Scientists from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and elsewhere have found the brain's "nose plug" - the switch in the brain that lets us stop smelling something, even though the odor is still there. "The ability to desensitize to odors is important for our well-being," says Randall Reed, Ph.D., a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator and a molecular biologist and neuroscientist in the school's Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences. "Odor adaptation is important in telling whether a scent is getting stronger or going away, and it prevents sensory overload. Understanding this process should help us figure out how adaptation affects our perception of odors." Two papers published in the December 7, 2001 issue of Science show that a protein called CNGA4 helps plug the "nose" of odor receptor cells -- neurons whose job is to detect smells and send that information to the brain as an electrical signal. The "nose" is really a channel in the neurons' membrane that opens when an odor is presented and closes as the neuron becomes desensitized to that smell. Copyright © 1992-2002 Bio Online, Inc. All rights reserved

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 1443 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Vietnam veterans who developed the disorder also suffer from specific cognitive problems, a replication of Gulf War vet studies WASHINGTON - Greater intellectual resources may, according to a new study of Vietnam veterans, help buffer soldiers from developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after combat. These findings appear in the January issue of Neuropsychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA). The same study confirmed that Vietnam veterans with PTSD, independently of intellectual resources, have more problems in attention, working memory and new learning than veterans without PTSD -- an association also found in Gulf War veterans. PTSD, first diagnosed as "shell shock" during World War I, is a distressing, sometimes disabling anxiety disorder precipitated by exposure to extreme psychological trauma, such as combat, torture, abuse or natural disaster. It is characterized by re-experiencing of the trauma (such as nightmares and intrusive thoughts), behavioral avoidance of reminders of that trauma, emotional numbing, and symptoms of increased arousal (such as sleep disturbance and exaggerated startle response). Article: "Attention, Learning, and Memory Performances and Intellectual Resources in Vietnam Veterans: PTSD and No Disorder Comparisons;" Jennifer J. Vasterling, Lisa M. Duke, Kevin Brailey, Joseph I. Constans, Albert N. Allain Jr., and Patricia B. Sutker, Neuropsychology, Vol 16. No.1.

Keyword: Stress; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 1441 - Posted: 01.30.2002

People who unknowingly received blood donations that may have been contaminated with the deadly brain disease vCJD are to be told that they may have been infected. The decision, by the UK Government's vCJD Incident Panel, represents a u-turn in policy. It is thought that 22 people have received potentially contaminated blood. However, it had previously been decided not to inform them unless they tried to donate blood themselves. (C) BBC

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 1440 - Posted: 01.30.2002

By Maggie Shiels in California US scientists are trying to find the gene, or genes, responsible for the rare musical ability known as perfect pitch, which allows a minority of the population to "hear" the world differently from everyone else. It's important for a child to hear music in their environment from the beginning The study team, led by Dr Jane Gitschier, at the University of California at San Francisco, and Nelson Freimer in Los Angeles, is exploring the belief that this is a gift that is passed down from generation to generation. (C) BBC

Keyword: Hearing; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 1439 - Posted: 01.30.2002

Modern birds evolved from ground-dwelling reptiles as their increasingly refined parenting skills led them into the trees, where they could better protect their young, proposes a researcher at the University of California, Davis. This new theory, contradicting the two leading theories on the evolution of avian flight, appears this month in the German journal "Archaeopteryx," named after a feathered fossil with both reptilian and birdlike traits. "The evidence indicates that a whole suite of behavioral and physical traits, including feathers and wings, evolved along with improved parenting and brood-care traits," said James Carey, a UC Davis demographer and ecologist. "Once the precursors to birds began to fly, the ecological interplay of flight and parental care may have been mutually reinforced, continuing the evolution of both traits and accelerating the rate at which the physical features of the modern bird were acquired."

