By Jane E. Brody I was packing up at the end of a family vacation in Florida when my back went into an excruciating spasm unrelieved by a fistful of pain medication. As my twin sons, then 8 years old, wheeled me through the airport, one of them suggested, “Mom, if you think about something else, it won’t hurt so much.” At the time, I failed to appreciate the wisdom of his advice. Now, four decades later, a sophisticated distraction technique is being used to help patients of all ages cope with pain, both acute and chronic. The method, called Virtual Reality Therapy, goes beyond simple distraction, as might result from watching television. Rather, it totally immerses the patient in an entertaining, relaxing, interactive environment that so occupies the brain, it has no room to process pain sensations at the same time. “It’s not just a distraction — it’s like an endogenous narcotic providing a physiological and chemical burst that causes you to feel good,” said Jeffrey I. Gold, director of the pediatric pain management clinic at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. “It’s different from reading a book or playing with a toy. It’s a multisensory experience that engages a person’s attention on a much deeper level.” Virtual Reality Therapy is the new kid on the block for pain management, now gradually growing in use as the opioid epidemic continues to soar and the price of the needed equipment has plummeted. VR, as it is called, has been most widely and successfully used so far to help children and adults weather acute pain, as can accompany an IV insertion or debridement of burns. But it can also enhance the effectiveness of established techniques like physical therapy, hypnosis and cognitive behavioral therapy to treat debilitating chronic pain. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Attention
Link ID: 26182 - Posted: 04.29.2019

By Susana Martinez-Conde Human night vision is not as precise as day vision. That’s why getting up barefoot in the middle of the night comes with a much higher risk of stepping on painful Lego pieces than walking along the same path during the day. I have three kids of ages twelve and under, so I know. But the specific ways in which our night vision is worse than our day vision are surprisingly counterintuitive to most of us. I remember learning in college that night-vision is achromatic (meaning that we only see in grayscale at night) and not really believing it. It took some careful night-time observation to conclude that my professor was right: objects that were colorful during the day had no hue at night. Most shocking of all was the realization that, though I had always suffered from night-time color blindness (as all of us do), I had never been aware of my deficiency. A recent study by Alejandro Gloriani and Alexander Schütz, from the University of Marburg, Germany, published earlier this month in Current Biology, shows that our night vision self-delusion is even more pervasive than previously thought. Advertisement To appreciate Gloriani and Schütz’s discovery, the first thing to understand is that day and night vision rely on the activity of different types of photoreceptors (these are the retinal cells that convert light energy into electrical signals, which your brain can then process). ‘Cones’ are active during the day (or when you turn the lights on at night). ‘Rods’ are active during the night (or at very dim light levels). © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 26181 - Posted: 04.29.2019

Lisa Wehrstedt Researchers in Philadelphia revealed last week that tastebuds also bear odour-detecting proteins, calling into question the idea that smell and taste come together in the brain to produce flavour. According to Dr Mehmet Hakan Ozdener, his findings open up the possibility of using smells to trick us into healthier eating, for example by adding a low-concentration odour to food to make it taste sweeter and thereby reduce sugar intake. It is believed that we all experience a form of motion-induced blindness while driving at night, when the red lights of the cars in front temporarily disappear if we move our eyes to the oncoming traffic. This phenomenon, where the brain ignores or discards visual information when it is placed in front of a moving background, was first observed in the lab in 1965. First described in 1976, the McGurk effect is a connection between hearing and vision in speech perception. When the auditory component of a syllable is paired with the visual component of another, this can lead to the perception of a third sound. Research conducted by the University of Oxford in 2013 suggests that the sight of cutlery and the perception of its size, weight, shape and colour have an effect on how we determine flavour, suggesting that the brain makes judgments on food even before it goes in our mouths. Yoghurt, for example, tastes sweeter on a white spoon than it does on a black spoon. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Vision
Link ID: 26180 - Posted: 04.29.2019

