Mara Gordon Kids with obesity face a host of health problems related to their weight, like high blood pressure, diabetes, and joint problems. Research points to another way heavier children and teens are at risk: their own doctors' bias. This prejudice has real health consequences for kids, making families less likely to show up for appointments or get recommended vaccines. I am a family physician at a community health center in Washington, D.C., and many of my young patients have obesity. It's no surprise. Obesity is the most common chronic disease that affects children and teens in the U.S. One third of American kids are overweight or obese. But I often feel totally unprepared to talk about it in a way that puts kids at ease. We have to cram in a physical exam, shots, and parent questions into a 15-minute appointment, and a discussion about a healthy lifestyle sometimes feels like an afterthought. I remember one recent visit with a teenage girl and her mom, tripping over the words I chose. "Let's talk about your weight," I said, offering a reassuring smile. It didn't seem to work. I still think about the look of shame on my patient's mom's face, as if her daughter's obesity were a personal failing. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 26302 - Posted: 06.05.2019

By Jon Morgenstern The nation’s growing addiction crisis has amplified the urgent and long-standing need for integrating research into substance abuse treatment and recovery process. While there has been an increase in research activity focused on addiction issues, the challenge is that it often takes a decade or more before important clinical findings can be implemented into real-world care delivery. How can the industry address this problem and make continuous quality improvement a cornerstone of substance abuse treatment? I believe we need to create addiction treatment learning laboratories that are embedded into, and coexist with, treatment and recovery centers. The goal of this approach is to accelerate the translation of basic science discoveries into actionable treatment methodologies that can be shared with and help advance the work of addiction professionals nationwide. While research has generated evidence of treatment efficacy in highly controlled settings, there is limited understanding of how to apply this knowledge in ongoing care regimens. For example, most programs offer a variety of different treatments, but there is no research on the impact of these multicomponent programs or how to tailor care to the unique problems of individual patients. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26301 - Posted: 06.05.2019

Nicole Karlis There is no way Leonardo da Vinci could have predicted that the Mona Lisa would remain one of the most widely-debated works of art in modern day — thanks in no small part to her intriguing expression. Indeed, as one of the most famous paintings in the world, Mona Lisa's facial expression continues to beguile both commoners and academics. A 2017 study published in the journal Scientific Reports (part of the network of Nature's journals) proclaimed that Mona Lisa’s smile did indeed depict genuine happiness, according to the study's subjects who compared it with subtly manipulated facial expressions. Now, a new study published in the neuroscience journal Cortex says that her smile is non-genuine. In other words, she's faking it. The three neuroscience and cognition researchers who penned the article fixated on the asymmetry of Mona Lisa’s smile. Some historical theories suggest the facial asymmetry is due to the loss of the subject's anterior teeth, while others have speculated it could have been related to Bell’s Palsy. The Cortex article's authors note that as the upper part of her face does not appear to be active, it is possible to interpret her smile as “non-genuine.” This would relate to theories of emotion neuropsychology, which is the characterization of the behavioral modifications that follow a neurological condition. © 2018 Salon Media Group, Inc

Keyword: Emotions; Vision
Link ID: 26300 - Posted: 06.05.2019

By Frances Cronin Health reporter Alison Cameron, from Dorset, was 17 when she had appendicitis and went into hospital. "I had my appendix out and I remember I came round out of the anaesthetic screaming, the pain was something else." It was the start of a "horrendous" three years of investigation before "they came to the conclusion through a process of elimination, it was nerve damage". Over the next 30 years, Alison had more than 50 injections, known as cryoblocks, to freeze the site of her abdominal pain, but none of them stopped the pain for more than six months. This left her needing high doses of painkillers which left her unable to eat or drink - and she ended up on a feeding tube which led to her losing weight, and her health deteriorating. But she says she always tried to stay positive, which was instilled in her by her mum. "No matter how bad things have been, I've always been able to find a positive at the end of the day. That isn't saying that I didn't have some very, very low moments. "I miscarried seven times - six of which were definitely down to the pain. So not only have I paid the price - but also those potential lives." She managed to have two children in the gaps between treatment, and now has three grandchildren. The eldest burst into tears the first time she saw Alison without an eating tube, "as that, for her, wasn't normal granny". Five years ago, a cryoblock caused a collapsed lung, and Alison was referred to consultant neurosurgeon Girish Vajramani at the University Hospital Southampton. "Alison is one of the most challenging patients I have ever known," he says. "She had undergone 50 cryoblocks over 30 years, which is unprecedented, and resulted in her referral to me when this proved too dangerous." © 2019 BBC

