By Judith Graham, Kaiser Health News Do I know I’m at risk for developing dementia? You bet. My father died of Alzheimer’s disease at age 72; my sister was felled by frontotemporal dementia at 58. And that’s not all: Two maternal uncles had Alzheimer’s, and my maternal grandfather may have had vascular dementia. (In his generation, it was called senility.) So what happens when I misplace a pair of eyeglasses or can’t remember the name of a movie I saw a week ago? “Now comes my turn with dementia,” I think. Then I talk myself down from that emotional cliff. Am I alone in this? Hardly. Many people, like me, who’ve watched this cruel illness destroy a family member, dread the prospect that they, too, might become demented. The lack of a cure or effective treatments only adds to the anxiety. It seems a common refrain, the news that another treatment to stop Alzheimer’s has failed. How do we cope as we face our fears and peer into our future? Andrea Kline, whose mother, as well as her aunt and uncle, had Alzheimer’s disease, just turned 71 and lives in Boynton Beach, Fla. She’s a retired registered nurse who teaches yoga to seniors at community centers and assisted-living facilities. “I worry about dementia incessantly: Every little thing that goes wrong, I’m convinced it’s the beginning,” she told me. Because Ms. Kline has had multiple family members with Alzheimer’s, she’s more likely to have a genetic vulnerability than someone with a single occurrence in their family. But that doesn’t mean this condition lies in her future. A risk is just that: It’s not a guarantee. The age of onset is also important. People with close relatives struck by dementia early — before age 65 — are more likely to be susceptible genetically. Ms. Kline was the primary caregiver for her mother, Charlotte Kline, who received an Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 1999 and passed away in 2007 at age 80. “I try to eat very healthy. I exercise. I have an advance directive, and I’ve discussed what I want” in the way of care “with my son,” she said. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 27056 - Posted: 02.20.2020

Maternal obesity may increase a child’s risk for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to an analysis by researchers from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), part of the National Institutes of Health. The researchers found that mothers — but not fathers — who were overweight or obese before pregnancy were more likely to report that their children had been diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or to have symptoms of hyperactivity, inattentiveness or impulsiveness at ages 7 to 8 years old. Their study appears in The Journal of Pediatrics. The study team analyzed the NICHD Upstate KIDS Study, which recruited mothers of young infants and followed the children through age 8 years. In this analysis of nearly 2,000 children, the study team found that women who were obese before pregnancy were approximately twice as likely to report that their child had ADHD or symptoms of hyperactivity, inattention or impulsiveness, compared to children of women of normal weight before pregnancy. The authors suggest that, if their findings are confirmed by additional studies, healthcare providers may want to screen children of obese mothers for ADHD so that they could be offered earlier interventions. The authors also note that healthcare providers could use evidence-based strategies to counsel women considering pregnancy on diet and lifestyle. Resources for plus-size pregnant women and their healthcare providers are available as part of NICHD’s Pregnancy for Every Body initiative.

Keyword: ADHD; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 27055 - Posted: 02.20.2020

Merrit Kennedy As doctors in London performed surgery on Dagmar Turner's brain, the sound of a violin filled the operating room. The music came from the patient on the operating table. In a video from the surgery, the violinist moves her bow up and down as surgeons behind a plastic sheet work to remove her brain tumor. The King's College Hospital surgeons woke her up in the middle of the operation in order to ensure they did not compromise parts of the brain necessary for playing the violin, such as parts that control precise hand movements and coordination. "We knew how important the violin is to Dagmar, so it was vital that we preserved function in the delicate areas of her brain that allowed her to play," Keyoumars Ashkan, a neurosurgeon at King's College Hospital, said in a press release. Turner, 53, learned that she had a slow-growing tumor in 2013. Late last year, doctors found that it had become more aggressive and the violinist decided to have surgery to remove it. In an interview with ITV News, Turner recalled doctors telling her, "Your tumor is on the right-hand side, so it will not affect your right-hand side, it will affect your left-hand side." "And I'm just like, 'Oh, hang on, this is my most important part. My job these days is playing the violin,' " she said, making a motion of pushing down violin strings with her left hand. Ashkan, an accomplished pianist, and his colleagues came up with a plan to keep the hand's functions intact. © 2020 npr