By Amy Barnhorst SACRAMENTO — If suicide is preventable, why are so many people dying from it? Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, and suicide rates just keep rising. A few years ago, I treated a patient, a flight attendant, whose brother had brought her in to the psychiatric crisis unit after noticing her unusual behavior at a wedding. After the ceremony, she quietly handed out gifts and heartfelt letters to her family members. When her brother took her home, he noticed many of her furnishings and paintings were missing. In her bathroom he found three unopened bottles of prescription sleep medication. He confronted her, and she admitted that she had donated her possessions to charity. She had also cashed out her retirement account and used the money to pay off her mortgage, her car loan and all of her bills. When I interviewed her, she said that for the last four months, doing anything — eating, cleaning her house, talking to her neighbors — had taken colossal effort, and brought her no joy. She felt exhausted by having to live through each day, and the thought of sustaining this for years to come was an intolerable torment. After evaluating her, I told her that I thought she was experiencing an episode of bipolar depression, and needed to be committed to the hospital while we started treatment. She shrugged and gave me her most troubling response yet: “I don’t care.” One of the reasons I remember this woman so well is that, of all the patients I have evaluated for suicide risk, she was an anomaly. She had a sustained and thought-out commitment to ending her life. Fortunately, that allowed her to be discovered, and her family was able to quickly get her into emergency care. She responded well to lithium, one of only two psychiatric medications shown to reduce suicide (the other is an antipsychotic, clozapine). Her depression lifted slowly and she began to remember the things that made her life worth living. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 26179 - Posted: 04.29.2019

By Sheila Kaplan COLUMBIA, S.C. — For months, Juul Labs has had a clear, unwavering message for officials in Washington: The e-cigarette giant is committed to doing all it can to keep its hugely popular vaping products away from teenagers. But here in Columbia, the South Carolina capital, and in statehouses and city halls across the country, a vast, new army of Juul lobbyists is aggressively pushing measures that undermine that pledge. The company’s 80-plus lobbyists in 50 states are fighting proposals to ban flavored e-cigarette pods, which are big draws for teenagers; pushing legislation that includes provisions denying local governments the right to adopt strict vaping controls; and working to make sure that bills to discourage youth vaping do not have stringent enforcement measures. Though Juul supports numerous state bills that would raise the legal age for buying vaping and tobacco products to 21, some of those bills contain minimal sanctions for retailers. Others fine only the clerks and not the owners for violations. “Juul is attempting to rehabilitate its public image by posing as a public health advocate while working behind the scenes to weaken or defeat tobacco control proposals and prevent communities from even considering policies to curb tobacco use,” said Nancy Brown, chief executive of the American Heart Association, whose network of lobbyists has parried with e-cigarette and tobacco industries in many states this year. In a statement, Juul said, “We are as committed as ever to combating youth usage but don’t take our word for it — look at our actions.” The company cited its action plan, unveiled in November, which included shutting down its social media accounts, discontinuing sales of many flavored pods in retail stores and strengthening its online age verification systems. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26178 - Posted: 04.29.2019

By Palko Karasz and Christopher F. Schuetze LONDON — When Munira Abdulla had last been fully awake, the first George Bush was America’s president and the Soviet Union was nearing its demise. It was the year the Persian Gulf war ended. In 1991, at the age of 32, Ms. Abdulla, from the oasis city of Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates, suffered injuries in a road accident that left her in a state of reduced consciousness for most of the next three decades. After 27 years, she awoke last June at a clinic near Munich, where doctors had been treating her for the complications of her long illness. “I never gave up on her, because I always had a feeling that one day she will wake up,” said Omar Webair, her 32-year-old son, who was just 4 when the accident happened. He shared his mother’s story with the Emirati news website The National on Monday. Dr. Friedemann Müller, the chief physician at the Schön Clinic, a private hospital with campuses around Germany, said that Ms. Abdulla had been in a state of minimal consciousness. He said only a handful of cases like hers, in which a patient recovered after such a long period, had been recorded. Patients in a state of reduced consciousness are usually classified into three categories. In a full coma, the patient shows no signs of being awake, with eyes closed and unresponsive to the environment. A persistent vegetative state includes those who seem awake but show no signs of awareness, while a minimally conscious state can include periods in which some response — such as moving a finger when asked — can be noted. Colloquially, all three categories are often described as comas. Signs that Ms. Abdulla was recovering started to emerge last year when she began saying her son’s name. A couple of weeks later, she started repeating verses from the Quran that she had learned decades ago. “We didn’t believe it at first,” Dr. Müller said. “But eventually it became very clear that she was saying her son’s name.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 26177 - Posted: 04.27.2019

