By Emily S. Rueb Excessive alcohol consumption is not safe for a person at any age, but it is particularly dangerous for older adults. And according to a study published this week, about one in 10 older adults is considered a binge drinker. “Binge drinking, even episodically or infrequently, may negatively affect other health conditions by exacerbating disease, interacting with prescribed medications and complicating disease management,” said Dr. Benjamin Han, the lead author of the study that was published on Wednesday in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. Alcohol is also a risk factor for injury, Dr. Han said, but the consequences and recovery from a fall are much more serious for an 81-year-old than a 21-year-old. The study defined binge drinking as consuming five or more drinks in a sitting for men, and four or more drinks in a sitting for women. And a drink equaled a can or bottle of beer, a glass of wine or a wine cooler, a shot of liquor, or a mixed drink with liquor in it. Dr. Han’s group analyzed data from the annual U.S. National Survey on Drug Use and Health between 2015 and 2017. In all, the findings included 10,927 adults aged 65 or older who reported their drinking habits in the previous 30 days. The group did not include adults living in long-term-care facilities or nursing homes, Dr. Han added. The prevalence of binge drinking among adults 65 and older is still relatively low compared with other age groups, Dr. Han said. Over 38 percent of college-aged adults, 18 to 25, had recently drunk excessively, the highest prevalence of any age group. Adults ages 26 to 34 had only slightly fewer binge drinkers, and the second highest percentage, the study found. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26482 - Posted: 08.03.2019

By Gina Kolata For decades, researchers have sought a blood test for beta amyloid, the protein that is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. Several groups and companies have made progress, and on Thursday, scientists at Washington University in St. Louis reported that they had devised the most sensitive blood test yet. The test will not be available for clinical use for years, and in any event, amyloid is not a perfect predictor of Alzheimer’s disease: Most symptomless older people with amyloid deposits in their brains will not develop dementia. But the protein is a significant risk factor, and the new blood test identified patients with amyloid deposits before brain scans did. That will be important to scientists conducting trials of drugs to prevent Alzheimer’s. They need find participants in the earliest stages of the disease. At present, a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is not easy to make. Doctors rely mostly on tests of mental acuity and interviews with the patient and family members. Studies have shown that community doctors are only 50 to 60 percent accurate in diagnosing the condition — about the same as tossing a coin. Methods that can improve accuracy, like PET scans of the brain, are expensive and often not available. The new test relies on mass spectrometry, a tool used in analytical chemistry that, with recent technical advances, can find elusive beta amyloid molecules in blood with high precision. The lead investigator, Dr. Randall Bateman, a neurologist at Washington University, has been working on a mass spectrometry test for 20 years. He and a colleague, Dr. David Holtzman, founded a company ten years ago and licensed patents from their university to commercialize a mass spectrometry test if they ever developed one. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26481 - Posted: 08.02.2019

Hope Reese Patricia S. Churchland is a key figure in the field of neurophilosophy, which employs a multidisciplinary lens to examine how neurobiology contributes to philosophical and ethical thinking. In her new book, “Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition,” Churchland makes the case that neuroscience, evolution, and biology are essential to understanding moral decision-making and how we behave in social environments. In the past, “philosophers thought it was impossible that neuroscience would ever be able to tell us anything about the nature of the self, or the nature of decision-making,” the author says. The way we reach moral conclusions, Churchland asserts, has a lot more to do with our neural circuitry than we realize. The way we reach moral conclusions, she asserts, has a lot more to do with our neural circuitry than we realize. We are fundamentally hard-wired to form attachments, for instance, which greatly influence our moral decision-making. Also, our brains are constantly using reinforcement learning — observing consequences after specific actions and adjusting our behavior accordingly. Churchland, who teaches philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, also presents research showing that our individual neuro-architecture is heavily influenced by genetics: political attitudes, for instance, are 40 to 50 percent heritable, recent scientific studies suggest. Copyright 2019 Undark