Keyword: Epilepsy; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 27054 - Posted: 02.20.2020

Amy Schleunes New Zealand’s North Island robins (Petroica longipes), known as toutouwai in Maori, are capable of remembering a foraging task taught to them by researchers for up to 22 months in the wild, according to a study published on February 12 in Biology Letters. These results echo the findings of a number of laboratory studies of long-term memory in animals, but offer a rare example of a wild animal retaining a learned behavior with no additional training. The study also has implications for conservation and wildlife management: given the birds’ memory skills, researchers might be able to teach them about novel threats and resources in their constantly changing habitat. “This is the first study to show [memory] longevity in the wild,” says Vladimir Pravosudov, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Nevada, Reno, who was not involved in the study. Rachael Shaw, a coauthor and behavioral ecologist at Victoria University in New Zealand, says she was surprised that the birds remembered the new skill she had taught them. “Wild birds have so much that they have to contend with in their daily lives,” she says. “You don’t really expect that it’s worth their while to retain this learned task they hardly had the opportunity to do, and they can’t predict that they will have an opportunity to do again.” Shaw is generally interested in the cognitive abilities of animals and the evolution of intelligence, and the toutouwai, trainable food caching birds that can live up to roughly 10 years, make perfect subjects for her behavioral investigations. “They’ve got this kind of boldness and curiosity that a lot of island bird species share,” says Shaw. These qualities make them vulnerable to predation by invasive cats, rats, and ermines (also known as stoats), but also inquisitive and relatively unafraid of humans, an ideal disposition for testing memory retention in the field. © 1986–2020 The Scientist

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 27053 - Posted: 02.20.2020

By Rachel Cericola A year ago, I was diagnosed with nasal polyps and regularly snored like a wild boar. I’ve had the polyps removed, but the snoring continues. I’m not alone. According to Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine (Fifth Edition), “about 40 percent of the adult population” snores. Sometimes my snoring wakes up my husband (and vice versa), so I decided to try out six popular over-the-counter anti-snoring contraptions. To get a baseline measurement of how much I was snoring without any intervention, I used SnoreLab, a highly rated app that listens for snoring sounds, records clips, and analyzes your resting audio. After calculating an average of four nights’ intervention-free snoring readings to get a starting “sleep score,” I then slept with each anti-snoring device for several nights and tracked my SnoreLab results against that baseline. (Note that some of these devices may work for you and not me — and none of them should be used to treat sleep apnea. If you’re having restless sleep, gasping awake, or even feeling tired and foggy in the daytime, see a doctor.) While longer-term testing is needed before we could confidently recommend any of these, a few devices showed promise in our preliminary — and far from scientific — trials. Here’s how they did, in order of how much I found they helped: Smart Nora, $329 at the time of publication This system will slightly move your head when it catches you snoring. It includes a wireless, mic-equipped device that can sit bedside or be wall-mounted to detect snoring. Once it does that, it communicates with an under-bed base station that pumps air through a tube to an insert that lives inside your pillow. That motion gently adjusts your head position to reduce snoring (in my case, it effectively did so without waking me up). It sounds bizarre, but this was actually the most effective device I tried, cutting my total snoring in half, according to my SnoreLab sleep scores. It is also the most expensive. There are many options for personalization, which we will continue to test. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 27052 - Posted: 02.20.2020

