By Benedict Carey More than 3 million Americans live with disabling brain injuries. The vast majority of these individuals are lost to the medical system soon after their initial treatment, to be cared for by family or to fend for themselves, managing fatigue, attention and concentration problems with little hope of improvement. On Saturday, a team of scientists reported a glimmer of hope. Using an implant that stimulates activity in key areas of the brain, they restored near-normal levels of brain function to a middle-aged woman who was severely injured in a car accident 18 years ago. Experts said the woman was a test case, and that it was far from clear whether the procedure would prompt improvements for others like her. That group includes an estimated 3 million to 5 million people, many of them veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with disabilities related to traumatic brain injuries. “This is a pilot study,” said Dr. Steven R. Flanagan, the chairman of the department of rehabilitation medicine at NYU Langone Health, who was not part of the research team. “And we certainly cannot generalize from it. But I think it’s a very promising start, and there is certainly more to come in this work.” The woman, now in her early 40s, was a student when the accident occurred. She soon recovered sufficiently to live independently. But she suffered from persistent fatigue and could not read or concentrate for long, leaving her unable to hold a competitive job, socialize much, or resume her studies. “Her life has changed,” said Dr. Nicholas Schiff, a professor of neurology and neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medicine and a member of the study team. “She is much less fatigued, and she’s now reading novels. The next patient might not do as well. But we want keep going to see what happens.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 26142 - Posted: 04.15.2019

by Jesse Noakes In August 2016 I went to New York for the first time. On the second evening, as the sun slipped behind the building across the street, I was sitting on a long couch on the top floor of an old church. All around me instruments were scattered on the floor – singing bowls, tuning forks, rainsticks, Tibetan bells. At the foot of a wall carpeted completely in moss, dripping like the jungle in the baking heat, was a large bronze gong. On the table in front of me two small ceramic bowls contained a capsule of 125mg of pure MDMA and a chilli guacamole with three grams of powdered magic mushrooms stirred through it. I eyed them nervously. I was terrified that I was going to lose my mind but I was more scared that nothing would happen at all, that I was too broken for even this radical treatment. I’d left Australia to take psychedelics with a therapist. Almost a decade of regular talk therapies for depression had done little to explain why I still felt so numb, trapped and terrified. A few months earlier I’d tracked down a guy online who said that, while it wasn’t a magic bullet, he might have something that would help. I can’t name him because it’s still completely illegal. He was sitting across from me and after I’d swallowed the contents of both bowls he handed me a padded eye mask and suggested I lie back on the couch. I heard him move across the room in the steamy darkness as I tried to relax and focus on my breathing. Moments later I heard the first strange notes from the gong. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26141 - Posted: 04.15.2019

/ By Dan Falk It’s been 30 years since Bobby McFerrin urged us, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” But it’s not so easy, is it? In the modern world, there’s plenty that you could worry about — but what should you worry about? If you worry about everything, you end up paralyzed with fear; if, on the other hand, you never worry about anything, you’re likely to end up falling victim to circumstances that you could have prevented. We should only worry about things that are likely to happen, and which are likely to cause serious harm if they do happen — and which you can take reasonable measures to prevent from happening. Lise Johnson and Eric Chudler have written a new book to help you navigate the worrysphere. Johnson is a biomedical engineer and a science writer and Chudler is a neuroscientist, and together they lead us on a tour of 58 things that one might potentially worry about, and try to assess how much those things are actually worth worrying about. The authors shine a spotlight on everything from caffeine, fluoride, and the Ebola virus to bees, snakes, public restrooms, and cruise ships. If it were only a list, I suspect they’d have had trouble getting a book deal — but fortunately it’s more than that. The authors have found a nifty way of presenting the variables in graphic form (what they call a “worry index”), displaying each worry-item as a circle on a Cartesian graph: Likelihood is plotted on the x-axis, and preventability on the y-axis; meanwhile, the size of the circle reflects the consequences, or the severity, of the issue. For example, a flesh-eating infection gets a pretty big circle — the disease can be fatal if left untreated. Fortunately, your chances of getting it are very low, so the circle is placed on the far left-hand-side of the graph; and it’s also highly preventable (with good hygiene and prompt medical treatment), so the circle sits high up on the y-axis. In contrast, although “medical errors” get a similar-sized circle, it falls in the lower-right quadrant: Doctors and nurses make mistakes more often than we might imagine, and there’s not much you can do to prevent such errors from happening. Copyright 2019 Undark

