By Dan Falk At the moment, you’re reading these words and, presumably, thinking about what the words and sentences mean. Or perhaps your mind has wandered, and you’re thinking about dinner, or looking forward to bingeing the latest season of “The Good Place.” But you’re definitely experiencing something. How is that possible? Every part of you, including your brain, is made of atoms, and each atom is as lifeless as the next. Your atoms certainly don’t know or feel or experience anything, and yet you — a conglomeration of such atoms — have a rich mental life in which a parade of experiences unfolds one after another. The puzzle of consciousness has, of course, occupied the greatest minds for millennia. The philosopher David Chalmers has called the central mystery the “hard problem” of consciousness. Why, he asks, does looking at a red apple produce the experience of seeing red? And more generally: Why do certain arrangements of matter experience anything? Anyone who has followed the recent debates over the nature of consciousness will have been struck by the sheer variety of explanations on offer. Many prominent neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, and physicists have put forward “solutions” to the puzzle — all of them wildly different from, and frequently contradicting, each other. “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 26802 - Posted: 11.08.2019

Sean McMinn Three years ago, only about one in ten high school students reported having recently used e-cigarettes. But a study published this week in JAMA shows the proportion of students vaping nicotine has now grown to more than one in four. Researchers from the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed data from the 2019 National Youth Tobacco Survey, which is conducted annually. They drilled down on e-cigarette use among high school and middle school students based on data from 19,000 students in the eighth, tenth and twelfth grades. Teen nicotine vaping has become so prevalent in recent years that the Food and Drug Administration has called it an "epidemic." An estimated 5.3 million teens use e-cigarettes, according to the study. It is illegal in all states for people under 18 to purchase e-cigarettes, and some states have raised that age to 21. Despite this and recent efforts to crack down on retailers selling to youth, rates of teen vaping have continued to rise. "For young people, this is of particular concern," the study's authors wrote, "because it could promote ... nicotine dependence, making it easier to initiate and proceed to regular e-cigarette use or transition to cigarette or other combustible tobacco product use." Students who took the survey, however, didn't appear to have moved on to traditional cigarettes yet. Just 6% of high schoolers reported having smoked a cigarette in the last month — a decrease from last year's survey. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26801 - Posted: 11.08.2019

By Sofie Bates Some people may be able to smell even without key structures that relay odor information from the nose to the brain. Researchers used brain scans to identify two women who appear to be missing their olfactory bulbs, the only parts of the brain known to receive signals about smell sensations from the nose and send them to other parts of the brain for processing. Both individuals performed similarly to other women with olfactory bulbs on several tests to identify and differentiate odors, the scientists report November 6 in Neuron. The findings challenge conventional views of the olfactory system, and may lead to treatments for people with no sense of smell (SN: 7/2/07). “I’m not sure that our textbook view of how the [olfactory] system works is right,” says Noam Sobel, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. MRI scans of the women’s brains revealed that where most people have two olfactory bulbs, these two appeared to have cerebrospinal fluid instead. To the researchers, this indicated that the women didn’t have olfactory bulbs. But Jay Gottfried, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study, says “I am not convinced that the women are indeed missing their bulbs.” Some evidence for olfactory bulbs may be undetectable with MRI, like microscopic structures or olfactory tissue that could be found with antibodies, he says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2019

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 26800 - Posted: 11.07.2019

By Sara Manning Peskin, M.D. At 66, Bob Karger was losing language. It was not the tip-of-the-tongue feeling that melts when you recall a sought-after word. He had lost the connection between sounds and meaning — the way ba-na-na recalls a soft, yellow fruit or ea-gle calls to mind a large bird of prey. In a recent conversation, he had thought acorns grew on pine trees. Mr. Karger did not know how to use items around the house, either. When he picked up a can opener, he would not realize it could remove the top from a tin. If he held a hammer, he might grasp it by the head, turning it around in his palm, not knowing he could swing it into a nail. His world was filled with incomprehensible items. His wife, Sandy Karger, noticed other changes. When she told her husband about a family member who died, Mr. Karger laughed instead of comforting her. He tipped excessively, slipping $20 bills to strangers, because they reminded him of close friends. He fixated on obese people. “Look at that person, they’re really fat,” he would say loudly, in public. Overcome by impatience, he would push people ahead of him in line at the store. “Can’t you hurry up?” he’d yell. “Do you really need to buy that?” In other ways, Mr. Karger’s mind was as sharp as it had ever been. He could remember upcoming appointments and recent dinners. He didn’t repeat himself in conversation. His long-term memory was at times better than Ms. Karger’s. After two years of worsening symptoms, the Kargers found Dr. Murray Grossman at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Grossman is short and charismatic, a quick-witted Montreal native who has mentored me since I began training in neurology. For the past several decades, he has pioneered research on neurodegenerative diseases that change behavior and language. When he saw Mr. Karger in 2007, the diagnosis was clear within the hour: Mr. Karger had a type of frontotemporal dementia. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 26799 - Posted: 11.07.2019