Keyword: Consciousness; Emotions
Link ID: 26480 - Posted: 08.02.2019

By Judith Graham By all accounts, the woman, in her late 60s, appeared to have severe dementia. She was largely incoherent. Her short-term memory was terrible. She couldn’t focus on questions that medical professionals asked her. But Malaz Boustani, a doctor and professor of aging research at Indiana University School of Medicine, suspected something else might be going on. The patient was taking Benadryl for seasonal allergies, another antihistamine for itching, Seroquel (an antipsychotic medication) for mood fluctuations, as well as medications for urinary incontinence and gastrointestinal upset. To various degrees, each of these drugs blocks an important chemical messenger in the brain, acetylcholine. Boustani thought the cumulative impact might be causing the woman’s cognitive difficulties. He was right. Over six months, Boustani and a pharmacist took the patient off those medications and substituted alternative treatments. Miraculously, she appeared to recover completely. Her initial score on the Mini-Mental State Examination had been 11 of 30 — signifying severe dementia — and it shot up to 28, in the normal range. An estimated 1 in 4 older adults take anticholinergic drugs — a wide-ranging class of medications used to treat allergies, insomnia, leaky bladders, diarrhea, dizziness, motion sickness, asthma, Parkinson’s disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and various psychiatric disorders. Older adults are highly susceptible to negative responses to these medications. Since 2012, anticholinergics have been featured prominently on the American Geriatrics Society Beers Criteria list of medications that are potentially inappropriate for seniors. © 1996-2019 The Washington Post

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26479 - Posted: 08.02.2019

By Simon Makin Can an Illusory World Help Treat Psychosis's Real-World Delusions? Scenes of everyday living within a virtual-reality simulation attempt to lessen social anxiety for people with psychosis. Credit: University of Oxford/Oxford VR Many people with psychosis suffer from persecutory delusions—beliefs that terrible things will happen to them in everyday situations, such as people trying to harm them. The disorder causes social anxiety, which can be exacerbated by other symptoms, such as hearing voices. All of this makes ordinary activities such as shopping or going to the doctor challenging. Often a person just withdraws entirely from social contact. In a vicious cycle, the ensuing isolation and rumination can exacerbate other symptoms, including those causing the withdrawal. The idea behind a virtual-reality system called gameChange is to help patients learn to feel safer, allaying social anxiety by putting them in simulations of situations they fear in which their worst dread does not materialize. Last month, clinical psychologist Daniel Freeman of the University of Oxford and his colleagues launched a clinical trial of gameChange, the biggest such trial to date of a VR treatment for schizophrenia. It will enroll 432 people with psychosis from five National Health Service (NHS) centers across the U.K. Researchers will assess participants’ avoidance and distress in real-world situations, using an established measure, before and after treatment and then do so again six months later. The hope is that the treatment will reduce participants’ anxiety, which will, in turn, improve other symptoms, particularly persecutory delusions. Freeman co-founded an Oxford spin-off company, Oxford VR, to develop and commercialize the technology. And if the trial is successful, gameChange could be rolled out by the NHS. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 26478 - Posted: 08.02.2019

By Katie Camero For humans, slight variations in temperature don’t mean much. But for some turtles, they mean the difference between whether embryos come out male or female. Now, scientists have evidence that these embryos have some power over their sexual destiny: By moving to slightly warmer or cooler spots inside their eggs, freshwater turtle embryos can help determine their own sex. Not everyone is convinced. But if the new finding holds, this behavior could potentially save some turtle species from extinction by balancing their sex ratios. A reptile’s sex depends on hormones produced during development. For crocodiles, many fish, some lizards, and most turtles, those hormones in turn depend on external temperatures. Cooler temperatures typically lead to more males, and warmer temperatures generally lead to more females. That means a shift of just 2°C can make all of the offspring one sex. As average global temperatures rise, such a strategy could doom some species, including the already-endangered Chinese pond turtle (Mauremys reevesii). As weather warms, warmer eggs produce more and more females—leaving them fewer males to mate with. Wondering whether turtle embryos could respond to rapidly changing temperatures, scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing examined the behavior of the Chinese soft-shelled turtle (Pelodiscus sinensis). They discovered that the embryos could in fact move between cooler and warmer spots inside their paperclip-size eggs, they reported in 2011 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 26477 - Posted: 08.02.2019

