Bahar Gholipour The death of free will began with thousands of finger taps. In 1964, two German scientists monitored the electrical activity of a dozen people’s brains. Each day for several months, volunteers came into the scientists’ lab at the University of Freiburg to get wires fixed to their scalp from a showerhead-like contraption overhead. The participants sat in a chair, tucked neatly in a metal tollbooth, with only one task: to flex a finger on their right hand at whatever irregular intervals pleased them, over and over, up to 500 times a visit. The purpose of this experiment was to search for signals in the participants’ brains that preceded each finger tap. At the time, researchers knew how to measure brain activity that occurred in response to events out in the world—when a person hears a song, for instance, or looks at a photograph—but no one had figured out how to isolate the signs of someone’s brain actually initiating an action. The experiment’s results came in squiggly, dotted lines, a representation of changing brain waves. In the milliseconds leading up to the finger taps, the lines showed an almost undetectably faint uptick: a wave that rose for about a second, like a drumroll of firing neurons, then ended in an abrupt crash. This flurry of neuronal activity, which the scientists called the Bereitschaftspotential, or readiness potential, was like a gift of infinitesimal time travel. For the first time, they could see the brain readying itself to create a voluntary movement.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 26602 - Posted: 09.11.2019

By Laura Sanders Two artists who paint with their toes have unusual neural footprints in their brains. Individual toes each take over discrete territory, creating a well-organized “toe map,” researchers report September 10 in Cell Reports. Similar brain organization isn’t thought to exist in people with typical toe dexterity. So finding these specialized maps brings scientists closer to understanding how the human brain senses the body, even when body designs differ (SN: 6/12/19). “Sometimes, having the unusual case — even the very rare one — might give you important insight into how things work,” says neuroscientist Denis Schluppeck of the University of Nottingham in England, who was not involved in the study. The skills of the two artists included in the study are certainly rare. Both were born without arms due to the drug thalidomide, formerly used to treat morning sickness in pregnant women. As a result, both men rely heavily on their feet, which possess the dexterity to eat with cutlery, write and use computers. The brain carries a map of areas that handle sensations from different body parts; sensitive fingers and lips, for example, have big corresponding areas. But so far, scientists haven’t had much luck in pinpointing areas of the human brain that respond to individual toes (although toe regions have been found in the brains of nonhuman primates). But because these men use their feet in unusually skilled ways, researchers wondered if their brains might represent toes a bit differently. The two artists, along with nine other people with no special foot abilities, underwent functional MRI scans while an experimenter gently touched each toe. For many people, the brain areas that correspond to individual toes aren’t discrete, says neuroscientist Daan Wesselink of University College London. But in the foot artists’ brains, “we found very distinct locations for each of their toes.” When each toe was touched, a patch of brain became active, linking neighboring toes to similarly neighboring areas of the brain. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2019

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Brain imaging
Link ID: 26601 - Posted: 09.11.2019

Ruth Williams Tau is a structural protein of brain cells that, in various neurodegenerative conditions and as a result of brain injury, can accumulate as tangled toxic deposits. Using a recently developed in vivo imaging technique, researchers have now examined such tau pathology in the brains of patients who, decades earlier, suffered a single head trauma. The results, presented in Science Translational Medicine last week (September 4), reveal not only that tau accumulation can remain unusually high in such patients, but also that tau abundance correlates with neuronal damage. “It’s an important paper that links a single traumatic brain injury that occurred many years ago to long-term neurodegeneration,” says neuropathologist Thor Stein of Boston University who was not involved in the research. It also “looks at important biomarkers that can be detected in life and that will hopefully, down the road, be useful in a clinical setting for earlier diagnosis.” “It’s a very good and scope-broadening research piece. No one has done a study like this,” adds neurologist Steven DeKosky of the University of Florida who also didn’t take part in the study. “It speaks to the longevity of the pathological changes that can occur to people [after an injury].” Tau tangles, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia and neurodegeneration, have been found in the brains of some people who have suffered repeated head traumas, such as boxers and NFL football players, as well as in some people who have suffered a single severe traumatic brain injury. © 1986–2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Alzheimers
Link ID: 26600 - Posted: 09.11.2019