Sam Wolfson People who are stoned often think they’re being funnier than they actually are, now we know they overestimate their driving ability too. Almost half of cannabis users believe it’s safe to drive when you’re high, according to a new study by PSB Research and Buzzfeed News. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those who abstain from weed, take a different view – only 14% believe someone who’s stoned can drive safely. The dangers of driving while intoxicated have been so well established that it’s easy to assume it’s the abstainers who are right and pot-smokers are simply failing to recognize the danger they pose to themselves. But a number of studies into the issue have produced a murkier picture. It’s true that THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, can impair a person’s levels of attention and their perception of time and speed, important skills you might think for driving a car. One meta-analysis of 60 studies found that marijuana use causes impairment on every measure of safe driving, including motor-coordination, visual function and completion of complex tasks. But a 2010 analysis published in the American Journal of Addiction found that while “cannabis and alcohol acutely impair several driving-related skills … marijuana smokers tend to compensate effectively while driving by utilizing a variety of behavioral strategies”. The authors concluded that while marijuana should, in theory, make you a worse driver, in tests it doesn’t seem to. “Cognitive studies suggest that cannabis use may lead to unsafe driving, experimental studies have suggested that it can have the opposite effect,” they wrote. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Attention
Link ID: 26176 - Posted: 04.27.2019

By Joe Lindsey In the final episode of Season 7 of Game of Thrones, the Night King uses a terrifying weapon—the recently deceased dragon Viserion, now reanimated—to destroy the massive, magic-infused Wall that has for millennia stopped the White Walkers from invading Westeros. As the Army of the Dead lumbers through the gap, it’s pretty clear: Winter is here. We’ve only seen the Army of the Dead in action a few times now: Hardhome, in Season 5, and Season 7’s epic Wight Hunt, but it seems like Episode 3 of Game of Thrones’ final season is setting us up for an absolutely titanic clash at the Stark’s ancestral home of Winterfell. But wights—or zombies to use a more common parlance—aren’t just a well-worn trope for fantasy writers. The possibility of reanimating dead tissue—including braaaaains—has challenged neurobiologists around the world. So what are the wights, how do they work, and why does an entire army psychically linked together seem to be controlled by just one mind—the Night King? First off, are wights zombies at all? There are actually two types of zombies, the shambling dead—as representing George A. Romero’s classics—and the zombies of Haitian legend. “There’s the socio-cultural definition of zombie from tales in Haitian voodoo, where someone was put into a state similar to death and then ‘brought back to life,’” says Bradley Voytek, avid Game of Thrones fan, neuroscientist at the University of California-San Diego, and co-author of Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep, which uses zombies as the basis for an introduction to serious neuroscience. ©2019 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 26175 - Posted: 04.27.2019