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 1436 - Posted: 01.30.2002

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, or rTMS, which delivers brief but intense magnetic pulses to the brain, may be as effective as traditional electroconvulsive therapy in treating severe depression, according to a University of Illinois at Chicago study. That's good news, said Dr. Philip Janicak, medical director of UIC's Psychiatric Clinical Research Center and head of the clinical trial, because rTMS appears to produce fewer harmful side effects than electroconvulsive therapy, better known as shock treatment. The preliminary results of the UIC trial will be published in a forthcoming issue of Biological Psychiatry. An abstract of the paper is currently available online at http://www.elsevier.com/locate/biopsych.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 1435 - Posted: 01.30.2002

By Mark Schrope, Discovery News — The deep sea, it seems, is quiet enough to hear a dead fish drop, at least if you're a scavenger in the inky blackness waiting on the rare meal dropping from above. The massive crowds of animals, like shrimp and fish, that rapidly appear, ready to devour every speck of flesh on dead animals that fall to the deep seafloor, have fascinated scientists since their discovery. Many animals appear to favor such falling food, but the rarity of such events demands efficient detection skills. Previous research has shown that deep-sea scavengers can smell new-fallen food by detecting the chemicals they give off. However, Michael Klages, a marine biologist at Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, said that during some experiments where bait was dropped to the seafloor on camera-equipped landers, animals sometimes made it to the food more quickly than the scent could have reached them. Copyright © 2001 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 1434 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LINDA CARROLL Dawn was 12 when she started smoking marijuana with her friends. It was just something the cool kids did to relax and forget their problems, she says. But, after a while, the cigar-shaped "blunts" she smoked also seemed to make learning difficult. "I would just forget school stuff," said Dawn, now 17. "I'd learn something one day and the next day I'd have no idea what the teacher was talking about." At first Dawn, a Long Islander, limited her marijuana smoking to the weekends, but soon it became an everyday habit that ultimately landed her in a residential treatment program run by Phoenix House. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 1432 - Posted: 01.29.2002

Doctors prescribe morphine with care. Patients quickly get used to the powerful painkiller, and ever higher doses are required to ease pain. Now, a paper in the 25 January issue of Cell shows that the onset of tolerance in rats can be slowed by giving the animals a small amount of a second painkiller. Many painkillers induce tolerance by decreasing the number of so-called opiate receptors, proteins on the surface of neurons and other cells that snag the drugs. With most drugs, these receptors--and the drug bound to them--are pulled into the cell through a process called endocytosis. Some then recycle to the surface while others are destroyed. But morphine is different: The molecule stays on the surface, cradled in its receptor, and sends constant signals to the neuron. So how does morphine induce tolerance? Cell biologist Jennifer Whistler and her colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, decided to test the notion that cells with receptors stuck in the "on" position ignore the signal unless the dose is increased. If there was a way to switch off the signaling, the researchers reasoned--for instance by using endocytosis to periodically take the receptors out of commission--perhaps they could prevent tolerance. Copyright © 2002 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 1431 - Posted: 06.24.2010

UNC-Chapel Hill receives additional $18 million, expands 'real world' clinical trials of schizophrenia and Alzheimer's drugs CHAPEL HILL - The University of North Carolina's Department of Psychiatry is expanding its large-scale effectiveness trials of anti-psychotic medications for schizophrenia and behavioral problems in Alzheimer's disease to include a newly-approved drug. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is providing an additional $18 million to the Clinical Antipsychotic Trials of Intervention Effectiveness (CATIE) project, bringing the total contract to $60 million. The two CATIE trials are examining which of the new generation of anti-psychotic drugs are best for patients with schizophrenia and disruptive behaviors associated with Alzheimer's disease. Completion of the trials is set for September 2004, but terms of the NIMH contract include an option for a five-year extension and expansion studies. The study was originally designed to examine the effectiveness of the various classes of anti-psychotic drugs represented by clozapine, risperidone, olanzapine, quetiapine and perphenazine. Now ziprasidone, which received Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval last February, will be added to the schizophrenia trial.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Alzheimers
Link ID: 1430 - Posted: 01.29.2002