By Knvul Sheikh It’s a myth that black widow female spiders always kill and consume their mates. But courtship remains perilous for males, cannibalism or no. The terrain, navigated in the dark, is challenging. The female’s web releases come-hither pheromones, but only about 12 percent of prospective males manage to reach it. And once there, they can expect to face male rivals competing to pass their genes on to the next generation. Usually, this results in wild displays of machismo. The males slash the female’s webs to make them less enticing to others. They deposit “mating plugs” in the female’s body to block rival sperm. Why not simply avoid the competition and seek out females’ webs empty of other males? But male black widows actually seem to thrive on the competition, according to a study published Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Researchers found that male black widows find potential mates faster by following the silk trails left behind by other males. “Males have to race to find females,” said Catherine Scott, an arachnologist at the University of Toronto Scarborough in Canada and the study’s lead author. “It makes sense for them to try to use all the tricks they can to find females as soon as possible, even if there are other males that have already found her.” If a male arrives an hour or two late at a female’s web, he still has a chance to interrupt the courting rituals of other males, and could still be the first to mate with the female, Ms. Scott said. Males typically make their way to a rendezvous by following female pheromones back to their source. But those signals must be at just the right distance, and uninterrupted by shifting winds and other factors. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 26476 - Posted: 08.01.2019

Bruce Bower Monkeys can keep strings of information in order by using a simple kind of logical thought. Rhesus macaque monkeys learned the order of items in a list with repeated exposure to pairs of items plucked from the list, say psychologist Greg Jensen of Columbia University and colleagues. The animals drew basic logical conclusions about pairs of listed items, akin to assuming that if A comes before B and B comes before C, then A comes before C, the scientists conclude July 30 in Science Advances. Importantly, rewards given to monkeys didn’t provide reliable guidance to the animals about whether they had correctly ordered pairs of items. Monkeys instead worked out the approximate order of images in the list, and used that knowledge to make choices in experiments about which of two images from the list followed the other, Jensen’s group says. Previous studies have suggested that a variety of animals, including monkeys, apes, pigeons, rats and crows, can discern the order of a list of items (SN: 7/5/08, p. 13). But debate persists about whether nonhuman creatures do so only with the prodding of rewards for correct responses or, at least sometimes, by consulting internal knowledge acquired about particular lists. Jensen’s group designed experimental sessions in which four monkeys completed as many as 600 trials to determine the order of seven images in a list. Images included a hot air balloon, an ear of corn and a zebra. Monkeys couldn’t rely on rewards to guide their choices. In some sessions, animals usually received a larger reward for correctly identifying which of two images came later in the list and a smaller reward for an incorrect response. In other sessions, incorrect responses usually yielded a larger reward than correct responses. Rewards consisted of larger or smaller gulps of water delivered through tubes to the moderately thirsty primates. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019

