Sirin Kale Alice,* a 31-year-old director from London, has been breaking the coronavirus lockdown rules. “I almost don’t want to tell you this,” she says, lowering her voice. Her violation? Once a week, Alice, who lives alone, walks to the end of her garden to meet her best friend Lucy.* There, with the furtiveness of a street drug deal, Lucy hugs her tightly. Alice struggles to let her go. “You just get that rush of feeling better,” Alice says. “Like it’s all OK.” Aside from Lucy’s hugs, Alice hasn’t been touched by another person since March 15, which is when she went into a self-imposed lockdown, a week before the official government advice to self-isolate. “I’ve found it really hard,” she says. “I am a huggy person. You start to notice it after a while. I miss it.” She feels guilty about her surreptitious hugs. “I feel like I can’t tell my other friends about it,” Alice says. “There’s a lot of shaming going on. I know we aren’t meant to. But I am so grateful to her for checking in on me. It gives me such a lift.” Alice is experiencing the neurological phenomenon of "skin hunger," supercharged by the coronavirus pandemic. Skin hunger is the biological need for human touch. It’s why babies in neonatal intensive care units are placed on their parent’s naked chests. It’s the reason prisoners in solitary confinement often report craving human contact as ferociously as they desire their liberty. © 2020 Condé Nast.

Keyword: Emotions; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 27240 - Posted: 05.08.2020

by Giorgia Guglielmi More than half of the genes expressed in the prefrontal cortex, a brain region that is implicated in autism, begin to change their expression patterns in late fetal development, according to a new study1. Previous studies have looked at how DNA variants can influence gene expression at specific developmental periods. This is the first to map their effects in a specific region over the full span of human brain development, says co-senior investigator Stephan Sanders, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. “If we ever really want to understand what autism is, understanding human fetal development of the brain is going to be absolutely critical,” Sanders says. Some of the changes in expression patterns vary depending on individual differences in neighboring DNA sequences, the study found. Some of that variation occurs in stretches of the genome linked to neurodevelopmental outcomes, such as how much schooling a person completes (a proxy for intelligence) or whether she develops schizophrenia. “This study creates a resource for trying to understand neurodevelopment and neuropsychiatric disorders,” Sanders says. Fetal expression: The researchers analyzed the prefrontal cortex of 176 postmortem brains from donors ranging in age from 6 weeks post-conception to 20 years. None had any known neuropsychiatric conditions or large-scale genetic anomalies. The team identified 23,782 genes expressed during brain development in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region implicated in many developmental conditions, including autism. © 2020 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 27239 - Posted: 05.08.2020

A small study funded by the National Institutes of Health suggests that sleep problems among children who have a sibling with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may further raise the likelihood of an ASD diagnosis, compared to at-risk children who do not have difficulty sleeping. Previous research has shown that young children who have a sibling with ASD are at a higher risk for also being diagnosed with the condition. The study appears in The American Journal of Psychiatry. If confirmed by other studies, the findings may give clinicians a tool to identify sleep problems early and provide interventions to reduce their effects on the health and development of children with autism. The findings may also provide insights into the potential role of sleep problems in the development of ASD. The study was conducted by Annette M. Estes, Ph.D., of the University of Washington Autism Center in Seattle, and colleagues in the NIH Autism Centers of Excellence Infant Brain Imaging Study Network. NIH funding was provided by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the National Institute of Mental Health. “The results are a promising lead,” said Alice Kau, Ph.D., of NICHD’s Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Branch. “If confirmed by more in-depth studies, patterns of sleep disturbance in early life might be used to pinpoint increased risk for ASD among young children already at risk because they have a sibling with ASD.” The researchers analyzed data from a long-term study of children who do and do not have siblings with ASD. When the children were 6 and 12 months of age, parents were asked to respond to an infant temperament questionnaire that asks how much difficulty their child has falling asleep at bedtime and falling back to sleep after waking up during the night. At these time intervals, the children also received MRI scans to track their brain development. At 24 months, the children were assessed for ASD.

