WASHINGTON - Research has shown that more than half of college women have experienced eating disorder symptoms (although most do not have full-blown anorexia or bulimia). While the cause of eating disorders is still unknown, new research suggests that depression and difficulty expressing one's feelings may be a risk factor for disordered eating in young women with a history of family problems or abuse. Psychologists Suzanne E. Mazzeo, Ph.D., of Virginia Commonwealth University and Dorothy L. Espelage, Ph.D., of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studied 820 undergraduate female college students to see whether certain risk factors led to disordered eating. The researchers found that family conflict, family cohesion, childhood physical and emotional abuse and neglect did indirectly influence whether a college student would develop problem eating behaviors. However, they found that depression and alexithymia -- difficulty in identifying and describing one's own feelings -- more directly influences whether women from this type of background develop eating problems. The findings appear in the January issue of the Journal of Counseling Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA).

Keyword: Depression; Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 1320 - Posted: 01.14.2002

Prozac and other new drugs triggered a revolution in the treatment of depression. But do we still need the couch? BY SANJAY GUPTA, M.D. There seems to be a lot of depression going around these days, which shouldn't be surprising, given the stress of the holidays and the continuing psychic fallout of Sept. 11. What is surprising is how many more depressed people are getting treatment--at least compared with 10 years ago. I remember in my first year of medical school, back in the late 1980s, being taught about a new class of antidepression medications called SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, of which Prozac is now the most famous. What we didn't realize then is that the SSRIs would start a revolution in the management of America's most common--but no less serious--mental disorder. How far that revolution has spread was driven home last week by a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Between 1987 and 1997, it reported, the number of Americans being treated for depression more than tripled, from 1.8 million to 6.3 million, while those taking antidepressants doubled. Copyright © 2002 Time Inc. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 1318 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By KIRK JOHNSON Public health researchers in New York, struggling to determine the real dimensions of the health threat at the World Trade Center site, are beginning an ambitious series of long-term studies to identify and then track a wide range of people who lived through the nightmare of dust, smoke and stress when the towers fell. Two Manhattan hospitals, for instance, are collecting blood samples from pregnant women who say they were in the vicinity of the trade center on the morning of Sept. 11 or in the days afterward. Mount Sinai School of Medicine will send out 3,000 letters to obstetricians in the region as early as next week, also seeking pregnant women who were near ground zero for a related study that will look at the possible effects of maternal anxiety as well as toxic substances in the air. Beginning next Monday, physicians and investigators from Queens College will start searching for nonunion day laborers, many of them now dispersed into the work force, who helped clean up dust-saturated buildings around the trade center in the weeks just after the attacks. The New York Academy of Medicine is beginning an even more ambitious task: building a registry of every person — from the firefighters to members of the New York City Transit tunnel crews — who worked, even for a day, at ground zero. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Depression
Link ID: 1317 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jay Ingram "Near-death experience." The words alone are enough to trigger angry disagreement. Skeptics, materialists, whatever you want to call them, dismiss these bizarre and intriguing phenomena as the last gasps of a dying brain. Believers, mind/body dualists, whatever you want to call them, take these reports at what seems to be their face value: real experiences reported by people who have had a glimpse of death and maybe even of something beyond. Now there's a solid new report for both sides to chew on. The Dec. 15 issue of the British medical journal The Lancet published a report by a Dutch medical group on near-death experiences in a group of 344 patients who had suffered cardiac arrest. Sixty-two of these patients, 18 per cent of the total, reported having a near-death experience, an NDE. To qualify for such an experience in this study patients had to remember having some or all of the following: an out-of-the-body experience, pleasant feelings, seeing the light at the end of the tunnel (literally), seeing deceased relatives or having the events of their life pass before their eyes. Copyright 1996-2002. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited.