Keyword: Stress; Emotions
Link ID: 26140 - Posted: 04.15.2019

By Denise Gellene Paul Greengard, an American neuroscientist whose 15-year quest to understand how brain cells communicate provided new insights into psychological diseases and earned him a Nobel Prize, and who used his entire $400,000 award to create an academic prize in memory of the mother he never knew, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 93. His death was confirmed by Rockefeller University, where he had worked since 1983. Dr. Greengard received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Dr. Arvid Carlsson of Sweden and Dr. Eric R. Kandel of the United States for independent discoveries related to the ways brain cells relay messages about movement, memory and mental states. Their discoveries offered new insights into disorders linked to errors in cell communication, such as Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and drug addiction. Dr. Greengard’s research described how cells react to dopamine, an important chemical messenger in the brain. His work provided the underlying science for many antipsychotic drugs, which modulate the strength of chemical signals in the brain. “Our work shows the details of how dopamine produces these effects — in other words, what’s wrong in these diseases and what can be done to correct them,” Dr. Greengard said. Dr. Greengard’s research extended from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. For much of the period, his work was ignored. A majority of biologists believed brain cells communicated through the use of electrical signals. To them, the only thing that mattered was whether a cell fired off a signal. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 26139 - Posted: 04.15.2019

Kate Kellaway Alice Robb is an American science journalist who has written for the Washington Post and the New Republic. Her new book, Why We Dream, encourages us to rethink the importance of dreams and to become dream interpreters ourselves. Writing a book about dreams turned you into a “magnet for confessions”. Why are people compelled to talk about dreams? It is a natural impulse because dreams are emotional, affect moods, feel profound. What is unusual is that we live in a culture where we’re expected to forget our dreams. We have this cliche that it is boring to talk about dreams. Between 1970 and 2000 you note that no research about dreaming was published in the top US journal, Science. Is that because it was looked down upon as a topic or the technical challenges involved in studying it? For most of the 20th century, researchers who wanted to study dreams had to rely on people’s descriptions of them – not the most perfect form of evidence. It didn’t help that psychologists were trying very hard to have their discipline seen as a “real” science; they were trying to distance themselves from Freud, who had put dreams at the centre of psychoanalysis. I think this is a case of technological advances enabling a shift in attitude. Once scientists saw that it was possible to study dreams with neuroimaging, they were able to start asking questions about what’s going on in the brain when we dream. There were a couple of big breakthroughs in the 1990s and early 2000s that helped make dreams a valid topic of scientific inquiry. Neuroscientist Matt Wilson discovered that rats’ brains kept working as they slept, replaying a maze they had run through during the day. And Robert Stickgold, a psychiatrist at Harvard, found that people who played Tetris in the lab would dream of the game at night. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26138 - Posted: 04.15.2019

In a study of healthy volunteers, National Institutes of Health researchers found that our brains may solidify the memories of new skills we just practiced a few seconds earlier by taking a short rest. The results highlight the critically important role rest may play in learning. “Everyone thinks you need to ‘practice, practice, practice’ when learning something new. Instead, we found that resting, early and often, may be just as critical to learning as practice,” said Leonardo G. Cohen, M.D., Ph.D., senior investigator at NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and a senior author of the paper published in the journal Current Biology. “Our ultimate hope is that the results of our experiments will help patients recover from the paralyzing effects caused by strokes and other neurological injuries by informing the strategies they use to ‘relearn’ lost skills.” The study was led by Marlene Bönstrup, M.D., a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Cohen’s lab. Like many scientists, she held the general belief that our brains needed long periods of rest, such as a good night’s sleep, to strengthen the memories formed while practicing a newly learned skill. But after looking at brain waves recorded from healthy volunteers in learning and memory experiments at the NIH Clinical Center, she started to question the idea. The waves were recorded from right-handed volunteers with a highly sensitive scanning technique called magnetoencephalography. The subjects sat in a chair facing a computer screen and under a long cone-shaped brain scanning cap. The experiment began when they were shown a series of numbers on a screen and asked to type the numbers as many times as possible with their left hands for 10 seconds; take a 10 second break; and then repeat this trial cycle of alternating practice and rest 35 more times. This strategy is typically used to reduce any complications that could arise from fatigue or other factors.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Brain imaging
Link ID: 26137 - Posted: 04.13.2019