Keyword: Autism; Sleep
Link ID: 27238 - Posted: 05.08.2020

By Godfrey Pearlson Around the world, about 188 million people use marijuana every year. The drug has been legalized for recreational use in 11 U.S. states, and it may eventually become legal at the federal level. In a Gallup survey conducted last summer, 12 percent of American adults reported that they smoked marijuana, including 22 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds. Those are the stats. The consequences remain a mystery. As access to marijuana increases—and while acceptance of the drug grows and perception of its harmfulness diminishes—it is important to consider the potential for long-term ill effects, especially in users who start young. One of marijuana’s best-documented consequences is short-lived interference with memory. The substance makes it harder to get information into memory and, subsequently, to access it, with larger doses causing progressively more problems. Much less documented, however, is whether the drug has lasting effects on cognitive abilities. Finding the answer to that question is essential. Depending on the severity of any such effects and their persistence, marijuana use could have significant downstream impacts on education, employment, job performance and income. There are plausible reasons why the teenage brain may be especially vulnerable to the effects of marijuana use. Natural cannabinoids play an essential role in brain cell migration and development from fetal life onward. And adolescence is a crucial age for finalizing brain sculpting and white matter proliferation. The hippocampi, paired structures in the temporal lobe that are crucial in the formation of new memories, are studded with cannabinoid receptors. THC, the main ingredient behind marijuana’s “high,” acts on the brain’s cannabinoid receptors to mimic some of the effects of the body’s endogenous cannabinoids, such as anandamide. The compound’s effects are more persistent and nonphysiological, however. It may be throwing important natural processes out of balance. © 2020 Scientific American,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 27237 - Posted: 05.08.2020

Ashley Yeager In the spring of 2019, neuroscientist Heather Cameron set up a simple experiment. She and her colleagues put an adult rat in the middle of a plastic box with a water bottle at one end. They waited until the rat started drinking and then made a startling noise to see how the animal would respond. The team did this repeatedly with regular rats and with animals that were genetically altered so that they couldn’t make new neurons in their hippocampuses, a brain region involved in learning and memory. When the animals heard the noise, those that could make new hippocampal neurons immediately stopped slurping water and looked around, but the animals lacking hippocampal neurogenesis kept drinking. When the team ran the experiment without the water bottle, both sets of rats looked around right away to figure out where the sound was coming from. Rats that couldn’t make new neurons seemed to have trouble shifting their attention from one task to another, the researchers concluded. “It’s a very surprising result,” says Cameron, who works at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland. Researchers studying neurogenesis in the adult hippocampus typically conduct experiments in which animals have had extensive training in a task, such as in a water maze, or have experienced repetitive foot shocks, she explains. In her experiments, the rats were just drinking water. “It seemed like there would be no reason that the hippocampus should have any role,” she says. Yet in animals engineered to lack hippocampal neurogenesis, “the effects are pretty big.” The study joins a growing body of work that challenges the decades-old notion that the primary role of new neurons within the adult hippocampus is in learning and memory. More recently, experiments have tied neurogenesis to forgetting, one possible way to ensure the brain doesn’t become overloaded with information it doesn’t need, and to anxiety, depression, stress, and, as Cameron’s work suggests, attention. Now, neuro-scientists are rethinking the role that new neurons, and the hippocampus as a whole, play in the brain. © 1986–2020 The Scientist.

Keyword: Neurogenesis; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 27236 - Posted: 05.06.2020

Michael Marshall In 2018, psychiatrist Oleguer Plana-Ripoll was wrestling with a puzzling fact about mental disorders. He knew that many individuals have multiple conditions — anxiety and depression, say, or schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. He wanted to know how common it was to have more than one diagnosis, so he got his hands on a database containing the medical details of around 5.9 million Danish citizens. He was taken aback by what he found. Every single mental disorder predisposed the patient to every other mental disorder — no matter how distinct the symptoms1. “We knew that comorbidity was important, but we didn’t expect to find associations for all pairs,” says Plana-Ripoll, who is based at Aarhus University in Denmark. The study tackles a fundamental question that has bothered researchers for more than a century. What are the roots of mental illness? In the hope of finding an answer, scientists have piled up an enormous amount of data over the past decade, through studies of genes, brain activity and neuroanatomy. They have found evidence that many of the same genes underlie seemingly distinct disorders, such as schizophrenia and autism, and that changes in the brain’s decision-making systems could be involved in many conditions. Researchers are also drastically rethinking theories of how our brains go wrong. The idea that mental illness can be classified into distinct, discrete categories such as ‘anxiety’ or ‘psychosis’ has been disproved to a large extent. Instead, disorders shade into each other, and there are no hard dividing lines — as Plana-Ripoll’s study so clearly demonstrated. © 2020 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 27235 - Posted: 05.06.2020