Lenny Bernstein A surgeon has implanted electrodes in the brain of a patient suffering from severe opioid use disorder, hoping to cure the man’s in­trac­table craving for drugs in the first such procedure performed in the United States. The device, known as a deep brain stimulator, is designed to alter the function of circuits in the man’s brain. It has been used with varying degrees of success in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, dystonia, epilepsy, obsessive-compulsive disorder and even depression. It is seen as a last-resort therapy after the failure of standard care, such as medication that reduces the craving for drugs. The deep brain stimulator, which functions much like a heart pacemaker, was implanted by Ali Rezai, executive chairman of the West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute. His patient, 33-year-old hotel worker Gerod Buckhalter, said he had been unable to remain sober for more than four months since the age of 15, despite trying a variety of medications and other inpatient and outpatient treatments. Buckhalter is the first of four people in a pilot program, which aims to demonstrate that the technique is safe so that a full-scale clinical trial can be conducted. It is aimed at a small percentage of opioid abusers with the most treatment-resistant cravings for opioids, who may face a lifetime of overdoses, relapses, inability to hold a job and other consequences of addiction.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26798 - Posted: 11.07.2019

Maheen Mausoof Adamson, Ph.D. The 1982 science fiction film classic Blade Runner is a gritty detective story set in the dystopian future that raises questions about what it means to be human. In the film, Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckard, a police officer turned bounty hunter searching the streets of Los Angeles for a replicant (human-like androids) rebellion leader Roy Batty. Batty is presented as a technologically perfected being fitted with a human-template brain completely rewired to create an enemy to be deathly feared. Fear of the perfect altered brain is prominent in science fiction—and may be particularly prevalent today, amid growing concerns about genetic editing and artificial intelligence. The prospect of a fully artificial human brain remains very distant. However, we are in the midst of a neuromodulation revolution that will increase our ability to treat disease and optimize human performance. We must, however, carefully consider the benefits and risks of these techniques in fully evaluating their potential for society as well as the individual. A large number of patients suffering from neurological or psychiatric disorders—depression, pain, and post-traumatic stress disorder among them—are resistant to or can develop resistance to standard medication and psychotherapy, suggesting the need for new approaches. Neuromodulation may possibly be such an approach. The term (aka neurostimulation) refers to direct stimulation and modification of the nervous system through the use of electrical, chemical, or mechanical signals. Neuromodulation therapy is already used to treat many brain disorders, most commonly movement disorders, chronic pain, and depression. © 2019 The Dana Foundation.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Depression
Link ID: 26797 - Posted: 11.07.2019

By Eva Frederick Few things are more adorable—or destructive—than a new puppy. When they pee on rugs, chew furniture, and get aggressive with other pups, their stressed-out owners usually turn to dog training. Now, a novel study suggests programs that use even relatively mild punishments like yelling and leash-jerking can stress dogs out, making them more “pessimistic” than dogs that experience reward-based training. “[Punishment] training may seem to work in the short run … but these methods can have future negative consequences,” says Marc Bekoff, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder who was not involved in the new study. “[These dogs are] living in perpetual stress.” Previous studies have suggested that although both reward-based and punishment-based training methods are effective, punishment-based training can have negative effects. But those studies tend to focus on police and laboratory dogs instead of family pets, and most used shock collars, which have been banned in several countries, as punishment. To find out how companion dogs react to more routine punishments, scientists led by Ana Catarina Vieira de Castro at the University of Porto in Portugal recruited 42 dogs from reward-based training schools, which use food or play to encourage good behaviors. The team also enlisted 50 dogs from aversive-based programs, which use negative reinforcement like yelling and leash jerking to train dogs, or even pressuring their rumps to get them to sit. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 26796 - Posted: 11.07.2019