Keyword: Cerebral Cortex; Attention
Link ID: 1316 - Posted: 01.13.2002

By ROB TURNER Ron Miles wants to put a bug in your ear. More specifically, a bug's ear, or rather a replica of one. Miles, a vibrations and acoustics expert at SUNY at Binghamton, is actually trying to replicate the incredibly accurate hearing mechanism of a rare fly -- the Ormia ochracea -- and use it to create everything from the world's most sophisticated hearing aid to tiny microphones that might help catch the future Osama bin Ladens of the world. GOOD VIBRATIONS It's all part of biomimicry, an attempt to mold technology on nature (its early successes include Velcro, developed after a Swiss inventor, out hiking, noticed cockleburs sticking to his wool pants). When two scientists -- Ron Hoy of Cornell and Daniel Robert of the University of Bristol -- first discovered that this Ormia had ears, they weren't thinking of their market potential. Most flies don't have ears; that they had found them on its underbelly was enough of a coup. What's more this Ormia's ears are extraordinary. They have developed through evolutionary necessity the ability to pinpoint the location of chirping crickets, on whose bodies the female deposits her larva (which then consume the said crickets) to propagate. ''We had no idea this ear would be so cool,'' Hoy admits. When Miles explained its mechanics -- it has two eardrums, the one closer to the sound vibrates more loudly than the other, detecting a noise's direction within one or two degrees -- the team of scientists realized that its supersensitivity could revolutionize hearing aids. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 1315 - Posted: 01.13.2002

Bruce Bower All sorts of animals groom themselves regularly, which keeps them clean and healthy. However, mice with an alteration in one of the genes that orchestrate body development lose their grip on grooming, a new study finds. These mice bite and lick themselves so hard and so often that they end up with bald patches and open sores, according to Joy M. Greer and Mario R. Capecchi, both geneticists at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Moreover, the same genetically altered rodents groom cage mates just as aggressively. The mice have a mutated version of one of the homeobox, or Hox , genes, which scientists have implicated in embryo development. The new finding offers a potential avenue for exploring the biological roots of trichotillomania, a rare condition in which people tear out their hair, as well as some of the repetitive cleaning behaviors classed as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the researchers conclude in the Jan. 3 Neuron. From Science News, Vol. 161, No. 2, Jan. 12, 2002, p. 20. Copyright ©2002 Science Service. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 1314 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A study of house finches has demonstrated that in just 30 years, finches newly settled in Montana and Alabama begin to act quite different from each other, despite being close kin. Females in one region produce male chicks first, then females; in another region, this pattern is reversed. Controlling the sex of their eggs as they lay them allows mothers to influence the size of their offspring, an important survival trait that appears to improve these avian pioneers' chances of success in a new environment. In 1939, many house finches were released in New York. From there, the finches headed south, reaching Alabama about 25 years ago. At about the same time, some native California birds colonized Montana. To see how the new habitats affected these populations, evolutionary ecologist Alexander Badyaev of Auburn University in Alabama and colleague Geoffrey Hill tagged thousands of birds at each site and followed their offspring from hatching through adulthood. Copyright © 2002 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 1311 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Tampa, FL (Jan. 11, 2002) — The glaring lights of neontal intensive care units may be more than annoying— they can harm the retinas of developing newborns and disrupt the way these tiny babies process important visual information. This and other new findings about how NICU environments impact the neurosensory development of premature infants will be presented at a University of South Florida College of Medicine conference Sunday, Jan. 13, to Wednesday, Jan. 16. The conference, titled "Evidence-Based Science for Establishing an Appropriate NICU Environment," will be held at the Sheraton Sand Key Resort in Clearwater Beach, FL. Featured speakers include top neonatologists, pediatricians and infant and child development experts from across the country. Among the topics will be: -- Early Visual Development: Effects of Preterm Birth and NICU Care -- Procedural Pain in Newborn Infants -- Lighting Quality and Quantity in the NICU -- NICU Noise and Long-Term Infant Auditory Development

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 1310 - Posted: 06.24.2010

There is no "music center" in the brain, but distinct regions are involved in different aspects of music perception. Now there is evidence that the auditory cortex, an area of the brain that interprets sound, is important for frequency processing and pitch perception. The work, published in the January Journal of Neurophysiology, provides insight into how a physical feature such as sound can be transformed into a mental phenomenon. "We have tens of millions of neurons in our auditory cortex, and we've looked at how they might allow us to distinguish different pitches," says lead author Mark Jude Tramo, MD, PhD, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Past research has shown that a particular neuron in the brain will only respond to a few, distinct notes or tones. How all of the neurons coordinate together has been somewhat of a mystery. "Now we know that there's no question that you need the neurons in the auditory cortex for fine-tuned pitch discrimination," says Tramo. There are differences in the sounds of two voices or two musical instruments even if they hit the same note, and somehow the brain knows that. In this study, Tramo and his colleagues looked at how people perceive these differences in pitch.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 1306 - Posted: 01.11.2002