By Rodrigo Pérez Ortega The left and right sides of our brains store different kinds of memories: The left side specializes in verbal information, for example, while the right side specializes in visual information. But it turns out we’re not the only ones. A new study suggests that ants—like humans, songbirds, and zebrafish—also store different memories in different sides of their tiny brains, in a process called lateralization. Honey bees and bumblebees seem to exhibit lateralization when it comes to memories involving scent. But researchers wanted to know whether other insects were also dividing up the labor of their brains. They trained wood ants (Formica rufa) just as Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov trained his famous dogs—by treating them with food each time they received a certain signal. To find out whether ants stored visual memories in different parts of their brains, the researchers touched the right antenna, the left antenna, or both, of dozens of ants with a sugary droplet each time they looked at a blue object (above). Then, the researchers tested their memories 10 minutes, 1 hour, and 24 hours after the training. They did this by showing them the blue object and observing whether they extended their mouths, a “thirst” response similar to Pavlov’s dogs salivating. Ants trained with the right antenna had strong thirst responses at the 10-minute mark and lingering responses after 1 hour, but not after that. Ants trained with the left antenna had no response at 10 minutes or 1 hour, but appeared thirsty 24 hours after their training. That suggests that one side of the ant brain stores short-term memories, while the other side stores longer-term ones, the researchers write today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. © 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Laterality; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 27234 - Posted: 05.06.2020

By Amanda Heidt Koalas begging firefighters for water have become emblematic of Australia’s recent wildfire woes. But aside from these unusual interactions, scientists have never been quite sure how koalas drink. Now, a new study has documented the first evidence of the clever way they stay hydrated: by licking water from the smooth bark of gum trees as it rains. Past research has suggested that because koalas spend the vast majority of their time in trees, they likely get most of their water from the eucalyptus leaves they eat. But over the course of 13 years—from 2006 to 2019—citizen scientists, ecologists, and land owners reported 46 sightings of tree-licking behavior (above) in wild koalas. Researchers reviewed video and photographic evidence, and they found that even when puddles or lakes were nearby, koalas were more likely to drink the water running down trees, they report this month in Ethology. Koalas face a number of threats, and dwindling access to water is high on the list. Australia is now experiencing its driest period on record, with higher average temperatures and fewer days of rain. If tree licking provides a significant proportion of koalas’ water needs, researchers hope their results can identify areas where water should be supplemented as the rain dries up. © 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Evolution
Link ID: 27233 - Posted: 05.06.2020

Catherine Offord No matter how he looked at the data, Albert Tsao couldn’t see a pattern. Over several weeks in 2007 and again in 2008, the 19-year-old undergrad trained rats to explore a small trial arena, chucking them pieces of tasty chocolate cereal by way of encouragement. He then recorded the activity of individual neurons in the animals’ brains as they scampered, one at a time, about that same arena. He hoped that the experiment would offer clues as to how the rats’ brains were forming memories, but “the data that it gave us was confusing,” he says. There wasn’t any obvious pattern to the animals’ neural output at all. Then enrolled at Harvey Mudd College in California, Tsao was doing the project as part of a summer internship at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience in Norway, in a lab that focused on episodic memory—the type of long-term memory that allows humans and other mammals to recall personal experiences (or episodes), such as going on a first date or spending several minutes searching for chocolate. Neuroscientists suspected that the brain organizes these millions of episodes partly according to where they took place. The Kavli Institute’s Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser had recently made a breakthrough with the discovery of “grid cells,” neurons that generate a virtual spatial map of an area, firing whenever the animal crosses the part of the map that that cell represents. These cells, the Mosers reported, were situated in a region of rats’ brains called the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) that projects many of its neurons into the hippocampus, the center of episodic memory formation. Inspired by the findings, Tsao had opted to study a region right next to the MEC called the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC), which also feeds into the hippocampus. © 1986–2020 The Scientist

