By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS PHILADELPHIA, (AP) — Ephedra, an herb found in weight-loss and bodybuilding supplements, is unsafe even when taken in recommended doses and should be restricted, doctors plan to report on Tuesday. American poison control centers reported 1,178 adverse reactions to ephedra dietary supplements in 2001, said the study, which is to be posted on The Annals of Internal Medicine's Web site and published in the journal next month. Ephedra accounted for 64 percent of all adverse reactions involving herbs, even though it is found in fewer than 1 percent of all herbal products sold. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 3399 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By DANIEL GOLEMAN All too many years ago, while I was still a psychology graduate student, I ran an experiment to assess how well meditation might work as an antidote to stress. My professors were skeptical, my measures were weak, and my subjects were mainly college sophomores. Not surprisingly, my results were inconclusive. But today I feel vindicated. To be sure, over the years there have been scores of studies that have looked at meditation, some suggesting its powers to alleviate the adverse effects of stress. But only last month did what I see as a definitive study confirm my once-shaky hypothesis, by revealing the brain mechanism that may account for meditation's singular ability to soothe. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 3398 - Posted: 02.04.2003

An inability to quickly bring down high levels of sugar in the blood is associated with poor memory and may help explain some of the memory loss that occurs as we age, according to a new study by NYU School of Medicine researchers. The study raises the possibility that exercise and weight loss, which help control blood sugar levels, may be able to reverse some of the memory loss that accompanies aging. The study, published the first week of February in the online edition of the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to show an association between the size of the hippocampus, a key brain structure for learning and memory, and the ability to control blood sugar levels in the body, according to the researchers. The study assessed non-diabetic middle-aged and elderly people, some of whom had an impaired ability to use sugar (glucose) effectively. Those with impaired glucose tolerance (a pre-diabetic condition characterized by higher than normal blood sugar levels) had a smaller hippocampus and scored worse on tests for recent memory.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Obesity
Link ID: 3397 - Posted: 02.04.2003

By JAMES HAGENGRUBER Of The Gazette Staff It could be a backcountry fall from a horse, a rough tumble on a distant ski slope or a car wreck on a remote stretch of Eastern Montana highway. Maybe the head injury doesn't seem so bad at first. But maybe a small blood vessel has been ruptured. The skull fills with blood - even a few extra spoonfuls - and the brain is squeezed. The victim drifts into a coma. By the time the person makes it to a Billings brain surgeon, it's too late. This happens too often, said Dr. John Schneider a brain surgeon with the Northern Rockies Brain and Spine Center in Billings. Copyright © The Billings Gazette,

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 3396 - Posted: 06.24.2010

LAURAN NEERGAARD Associated Press WASHINGTON - Scientists have found yet another reason to slim down: The high blood sugar so common among the overweight may contribute to the fogged memory of old age. A small study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that middle-aged and elderly people with high blood sugar actually had a smaller hippocampus, the brain region so crucial for recent memory. The good news: If the findings are confirmed, simple diet and exercise could help many people protect their brains. Maybe the threat of memory loss will provide the final push for aging baby boomers to take those steps, said lead researcher Dr. Antonio Convit of New York University.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Obesity
Link ID: 3395 - Posted: 02.04.2003

The discovery of genes that control the development of muscles in the fruit fly could help unravel the secrets of a devasting human disease. Cachexia is a severe wasting disorder normally linked to advanced cancer, Aids and a variety of chronic infections. It causes not just the loss of fat, but also of bone and muscle, and happens regardless of the amount the patient manages to eat. The patient's metabolism speeds up, burning more calories. The condition further robs patients of the ability to fight the disease which triggered the cachexia. It is believed that chemicals called cytokines released by the body in response to the underlying illness are responsible for the wasting illness. (C) BBC

Keyword: Muscles; Obesity
Link ID: 3394 - Posted: 02.03.2003

In a first-of-its-kind collaboration, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) has joined forces with three national African American Women's organizations in a year-long program to reduce the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) among African American infants. The leadership and members of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, the Women in the NAACP, and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., will work with the NICHD to conduct SIDS risk reduction training and outreach activities in communities around the country. Each organization will hold a regional summit meeting to launch its activity. At the summits, members of the organizations and community leaders will be equipped with educational techniques, strategies, and promotional materials to conduct outreach activities on reducing infants' risk for SIDS. The National Coalition of 100 Black Women will sponsor the first of the three summits on January 31 and February 1 at the Kellogg Conference Center, Tuskegee University, in Tuskegee, Alabama. The Women of the NAACP will conduct the second summit in Los Angeles, California. on March 14-15. The Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. will sponsor the third summit in Detroit, Michigan on May 30-31.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 3393 - Posted: 02.03.2003