New Haven, Conn. – Dosage appears to be a critical factor in the effectiveness of a cocaine vaccine being tested by Yale researchers that is designed to block the euphoria drug abusers experience. Of eight patients in the second phase of clinical trials of the vaccine, one received one dose and the others received three to four doses. Six of the eight patients reported only one or two uses of cocaine during six months of follow up treatment and the two other patients used cocaine on a regular basis during the six months. "These are very good results for people who abuse cocaine," said Thomas Kosten, M.D., professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine and lead researcher on the project. There are an estimated three million cocaine abusers, making cocaine the second most commonly abused illicit drug after marijuana.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 1429 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Copyright © 2002 Scripps Howard News Service By MAURA LERNER, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune - The marijuana-like drug Marinol was less effective than standard treatment in helping cancer patients fight appetite loss and weight loss, researchers at the Mayo Clinic say. Their study disappointed scientists who had hoped to find a better way of treating a problem that plagues more than half of patients with advanced cancer. The researchers compared Marinol, a synthetic version of THC, one of the active ingredients in marijuana, with a drug that's routinely used to curb appetite loss, megestrol acetate, in 469 people with advanced cancer. Copyright © 2001 Nando Media

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 1428 - Posted: 06.24.2010

the virtues of proteins that can save dying neurons Diseases characterized by neurodegeneration affect individuals over 50 years of age and they attack one particular class of neurons in the brain or spinal cord. The research interest of Professor Ann Kato and her team is principally focalized on ALS in which there is a progressive paralysis caused by the destruction of motor neurons which exist in both the brain and spinal cord. These cells are responsible for the movements of the upper and lower limbs and their elimination causes muscular atrophy and finally death. During the last 3 years, the objectives of the experiments of Professor Kato consist in trying to understand why these neurons die and to study the intracellular and molecular pathways which can prevent their degeneration. It was during the course of their experiments to attempt to prolong the survival of the cells that the group of Professor Kato found that a newly discovered family of proteins called Inhibitors of Apoptosis Proteins (IAP’s) were capable of preventing the death of motor neurons. Nature Cell Biology, February 2002, vol. 4, and pages175-179 © AlphaGalileo 2001

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease ; Apoptosis
Link ID: 1426 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nicole Strahan THE world-first use of brain scanning technology on children in Melbourne has found that using a wrinkle treatment called Botox to treat cerebral palsy can permanently improve brain function. The first phase of a study by Melbourne's Murdoch Children's Research Institute and the Brain Research Institute has discovered once-inactive areas of the brain show significant signs of activity after Botox injections into stiff limbs. Until now researchers have been unsure whether Botox, derived from the deadly botulism bacteria and used by Hollywood stars to reduce facial wrinkles, permanently improved brain function.

Keyword: Cerebral Cortex; Brain imaging
Link ID: 1425 - Posted: 01.28.2002

Using functional brain imaging, National Institute of Mental Health scientists for the first time have linked two key, but until now unconnected, brain abnormalities in schizophrenia. They have shown that the less patients' frontal lobes activate during a working memory task, the more the chemical messenger dopamine, thought to underlie the delusions and hallucinations of schizophrenia, rises abnormally in the striatum, a relay station deep in the brain. Together with other evidence, this suggests that the excess dopamine activity that antipsychotic drugs quell may be driven by a defect in the prefrontal cortex, the brain's executive control center. Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, M.D., and Karen Berman, M.D., report on their PET (positron emission tomography) study, published online January 28, 2002, in Nature Neuroscience. The most disabling form of mental illness, schizophrenia affects one percent of the adult population, typically in young adulthood, with hallucinations, delusions, social withdrawal, flattened emotions and loss of social and personal care skills. Although the cause of the disorder remains a mystery, studies that shed light on the role of dopamine in schizophrenia hold promise for advancing understanding and, ultimately, improving treatments. The researchers used two different types of radioactive tracers in the same scanning sessions with 6 patients and 6 healthy controls to simultaneously monitor two different types of brain activity. A radioactive form of oxygen revealed where blood flowed, and hence what parts of the brain were active, during the experimental task.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Brain imaging
Link ID: 1424 - Posted: 01.28.2002

