ST. PAUL, MN – Women who take vitamin D supplements through multivitamins are 40 percent less likely to develop multiple sclerosis (MS) than women who do not take supplements, according to a study published in the January 13 issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Food is a source of vitamin D, and the body makes vitamin D through exposure to sunlight. "Because the number of cases of MS increases the farther you get from the equator, one hypothesis has been that sunlight exposure and high levels of vitamin D may reduce the risk of MS," said study author Kassandra Munger, MSc, of Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, MA. "This is the first prospective study to look at this question. "These results need to be confirmed with additional research, but it's exciting to think that something as simple as taking a multivitamin could reduce your risk of developing MS."

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 4795 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Men are better suited for math and science than women. Whites have more positive feelings toward other whites than blacks. The young are preferred over older people. These are just a few of the biases discussed by social psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Thierry Devos in their article, "Implicit Self and Identity", published in The Self: From Soul to Brain, Volume 1001 of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Based on a recent Academy conference, the book offers the latest research from 16 experts in the areas of neuroscience, cognitive science, social and developmental psychology, anthropology, philosophy and theology. Their article is one of many that examine how the neurological aspects of our unconscious selves influence our explicit, psychological, social and spiritual selves. Using a population of college students who described themselves as "liberal" and professed to have no "consciousness of stereotyping" others, Dr. Banaji and her colleagues tested them for hidden racial, age, national, and gender bias by using rapid association tests, dubbed Implicit Association Tests or IATs. These tests consist of rapid visual and linguistic stimuli designed to provoke responses too quickly for rational consideration. For example, the "Race" test asked subjects to classify words such as "wonderful", "agony", "love" as being either "good" or "bad". Photos of White Americans and African-Americans were then flashed with these words and testers made rapid word-picture associations. Response times indicated that many white Americans exhibited an automatic preference for whites over blacks. © 2002 New York Academy of Sciences, All rights reserved.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 4794 - Posted: 06.24.2010

At the tender age of 12, Zoe Pearson was already an accomplished athlete, good enough to represent her county at netball. But a minor injury during a match was to spark a crippling condition that left her in agony and meant she spent most of her teenage years in a wheelchair. Zoe had been struck down by a rare and complex syndrome called Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, also known as complex regional pain syndrome. Extremely difficult to diagnose, it can cause such severe pain and swelling in the hands, wrist, ankles or knees that some victims have been known to resort to amputation just to ease their agony. In Zoe's case, it took more than a year for doctors to pinpoint her problem. "The problems started after I twisted my knee during a game," says Zoe, from Nottingham. "The pain that followed was excruciating and I ended up spending four-and-a-half years in a wheelchair." (C) BBC

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 4793 - Posted: 01.13.2004

The body mass index doesn't weigh up for Asian populations HELEN PEARSON The index commonly used to rate healthy body weight has come under fire in a new report showing that Asian populations don't fit into the existing scale1. Doctors routinely use the body-mass index (BMI) to classify patients as healthy or unhealthy. BMI is calculated by dividing a person's weight in kilograms by their height in metres squared. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends cut-off points, such that a BMI below 18.5 is considered underweight, 20.0-24.9 is classified normal, 25.0-29.9 is overweight and a BMI of 30 or greater is obese. These lines were drawn largely based on mortality statistics from European and American populations. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 4792 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A new type of ear implant may work better by placing electrodes inside the brain stem itself. US surgeons have now finished putting the implants into the first two patients, reports New Scientist. The operation to place the implant is potentially riskier than one involving a standard cochlear implant - but the results may be better for patients. The procedure could help people who have lost their auditory nerve through cancer - or who were born without one. Normal cochlear implants place electrodes in various locations against the outside of the brain stem. The implant receives sound signals such as speech, and converts them into electrical signals which stimulate cells near the surface of this brain region. (C) BBC

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 4791 - Posted: 01.11.2004

Patients who have suffered a head injury may be more likely to develop depression, say researchers. A small study published in a US journal revealed that head injury patients had a higher risk of problems than patients who had suffered other injuries. A third of those examined by doctors in Iowa City showed signs of depressive illness within a year. Patients who suffered major bouts of depression had differences in the physical structure of their brains. The mechanism by which a head injury might cause changes of mood and behaviour are poorly understood. However, many people who have suffered a head injury become more irritable and aggressive, or endure anxiety attacks or full-blown clinical depression. (C)BBC

Keyword: Depression; Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 4790 - Posted: 01.11.2004

By ALEXANDER COOLIDGE, SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE Procter & Gamble is in the advanced stages of testing a drug to improve the sex drive in women that executives say may be a "blockbuster" seller. Company officials say the first-of-its-kind drug, called Intrinsa, is intended for women suffering from a loss of sexual desire as a result of menopause or surgery. The drug is being developed as a skin patch containing testosterone, a hormone that affects sexual desire in women. ©1996-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 4789 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A brain chemical has been found that could improve the lives of people with Huntington's disease, scientists say. Mice tailored to develop the degenerative brain disease had fewer symptoms and declined at a slower rate when given Ciliary Neurotrophic Factor. The team at Portugal's Centre for Neuroscience in Coimbra used gene therapy to reprogramme the brain to produce the chemical. A UK team is now working to produce a tablet that has a similar effect. The research, published in the journal Experimental Neurology, is further evidence that the lack of certain "neurotrophic factors" are key to the progressive symptoms of Huntington's. (C) BBC

