Researchers have identified a genetic factor that may predispose young people to harmful drinking habits. A team of scientists interviewed college students about their alcohol consumption and then analyzed their genetic profiles, or genotypes. They found that students who shared a particular variant of the serotonin transporter gene (5HTT) consumed more alcohol per occasion, more often drank expressly to become inebriated, and were more likely to engage in binge drinking than students without the variant. The study appears in the current issue of the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism. "This research provides important new evidence that the risk of developing a maladaptive pattern of alcohol consumption is influenced by genetically determined neurobiological differences that exert their effects during young adulthood," says Ting-Kai Li, M.D., director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). NIAAA clinical investigators Paolo B. DePetrillo, M.D., and Research Fellow Aryeh I. Herman B.A., along with researchers from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., conducted the study of 262 male and female college students and analyzed data from the largest homogenous group: 204 male and female Caucasian college students aged 17 to 23 years.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4135 - Posted: 08.21.2003

A cannabis-based drug could help people with Alzheimer's disease by giving them the "munchies", researchers say. Patients with the condition often experience weight loss because they stop recognising when they are hungry. The study does not suggest they should be given cannabis to smoke - instead, they tested a synthetic version of a cannabis extract. It was found the cannabinoid led to weight and reduced agitation, another symptom of the disease. The researchers from the Meridian Institute for Aging in New Jersey looked at a drug called dronabinol which is an artificial version of delta-9 THC, the active ingredient in cannabis. The drug has already been approved in the US for the treatment of anorexia in patients with HIV/Aids and nausea associated with chemotherapy. (C) BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 4134 - Posted: 08.21.2003

By CANDICE REED I thought my husband, Ralph, was having a stroke. What else could cause a healthy 54-year-old man suddenly to become disoriented and confused? More than eight hours after the onset of his symptoms, the attending doctor at our local E.R. diagnosed a very strange disorder — amnesia — or transient global amnesia. It is a temporary brain affliction that affects about 23.5 per 100,000 people every year. After a second and third opinion, we were convinced that Ralph had experienced this rare but real phenomenon. "I see about 150 cases a year," said Dr. Thomas Chippendale, a neurologist in San Diego and research director at University of California at San Diego. "There are probably many more cases out there that have been confused with symptoms of a stroke." Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Stroke
Link ID: 4133 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Are there 'social behavior' genes? La Jolla, Calif. -- A rare genetic disorder may lead scientists to genes for social behavior, a Salk Institute study has found. The study zeros in on the genes that may lead to the marked extroverted behavior seen in children with Williams syndrome, demonstrating that "hyper-sociability" – especially the drive to greet and interact with strangers -- follows a unique developmental path. The path is not only different from typical children but also from children with other developmental disorders of the nervous system. The study appears in the online version of the American Journal of Medical Genetics.

Keyword: Language; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4132 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NHS patients are to be given cannabis as part of a government-funded trial. The study, which is being run by the Medical Research Council, aims to find out if the drug really can help to relieve pain. Scientists will randomly select 400 patients who have undergone surgery from 36 hospitals across England to take part in the study. They will be given one of four pills after undergoing surgery, two of which will be a form of cannabis. They will receive a capsule containing standardised cannabis extract or a capsule containing tetrahydrocannabinol - the active ingredient in cannabis. The remaining patients will receive either a standard pain-relieving drug or a dummy pill. (C) BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 4131 - Posted: 08.20.2003

We’ve heard that Botox can help fade those frown lines. But as this ScienCentral News video reports, neurologists say it can also help children with cerebral palsy. About 500,000 Americans have some form of cerebral palsy, a developmental disability affecting body movements and muscle coordination that results from an injury to the brain before, during, or shortly after birth. "There is too much excitation from the central nervous system, meaning the brain and the spinal cord are telling that nerve to continuously fire," explains Dr. Marc DiFazio, a child neurologist at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. "Typically, this results in an increased amount of muscle tone. Generally what that causes is an impairment in function, meaning it’s difficult for children to walk who have too much tone in their lower extremities. Likewise, they have difficulties reaching for objects, picking up objects, holding their bottles, that type of thing. They often remain very much dependent on caretakers and parents for a lot of the normal daily activities that we often do independently." © ScienCentral, 2000-2003.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 4130 - Posted: 06.24.2010

