.2004

By JAMES GORMAN Amnesia is still popular in the movies, as it always has been. But after watching Drew Barrymore muddle along with an addled memory in "50 First Dates," I realized that even if I had amnesia, much of the information about my life would still be saved somewhere. The data might be on my 256-megabyte thumb drive or my 16-megabyte hand-held digital assistant, on my work, home or traveling laptop computer or deep in the hard drives of government and banking server farms. If I were really important, there might even be satellite surveillance images of my house and garden. People may still lose their own memories but, barring the magnetic pulse of a nuclear explosion, the data dust that accumulates under the radiators and behind the couches of modern life will be preserved. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 5326 - Posted: 04.20.2004

By CAROL KAESUK YOON HAMBURG, Germany, — In a long, crowded room stuffed full of small aquariums at the Zoological Institute of the University of Hamburg, oddities of the fish world swim back and forth behind glass to the background music of bubbling water. Plucked from the pitch-black depths of caves around the world — in Oman, Croatia, Brazil, Mexico — many of these fish are blind, their unseeing eyes staring out, oblivious to the humans that stare in at them or the daylight that pours in the windows. Others are not only blind, but also eyeless, cruising along with their eerily blank heads alongside other bizarre-looking swimmers. Watching these queer creatures, anyone can understand why biologists have long studied the most striking of the physical changes — like eyelessness and loss of coloration to near translucence — that typically accompany the shift from daylight into eternal night. But such a focus has left much of life in caves a biological mystery. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5325 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE Worried that millions of Americans are using prescription opiate painkillers to get high rather than to ease severe chronic pain, drug makers are working on ways to prevent abuse. Cooperating closely with government officials and pain specialists, the companies are educating doctors, rewriting warning labels and tracking pills as they move from pharmacy to patient. They are also reformulating pills with added ingredients. One combination blocks euphoria. Another produces a nasty burning sensation. "The problem of prescription painkiller abuse is much bigger than people realize," said Dr. Clifford Woolf, director of the neural plasticity group and professor of anesthesia research at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 5324 - Posted: 04.20.2004

By JOHN TIERNEY LOS ANGELES, — The political consultants discreetly observed from the next room as their subject watched the campaign commercials. But in this political experiment, unlike the usual ones, the subject did not respond by turning a dial or discussing his reactions with a focus group. He lay inside an M.R.I. machine, watching commercials playing on the inside of his goggles as neuroscientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, measured the blood flow in his brain. Instead of asking the subject, John Graham, a Democratic voter, what he thought of the use of Sept. 11 images in a Bush campaign commercial, the researchers noted which parts of Mr. Graham's brain were active as he watched. The active parts, they also noted, were different from the parts that had lighted up in earlier tests with Republican brains. The researchers do not claim to have figured out either party's brain yet, since they have not finished this experiment. But they have already noticed intriguing patterns in how Democrats and Republicans look at candidates. They have tested 11 subjects and say they need to test twice that many to confirm the trend. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 5323 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Richard J. McNally, Ph.D. Individuals exposed to horrifying, life-threatening events are at heightened risk for posttraumatic stress disorder. Given the substantial personal and societal costs of chronic PTSD, mental health care professionals have developed early intervention methods designed to mitigate acute emotional distress and prevent the emergence of posttraumatic psychopathology. The method most widely used throughout the world is psychological debriefing. Psychological debriefing is a brief crisis intervention usually administered within days of a traumatic event (Raphael and Wilson, 2000). A debriefing session, especially if done with a group of individuals (e.g., firefighters), usually lasts about three to four hours. By helping the trauma-exposed individual "talk about his feelings and reactions to the critical incident" (Mitchell, 1983), the debriefing facilitator aims "to reduce the incidence, duration, and severity of, or impairment from, traumatic stress" (Everly and Mitchell, 1999). The most popular model, Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD), has seven phases (Mitchell, 1983; Mitchell and Everly, 2001) (Figure). The facilitator begins by explaining that debriefing is not psychotherapy, but rather a method for alleviating common stress reactions triggered by critical events (introduction). The facilitator then asks each participant, in turn, to describe what happened during the trauma in order "to make the whole incident come to life again in the CISD room" (fact phase) (Mitchell, 1983). After each participant has done so, the facilitator asks group members to describe their thoughts as the traumatic event was unfolding (thought phase). The facilitator then moves to the phase designed to foster emotional processing of the experience (feeling phase). © 2004 Psychiatric Times. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 5322 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Arline Kaplan A recent Consensus Statement formulated by four major medical associations encouraged physicians to screen and monitor their patients on atypical antipsychotics for signs of rapid weight gain or other problems leading to obesity, diabetes and dyslipidemia. Yet, that same Consensus Statement has potentially evoked disagreements among pharmaceutical companies. The Consensus Statement, published in the February issues of Diabetes Care and Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, was issued by an eight-person panel representing the American Diabetes Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and the North American Association for the Study of Obesity. The panelists not only reviewed clinical studies examining the relationships between second-generation antipsychotics and diabetes, but they also heard presentations from experts in the fields of psychiatry, obesity and diabetes and from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and pharmaceutical company representatives. "Hopefully, [the Consensus Statement] provides a thoughtful summary of the use of these agents, their advantages and limitations, as well as practical guidelines for the use of these agents to avoid or minimize significant metabolic complications that can arise from their use," Eugene Barrett, M.D., panel chairperson, told Psychiatric Times. Barrett is a professor in the department of medicine at the University of Virginia. © 2004 Psychiatric Times. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Obesity
Link ID: 5321 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A brain imaging study has shown that, after they overcome their reading disability, the brains of formerly poor readers begin to function like the brains of good readers, showing increased activity in a part of the brain that recognizes words. The study appears in the May 1 Biological Psychiatry and was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), one of the National Institutes of Health. "These images show that effective reading instruction not only improves reading ability, but actually changes the brain's functioning so that it can perform reading tasks more efficiently," said Duane Alexander, M.D., Director of the NICHD. The research team was led by Bennett Shaywitz, M.D., and Sally Shaywitz, M.D, of Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut. Other authors of the study were from Syracuse University, in Syracuse, New York; Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee; and the NICHD. According to Dr. Sally Shaywitz, the results show that "Teaching matters and good teaching can change the brain in a way that has the potential to benefit struggling readers."

