Nicola Davis and Hannah Devlin Tangles of a protein found inside the brain cells of people with Alzheimer’s disease can be used to predict future brain shrinkage, research suggests. In healthy people, a protein called tau is important in supporting the internal structure of brain cells. However, in those with Alzheimer’s, chemical changes take place that cause the protein to form tangles that disrupt the cells. Such tangles have previously been linked to a loss of brain cells. Now scientists have used imaging techniques to track the extent of tau tangles in the brains of those with early signs of Alzheimer’s, revealing that levels of the protein predict not only how much brain shrinkage will subsequently occur, but where. “Our study supports the notion that tau pathology accumulates upstream of brain tissue loss and clinical symptoms,” said Prof Gil Rabinovici, a co-author of the research from the University of California, San Francisco. A number of drugs targeting tau tangles are currently in clinical trials, including some that aim to interfere with the production of tau in the brain or its spread between cells. Dr Renaud La Joie, another author of the research, said the findings suggested the imaging technique could prove valuable both in choosing which patients to enrol to test such drugs and in monitoring whether the drugs work. Dr Laura Phipps, of Alzheimer’s Research UK, said: “The ability to track tau in the brain will be critical for testing treatments designed to prevent the protein causing damage, and the scans used in this study could be an important tool for future clinical trials.” Writing in the journal Science Translational Medicine, La Joie and colleagues report how they used an imaging technique called PET to study the brains of 32 people aged between 49 and 83 who were in the early stages of showing Alzheimer’s symptoms. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Alzheimers; Brain imaging
Link ID: 26928 - Posted: 01.02.2020

By Lisa Sanders, M.D. The 67-year-old woman had just flown back to her old hometown, Eugene, Ore., to pick up one more load of boxes to move them to her new hometown, Homer, Alaska. As usual, the shuttle to long-term parking was nowhere in sight, so she pulled out the handles of her bags and wheeled them down the now-familiar airport road. It was a long walk — maybe half a mile — but it was a beautiful afternoon for it. A lone woman walking down this rarely used road in the airport caught the attention of Diana Chappell, an off-duty emergency medical technician, on her way to catch her own flight. She watched as the woman approached a building where some airport E.M.T.s were stationed. Suddenly the woman stopped. She rose to her toes and turned gracefully, then toppled over like a felled tree and just lay there. Chappell jumped out of the car and ran to the woman. She was awake but couldn’t sit up. Chappell helped her move to the side of the road and took a quick visual survey. The woman had a scrape over her left eye where her glasses had smashed into her face. Her left knee was bleeding, and her left wrist was swelling. She’d dropped the handle of one of her rolling bags, the woman explained. When she tried to pick it up, she fell. But she felt fine now. As she spoke, Chappell noticed that her speech was slightly slurred and that the left side of her mouth wasn’t moving normally. “I don’t know you, but your speech sounds a little slurred,” she said. “Have you been drinking?” Not at all, the woman answered — surprised by the question. Chappell introduced herself, then asked the woman if she could do a few quick tests to make sure she was O.K. Chappell asked her to smile, but the left side of the patient’s mouth did not cooperate; she asked her to shrug her shoulders, and the left side wouldn’t stay up. You need to go to the hospital, she told the woman. The woman protested; she felt fine. At least let me call my E.M.T. pals to check your blood pressure, Chappell insisted. After a fall like that, it could be high. The woman reluctantly agreed, and Chappell called her colleagues. The woman on the ground was embarrassed by the flashing lights of the emergency vehicle but allowed her blood pressure to be taken. It was sky-high. She really did need to go to the hospital. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 26927 - Posted: 01.02.2020

