By DAVID BERREBY NEWTON, Mass. — At age 40 Jonathan Shay had life by the tail. He had his own lab at Massachusetts General Hospital and several papers published in prestigious journals. He was focused on the biochemistry of brain-cell death, with its relevance to strokes. But life takes sudden twists. As Sophocles wrote in Athens 2,400 years ago, no one should be counted happy who is still alive. Dr. Shay soon had reasons to contemplate that line, and plenty of time. That year he turned 40, Dr. Shay, the professional student of strokes, had one of his own. He emerged from a coma paralyzed on his entire left side. Not long after, his marriage ended. The family business — which had paid the bills for his lively intellectual life through graduate school in sociology, a medical degree and a Ph.D. in neuroscience — hit hard times. Medical research grants were getting scarcer, so even as he pulled himself together he found his work stalled. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke; Apoptosis
Link ID: 3540 - Posted: 06.24.2010

UCLA neuroscientists using positron emission tomography (PET) brain imaging have discovered distinct patterns of brain activity that predict the effectiveness of paroxetine, or Paxil, in treating obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) vs. major depression. Published in the March 2003 edition of the peer-reviewed American Journal of Psychiatry, the study is the first to compare neurobiological predictors of response to the same treatment across different disorders. Since patient responses to treatment options vary widely, the findings demonstrate the potential for using brain scans prior to treatment to tailor psychiatric care. "The study demonstrates the potential of functional brain imaging to predict how a patient will respond to treatment," said lead investigator Dr. Sanjaya Saxena, director of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute's OCD Research Program and associate professor-in-residence of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine. "Pretreatment brain scans hold promise for accelerating the sometimes painstaking process of identifying the best treatment for an individual patient and speeding development of new interventions."

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Brain imaging
Link ID: 3539 - Posted: 03.11.2003

By Ann Quigley, Contributing Writer, Health Behavior News Service A portion of the brain that helps us respond to odors and process emotions may be malfunctioning in severely depressed individuals, say researchers who measured the brain activity of individuals presented with smells like roses and rotten butter. Because odors and emotions are processed in similar brain structures, study of the olfactory system may increase our understanding of the physiological underpinnings of depression, according to the study. Previous studies have attempted to pinpoint exactly what processes in depressed individuals' brains lead to their tendency to remember negative memories over positive ones, and to have a sense of hopelessness regarding the future. Some studies have measured brain responses to emotionally charged images or words, but these methods involve a certain amount of decoding, as individuals can respond to such images differently.

Keyword: Depression; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 3538 - Posted: 03.11.2003

Don't be too quick to blame your diet, new research suggests ST. LOUIS - Lack of exercise - and not diet - causes obesity and diabetes among those who are predisposed to the conditions, suggests new research on wild baboons by Saint Louis University geriatricians published this month in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. In addition, researchers discovered that obese animals were NOT the ones with the highest cholesterol levels, suggesting cholesterol problems and obesity are triggered by different mechanisms. "Figuratively speaking, if humans don't exercise, some are likely to become obese and as fat as baboons. You're genetically predisposed or you're not," says William A. Banks, M.D., professor of geriatrics in the department of internal medicine and professor of pharmacological and physiological science at Saint Louis University School of Medicine. "Our research suggests some people get obese by not spending all the calories they are taking in rather than taking in a large number of calories."

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 3537 - Posted: 03.11.2003

Mutations in a particular gene may be the cause of a devastating condition that leads to babies being born without eyes. Bilateral Anophthalmia is rare, affecting approximately one in every 100,000 births. It happens when the foetus simply does not develop eyes in the normal way during the first 28 days of pregnancy. The babies are born with empty eye sockets, and are often fitted with prosthetic eyes to allow normal facial development. Researchers from the Human Genetics Unit in Edinburgh say that at least some cases may have their roots in a mutation of a gene called SOX2. Their research, published in the journal Nature Genetics, will, say the scientists, reassure parents who fear that the blindness could have been their fault. (C) BBC

Keyword: Vision; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 3536 - Posted: 03.10.2003