New approaches and technologies for drug discovery help reveal disease mechanisms for treating neurological disorders Tanuja Koppal, PhD Senior Editor The working of a human brain—a complex, fascinating organ—has continued to baffle scientists for centuries. Understanding a functioning, healthy brain is challenging enough but studying disease mechanisms to treat various neurological disorders adds a whole new layer of complexity to the problem. Neurological disorders, diseases afflicting the central nervous system (CNS) and the peripheral nervous system, affect a large population worldwide. These disorders broadly cover three main areas: psychiatric disorders, neurological diseases and conditions like pain and insomnia. Psychiatric disorders include anxiety, depression, schizophrenia and others. Neurological disorders include Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD), multiple sclerosis, ischemic stroke, and spinal cord injury, to name a few. There exists a large unmet medical need for the treatment of neurological conditions and the drugs currently available on the market are not very effective. “Drugs entering the neurological market can impact not only the quality of life and improve patient health, but also have huge commercial opportunities that are sure to bring in revenues in the $5 billion to 10 billion range,” says Franz Hefti, PhD, senior vice president at Merck and head of the Merck Neuroscience Research Laboratory, San Diego. Because there exists an enormous potential for developing blockbuster drugs in this market, many companies are actively involved in the search to find effective cures. “Thirty percent of basic research done worldwide at Merck focuses on neuroscience, and this number is up 9% from 2000,” says Hefti.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 3392 - Posted: 06.24.2010

WASHINGTON,(AP) Scientists working with mice have found that a compound used to fight severe blood infections may be useful in preventing stroke damage. Activated protein C was found to reduce the likelihood that brain cells would self-destruct after a stroke, the researchers report in Monday's online issue of the journal Nature Medicine. Strokes occur when the blood supply is cut off to part of the brain, by a blood clot for example. Some cells die right away; others are damaged and self-destruct later in a process called apoptosis. ©MMIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc.

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 3391 - Posted: 06.24.2010

University Counseling Center Study Shows More Students Seeking Help for Depression, Thoughts of Suicide and Sexual Assault WASHINGTON - College students frequently have more complex problems today than they did over a decade ago, including both the typical or expected college student problems -- difficulties in relationships and developmental issues -- as well as the more severe problems, such as depression, sexual assault and thoughts of suicide. That is the finding of a study involving 13,257 students seeking help at a large Midwestern university counseling center over a 13-year period. Some of these increases were dramatic. The number of students seen each year with depression doubled, while the number of suicidal students tripled and the number of students seen after a sexual assault quadrupled. The findings are reported on in the February issue of Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, a journal of the American Psychological Association (APA). © 2003 American Psychological Association

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 3390 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BARBARA SMUTS While studying wild baboons in Kenya, I once stumbled upon an infant baboon huddled in the corner of a cage at the local research station. A colleague had rescued him after his mother was strangled by a poacher's snare. Although he was kept in a warm, dry spot and fed milk from an eyedropper, within a few hours his eyes had glazed over; he was cold to the touch and seemed barely alive. We concluded he was beyond help. Reluctant to let him die alone, I took his tiny body to bed with me. A few hours later I was awakened by a bright-eyed infant bouncing on my stomach. My colleague pronounced a miracle. ''No,'' Harry Harlow would have said, ''he just needed a little contact comfort.'' The phrase ''contact comfort'' was made famous through Harlow's experiments with baby rhesus monkeys at the University of Wisconsin in the 1950's and 60's. In her well-researched account of Harlow's life and work, ''Love at Goon Park,'' Deborah Blum describes how Harlow removed newborn infants from their mothers and housed them with surrogate mothers, some made of terry cloth and some of wire. When exposed to a moving toy or a strange room, babies with cloth mothers rushed to them, buried their faces in the soft fabric and relaxed. Their peers, with only wire mothers, shook in terror against the wall. Left alone for months with only wire mothers, they pined away, staring at the world with lifeless eyes, like my orphaned baboon. The series of Harlow's experiments that followed revolutionized psychology in the middle of the 20th century. Until then, as Blum vividly documents, the dominant thinking in psychology was very different. An extreme position, made popular by psychologists like John Watson, held that young children should never be caressed, held or physically comforted by parents. Watson and later behaviorists like B. F. Skinner claimed that a baby reaching for Mom is simply reflecting an association between Mom and food. Early psychologists said that mothers who responded warmly to a baby's cries would produce excessively dependent adults, unable to function in American society. Despite the absence of supporting evidence, this view profoundly influenced not only parental behavior but national institutions like orphanages, which minimized contact between caregivers and children, and hospitals, which denied parents the opportunity to comfort their sick and frightened children. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 3389 - Posted: 02.02.2003