Culture helps shape when babies learn to walk By Sujata Gupta For generations, farther back than anyone can remember, the women in Rano Dodojonova’s family have placed their babies in “gahvoras,” cradles that are part diaper, part restraining device. Dodojonova, a research assistant who lives in Tajikistan, was cradled for the first two or three years of her life. She cradled her three children in the same way. Ubiquitous throughout Central Asia, the wooden gahvora is often a gift for newlyweds. The mother positions her baby on his back with his bottom firmly over a hole. Underneath is a bucket to capture whatever comes out. She then binds the baby with several long swaths of fabric so that only the baby’s head can move. Next, she connects a funnel, specially designed for either boys or girls, to send urine out to that same bucket under the cradle. Finally, she drapes heavy fabric over the handle atop the gahvora to protect the child from bright light and insects. Babies stay in that womblike apparatus for hours on end, with use decreasing as the child ages. When babies fuss, mothers often shush them by vigorously rocking the cradle back and forth or leaning over the side to breastfeed. Besides keeping babies dry and warm, gahvoras provide a sense of safety, Dodojonova says. “It is very nice for children because they are bound and cannot move.” Eventually, they are running and jumping like children everywhere. To the uninitiated, this child-rearing approach may sound odd, or even shocking. Yet cultures should be viewed within their own context, says psychologist Catherine Tamis-LeMonda of New York University. “We engage in practices that fit our needs, our own everyday lives.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2019.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26599 - Posted: 09.11.2019

Nell Greenfieldboyce The Environmental Protection Agency says it will aggressively reduce the use of animals in toxicity testing, with a goal of eliminating all routine safety tests on mammals by 2035. Chemicals such as pesticides typically get tested for safety on animals like mice and rats. Researchers have long been trying to instead increase the use of alternative safety tests that rely on lab-grown cells or computer modeling. The EPA's administer, Andrew Wheeler, has now set some specific deadlines to try to speed up that transition. Federal Watchdog Warns EPA Is Failing To Enforce Lead Paint Abatement Rules Shots - Health News Federal Watchdog Warns EPA Is Failing To Enforce Lead Paint Abatement Rules In a signed memo made public Tuesday, he's directed the agency to reduce all requests for, and funding of, studies with live mammals by 30 percent by 2025. He says he wants the agency to essentially eliminate all mammal study requests and funding by 2035, with the use of live mammals only allowed after that with special permission. "I really do think that with the lead time that we have in this — 16 years before we completely eliminate animal testing — that we have enough time to come up with alternatives," says Wheeler. He notes that he wrote an op-ed for his college newspaper on the need to reduce animal testing back in 1987. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 26598 - Posted: 09.11.2019

By Anahad O’Connor Dr. Elaine Yu, an endocrinologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, was inundated with volunteers when she put out a call a few years ago for overweight people who were willing to take part in a study of obesity and the microbiome. People as far away as Alaska and Hawaii were eager to enroll. But the most surprising part was what they were willing to do. The study required them to swallow capsules containing stool to test whether gut bacteria from lean donors could improve their metabolic health. “We had this concern that it would be difficult to recruit people because there’s a certain yuck factor with having to take a poop pill,” Dr. Yu said. “But we had an overwhelming number of volunteers wanting to participate.” The link between the gut and metabolic disease is a growing area of obesity research. In recent years, scientists have uncovered clues that the microbiota, the community of trillions of microbes that live in the gut, plays a role in weight gain and metabolic disease. Now, in small studies, they are exploring whether they can spur changes in metabolism and potentially in body weight through a therapy known as fecal microbiota transplants, or F.M.T., which transfers gut bacteria from lean donors to the guts of obese patients. The research, which is still in its infancy, has yielded mixed results and plenty of skepticism. Experts say fecal transplants will never replace diet, exercise, behavioral therapies and other standard interventions for obesity and Type 2 diabetes. But some believe they could lead to the discovery of bacteria that protect against metabolic disease, and perhaps become one of many tools that help obese patients who are struggling to shed pounds. “Obesity is a very complex disorder,” said Dr. Jessica Allegretti, the director of the Fecal Microbiota Transplant Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “Perhaps the microbiome is a contributing part of it, and maybe for everyone it’s slightly different. But even for patients where the microbiome is playing a big part, I think this would be something that is part of a larger weight loss program.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 26597 - Posted: 09.10.2019