Children who Identify with Aggressive TV Characters and Perceive the Violence to be Realistic are Most at Risk for Later Aggression WASHINGTON - Children's viewing of violent TV shows, their identification with aggressive same-sex TV characters, and their perceptions that TV violence is realistic are all linked to later aggression as young adults, for both males and females. That is the conclusion of a 15-year longitudinal study of 329 youth published in the March issue of Developmental Psychology, a journal of the American Psychological Association (APA). These findings hold true for any child from any family, regardless of the child's initial aggression levels, their intellectual capabilities, their social status as measured by their parents' education or occupation, their parents' aggressiveness, or the mother's and father's parenting style. Psychologists L. Rowell Huesmann, Ph.D., Jessica Moise-Titus, Ph.D., Cheryl-Lynn Podolski, M.A., and Leonard D. Eron, Ph.D., of the University of Michigan undertook the study as a follow-up of a 1977 longitudinal study of 557 children, ages 6 - 10, growing up in the Chicago area. In that study, children identified which violent TV shows they watched most, whether they identified with the aggressive characters and whether they thought the violent situations were realistic. Some examples of shows rated as very violent were Starsky and Hutch, The Six Million Dollar Man and Roadrunner cartoons. The current study re-surveyed 329 of the original boys and girls, now in their early 20s. The participants asked about their favorite TV programs as adults and about their aggressive behaviors. The participants' spouses or friends were also interviewed and were asked to rate the participant's frequency of engaging in aggressive behavior. The researchers also obtained data on the participants from state archives, which included criminal conviction records and moving traffic violations. © 2003 American Psychological Association

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 3535 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Aficionados may not only treat their automobiles as if they are people, but it now appears that they recognize their cars with the special part of the brain that is also used to identify faces. And, when they try to identify cars and faces at the same time, they are likely to experience a kind of perceptual traffic jam. Those are some of the implications of research conducted at Vanderbilt University and the University of Colorado at Boulder. Researchers there compared how the brains of auto experts and novices process pictures of cars and faces. They found that viewing cars elicits signals from the brains of car experts that are just like the signals evoked by viewing faces in other brains. Moreover, the experts' skill interfered with their ability to identify faces when they were forced to process cars and faces simultaneously. The findings, reported online on March 10 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, directly challenge the widely held view that a small, specialized area in the brain is specially hardwired to recognize faces. When confronted with a novel object, people use different parts of the brain to identify it by breaking it down into pieces. By contrast, the special facial recognition area appears to recognize faces holistically, all at one time, and does so more quickly than the piecemeal approach.

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 3534 - Posted: 06.24.2010

WHO? Stanford's Felix Bloch and Harvard's Edward Mills Purcell shared the 1952 Nobel Prize in physics "for their development of new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements and discoveries in connections therewith." WHAT? Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) concerns atomic nuclei, which carry positive charges. Many nuclei spin on their axes and generate magnetic fields, like billions of tiny bar magnets. Slightly more than half of these nuclear magnets aim their north-seeking poles toward magnetic north (the so-called low-energy state), but the rest point in the opposite direction (high energy). If a sample is placed in a relatively strong magnetic field at a temperature above absolute zero, each spinning nucleus will wobble around its axis like a top that's been pushed sideways. The rate of this wobble is much lower than that of the spin, which can be billions of revolutions per second. The wobble, called precession, is random among spinning nuclei--unless the sample receives a precise pulse of radio frequency (RF) energy. ©2003, The Scientist Inc.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 3533 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Smoking-related lung disease can lead to profound changes in the way the brain works, researchers have found. It appears that the brain changes the way it functions in response to a poor oxygen supply. But it also has the ability to switch back again once oxygen levels rise in the blood. It has long been known that smoking causes emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a common disorder in which lung damage over a long period of time impairs the flow of air in and out of the lungs. This causes breathlessness and reduces the capacity to replace carbon dioxide in the blood with new supplies of oxygen. Doctors at the Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust and Imperial College London have found that this imbalance can lead to biochemical changes in the brain during the later stages of lung disease. (C) BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 3532 - Posted: 03.08.2003