Researchers at the University of Toronto, The Hospital for Sick Children and the Amgen Institute have discovered a genetic mechanism involved in pain modulation that could lead to an entirely new approach to pain control. The results of their research are published in the Jan. 11 issue of the journal Cell. In the study, genetically engineered mice lacking a gene called DREAM (downstream regulatory element antagonistic modulator) showed a dramatic loss of pain sensitivity compared to mice who had the DREAM gene. "This is an exciting development," says study co-author Professor Michael Salter, director of the University of Toronto Centre for the Study of Pain and a senior scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children. "There's a great interest in this finding because it's so different from the traditional approaches researchers have been taking to pain management."

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 1305 - Posted: 01.11.2002

-- Bethesda, MD -- Sleep apnea/hypopnea syndrome is characterized by repetitive upper airway obstruction with ensuing cyclical hypoxia, or a decreased level of oxygen in the blood. Repetitive hypoxia is followed by persistently increased ventilatory motor output, commonly referred to as long-term facilitation (LTF). This excitatory mechanism occurs after repetitive stimulation of the carotid bodies as ventilation returns to baseline over a long duration, up to several hours. LTF is drawn out by repetitive hypoxia during sleep but only in those who snore regularly and have evidence of inspiratory (timed during inhalation) flow limitation during sleep. Given the occurrence of repetitive hypoxemia in patients with sleep apnea, researchers set out to investigate the occurrence of LTF in patients with obstructive sleep apnea/hypopnea syndrome (OSA). A new study tested the hypothesis that episodic hypoxic exposure activates LTF in OSA patients during stable non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. The study was undertaken by inducing repetitive hypoxia in OSA patients using nasal continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) to maintain upper airway patency and stable sleep state for the duration of the experiments. Copyright © 2001, The American Physiological Society

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 1304 - Posted: 06.24.2010

CHAPEL HILL – Talking Barbie dolls, some of which said, “Math is hard!” in the 1990s could one day more appropriately say “Math is fun, and I like it!” new research suggests. Using large national data sets, investigators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have discovered that -- contrary to previous research -- U.S. boys hardly surpass U.S. girls in mathematical ability. “Whether boys’ mathematical skills are superior to girls’ has been a controversial topic among social scientists for decades,” said Erin Leahey, who is completing a doctorate in sociology at UNC. “Strong evidence for a male advantage comes from the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, which began in 1972.”

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Intelligence
Link ID: 1303 - Posted: 06.24.2010

CHAPEL HILL - A brain protein linked to narcolepsy, the sudden, uncontrollable and inexplicable onset of sleep, helps regulate bodily sensations . Exactly how that protein, hypocretin-2, is involved in narcolepsy remains unclear. Indications are that people and animals exhibiting narcoleptic symptoms are deficient in this protein or the molecular receptor to which it attaches. But the new findings by neuroscientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Yale University may open a door to the answer. Their report is the cover story for the January 15 issue of the Journal of Physiology. According to Dr. Edward R. Perl, professor of cell and molecular physiology at UNC-Chapel Hill School of Medicine and the report's corresponding author, hypocretin peptides are distributed widely throughout the brain. They arise from part of the hypothalamus, a region prominently involved in regulation of the autonomic nervous system, endocrine activity, and mood and motivational states. Recently, these proteins have been implicated in the regulation of behaviors associated with arousal such as feeding and sleep.

Keyword: Narcolepsy; Sleep
Link ID: 1301 - Posted: 01.11.2002

More genetic links found; disorder may have arisen recently Irvine, Calif., — A variant form of a gene associated with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) indicates that the disorder is a recent affliction and may once have helped humans thrive and survive, according to a UCI College of Medicine study. The human gene study, which appears in the Jan. 8 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, suggests that behavior now considered inappropriate in a classroom may be related to behavior that once helped humans overcome their environment. Robert Moyzis, professor of biological chemistry, and his colleagues studied genes from 600 individuals worldwide. Among numerous new genetic variations of the receptor for the dopamine neurotransmitter, they found one linked strongly to both ADHD and a behavior trait called "novelty seeking," a condition often underlying addiction. Their analysis of the genetic variations also suggests that this variation occurred recently in human evolution between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago. © copyright 2001 UC Regents