By Andrew Joseph, STAT Chinese regulators have granted conditional approval to an Alzheimer’s drug that is derived from seaweed, potentially shaking up the field after years of clinical failures involving experimental therapies from major drug companies. The announcement over the weekend has been met with caution as well as an eagerness from clinicians and others to see full data from the drug maker, Shanghai Green Valley Pharmaceuticals. The company said its drug, Oligomannate, improved cognitive function in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s compared to placebo in a Phase 3 trial, with benefits seen in patients as early as week four and persisting throughout the 36 weeks of the trial. It has been almost two decades since any Alzheimer’s drug was approved. Oligomannate has received scant attention in the United States during its development. Advertisement Although full data on the drug have not yet been made available, the conditional approval by regulators means Oligomannate, also known as GV-971, will on the market in China by the end of the year, Green Valley said. The company will have to submit additional research on the mechanism of the drug and its long-term safety and effectiveness to the country’s National Medical Products Administration, Reuters reported. Green Valley also said it would launch a global Phase 3 trial next year in hopes of filing for approval in other countries as well. “It’s good to see that drug regulators in China are prioritizing emerging treatments for Alzheimer’s, but we do still need to see more evidence that this drug is safe and effective,” Carol Routledge, the director of research at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said in a statement. “For any potential drug to gain a stamp of approval by regulators in the UK, we’ll need to see larger trials in countries around the world to back up the evidence from China.” © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26795 - Posted: 11.06.2019

By Gretchen Reynolds Being physically fit may sharpen the memory and lower our risk of dementia, even if we do not start exercising until we are middle-aged or older, according to two stirring new studies of the interplay between exercise, aging, aerobic fitness and forgetting. But both studies, while underscoring the importance of activity for brain health, also suggest that some types of exercise may be better than others at safeguarding and even enhancing our memory. The scientific evidence linking exercise, fitness and brain health is already hefty and growing. Multiple studies have found that people with relatively high levels of endurance, whatever their age, tend to perform better on tests of thinking and memory than people who are out of shape. Other studies associate better fitness with less risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease. But many of these studies have been one-time snapshots of people’s lives and did not delve into whether and how changing fitness over time might alter people’s memory skills or dementia risk. They did not, in other words, tell us whether, by midlife or retirement age, it might be too late to improve our brain health with exercise. So, for the first of the new studies, which was published this month in The Lancet Public Health, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, helpfully decided to look into that very issue, taking advantage of the reams of health data available on average Norwegians. They began by turning to records from a large-scale health study that had enrolled almost every adult resident in the region around Trondheim beginning in the 1980s. The participants completed health and medical testing twice, about 10 years apart, that included estimates of their aerobic fitness. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26794 - Posted: 11.06.2019

By Erica Tennenhouse Live in the urban jungle long enough, and you might start to see things—in particular humanmade objects like cars and furniture. That’s what researchers found when they melded photos of artificial items with images of animals and asked 20 volunteers what they saw. The people, all of whom lived in cities, overwhelmingly noticed the manufactured objects whereas the animals faded into the background. To find out whether built environments can alter peoples’ perception, the researchers gathered hundreds of photos of animals and artificial objects such as bicycles, laptops, or benches. Then, they superimposed them to create hybrid images—like a horse combined with a table (above, top left) or a rhinoceros combined with a car (above, bottom right). As volunteers watched the hybrids flash by on a screen, they categorized each as a small animal, a big animal, a small humanmade object, or a big humanmade object. Overall, volunteers showed a clear bias toward the humanmade objects, especially when they were big, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The bias itself was a measure of how much the researchers had to visually “amp up” an image before participants saw it instead of its partner image. That bias suggests people’s perceptions are fundamentally altered by their environments, the researchers say. Humans often rely on past experiences to process new information—the classic example is mistaking a snake for a garden hose. But in this case, living in industrialized nations—where you are exposed to fewer “natural” objects—could change the way you view the world. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 26793 - Posted: 11.06.2019

By Pam Belluck The woman’s genetic profile showed she would develop Alzheimer’s by the time she turned 50. She, like thousands of her relatives, going back generations, was born with a gene mutation that causes people to begin having memory and thinking problems in their 40s and deteriorate rapidly toward death around age 60. But remarkably, she experienced no cognitive decline at all until her 70s, nearly three decades later than expected. How did that happen? New research provides an answer, one that experts say could change the scientific understanding of Alzheimer’s disease and inspire new ideas about how to prevent and treat it. In a study published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, researchers say the woman, whose name they withheld to protect her privacy, has another mutation that has protected her from dementia even though her brain has developed a major neurological feature of Alzheimer’s disease. This ultra rare mutation appears to help stave off the disease by minimizing the binding of a particular sugar compound to an important gene. That finding suggests that treatments could be developed to give other people that same protective mechanism. “I’m very excited to see this new study come out — the impact is dramatic,” said Dr. Yadong Huang, a senior investigator at Gladstone Institutes, who was not involved in the research. “For both research and therapeutic development, this new finding is very important.” A drug or gene therapy would not be available any time soon because scientists first need to replicate the protective mechanism found in this one patient by testing it in laboratory animals and human brain cells. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 26792 - Posted: 11.05.2019

