By SANDRA BLAKESLEE Autism is about 10 times as prevalent today as it was in the 1980's, according to the country's largest study ever on the problem. Some of the increase is the result of widened definitions of the disorder, researchers say, but the explanation for the rest of the increase is unknown. The study, conducted in metropolitan Atlanta in 1996, found that 3.4 in every 1,000 children ages 3 to 10 had mild to severe autism that year. In the late 1980's, 4 to 5 in every 10,000 children were thought to be afflicted. The higher rate, described in today's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, is in line with rates found in recent smaller studies in the United States and abroad in which the autism prevalence was 4 to 6 children in 1,000. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 3239 - Posted: 01.01.2003

By ERIC NAGOURNEY Researchers say they have direct evidence that the mood changes many people experience when winter comes and the days grow shorter have a physiological basis in the brain. Writing in a recent issue of The Lancet, researchers from the Baker Heart Research Institute in Australia say that concentrations of a chemical messenger in the brain rise and fall in relation to the amount of sunlight. The chemical, serotonin, has been linked to depression. The findings, the researchers say, demonstrate the importance of serotonin in seasonal affective disorder, sometimes simply called the winter blues. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 3238 - Posted: 12.31.2002

about the length of time it takes their wife to get ready, and then decide to either clean some shoes, cut their nails or water the lawn the moment the wife in question gets to the front door? This behaviour evolved in the earliest period of human cooperative hunting. Competing with big animals such as bears and lions, and hunting dangerous prey like mammoths, took a terrible toll on human life. This taken together with a lower average birth weight for baby boys led to a higher level of infant mortality among males, creating a serious gender imbalance that threatened the species. It was vital to preserve the lives of adult breeding males, so they took to leaving the cave behind the females, so that anything nasty outside the cave would get the females first. However, males needed to get out there early in the morning - after all, it's the early hunter that catches the mammoth - so they would nag at the females to get going and then hang about looking busy until the females had safely defused any lurking danger, before setting off themselves. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 3237 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D. In the course of the last year, the woman lost her husband to cancer and then her job. But she did not come to my office as a patient; she sought advice about her teenage son who was having trouble dealing with his father's death. Despite crushing loss and stress, she was not at all depressed — sad, yes, but still upbeat. I found myself stunned by her resilience. What accounted for her ability to weather such sorrow with buoyant optimism? So I asked her directly. "All my life," she recalled recently, "I've been happy for no good reason. It's just my nature, I guess." But it was more than that. She was a happy extrovert, full of energy and enthusiasm who was indefatigably sociable. And she could get by with five or six hours of sleep each night. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 3236 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JOHN HORGAN When I woke this morning, I stared at the ceiling above my bed and wondered: to what extent will my rising really be an exercise of my free will? Let's say I got up right . . . now. Would my subjective decision be the cause? Or would computations unfolding in a subconscious neural netherworld actually set off the muscular twitches that slide me out of the bed, quietly, so as not to wake my wife, and propel me toward the door? One of the risks of science journalism is that occasionally you encounter research that threatens something you cherish. Free will is something I cherish. I can live with the idea of science killing off God. But free will? That's going too far. And yet a couple of books I've been reading lately have left me brooding over the possibility that free will is as much a myth as divine justice. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 3235 - Posted: 12.31.2002

Mouth's muscle could be a route for infection. HELEN PEARSON Tongue meat could carry a risk of infection from mad cow disease, a new report suggests1. Tongue could contain high levels of the prion protein thought to cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, say Richard Bessen and his colleagues. Prions injected into hamster brains travelled to the tongue and accumulated to relatively high levels, the team found. This doesn't prove that cows with BSE have prion-loaded tongues, or that eating these tongues could cause human disease, says Bessen, who works at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. But guidelines on the meat allowed into the food-chain should be re-evaluated, he says. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2002

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 3234 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Susan FitzGerald Knight Ridder Newspapers PHILADELPHIA - Dr. D. Holmes Morton was new to Lancaster County when he was asked to come see a baby born to an Amish family. The child had a very small head, but looked surprisingly normal in every other way. "I could tell by examining the baby it was not the kind of problem that would get better," Morton said. Since that visit in 1989, Morton has seen about 20 Amish babies with microcephaly, with brains so underdeveloped that there is no chance for survival beyond the first few months. Copyright © 2002 Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services -