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26299 - Posted: 06.05.2019

Laura Sanders In a nighttime experiment called the Dream Catcher, people’s dreams slipped right through the net. Looking at only the brain wave activity of sleeping people, scientists weren’t able to reliably spot a dreaming brain. The details of that leaky net, described May 27 at bioRxiv.org, haven’t yet been reviewed by other scientists. And the results are bound to be heavily scrutinized, as they run counter to earlier work that described signs of dreams in neural data. The experimental design matters, because scientists suspect that dreams hold clues about the deepest mystery of the mind — consciousness itself. The brain can create rich tapestries of awareness even in the complete absence of incoming information. Studying these instances of brain-created consciousness, which include dreaming, mind-wandering and daydreaming, “is a powerful way to understand the relationship between the brain and the mind,” says study coauthor Naotsugu Tsuchiya of Monash University in Clayton, a town near Melbourne, Australia. Tsuchiya and his colleagues analyzed data generated from nine people who slept overnight in a laboratory while wearing an electrode cap that measured brain waves. The researchers focused on a stage of sleep called non-REM sleep. (Dreams are so abundant during REM sleep that researchers would have been hard-pressed to find enough instances of nondream sleep to use as a comparison.) To identify dreams, researchers employed an irritating method: They would wake up a person once he or she had entered non-REM sleep, and ask whether the person had been dreaming. To keep the experiment free from unintentional biases, the project relied on two teams of researchers: data collectors and data analyzers. Once the collectors had gathered brain wave data on both dreams and nondreams, the data was handed over to Tsuchiya and other data analyzers without any clues about the subjects, including whether they were dreaming. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26298 - Posted: 06.04.2019

By Amitha Kalaichandran, M.D. It was 11 p.m. and my 5-year-old patient was sleeping peacefully in her hospital bed, snuggled up with her mother and several stuffed animals. Her breathing was quiet and soft. Her bedside heart rate monitor, which glowed a faint yellow in the dark hospital room, was turned to “silent.” “Sorry, I have to take a listen to her heart,” I whispered to her mother, tapping her shoulder lightly. Her mother and I had a good relationship: I had served as an advocate for her daughter several times during her seven-week stay in the ward. She had a rare disease that had been a medical mystery for many months, but she would be transferred to a more specialized center soon. I hated to wake her, but recently, when I had offered to wait to examine a child until after a nap, my attending physician had scolded: “You can’t care about that. If you do, you’ll never examine them. They have to get used to it — they’re in the hospital, after all.” But the poor girl was tired. She was poked three times a day for blood and taken to the M.R.I. or CT scanner at various times. I completed my exam: her vital signs, her heart, perfusion (how well her heart was pumping blood to her body), and palpated her abdomen to check her liver and spleen (which were enlarged, but no more than they had been). She seemed stable. I backed out slowly. The next morning, the girl’s mother mentioned that it had taken another hour for her to fall asleep again. Was there anything that we could do to allow her to sleep through the night? Wouldn’t a good night’s sleep help with her condition? She had a point. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26297 - Posted: 06.04.2019

By Larissa Zimberoff At the urging of doctor friends and a few popular books, I embarked on a diet plan earlier this year called intermittent fasting. The basics are that I could eat the foods I enjoyed and most of my regular meals, but it had to be within a short time frame of eight to 10 hours. Outside of that, I would stick to water, tea and black coffee. Proponents of the plan, also known as time-restricted eating, say that intermittent fasting could help me lose weight, always a worthwhile goal. It would also give my gut a much-needed break from processing food, improve focus and lessen daily inflammation. In the long-term, it might even help me live longer. I’ll admit, the words “intermittent fasting” sounded a little daunting. But Dr. Jason Fung, author of “The Obesity Code,” assured me that it could easily be incorporated into my daily routine. “Anytime you’re not eating is a fast — anything above four hours is fasting,” he said. “A lot of times people eat because they have to, versus really enjoying what they are eating. If you don’t want the sandwich, skip it. Your body knows what to do, it will take your body fat. That’s why you carry it around with you.” In other words, by voluntarily submitting to an absence of food for long periods during the day, my body would transition from burning sugar for fuel to burning fat. Two things made me think I might be able to stick with an intermittent fasting plan. First, I have Type 1 diabetes, which means eating requires thinking. For most of my life, I have spent my days making in-air computations about what I might or might not consume: weighing pros and cons about specific foods while factoring in things like carbs, fat and fiber. Protein too, if I’m super diligent. The more I eat, the more I have to think. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 26296 - Posted: 06.04.2019