An emerging understanding of the brain's stress pathways points toward treatments for anxiety and depression beyond Valium and Prozac By Robert Sapolsky Over the centuries, society's approaches to treating the mentally ill have shifted dramatically. At present, drugs that manipulate neurochemistry count as cutting-edge therapeutics. A few decades ago the heights of efficacy and compassion were lobotomies and insulin-induced comas. Before that, restraints and ice baths sufficed. Even earlier, and we've entered the realm of exorcisms. Society has also shifted its view of the causes of mental illness. Once we got past invoking demonic possession, we put enormous energy into the debate over whether these diseases are more about nature or nurture. Such arguments are quite pointless given the vast intertwining of the two in psychiatric disease. Environment, in the form of trauma, can most certainly break the minds of its victims. Yet there is an undeniable biology that makes some individuals more vulnerable than others. Conversely, genes are most certainly important factors in understanding major disorders. Yet being the identical twin of someone who suffers one of those illnesses means a roughly 50 percent chance of not succumbing. Obviously, biological vulnerabilities and environmental precipitants interact, and in this article I explore one arena of that interaction: the relation between external factors that cause stress and the biology of the mind's response. Scientists have recently come to understand a great deal about the role that stress plays in the two most common classes of psychiatric disorders: anxiety and major depression, each of which affects close to 20 million Americans annually, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. And much investigation focuses on developing the next generation of relevant pharmaceuticals, on finding improved versions of Prozac, Wellbutrin, Valium and Librium that would work faster, longer or with fewer side effects.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 4129 - Posted: 08.20.2003

The brain is still an enigma. But that won't stop us from trying to enhance mental functioning By Gary Stix The Decade of the Brain came and went quietly. For the promoters who conceive and execute campaigns to raise public awareness and research dollars, duration is measured only in days, weeks, months or, rarely, years--never more than a decade. Any longer would exceed the natural life span of the potential audience and sponsors for the message conveyed: The Century of Kidney Disease Awareness? One Hundred Years of Schizophrenia? Organizers of the Brain Decade coped with the difficulty of deciphering the world's most complex machine by setting out a series of comparatively modest challenges for the 1990s. A representative of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, which established a series of research objectives for the Decade, assigned generally high marks for meeting the stated goals: the identification of defective genes in familial Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease and the development of new treatments for multiple sclerosis and epilepsy, among other advances. The realization that the brain is more changeable than we ever thought has transformed neuroscience. © 1996-2003 Scientific American, Inc

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 4128 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By DENISE GRADY and GINA KOLATA Do I have a hard head?" asked Nathan Klein. "My wife always says I have a hard head." "No, it's pretty average," said Dr. Michael G. Kaplitt. "This is one of the few situations in life where you want to be average." Dr. Kaplitt had just bored a hole about the size of a quarter through the top of Mr. Klein's skull, in preparation for an ambitious experiment: the infusion deep into the brain of 3.5 billion viral particles, each bearing a copy of a human gene meant to help relieve the tremors, shuffling gait and other abnormal movements caused by Parkinson's disease. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 4127 - Posted: 08.20.2003

By Lauran Neergaard, AP Medical Writer Susan Sheridan recalls frantically racing her days-old son to doctor after doctor because his skin was so yellow -- only to be assured that jaundice is a rite of infancy. But as pediatricians looked on, the baby's neck suddenly arched backward and he began a strangely high-pitched, catlike howl. "We all watched Cal suffer brain damage before our eyes," says Sheridan. Jaundice strikes 60 percent of newborns as their livers slowly begin functioning in the first days of life. The vast majority recover easily. But a small percentage of babies suffer extreme jaundice that, if untreated, drastically damages their brains. Like Cal Sheridan, now 8, they're left with a severe type of cerebral palsy -- his intellect untouched but trapped behind unworking muscles -- or injuries such as hearing loss. © 2003 The Associated Press

