Tampa, FL — Researchers at the University of South Florida's Roskamp Institute have identified an immune molecule, CD40, on the surface of neurons that appears to promote both neuron development and protection. The finding is a first step in defining the role of CD40 in the brain at different stages of life and evaluating its usefulness in helping neurons survive. The study is published in the latest March issue of the journal European Molecular Biology Organization. In the bloodstream, the interaction between the protein receptor CD40 and another protein, CD40 ligand (CD40L), allows white cells to trigger antibody production and to activate cellular immunity. This immune response helps neutralize foreign invaders, such as bacteria and viruses. However, in an earlier study, the USF reseachers found that when this same CD40-CD40L signaling system is triggered in the brain, the immune response can cause microglia damage to neurons.

Keyword: Glia; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 1796 - Posted: 06.24.2010

GAINESVILLE, Fla.---Scientists report this week they have demonstrated that the injection of two corrective genes into a specific brain region generated significant restoration of normal limb movement in rats with a chemical-induced form of Parkinson’s disease. The findings – by a team of researchers from the University of Florida in Gainesville and Lund University in Lund, Sweden – are published in the current online version of the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Neuroscientists Anders Bjorklund of Sweden and Ronald Mandel with UF said the strategy that proved effective in the rodents is not a cure for Parkinson’s disease, but is expected to lead to a better method for delaying and controlling symptoms of the progressively disabling condition. About 1 million Americans are affected by Parkinson’s disease, which occurs most often between the ages of 65 and 90. "We found that the simultaneous delivery of two selected genes, coupled with a powerful gene-activating agent, works like a pump to prime the production of L-dopa, which is then converted into dopamine by appropriate nerve cells in the brain," said Mandel, a professor of neuroscience with UF’s Evelyn F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute and the UF Genetics Institute. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter chemical that plays a lead role in coordinating limb movements.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 1795 - Posted: 06.24.2010

DIFFERENT SOUND DIMENSIONS INTERACT AND LEAD TO DISTORTED PERCEPTIONS Increasingly popular auditory "displays" may require further research to ensure their effectiveness WASHINGTON - From the classroom to the cockpit, a burgeoning number of devices use sound -- whether in the form of beeps, clicks, alarms or tones -- to tell people what's happening in bodies, structures and machines. These devices translate data changes into corresponding sound changes, guiding everyone from nurses and surgeons to jet pilots -- sometimes in critical or life-threatening situations. However, new research reveals that people misperceive how sounds change when both their pitch and loudness change, as often happens with these devices. Listeners can't accurately judge how the sounds' changes reflect changes in the underlying data -- and may, as a result, make serious mistakes. The research appears in the March issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 1794 - Posted: 03.29.2002

By DANA CANEDY MIAMI, — For Connie Standley, the final indignity came when the manager of a fast food restaurant asked why she was bringing her service dogs into his business in the Florida panhandle when she was obviously not blind. "He kept saying to me that these are not guide dogs," Ms. Standley, who has epilepsy, recalled of a trip home from the Grand Canyon last year. "I said, `No, they are seizure-alert dogs,' and he kept on saying he has never heard of that and `I don't want you in here.' " For the rest of the trip, she ate in her car. In the seven years since she bought her first service dog, Ms. Standley, who lives in Eustis, about 30 miles northwest of Orlando, has had to explain countless times that she relies on Alex, an 80-pound black Bouvier des Flandres, to keep her safe. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 1793 - Posted: 06.24.2010

It is amazing how our eyes adapt to let us see in hugely differing light conditions, from almost complete darkness to blinding sunlight. It is almost as if they had built-in sunglasses. Two papers in today's issue of Neuron provide striking insights into the molecular nature of this important phenomenon, with converging experimental evidence from work in rats and flies. The first step in “seeing” happens in the eye. It is there that light hits the specialized photoreceptor cells of the retina and is captured by complexes of proteins that convert the captured light energy into an electrical signal that is ultimately carried to the brain. (Reference: Neuron, Volume 34 Number 1, March 28, 2002) Copyright © 1995-2002 UniSci. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 1792 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A tiny section of the brain that is ravaged by Alzheimer's disease is more important for our ability to orient ourselves than scientists have long thought, helping to explain why people with the disease become lost so easily. The findings by neuroscientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center are reported in the March 29 issue of Science. Neurologist Charles Duffy, M.D., Ph.D., previously discovered that a small section of brain tissue slightly above and behind the ear - known as the medial superior temporal area (MST) - acts much like a compass, instantly updating your mental image of your body's movements through space. In new research, Duffy and graduate student Michael Froehler show that the MST acts not only as a compass but also as a sort of biological global positioning system, providing a mental map to help us understand exactly where we are in the world and how we got there. The findings help explain why people with Alzheimer's disease have such a difficult time finding their way in the world, Duffy says. Doctors already know that brain cells in the MST die in great numbers in patients with the disease, and four years ago Duffy described a condition known as "motion blindness" that explains why Alzheimer's patients lose the ability to keep track of their own movements. ©Copyright University of Rochester Medical Center, 1999-2002.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Vision
Link ID: 1791 - Posted: 06.24.2010