Darian Woods Recently, Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy as part of a tentative multi-billion dollar settlement with state and local governments over lawsuits alleging that the company misled doctors and the public about the addictive nature of their well-known painkiller, Oxycontin. But Purdue Pharma's story is part of a pattern that has repeated itself throughout the history of the opium trade. It's a pattern documented by the book Opium: How An Ancient Flower Shaped And Poisoned Our World by Dr. John H. Halpern and David Blistein. The cycle begins when an opium product proves devastating to users. Innovators come along, promising a safer alternative, and virtually every time, they downplay the risks of addiction. Addiction ensues. Then come new innovators, promising something better and less addictive, and the cycle continues. This cycle, Halpern and Blistein recount, goes all the way back to Ancient Greece. Aulus Cornelius Celsus was a doctor famous for writing one of the world's first medical encyclopedias, which included a recipe for opium pills. He recommended it for insomnia, bad headaches, and joint pain. It didn't turn out so well. Opium addiction spread, and its victims included Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. Around 1000 AD, Persian physician Avicenna developed standard opium doses the size of chickpeas. Dose standardization helped prevent overdoses but opium addiction rose in Persia over the following centuries. Avicenna himself died of an opium overdose. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26791 - Posted: 11.05.2019

By David Z. Hambrick, Daisuke S. Katsumata Disagreements are virtually inevitable in a romantic relationship. More than 90 percent of couples argue, according to a survey by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, with nearly half quarreling at least once a month. Common topics of marital disagreement are money, sex and time spent together. None of this will surprise anyone who has been in a long-term relationship. But a new study indicates that a cognitive ability may help to explain why some couples are more successful in resolving their differences. University of North Carolina Greensboro psychologist Levi Baker and his colleagues report that spouses who were high in working memory capacity had better memory for each other’s statements in discussions about problems. In turn, these couples showed greater progress in resolving their problems over time. The study suggests that it’s not just dogged commitment that gets couples through rough spots, but a cognitive factor that directly affects the quality of partners’ communication with each other. The sample included 101 couples (93 heterosexual, 7 lesbian and 1 gay) that had been married for less than three months. Working individually, the newlyweds first completed tests of working memory capacity, which is the ability to hold information in the focus of attention over a short period, as when following what someone is saying to you in a conversation. In one of the tests used by Baker and his colleagues, called “operation span,” the test-taker sees an arithmetic problem on the screen and attempts to solve it, after which a letter appears. After some number of these trials, the person is prompted to recall the letters in the order in which they were presented. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Intelligence
Link ID: 26790 - Posted: 11.05.2019

By Elizabeth Preston A pack of baldheaded, boldly plumaged birds steps through the grass shoulder to shoulder, red eyes darting around. They look like middle schoolers seeking a cafeteria table at lunchtime. Perhaps they’re not so different. A study published Monday in Current Biology shows that the vulturine guineafowl of eastern Africa, like humans, have many-layered societies. In the past, scientists hypothesized that such social structures require a lot of brainpower. But the pea-brained guineafowl are revealing the flaws in that assumption. Damien Farine, who led the research and is an ornithologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior who studies collective behavior, first worked in Kenya during his postdoctoral research on baboon societies. Baboons are a model for researchers trying to understand how human society evolved. Some kinds of baboons live in groups within groups, a structure that’s called a multilevel society. “Humans are the classic multilevel society,” Dr. Farine said. Imagine a human family living in a village: The family might be friendly with other families within the village, which in turn might have ties to neighboring villages, and so on. “People have long hypothesized that living in complex society is one of the reasons why we’ve evolved such large brains,” Dr. Farine said. Researchers have found evidence for multilevel societies in some other large-brained mammals, such as monkeys, elephants, giraffes and sperm whales. But as Dr. Farine studied baboons, he also watched the vulturine guineafowl wandering around his study site. “I was really struck by the social behavior that they exhibited,” he said. These hefty birds can fly, but rarely choose to. Instead, they stroll across the landscape in packs, often walking so closely that their bodies touch. They may chase each other or fight to maintain their strict hierarchies. But at other times they engage in friendly behaviors like sharing food. Their groups are unusually large for birds, sometimes including 60 or more individuals. And while most other social birds are very territorial, Dr. Farine says, groups of vulturine guineafowl don’t mind sharing turf. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 26789 - Posted: 11.05.2019