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 27232 - Posted: 05.05.2020

by Laura Dattaro / Autistic people have atypical activity in a part of the brain that regulates attention, according to a new study1. The researchers measured pupil responses as a proxy for brain activity in a brain region known as the locus ceruleus. Located in the brain stem, the region plays a key role in modulating activity throughout the brain, in part by controlling attention. It can broaden and narrow pupils to adjust how much visual information a person receives, for example. Because of this, researchers can use pupil size to infer activity in the region and gauge a person’s focus on a task; a wider pupil indicates increased focus. The locus ceruleus may also be key to regulating the balance between excitatory and inhibitory brain signals. Some research indicates this equilibrium is disrupted in autism, suggesting the region plays a role in the condition’s underlying biology. In the new study, researchers compared autistic and typical people’s pupil responses when performing a task with and without a distracting sound. Typical people’s pupils grew larger when hearing the sound, suggesting a boost in focus directed by the locus ceruleus. By contrast, the pupils of autistic people did not widen, indicating they do not modulate their attention in the same way. This might have profound consequences for autistic people’s sensory experience, the researchers say. © 2020 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Autism; Attention
Link ID: 27231 - Posted: 05.05.2020

By Susan Milius An elephant, a narwhal and a guinea pig walk into a bar. From there, things could get ugly. All three might get drunk easily, according to a new survey of a gene involved in metabolizing alcohol. They’re among the creatures affected by 10 independent breakdowns of the ADH7 gene during the history of mammal evolution. Inheriting that dysfunctional gene might make it harder for their bodies to break down ethanol, says molecular anthropologist Mareike Janiak of the University of Calgary in Canada. She and colleagues didn’t look at all the genes needed to metabolize ethanol, but the failure of this important one might allow ethanol to build up more easily in these animals’ bloodstreams, Janiak and colleagues report April 29 in Biology Letters. The carnivorous cetaceans, grain- or leaf-eating guinea pigs and most other animals that the study identified as potentially easy drunks probably don’t binge on sugary fruit and nectar that brews ethanol. Elephants, however, will feast on fruit, and the new study reopens a long-running debate over whether elephants truly get tipsy gorging on marula fruit, a relative of mangoes. Descriptions of elephants behaving oddly after binging on overripe fruit go back at least to 1875, Janiak says. Later, a taste test offering the animals troughs of water spiked with ethanol found that elephants willingly drank. Afterward, they swayed more when moving and seemed more aggressive, observers reported. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2020.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Evolution
Link ID: 27230 - Posted: 05.05.2020

By Kim Severson In the 1980s, when marriage and adopting children seemed impossible dreams for gay men, the psychoanalyst Richard C. Friedman became their champion. His 1988 book, “Male Homosexuality: A Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspective,” showed that sexual orientation was largely biological and presented a case that helped undermine the belief held by most Freudian analysts at the time that homosexuality was a pathology that could somehow be cured. “I felt an ethical obligation to find the reasons for anti-homosexual prejudice,” he once told an interviewer. His wife, Susan Matorin, a clinical social worker at the Weill Medical College of Cornell, put it more plainly: “Straight people had the same personality issues, and they got away with murder, but gay people were stigmatized, and he didn’t think that was right.” Dr. Friedman’s motivation wasn’t political. “He very much felt like you followed the science, and it didn’t matter what the political backdrop was,” his son, Jeremiah, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, said in a phone interview. Although the American Psychiatric Association, the dominant mental health organization in the United States, changed its diagnostic manual in 1973 and stopped classifying homosexuality as an illness, psychoanalysts continued to describe homosexuality as a perversion, and many believed it could be cured. Dr. Friedman, using studies of identical twins and theories of developmental psychology, made a scholarly rather than ideological case that biology rather than upbringing played a significant role in sexual orientation. It was a direct challenge to popular Freudian theories and thrust him into the center of debates among the more established heavyweights of psychoanalysis. It led to a model in which analyst and patient simply assumed that homosexuality was intrinsic, said Jack Drescher, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University who knew Dr. Friedman and would later offer his own critiques of Dr. Friedman’s theory as new approaches to working with gay and lesbian patients emerged. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 27229 - Posted: 05.05.2020

