By GARDINER HARRIS The Food and Drug Administration issued a public health advisory yesterday that makes clear that the agency has grown increasingly skeptical that there is any link between antidepressant use and the risk of suicide in teenagers and children. "I think probably that we have backed off a little bit from the advisory issued in June, which recommended against using Paxil," said Dr. Thomas Laughren, a psychiatrist and an F.D.A. official. "I believe our position now is that we just don't know." The F.D.A. plans to convene a panel on Feb. 2 to examine the relationship between suicide and antidepressant drug therapy. The panel will be asked to decide if the drugs should be prescribed to teenagers and children, if the drugs' warnings sections should be changed, and what studies should be done to determine if there is a link between antidepressant use and suicide in teenagers and children. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 4435 - Posted: 10.28.2003

By DAVID TULLER For doctors who want to discuss using medical marijuana with their patients, the line between advice and advocacy remains almost as blurred as it was before a recent court decision guaranteed a physician's right to address the issue openly. Some doctors are relieved that the United States Supreme Court let stand a lower-court decision two weeks ago that barred the federal government from punishing doctors who advised patients that marijuana might ease some symptoms. But some doctors are also perplexed, and even inhibited, by part of the underlying court decision at the center of the case. That decision essentially affirms the federal government's right to hold physicians accountable if they actually take steps to help patients obtain marijuana. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 4434 - Posted: 10.28.2003

ITHACA, N.Y. -- Sometimes familiarity does not breed contempt: A Cornell University behavioral scientist has found that female wolf spiders prefer mates that are comfortably familiar. However, the researcher has discovered, a male wolf spider unlucky enough to attempt to mate with an unfamiliar female probably is doomed to be killed and eaten by the female. "Finding this behavior is really surprising. Social experience influences mate choice," says Eileen Hebets, a Cornell postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, whose findings will be published in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS early edition, Oct. 27-31, 2003).

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 4433 - Posted: 10.28.2003

Cassowaries’ low-frequency sounds may give insight into dinosaur communications NEW YORK -- A family of huge forest birds living in the dense jungles of Papua New Guinea emit low-frequency calls deeper than virtually all other bird species, possibly to communicate through thick forest foliage, according to a study published by the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society. Published in the recent issue of the scientific journal The Auk, the study says that three species of cassowaries – flightless birds that can weigh as much as 125 pounds – produce a "booming" call so low that humans may not be able to detect much of the sound. The researchers draw similarities between the birds' calls and the rumbling elephants make to communicate. "When close to the bird, these calls can be heard or felt as an unsettling sensation, similar to how observers describe elephant vocalizations," said WCS researcher Dr. Andrew Mack, the lead author of the study.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Hearing
Link ID: 4432 - Posted: 06.24.2010

St. Louis -- An international team of scientists led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that the enzyme largely responsible for the development of Alzheimer's disease may work in a different way than previously thought. "We're very excited to provide more insight into how this bizarre process takes place," says principal investigator Raphael Kopan, Ph.D., professor of medicine and of molecular biology and pharmacology. "The more we understand the way this enzyme works, the easier it will be to design better and more intelligent approaches to tweaking the enzyme to do what we want." The results are published online in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and will appear in the Oct. 28 print edition. The study was an international collaboration between researchers at the School of Medicine, Merck and Co. Inc., University of Tokyo, Harvard Medical School, University of Tennessee at Memphis, and the K.U. Leuven and Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology in Belgium.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 4431 - Posted: 06.24.2010

ST. PAUL, MN – Smokers are nearly twice as likely to develop multiple sclerosis (MS) as people who have never smoked, according to a study published in the October 28 issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The risk was increased for people whether they were smokers at the time they developed MS or were past smokers. "This is one more reason for young people to avoid smoking," said study author Trond Riise, PhD, of the University of Bergen in Norway. "Hopefully, these results will help us learn more about what causes MS by looking at how smoking affects the onset of the disease."