Keyword: Attention; Evolution
Link ID: 26475 - Posted: 08.01.2019

By Lydia Denworth An elderly woman suffering from late-stage Alzheimer’s disease had neither talked to nor reacted to any of her family members for years. Then, one day, she suddenly started chatting with her granddaughter, asking for news of other family members and even giving her granddaughter advice. “It was like talking to Rip van Winkle,” the granddaughter told University of Virginia researchers of her astonishment. Unfortunately, the reawakening did not last—the grandmother died the next week. That event got written up as what the case study authors called terminal lucidity—a surprising, coherent episode of meaningful communication just before death in someone presumed incapable of social interaction. Yet it was by no means unique. Physician Basil Eldadah, who heads the geriatric branch at the National Institute on Aging (NIA), had heard such stories and filed them away as intriguing accounts. But in 2018, spurred by the need to make progress combatting Alzheimer’s, Eldadah began to think it was time to do more and organized a workshop for interested scientists. After all, if the grandmother was able to tap into mysterious neural reserves, cases such as hers might help scientists explore how cognition could possibly be restored—even briefly—in patients with the most advanced neurodegenerative disease. This summer Eldadah and the scientists he assembled have taken the first steps toward systematic and rigorous study of what they are now calling paradoxical lucidity, a broader label intended to capture the dramatic, unexpected and puzzling nature of the phenomenon. The workshop participants published two papers on it in the August issue of Alzheimer’s and Dementia, and the NIA announced plans to fund relevant research next year. The early goals are modest—the formulation of an operational definition and a gauging of the phenomenon’s prevalence. The possible long-term implications, however, are tantalizing. “If the brain were able to access that normal state, even if it’s transient, it would suggest that there’s some requisite level of machinery that can work under some kind of unique circumstance,” anesthesiologist and neuroscientist George Mashour, director of the Center for Consciousness Science at the University of Michigan and lead author of one of the papers, says. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26474 - Posted: 08.01.2019

By Nicholas Bakalar A new study confirms earlier reports that anemia — a condition caused by having too little hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying component of red blood cells — increases the risk for dementia. It found that having high hemoglobin levels does so as well. Dutch researchers looked at 12,305 people without dementia at the start of the study, measuring their hemoglobin levels and following them for an average of 12 years. Over the period, 1,520 developed dementia, including 1,194 with Alzheimer’s disease. The study is in Neurology. The scientists divided the hemoglobin levels into five groups, low to high. Compared with those in the middle one-fifth, those in the highest fifth had a 20 percent increased risk for any dementia type, and a 22 percent increased risk for Alzheimer’s. Those in the lowest were at a 29 percent increased risk for dementia and a 36 percent increased risk for Alzheimer’s. The researchers controlled for education level, blood pressure, diabetes, lipid-lowering medication, alcohol intake and other health and behavioral characteristics. “We don’t have the intervention studies that would show that modifying hemoglobin could prevent dementia,” said the lead author, Frank J. Wolters, a researcher at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, “and we can’t recommend interventions based on this study. In the meantime, given the other beneficial effects of treating anemia, this study provides an extra incentive.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26473 - Posted: 08.01.2019

Ian Sample Science editor Doctors have turned the brain signals for speech into written sentences in a research project that aims to transform how patients with severe disabilities communicate in the future. The breakthrough is the first to demonstrate how the intention to say specific words can be extracted from brain activity and converted into text rapidly enough to keep pace with natural conversation. In its current form, the brain-reading software works only for certain sentences it has been trained on, but scientists believe it is a stepping stone towards a more powerful system that can decode in real time the words a person intends to say. A neuroscientist explains: the need for ‘empathetic citizens’ - podcast Doctors at the University of California in San Francisco took on the challenge in the hope of creating a product that allows paralysed people to communicate more fluidly than using existing devices that pick up eye movements and muscle twitches to control a virtual keyboard. “To date there is no speech prosthetic system that allows users to have interactions on the rapid timescale of a human conversation,” said Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon and lead researcher on the study published in the journal Nature. The work, funded by Facebook, was possible thanks to three epilepsy patients who were about to have neurosurgery for their condition. Before their operations went ahead, all three had a small patch of tiny electrodes placed directly on the brain for at least a week to map the origins of their seizures. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Brain imaging; Language
Link ID: 26472 - Posted: 07.31.2019