Amber Dance A mouse finds itself in a box it’s never seen before. The walls are striped on one side, dotted on the other. The orange-like odor of acetophenone wafts from one end of the box, the spiced smell of carvone from the other. The mouse remembers that the orange smell is associated with something good. Although it may not recall the exact nature of the reward, the mouse heads toward the scent. Except this mouse has never smelled acetophenone in its life. Rather, the animal is responding to a false memory, implanted in its brain by neuroscientists at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Sheena Josselyn, a coauthor on a 2019 Nature Neuroscience study reporting the results of the project, says the goal was not to confuse the rodent, but for the scientists to confirm their understanding of mouse memory. “If we really understand memory, we should be able to trick the brain into remembering something that never happened at all,” she explains. By simultaneously activating the neurons that sense acetophenone and those associated with reward, the researchers created the “memory” that the orange-y scent heralded good things. Thanks to optogenetics, which uses a pulse of light to activate or deactivate neurons, Josselyn and other scientists are manipulating animal memories in all kinds of ways. Even before the Toronto team implanted false memories into mice, researchers were making rodents forget or recall an event with the flick of a molecular light switch. With every flash of light, they test their hypotheses about how these animals—and by extension, people—collect, store, and access past experiences. Scientists are also examining how memory formation and retrieval change with age, how those processes are altered in animal models of Alzheimer’s disease, and how accessing memories can influence an animal’s emotional state. © 1986–2020 The Scientist.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 27228 - Posted: 05.02.2020

By Dennis Normile Scientists studying brains and other organs and cancerous tumors have long tried to get detailed 3D views of their insides—down to the level of blood vessel and cell type. But producing such images is time-consuming and difficult. Now, dramatic improvements to a 3D imaging technique can reveal the internal components of entire organs or even animals in a simple procedure, researchers report this week. The new tissue staining protocol allows cellular level analyses in unprecedented detail; it could aid research efforts in neuroscience, developmental and evolutionary biology, and immunology, and it could prove useful in diagnosing some cancers and studying damaged brain tissue after death. To image biological samples in 3D, researchers basically have two main options: They can slice tissues into thin sections and use computer software to reconstruct the whole sample, or they can render biological tissue transparent using special chemicals, which lets researchers view its interior with an optical microscope. To distinguish different cell types, researchers typically stain tissues by soaking them in a cocktail of dyes and chemicals. But getting staining dyes to penetrate organs and large samples has proved difficult. To tackle this problem, researchers at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research identified a gel that closely mimics the physicochemical properties of organs that have undergone the tissue clearing process. Starting with computer simulations and following up with laboratory tests, the team optimized the soaking solution temperature, dye and antibody concentrations, chemical additives, and electrical properties to produce the best staining and imaging results. They then tested their method with more than two dozen commonly used dyes and antibodies on mouse and marmoset brains. © 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 27227 - Posted: 05.02.2020

Ruth Williams Scientists have created a light-responsive opsin so sensitive that even when engineered into cells deep within tissue it can respond to an external light stimulus, according to a report in Neuron yesterday (April 30). Experiments in mice and macaques showed that shining blue light on the surface of the skull or brain was sufficient to activate opsin-expressing neurons six millimeters deep. “I was pretty blown away that this was even possible,” says Gregory Corder, who studies the neurological basis of pain and addiction at the University of Pennsylvania and who was not involved with the work. At that sort of depth, he continues, “essentially no part of the rodent brain is off-limits now for doing this non-invasive [technique]. . . . It’s pretty impressive.” “This development will help to extend the use of optogenetics in non-human primate models, and bring the techniques closer to clinical application in humans,” adds neurological disease expert Adriana Galvan of Yerkes National Primate Research Center in an email to The Scientist. Galvan was not a member of the research team. Optogenetics is a technique whereby excitable cells, such as neurons, can be controlled at will by light. To do this, cells are genetically engineered to produce ion channels called opsins that sit in the cells’ membranes and open in response to a certain wavelength of light. Switching on the light, then, floods the cells with ions, causing them to fire. Because light doesn’t penetrate tissue easily, to activate opsin-producing neurons deep in the brain of a living animal, researchers insert fiber optic cables. This is “highly invasive,” says Galvan, explaining that “the brain tissue can be damaged.” © 1986–2020 The Scientist.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 27226 - Posted: 05.02.2020