Nell Greenfieldboyce At the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., there's a room filled with burbling aquariums. A lot of them have lids weighed down with big rocks. "Octopuses are notorious for being able to, kind of, escape out of their enclosures," says Bret Grasse, whose official title at MBL is "manager of cephalopod operations" — cephalopods being squid, cuttlefish and octopuses. He's part of a team that's trying to figure out the best ways to raise these sea creatures in captivity, so that scientists can investigate their genes and learn the secrets of their strange, almost alien ways. For decades, much of the basic research in biology has focused on just a few, well-studied model organisms like mice, fruit flies, worms and zebrafish. That's because these critters are easy to keep in the laboratory, and scientists have worked out how to routinely alter their genes, leading to all kinds of insights into behavior, diseases and possible treatments. "With these organisms, you could understand what genes did by manipulating them," says Josh Rosenthal, another biologist at MBL. "And that really became an indispensable part of biology." But it's also meant that basic biology has ignored much of the animal kingdom, especially its more exotic denizens. "We're really missing out on, I would say, the diversity of biology's solutions to problems," Rosenthal notes. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 26295 - Posted: 06.04.2019

By Robert D. McFadden Dr. James S. Ketchum, an Army psychiatrist who in the 1960s conducted experiments with LSD and other powerful hallucinogens using volunteer soldiers as test subjects in secret research on chemical agents that might incapacitate the minds of battlefield adversaries, died on May 27 at his home in Peoria, Ariz. He was 87. His wife, Judy Ketchum, confirmed the death on Monday, adding that the cause had not been determined. Decades before a convention eventually signed by more than 190 nations outlawed chemical weapons, Dr. Ketchum argued that recreational drugs favored by the counterculture could be used humanely to befuddle small units of enemy troops, and that a psychedelic “cloud of confusion” could stupefy whole battlefield regiments more ethically than the lethal explosions and flying steel of conventional weapons. For nearly a decade he spearheaded these studies at Edgewood Arsenal, a secluded Army chemical weapons center on Chesapeake Bay near Baltimore, where thousands of soldiers were drugged. Some could be found mumbling as they pondered nonexistent objects, or picking obsessively at bedclothes, or walking about in dreamlike deliriums. Asked to perform reasoning tests, some subjects could not stop laughing. It sometimes took days for the effects to wear off, and even then, Dr. Ketchum wrote in a self-published memoir, many displayed irrational aggressions and fears. He built padded rooms to minimize injuries, but occasionally one would escape. Some soldiers smashed furniture or menaced others, imagining they were running from hordes of rats or killers. “The idea of chemical weapons is still preferable to me, depending on how they are used, as a way of neutralizing an enemy,” Dr. Ketchum told The New York Times in an interview for this obituary in 2016, a half-century after his groundbreaking experiments. “They are still more humane than conventional weapons currently being used, if the public can ever get over its psychological block of being afraid of chemical weapons.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26294 - Posted: 06.04.2019

By Virginia Morell Most of us can look at two meal plates and easily tell which one has more food on it. But if someone turns out the lights, we’re out of luck. Not so for Asian elephants. A new study reveals that the pachyderms can judge food quantity merely by using their sense of smell, the first time an animal has been shown to do this. To conduct the research, scientists presented six Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) at an educational sanctuary in Thailand with two opaque, locked buckets containing 11 different ratios of sunflower seeds, a favorite treat. The elephants could not see how many seeds each bucket contained, but they could smell the contents through small holes in the lids. The animals chose the bucket with the greater quantity of food 59% to 82% of the time, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (Even dogs, with their famed sense of smell, fail this test, other research has shown.) The discovery makes sense, the scientists say, because elephants are known to have the highest number of genes associated with olfactory reception of any species (about 2000 versus dogs’ 811). They can distinguish between the scent of Maasai pastoralists and Kamba farmers, and rely on their sense of smell to navigate long distances to find food and water (up to 19.2 kilometers). The researchers hope their findings could help mitigate human-elephant conflicts in Asia and Africa, because wandering herds use odors to decide where to travel; enticing scents might help lure them away from agricultural fields, for instance. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 26293 - Posted: 06.04.2019