By Katherine Kornei Imagine a frog call, but with a metallic twang—and the intensity of a chainsaw. That’s the “boing” of a minke whale. And it’s a form of animal communication in danger of being drowned out by ocean noise, new research shows. By analyzing more than 42,000 minke whale boings, scientists have found that, as background noise intensifies, the whales are losing their ability to communicate over long distances. This could limit their ability to find mates and engage in important social contact with other whales. Tyler Helble, a marine acoustician at the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, and colleagues recorded minke whale boings over a 1200-square-kilometer swathe of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility near the Hawaiian island of Kauai from 2012 to 2017. By measuring when a single boing arrived at various underwater microphones, the team pinpointed whale locations to within 10 to 20 meters. The researchers then used these positions, along with models of how sound propagates underwater, to calculate the intensity of each boing when it was emitted. The team compared these measurements with natural ambient noise, including waves, wind, and undersea earthquakes (no military exercises were conducted nearby during the study period). They found that minke whale boings grew louder in louder conditions. That’s not surprising—creatures across the animal kingdom up their volume when there’s background noise. (This phenomenon, dubbed the Lombard effect, holds true for humans, too—think of holding a conversation at a loud concert.) © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Hearing
Link ID: 27051 - Posted: 02.19.2020

Ian Sample Science editor Consuming a western diet for as little as one week can subtly impair brain function and encourage slim and otherwise healthy young people to overeat, scientists claim. Researchers found that after seven days on a high fat, high added sugar diet, volunteers in their 20s scored worse on memory tests and found junk food more desirable immediately after they had finished a meal. The finding suggests that a western diet makes it harder for people to regulate their appetite, and points to disruption in a brain region called the hippocampus as the possible cause. “After a week on a western-style diet, palatable food such as snacks and chocolate becomes more desirable when you are full,” said Richard Stevenson, a professor of psychology at Macquarie University in Sydney. “This will make it harder to resist, leading you to eat more, which in turn generates more damage to the hippocampus and a vicious cycle of overeating.” Previous work in animals has shown that junk food impairs the hippocampus, a brain region involved in memory and appetite control. It is unclear why, but one idea is that the hippocampus normally blocks or weakens memories about food when we are full, so looking at a cake does not flood the mind with memories of how nice cake can be. “When the hippocampus functions less efficiently, you do get this flood of memories, and so food is more appealing,” Stevenson said. To investigate how the western diet affects humans, the scientists recruited 110 lean and healthy students, aged 20 to 23, who generally ate a good diet. Half were randomly assigned to a control group who ate their normal diet for a week. The other half were put on a high energy western-style diet, which featured a generous intake of Belgian waffles and fast food. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Obesity
Link ID: 27050 - Posted: 02.19.2020

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health found evidence that specific immune cells may play a key role in the devastating effects of cerebral malaria, a severe form of malaria that mainly affects young children. The results, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, suggest that drugs targeting T cells may be effective in treating the disease. The study was supported by the NIH Intramural Research Program. “This is the first study showing that T cells target blood vessels in brains of children with cerebral malaria,” said Dorian McGavern, Ph.D., chief of the Viral Immunology and Intravital Imaging Section at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) who co-directed the study with Susan Pierce, Ph.D., chief of the Laboratory of Immunogenetics at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). “These findings build a bridge between mouse and human cerebral malaria studies by implicating T cells in the development of disease pathology in children. It is well established that T cells cause the brain vasculature injury associated with cerebral malaria in mice, but this was not known in humans.” More than 200 million people worldwide are infected annually with mosquito-borne parasites that cause malaria. In a subset of those patients, mainly young children, the parasites accumulate in brain blood vessels causing cerebral malaria, which leads to increased brain pressure from swelling. Even with available treatment, cerebral malaria still kills up to 25% of those affected resulting in nearly 400,000 deaths annually. Children who survive the infection will often have long-lasting neurological problems such as cognitive impairment.