Diana Kwon As rodents scuttle through a maze, scientists can observe the activity of their brains’ “inner GPS,” neurons that manage spatial orientation and navigation. This positioning system was revealed through two different discoveries, decades apart. In 1971, neuroscientist John O’Keefe found place cells, neurons that are consistently activated when rats are in a specific location, while observing the animals as they ran around an enclosure. More than thirty years later, neuroscientists May-Britt and Edvard Moser used a similar method to identify grid cells, neurons that fire at regular intervals as animals move, enabling them to keep track of navigational cues. It was the early 2010s when neuroscientist Elizabeth Buffalo and her team at Emory University’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta started investigating what the brain’s GPS looks like in primates. While conducting memory tests by tracking the eye movements of primates viewing either familiar or unfamiliar images, the researchers began to wonder: Was this system also active in stationary animals? “They were moving their eyes as they were forming a memory of these pictures,” Buffalo says. “So we thought that maybe this eye movement exploration was something that primates do in an analogous way to how rodents explore as they move around a physical environment.” One of Buffalo’s graduate students, Nathaniel Killian, put this hypothesis to the test. Working with monkeys, he placed electrodes into the entorhinal cortex—the brain region where grid cells are found in rodents—and recoded brain activity while the animals viewed images on a screen. One day, Killian came into a lab meeting with an announcement: he had found grid cells in the primate brain. Although it took many more months to complete additional experiments to validate the results, Buffalo remembers thinking during that meeting, “Wow, we’re seeing something really new.” © 1986–2020 The Scientist

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 27225 - Posted: 05.02.2020

By Lisa Sanders, M.D. “Honey” — the woman could hear fear tightening her husband’s voice as he called out to her — “I think your mother just died.” She ran into the living room. Her 78-year-old mother sat rigid in a chair, her skin gray and lifeless. Her eyes were open but all white, as if she were trying to see the back of her own skull. Then her arms started to make little jerking movements; her lips parted as saliva seeped out the corner of her mouth onto her chin. Then her body slumped. She seemed awake but confused after this seizure-like episode. Should I call an ambulance? the husband asked. No, his wife responded. Her mother had a complicated medical history, including a kidney transplant 12 years before and an autoimmune disease. An ambulance would want to take her to the nearby Hartford Hospital. But her doctors were at Yale New Haven Hospital — some 30 miles from their home in Cromwell, Conn. They helped the woman into the car. It was only a half-hour drive to the hospital that March 10 evening, but it seemed to last forever. Would her mother make it? Her eyes were closed, and she looked very pale. Her other daughter worked at the hospital and was waiting with a wheelchair when they arrived. The daughters made sure that the doctors and nurses knew that their mother took two medications to keep her immune system from killing her transplanted kidney. Because of those immune-suppressing drugs, she’d had many infections over the years. Six months earlier, she nearly lost her kidney to a particularly aggressive bacterium. She’d been well since then, until a few days earlier when she came down with a cold. It was just a sore throat and a runny nose, but the couple were worried enough to move her into their home to keep an eye on her. She didn’t want to eat because of the pain in her throat, but otherwise she seemed to be doing well. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 27224 - Posted: 04.30.2020