Keyword: Dyslexia; Brain imaging
Link ID: 5320 - Posted: 04.20.2004

Team work is just as important in your brain as it is on the playing field: A new study published online on April 19 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that groups of brain cells can substantially improve their ability to discriminate between different orientations of simple visual patterns by synchronizing their electrical activity. The paper, "Cooperative synchronized assemblies enhance orientation discrimination," by Vanderbilt professor of biomedical engineering A. B. Bonds with graduate students Jason Samonds and Heather A. Brown and research associate John D. Allison provides some of the first solid evidence that the exact timing of the tiny electrical spikes produced by neurons plays an important role in brain functioning. Since the discovery of alpha waves in 1929, experts have known that neurons in different parts of the brain periodically coordinate their activity with their neighbors. Despite a variety of theories, however, scientists have not been able to determine whether this "neuronal synchrony" has a functional role or if it is just a by-product of the brain's electrical activity.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5319 - Posted: 04.20.2004

Same area of brain affected as seen in drug-addiction studies UPTON, NY— Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have produced new evidence that brain circuits involved in drug addiction are also activated by the desire for food. The mere display of food — smelling and tasting favorite foods without actually eating them — causes increases in metabolism throughout the brain. Increases of metabolism in the right orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region that controls drive and pleasure, also correlate strongly with self-reports of desire for food and hunger. “These results could explain the deleterious effects of constant exposure to food stimuli, such as advertising, candy machines, food channels, and food displays in stores,” says Brookhaven physician Gene-Jack Wang, the study’s lead author. “The high sensitivity of this brain region to food stimuli, coupled with the huge number and variety of these stimuli in the environment, likely contributes to the epidemic of obesity in this country.” The study appears in the April 2004 issue of NeuroImage.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Obesity
Link ID: 5318 - Posted: 06.24.2010

INDIANAPOLIS – Indiana University School of Medicine is taking a close look at the faces of children with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism is paying for it to do so. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, the only preventable birth defect, can have a devastating impact on its victims, but in some cases the effects are so minimal children are denied needed assistance and benefits. The NIAAA awarded IU two grants totaling $784,334 to conduct the research and manage the data. To better define the visual characteristics of the syndrome, IU researchers will use sophisticated technology and facial recognition techniques to examine the faces of children from across the globe. "Some children exhibit classic features of FAS and other children have a more mild, less visually obvious version of the disorder, which may not be as recognizable but still can result in learning disabilities and behavioral disorders," said Tatiana Foroud, Ph.D., associate professor of medical and molecular genetics at the Indiana University School of Medicine and the principal investigator of the study.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 5317 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Drug could help curb excess drinking. HELEN PEARSON Cutting back on drinking could be helped by slapping on an 'alcohol patch', say US researchers who are planning trials of a drug to combat alcohol cravings. The skin patch was originally developed to help people quit smoking. But one of the drugs it contains, mecamylamine, appears to curb the desire for alcohol as well as that for tobacco. Jed Rose and his team at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, plan to examine whether it can help drinkers cut back on booze. They have reason to suspect that it will. In preliminary investigations, people who typically drank more than ten drinks a week cut down to six after four weeks on mecamylamine pills, he says. The team is now trying to obtain funding and ethical approval for a proper trial. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 5316 - Posted: 06.24.2010