Keyword: Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 27049 - Posted: 02.19.2020

Nicola Davis Parents should not worry about their teenagers’ delinquent behaviour provided they were well behaved in their earlier childhood, according to researchers behind a study that suggests those who offend throughout their life showed antisocial behaviour from a young age and have a markedly different brain structure as adults. According to figures from the Ministry of Justice, 24% of males in England and Wales aged 10–52 in 2006 had a conviction, compared with 6% of females. Previous work has shown that crime rises in adolescence and young adulthood but that most perpetrators go on to become law-abiding adults, with only a minority – under 10% of the general population – continuing to offend throughout their life. Such trends underpin many modern criminal justice strategies, including in the UK where police can use their discretion as to whether to a young offender should enter the formal justice system. Now researchers say they have found that adults with a long history of offences show striking differences in brain structure compared with those who have stuck to the straight and narrow or who transgressed only as adolescents. “These findings underscore prior research that really highlights that there are different types of young offenders – they are not all the same. They should not all be treated the same,” said Prof Essi Viding, a co-author of the study from University College London. Prof Terrie Moffitt, another co-author of the research from Duke University in North Carolina, said the study helped to shed light on what may be behind persistent antisocial behaviour. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Aggression; Brain imaging
Link ID: 27048 - Posted: 02.18.2020

By Laura Sanders SEATTLE — Live bits of brain look like any other piece of meat — pinkish, solid chunks of neural tissue. But unlike other kinds of tissue or organs donated for research, they hold the memories, thoughts and feelings of a person. “It is identified with who we are,” Karen Rommelfanger, a neuroethicist at Emory University in Atlanta, said February 13 in a news conference at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. That uniqueness raises a whole new set of ethical quandaries when it comes to experimenting with living brain tissue, she explained. Such donations are crucial to emerging research aimed at teasing out answers to what makes us human. For instance, researchers at the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Brain Science conduct experiments on live brain tissue to get clues about how the cells in the human brain operate (SN: 8/7/19). These precious samples, normally discarded as medical waste, are donated by patients undergoing brain surgery and raced to the lab while the nerve cells are still viable. Other experiments rely on systems that are less sophisticated than a human brain, such as brain tissue from other animals and organoids. These clumps of neural tissue, grown from human stem cells, are still a long way from mimicking the complexities of the human brain (SN: 10/24/19). But with major advances, these systems might one day be capable of much more advanced behavior, which might ultimately lead to awareness, a conundrum that raises ethical issues. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2020

Keyword: Consciousness; Emotions
Link ID: 27047 - Posted: 02.18.2020

Fergus Walsh Medical correspondent A new gene therapy has been used to treat patients with a rare inherited eye disorder which causes blindness. It's hoped the NHS treatment will halt sight loss and even improve vision. Matthew Wood, 48, one of the first patients to receive the injection, told the BBC: "I value the remaining sight I have so if I can hold on to that it would be a big thing for me." The treatment costs around £600,000 but NHS England has agreed a discounted price with the manufacturer Novartis. Luxturna (voretigene neparvovec), has been approved by The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which estimates that just under 90 people in England will be eligible for the treatment. The gene therapy is for patients who have retinal dystrophy as a result of inheriting a faulty copy of the RPE65 gene from both parents. The gene is important for providing the pigment that light sensitive cells need to absorb light. Initially this affects night vision but eventually, as the cells die, it can lead to complete blindness. An injection is made into the back of the eye - this delivers working copies of the RPE65 gene. These are contained inside a harmless virus, which enables them to penetrate the retinal cells. Once inside the nucleus, the gene provides the instructions to make the RPE65 protein, which is essential for healthy vision. © 2020 BBC

Keyword: Vision; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 27046 - Posted: 02.18.2020