Cassandra Willyard Rob Summers was flat on his back at a rehabilitation institute in Kentucky when he realized he could wiggle his big toe. Up, down, up, down. This was new — something he hadn’t been able to do since a hit-and-run driver left him paralysed from the chest down. When that happened four years earlier, doctors had told him that he would never move his lower body again. Now he was part of a pioneering experiment to test the power of electrical stimulation in people with spinal-cord injuries. “Susie, look, I can wiggle my toe,” Summers said. Susan Harkema, a neurophysiologist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, sat nearby, absorbed in the data on her computer. She was incredulous. Summers’s toe might be moving, but he was not in control. Of that she was sure. Still, she decided to humour him. She asked him to close his eyes and move his right toe up, then down, and then up. She moved on to the left toe. He performed perfectly. “Holy shit,” Harkema said. She was paying attention now. “How is that happening?” he asked. “I have no idea,” she replied. Summers had been a university baseball player with major-league ambitions before the vehicle that struck him snapped all the ligaments and tendons in his neck, allowing one of his vertebra to pound the delicate nerve tissue it was meant to protect. Doctors classified the injury as complete; the motor connections to his legs had been wiped out. When Harkema and her colleagues implanted a strip of tiny electrodes in his spine in 2009, they weren’t trying to restore Summers’s ability to move on his own. Instead, the researchers were hoping to demonstrate that the spine contains all the circuitry necessary for the body to stand and to step. They reasoned that such an approach might allow people with spinal-cord injuries to stand and walk, using electrical stimulation to replace the signals that once came from the brain.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 26471 - Posted: 07.31.2019

By Brooke N. Dulka As you read this article, your brain has begun a series of complicated chemical steps in order to form a memory. How long you keep this memory may well depend on whether you are a man or a woman. Some scientists think that the reason for this difference may be estrogens. Women are disproportionately affected by Alzheimer’s disease, dementia and memory loss. In fact, almost two thirds of Americans living with Alzheimer’s are women. While researchers across the globe are still working to uncover the basic mechanisms of learning and memory, it is now known that estrogens help to regulate memory formation in both males and females. From a cultural and societal standpoint, when people think of estrogen they probably imagine pregnancy, periods and woman-fueled rage. Most people probably don’t consider memory; but maybe it’s time we all start thinking about estrogens’ role in memory a little more. Karyn Frick, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, studies the connection between estrogens and memory. She and her students are among the scientists working to uncover the basic cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying memory formation. Part of Frick’s research focuses on how estrogens enhance memory, particularly through their action in the hippocampus. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 26470 - Posted: 07.31.2019

By Aimee Berg Virginia Fuchs announced herself to the boxing world at the 2016 United States Olympic Trials, where she twice upset Marlen Esparza, a world champion. In 2017, Fuchs went 18-0. In 2018, she claimed a bronze medal at the world championships by attacking her flyweight opponents, on average, every four seconds during nine minutes of boxing. “That’s an engine!” said Billy Walsh, the head coach for the American team. “She’s a supreme athlete. We joke and call her Seabiscuit because she’s like a racehorse.” Fuchs, known as Ginny, is now the most established fighter from the United States at the Pan American Games this week. The same will most likely be true at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. “Pretty much everybody’s looking at me to win gold,” said Fuchs, a 31-year-old Texan. Boxing, though, is the least of her battles. About 20 years ago, she learned she had severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. In January, Fuchs had a breakdown that sent her to inpatient treatment for the second time in her life. She spent a month at an O.C.D. clinic in Houston. “I was like: I can’t function like this anymore,” she said. She grew so stuck in her cleaning rituals that she was training daily on three hours of sleep. One night, she said, she couldn’t stop at all and thought: “I’m out of control. I’m scared. I need serious help.” Elite athletes usually know how to solve their opponents. If they are taller and stronger, be quicker. If they are faster, be smarter. If they are tactically superior, be relentless. But what do you do when the most powerful opponent lies permanently within? By definition, O.C.D. involves unwanted, recurring and distressing thoughts. In response, people often perform repetitive behaviors, or rituals, to alleviate the anxiety caused by the obsessions. “But the ritual only works very temporarily,” said Dr. Joyce Davidson, a psychiatrist and medical director at the Menninger Clinic in Houston. “The obsessions keep coming back so people get stuck in this vicious circle of obsessions and rituals. In many cases, it really snowballs.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 26469 - Posted: 07.31.2019