Robert Langreth, Forbes Magazine, Biotech firms are tantalizingly close to unraveling the mysteries of memory. On the way are drugs to help fading minds remember and let haunted ones forget. Inside a small lab in an anonymous office park off the Garden State Parkway in northern New Jersey, researchers probe the molecular intricacies of memory. Tiny metal electrodes zap minute jolts of electricity at precise intervals into slices of rat brain suspended in nutrient broth in plastic lab dishes. This simulates the electrochemical changes that occur in brain cells when a new memory is created. A robotic pump drips experimental drugs through plastic tubes onto the brain cells, while other electrodes measure how each drug alters their activity. Six such setups chart the mind-altering effects of dozens of compounds a month. Most have little effect, but a few drugs fit a cherished profile: helping the disembodied neurons form stronger, longer-lasting connections. Memory Pharmaceuticals, the closely held biotech firm doing this work, is at the forefront of an intense scientific race to devise the first effective memory-enhancing drug. The idea has long been the stuff of science fiction, but now researchers are decoding the molecular details of how memories are formed and how they are lost. They have taken a crucial first step: identifying the genes and proteins inside brain cells that regulate memory formation. They are tantalizingly close to creating a kind of Viagra for the brain: a chemical that reinvigorates an organ that has faded with age. This new generation of drugs could mend memory loss in the seriously ill or the merely absentminded. "My friends keep asking when the little red pill is coming," says Eric Kandel , 72, the elder statesman of the field, a Columbia University researcher who founded Memory Pharmaceuticals in 1998 and won the Nobel Prize in 2000. He began his work in the 1950s, when most researchers viewed it as futile. "If we continue making the kind of progress we are now, we will have drugs for age-related memory loss in five or ten years," he says. © 2001 Forbes.com™ All Rights Reserved

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 1423 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Genetically and physically male babies born with a rare condition called "micropenis" are happier when raised as boys, according to research. Those born with micropenis and raised as girls said they identified solidly with their female gender, but only 20% of the women said they were satisfied with their genitalia. However, 50% of men, some of whom had achieved normal penis length with the help of testosterone replacement, said they were satisfied with their genitalia. (C) BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 1422 - Posted: 01.27.2002

sleep ... perchance to dream KAYLEY MENDENHALL Chronicle Staff Writer Doreen Austin diligently shuffles toward a full-size bed, wires dangling across her body, leading to 12 points on her head, two on her chest and four on her legs. She lies down. A lab technician tightens the straps across her forehead and chin and places a mask over her nose. The tube from the mask to a machine beside the bed gives Austin the look of an elephant. "I'm not happy about this," she says, as the technician helps her lay back against the hospital pillows and then moves to the next room to check the electrode signals on her computer. ©2001 MyWebPal.com. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 1421 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Georgina Kenyon You may not realise it, but you run on electricity. Some scientists believe that if a person's naturally occurring electric and magnetic fields are disturbed, serious health problems and disease like cancer can develop. "There are a lot of researchers now carrying out experiments on the activity of electricity and magnetism in human beings," according to Dr Gerard Hyland, biophysicist, formerly at Warwick University, Coventry. But these researchers are not the sort of scientists who would like you to think they are dabbling in the ancient Eastern study of Reiki and energy fields. (C) BBC

Keyword: Epilepsy; Depression
Link ID: 1420 - Posted: 01.27.2002

New 4-year study finds chronic school and behavior problems in brain-injured children, with those from more stressed, less advantaged families at greater risk; severity of injury also plays a role in relative recovery WASHINGTON - Family strength and socioeconomic status can make a positive difference in a child's recovery from traumatic brain injury, according to a new study. Although children with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) exhibit substantial and long-term academic and behavioral residual disability, there is a brighter outlook for children with moderate TBI -- but improvement is greater for children from more advantaged environments. These findings appear in the January issue of Neuropsychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA). H. Gerry Taylor, Ph.D., of Case Western Reserve University and Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital, led a research team that assessed the academic achievement (measured by teacher ratings along with letter-word identification, calculation and writing tests) and the adaptive, social and classroom behavior of Ohio children four times -- three weeks, six months, 12 months and four years after injury. Participants were between six and 12 at time of injury. They included 53 children with severe TBI (most often in motor-vehicle accidents); 56 children with moderate TBI (most often in sports and recreational accidents); and a control group of 80 children with orthopedic injuries not involving brain injury. The team also evaluated the children's families in terms of a commonly used socio-economic index, annual income, and years of maternal education, as well as social stressors and resources that considered Health, Work, Spouse, Extended Family and Friends. © PsycNET 2001 American Psychological Association

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 1419 - Posted: 06.24.2010