/ By Rod McCullom In recent years, a steadily increasing volume of data has demonstrated that peer victimization — the clinical term for bullying — impacts hundreds of millions of children and adolescents, with the effects sometimes lasting years and, possibly, decades. The problem is even recognized as a global health challenge by the World Health Organization and the United Nations. And yet, researchers maintain there is still a limited understanding of how the behavior may physically shape the developing brain. Researchers believe more than 3.2 million American students experience bullying every year. That’s about 1 percent of the nation’s total population. Bullying is usually defined as repeated and intentional verbal, physical, and anti-social behavior that seeks to intimidate, harm, or marginalize someone perceived as smaller, weaker, or less powerful. Among younger children, common forms of bullying include abusive language and physical harm. This behavior may grow subtler with age as adolescent bullies routinely exclude, insult, and mock their targets. Sometimes this behavior escalates into “mobbing” among groups of bullies in school, work, or cyberspace. Researchers believe more than 3.2 million American students experience bullying every year. That’s about 1 percent of the nation’s total population. Among these students, about 10 to 15 percent experience “chronic” or persistent bullying that will last more than six continuous months. Experiencing chronic peer victimization is associated with lower academic achievement, higher unemployment rates, depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, and self-harm and suicidal thoughts. Copyright 2019 Undark

Keyword: Aggression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26596 - Posted: 09.10.2019

Ian Sample Science editor Society must prepare for a technological revolution in which brain implants allow people to communicate by telepathy, download new skills, and brag about their holidays in “neural postcards”, leading scientists say. While such far-fetched applications remain fiction for now, research into brain implants and other neural devices is advancing so fast that the Royal Society has called for a “national investigation” into the technology. “In 10 years’ time this is probably going to touch millions of people,” said Tim Constandinou, director of the next generation neural interfaces lab at Imperial College London, and co-chair of a new Royal Society report called iHuman. “These technologies are not possible today, but we are heading in that direction.” A neuroscientist explains: the need for ‘empathetic citizens’ - podcast The report foresees a “neural revolution” driven by electronic implants that communicate directly with the brain and other parts of the nervous system. By 2040, the scientists anticipate that implants will help the paralysed to walk, with other devices alleviating the symptoms of neurodegenerative diseases and treatment-resistant depression. The new wave of devices will go beyond existing products such as cochlear implant hearing aids and deep brain stimulators for people with Parkinson’s disease, with gadgets that help the healthy. In research labs, scientists are working on ways for people to type with their brains, and share thoughts by connecting their minds. Other teams are developing helmets and headbands to speed up learning and improve memory. “People could become telepathic to some degree, able to converse not only without speaking but without words, through access to each other’s thoughts at a conceptual level. This could enable unprecedented collaboration with colleagues and deeper conversations with friends,” the report states. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Brain imaging; Depression
Link ID: 26595 - Posted: 09.10.2019

By Emily Oster At some point or another, most books about the brain come back to the story of Phineas Gage. Gage was a railroad worker in the 19th century. In an unfortunate 1848 accident, a large steel spike was driven through his eye and out the other side of his head, taking some of his brain with him (this is the point in the story where my 8-year-old told me to please stop telling it). Amazingly, Gage survived the accident with much of his faculties intact. What did change was his personality, which, by many reports, became more aggressive and belligerent. Gage’s doctor wrote up his case, arguing that it suggested “civilized conduct” was localized in a particular part of the brain — specifically, the part he had lost. Science was off in search of where in the brain various skills were kept, with the idea that the brain was a kind of map, with little areas for, say, walking or talking or hearing or smelling. This proceeded, albeit slowly; for a while, there wasn’t much of a way to study this other than by looking at people with traumatic brain injuries. So it’s understandable that the development of technologies to study intact brains caused a lot of excitement. Generating the most discussion in recent years has been functional magnetic resonance imaging (or fMRI), which allows researchers to measure oxygen flow to the brain and identify which parts activate in response to varying stimuli. These technologies have not always lived up to the hype. The mechanics and statistics of processing fMRI imaging data have turned out to be far more complex than initially imagined. As a result there were many false claims made about which parts of the brain “controlled” different aspects of behavior or actions. The best, or at least funniest, example of this was a paper that showed how cutting-edge statistical analysis of fMRI made it possible to identify parts of the brain that responded differently to happy or sad faces. Sounds good, until you learn that the subject for this experiment was a dead fish. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Brain imaging
Link ID: 26594 - Posted: 09.10.2019