By CHIP BROWN It takes a while to figure out why Dr. Mark Mahowald's grainy sleep-lab videos are so spooky. One immediate reason is the phenomena on the footage -- a class of disorders called ''parasomnias,'' which are defined as unwanted and involuntary behaviors during sleep and are by definition occult, because they appear when most people are unable to witness them. But even the scientists who stay up late by profession never quite get used to what they see. Mahowald, a neurology professor at the University of Minnesota and director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center, likes to say to his students, ''We study the strange and the beautiful.'' To judge from the tapes, that's the understatement of the semester. Here's a bearded elder man bolting up at 4:30 a.m. He clutches his left leg, waves his right arm and brays at the top of his lungs -- "HO! HO! HO!" -- dementedly jolly cries that also evoke something bestial and wounded. In the morning he remembers nothing of this ''confusional arousal'' triggered by obstructive sleep apnea, a condition in which a constriction of the throat causes you to gasp for breath. Inevitably the man came to be known at the lab as Santa Claus. Mahowald said that when the patient saw himself on tape he was ''horrified'' but finally understood why he'd been kicked out of so many hotels. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 3388 - Posted: 02.02.2003

By Shari Roan Health Correspondent High-tech medicine can now save the lives of people injured in accidents that a generation ago would have proved fatal. But it still can do little to heal a severe brain injury. "We've looked at dozens of drugs and treatments over the years, and we've never found one that's effective," said Dr. Kenneth Smith, director of neurosurgery at St. Louis University. "We're kind of stuck." So Smith and other researchers are trying a different approach. As part of a new, unusual study, they will put people with severe blunt-force brain injuries in a state of hypothermia, lowering body temperature to as low as 93 degrees. Patients will spend 48 hours wrapped in cooling blankets before being gradually warmed to the standard 98.6 degrees. Copyright © 2003, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 3387 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Can bone marrow seed the brain with fresh neurons? BY EMILY SOHN The healing promise of stem cells is one of medicine's bright hopes. But the field needs some healing itself. It is beset by controversy because stem cells able to develop into every kind of tissue come from discarded embryos. What if adults had their own reserves of universal cells? Now comes the latest hint that they do: evidence that stem cells from adult bone marrow can turn into brain cells. If it holds up, the finding might lead to new techniques for treating brain injury and diseases like Alzheimer's, without the ethical baggage of embryo cells. But the study has also inflamed a debate over what adult stem cells can and cannot do. In test tubes, mice, and even some human studies, bone marrow stem cells have seemed to turn into tissues including liver, heart, skin, and lung, although other groups have often failed to replicate the findings. Two years ago, researchers also showed that in mice, marrow stem cells could become brain cells. Copyright © 2003 U.S. News & World Report