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 1298 - Posted: 06.24.2010

DHEA - dehydroepiandrosterone - has been called the "Mother Hormone" and hailed as the new Fountain of Youth. The most abundant steroid hormone produced by the body, its enthusiasts claim it can help people stay thin, build muscle, reduce stress, improve memory and prevent killer diseases. But the verdict is still out on synthetic DHEA, which was banned by the Food and Drug Administration in the 1980s and can now be sold only as a food supplement. Now, researchers at Lehigh University believe they have established a possible cause-and-effect relationship between DHEA and the workings of the body's central nervous system.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Stress
Link ID: 1297 - Posted: 01.10.2002

Toronto, Ont. -- If cellist Yo Yo Ma and fiddler Natalie MacMaster live to be 80, will their musically-trained brains help them fend off the ravages of age-related dementia? A Canadian study is underway to look at whether musical training gives children an edge over non-musical counterparts in verbal and writing skills AND gives the elderly an edge in preserving cognitive function for as long as possible. It is one of the most ambitious studies to date to look at musical training and its influence on the brain's wiring across the age spectrum. The reseach is lead by neuroscientist Dr. Christo Pantev at The Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto and will be carried out together with Profs. Larry E. Roberts and Laurel Trainor from McMaster University in Hamilton. The project is funded with a $200,000 US grant from the California-based International Foundation for Music Research.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 1296 - Posted: 01.10.2002

Currently, mind-robbing disease only diagnosed at autopsy MSNBC NEWS SERVICES — A new imaging agent that homes in on the gummy plaques and tangles that jam up the brains of Alzheimer’s patients has allowed doctors to see the disease in a living person for the first time, researchers said Wednesday. The mind-robbing disease, which is always fatal and has no cure, can now only be definitively diagnosed by looking at the brain after a patient has died. IN THE NEW study, the researchers were able to view the messy clumps of dead cells in the brains of nine living Alzheimer’s patients. The finding means that Alzheimer’s, which affects 4 million Americans and millions more around the world, may be diagnosed in the early stages, when treatments might be able to do some good, said Jorge Barrio of the University of California Los Angeles, who helped lead the study. MSNBC Terms and Conditions © 2002

Keyword: Alzheimers; Brain imaging
Link ID: 1295 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Question Is it true that some animals sleep with only half their brain at a time? If so, which animals do this and why? Answer Yes, it's true. So-called unihemispheric sleep happens in animals when one side of the brain shows waking activity while the other side is asleep (an electroencephalographic recording of brain activity under these circumstances shows slow synchronous waves). Unihemispheric sleep is a characteristic of several bird species and may be present in some reptiles. Not many mammals can sleep unihemispherically; only aquatic mammals such as dolphins, porpoises, toothed whales, and certain species of seal are known to alternate sleep between brain hemispheres. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Sleep; Laterality
Link ID: 1294 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Shankar Vedantam Washington Post Staff Writer The number of people being treated for depression has increased dramatically in the United States in the past decade, marking a profound shift in how Americans cope with the common emotional disorder, the most comprehensive study to date shows. Drugs such as Prozac have become the mainstay for the vast majority of those being treated, even as doctors spend less time with patients and offer comparatively less psychotherapy, researchers said yesterday in reporting the results of the study. The sea change probably does not stem from an actual increase in depression, experts said. Instead, it is most likely connected to the destigmatization of mental health problems in general and depression in particular, the rise of managed-care insurance plans, and the arrival of powerful drugs including Prozac, accompanied by multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns. © 2002 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 1293 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Hand-held tasting device displays highly discriminating palate. PHILIP BALL A new hand-held electronic tongue promises to give accurate and reliable taste measurements for companies currently relying on human tasters for their quality control of wine, tea, coffee, mineral water and other foods. Human tasters are still irreplaceable for subtle products such as fine wines and whiskies. But their sense of taste saturates after a while, losing its discriminating edge. The device made by Antonio Riul of EMBRAPA Instrumentação Agropecuária in São Carlos, Brazil, and colleagues rivals human taste buds and never tires1. The electronic tongue can sense low levels of impurities in water. It can discriminate between Cabernet Sauvignons of the same year from two different wineries, and between those from the same winery but different years. It can also spot molecules such as sugar and salt at concentrations too low for human detection. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2002

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Robotics
Link ID: 1291 - Posted: 06.24.2010