Jon Hamilton The depression drug esketamine, marketed as Spravato, appears to offer quick relief to people who are actively considering suicide. Esketamine, a chemical cousin of the anesthetic and party drug ketamine, reduced depression symptoms within hours in two large studies of suicidal patients, the drug's maker announced Monday. The studies, which included 456 patients who were suicidal, found that after 24 hours, patients who got the drug along with standard treatment were less depressed than people who got standard treatment alone. Surprisingly, though, patients who got esketamine were not significantly less suicidal, even though they had fewer symptoms of depression. The finding came from two studies sponsored by the drug's maker, Johnson & Johnson, and presented at the 32nd European College of Neuropsychopharmacology meeting in Copenhagen. Esketamine "showed a benefit in a very high-risk patient population, which is usually excluded from most clinical trials," says Dr. David Hough, a psychiatrist and esketamine compound development team leader at Janssen Research and Development LLC, a part of Johnson & Johnson. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26593 - Posted: 09.10.2019

By Nicholas Bakalar Getting less than six hours of sleep a night, or more than nine hours, might increase the risk for heart attack. Previous observational studies have found an association between sleep duration and heart attack. But for the current study, researchers had DNA data about study participants and knew who had a high or low genetic risk for cardiovascular disease. This allowed them to more clearly identify the role of sleep duration by itself on heart attack risk and provided greater certainty that the relationship might be causal. The study, in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, included 461,347 men and women ages 40 to 69, all of whom were healthy at the start. Over seven years of follow-up, there were 5,218 heart attacks. Comparing people with the same low genetic risk score for cardiovascular disease, they found that those with poor sleep duration — less than six hours or more than nine — had a 32 percent higher risk of having a heart attack. The researchers also compared people with high genetic risk for heart disease. Although their risks were significantly higher than those with low genetic risk, those who tended to get favorable sleep reduced their risk by 18 percent compared with those with unfavorable sleep patterns. The effects of sleep could have a significant impact on health and mortality, because while genes cannot be changed, sleep patterns are modifiable. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26592 - Posted: 09.10.2019

By Matt Richtel and Denise Grady Hundreds of people across the country have been sickened by a severe lung illness linked to vaping, and a handful have died, according to public health officials. Many were otherwise healthy young people, in their teens or early 20s. Investigators from numerous states are working with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration in an urgent effort to figure out why. Here’s what we know so far. Who is at risk? Anyone who uses e-cigarettes or other vaping devices, whether to consume nicotine or substances extracted from marijuana or hemp, may be at risk because investigators have not determined whether a specific device or type of vaping liquid is responsible. The Food and Drug Administration is warning that there appears to be a particular danger for people who vape THC, the psychoactive chemical in marijuana. The F.D.A. said a significant subset of samples of vaping fluid used by sick patients included THC and also contained a chemical called vitamin E acetate. The F.D.A. issued this statement: “Because consumers cannot be sure whether any THC vaping products may contain vitamin E acetate, consumers are urged to avoid buying vaping products on the street, and to refrain from using THC oil or modifying/adding any substances to products purchased in stores.” But some of the patients who have fallen severely ill said they did not vape THC. In 53 cases of the illness in Illinois and Wisconsin, 17 percent of the patients said they had vaped only nicotine products, according to an article published on Friday in The New England Journal of Medicine. The researchers who wrote the journal article cautioned, “e-cigarette aerosol is not harmless; it can expose users to substances known to have adverse health effects, including ultrafine particles, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds and other harmful ingredients.” The health effects of some of those chemicals are not fully understood, the researchers wrote, even though the products are already on the market. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26591 - Posted: 09.09.2019