By Jane E. Brody When a child is born with a rare disorder that few doctors recognize or know how to manage, it can pay big dividends for parents to be proactive, learn everything they can about the condition, and with expert medical guidance, come up with the best way to treat it. That is the approach Lara C. Pullen of Chicago adopted when her son, Kian Tan, was born 15 years ago last month at 7½ pounds, seemingly well-formed and healthy. But within 24 hours, Dr. Pullen, who already had two daughters, said Kian had stopped moving, wouldn’t nurse and felt as floppy as a rag doll. Two and a half weeks later, a genetic test showed that Kian had Prader-Willi syndrome, a genetic disorder that occurs once in every 15,000 to 25,000 live births. While at first it is a struggle to get enough food into these babies because they’re too weak to suck, within two or three years their main symptom is an insatiable appetite that results in extreme obesity unless the child, who is driven by constant hunger, is kept from sneaking and stealing food. Prader-Willi syndrome is caused by the failed expression of several genes on chromosome 15 derived from the child’s father. The genes are either missing or inactivated by a mistake that occurs during sperm development or, in some cases, the father’s entire chromosome 15 is not inherited by the fetus. The disorder is only rarely inherited, but when a father has Prader-Willi syndrome caused by a deletion in chromosome 15, there’s a 50 percent chance each child he fathers will inherit the defective chromosome. In addition to an excessive appetite, its range of symptoms includes short stature, sleep apnea, extreme daytime sleepiness, visual defects, underdeveloped genital organs, poor coordination, mild to moderate intellectual disability, speech problems, a high tolerance for pain, temper tantrums, obsessive behaviors and blood sugar irregularities. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 26292 - Posted: 06.03.2019

by Jessica Wright Spontaneous mutations that occur between genes are as important in autism as those within genes, a new study suggests1. The study, published today in Nature Genetics, is the first to look at the impact of these ‘noncoding’ mutations across the whole genomes of autistic people. Many teams over the past three years have sequenced the DNA of autistic people both within and between genes. Yet sorting through the hundreds of thousands of mutations between genes had seemed nearly impossible because researchers know so little about these genetic segments. The new study overcomes this challenge by using a machine-learning approach. The researchers created an algorithm that predicts whether a particular noncoding mutation alters any gene’s expression. It assigns each mutation a score based on how likely it is to do so — and to be harmful. “The unique approach here is that instead of just counting mutations, we’re using the deep-learning-based frameworks to look at their regulatory impacts,” says co-lead author Olga Troyanskaya, professor of integrative genomics at Princeton University in New Jersey. “All mutations are not created equal, and all effects are not created equal.” (Troyanskaya also holds a position at the Simons Foundation, Spectrum’s parent organization.) A strength of the study is that it looks at spontaneous mutations across the entire genome, experts say. © 2019 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 26291 - Posted: 06.03.2019

By Gian Gastone Mascetti One of the most striking features of living organisms, both animals and plants, is the way their physiology and behavior have adapted to follow the fluctuations of daily light and nocturnal darkness. A clock in the brain synchronized to environmental cues generates biological changes that vary over a 24-hour cycle—circadian rhythms (from the Latin words circa and diem, meaning “about” and “a day,” respectively). In this way, the earth’s rotation is reproduced in the dynamics of our neuronal circuits. The sleep-wakefulness cycle is a typical circadian rhythm. Wakefulness is characterized by sensory activity and movement; during sleep the senses lose touch with their surroundings, and movements subside. This periodic loss of consciousness appears on electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings as a clear signature: deep sleep consists of slow oscillations of high amplitude. Wakefulness, in contrast, is made up of fast, low-amplitude oscillations. Much about sleep remains a mystery, however. Why would an animal shut down basic sensory and motor activity for hours on end, leaving itself a target for predators? This question becomes more acute in aquatic mammals, which need to regulate breathing and body temperature while they sleep. Remarkably, some animals have solved this problem by developing the ability to sleep with one half their brain while remaining vigilant with the other—a behavior known as unihemispheric slow-wave sleep (USWS). Still others engage in USWS under some circumstances but put both hemispheres to bed when necessary. Marine mammals, bird species and possibly reptiles enter a half-on/half-off state, sometimes keeping one eye open during these intervals. Recently researchers have even discovered a vestigial form of unihemispheric sleep in humans. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Sleep; Laterality
Link ID: 26290 - Posted: 06.03.2019