— Howard Hughes Medical Institute scientists at The Salk Institute have discovered a new class of optical illusion that they have studied in detail to show that humans use both the timing and spatial context of a visual stimulus to judge brightness. The researchers said the discovery of the illusion, which they call the “temporal context effect,” suggests that the human brain has separate, parallel circuitry to process brightness. One circuit pathway adapts to a stimulus that is constant in intensity, while the other assigns a brightness to an object and does not adapt, they said. The researchers said their findings offer an experimental approach for teasing out new information about how the brain processes information about an object's brightness. The researchers, led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Terrence J. Sejnowski, published their findings in the April 15, 2004, issue of the journal Nature. Sejnowski and his colleagues at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies collaborated on the studies with researchers from the University of Texas and the University of California, San Diego. ©2004 Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 5315 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Terry Jones Everyone agrees that President George Bush's lobotomy has been a tremendous success. Dick Cheney, the vice-president, declared that he was fully satisfied with it from his point of view. "Without the lobotomy," Mr Cheney told the American Academy of Neurology, "it might have proved difficult to persuade the president to start wars all around the world without any good pretext. But the removal of those parts of the brain associated with understanding the outcome of one's actions has enabled the president to function fully and without hesitation. Even when it is clear that disaster is around the corner, as it is currently in Iraq, the chief executive is able to go on TV and announce that everything is on course and that he has no intention of changing tactics that have already proved disastrous. Similarly, Donald Rumsfeld regards the surgery as an unqualified success. He writes in this month's American Medical Association Journal: "The president's prefrontal leucotomy has successfully removed all neural reflexes resistant to war-profiteering. It is a tribute to the medical team who undertook this delicate operation that, no matter how close the connection between those instigating military action and the companies who benefit from it, the president is able to carry on as if he were morally in the right." © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5314 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Autism may be linked to hormone levels circulating in the developing foetus, research suggests. A team from Cambridge University found babies who produce high levels of the male hormone testosterone in the womb are more likely to show symptoms. The finding suggests the condition may be genetic - and raises the possibility of a screening test. It also lends weight to the theory that autism is basically an extreme form of the way men think and behave. The research, led by psychologist Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, focused on 70 children whose mothers underwent an amniocentesis test while they were pregnant. This enabled the researchers to measure levels of foetal testosterone in the samples. When the children were four, their parents were asked to complete a checklist designed to record any signs of behavioural and social difficulties - which are associated with autism. (C)BBC

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 5313 - Posted: 04.19.2004

Washington, DC – Most weight loss experts advocate a sensible diet and regular exercise to shed unwanted pounds. Americans are accepting that advice: low-fat meals are the staples of many diets and both sexes are now engaged in an exercise regimen. As evidence of the latter, marketing experts claim that membership growth in health and fitness club facilities will soon outpace capacity, with almost 12 percent of the population belonging to health clubs in 2000. This figure is expected to reach 41.1 million members, or 14 percent of the population, in 2006. Previous research has demonstrated that, in general, quality of sleep improves after regular physical exercise. However, a number of factors such as the particular exercise training routines and various individual subjective characteristics complicate this overall conclusion. Army researchers set out to quantify the quality and length of sleep obtained after non-habitual acute resistance and aerobic exercise. Of interest was whether a single workout would be beneficial or harmful in obtaining restful sleep the night following the exercise.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 5312 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Washington, DC -- Are you annoyed by cheerful "morning people?" Do you ever wonder how "night owls" can keep going? Most of us ask these questions because we are in between these two extremes, and take a while to get going early in the morning and tire long before midnight. This entire spectrum reflects the broad, normal variation in sleep patterns in humans that is rooted in the very genetic foundations of how our body works. Because these variations occur within our population and differ with age, the presumption exists that the differences in sleep patterns are controlled by complex mechanisms with contributions from multiple genes and influenced by environmental factors. Linking our genetic make-up and sleep related disorders require data that compare genetic differences that might explain the basis of sleep disorders. Knowing what causes these disorders is important -- getting a good night sleep is now a challenge for some 50 to 70 millions American of all ages. A 2002 National Sleep Foundation annual survey reported that nearly 40 percent of adults 30 to 64 years old, and 44 percent of those age 18 to 29, reported that daytime sleepiness is so severe that it interferes with work and social functioning at least a few days each month. Excessive daytime sleepiness has been blamed on interference in cognitive functioning, motor vehicle crashes (especially at night), poor job performance and reduced productivity. While researchers have learned much about the basic mechanism underlying the control of sleep and its importance on our daily function and health, they have only just begun to examine the complex genetic and environmental interactions that shape sleep and health.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 5311 - Posted: 04.19.2004

Snoring affects 3.5 million people in the UK and is an affliction which can ruin friendships, marriages and lives. It is an embarrassing condition for sufferers and often an endurance for family and friends. As well-rested snorers and their bleary-eyed partners mark the British Snoring and Sleep Apnoea Association's national Stop Snoring Week, BBC News Online's Melissa Jackson spoke to one man whose problem has forced his wife into the spare room. Rex Sils knew he had a problem when he woke up in his armchair one afternoon to find his family sniggering at the sound reverberating from his nostrils. The 58-year-old project manager from south-east London, has a sense of humour as well developed as his snoring. "One of the worst moments I ever had after dozing off was on a cross-Channel ferry," he said with a chuckle. He recalls: "I fell asleep reading a book and was woken up by people around me laughing. "I eventually had to move somewhere else on the ferry because it was so embarrassing." (C)BBC

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 5310 - Posted: 04.18.2004