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 3233 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Exposure to anaesthetic gases at work could triple the risk of developing multiple sclerosis, researchers claim. A small study of nurse anaesthetists in Sweden made the link. Researchers say it highlights the risks associated with the commonly used anaesthetic gases. But MS and anaesthetic experts warn the finding is not backed up by other studies. Anaesthetic gases are organic solvents. Previous research suggested exposure to the solvents doubled the risk of developing multiple sclerosis (MS). Eighty-three nurses with MS, who had responded to appeals in magazines published by the Swedish Nurse Union and the Neurological Patients' Association in Sweden, were surveyed. (C) BBC

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 3232 - Posted: 12.24.2002

By DAVID TULLER In 1989, when a government report suggested that gay teenagers were at high risk for suicide attempts, lesbian and gay rights advocates welcomed the finding as long overdue. They said the report, one of the first to address the health of gay youth, offered compelling evidence of what they had maintained for years — that prejudice had damaged gay adolescents' psychological well-being. Indeed, dozens of studies in the past several years have strengthened that conviction. Gay teenagers, researchers say, are much more likely than their heterosexual peers not only to attempt suicide but to suffer from depression, eating disorders, alcohol and drug abuse, violence-related injuries, and infection with H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Depression
Link ID: 3231 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LINDA VILLAROSA Jillian Polis, a second-year medical student at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, admits that she had little if any experience with substance abuse. Raised in a suburb of Denver, she learned about drugs from popular culture. "I thought the only people who got addicted were those who were wealthy with nothing to do or the urban poor," said Ms. Polis, 23. "I got those images from movies like `Traffic' since there was little or no addiction that I knew of growing up.' " Jonathan Austrian, Ms. Polis's classmate at Cornell, said that he thought people used drugs simply to have a good time, and that he didn't know anyone who had been addicted. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Dyslexia
Link ID: 3230 - Posted: 12.24.2002

By MARY DUENWALD A rhesus monkey, only 4 months old, has been pried from the shoulders of its sedated mother and let into a small steel cage. Within minutes the fright in its little brown eyes softens into curiosity, and stepping tentatively, the monkey makes its way across the cage. But when a man with a white hood over his head strides in and stops two feet away, the baby freezes. It pulls its body close to the bars and quietly looks the other way, appearing to ignore the man until, two minutes later, he leaves. "This is a very inhibited response," says Dr. Judy Cameron, a neurobiologist and the director of the University of Pittsburgh's primate laboratory, watching the monkey through an opening in a curtain. "Obviously, the intruder caused this animal a great deal of anxiety." Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 3229 - Posted: 12.24.2002

By MARK DERR MIAMI, — When bomb-sniffing dogs indicated the presence of explosives last summer in the cars of three medical students bound for Miami, the authorities detained the men and closed a major thoroughfare across South Florida. No trace of explosives was found in their cars. Now, a number of scientists and trainers are expressing concern that such mistakes could become more common as thousands of new canine detectives are deployed across the country. Experts on explosives detection say that when dogs' handlers are excited and stressed, the dogs may overreact and falsely suggest that explosives are present when they are not. False alerts are better than missing a live bomb, they say, but it is better for the dogs to be accurate. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 3228 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NATALIE ANGIER In a world overwhelmed by religious conflict, where no faith seems secure from the wrath of competing creeds, humanity's religious impulse can look like a decidedly mixed blessing, a source of violent intolerance as much as a prescription for upstanding and altruistic behavior. How can a force that transforms convicted murderers into placid samaritans, and that has given the world Handel's "Messiah," the mosaics of Ravenna and Borobudur Temple also have spawned the Salem witch hunts, Osama bin Laden and columnists who snarl that America should invade Muslim countries, "kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity"? What sort of Jekyll-and-Hydra-headed beast is this thing called religious faith? In the view of Dr. David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University in upstate New York, a very natural and very powerful beast indeed, and one that helps explain humanity's rise to global dominance. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 3227 - Posted: 12.24.2002

Johns Hopkins School of Medicine scientists have shown for the first time that primitive fat cells must copy themselves at least twice before they can mature into full-fledged fat-storing cells. The finding, published online the week of Dec. 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may help provide new targets for understanding and treating obesity. The finding also helps explain how the body ensures that it can always store fat, a key to surviving when food is scarce (and an unfortunate ability when it is not). By requiring a primitive fat cell to copy itself at least twice before it matures and can't divide anymore, nature ensures a ready reservoir of the cells, say the researchers. While proliferation of these cells has long been recognized, this is the first evidence that those divisions are necessary for the cells' maturation. "Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, food is not scarce in many parts of the world, and storing the excess calories can lead to obesity and many serious associated health problems," notes Daniel Lane, Ph.D., professor of biological chemistry at the school's Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences. "Our finding may lead to new ways to tackle obesity, since we now know a crucial step in the body's ability to store additional fat, but that step would have to be targeted specifically."