By Austin Frakt New graduates of Fayetteville State University last month in North Carolina. A college degree is linked to higher life expectancy, but does it cause it?CreditTravis Education is associated with better health outcomes, but trying to figure out whether it actually causes better health is tricky. People with at least some college education have mortality rates (deaths per 1,000 individuals per year) less than half of those without any college education, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In addition, people who are more educated exhibit less anxiety and depression, have fewer functional limitations, and are less likely to have a serious health condition like diabetes, cardiovascular disease or asthma. But causality runs both ways. People in poor health from a young age may be unable to pursue education as much as those with better health. On the other hand, a person who tends to focus on long-term outcomes may be motivated to develop healthier habits like regular exercise — even if blocked from a pursuit of higher education. Some clever studies have teased out the causal effects of education by exploiting natural experiments. One, by the U.C.L.A economist Adriana Lleras-Muney, relied on state compulsory education laws enacted between 1915 and 1939. These laws required some children to obtain more education than they might have otherwise, resulting in longer lives for those that did so. According to the study, having an additional year of education by 1960 increased life expectancy at age 35 by 1.7 years. Studies that relied on inducements for greater education because of a poor labor market or as a way to avoid the Vietnam draft found that increased education led to better health and a lower likelihood of smoking. This finding is one clue about how education may improve health. It can reduce people’s engagement in risky behaviors, perhaps because those behaviors could threaten the higher income that greater education typically confers. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 26289 - Posted: 06.03.2019

Coffee lovers who drink up to 25 cups a day can rest assured the drink is not bad for their heart, scientists say. Some previous studies have suggested that coffee stiffens arteries, putting pressure on the heart and increasing the likelihood of a heart attack or stroke, with drinkers warned to cut down their consumption. But a new study of more than 8,000 people across the UK found that drinking five cups a day, and even up to 25, was no worse for the arteries than drinking less than a cup a day. The research, part-funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF), is being presented at the British Cardiovascular Society conference in Manchester. Get Society Weekly: our newsletter for public service professionals Read more Experts from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) divided 8,412 people into three groups for the study. The first group was of those who drink less than one cup of coffee a day, the second was of those who drink between one and three cups a day, and the third was those who drink more than three. Some people in the latter group drank up to 25 cups a day, although the average number for people in this group was five cups a day. Researchers found that even those drinking up to 25 cups of coffee a day were no more likely to have stiffening of arteries than those who drank less than one cup a day.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26288 - Posted: 06.03.2019

By Veronique Greenwood After a long hike on a hot day, few things are more rewarding than a tall, frosty glass of water. The rush of pleasure that comes with a drink might feel like a sign from your body that you’ve done the right thing, a reward for remedying your dehydration. But that pleasing sensation isn’t actually linked to your real need for a drink. In a study published Wednesday in the journal Neuron, a group of scientists who have studied how thirst works in the bodies of mammals report that the neural systems related to the feeling of reward work independently of those involved in monitoring water intake. Staying hydrated is high on most organisms’ list of priorities. Mammals have multiple ways of tracking the water they’ve consumed, a subject Yuki Oka, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology, has long studied in mice. The mechanisms in other mammals, including humans, may be similar. One method he and colleagues explored in earlier research involves the gulping motion made by the throat as liquid is swallowed. That gulping sends a message to the brain that water has been consumed, quieting the neurons that generate the urge to drink. But that happens regardless of whether the substance gulped was water or oil, suggesting that the act of gulping only briefly convinces your brain that your thirst is quenched. The body also tracks the presence of water in the gut, and when it becomes clear that water is not arriving, thirst returns. Dr. Oka and colleagues report in their latest study that injecting water directly into the stomachs of mice did quench thirst, albeit after a longer lag. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26287 - Posted: 06.01.2019

By Jonathan Ore, Dawna Dingwall & Dr. Brian Goldman In his youth, Dayton Wilson was a free spirit, an aspiring rap artist with a burgeoning talent at playing the electric guitar. That all changed in September 2016, when a fentanyl overdose left him with brain damage. Wilson's speech and balance were most greatly affected after the overdose. His movements are as slow and deliberate as the way he talks. His vocabulary remains intact, but he speaks as though a recording of his voice is being played at half-speed. Today it takes the 24-year-old a few moments to find the words he wants to say. "Sometimes it's too loud. Sometimes I can't find an opportune moment to try to say [the right word]," Wilson said in an interview with White Coat, Black Art. His hands often involuntarily clench into fists. He's likely permanently lost the dexterity that allowed him to play the guitar. While most news headlines centre on the thousands of deaths that have resulted from opioid-related overdoses, advocates say those who survive, like Wilson, are largely forgotten, even as they're left struggling to deal with the life-changing aftermath. "The death numbers are what's reported and people, I think, get the impression that you have a drug overdose, you get naloxone and you survive. Or you do not get naloxone … and you die," said Dr. Delbert Dorscheid, a critical care physician at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26286 - Posted: 06.01.2019