By Jane E. Brody I’ve long thought the human body was not meant to run on empty, that fasting was done primarily for religious reasons or political protest. Otherwise we needed a reliably renewed source of fuel to function optimally, mentally and emotionally as well as physically. Personal experience reinforced that concept; I’m not pleasant to be around when I’m hungry. There’s even an official name for that state of mind, confirmed by research: Hangry! But prompted by recent enthusiasm for fasting among people concerned about their health, weight or longevity, I looked into the evidence for possible benefits — and risks — of what researchers call intermittent fasting. Popular regimens range from ingesting few if any calories all day every other day or several times a week to fasting for 16 hours or more every day. A man I know in his early 50s said he had lost 12 pounds in about two months on what he calls the 7-11 diet: He eats nothing from 7 p.m. until 11 a.m. the next morning, every day. I was skeptical, but it turns out there is something to be said for practicing a rather prolonged diurnal fast, preferably one lasting at least 16 hours. Mark P. Mattson, neuroscientist at the National Institute on Aging and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, explained that the liver stores glucose, which the body uses preferentially for energy before it turns to burning body fat. “It takes 10 to 12 hours to use up the calories in the liver before a metabolic shift occurs to using stored fat,” Dr. Mattson told me. After meals, glucose is used for energy and fat is stored in fat tissue, but during fasts, once glucose is depleted, fat is broken down and used for energy. Most people trying to lose weight should strive for 16 calorie-free hours, he said, adding that “the easiest way to do this is to stop eating by 8 p.m., skip breakfast the next morning and then eat again at noon the next day.” (Caffeine-dependent people can have sugar- free black coffee or tea before lunch.) But don’t expect to see results immediately; it can take up to four weeks to notice an effect, he said. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 27045 - Posted: 02.18.2020

By Tam Hunt Strangely, modern science was long dominated by the idea that to be scientific means to remove consciousness from our explanations, in order to be “objective.” This was the rationale behind behaviorism, a now-dead theory of psychology that took this trend to a perverse extreme. Behaviorists like John Watson and B.F. Skinner scrupulously avoided any discussion of what their human or animal subjects thought, intended or wanted, and focused instead entirely on behavior. They thought that because thoughts in other peoples’ heads, or in animals, are impossible to know with certainty, we should simply ignore them in our theories. We can only be truly scientific, they asserted, if we focus solely on what can be directly observed and measured: behavior. Erwin Schrödinger, one of the key architects of quantum mechanics in the early part of the 20th century, labeled this approach in his philosophical 1958 book Mind and Matter, the “principle of objectivation” and expressed it clearly: Advertisement “By [the principle of objectivation] I mean … a certain simplification which we adopt in order to master the infinitely intricate problem of nature. Without being aware of it and without being rigorously systematic about it, we exclude the Subject of Cognizance from the domain of nature that we endeavor to understand. We step with our own person back into the part of an onlooker who does not belong to the world, which by this very procedure becomes an objective world.” Schrödinger did, however, identify both the problem and the solution. He recognized that “objectivation” is just a simplification that is a temporary step in the progress of science in understanding nature. © 2020 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 27044 - Posted: 02.18.2020

Shannon Bond If you're having a hard time falling asleep, that sleep tracker on your wrist might be to blame. And there's a name for this new kind of insomnia of the digital age: orthosomnia. It's "when you just really become fixated on having this perfect sleep via tracker," said Seema Khosla, medical director at the North Dakota Center for Sleep. "And then you start worrying about it, and you wind up giving yourself insomnia." Sleep trackers have become increasingly popular. They come in the form of watches, wristbands, rings and even mattresses. The gadgets measure how you breathe, how fast your heart is beating, how much you're tossing and turning. They crunch that data to produce a sleep score, usually through a smartphone app. But in an irony of our digital lifestyles, for some people, perfecting that sleep score becomes an end unto itself — so much so that they can lose sleep over it. Khosla sees this is her own practice as a sleep doctor. Stressed-out patients complain they are aiming for a sleep score of 100 but are getting only 80. It keeps them up at night. She has a simple solution. "I'll ask them just to put their tracker away for a couple of weeks. And honestly, sometimes you can just see the relief on their faces," she said. Kathrin Hamm experienced this problem firsthand. She was traveling around the world as an economist for the World Bank, and getting good sleep was a priority. © 2020 npr