By Benedict Carey “In my head, I churn over every sentence ten times, delete a word, add an adjective, and learn my text by heart, paragraph by paragraph,” wrote Jean-Dominique Bauby in his memoir, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” In the book, Mr. Bauby, a journalist and editor, recalled his life before and after a paralyzing stroke that left him virtually unable to move a muscle; he tapped out the book letter by letter, by blinking an eyelid. Thousands of people are reduced to similarly painstaking means of communication as a result of injuries suffered in accidents or combat, of strokes, or of neurodegenerative disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., that disable the ability to speak. Now, scientists are reporting that they have developed a virtual prosthetic voice, a system that decodes the brain’s vocal intentions and translates them into mostly understandable speech, with no need to move a muscle, even those in the mouth. (The physicist and author Stephen Hawking used a muscle in his cheek to type keyboard characters, which a computer synthesized into speech.) “It’s formidable work, and it moves us up another level toward restoring speech” by decoding brain signals, said Dr. Anthony Ritaccio, a neurologist and neuroscientist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., who was not a member of the research group. Researchers have developed other virtual speech aids. Those work by decoding the brain signals responsible for recognizing letters and words, the verbal representations of speech. But those approaches lack the speed and fluidity of natural speaking. The new system, described on Wednesday in the journal Nature, deciphers the brain’s motor commands guiding vocal movement during speech — the tap of the tongue, the narrowing of the lips — and generates intelligible sentences that approximate a speaker’s natural cadence. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Robotics
Link ID: 26174 - Posted: 04.25.2019

Jayne O'Donnell and Ken Alltucker, Doctors are misusing 2016 opioid pain medication guidelines, federal officials said Wednesday, a clear response to increasing complaints from chronic pain patients who say they are the victims of an overreaction to the opioid crisis. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in new guidance for opioid prescribing, said many physicians were guilty of a "misapplication" of 2016 guidelines that clamped down on the use of opioids. The new guidelines, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, was the latest federal acknowledgement that many physicians' responses to the opioid crisis went too far. Former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb, a physician, spoke out last July about the impact the opioid crisis response had on pain patients when he called for development of more options. Until then, people in the middle of cancer treatments, having "acute sickle cell crises" or with pain after surgery shouldn't be affected by the earlier recommendations, CDC said. These patients were outside the scope of the guidelines, which were intended for primary care doctors treating chronic pain patients, CDC said. Doctors that set hard limits or cut off opioids are also misapplying the government's guidance, CDC said. Doctors should prescribe the lowest effective dosage and avoid increasing it to 90 "morphine milligram equivalents" a day or "carefully justify" any decision to raise the dose to that level.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26173 - Posted: 04.25.2019

By Niraj Chokshi Americans are among the most stressed people on the planet, according to a new survey. And that’s just the start of it. Last year, Americans reported feeling stress, anger and worry at the highest levels in a decade, according to the survey, part of an annual Gallup poll of more than 150,000 people around the world, released on Thursday. “What really stood out for the U.S. is the increase in the negative experiences,” said Julie Ray, Gallup’s managing editor for world news. “This was kind of a surprise to us when we saw the numbers head in this direction.” For the annual poll, started in 2005, Gallup asks individuals about whether they have experienced a handful of positive or negative feelings the day before being interviewed. The data on Americans is based on responses from more than 1,000 adults. In the United States, about 55 percent of adults said they had experienced stress during “a lot of the day” prior, compared with just 35 percent globally. Statistically, that put the country on par with Greece, which had led the rankings on stress since 2012. About 45 percent of the Americans surveyed said they had felt “a lot” of worry the day before, compared with a global average of 39 percent. Meanwhile, the share of Americans who reported feeling “a lot” of anger the day before being interviewed was the same as the global average: 22 percent. When Gallup investigated the responses more closely, it found that being under 50, earning a low income and having a dim view of President Trump’s job performance were correlated with negative experiences among adults in the United States. But there still isn’t enough data to say for sure whether any of those factors were behind the feelings of stress, worry and anger. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 26172 - Posted: 04.25.2019