Keyword: Huntingtons; Trophic Factors
Link ID: 4788 - Posted: 01.10.2004

Siberian hamsters are being drafted in by researchers in a drive to combat obesity in humans. Scientists at Aberdeen's Rowett Research Institute believe genes in the hamsters could control how much they eat at various times of the year. Siberian hamsters are able to adjust their weight to become fatter in the summer and leaner in the winter. Rowan Institute director Professor Peter Morgan said he hoped the work would help to tackle human obesity. The institute has been awarded £250,000 in EU funding to continue its research. The five-year project will involve 24 groups of scientists in 10 countries and has been co-ordinated by Gothenburg University in Sweden and funded under the EU Sixth Framework Programme. (C) BBC

Keyword: Obesity; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 4787 - Posted: 01.10.2004

Ben Harder The first appearance in the United States of the cattle-killing ailment known as mad cow disease has rocked the beef industry and raised fears of an outbreak of a similar deadly brain disease in people. However, the threat to both people and animals in the United States remains low as long as the government enforces specific feed-processing and slaughter regulations, risk analysts say. The most crucial safeguard, according to the researchers, is a ban put in place in 1997 that prohibits feeding potentially infective animal parts to cattle. That practice, which provided cheap protein for animal feed, is the main route of transmission of the misshapen proteins that cause mad cow disease, which is formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). The proteins, called prions, may spread when animals consume brain, spinal cord tissue, bone particles, eyes, and small intestines of infected animals. In people, prions occasionally cause the lethal brain condition known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or vCJD. New safety measures that the government has announced in recent weeks might further reduce the odds of a U.S. outbreak of vCJD in people, says George Gray of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis in Boston. One of these rules would delay the sale of meat from cattle carcasses until they're tested for BSE, and another would ban or restrict the use of processing technologies that may mix bits of nerve tissue with meat. Copyright ©2004 Science Service.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 4786 - Posted: 06.24.2010

BY JULIA KELLER, Chicago Tribune CHICAGO - (KRT) - There was a story he loved to hear. Sometimes it was the only way to settle him down, telling that story. When Jim Kane was so agitated that he looked as if he might vibrate right out of his wheelchair, his wife would tell him the story. Jill Kane had told it almost every day of his six-week stay at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. She told him the story again on his final day, as Jim, like research into brain injury medicine itself, headed down an uncharted road. "Do you remember, Jim, when you worked at the racetrack?" she said. "You were 18 years old, and your job was to take care of two horses. Mr. Brown and Scotch Run. You'd walk them around and around, and Mr. Brown - do you remember this, Jim? Mr. Brown loved Snickers bars." She laughed. "A horse who loved Snickers bars! Isn't that funny, Jim? And you took care of them." © 2004, Chicago Tribune.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Regeneration
Link ID: 4785 - Posted: 06.24.2010

MRIs in Stanford study show active suppression of memories Keay Davidson More than a century after Sigmund Freud's ideas first stirred controversy, they've won partial support from Stanford University laboratory experiments involving technology that was unimaginable in his time. One of Freud's key claims was that humans "repress" unpleasant memories. Such memories continue to lurk within the brain, and they occasionally resurface in disguised form -- say, in the eerie symbolism of dreams or in embarrassing "slips of the tongue," he argued. But skeptics have questioned whether such repression really occurs. Now, using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or "fMRI" for short, researchers have caught human brain tissue in the act of suppressing simple memories in the form of paired words. The scientists report the findings in today's issue of the journal Science. ©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Brain imaging
Link ID: 4784 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Historical figures including Socrates, Charles Darwin, and Andy Warhol probably had a form of autism, says a leading specialist. Professor Michael Fitzgerald, of Dublin's Trinity College believes they showed signs of Asperger's syndrome. Scientific geniuses Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein have also been previously linked to the condition. Asperger's is associated with poor social skills, and obsessions with complex topics such as music. However, people with the condition are often bright, and have above average verbal skills. Professor Fitzgerald said the number of people being diagnosed with Asperger's had significantly increased as doctors had become more aware of the condition. (C) BBC