By Christoph Droesser In 2004, a paper appeared in the journal Psychological Science, titled “Music Lessons Enhance IQ.” The author, composer and University of Toronto Mississauga psychologist Glenn Schellenberg, had conducted an experiment with 144 children randomly assigned to four groups: one learned the keyboard for a year, one took singing lessons, one joined an acting class, and a control group had no extracurricular training. The IQ of the children in the two musical groups rose by an average of seven points in the course of a year; those in the other two groups gained an average of 4.3 points. Schellenberg had long been skeptical of the science underpinning claims that music education enhances children’s abstract reasoning, math, or language skills. If children who play the piano are smarter, he says, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are smarter because they play the piano. It could be that the youngsters who play the piano also happen to be more ambitious or better at focusing on a task. Correlation, after all, does not prove causation. The 2004 paper was specifically designed to address those concerns. And as a passionate musician, Schellenberg was delighted when he turned up credible evidence that music has transfer effects on general intelligence. But nearly a decade later, in 2013, the Education Endowment Foundation funded a bigger study with more than 900 students. That study failed to corroborate Schellenberg’s findings, finding no evidence that music lessons improved math and literacy skills.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Intelligence
Link ID: 26788 - Posted: 11.04.2019

By Austin Frakt Daylight Saving Time ended on Sunday, and for many of us the extra hour of sleep has provided a small energy boost. It’s widely known that sleep affects our mood and health. Less understood is how it can also affect our paychecks. A study published last year in the Review of Economics and Statistics found that workers who live in locations where people get more sleep tend to earn more than those in areas where people get less. One theory: Better-rested workers are more productive and are compensated for it with additional income. “There are other explanations, but we consider them less likely,” said an author of the study, Matthew Gibson, an economist at Williams College. It’s not as if simply sleeping more will cause your boss to pay you more. In fact, if you get that extra sleep by being late for work, you might earn less or even lose your job. So how would the sleep-income relationship actually work? Studying the issue is complicated by reverse causality: Not only does sleep affect work, but work also affects sleep. On an individual level, people who work more, and earn more for it, often sleep less. Studies show that higher-income earners sleep less than lower-income ones. That could be because higher-income people are spending more time working, so they have less time for sleep. Additionally, working more is stressful, and stress disrupts sleep. But poor sleep contributes to stress, too. A study in Sleep Health found that a poorer night’s sleep is followed by more stress and distracting thoughts at work. Other studies also find that less and poorer sleep is associated with more conflict and stress the next day. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Stress
Link ID: 26787 - Posted: 11.04.2019

Kas Roussy · CBC News · At the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, Dr. Andrea Furlan, a pain specialist, is holding a regular meeting with some of her colleagues. Sitting around the table are physiotherapists, pharmacists, doctors and nurses. Other health-care professionals have joined in via teleconferencing. The discussion focuses on chronic pain and the role opioids have in treating the condition at a time when current prescribing guidelines in Canada advises doctors to put the prescription pad down. On a monitor, someone asks Furlan how she should start tapering her patient who is prescribed opioids. "Each patient is different," Furlan said. "I don't have a recipe for everyone. The patients are afraid of the pain getting worse. They are afraid of the withdrawal symptoms. You need to provide a lot of education." She also suggests exercise and physiotherapy — even diet and sleep can have an impact on chronic pain. One in five Canadians suffers from chronic pain (i.e., pain that is ongoing and lasts longer than six months like low back pain, nerve damage or arthritis). For these pain sufferers, opioids are a lifesaver. But access to the pain medication is getting harder because of doctors' concerns about addiction and abuse. More than 12,800 apparent opioid-related deaths occurred from January 2016 to March 2019, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada, the vast majority from illicit fentanyl use. "I have had patients referred to us because their doctors cut them from opioids," said Furlan. "That's ridiculous because they were not addicted. They were not having any complications. They were not on a high dose." ©2019 CBC/Radio-Canada