Judith Grisel I used to think addiction was caused by screwy molecules in the brain, and would be cured by neuroscience. I began learning about how the brain works after I ended up in treatment for drug addiction in the mid-1980s, when hopes for neuroscientific cures were as overblown as the hairstyles. My own journey away from the destructive cycle of addiction has been sourced much more by factors outside my brain Like many at the time, I envisioned the brain as executive director of an epic drama – solely responsible for the total picture of what I did, felt and thought. My specific purpose in getting a doctorate in behavioural neuroscience was to discover the neural explanation for my irrational choices around mind-altering chemicals. What was the faulty neural switch that swept away heartfelt promises or strongly held convictions in response to practically every opportunity to twist reality? I made increasingly risky and harebrained decisions, as the possibility of transient bliss in a shot of cocaine, a belly full of booze or a head in the (cannabis) clouds came to outweigh my obligations or common sense. Final exams, “last chances” at work, or loved ones’ funerals, for example, didn’t stand a chance compared to hitching myself to whatever intoxicating ride I could catch. By the time I hit bottom, the choice between facing stark reality or using drugs to escape was no choice at all: cortical regulation had completely given way to subcortical impulses and habits. Globally 35 million people are estimated to suffer from drug use disorders. The causes of this public health disaster are complicated, but it is widely accepted that about half of the contribution comes from inherited risk, and the rest an unfortunate confluence of environmental factors interacting with that biologic vulnerability.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26926 - Posted: 01.02.2020

By Gretchen Reynolds What’s good for your muscles can also be good for your mind. A Single Workout Can Alter the Brain A single, moderate workout may immediately change how our brains function and how well we recognize common names and similar information, according to a promising new study of exercise, memory and aging. The study adds to growing evidence that exercise can have rapid effects on brain function and also that these effects could accumulate and lead to long-term improvements in how our brains operate and we remember. Until recently, scientists thought that by adulthood, human brains were relatively fixed in their structure and function, especially compared to malleable tissues, like muscle, that continually grow and shrivel in direct response to how we live our lives. But multiple, newer experiments have shown that adult brains, in fact, can be quite plastic, rewiring and reshaping themselves in various ways, depending on our lifestyles. A hormone that is released during exercise may improve brain health and lessen the damage and memory loss that occur during dementia, a new study finds. The study, which was published this month in Nature Medicine, involved mice, but its findings could help to explain how, at a molecular level, exercise protects our brains and possibly preserves memory and thinking skills, even in people whose pasts are fading. Considerable scientific evidence already demonstrates that exercise remodels brains and affects thinking. Researchers have shown in rats and mice that running ramps up the creation of new brain cells in the hippocampus, a portion of the brain devoted to memory formation and storage. Exercise also can improve the health and function of the synapses between neurons there, allowing brain cells to better communicate. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26925 - Posted: 12.30.2019

By John Horgan I just spent a week at a symposium on the mind-body problem, the deepest of all mysteries. The mind-body problem--which encompasses consciousness, free will and the meaning of life--concerns who we really are. Are we matter, which just happens to give rise to mind? Or could mind be the basis of reality, as many sages have insisted? The week-long powwow, called “Physics, Experience and Metaphysics,” took place at Esalen Institute, the legendary retreat center in Big Sur, California. Fifteen men and women representing physics, psychology, philosophy, religious studies and other fields sat in a room overlooking the Pacific and swapped mind-body ideas. What made the conference unusual, at least for me, was the emphasis on what were called “exceptional experiences,” involving telepathy, telekinesis, astral projection, past-life recall and mysticism. I’ve been obsessed with mysticism since I was a kid. As defined by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, mystical experiences are breaches in your ordinary life, during which you encounter absolute reality--or, if you prefer, God. You believe, you know, you are seeing things the way they really are. These experiences are usually brief, lasting only minutes or hours. They can be triggered by trauma, prayer, meditation or drugs, or they may strike you out of the blue. Advertisement I’ve had mild mystical intuitions while sober, for example, during a Buddhist retreat last year. But my most intense experience, by far, happened in 1981 while I was under the influence of a potent hallucinogen. I tried to come to terms with my experiences in my book Rational Mysticism, but my obsession endures. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 26924 - Posted: 12.30.2019