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 4430 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists call for boycott, launch open-access project Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer More than five centuries after Gutenberg's printing press revolutionized the transmission of scientific information, the multibillion- dollar scientific publishing industry is quaking to two Bay Area-led revolts. This month, a nonprofit venture founded by Nobel laureates with the help of a $9 million startup grant launched the first of two new scientific journals that will make all content freely available online. Print versions of the journals will be available for a subscription fee. The goal of the initiative, called the Public Library of Science, is to force a new standard of "open public access" to scientific research, which, after all, is largely funded by taxpayer dollars. As it is now, scientific journals demand a hefty subscriber fee and limit online access to only those who pay. In another move, two prominent UCSF scientists called last week for a global boycott of six molecular biology journals, accusing the publisher, Reed Elsevier, the Goliath of science publishing, of charging exorbitant new subscription fees for online access. ©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 4429 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Carl T. Hall, Chronicle Science Writer With only a used syringe to go on, it took three months of extraordinary chemical detective work to unravel the mystery behind THG, the previously unknown designer steroid that is at the center of a widening sports doping scandal linked to a Bay Area nutritional supplement laboratory. In a story with a far-flung cast - including world-class athletes -- one of the more enterprising and anonymous characters is Dr. Don Catlin, head of UCLA's renowned Olympic Analytical Laboratory, the sole U.S. facility used to screen for chemical cheating at the Olympic level. Catlin, who founded the lab two years before the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, revealed to The Chronicle new details about how his team of eight chemists and 40 support staff joined together in a crash effort to find THG -- short for tetrahydrogestrinone -- and devise a practical way to find it in athlete urine samples. ©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 4428 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By PAUL von ZIELBAUER Correction officers at the Arthur Kill Correctional Facility, a state prison on Staten Island with about 900 inmates, say they collect at least 200 prescription pills every day that inmates who are considered psychotic, depressed or disruptive pretend to swallow in the presence of nurses but then throw out. Perhaps the inmates mistrust the people giving them the drugs, or are weary of the side effects or believe they are not sick. But the costly result, according to Arthur Kill correction officers and members of the nursing staff, is a constellation of expensive yellow, blue and white pills they pick up off the ground, collect in a bag and flush down the toilet each day. The most common type of pills found, officers said, are Thorazine, a powerful antipsychotic; lithium, an antidepressant; Paxil, an antianxiety medicine; and Neurontin, an anti-seizure mood-stabilizing medicine often prescribed for nervous or unruly prisoners. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 4427 - Posted: 10.27.2003

Johns Hopkins researchers have uncovered a key step in the body's regulation of melatonin, a major sleep-related chemical in the brain. In the advance online section of Nature Structural Biology, the research team reports finding the switch that causes destruction of the enzyme that makes melatonin -- no enzyme, no melatonin. Melatonin levels are high at night and low during the day. Even at night, melatonin disappears after exposure to bright light, a response that likely contributes to its normal daily cycle, but plagues shift workers and jet setters by leading to sleeplessness. To help understand melatonin's light-induced disappearance, the Hopkins researchers turned to the enzyme that makes it, a protein called AANAT. One way cells turn proteins like AANAT on and off is by modifying them, attaching or removing small bits, such as phosphate groups, to particular spots along the protein's backbone. For AANAT, the key spot turns out to be building block number 31, the researchers have found.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 4426 - Posted: 10.27.2003

Imaging studies yield a potential core marker for reading problems, underscore neurological basis of difficulties WASHINGTON — Researchers have additional evidence that reading problems are linked to abnormal sound processing, thanks to high-precision pictures of the brain at work. In a recent study, when children without reading problems tried to distinguish between similar spoken syllables, speech areas in the left brain worked much harder than corresponding areas in the right brain, whose function is still unknown. But when children with dyslexia made the same attempt, those right-brain areas actually worked harder, going into overdrive after a brief delay. These findings appear in the October issue of Neuropsychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association (APA). Psychologists at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston targeted the suspect brain areas by isolating speech-processing sites from sites involved with other aspects of language, such as memory and meaning. As a result, they believe their research contributes to the identification of a central marker of the deficit that makes it hard for people with dyslexia to process similar but different sounds –- in both spoken and written form. The results parallel prior evidence gathered by the Houston team that brains of children with dyslexia also respond abnormally during reading. The researchers studied the brain activity of 12 children with and 11 children without dyslexia during a simple speech perception task. The children were eight to 12 years old. Magnetoencephalography (MEG), a non-invasive, high-resolution form of functional imaging, highlighted precise activity in participants’ left and right temporoparietal (TP) language areas while the children discriminated between spoken pairs of syllables, such as /ga/ and /ka/. This kind of task, known as phonological processing, is fundamental to acquiring reading skill. The temporoparietal areas are on the surface in the back of the brain. © 2003 American Psychological Association