Giorgia Guglielmi People who have low-risk surgery in Canada and the United States fill prescriptions for opioid painkillers at nearly seven times the rate seen in Sweden, according to recent research1. Studying these differences could help nations such as the United States to develop prescribing guidelines to counteract the surge in opioid use that is devastating some communities, say the study authors. The findings, which are published on 4 September in JAMA Network Open, are the first to quantify the differences in opioid use for people who had similar types of surgery across countries. There’s anecdotal evidence that clinicians tend to prescribe more opioids after surgery in some countries than in others, says Mark Neuman, an anaesthesiologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who led the study. And over-prescription of opioids is associated with an increased risk of developing long-term dependence and addiction, he says. To investigate further, Neuman and his team gathered prescription data from between 2013 and 2016 from Canada, the United States and Sweden. The countries all have similar levels of surgical care as well as detailed data on opioid prescriptions. The team found that nearly 79% of people in Canada and about 76% of those in the United States who had one of 4 operations — and who filled their opioid prescriptions — did so within 7 days of leaving hospital, compared with 11% of people in Sweden (see ‘Painkiller prescriptions’). “That’s a striking difference,” says Gabriel Brat, a surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. The procedures were removals of the gallbladder, appendix, breast lumps or meniscus cartilage in the knee. © 2019 Springer Nature Publishing AG

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26590 - Posted: 09.09.2019

Three years ago, Ady Barkan, a longtime activist and a leader of the Fed Up campaign pushing for policies that would encourage full employment and higher wages, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The neurodegenerative disease, which paralyzes the body and has an average survival rate of three years, has put Barkan, now 35, in a wheelchair. He can no longer speak on his own. But he remains an organizer for the Center for Popular Democracy, now focusing on health care after co-founding the Be A Hero Project, and in April came to Washington from his home in California to testify for the Democrats’ Medicare-for-all bill. He spoke assisted by a computer. Barkan’s memoir, “Eyes to the Wind,” is being published Tuesday. He was interviewed recently by Lucy Kalanithi, host of a forthcoming podcast about hardship. She is an internist on the faculty at the Stanford University School of Medicine and widow of neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, who wrote the memoir “When Breath Becomes Air.” Here is an excerpt from their conversation, edited for clarity and length: LK: You have built this whole career defined around resistance and resisting injustice, and then you suddenly become a person for whom acceptance is this big priority, and the resistance part has to recede. How did you get there? AB: There were, perhaps, two different components to my acceptance. The first was intellectual: acknowledging that the disease is no joke and no bad dream, that it will almost certainly kill me and that the long future we had planned for was not going to happen. That intellectual acceptance happened very quickly. It was informed by my awareness of my tremendous privilege compared to most of the world’s 7 billion people and the others who came before us. Knowing what others have gone through made me feel less disbelieving that this could happen to me. But I think when we talk about acceptance, we mean something deeper, like finding peace in the new reality. © 1996-2019 The Washington Post

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 26589 - Posted: 09.09.2019

By Gregg Easterbrook Sunday marks the opening weekend of the 100th season of the National Football League. Many can’t get enough professional football. During the 2018-19 prime-time TV schedule, three of the four top-rated shows among adults ages 18 to 49 were pro football games. Only “Game of Thrones” bested pigskin in the ratings, and that series concluded, while the N.F.L. goes on. Still, many people presume the sport is in an irreversible tailspin. They think that mounting evidence of brain trauma from concussions, along with the sort of routine brutality that led to last month’s surprise retirement of the 29-year-old quarterback Andrew Luck, will result in football losing its mass appeal. It is also assumed that parents of young athletes will refuse to allow their children to play football at the youth and high school levels, depleting the talent pool. But the future of football looks much brighter than that. It’s true that the game faces multiple challenges involving player safety, especially at the youth and high school levels. But recent reforms in pro, college and high school football appear to be reducing the harm caused by the sport. With a handful of additional reforms at all levels of play, none of which would threaten the fundamental character of the game, the N.F.L.’s second century could look as good as its first. Andrew Luck’s retirement should not be taken as an omen. Generally, N.F.L. longevity is improving. Peyton Manning won the Super Bowl in 2016 at age 39; in February, Tom Brady hoisted the trophy at age 41. The 40-year-old quarterback Drew Brees is likely to be in the Super Bowl mix again this season. Football brought Mr. Luck wealth and celebrity, then he quit while he was ahead. Good for him! Mr. Luck’s injuries were similar in severity to those suffered by the cyclist Alessandro de Marchi during the Tour de France, which often has bicycle crashes, and by the skiing star Lindsey Vonn in many incidents. Athletics cannot be made free of danger of bodily harm. A more significant omen is that N.F.L. neurological damage is not getting worse but rather is in decline. Concussions are down. Numerous rules changes led to the N.F.L. reporting 214 concussions last season, versus 281 the season before. Over the five prior seasons, the average was 243 concussions. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 26588 - Posted: 09.09.2019