Jane Elliott, BBC News Online Health Staff When Catherine Crossin started suffering from fever, aching and exhaustion she thought she just had a bad case of flu. She took to her bed and waited for the illness to pass. Medics agreed it was probably flu, but soon her condition deteriorated, leaving her paralysed and unable to move even her little finger. She was so ill she needed 11 weeks in hospital to recover. "I couldn't bear anyone to touch me, I was so sensitive. My skin felt as if it was on fire." Her body became badly swollen and she was unable to move her muscles. For a while everyone was in the dark about Mrs Crossin's disease and she had a barrage of tests. "I had always been so healthy. I had never had colds and now I could not do anything," she said. Then doctors found she had a very serious case of polymyositis. Myositis is a relatively uncommon condition, which only affects about five new cases a year for every million people, leaving their muscles badly inflamed. (C) BBC

Keyword: Muscles; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 3531 - Posted: 03.08.2003

By GINIA BELLAFANTE IN her 23 years as a specialist in eating disorders, Dr. Margo Maine has received countless telephone calls from women worried that their teenage daughters might be dieting into a danger zone. But several years ago, Dr. Maine, a psychologist who runs an eating-disorders treatment program with a partner in West Hartford, Conn., noticed a shift in the telephone inquiries. "Increasingly, our calls began to include a significant number of adults seeking help not for their children but for themselves," Dr. Maine said. Some of those callers — women in their late 40's and early 50's — were relapsing after overcoming eating disorders in their youth, and others were experiencing them for the first time. Naomi Burton Isaacs, a public relations executive in New York, had been obsessed about her weight most of her life, she said, but it was only at age 45 that her dieting grew extreme and she developed an addiction to laxatives. She swallowed 25 pills a day. Ms. Burton Isaacs, who is 5-foot-9, withered to 105 pounds. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 3530 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Genetically Altered Rodents Teach Scientists About Disorder -- More than two million people in the United States have schizophrenia, yet the disorder remains a medical mystery. Scientists don't know precisely what causes some brains to produce hallucinations, delusions and disordered thinking. One reason it's particularly hard to study schizophrenia is that it doesn't seem to occur in animals. But as NPR's Jon Hamilton reports, a small group of scientists at the National Institutes of Health are using genetic engineering to reproduce some of the symptoms of schizophrenia -- in mice. At the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., one laboratory, run by Dr. Jacqueline Crawley, is home to hundreds of mice that have been genetically altered to mimic the symptoms of people with all kinds of mental problems. Some act anxious -- they won't explore exposed areas. Others show a symptom associated with depression -- they give up quickly when placed in stressful situations. But perhaps the most intriguing mouse models are those used to study schizophrenia. Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), explains why. Copyright 2003 NPR

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 3529 - Posted: 03.08.2003

Studying mice, scientists from Johns Hopkins have successfully prevented a molecular event in brain cells that they've found is required for storing spatial memories. Unlike regular mice, the engineered rodents quickly forgot where to find a resting place in a pool of water, the researchers report in the March 7 issue of the journal Cell. The experiments are believed to be the first to prove that subtly altering the chemistry of a certain protein can profoundly affect a brain cell's ability to respond to external stimulation, a process called neuronal plasticity, long thought to underlie learning and memory. By genetically altering part of a receptor that binds glutamate -- the most important excitatory chemical in the brain -- the scientists created a version of the protein that could not be modified by adding phosphate groups. In their experiments, preventing phosphorylation of the receptor kept it from responding normally to external stimulation in the lab and limited how long animals could store new memories.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 3528 - Posted: 03.08.2003

American Heart Association meeting report MIAMI, - Cigarette smoking significantly increases the risk of erectile dysfunction, according to a study reported today at the American Heart Association's 43rd Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention. Men who smoked more than 20 cigarettes daily had 60 percent higher risk of erectile dysfunction, compared to men who never smoked. The data showed a dose-related impact of smoking: the risk of erectile dysfunction was lower in men who smoked fewer cigarettes, but still increased compared to non-smokers. The effect of smoking remained significant after considering other factors known to affect erectile function such as age, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, diabetes and body mass index (BMI).