By Zheala Qayyum A nurse showed me the newspaper just as I was walking in. I saw the smiling face of the young man I had taken care of since he was a teenager. Several times after hurting himself or threatening suicide he had been admitted to the Connecticut hospital where I work as a child and adolescent psychiatrist. I wished I had seen that smile during our interactions. It looked genuine. But this was an obituary. I was devastated. I didn’t know what to do with how I felt, and too ashamed to let people know. Suicide assessments were a fundamental part of my psychiatric training, but what to do when suicide occurs was not. This is true for many psychiatry training programs across the country. The emphasis lies on suicide prevention but there is not enough focus on preparing psychiatry trainees for the loss of a patient due to suicide or how to deal with the aftermath. This young man’s death was particularly painful because he was not a complete stranger. His last hospitalization, a couple of months before his death had been the first time I didn’t care for him. Just before that hospitalization, the lovely lady who altered my clothes mentioned that her grandson had been hospitalized several times. She knew I was a psychiatrist and started telling me about the arduous journey her family had faced because of her grandson’s mental health struggles. Then she mentioned his name. © 2019 Scientific American,

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 26468 - Posted: 07.31.2019

By Christof Koch “Consciousness” refers to any subjective experience — the delectable taste of Nutella, the sharp sting of an infected tooth, the slow passage of time when bored, the sense of vitality and anxiety just before a competitive event. In the words of the philosopher Thomas Nagel, consciousness exists in a human or other subject whenever “there is something it is like to be that organism.” The concept has inspired countless philosophical theories since antiquity and much laboratory work over the past century, but it has also given rise to many misunderstandings. Myth No. 1 Humans have a unique brain. There’s a long history of scientists thinking they have identified a particular feature to explain our advanced consciousness (and planetary dominance). In a popular TED talk, the neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel argues that the human brain’s distinctiveness lies in the huge number of neurons that make up the outermost layer of the organ, the cerebral cortex (or neocortex): 16 billion, out of some 86 billion total neurons. “That’s the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities,” she says. Other suppositions have included special brain regions or nerve cells found only (or primarily) in humans — spindle or von Economo neurons, for example. Or perhaps the human brain consumes more calories than the brains of other species? After close to two centuries of brain research, however, no single feature of the human brain truly stands out. We certainly do not possess the largest brain — elephants and whales trounce us. Recent research has revealed that pilot whales, a type of dolphin, have 37 billion cortical neurons, undermining Herculano-Houzel’s hypothesis. And researchers have found that whales, elephants and other large-brained animals (not just great apes and humans) also have von Economo neurons. New research shows that humans and mice have about the same number of categories of brain cells. The fact is, there is no simple brain-centric explanation for why humans sit atop the cognitive hill. © 1996-2019 The Washington Post

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 26467 - Posted: 07.30.2019

By Jennifer Leman, Liz Tormes Art and neuroscience have been intertwined for centuries. Early surgeons and scientists who poked and prodded inside cranial cavities—such as Santiago Ramón y Cajal—often drew what they saw. These artistic renderings played a critical role in helping researchers grapple with the mysteries of our most vital organ. (Cajal even shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906 for his drawings.) Methods for exploring the brain have (thankfully) changed, and our understanding has evolved. The desire to visualize what we discover, however, has persisted. For the ninth year in a row, the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam has published the winners of its annual Art of Neuroscience competition. The contest celebrates artists and scientists who strive to illustrate the brain’s complexities. This year’s entrants questioned the origins of imagination, imaged collagen fiber, modeled starlike brain cells called astrocytes and explored other intricacies. Presented below—selected from 87 submissions representing 25 countries—are the winning entry, four honorable mentions and five works selected by Scientific American’s editors.* This video employs three artificial-intelligence-based computing systems inspired by human brain networks. The resulting three neural networks simulate the brain’s ability to generate abstract images, sounds and concepts inspired by prior experiences, a phenomenon better known as imagination. In the winning video, produced by members of the pt9 art group at Far Eastern Federal University in Russia, one neural network produces a string of jarring images prompted by a catalogue of existing photographs; a second neural network generates image descriptions; and the third neural network reads the descriptions aloud. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 26466 - Posted: 07.30.2019