By Jane E. Brody Every now and then I write a column as much to push myself to act as to inform and motivate my readers. What follows is a prime example. Last year in a column entitled “Hearing Loss Threatens Mind, Life and Limb,” I summarized the current state of knowledge about the myriad health-damaging effects linked to untreated hearing loss, a problem that afflicts nearly 38 million Americans and, according to two huge recent studies, increases the risk of dementia, depression, falls and even cardiovascular diseases. Knowing that my own hearing leaves something to be desired, the research I did for that column motivated me to get a proper audiology exam. The results indicated that a well-fitted hearing aid could help me hear significantly better in the movies, theater, restaurants, social gatherings, lecture halls, even in the locker room where the noise of hair dryers, hand dryers and swimsuit wringers often challenges my ability to converse with my soft-spoken friends. That was six months ago, and I’ve yet to go back to get that recommended hearing aid. Now, though, I have a new source of motivation. A large study has documented that even among people with so-called normal hearing, those with only slightly poorer hearing than perfect can experience cognitive deficits. That means a diminished ability to get top scores on standardized tests of brain function, like matching numbers with symbols within a specified time period. But while you may never need or want to do that, you most likely do want to maximize and maintain cognitive function: your ability to think clearly, plan rationally and remember accurately, especially as you get older. While under normal circumstances, cognitive losses occur gradually as people age, the wisest course may well be to minimize and delay them as long as possible and in doing so, reduce the risk of dementia. Hearing loss is now known to be the largest modifiable risk factor for developing dementia, exceeding that of smoking, high blood pressure, lack of exercise and social isolation, according to an international analysis published in The Lancet in 2017. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 26923 - Posted: 12.30.2019

By Debbie Jackson BBC Scotland "Fluffing your son's hair, really hugging him, holding his hand." For someone who has been through what she has in the space of a year, Corinne Hutton doesn't need much to make her happy. Last January she got the double hand transplant she had been waiting more than five years for, and feared would never happen. This January, she will celebrate her "handiversary", a year since a surgeon handed her back her independence. Being able to do the simplest things for 11-year-old son Rory means the world to Finding Your Feet charity founder Cor. "From an emotional point of view to be able to do things for him - make the packed lunches or the washing, or do the ironing is great," she said. "But on top of that, being able to hold his hand, fluff his hair, little things that might not be hugely exciting to him - but they matter a lot to me. "People don't appreciate what it means to have lost them," she said. Cor became the first Scot to undergo a double hand transplant when, in a 12-hour procedure, Prof Simon Kay attached two donor hands to her arms at Leeds general Infirmary. The 48-year-old lost her hands and feet in 2013 after suffering acute pneumonia and sepsis, which almost killed her. After more than a dozen false alarms over the years, a match for her own blood group, skin tone and hand size had been found. Much celebration and wonder was made of the news that the transplant had finally happened, but the aftermath was far from easy. © 2019 BBC.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26922 - Posted: 12.30.2019

By Sarah Bate Alice is six years old. She struggles to make friends at school and often sits alone in the playground. She loses her parents in the supermarket and approaches strangers at pickup. Once she became separated from her family on a trip to the zoo, and she now has an intense fear of crowded places. Alice has a condition called face blindness, also known as prosopagnosia. This difficulty in recognising facial identity affects 2 percent of the population. Like Alice, most of these people are born with the condition, although a small number acquire face-recognition difficulties after brain injury or illness. Unfortunately, face blindness seems largely resilient to improvement. Yet a very recent study offers more promising findings: children’s face-recognition skills substantially improved after they played a modified version of the game Guess Who?over a two-week period. In the traditional version of Guess Who?, two players see an array of 24 cartoon faces, and each selects a target. Both then take turns asking yes/no questions about the appearance of their opponent’s chosen face, typically inquiring about eye color, hairstyle and accessories such as hats or spectacles. The players use the answers to eliminate faces in the array; when only one remains, they can guess the identity of their opponent’s character. The experimental version of the game preserved this basic setup but used lifelike faces that differed only in the size or spacing of the eyes, nose or mouth. That is, the hairstyle and outer face shape were identical, and children had to read the faces solely on the basis of small differences between the inner features. This manipulation is thought to reflect a key processing strategy that underlies human face recognition: the ability to account not only for the size and shape of features but also the spacing between them. Evidence suggests this ability to process faces “holistically” is impaired in face blindness. The Guess Who? training program aimed to capitalize on this link. Children progressed through 10 levels of the game, with differences between the inner features becoming progressively less obvious. Children played for half an hour per day on any 10 days over a two-week period, advancing to the next level when they won the game on two consecutive rounds. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 26921 - Posted: 12.27.2019