Kerry Grens In mice whose sense of smell has been disabled, a squirt of stem cells into the nose can restore olfaction, researchers report today (May 30) in Stem Cell Reports. The introduced “globose basal cells,” which are precursors to smell-sensing neurons, engrafted in the nose, matured into nerve cells, and sent axons to the mice’s olfactory bulbs in the brain. “We were a bit surprised to find that cells could engraft fairly robustly with a simple nose drop delivery,” senior author Bradley Goldstein of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine says in a press release. “To be potentially useful in humans, the main hurdle would be to identify a source of cells capable of engrafting, differentiating into olfactory neurons, and properly connecting to the olfactory bulbs of the brain. Further, one would need to define what clinical situations might be appropriate, rather than the animal model of acute olfactory injury.” Goldstein and others have independently tried stem cell therapies to restore olfaction in animals previously, but he and his coauthors note in their study that it’s been difficult to determine whether the regained function came from the transplant or from endogenous repair stimulated by the experimental injury to induce a loss of olfaction. So his team developed a mouse whose resident globose basal cells only made nonfunctional neurons, and any restoration of smell would be attributed to the introduced cells. © 1986–2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Stem Cells
Link ID: 26285 - Posted: 06.01.2019

By JoAnna Klein Say you are prescribed medication for depression, anxiety or even just to sleep. Would you want to take it if you knew that the drug had only been tested on men and male animals? Rebecca Shansky, a neuroscientist at Northeastern University in Boston, thinks you might not. When she tells nonscientific audiences that researchers “for the most part don’t study female animals, people are blown away,” she said. She added: “It seems like such an obvious thing to a normal person. But when you come up in the academic and science world, it’s like, ‘Oh no, females are so complicated, so we just don’t study them.’” In 2016, the National Institutes of Health and its Canadian counterpart mandated that all preclinical research they fund must include female subjects. Now, Dr. Shansky and other scientists wonder if that requirement will do enough to improve how research is conducted. In an essay published Thursday in Science, Dr. Shansky questions whether simply adding female organisms to experiments or looking for sex differences misses the point. She warns that this is a public health problem — with implications beyond neuroscience — and says scientists should design experiments better suited to both biological sexes. If scientists don’t stop looking through a male lens, outdated gender stereotypes will continue to foster dangerous assumptions about the brain and behavior, resulting in clinical studies and eventual treatments that don’t work equally for all people on the gender spectrum. Basic research is the foundation for clinical studies and practice, and that often begins with animals, which offer controlled settings for research of human diseases. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 26284 - Posted: 05.31.2019

By Kelly Servick Genes are a powerful driver of risk for autism, but some researchers suspect another factor is also at play: the set of bacteria that inhabits the gut. That idea has been controversial, but a new study offers support for this gut-brain link. It reveals that mice develop autismlike behaviors when they are colonized by microbes from the feces of people with autism. The result doesn’t prove that gut bacteria can cause autism. But it suggests that, at least in mice, the makeup of the gut can contribute to some hallmark features of the disorder. “It’s quite an encouraging paper,” says John Cryan, a neuroscientist at University College Cork in Ireland who was not involved in the research. The idea that metabolites—the molecules produced by bacterial digestion—can influence brain activity “is plausible, it makes sense, and it will help push the field forward.” Many studies have found differences between the composition of the gut microbiomes in people with and without autism. But those studies can’t determine whether a microbial imbalance is responsible for autism symptoms or is a result of having the condition. To test the effect of the gut microbiome on behavior, Sarkis Mazmanian, a microbiologist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, and collaborators put fecal samples from children with and without autism into the stomachs of germ-free mice, which had no microbiomes of their own. The researchers then mated pairs of mice colonized with the same microbiomes, so their offspring would be exposed to a set of human microbes early in development. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 26283 - Posted: 05.31.2019