By Nicholas Bakalar The most common cause of injury deaths in babies under a year old is unintentional suffocation, and almost all of these deaths are preventable, a new report found. Researchers used a federal government case registry to look at the causes of infant deaths by injury between 2011 and 2014. Of 1,812 sudden and unexpected infant deaths over the period, about 14 percent were caused by accidental suffocation. Of these, 69 percent were caused by soft bedding, 19 percent were overlay deaths, in which a caregiver rolled over on the baby, and 12 percent happened when the infant was trapped between two objects, usually the mattress and a wall. The analysis appears in Pediatrics. About 71 percent of the overlay deaths occurred in an adult’s bed, as did 49 percent of the soft bedding deaths, where blankets, pillows or soft toys covering the airway were the most common cause. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that babies be put to sleep on their backs, that the crib have no soft bedding or soft objects, and that adults never sleep in the same bed with a baby. “This paper supports the A.A.P. recommendations,” said the lead author, Alexa B. Erck Lambert, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “And it shows that these deaths by suffocation could have been avoided if the babies had been placed properly.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26171 - Posted: 04.25.2019

By Karen Weintraub Stroke, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and other medical conditions can rob people of their ability to speak. Their communication is limited to the speed at which they can move a cursor with their eyes (just eight to 10 words per minute), in contrast with the natural spoken pace of 120 to 150 words per minute. Now, although still a long way from restoring natural speech, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have generated intelligible sentences from the thoughts of people without speech difficulties. The work provides a proof of principle that it should one day be possible to turn imagined words into understandable, real-time speech circumventing the vocal machinery, Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at U.C.S.F. and co-author of the study published Wednesday in Nature, said Tuesday in a news conference. “Very few of us have any real idea of what’s going on in our mouth when we speak,” he said. “The brain translates those thoughts of what you want to say into movements of the vocal tract, and that’s what we want to decode.” But Chang cautions that the technology, which has only been tested on people with typical speech, might be much harder to make work in those who cannot speak—and particularly in people who have never been able to speak because of a movement disorder such as cerebral palsy. Chang also emphasized that his approach cannot be used to read someone’s mind—only to translate words the person wants to say into audible sounds. “Other researchers have tried to look at whether or not it’s actually possible to decode essentially just thoughts alone,” he says.* “It turns out it’s a very difficult and challenging problem. That’s only one reason of many that we focus on what people are trying to say.” © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging; Language
Link ID: 26170 - Posted: 04.24.2019

Sarah Boseley Antidepressants can save lives. At best, they work. At worst, they are a sticking plaster, hopefully enabling people to hold it all together until they get other help in the form of talking therapies. Either way, they are not supposed to be long-term medication. But whether depression is now better diagnosed or we live in sad times, more and more people are taking the pills and the weeks extend into months and years. In some cases, the users find they can’t stop. “I am currently trying to wean myself off,” one told researchers, “which honestly is the most awful thing I have ever done. I have horrible dizzy spells and nausea whenever I lower my dose.” “The withdrawal effects if I forget to take my pill,” another reported, “are severe shakes, suicidal thoughts, a feeling of too much caffeine in my brain, electric shocks, hallucinations, insane mood swings … Kinda stuck on them now cos I’m too scared to come off.” “While there is no doubt I am better on this medication,” said a third, “the adverse effects have been devastating when I have tried to withdraw – with ‘head zaps’, agitation, insomnia and mood changes. This means that I do not have the option of managing the depression any other way.” These anonymised accounts come from scientific studies cited in a report last year to the all-party parliamentary group for prescribed drug dependence and published in the journal Addictive Behaviors. They give a flavour of the reality of dependence on modern antidepressants, the SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). The most famous is Prozac, AKA fluoxetine, once portrayed as a wonder drug that would make the world rosy and shiny again for all of us, without the dangerous dark side of Valium and the rest of the benzodiazepines. Not only was it harder to overdose on SSRIs than on “benzos”, the experts said; it was also easier to come off them. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 26169 - Posted: 04.24.2019