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 3527 - Posted: 03.08.2003

Research indicates that astrocytes may play key role in build-up, degradation of Alzheimer’s proteins New York, NY – – A new study from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons (P&S) and Stanford University suggests that the malfunctioning of brain cells called astrocytes may be behind the accumulation of amyloid protein in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s disease, most researchers believe, is caused when small peptides called beta-amyloid accumulate in the brain. Everyone makes these peptides at all times during their life, but in people with Alzheimer’s, either too much is made or too little is degraded or both. The resulting excess of peptides aggregate together in plaques. Beta-amyloid plaques then lead to death of neurons and dementia. Researchers have known that microglia cells in the brain, which surround the plaques, can ingest and destroy the plaque’s proteins in cell culture, so they’ve been trying to stimulate the cells to do so in vivo. But the role of other cells that surround the plaques, the astrocytes, hasn’t been clear. The new findings show that normal astrocytes can also degrade plaque proteins, suggesting that treatments to boost astrocyte activity in Alzheimer’s disease may be beneficial. The study is published in the advanced online edition of Nature Medicine and will be featured in the April issue of the publication.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Glia
Link ID: 3526 - Posted: 06.24.2010

People with severe depression may be better off having electric shock therapy than taking medication, a study suggests. Researchers at Oxford University say there is strong evidence that the controversial treatment may be more effective than drugs. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) has been used by psychiatrists since the 1930s. However, some groups have criticised its use saying there is little evidence it works and not enough is known about its long-term effects. There has also been criticism of the fact that the therapy is often used on patients who are unable to give their consent. ECT involves placing electrodes on the temples, on one or both sides of the patient's head, and delivering a small electrical current. This aims to shock the brain and to restore its natural chemical balance. Professor John Geddes and colleagues at Oxford University reviewed more than 73 trials of ECT carried out over the past 40 years. (C) BBC

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 3525 - Posted: 03.07.2003

UCSF scientists have identified for the first time a molecule that directs neurons to form connections with each other during an animal's early development – creating synapses essential to all behavior. The molecule may be one of only a few "matchmaker" proteins that instruct one type of neuron to form a synapse with another type, essentially wiring up the body during embryological development, the researchers say. Such molecules have been sought for decades, but this is the first discovered in a living animal. The matchmaker protein, known as SYG-1, was discovered in studies of egg-laying behavior in the roundworm C. elegans. It is a member of a large family of proteins known as the immunoglobulin superfamily, and is closely related to proteins in fruit flies, mice and humans. The related molecules are always found where two different types of cells form a close connection, and SYG-1 probably receives a signal to form a synapse from the animal's egg-laying tissue, the scientists report.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 3524 - Posted: 06.24.2010

— Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researches and their colleagues have discovered that escort molecules are required to usher pheromone receptors to the surface of sensory neurons where they are needed to translate chemical cues. In an interesting twist, the researchers found that the escort molecules belong to a family of proteins, called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which plays an important role in the immune system. The researchers speculate that in addition to being escort molecules, the MHC proteins might actively modulate an animal's response to pheromones. Modulation of pheromone activity might aid in the recognition of other animals. The studies in mice add “a novel and unexpected layer of complexity to the process of pheromone detection,” the researchers wrote in an article published in the March 7, 2003, issue of the journal Cell. The article was published online on March 4, 2003. The findings also suggest that, similarly, escort molecules, although of a different kind, may be important in smell and taste receptors. ©2003 Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 3523 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Therapy looks best yet to tackle brain disease. HELEN PEARSON The possibility of using antibodies to treat variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) receives a boost this week, with the first promising results from an animal trial. The lethal brain condition - which is a human version of mad cow disease - occurs when healthy proteins called prions become twisted and clump together. Probably caught from eating infected beef, there is currently no known cure for the condition. A team of London researchers injected mice with antibodies that latch onto prions. The animals, who had another form of prion disease called scrapie, stayed healthy for at least two years, rather than dying by the time they reached seven months1. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 3522 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The brain is constantly compromising as it pieces together information, often ignoring or downplaying small visual changes in the world that do not fit with its expectations. This process - far from being flawed - shows that the brain functions optimally, say University of Toronto researchers. "Our brains are very well designed," says Dr. Douglas Tweed, physiology professor at U of T and senior author on a paper in the March 6 issue of Nature. "The brain takes in raw data from its surroundings through sensors and interprets it, rejecting interpretations that it considers unlikely. The brain gauges the probabilities of things in real life and uses these estimates to guide our perceptions. But sometimes we can be fooled by bizarre things. "This shouldn't be seen as a flaw in the system, however," Tweed argues. "This is the way the brain works. Sensors are always flawed; they simply do not provide enough information for us to reconstruct our world. The brain must use prior knowledge to interpret our surroundings and we found that it seems to do this optimally."

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 3521 - Posted: 03.06.2003