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 4783 - Posted: 01.09.2004

The present situation where scientists are caught between political manipulation and public incomprehension must end for all our good Colin Blakemore Not a squeak. No sign of communication. Sitting in a strange environment, remote, mysterious and invisible. Microscope and mass spectrometer at the ready; ultraviolet sensor, thermocouples and three-axis accelerometer poised for action. Thirty-two-bit processor eager to crunch numbers. Centuries of scientific knowledge, years of preparation and investment were needed for its work. Yet it remains silent, a source of fascination to the public but unheard. No, not Beagle-2 (although as I write it is, alas, still silent). This image is the stereotypical, faceless British scientist - a grey, male personage in a white coat. He works long hours and shows a vocational devotion rare in other professions. His primary targets are gaining tenure in his job, publishing before his rivals in the States and getting his next grant. Telling anyone about his ideas (except through the medium of an academic paper) is very low on his list of priorities. In the pub, he will talk politics or Manchester Utd rather than bosons or genes. Who would listen, who would bother, who would understand? Was it ever thus? Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 4782 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers are finding that it may be easier for teenagers to become addicted to cigarettes than adults because teens seem to react differently to nicotine, the addictive substance in cigarettes. "The more nicotine you take as a teenager, the more likely you are to become a smoker,” says George Koob, professor of neuropharmacology at the Scripps Research Institute. "And what smoking does for you is, it kills you." Koob says that, like other drugs, nicotine produces a withdrawal state. "If you don't believe in the nicotine withdrawal syndrome, just watch people getting off a flight from Paris to Los Angeles, which is eleven hours long, and you’ll see the cigarette smokers can't wait to get outside and have a cigarette because they’re in full-blown withdrawal after eleven hours of no cigarettes," he says. "When [smokers] stop taking cigarettes, when they stop smoking, they are very uncomfortable. They're irritable, they have a malaise, like a fatigue, they are cranky, they are dysphoric, they don't feel good about themselves, they have trouble thinking properly, their work performance deteriorates, and they're basically in a state that we call a motivational withdrawal state." © ScienCentral, 2000-2003.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 4781 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR Unwanted memories can be driven from awareness, according to a team of researchers who say they have identified a brain circuit that springs into action when people deliberately try to forget something. The findings, published today in the journal Science, strengthen the theory that painful memories can be repressed by burying them in the subconscious, the researchers say. In the study, people who had memorized a pair of words were later shown one of them and asked to either recall the second word or to consciously avoid thinking about it. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 4780 - Posted: 01.09.2004

Two personas trigger different brain networks. HELEN PEARSON One human brain can have two different personalities dwelling in it, according to a new imaging study - and each personality seems to use its own network of nerves to help recall or suppress memories. Alternative personalities are typically developed by children who suffer severe trauma or abuse. The condition, called multiple personality disorder, or dissociative identity disorder, appears to help people cope by cutting off difficult memories, making them seem as if they happened to someone else. A team led by Simone Reinders of Groningen University Hospital in the Netherlands used positron emission tomography to scan the brains of 11 female multiple-personality patients while they listened to autobiographical stories in each of their two personality states1. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 4779 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Tiny particles enter the brain after being inhaled. JIM GILES Nanoparticles - tiny lumps of matter that could one day to be used to build faster computer circuits and improve drug delivery systems - can travel to the brain after being inhaled, according to researchers from the United States1. The finding sounds a cautionary note for advocates of nanotechnology, but may also lead to a fuller understanding of the health effects of the nanosized particles produced by diesel engines. Günter Oberdörster of the University of Rochester in New York and colleagues tracked the progress of carbon particles that were only 35 nanometres in diameter and had been inhaled by rats. In the olfactory bulb - an area of the brain that deals with smell - nanoparticles were detected a day after inhalation, and levels continued to rise until the experiment ended after seven days. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 4778 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Of Normal Brain Connections Resulting From Sensory Input By Sherry Seethaler Biologists at the University of California, San Diego and the Johns Hopkins University have discovered a gene that plays a key role in initiating changes in the brain in response to sensory experience, a finding that may provide insight into certain types of learning disorders. After birth, learning and experience change the architecture of the brain dramatically. The structure of individual neurons, or nerve cells, changes during learning to accommodate new connections between neurons. Neuroscientists believe these structural changes are initiated when neurons are activated, causing calcium ions to flow into cells and alter the activity of genes. In a paper featured on the cover of the January 9th issue of the journal Science, biologists at UCSD and the Johns Hopkins University medical school report the discovery of the first gene, CREST, known to mediate these changes in the structure of neurons in response to calcium. Copyright ©2001 Regents of the University of California.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 4777 - Posted: 06.24.2010

EUGENE, Ore.-Researchers at the University of Oregon and Stanford University have located a mechanism in the human brain that blocks unwanted memories. This is the first time that anyone has shown a neurobiological basis for memory repression. The findings, by lead researcher Michael Anderson, associate professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, and his colleague, John D.E. Gabrieli, professor of psychology at Stanford, will be published Jan. 9 in Science. The research provides compelling evidence that Freud was on to something 100 years ago when he proposed the existence of a voluntary repression mechanism that pushes unwanted memories out of consciousness. Since then the idea of memory repression has been a vague and highly controversial idea, in part because it has been difficult to imagine how such a process could occur in the brain. Yet, the process may be more commonly applied than was previously thought.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 4776 - Posted: 01.09.2004