GENDER-bending chemicals could be interfering with the breeding of songbirds. First alligators and fish were being feminised by synthetic hormones leaking into the environment. Now nightingales, skylarks and even the humble sparrow seem to be at risk. Researchers have found that such chemicals interfere with songbirds' reproduction. They also alter their brains, making females sing when they shouldn't. "This is very significant," says David Crews, an expert on the effects of synthetic chemicals on animal reproduction at the University of Texas in Austin. He says that until now, concrete evidence on how pollutants affect animals has been scarce. "This is the first step needed to demonstrate a causal link between specific pollutants and the effects on wildlife populations," he says.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 1790 - Posted: 03.29.2002

The ability to recognize objects in the real world is handled by different parts of the brain than those that allow us to imagine what the world is like. That is the result of a brain mapping experiment published in the March 28 issue of the journal Neuron. The study focused on two cognitive tasks widely used by experimental psychologists. One is mental rotation – mentally rotating a complex object into a different position to compare it with a second similar shape – and object recognition – determining whether two complex objects are the same or different. “Mental rotation and object recognition are indistinguishable from a behavioral viewpoint: You can’t tell them apart,” says the paper’s first author, Isabel Gauthier, assistant professor of psychology at Vanderbilt. “As a result, the field has been deadlocked over the question of whether the brain uses the same mechanism or different mechanisms for the two tasks.”

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 1789 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sufferers are not seeking alternative treatments New York – New survey data released today reveals that people with hard to control epilepsy experience a poor quality of life, but that many do not proactively pursue new treatments that could help. The Quality of Life in Epilepsy survey, sponsored by Cyberonics, reveals that people with epilepsy are three times more likely to be unemployed than the national average. Almost half of these patients suffer from depression and believe that epilepsy has reduced their daily activities and their personal and professional goals for the future. Three-quarters of the epilepsy patients surveyed strongly believe that even modest improvements in seizure control would significantly improve their daily lives but only one-third of them regularly ask their doctor if new or alternative treatments are available. The Balance Between Seizure Control and Number of Medications Only 25 percent of surveyed patients have been seizure-free for the past year, with the remaining 75 percent experiencing an average of 70 seizures each year.

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 1788 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Gunjan Sinha Almost everybody gets pleasure from some kind of pain. Some people like their food so hot it makes them sweat; others get off on the "burn" that comes from a hellacious workout. Scientists, meanwhile, are hard at work figuring out why some things hurt so good. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have discovered that the part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, which lights up when people feel pleasure, also does so when they feel pain. This, says David Borsook, one of the study's authors, proves that there's a bona fide intersection between pain and pleasure. Copyright © 2002 Popular Science.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Emotions
Link ID: 1787 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Concerns Linger, but British Study No Smoking Gun By Daniel DeNoon WebMD Medical News -- A British study widely reported to link Prozac to cancer does no such thing. The study appears in the April 1 issue of the journal Blood. News headlines immediately heralded the findings as evidence that the antidepressants Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, and Celexa can cause cancer. This came as a complete surprise to study leader John Gordon, PhD, immunologist at England's University of Birmingham. © 1996-2002 WebMD Corporation. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 1785 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Increase Reflects Delay of Symptoms, Not New Cases, British Expert Says By David Brown Washington Post Staff Writer ATLANTA, March 27 -- The number of British cases of the rare and fatal human equivalent of "mad cow disease" is doubling every three years, even though measures to protect meat, the presumed source of the infecting agent, have been in place for nearly a decade. The continued growth of the epidemic of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) almost certainly reflects the long delay between infection and the appearance of symptoms, rather than representing new infections, a British scientist told a gathering of infectious disease specialists here. "The trend is continuing upward," said Robert Will, of Western General Hospital, in Edinburgh, Scotland. "The central issue is, how long is this going to go on? We don't know, because we simply don't know what the incubation period is." © 2002 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 1784 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NewScientist.com news service Genes linked to depression differ between men and women, according to the first systematic search for chromosomal regions linked to severe depression. The new work suggests that there are important differences in the molecular basis of clinical depression in men and women, or sex-specific differences that determine resistance to stressful events, says George Zubenko of the University of Pittsburgh, who led the research. Further studies based on these findings could have huge implications for scientists' understanding of the various biochemical causes of depression - and for treatments. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Depression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 1783 - Posted: 06.24.2010