Jessica Wright Sequencing can identify mutations linked to autism even before a child’s birth—especially in cases where doctors suspect problems, two new studies suggest. In the studies, scientists sequenced fetal DNA only when ultrasounds revealed atypical development of limbs or other organs, and they gave families only the results that seemed to explain those problems But there is a real risk that others might use the technique to test for mutations in any fetus—and to relay all the results to parents—without proper oversight, says Ronald Wapner, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Columbia Institute for Genomic Medicine, who led one of the studies. “Not everybody should be doing this; it should be in the hands of people that have expertise,” he says. Other types of analyses already detect mutations in a fetus: Some detect large DNA segments that are swapped between chromosomes, and others can pick up on missing or duplicated copies of DNA fragments. The new studies are among the first to scan for mutations across the fetal exome—essentially, the collection of genes in a genome. The field is fraught with ethical questions, including whether parents might choose to terminate a pregnancy based on the results. But the researchers note that most of the mutations they found pose serious health risks, which could be treated at birth or in utero. © 1986 - 2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 26168 - Posted: 04.24.2019

By Olivia Goldhill Free will, from a neuroscience perspective, can look like quite quaint. In a study published this week in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers in Australia were able to predict basic choices participants made 11 seconds before they consciously declared their decisions. In the study, 14 participants—each placed in an fMRI machine—were shown two patterns, one of red horizontal stripes and one of green vertical stripes. They were given a maximum of 20 seconds to choose between them. Once they’d made a decision, they pressed a button and had 10 seconds to visualize the pattern as hard as they could. Finally, they were asked “what did you imagine?” and “how vivid was it?” They answered these questions by pressing buttons. Using the fMRI to monitor brain activity and machine learning to analyze the neuroimages, the researchers were able to predict which pattern participants would choose up to 11 seconds before they consciously made the decision. And they were able to predict how vividly the participants would be able to envisage it. Lead author Joel Pearson, cognitive neuroscience professor at the University of South Wales in Australia, said that the study suggests traces of thoughts exist unconsciously before they become conscious. “We believe that when we are faced with the choice between two or more options of what to think about, non-conscious traces of the thoughts are there already, a bit like unconscious hallucinations,” he said in a statement. “As the decision of what to think about is made, executive areas of the brain choose the thought-trace which is stronger. In, other words, if any pre-existing brain activity matches one of your choices, then your brain will be more likely to pick that option as it gets boosted by the pre-existing brain activity.”

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 26167 - Posted: 04.23.2019

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News A treatment that has restored the movement of patients with chronic Parkinson's disease has been developed by Canadian researchers. Previously housebound patients are now able to walk more freely as a result of electrical stimulation to their spines. A quarter of patients have difficulty walking as the disease wears on, often freezing on the spot and falling. Parkinson's UK hailed its potential impact on an aspect of the disease where there is currently no treatment. Prof Mandar Jog, of Western University in London, Ontario, told BBC News the scale of benefit to patients of his new treatment was "beyond his wildest dreams". "Most of our patients have had the disease for 15 years and have not walked with any confidence for several years," he said. "For them to go from being home-bound, with the risk of falling, to being able to go on trips to the mall and have vacations is remarkable for me to see." Normal walking involves the brain sending instructions to the legs to move. It then receives signals back when the movement has been completed before sending instructions for the next step. Prof Jog believes Parkinson's disease reduces the signals coming back to the brain - breaking the loop and causing the patient to freeze. The implant his team has developed boosts that signal, enabling the patient to walk normally. However, Prof Jog was surprised that the treatment was long-lasting and worked even when the implant was turned off. He believes the electrical stimulus reawakens the feedback mechanism from legs to brain that is damaged by the disease. "This is a completely different rehabilitation therapy," he said. "We had thought that the movement problems occurred in Parkinson's patients because signals from the brain to the legs were not getting through. "But it seems that it's the signals getting back to the brain that are degraded." © 2019 BBC