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26786 - Posted: 11.04.2019

Nicola Davis A potential route to reducing brain injury in premature babies has been found, say researchers who have discovered a way to tackle overactive immune cells in the brain. Microglia are a type of immune cell that play an important part in the building of a baby’s brain. However, if these cells go into overdrive as a result of inflammation – often because of a bacterial infection of the foetal membranes, a maternal infection or even sepsis after delivery of the baby – they can cause harm to the child’s brain. In particular, they can damage white matter, reducing the degree to which neurons are insulated and thereby affecting connectivity in the brain. It is thought that of the 15 million infants born before 37 weeks every year, up to 9 million are left with lifelong harm to the brain, sometimes resulting in conditions such as epilepsy or cerebral palsy. Now researchers say they have found a signalling pathway in these immune cells that is behind their transformation. “We have actually identified the immune switch that turns these immune cells in the developing brain from being helpful in building a brain and taking care of the brain to causing damage,” said Dr Bobbi Fleiss from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, a co-author of the study. What is more, the researchers say, it might even be possible to intervene and turn rogue microglia back into helpful workhorses. Writing in the journal Brain, Fleiss and colleagues reported how they took mouse pups just after birth and injected them with proteins that mimic an infection in the mother or foetus, inducing the transformation of microglia from helpful to harmful. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Glia
Link ID: 26785 - Posted: 11.02.2019

By Emily Eakin Ten years ago, Susannah Cahalan was hospitalized with mysterious and terrifying symptoms. She believed an army of bedbugs had invaded her apartment. She believed her father had tried to abduct her and kill his wife, her stepmother. She believed she could age people using just her mind. She couldn’t eat or sleep. She spoke in gibberish and slipped into a catatonic state. Had it not been for an ingenious doctor brought in to consult on her case, Cahalan might well have ended up in a psychiatric ward. Instead, as she recounted in “Brain on Fire,” her best-selling 2012 memoir about her ordeal, she was eventually found to have a rare — or at least newly discovered — neurological disease: anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis. In plain English, Cahalan’s body was attacking her brain. She was only the 217th person in the world to be diagnosed with the disorder and among the first to receive the concoction of steroids, immunoglobulin infusions and plasmapheresis she credits for her recovery. Cahalan’s condition is what in medicine is called a “great pretender”: a disorder that mimics the symptoms of various disorders, confounding doctors and leading them astray. “The Great Pretender” also happens to be the title of Cahalan’s new book, which comes out on Tuesday. It, too, is a medical detective story, only this time at the heart of the mystery is not a patient or a disease but a member of the profession: David Rosenhan, a Stanford psychologist and the author of “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” a landmark 1973 study that, by questioning psychiatrists’ ability to diagnose mental illness, plunged the field into a crisis from which it has still not fully recovered. Cahalan, 34, learned about Rosenhan six years ago, while on tour for the paperback edition of “Brain on Fire.” She was inundated with letters, hundreds a week, from desperate patients and their families, convinced that they too might have a neurological condition masquerading as mental illness. She was haunted by the idea that sheer luck had allowed her to escape a similar fate. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 26784 - Posted: 11.02.2019

This is an excerpt from Second Opinion, a weekly roundup of eclectic and under-the-radar health and medical science news emailed to subscribers every Saturday morning. If you haven't subscribed yet, you can do that by clicking here. A review of 40 years' worth of studies suggests cannabis may not be effective in treating mental health disorders, but experts say that might have more to do with the lack of high-quality research than the drug itself. The review, published in Lancet Psychiatry this week, looked at 83 studies dating back to 1980 on cannabis and constituent cannabinoids as a treatment for depression, anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, Tourette syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder and psychosis. The study concluded there was "scarce evidence" to suggest cannabis, including active ingredients such as cannabinoids tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD), improves the symptoms of any of these conditions based on 3,513 participants. There was also "very low-quality evidence" that it leads to a "small improvement" in anxiety symptoms for individuals, but only in those with other medical conditions like chronic pain and multiple sclerosis. "There remains insufficient evidence to provide guidance on the use of cannabinoids for treating mental disorders," Prof. Michael Farrell, co-author of the report and director of the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre in New South Wales, Australia, said in an email. 'Risk of error' in research While experts say the review itself is credible, the decades-old research could be flawed due to a number of challenges — including the fact that cannabis is still illegal in much of the world, which has made securing funding for research challenging. "The research in these conditions, in general, have been hampered by, obviously, the illegality of these compounds and these products," said Dr. Peter Selby, chief of medicine in the psychiatry division of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. ©2019 CBC/Radio-Canada

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stress
Link ID: 26783 - Posted: 11.02.2019