By Emily Willingham Professional burnout is all too familiar: Go at something too hard for too long, and the motivational tank empties. But burnout for an autistic person isn’t always about overwork, Dora Raymaker, an autistic systems scientist at Portland State University (PSU), found in a study of autistic workers. Instead, the need to mask autistic behaviors through a workday with nonautistic people can cause chronic exhaustion, reduced ability to tolerate stimuli like light or sound, and loss of skills, the study showed through interviews and a survey of social media comments. The work, which Raymaker’s team published last month, highlights a new trend in autism research. Raymaker and colleagues are part of a small but growing number of research teams with autistic members. These groups are shifting the focus in autism research from cause and cure to practical steps, including ones that help autistic people in settings such as the workplace. And they’re publishing some of their findings in a new journal, Autism in Adulthood, which is dedicated to including the perspectives of autistic people in what it publishes. Interest in those perspectives is “skyrocketing,” says Christina Nicolaidis, a co-author on the burnout study. Nicolaidis, a professor in the School of Social Work at PSU, has an adult son who is autistic. Although much research on autism has focused on children, autistic adults who came of age in the 1990s and early 2000s are joining the field and bringing a focus on their own experience. One member of that cohort is TC Waisman, a doctoral candidate at the University of Calgary studying how faculty and staff can improve autistic students’ college experiences. Waisman says she sees researchers increasingly “respecting us as our own self-determined culture and foregrounding our needs in studies.” © 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 27223 - Posted: 04.30.2020

By Tanya Lewis In March 2019 biotechnology giant Biogen stopped two big trials of its experimental Alzheimer's disease drug aducanumab because it did not appear to improve memory in declining patients. Then, in a surprise reversal several months later, the company and its partner, Japanese drugmaker Eisai, said they would ask the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve the treatment. A new analysis, Biogen said, showed that a subset of people on the highest doses in one trial did benefit from the compound, which dissolves clumps of a protein called beta-amyloid within the brain. The back-and-forth decisions, along with the failure of a slew of other amyloid-clearing compounds, have left experts divided about whether treating amyloid buildup—long thought to be the best target for an Alzheimer's therapy—is still a promising approach. Some of the scientists rethinking the so-called amyloid hypothesis helped to generate it in the first place. “I would say it has legs, but it's limping,” says geneticist John Hardy, who co-authored the genetic studies that pioneered the idea more than two decades ago. According to Hardy, who runs a molecular neuroscience program at University College London's Institute of Neurology, “the [concept] we drew in 1998 is cartoonishly oversimplistic. There were lots of question marks. We thought those questions would be filled in within a couple of years. And yet 20 years later they are not filled in.” Other experts, though, still contend that the amyloid hypothesis is a strong explanation and that treatments targeting the protein are the right way to go. © 2020 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 27222 - Posted: 04.30.2020

By Jennifer Couzin-Frankel Science's COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center. Among the many surprises of the new coronavirus is one that seems to defy basic biology: infected patients with extraordinarily low blood-oxygen levels, or hypoxia, scrolling on their phones, chatting with doctors, and generally describing themselves as comfortable. Clinicians call them happy hypoxics. “There is a mismatch [between] what we see on the monitor and what the patient looks like in front of us,” says Reuben Strayer, an emergency physician at Maimonides Medical Center in New York City. Speaking from home while recovering from COVID-19 himself, Strayer says he was first struck by the phenomenon in March as patients streamed into his emergency room. He and other doctors are keen to understand this hypoxia, and when and how to treat it. A normal blood-oxygen saturation is at least 95%. In most lung diseases, such as pneumonia, falling saturations accompany other changes, including stiff or fluid-filled lungs, or rising levels of carbon dioxide because the lungs can’t expel it efficiently. It’s these features that leave us feeling short of breath—not, counterintuitively, low oxygen saturation itself, says Paul Davenport, a respiratory physiologist at the University of Florida. “The brain is tuned to monitoring the carbon dioxide with various sensors,” Davenport explains. “We don’t sense our oxygen levels.” In serious cases of COVID-19, patients struggle to breathe with damaged lungs, but early in the disease, low saturation isn’t always coupled with obvious respiratory difficulties. Carbon dioxide levels can be normal and breathing deeply is comfortable—“the lung is inflating so they feel OK,” says Elnara Marcia Negri, a pulmonologist at Hospital Sírio-Libanês in São Paulo. But oxygen saturation, measured by a device clipped to a finger and in many cases confirmed with blood tests, can be in the 70s, 60s, or 50s. Or even lower. Although mountain climbers can have similar readings, here the slide downward, some doctors believe, is potentially “ominous,” says Nicholas Caputo, an emergency physician at New York City Health + Hospitals/Lincoln. © 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 27221 - Posted: 04.29.2020