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 26166 - Posted: 04.23.2019

Allison Aubrey An estimated 40% of adults in the U.S. snore. And, men, you tend to out-snore women. (Yes, this may explain why you get kicked or shoved at night!) And despite the myth that snoring is a sign of deep sleep, there's really no upside to it. "Snoring really does not demonstrate anything good, " says Erich Voigt, an ear, nose, and throat doctor and sleep specialist at New York University Langone Health. "You can have beautifully deep sleep in a silent sleep." Snoring is never great news, but often it's harmless (other than the pain your sleeping partner may feel). In some cases, though, it's a sign of something serious. When we sleep, if the air that moves through our nose and mouth has a clear passage, we can sleep silently. But when the airways are narrowed, we snore. "Snoring is basically a vibration of the tissues inside of the airway," Voigt explains — that is, the roof of the mouth and the vertical folds of tissue that surround the tonsils. A lot of factors can contribute to snoring, says Voigt. We can control some of the underlying triggers. For instance, drinking alcohol is linked to snoring. Alcohol tends to make the tissues within our mouths swell a bit, and alcohol can also change the quality of sleep. "Your brain is sedated from alcohol, so the combination can make you snore worse," Voigt says. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26165 - Posted: 04.23.2019

By Dave Philipps Post-traumatic stress disorder has long been one of the hardest mental health problems to diagnose because some patients try to hide symptoms while others exaggerate them. But a new voice analysis technique may be able to take the guesswork out of identifying the disorder using the same technology now used to dial home hands-free or order pizza on a smart speaker. A team of researchers at New York University School of Medicine, working with SRI International, the nonprofit research institute that developed the smartphone assistant Siri, has created an algorithm that can analyze patient interviews, sort through tens of thousands of variables in their speech and identify minute auditory markers of PTSD that are otherwise imperceptible to the human ear, then make a diagnosis. The results, published online on Monday in the journal Depression and Anxiety, show the algorithm was able to narrow down the 40,500 speech characteristics of a group of patients — like the tension in the larynx and the timing in the flick in the tongue — to just 18 relevant indicators that together could be used to diagnose PTSD. Based on those 18 speech clues, the algorithm was able to correctly identify patients with PTSD 89 percent of the time. “They were not the speech features we thought,” said Dr. Charles Marmar, a psychiatry professor at N.Y.U. and one of the authors of the paper. “We thought the telling features would reflect agitated speech. In point of fact, when we saw the data, the features are flatter, more atonal speech. We were capturing the numbness that is so typical of PTSD patients.” As the process is refined, speech pattern analysis could become a widely used biomarker for objectively identifying the disorder, he said. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 26164 - Posted: 04.22.2019

James Hamblin The past two weeks have been frenetic for Bre Hushaw, who is now known to millions of people as the girl in the depression helmet. Hushaw has been hearing from people all around the world who want to try it, or at least want to know how it works. Her life as a meme began when she agreed to an on-camera interview with the local-news site AZfamily.com for a story headlined “Helmet Approved by FDA to Treat Depression Available in Arizona.” The feel-good tale of Hushaw’s miraculous recovery from severe depression was tossed into the decontextualizing maw of the internet and distilled down to a screenshot of a young woman looking like a listless Stormtrooper. Jokes poured in. Some of the most popular, each with more than 100,000 likes on Twitter, include: “If u see me with this ugly ass helmet mind ur business.” “Friend: hey everything alright? Me, wearing depression helmet: yeah I’m just tired.” “The depression helmet STAYS ON during sex.” Hushaw has been tracking the virality, sometimes cringing and sometimes laughing. She replies to as many serious inquiries as she can, while finishing up her senior year at Northern Arizona University before starting a job in marketing. A year ago, she didn’t think she was going to live to graduation. When she was 10 years old, her mother died. Her depression symptoms waxed and waned from then on, and they waxed especially when she heard the gunshots on her campus during a shooting at the school in 2015. She’s tried many medications over the years—14, by her count. (c) 2019 by The Atlantic Monthly Group.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 26163 - Posted: 04.22.2019