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 4126 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NewScientist.com news service Copper may increase the growth of the protein clumps in the brain that are a trademark of Alzheimer's disease, according to a new US study on rabbits. Researchers first noticed that the rabbits they use to model Alzheimer's disease developed fewer plaques in their brains when they drank distilled water rather than tap water. These insoluble plaques, generated in the rabbits via a high-cholesterol diet, are a trademark of the degenerative illness. The tap water contained significant amounts of copper, so Larry Sparks, at the Sun Health Institute in Sun City, Arizona, and Bernard Schreurs, at West Virginia University, then gave the rabbits distilled water spiked with copper supplements. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 4125 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Ben Harder The popular muscle-building supplement creatine can boost performance on mental tests. Students preparing for exams might benefit from taking creatine in much the way that some competitive athletes do, an Australian neurochemist suggests. Creatine, an amino acid produced by the body and also obtained from meat in a person's diet, helps cells store ready-to-use energy. When taken during weight training, pills containing synthetic creatine accelerate gains in muscle strength. Creatine's popularity among athletes and body builders fuels a market of more than $200 million per year for the pills in the United States. Increased blood flow to the brain accelerates metabolism when someone confronts a challenging mental task, but an energy debt in taxed brain cells can last for several seconds. To see whether extra creatine could help meet the brain's demands during quick thinking, Caroline Rae of the University of Sydney and her colleagues gave a daily pill to each of 45 university students who were vegetarians. The researchers suspected that creatine might help vegetarians more than omnivores, who acquire the compound from their diets. Copyright ©2003 Science Service. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 4124 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By MARY DUENWALD BETHESDA, Md. — The road from Dr. Nora Volkow's childhood home in Mexico to the director's office at the National Institute on Drug Abuse here was surprisingly short and straight. From the time she entered medical school, at 18, Dr. Volkow devoted herself to the study of addiction. A research psychiatrist known for her brain-imaging studies, she has published hundreds of papers, including many that demonstrate how dopamine, a brain chemical linked to pleasure and motivation, plays a major role in addictions of all kinds: to drugs, to alcohol and even, some say, to food. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 4123 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Oystercatchers that initiate a split bag better homes and more chicks. HELEN PEARSON It's better to dump than be dumped. So ornithologists have concluded after eight years camped out in a hide on the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog. Oystercatchers (Haematopus ostralegus) that initiate a split - usually females - end up higher on the bird social scale, say Dik Heg of the University of Bern, Switzerland, and his colleagues1. They are more likely to land a superior nesting spot next to the mudflats where they feed, and they bear up to 20% more chicks. Abandoned partners, on the other hand, often wind up in shoddy nesting spots. They have to fly to the feeding ground, leaving offspring vulnerable to predators and new mates open to infidelity. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 4122 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Just as some people become stubbornly attached to routine as they get older, so too do neurons settle into a strict regimen with time. New research shows that whereas neurons in young mice continuously make and break their connections with one another, neurons in middle-aged mice tend to solidify those contacts. The results support the contention that old brains aren't terribly pliable. Neurons talk to each other at synapses: The axon of the speaking nerve cell sends its message across this tiny gap to the listening dendrite of another cell, which then passes the message along. Neurobiologists have long wondered whether the chain of communication is fixed like old-fashioned telephone lines or if the contacts are made and broken like the transient connections between cell phones and transmission towers. Last year, two studies that examined the receiving dendrites came to opposite conclusions: One revealed stable connections in older animals, and the other indicated dynamic ones (see Science, 4 April ). Neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and colleagues decided to look instead at the transmitting axons. Copyright © 2003 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 4121 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists project that some 13.2 million older Americans will have Alzheimer's disease (AD) by 2050 unless new ways are found to prevent or treat the disease. According to these latest estimates of the current and future prevalence of AD, reported by Denis A. Evans, M.D., and colleagues of Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, the numbers of older people with AD — now at 4.5 million — will grow dramatically as the population ages. The most notable increases will be among people age 85 and older, when by mid-century 8 million people in that age group may have the disease. The projections appear in the August 2003 issue of the Archives of Neurology . "These updated estimates from Evans and his group underscore the challenge that we face in the fight against AD," says Marcelle Morrison-Bogorad, Ph.D., NIA Associate Director for the Neuroscience and Neuropsychology of Aging Program, which funded the research. "But I am also optimistic that current research will lead to strategies for intervention early in the disease so that we can keep these projections from becoming a reality."