By Eryn Brown, On March 30, 1981, 25-year-old John W. Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan and three other people. The following year, he went on trial for his crimes. Defense attorneys argued that Hinckley was insane, and they pointed to a trove of evidence to back their claim. Their client had a history of behavioral problems. He was obsessed with the actress Jodie Foster, and devised a plan to assassinate a president to impress her. He hounded Jimmy Carter. Then he targeted Reagan. In a controversial courtroom twist, Hinckley’s defense team also introduced scientific evidence: a computerized axial tomography (CAT) scan that suggested their client had a “shrunken,” or atrophied, brain. Initially, the judge didn’t want to allow it. The scan didn’t prove that Hinckley had schizophrenia, experts said—but this sort of brain atrophy was more common among schizophrenics than among the general population. It helped convince the jury to find Hinckley not responsible by reason of insanity. Nearly 40 years later, the neuroscience that influenced Hinckley’s trial has advanced by leaps and bounds—particularly because of improvements in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and the invention of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which lets scientists look at blood flows and oxygenation in the brain without hurting it. Today neuroscientists can see what happens in the brain when a subject recognizes a loved one, experiences failure, or feels pain. Despite this explosion in neuroscience knowledge, and notwithstanding Hinckley’s successful defense, “neurolaw” hasn’t had a tremendous impact on the courts—yet. But it is coming. Attorneys working civil cases introduce brain imaging ever more routinely to argue that a client has or has not been injured. Criminal attorneys, too, sometimes argue that a brain condition mitigates a client’s responsibility. Lawyers and judges are participating in continuing education programs to learn about brain anatomy and what MRIs and EEGs and all those other brain tests actually show. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 26587 - Posted: 09.09.2019

Selena Simmons-Duffin Peter Grinspoon got addicted to Vicodin in medical school, and still had an opioid addiction five years into practice as a primary care physician. Then, in February 2005, he got caught. "In my addicted mindframe, I was writing prescriptions for a nanny who had since returned back to another country," he says. "It didn't take the pharmacist long to figure out that I was not a 19-year-old nanny from New Zealand." One day, during lunch, the state police and the DEA showed up at his medical office in Boston. "I start going all, 'I'm glad you're here. How can I help you?' " he says. "And they're like, 'Doc, cut the crap. We know you're writing bad scripts.' " He was fingerprinted the next day and charged with three felony counts of fraudulently obtaining a controlled substance. He also was immediately referred to a Physician Health Program, one of the state-run specialty treatment programs developed in the 1970s by physicians to help fellow physicians beat addiction. Known to doctors as PHPs, these programs now cover other sorts of health providers, too. The programs work with state medical licensing boards — if you follow the treatment and monitoring plan they set up for you, they'll recommend to the board that you get your medical license back, Grinspoon explains. It's a significant incentive. "The PHPs basically say, 'Do whatever we say or we won't give you a letter that will help you get back to work,' " Grinspoon says. "They put a gun to your head." But the problem, he and other critics say, is that, for various reasons, most PHPs don't allow medical professionals access to the same evidence-based, "gold standard" treatment that addiction specialists today recommend for most patients addicted to opioids: medication-assisted treatment. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26586 - Posted: 09.07.2019