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor Stanford University sleep researchers say they have learned to treat a rare medical disorder that causes patients to commit sexual acts -- sometimes extremely violent ones -- even while they are fast asleep. Some of the patients may often moan or cry out in sexual excitement that merely disrupts their partners, according to Dr. Christian Guilleminault, a psychiatrist at Stanford's sleep disorders clinic, while others have been known to assault their bedmates sexually or masturbate so violently they may damage themselves. The disorder is most often called "sleep sex" by the patients who have come to the Stanford center and is distinguished from other types of sleep activity, such as flailing arms or running while asleep. It is highly unusual behavior, but researchers have found it may be more common than they first thought, according to Guilleminault and his colleagues. ©2002 San Francisco Chronicle

Keyword: Sleep; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 1782 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ANNE EISENBERG THIS is a case of monkey think, monkey do. A rhesus macaque monkey at a Brown University laboratory can move a cursor on a computer screen just by thinking about it — playing a pinball game in which every time a red target dot pops up, the monkey moves a cursor to meet the target quickly and accurately. The monkey doesn't do this trick with a mouse or a joystick. It plays the game mentally, controlling where it wants the cursor to go by thinking. (The simple pinball video game the monkey played can be viewed at donoghue.neuro.brown.edu/multimedia.php.) Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 1781 - Posted: 06.24.2010

An international research team has identified the specific genes that control the growth and development of brain cells in fruit flies. The discovery could have applications well beyond the insect world, providing new insights into human nerve cell development and the treatment of neurological diseases in people. Scientists from Stanford and the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, Austria, report their findings in the March 28 issue of the journal Nature. In a companion paper, the authors demonstrate how the same genes that control nerve cell growth also affect embryo development in fruit flies. The Nature studies focus on Rac genes, which are found in the DNA of all animals as well as people. In fact, Rac genes produce a class of proteins called Rac GTPases, whose molecular structure is virtually identical in a wide range of organisms -- from fruit flies to humans.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Evolution
Link ID: 1780 - Posted: 03.28.2002

A signaling protein suspected of malfunctioning in anxiety and mood disorders plays a key role in the development of emotional behavior, report researchers funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. Mice lacking it in frontal brain circuits during an early critical period fail to develop normal reactions in anxiety-producing situations. Rene Hen, Ph.D., Columbia University, and colleagues created mice that lacked the protein, which brain cells use to receive signals from the chemical messenger serotonin, by knocking-out the gene that codes for it. As adults, these "knockout" mice were slow to venture into -- or eat in -- unfamiliar environments. By selectively restoring, or "rescuing" certain populations of the receptor proteins, the researchers have now pinpointed when and where they enable the brain to cope with anxiety. Hen, Cornelius Gross, Ph.D., Xiaoxi Zhuang, Ph.D, and colleagues report on their discovery in the March 28, 2002 Nature. Brain neurons communicate with each other by secreting messenger chemicals, such as serotonin, which cross the synaptic gulf between cells and bind to receptors on neighboring cell membranes. Medications that enhance such binding of serotonin to its receptor (serotonin selective reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs) are widely prescribed to treat anxiety and depression, suggesting that the receptor plays an important role in regulating these emotions.

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 1779 - Posted: 03.28.2002

Source: Tufts University Heart-health conscious consumers have likely heard about homocysteine -an amino-acid that, at higher-than-normal levels in the bloodstream, can damage blood vessels. New research published in The New England Journal of Medicine speculates that high homocysteine can also damage the delicate blood vessels in the brain, setting the stage for the development of dementia. Boston researchers analyzed information gathered on more than a thousand older participants of the long-running Framingham Study. They looked for a link between blood homocysteine measurements collected in 1990 and the development of dementia in the decade that followed. The researchers found that the risk of dementia rose with increasing homocysteine levels. Copyright © 2002 Novartis Foundation for Gerontology. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 1778 - Posted: 06.24.2010

MARGIE MASON Associated Press Writer If the mice appeared anxious - New research suggests that serotonin, an all-purpose neurotransmitter already known to play a vital role in many behaviors and emotions, appears to be implicated in regulating anxiety as well. In experiments with bioengineered mice, researchers showed that animals lacking serotonin early in life when their brains were rapidly developing displayed anxious behaviors as adults. This suggests there is an early window during which serotonin is necessary to establish the proper brain circuitry that is essential for normal emotional behavior throughout life, they said. Researchers said these findings in mice may be relevant to anxiety disorders in people. Serotonin levels already have been linked to depression, migraine headaches and irritable bowel syndrome.

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 1777 - Posted: 03.28.2002

Scientists have succeeded in boosting the memory of fruit flies in a laboratory. The discovery could provide clues about the way the human brain works as the fundamental mechanism of memory appears to be common to most animals. It is widely believed that memories are stored as changes in the number and strength of the connections between brain cells (neurons). A typical neuron makes thousands of these connections - called synapses - with other neurons. However, only a proportion of these synapses play a role in a particular memory. Neuroscientists are investigating chemicals that appear to strengthen synapses. The latest research suggests that one such chemical is a protein called PKM. (C) BBC

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 1776 - Posted: 03.27.2002