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 4120 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists tracking the progress of children diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as they became teenagers have shed new light on the link between ADHD and the risk of developing alcohol and substance use problems. The researchers found that individuals with severe problems of inattention as children were more likely than their peers to report alcohol-related problems, a greater frequency of getting drunk, and heavier and earlier use of tobacco and other drugs. The findings indicate that childhood ADHD may be as important for the risk of later substance use problems as having a history of family members with alcoholism and other substance use disorders. The study appears in the August issue of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. ADHD is one of the most commonly diagnosed pediatric mental health disorders. It occurs in three to five percent of school-aged children. While previous research has indicated that ADHD together with a variety of other childhood behavior disorders may predispose children to drug, alcohol, and tobacco use earlier than children without ADHD, this study explores more closely specific aspects of that association. "This is one of the first studies to focus on the severity of inattention problems in childhood ADHD as distinct from impulsivity and hyperactivity," says Ting-Kai Li, M.D., director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA).

Keyword: ADHD; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 4119 - Posted: 08.19.2003

Blocking the formation of neurons in the hippocampus blocks the behavioral effects of antidepressants in mice, say researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Their finding lends new credence to the proposed role of such neurogenesis in lifting mood. It also helps to explain why antidepressants typically take a few weeks to work, note Rene Hen, Ph.D., Columbia University, and colleagues, who report on their study in the August 8th Science. "If antidepressants work by stimulating the production of new neurons, there's a built-in delay," explained Hen, a grantee of NIH's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). "Stem cells must divide, differentiate, migrate and establish connections with post-synaptic targets — a process that takes a few weeks." "This is an important new insight into how antidepressants work," added NIMH director Thomas Insel, M.D. "We have known that antidepressants influence the birth of neurons in the hippocampus. Now it appears that this effect may be important for the clinical response."

Keyword: Depression; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 4118 - Posted: 06.24.2010

For scientists in the field of neurobiology, defining the factors that influence the arousal of brain and behavior is a "Holy Grail." Research published by Rockefeller University scientists in the Aug. 11 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition are the first to give a rigorous definition of what is meant by arousal, considered to be at the base of all emotionally laden behaviors. In particular, the researchers, led by Donald W. Pfaff, Ph.D., provide an operational definition of arousal that scientists can pursue and measure quantitatively in laboratory animals, as well as in human beings. "If you ask someone on the street what arousal means, that person might have an intuitive concept of arousal in terms of sexual excitement, alertness or an emotional response such as fear," says Pfaff, professor and head of the Laboratory of Neurobiology and Behavior at Rockefeller. "But, if you ask, 'Exactly what does arousal mean scientifically,' it's been very hard for scientists to pin down." Scientists who study arousal historically were divided into two camps: those who consider arousal to be a single, "monolithic" physiological function, and those who believe that arousal does not exist as a whole, but is a collection of small specific abilities.

Keyword: Attention; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 4117 - Posted: 08.19.2003

WASHINGTON, DC — Environmental cues associated with prior drug use can provoke a relapse. In a new study, scientists have linked the relapse behavior to specific nerve cells in a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens. The findings may foster further research into what makes long-abstinent drug users prone to relapse and lead the way to new strategies for treating drug addiction. “The study finds an increase in neuronal activity that persists after the behavioral response of seeking the drug is absent,” says George Koob, PhD, an addiction researcher at the Scripps Research Institute. “This suggests the existence of a neuroadaptation that may make individuals more vulnerable to resuming drug-taking behavior.” The study appears in the August 13 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience and was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Copyright © 2003 Society for Neuroscience

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 4116 - Posted: 06.24.2010