By Christie Aschwanden When she was 24, Susannah Cahalan developed a sudden psychosis. She grew paranoid — convinced her apartment was infested with bedbugs, that people were spying on her, that her boyfriend was cheating. She started to believe she could age people with her mind. As she recounted in her 2013 bestseller, “Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness,” she received several misdiagnoses (bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder) before an alert doctor discovered the true culprit: autoimmune encephalitis. The moment her illness was deemed neurological, ”as in physical, in the body, real,” rather than psychiatric, “in the mind and therefore somehow less real,” the quality of her care drastically improved, Cahalan writes in her new book, “The Great Pretender.” Sympathy and understanding replaced the detached attitude that had defined her treatment as a mental patient, “as if a mental illness were my fault, whereas a physical illness was something unearned, something ‘real,’” she writes. Cahalan, a journalist, recovered from her brief psychosis, but the distinction between physical and mental illness continued to perplex her. “What does mental illness mean, anyway, and why would one affliction be more ‘real’ than another?” she asks. These questions form the backbone of “The Great Pretender.” The book centers on the work of David Rosenhan, a Stanford psychologist whose paper, “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” was an instant sensation when it was published in the journal Science in 1973. The paper begins with a question: “If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?”

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 26920 - Posted: 12.27.2019

Getting a Good Night’s Sleep Without Drugs By Jane E. Brody As many as 20 percent to 30 percent of people in the general population sleep poorly. They may have difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep, some awaken much too early, while others do not feel rested despite spending a full night seemingly asleep in bed. For one person in 10, insomnia is a chronic problem that repeats itself night after night. Little wonder that so many resort to sleeping pills to cope with it. But experts report that there are better, safer and more long-lasting alternatives than prescription drugs to treat this common problem. The alternatives are especially valuable for older people who metabolize drugs more slowly, are more likely to have treatable underlying causes of their insomnia and are more susceptible to adverse side effects of medications. Is Your Sleep Cycle Out of Sync? It May Be Genetic By Jane E. Brody Early to bed, early to rise — a fine plan for a dairy farmer who has to get up long before dawn to milk the cows. But if you’re someone who works all day with stocks and clients and may want to enjoy an evening out now and then, it would be better not to be getting up at 2 a.m. and have to struggle to stay awake through dinner or a show. Such is the challenge faced by a friend who has what sleep specialists call an advanced sleep phase. Her biological sleep-wake cycle, or circadian rhythm, is out of sync with the demands of the modern world. Read more>>> By Perri Klass, M.D. The biology of adolescent sleep reflects a natural and normal delay in melatonin secretion that leads to a later sleep onset time, which unfortunately coincides with early high school start times, creating a high-stress set up. Pediatricians often see adolescents with insomnia, who have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, waking up too early or finding sleep not restful or refreshing. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26919 - Posted: 12.27.2019

Alejandra Manjarrez When he was a postdoc at KU Leuven in Belgium, Daniel Vigo helped analyze results from an experiment that simulated a spaceflight to Mars. Six crew members were secluded in an artificially lit, spacecraft-like facility for 520 days starting in June 2010. Part of an international project known as the Mars500 mission, the experiment aimed to assess the psychological, social, and biological effects of prolonged confinement and isolation, along with the absence of normal day and night rhythms. That isolation, of course, was just an illusion, manufactured by the Institute for Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the European Space Agency. The simulation took place in central Moscow, where any sudden medical problems could have received immediate attention—as Vigo, now a researcher at the Catholic University of Argentina and a member of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), tells The Scientist in Spanish. He began wondering what would happen in a less artificial scenario. One of the key findings from the study, for example, was that confinement—in this case in an artificially lit building—disrupted normal sleep patterns: the crew members in the Mars500 experiment had suffered from sleep problems and rapidly fell into sleep-wake routines that were out of sync with one another. But what would the story be like for people experiencing a similarly extreme living environment, Vigo wondered, without the safety net provided by a carefully controlled simulation? © 1986–2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Sleep; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 26918 - Posted: 12.27.2019