Keyword: Regeneration; Stem Cells
Link ID: 3386 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition Transplants of fetal eye tissue seem to have improved the vision of two out of four people with a degenerative eye disease. It is too early to be sure the improvements are real and lasting, but on the strength of the results the team pioneering the surgery has asked regulators for permission to carry out further operations. Before the experimental surgery on her left eye a year ago, Elisabeth Bryant, who is 63, could barely see anything with it. "Now I can see people's eyes, noses and mouths when they're sitting across the room from me." Like the other patients in the trial, she has advanced retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary disease that causes degeneration of the retina. It affects around one in 3500 people in Western countries. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Stem Cells
Link ID: 3385 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jessica Gorman Sharks possess uncanny skill at tracking down prey, but it's unclear how the animals sense their surroundings so acutely. New studies suggest that a clear jelly under a shark's skin keeps the animal informed about minute changes in seawater temperature that may serve as signposts to feeding grounds. Brandon R. Brown, a physicist at the University of San Francisco, set out to characterize this mysterious gel. The salty brew of glycoproteins fills hundreds of electrosensory canals, called ampullae, that connect skin pores to subsurface nerve cells in sharks, skates, and rays. After collecting gel from black-tip reef sharks and white sharks that had recently died at aquariums, Brown placed each sample in a tube and warmed one end. He then measured any voltage produced by the temperature difference along the gel's length. To his surprise, Brown found that a variation as small as 1°C would produce a voltage as large as 300 microvolts. From these data, reported in the Jan. 30 Nature, he concluded that a temperature change in seawater of less than a thousandth of a degree Celsius would induce a voltage in the gel filling the ampullae large enough for the shark to detect. Copyright ©2003 Science Service.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 3384 - Posted: 06.24.2010

An international collaboration of scientists, led by Dr. Guillermo Oliver at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital (Memphis, TN) has identified a single gene, called Six3, as a crucial factor in the normal development of the vertebrate forebrain -- the part of the brain that is responsible for smell, memory storage, intelligence, and vision, as well as the regulation of body temperature, breathing, and sleep. Published in the February 1 issue of Genes & Development, this discovery also sheds light on a possible mechanistic basis for the human congenital brain defect, holoprosencephaly. Holoprosencephaly (HPE) is a brain malformation characterized by the failure of the forebrain to divide into hemispheres during development. While it is estimated that HPE affects 1 in 5,000-10,000 live births, the real incidence may by as high as 1 in 200-250 fetuses, owing to the high rates of spontaneous abortion of those severely affected. Although not the sole culprit, mutations in the Six3 gene can cause HPE. Dr. Oliver and colleagues are helping to understand why.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 3383 - Posted: 02.01.2003

St. Louis, – A team of researchers from the University of Virginia Health System and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has found that drugs commonly used to anesthetize children can cause brain damage and long-term learning and memory disturbances in infant rats. The researchers report their findings in the Feb. 1 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. "We frequently perform surgical procedures on children, including premature infants, and those procedures have become increasingly more complex and take longer to perform," says the study's lead author Vesna Jevtovic-Todorovic, M.D., associate professor of anesthesiology at the University of Virginia Health System. "That means many pediatric patients are being exposed to anesthetic drugs more frequently and for longer periods of time. Our results would suggest that might be problematic." Previously, Jevtovic-Todorovic was at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, where the rest of the research team is located. The investigators anesthetized 7-day-old rats with a combination of three drugs -- midazolam, nitrous oxide and isoflurane -- commonly used in pediatric surgery.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 3382 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Millions of middle-aged Britons could soon be able to throw away their reading glasses. A new treatment, which reverses the damage caused to the eyes by ageing, has now become available in this country. The painless procedure, called conductive keratoplasty (CK), uses radio waves to reshape the eye without surgery. The treatment lasts just five minutes and costs between £1,000 and £1,500. Doctors believe it could eclipse laser correction treatment in terms of popularity. An estimated 18 million Britons need glasses to help them to read as they become long-sighted with advancing age. (C) BBC

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 3381 - Posted: 01.31.2003

The fossil of an early human (hominid) from southern Africa is raising fresh questions about our origins. Remains from the Sterkfontein Caves near Johannesburg suggest our ancestors were less chimp-like than we thought. The revelation follows the discovery of missing bones from a 3.5 million-year-old skeleton found in 1998. Fragments of pelvis, upper leg, ribs and backbone have recently been dug out of the rock, allowing scientists to piece together its gait. The anatomy of the hominid, a member of the genus Australopithecus, raises some interesting questions. Its bone structure shows it did not walk like modern chimps, using the knuckles of its hands. It probably walked on two legs when it was on the ground but spent much of the time climbing trees, says Dr Ron Clarke, of the University of the Witwatersrand, who discovered the fossil. (C) BBC

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 3380 - Posted: 01.31.2003