By: Michael L. Lipton, M.D., Ph.D., F.A.C.R. I n December 1960, President-elect John F. Kennedy (JFK) penned The Soft American for Sports Illustrated, in which he described the importance of physical fitness to brain health: “Physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body; it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity.” As with many of JFK’s public statements, these prescient words remain spot-on today. Neuroscientists continue to uncover the remarkable connection between physical well-being and brain health on many levels: cognitive, behavioral, social, emotional, and more. Boxing, JFK noted, was one of the sports the ancient Greek states pursued to enhance national fitness. But the idea that boxing could promote “dynamic and creative intellectual activity” certainly runs counter to current sensibilities, much like the advertisement for Marlboro cigarettes that graced the back cover of Sports Illustrated at the time. While JFK did not name other collision sports, it seems reasonable to assume that American football would have also qualified as a rung on his ladder to physical fitness and mental well-being. From a 2019 vantage point, it seems shocking that JFK was touting the benefits of sport for brain health while ignoring risks of sport-related brain injury. In 1960, however, when he proposed a comprehensive national program to improve physical fitness, the adverse impact of sport-related head trauma on brain development and function was not on anyone’s radar. Even forty-five years later, when “ Iron Mike ” Webster ’s chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) was reported in the journal Neurosurgery, adverse effects of sport-related head trauma were largely unknown to the general public and, at best, widely under-recognized among the medical community. It is worth noting that Mike Webster himself had never been diagnosed with a concussion or other form of brain injury during his time on the gridiron. Attitudes have changed dramatically since, but in what way has our understanding of head trauma and its adverse effects actually evolved? And most importantly, how can our expanding knowledge inform a viable path forward? © 2019 The Dana Foundation.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26585 - Posted: 09.07.2019

/ By Hope Reese In her new book “Gender and Our Brains,” cognitive neuroimaging professor Gina Rippon explains that brains aren’t gendered, but research can be. The differences among women as a group, or men as a group, are greater than the differences between men and women, Rippon says. Rippon sifts through centuries of research into supposed differences in areas such as behavior, skills, and personality, and shows that external factors like gender stereotypes and real-world experiences are the likely cause of any detectable differences in mental processing. And she demonstrates that the differences among women as a group, or among men as a group, are much greater than the differences between men and women. She cites a 2015 study looking at 1,400 brain scans as an example. Comparing 160 brain structures in the scans — identifying areas that were, on average, larger in men or in women — researchers could not find any scans that had all “male” traits, or all “female” traits — physical attributes such as weight or tissue thickness. “The images were, literally, of a mosaic,” she says. “We’re trying to force a difference into data that doesn’t exist.” Rippon teaches cognitive neuroimaging — the study of behavior through brain images — at Aston University in England. For this installment of the Undark Five, I spoke with her about how neuroimages are misinterpreted and whether PMS is real, among other topics. Here is our conversation, edited for length and clarity. Undark: Scientists have been trying to find differences in the brains of men and women for years. What are some examples of how the cherry-picking approach is problematic? Gina Rippon: It’s what I call the “hunt the differences” agenda, which started about 200 years ago when scientists were starting to understand the importance of the brain in explaining human behavior and human ability. Copyright 2019 Undark

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Brain imaging
Link ID: 26584 - Posted: 09.07.2019

Bill Sullivan As author George R.R. Martin would attest, good writing takes time. For eons, DNA has been writing genetic scripts for “survival machines,” evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s term for living organisms—their primary purpose being to live long enough to propagate their DNA. As author Samuel Butler recognized in 1877, “A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.” But our planet has limited resources, so survival machines that had a leg up on the competition won the DNA replication relay. Selfish genes were locked in an arms race to craft survival machines that were better, stronger, faster. About 600 million years ago, an ancestral neuron emerged that heralded a new weapon: intelligence. It took nearly 4 billion years, but DNA has finally built a survival machine intelligent enough to expose DNA’s game. We are the first species to meet our maker. The realization that we’re an apparatus for the dissemination of genes is quite different from traditional creationist narratives. It is even more humbling to reflect on the power of a related revelation: instead of passively watching genetic stories unfold, we can now become the authors. Are we ready for this awesome responsibility? In just a half century, we resolved the structure of DNA, made genome sequencing easy, and discovered ways to edit genes. Although we don’t fully understand its language, some are now eager to take a red pen to the genome. With the help of the first human genome, published in 2003, researchers have revealed genes involved in certain diseases, and this knowledge is guiding the discovery of novel therapeutics. © 1986–2019 The Scientist.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 26583 - Posted: 09.07.2019