By Nicholas Bakalar The right diet might help you sleep better. In a study of 77,860 postmenopausal women, researchers found that consuming foods that had a low glycemic index is associated with a reduced risk for insomnia. Foods with low glycemic indexes — for example, vegetables, nuts and whole grain breads — have carbohydrates that are slowly absorbed and cause lower, and slower, rises in blood glucose and insulin levels after being consumed. For this study, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, participants completed lengthy questionnaires about what foods they ate and how often. They also reported their degree of insomnia at the start of the study and after three years of follow-up. Compared with the one-fifth of participants whose diet had the lowest glycemic index, those with the highest were 11 percent more likely to have insomnia. Some low-glycemic index foods — whole grains and dairy foods, for example — were not associated with reduced insomnia. But people who ate the most fruits and vegetables were about 14 percent less likely to have insomnia, and the largest consumers of fiber were 13 percent less likely. In contrast, women who ate the most refined grains had a 16 percent higher risk of insomnia than those who ate the least. Although the study controlled for many health and behavioral characteristics, the study showed only an association and could not prove cause and effect. “Randomized controlled trials examining dietary patterns in relation to insomnia are needed to clarify these findings,” the authors write. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Obesity
Link ID: 26917 - Posted: 12.27.2019

By Eva Frederick One day in 2014, primatologist Yuko Hattori was trying to teach a mother chimpanzee in her lab to keep a beat. Hattori would play a repetitive piano note, and the chimp would attempt to tap out the rhythm on a small electronic keyboard in hopes of receiving a tasty piece of apple. Everything went as expected in the experiment room, but in the next room over, something strange was happening. Another chimpanzee, the mother’s son, heard the beat and began to sway his body back and forth, almost as if he were dancing. “I was shocked,” Hattori says. “I was not aware that without any training or reward, a chimpanzee would spontaneously engage with the sound.” Hattori has now published her research showing that chimps respond to sounds, both rhythmic and random, by “dancing.” “This study is very thought-provoking,” says Andrea Ravignani, a cognitive biologist at the Seal Rehabilitation and Research Centre who researches the evolution of rhythm, speech, and music. The work, she says, could shed light on the evolution of dancing in humans. For their the study, Hattori and her colleague Masaki Tomonaga at Kyoto University played 2-minute clips of evenly spaced, repetitive piano tones (heard in the video above) to seven chimpanzees (three males and four females). On hearing the sound, the chimps started to groove, swaying back and forth and sometimes tapping their fingers or their feet to the beat or making howling “singing” sounds, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. All of the chimps showed at least a little bit of rhythmic movement, though the males spent much more time moving to the music than females. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution; Hearing
Link ID: 26916 - Posted: 12.26.2019

Stephanie O'Neill For many Americans, hallucinogens still evoke the psychedelic '60s, bringing to mind the sex-and-drugs lifestyle of the hippie counterculture. But that stereotype lags behind reality, by several decades. Today, psychedelic experimentation is more likely to refer to dozens of clinical trials taking place at universities and research facilities. The psychedelics under study range from psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms, to MDMA (also known as Ecstasy or Molly), to LSD, among others. Researchers are studying them for their therapeutic potential in treating hard-to-treat conditions such as PTSD, addiction, depression and anxiety. The promise of freedom from cigarettes was what compelled Carine Chen-McLaughlin, 65, to enroll in an experimental study of psilocybin therapy for smokers. She was desperate to break free from her decades-long physical addiction to nicotine. Quitting smoking had felt impossible for so long. "It's basically saying good-bye to a very old friend, and worrying about: Am I going to be OK without this good friend?'" the Baltimore resident says. Like many of the 49 million tobacco users in the U.S., Chen-McLaughlin wanted to quit and had tried various methods: nicotine gum, the nicotine patch and even stopping cold turkey. But nothing worked for more than a couple days. The clinical trial she joined took place in her hometown of Baltimore, at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. While she was a bit anxious about the experiment, Chen-McLaughlin says she was nevertheless hopeful about trying something totally different. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26915 - Posted: 12.26.2019