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 3226 - Posted: 12.24.2002

Child blinded and unable to speak, move after entering hospital to have teeth filled By SHAWNA RICHER HALIFAX -- A New Brunswick family are suing an anesthetist, their dentist and the Georges L. Dumont Hospital after their two-year-old son was left with massive brain damage, unable to see, speak, eat or move, following routine dental surgery. The suit, which alleges cover-up and criminal misconduct, was filed yesterday in Court of Queen's Bench of New Brunswick at Saint John. It names the anesthetist, Amr Mahmoud; the dentist, Anil Joshi; and the Moncton hospital. Heidi and Jamie Paul, who live on the Big Cove Reserve and also have a four-month-old son, took Davey, now three, to hospital on Aug. 2 to have some cavities filled. During the procedure, the child slipped into a coma and did not awaken until after he had been taken by air ambulance to hospital in Halifax. © 2002 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 3225 - Posted: 06.24.2010

ST. PAUL, MN – High dietary intakes of total fat, saturated and trans fats and cholesterol have long been associated with such health risk factors as heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and several forms of cancer. And while researchers continue to articulate ways in which a high-fat diet may negatively impact overall health, there appears to be at least one devastating health condition that cannot yet be tied to the percentage of fat one consumes: dementia. According to a study reported in the December 24 issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology, dietary intake of fat was not associated with an increased risk of dementia. For this study, more than 5,000 subjects from the Rotterdam Study, a large, population-based study examining risk factors for a variety of diseases among the elderly, were followed for an average of six years by researchers from Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 3224 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A teenager dying from the brain disease variant CJD can have pioneering surgery performed on him in the UK, the High Court in Belfast has ruled. His parents took further legal action to clear the way for the treatment. Jonathan Simms' parents last week won the right to have a drug injected into their 18-year-old son's brain after the High Court in London ruled it was both lawful and in his best interests. The family took legal action in the Belfast High Court on Monday because the original verdict does not apply in Northern Ireland. Speaking before the ruling, Jonathan's father Don said it was frustrating. He said time was of the essence and that it was essential his son received the treatment immediately. (C) BBC

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 3223 - Posted: 12.23.2002

SUZANNE GAMBOA, Associated Press Writer PST WASHINGTON (AP) -- Low levels of sarin nerve gas affected behavior and organ functions in laboratory animals at least a month after exposure, suggests new research that may provide clues to the mysterious illnesses of Persian Gulf War veterans. In separate Army-sponsored studies, scientists observed behavioral problems, brain changes and immune system suppression in the animals many days after exposure to doses that caused no immediate effects, such as convulsions or pupil constriction. Both studies involved rodents, and "that's a big leap to human beings," said Melinda Roberson, a behavioral neuroscientist involved in a study still under way. ©2002 Associated Press

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 3222 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Black and white imagery makes dreams monochrome. JOHN WHITFIELD Spend too long watching old movies this holiday season, and your nightlife might seem a lot less colourful. When we are surrounded by black and white imagery, we think our dreams are monochrome, says a US philosopher. In surveys from the 1950s - the golden age of black and white - most said that their dreams were never or rarely in colour, found Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of California, Riverside1. Before and since, most have reported colourful dreams. The finding shows how little we know our own senses, says Schwitzgebel. "This is one piece of a general picture - our knowledge of our stream of experience is very poor." © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2002

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 3221 - Posted: 06.24.2010

BY ROBYN SURIANO The Orlando Sentinel - Mariel Segovia changes from her stylish denim jacket and black jeans into drab, green hospital scrubs and climbs onto a table for a brain scan. The Neuroimaging machine is pulled into place, swallowing most of the 10-year-old's head like a giant helmet. The $1.8 million device is so sensitive that the metal buttons on Mariel's jeans would disrupt the machine. Any body movement - even blinking - is also bad for the machine. So Mariel is lying still with her hands clasped on her chest, eyes focused on a computerlike screen hanging above her. This is not a medical test, and Mariel is not a patient. The healthy fifth-grader with a sister, brother and a trampoline at her Texas home is helping research that could revolutionize the way reading is taught in America. © 2002, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.).

Keyword: Dyslexia; Language
Link ID: 3220 - Posted: 06.24.2010