Keyword: Dyslexia
Link ID: 4425 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By DUDLEY CLENDINEN TERRI SCHIAVO'S eyes are often open, and, in photographs, seem clear. She smiles. When her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, look at her face, they think she is still there. That is how we try to measure people. The stranger we encounter. The salesman. The actor on the movie screen. The boyfriend. The wife or husband. The child — especially if it is our child. Especially if the child is hurt, and we think we can help. We look into their eyes, because we expect to find truth there, information — or at least some indication that they know we are with them, trying to know what they are experiencing. What they need. What we can do. Sometimes the eyes tell us. When my father opened his eyes, three days after a massive cerebral hemorrhage, they weren't clear and hazel as usual, but wild and black. It was like looking into a storm at night, or a destroyed brain. My father wasn't there. We asked the hospital to disconnect his hydration and feeding tubes. As I've come to learn, a person can live for a month or more without food, but only 8 to 14 days without water. Nine days later, still in a coma, he died. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 4424 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By CLIVE THOMPSON When he isn't pondering the inner workings of the mind, Read Montague, a 43-year-old neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, has been known to contemplate the other mysteries of life: for instance, the Pepsi Challenge. In the series of TV commercials from the 70's and 80's that pitted Coke against Pepsi in a blind taste test, Pepsi was usually the winner. So why, Montague asked himself not long ago, did Coke appeal so strongly to so many people if it didn't taste any better? Over several months this past summer, Montague set to work looking for a scientifically convincing answer. He assembled a group of test subjects and, while monitoring their brain activity with an M.R.I. machine, recreated the Pepsi Challenge. His results confirmed those of the TV campaign: Pepsi tended to produce a stronger response than Coke in the brain's ventral putamen, a region thought to process feelings of reward. (Monkeys, for instance, exhibit activity in the ventral putamen when they receive food for completing a task.) Indeed, in people who preferred Pepsi, the ventral putamen was five times as active when drinking Pepsi than that of Coke fans when drinking Coke. In the real world, of course, taste is not everything. So Montague tried to gauge the appeal of Coke's image, its ''brand influence,'' by repeating the experiment with a small variation: this time, he announced which of the sample tastes were Coke. The outcome was remarkable: almost all the subjects said they preferred Coke. What's more, the brain activity of the subjects was now different. There was also activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that scientists say governs high-level cognitive powers. Apparently, the subjects were meditating in a more sophisticated way on the taste of Coke, allowing memories and other impressions of the drink -- in a word, its brand -- to shape their preference. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Brain imaging
Link ID: 4423 - Posted: 10.26.2003

How the same enzyme helps protect brain cells from the destruction of Alzheimer's yet contributes to the blood vessel disease of diabetics is a puzzle Dr. Mario B. Marrero wants to solve. "I call JAK2 the good, the bad and the ugly because its function depends on the cell type and where it acts," says the biochemist at the Medical College of Georgia who wants to eliminate – or at least control – the "bad" and "ugly." JAK2, or janus kinase 2, is an enzyme found in all cells that plays an important role in development and growth; mice lacking this enzyme die in utero, Dr. Marrero says. After birth, the enzyme becomes a two-edged sword that activates or deactivates other proteins and plays a role in Alzheimer's, diabetes, hypertension and kidney failure.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 4422 - Posted: 06.24.2010