By Richard Sima Luke Miller, a cognitive neuroscientist, was toying with a curtain rod in his apartment when he was struck by a strange realization. When he hit an object with the rod, even without looking, he could tell where it was making contact like it was a sensory extension of his body. “That’s kind of weird,” Miller recalls thinking to himself. “So I went [to the lab], and we played around with it in the lab.” Sensing touch through tools is not a new concept, though it has not been extensively investigated. In the 17th century, philosopher René Descartes discussed the ability of blind people to sense their surroundings through their walking cane. While scientists have researched tool use extensively, they typically focused on how people move the tools. “They, for the most part, neglected the sensory aspect of tool use,” Miller says. In a 2018 Nature study, Miller and his colleagues at Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University in France reported that humans are actually quite good at pinpointing where an object comes into contact with a handheld tool using touch alone, as if the object were touching their own skin. A tool is not innervated like our skin, so how does our brain know when and where it is touched? Results in a follow-up study, published in December in Current Biology, reveal that the brain regions involved with sensing touch on the body similarly processes it on the tool. “The tool is being treated like a sensory extension of your body,” Miller says. In the initial experiment, the researchers asked 16 right-handed subjects to determine where they felt touches on a one-meter-long wooden rod. In a total of 400 trials, each subject compared the locations of two touches made on the rod: If they were felt in different locations, participants did not respond. If they were in the same location, the people in the study tapped a foot pedal to indicate whether the touches were close or far from their hand. Even without any experience with the rod or feedback on their performance, the participants were, on average, 96 percent accurate. © 2019 Scientific American,

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26914 - Posted: 12.26.2019

Nell Greenfieldboyce Shepherds in Christmas Nativity scenes that were painted, carved or sculpted hundreds of years ago sometimes have throats with large, abnormal growths. These are realistic depictions of goiter, an enlargement of the thyroid gland caused by iodine deficiency. The condition was common in those days in northern Italy, where the soil and water are depleted of iodine. "Goiter is more often seen in poor people," says retired surgeon Renzo Dionigi of the University of Insubria in Varese, Italy, who notes that the working classes in this region would historically not have a varied diet that might supply this vital nutrient. "That's why, probably, the poor shepherds are depicted with goiters," he says. He and his son, an endocrine surgeon named Gianlorenzo Dionigi, have for years enjoyed studying art and looking for signs of medical conditions. In the Sacri Monti ("Sacred Mountains") of Piedmont and Lombardy, they have visited chapels and churches created in the 16th and 17th centuries. "In all the Sacri Monti that I and my son visited, we have been able to observe representations of goiters very, very often," says the elder Dionigi. In one Nativity tableau from 1694, for example, a young horn player with a large goiter plays for the Holy Family. And in one fresco over the main door of the Aosta Cathedral, a shepherd with goiter plays his bagpipe for the newborn Jesus. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 26913 - Posted: 12.26.2019

By Douglas Martin Baba Ram Dass, who epitomized the 1960s of legend by popularizing psychedelic drugs with Timothy Leary, a fellow Harvard academic, before finding spiritual inspiration in India, died on Sunday at his home on Maui, Hawaii. He was 88. His death was announced on his official Instagram account. Having returned from India as a bushy-bearded, barefoot, white-robed guru, Ram Dass, who was born Richard Alpert, became a peripatetic lecturer on New Age possibilities and a popular author of more than a dozen inspirational books. The first of his books, “Be Here Now” (1971), sold more than two million copies and established him as an exuberant exponent of finding salvation through helping others. ImageRam Dass’s book “Be Here Now,” originally published in 1971, has had more than three dozen printings and sold more than two million copies. Ram Dass’s book “Be Here Now,” originally published in 1971, has had more than three dozen printings and sold more than two million copies. He started a foundation to combat blindness in India and Nepal, supported reforestation in Latin America, and developed health education programs for American Indians in South Dakota. He was particularly interested in the dying. He started a foundation to help people use death as a journey of spiritual awakening and spoke of establishing a self-help line, “Dial-a-Death,” for this purpose. A year later, Ram Dass suffered a cerebral hemorrhage that left him partly paralyzed, unable to speak and in a wheelchair. From his home in Maui, he learned to “surf the silence” at first, he said, but over time he painstakingly reacquired a halting form of speech and was able to lecture on the internet and make tapes. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26912 - Posted: 12.26.2019