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 27043 - Posted: 02.18.2020

Blake Richards Despite billions of dollars spent and decades of research, computation in the human brain remains largely a mystery. Meanwhile, we have made great strides in the development of artificial neural networks, which are designed to loosely mimic how brains compute. We have learned a lot about the nature of neural computation from these artificial brains and it’s time to take what we’ve learned and apply it back to the biological ones. Neurological diseases are on the rise worldwide, making a better understanding of computation in the brain a pressing problem. Given the ability of modern artificial neural networks to solve complex problems, a framework for neuroscience guided by machine learning insights may unlock valuable secrets about our own brains and how they can malfunction. Our thoughts and behaviours are generated by computations that take place in our brains. To effectively treat neurological disorders that alter our thoughts and behaviours, like schizophrenia or depression, we likely have to understand how the computations in the brain go wrong. However, understanding neural computation has proven to be an immensely difficult challenge. When neuroscientists record activity in the brain, it is often indecipherable. In a paper published in Nature Neuroscience, my co-authors and I argue that the lessons we have learned from artificial neural networks can guide us down the right path of understanding the brain as a computational system rather than as a collection of indecipherable cells. © 2010–2020, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Robotics
Link ID: 27042 - Posted: 02.14.2020

By Jade Wu 3 Anxiety-Related Disorders You Might Not Know About Person suffering from trichotillomania, an obsessive compulsive condition where sufferers can't resist pulling their hair out. Credit: Ryan Jackson Getty Images Most people know what it’s like to feel anxious. That tension in your muscles, those butterflies in your stomach, and the drumming of your heart tells you that you’re not calm. And this is totally normal. Where would we be if genuinely dangerous situations like dark alleys at night didn’t give us the heebie-jeebies? And would we take important tasks very seriously if we didn’t get nervous in the spotlight, like when giving a wedding toast? Sometimes, anxiety goes too far and gets in the way of our everyday functioning. It can mess up our health, relationships, work, and fun. It’s not hard to imagine the pain of being plagued by non-stop worries or feeling so shy as to have trouble with dating. But sometimes, anxiety and anxiety-related processes can show up in more unusual ways, even ways that don’t seem at first to have anything to do with emotions. The Diagnostic and Statistics Manual - 5th Edition is the official American Psychiatric Association’s list of psychological disorders. It’s a huge bible detailing everything that’s considered a disorder and how it’s categorized. It takes experts years to update it in response to ongoing scientific findings. Advertisement The Anxiety Disorders section got a big makeover in the last update, which came out in 2013. It’s now split into a few different sections, including Trauma and Stress-Related Disorders and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders. Some of the less common disorders got shuffled around, some got new names, but experts still agree that the line between categories is blurry at best. Overlapping and related to some of the most common anxiety disorders, such as generalized anxiety disorder and social anxiety disorder, are some that are less well-known.

Keyword: Stress; Emotions
Link ID: 27041 - Posted: 02.14.2020

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News, Seattle US researchers are developing a better understanding of the human brain by studying tissue left over from surgery. They say that their research is more likely to lead to new treatments than studies based on mouse and rat models. Dr Ed Lein, who leads the initiative at the Allen Institute has set up a scheme with local doctors to study left over tissue just hours after surgery. He gave details at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Seattle. "It is a little bit crazy that we have such a huge field where we are trying to solve brain diseases and there is very little understanding of the human brain itself," said Dr Lein. "The field as a whole is largely assuming that the human brain is similar to those of animal models without ever testing that view. "But the mouse brain is a thousand times smaller, and any time people look, they find significant differences." Dr Lein and his colleagues at the Allen Institute in Seattle set up the scheme with local neurosurgeons to study brain tissue just hours after surgery - with the consent of the patient. It functions as if it is still inside the brain for up to 48 hours after it has been removed. So Dr Lein and his colleagues have to drop everything and often have to work through the night once they hear that brain tissue has become available. © 2020 BBC