Nicola Davis Forget counting sheep and drinking warm milk, an effective way to tackle chronic insomnia is cognitive behavioural therapy, researchers have confirmed. The authors of a new study say that although the therapy is effective, it is not being used widely enough, with doctors having limited knowledge about it and patients lacking access. “There is a very effective treatment that doesn’t involve medication that should be available through your primary care service. If it’s not, it should be,” said Dr Judith Davidson, co-author of a new study on CBT for insomnia from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. Chronic insomnia, in which individuals have difficulties dropping off or staying asleep at least three nights a week for three months or more, is thought to affect about 10-15% of adults. The condition is linked to health problems including depression, as well as difficulties in functioning and sometimes resulting in accidents. Sleeping pills are not recommended for long-term use and can have side-effects, as well as posing a risk of addiction. Instead, the main treatment for chronic insomnia is CBT – a programme of changes to the way an individual approaches and thinks about sleep. These include staying away from the bed when awake, challenging attitudes about sleep loss and restricting the number of hours spent in bed. Writing in the British Journal of General Practice, Davidson and colleagues report how they examined the results from 13 previously conducted studies on the provision of CBT for insomnia through primary care. In some studies, participants were also taking medication to help them sleep. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26465 - Posted: 07.30.2019

Tickling the ear with a small electric current could rebalance the nervous system in over-55s and help them age more healthily, research suggests. Stimulation of the vagus nerve, which connects to the heart, lungs and gut, led to improvements in body, sleep and mood, a small study found. The University of Leeds team said the procedure could make a big difference to people's lives. But more research is needed to work out the long-term health effects. Why the ear? The ear acts as a gateway to the body's nervous system. One small branch of the vagus nerve can be stimulated via the skin in specific bits of the outer ear. To some people, the therapy feels ticklish. To others, it's painless. What's the vagus nerve? Also called the "wandering nerve", because it's long and well-connected, the vagus nerve transmits information from the brain to organs around the body, such as the heart and lungs. It is also fundamental to the body's autonomic nervous system. This system, which has branches known as sympathetic and parasympathetic, controls many of the body's functions, such as breathing, digestion, heart rate and blood pressure. Does the nervous system change as we age? Yes. As we get older, the balance of the body's nervous system goes awry. The sympathetic branch, which helps the body prepare for high intensity "fight or flight" activity, begins to dominate. And the parasympathetic branch, which is important for "rest and digest" activity, becomes less active. This makes people more prone to diseases, such as heart problems and hypertension, as well as depression and anxiety. © 2019 BBC

Keyword: Sleep; Depression
Link ID: 26464 - Posted: 07.30.2019

Dr. Brian Goldman A 2018 report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found that brain injuries — which are caused by a blow to the head — send just over a million children and adolescents per year to emergency departments. A study published Monday in the journal Brain Injury reveals some disturbing reasons for these potentially serious injuries. Researchers led by Bina Ali from the U.S.-based Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation reviewed injury surveillance data over a four-year period ending in 2013. They looked for specific causes of brain injuries in children and adolescents in five age groups from infancy to 19 years of age. Overall, 72 per cent of brain injuries that did not result in death but did result in a visit to the emergency department were caused by consumer products that are regulated by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, the independent U.S. government agency that develops uniform standards while promoting the safety of consumer products. The study found that the type of consumer product depended on the age of the child. Infants under one year of age got traumatic brain injuries because they fell. According to the researchers, 25 per cent of all emergency visits for traumatic brain injuries in that age group were caused by a fall from the crib or bed. At 14 per cent, the second leading cause was uneven flooring that caused the infant to trip and fall. Bunk beds were especially risky in children one to four years of age. But stairs and floors were equally hazardous in that age group. Between five and nine years of age, flooring was still the leading cause of brain injuries, and falling off a bicycle placed second. ©2019 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 26463 - Posted: 07.30.2019