By Nicholas Bakalar Living with a pet dog in childhood may be linked to a reduced risk of schizophrenia in adulthood. Researchers studied adult patients at Sheppard Pratt Health System in Baltimore, 396 with schizophrenia and 381 with bipolar disorder. They compared them with 594 healthy controls. The participants reported whether they had had a dog or a cat in the household when they were children and, if so, the first and most recent time they had contact with the animal. The findings appeared this month in PLOS One. More than half of the subjects had dogs, and about a third had cats before their 13th birthdays. After adjusting for other characteristics, the scientists found that exposure to a dog at any time in childhood was associated with a 24 percent reduced risk for schizophrenia. Those exposed to dogs at birth were 55 percent less likely to have schizophrenia than people who had not been exposed at all. There was no significant effect of exposure to cats, and no effect of either animal on the risk for bipolar disorder. “We don’t know the mechanism,” said the lead author, Dr. Robert H. Yolken, a professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, though he noted that the microbiome, or collection of gut bacteria, of people with schizophrenia is different from that of controls. “One possibility is that having a dog in the house causes a different microbiome and changes the likelihood of developing a psychiatric disorder,” he said. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Stress
Link ID: 26911 - Posted: 12.26.2019

By Sharon Begley @sxbegle The filmgoers didn’t flinch at the scene of the dapper man planting a time bomb in the trunk of the convertible, or tense up as the unsuspecting driver and his beautiful blonde companion drove slowly through the town teeming with pedestrians, or jump out of their seats when the bomb exploded in fiery carnage. And they sure as heck weren’t wowed by the technical artistry of this famous opening shot of Orson Welles’ 1958 noir masterpiece, “Touch of Evil,” a single three-minute take that ratchets up the suspense to 11 on a scale of 1 to 10. In fairness, lab mice aren’t cineastes. But where the rodents fell short as film critics they more than delivered as portals into the brain. As the mice watched the film clip, scientists eavesdropped on each one’s visual cortex. By the end of the study, the textbook understanding of how the brain “sees” had been as badly damaged as the “Touch of Evil” convertible, scientists reported on Monday. The new insights into the workings of the visual cortex, they said, could improve technologies as diverse as self-driving cars and brain prostheses to let the blind see. “Neuroscience lets us make better object recognition systems” for, say, self-driving cars and artificial intelligence-based diagnostics, said Joel Zylberberg of York University, an expert on machine learning and neuroscience who was not involved in the new research. “But computer vision has been hampered by an insufficient understanding of visual processing in the brain.” The “unprecedented” findings in the new study, he said, promise to change that. The textbook understanding of how the brain sees, starting with streams of photons landing on the retina, reflects research from the 1960s that won two of its pioneers a Nobel prize in medicine in 1981. It basically holds that neurons in the primary visual cortex, where the signals go first, respond to edges: vertical edges, horizontal edges, and every edge orientation in between, moving and static. We see a laptop screen because of how its edges abut what’s behind it, sidewalks because of where their edges touch the curb’s. Higher-order brain systems take these rudimentary perceptions and process them into the perception of a scene or object. © 2019 STAT

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 26910 - Posted: 12.21.2019

By Gina Kolata Not long ago, the only way to know if someone had Alzheimer’s disease was to examine the brain in an autopsy. That is changing — and fast — with brain scans and spinal taps that can detect beta amyloid, the telltale Alzheimer’s protein. There is a blood test on the horizon that can detect beta amyloid, and researchers are experimenting with scans to look for another protein, called tau, also characteristic of Alzheimer’s. As this sort of diagnostic testing becomes widespread, more people who fear their memories are slipping will face a difficult question: Would I really want to know if I were getting Alzheimer’s disease? “This is a new era, and we are just at the precipice,” said Dr. Gil Rabinovici, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco. A positive test could help you get your affairs in order and plan your future. And a drug company, Biogen, claims to have the first treatment that may slow the course of the disease if begun early enough. Health insurers are prohibited by law — for now, at least — from denying coverage if you have Alzheimer’s. But there is nothing that prevents long-term-care and life insurers from denying you. Will your friends stay with you? How about your spouse? What would it be like to live with the knowledge that you will eventually be unable to recognize your family, or even to speak? For some who have been given diagnostic tests, those questions are all too real. When Dr. Daniel Gibbs, 68, a neurologist in Portland, Ore., noticed his memory starting to slip, he wanted to know if it was Alzheimer’s. He had seen its damage all too often in his patients. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26909 - Posted: 12.21.2019