Keyword: Brain imaging; Epilepsy
Link ID: 27040 - Posted: 02.14.2020

Alison Abbott The use of animals in scientific research seems to be declining in the European Union, according to statistics gathered by the European Commission. The figures come from the first report on the state of animal research in the bloc since the introduction of tougher regulations 7 years ago. The report — published on 6 February — reviews the impact of an animal-research directive, legislation that was designed to reduce the use of animals in research and minimize their suffering. The directive, which came into effect in 2013, is widely considered to be one of the world’s toughest on animal research. According to the report, 9.39 million animals were used for scientific purposes in 2017 — the most recent year for which data have been collated — compared with 9.59 million in 2015. From 2015 to 2016, however, there was a slight increase, to 9.82 million. The report acknowledges that this prevents the confirmation of a clear decrease. But it concludes that, when compared with figures from before the directive came into force, the numbers suggest “a clear positive development”. In 2017, more than two-thirds of animals were used in basic or applied research (45% and 23%, respectively), and around one-quarter (23%) were involved in the testing of drugs and other chemicals to meet regulatory requirements. Other uses included the routine production of biological agents such as vaccines; teaching; and forensic investigations (see ‘Animals in science’). More than 60% of the animals used in 2017 were mice, 12% were rats, 13% were fish and 6% were birds. Dogs, cats and non-human primates made up just 0.3% of the total. © 2020 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 27039 - Posted: 02.14.2020

By Gina Kolata The study aimed to show that Alzheimer’s disease could be stopped if treatment began before symptoms emerged. The participants were the best candidates that scientists could find: still healthy, but with a rare genetic mutation that guaranteed they would develop dementia. For five years, on average, the volunteers received monthly infusions or injections of one of two experimental drugs, along with annual blood tests, brain scans, spinal taps and cognitive tests. Now, the verdict is in: The drugs did nothing to slow or stop cognitive decline in these subjects, dashing the hopes of scientists. Dr. Randall Bateman, a neurologist at Washington University in St. Louis and principal investigator of the study, said he was “shocked” when he first saw the data: “It was really crushing.” The results are a deep disappointment, scientists said — but not a knockout punch. The drugs did not work, but the problems may be fixable: perhaps the doses were too low, or they should have been given to patients much younger. Few experts want to give up on the hypothesis that amyloid plaques in the brain are intimately involved in Alzheimer’s disease. The data from this international study, called DIAN-TU, are still being analyzed and are to be presented on April 2 at scientific conferences in Vienna in April and in Amsterdam in July. The trial was sponsored by Washington University in St. Louis, two drug companies that supplied the drugs — Eli Lilly and Roche, with a subsidiary, Genentech — the National Institutes of Health and philanthropies, including the Alzheimer’s Association. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 27038 - Posted: 02.13.2020

By Elizabeth Pennisi Scientists seeking the origins of sleep may have uncovered important clues in the Australian bearded dragon. By tracing sleep-related neural signals to a specific region of the lizard’s brain—and linking that region to a mysterious part of the mammalian brain—a new study suggests complex sleep evolved even earlier in vertebrate evolution than researchers thought. The work could ultimately shed light on the mechanisms behind sleep—and pave the way for studies that may help humans get a better night’s rest. “Answers to the questions raised and reframed by this research seem extremely likely to be significant in many ways, including clinically,” says Stephen Smith, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute who was not involved with the new study. Mammals and birds have two kinds of sleep. During rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, eyes flutter, electrical activity moves through the brain, and, in humans, dreaming occurs. In between REM episodes is “slow wave” sleep, when brain activity ebbs and electrical activity synchronizes. This less intense brain state may help form and store memories, a few studies have suggested. In 2016, Gilles Laurent, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, discovered that reptiles, too, have both kinds of sleep. Every 40 seconds, central bearded dragons (Pogona vitticeps) switch between the two sleep states, he and his colleagues reported. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sleep; Evolution
Link ID: 27037 - Posted: 02.13.2020