John Travis An unlikely partnership between AIDS researchers seeking new antiviral therapies and developmental biologists exploring how the brain forms has produced a promising new drug for the fight against deadly brain tumors. In cell and animal studies, the drug, originally developed as an anti-HIV medication, has slowed the growth of several kinds of brain cancers. "I hope and would like to think that this will end up being useful in human disease," says Rosalind A. Segal of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, who headed the work. Several years ago, researchers discovered that for the AIDS virus to infect an immune cell, HIV must grab on to a cell-surface protein called a chemokine receptor. Chemokines are chemicals that guide immune cells around a body, and receptors allow the cells to detect the compounds. Copyright ©2003 Science Service.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 4421 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower Since average scores on particular IQ tests rise a few points every 3 or 4 years, those tests become obsolete after a couple of decades. In order to reset the average score to 100, harder IQ tests are devised every 15 to 20 years. Trickier tests have no practical impact on people who score within the normal IQ range of 90 to 110. But so-called renormed IQ tests create a yo-yo effect in the number of mental retardation placements in U.S. schools, a new study finds. Rates of mental retardation among children appear to bottom out near the end of a particular test's run, followed by a sharp rebound with the introduction of a tougher test, say Tomoe Kanaya, a graduate student at Cornell University, and her colleagues. Scores on the new test then increase over time, pulling many children from just below to just above the score of 70, which stands as the rough cutoff for mental retardation. That trend continues until the next test revision comes along. Copyright ©2003 Science Service.

Keyword: Intelligence
Link ID: 4420 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sex changes are hardly talk-show material in the sea. In fact, they're common in many marine animals, and now scientists believe they've made an important observation about how critters know the time for a change has come. Across a wide variety of species, the researchers found that sex changes occur almost exclusively in animals that have reached a particular size. The results may shed light on the evolutionary forces behind this curious phenomenon. Animals convert from one sex to the other for a multitude of reasons. A common one is to balance out the genders in their population. For example, some female fish will transform to males if the school has too few males. The newly minted males are in great demand, and thus pass on more of their genes than if they'd stayed female. Slugs, starfish, and other creatures also switch gender when it works to their advantage. However, the cues that trigger the change vary from species to species. Copyright © 2003 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 4419 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Some people say we should settle gay rights disputes on the basis of the Old Testament. I say we should rely on blinking patterns. In case you've misplaced your latest copy of Behavioral Neuroscience, there's a fascinating article about how people blink. It turns out that when males and females are exposed to a loud noise, they blink in somewhat different ways — except that lesbians appear to blink like men, not like women. The study (peer-reviewed but based on a small sample) is the latest in a growing scientific literature suggesting that sexual preferences may be not simply a matter of personal preference but part of our ingrained biology. Indeed, some geneticists believe that sexual orientation in men (though not women) may be determined in part by markers in the Xq28 chromosomal region. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 4418 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Analysis of DNA samples from patients with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and related illnesses suggests that these neuropsychiatric disorders affecting mood and behavior are associated with an uncommon mutant, malfunctioning gene that leads to faulty transporter function and regulation. Norio Ozaki, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues in the collaborative study explain their findings in the October 23 Molecular Psychiatry. Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have found a mutation in the human serotonin transporter gene, hSERT, in unrelated families with OCD. A second variant in the same gene of some patients with this mutation suggests a genetic "double hit," resulting in greater biochemical effects and more severe symptoms. Among the 10 leading causes of disability worldwide, OCD is a mental illness characterized by repetitive unwanted thoughts and behaviors that impair daily life. "In all of molecular medicine, there are few known instances where two variants within one gene have been found to alter the expression and regulation of the gene in a way that appears associated with symptoms of a disorder," said co-author Dennis Murphy, M.D., National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Laboratory of Clinical Science. "This step forward gives us a glimpse of the complications ahead in studying the genetic complexity of neuropsychiatric disorders."

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4417 - Posted: 10.24.2003

A common drug administered in the first hours following trauma to patients deemed to be at risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) reduced the occurrence of PTSD, according to a study led by researchers at the University of Lille, France. While the study involved a small number of subjects, its results are encouraging, says its senior author, Charles Marmar, MD, associate chief of staff for mental health at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and professor and vice chair of psychiatry at University of California, San Francisco. "The study is based on the new theory that PTSD is most likely to occur in patients who experience a particularly severe and prolonged response to trauma. If this model proves accurate after five or ten replications of studies like this one, it could have very profound ramifications. From a public health perspective, if you could identify the subgroup of people who are susceptible to PTSD, giving them this course of medication -- which is brief, very well tolerated and inexpensive -- could be very effective prevention [following major trauma] and may have great social relevance." The study appears in the November 1 issue of Biological Psychiatry.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 4416 - Posted: 10.24.2003