Cindy Buckmaster Wasteful, outdated, and unnecessary. These are three of the most common claims voiced by animal rights groups about the use of animals in research. Are they accurate? Not in the least. Countless published papers and medical advancements demonstrate how animal studies lead to medical progress. But despite this reality, public opinion is no longer solidly behind science. Pew Research Center polling data from 2018 showed that only 47 percent of Americans are in favor of the use of animals in scientific research. This compares to 52 percent in 2009. Another recent poll, this time from Gallup, showed slightly more encouraging results. In 2018, 54 percent of respondents said medical testing in animals is morally acceptable. That’s down from 62 percent in 2004. Based on these sobering statistics, it’s abundantly clear that the science community needs to try a new communications approach. For several decades, most research organizations have shied away from sharing anything but the most minimal details about the role of animals in advancing human and veterinary medicine. This decision was historically based in part on security concerns. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, a small group of animal extremists targeted individual scientists with harassment, home protests, and even firebombs and arson attacks. Thankfully, those days appear to be behind us. © 1986 - 2019 The Scientist.

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 26136 - Posted: 04.13.2019

Robert J King Ph.D. Saying that people deserve to be treated decently is not a factual claim. You can’t look it up in a textbook, and no amount of brain-scanning is going to reveal why it’s true. People have been either succeeding (or more often failing) to treat each other kindly, fairly, and honorably, since before there was science, since before there were people really. And—they will continue to try (and often fail) far into the future, whatever science reveals about our natures. If I am trying to help a child understand why stealing from another child was wrong, or that they should share the sandpit, or apologize to that other annoying (and now crying) kid…yes…I know he took your dolly, but you still can’t hit him with that Lego dinosaur… Well, I don’t get out my copy of Eric Kandel's Principles of Neural Science, and start pointing meaningfully to the diagram of Brodmann area 11 in the prefrontal cortex. This seems blindingly obvious. However, the corollary: That you don’t need neurological backup to argue that you should treat people fairly, seems lost on writers like Cordelia Fine and Gina Rippon. Both are trying to argue that humans are neurological hermaphrodites, as if somehow admitting any sex differences in brains would mandate the unfair treatment of women. Gina Rippon is back to “debunk” neuroscience with her latest, The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters The Myth Of The Female Brain. It is tempting to rebunk these debunkings but, if I am right in my guess about what is going on here, no amount of factual piling on is going to help. In fact—it may make things worse, because it’s going to convince writers like Fine and Rippon that some hideous conspiracy is occurring and, like some horrible feminist version of Alex Jones, that the whole of brain science is fake news. Let’s stop things before they get out of hand. © 2019 Sussex Publishers, LLC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 26135 - Posted: 04.13.2019

Tina Hesman Saey ORLANDO — Being exposed to a chemical early in life can be a bit like a choose-your-own-adventure book: Some things that happen early on may hurt you later, but only if you make certain choices, an unpublished study in mice suggests. Mouse pups were exposed to the chemical bisphenol A (BPA) for only five days after birth, a crucial time during which mice’s livers develop. BPA, once common in plastics, has been linked to a host of health problems in people, from diabetes to heart disease (SN: 10/11/08, p. 14). But depending on diet as adults, the mice either grew up to be healthy or to have enlarged livers and high cholesterol. As long as the BPA-exposed mice ate mouse chow for the rest of their lives, the rodents remained healthy, molecular biologist Cheryl Walker of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston reported April 7 at the 2019 Experimental Biology meeting. But researchers switched some BPA-exposed mice to a high-fat diet as adults. Those mice had larger livers, higher cholesterol and more metabolic problems than mice who ate a high-fat diet but were not exposed to BPA as pups, Walker said. BPA exposure immediately altered epigenetic marks at more than 5,400 genes, including 3,000 involved in aging. Epigenetic marks are chemical tags on DNA or on histones — protein around which DNA winds in a cell — that don’t change information in genes themselves, but affect gene activity. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26134 - Posted: 04.13.2019

By Kelly Servick At age 16, Danielle Bassett spent most of her day at the piano, trying to train her fingers and ignoring a throbbing pain in her forearms. She hoped to pursue a career in music and had been assigning herself relentless practice sessions. But the more she rehearsed Johannes Brahms's feverish Rhapsody in B Minor on her family's Steinway, the clearer it became that something was wrong. Finally, a surgeon confirmed it: Stress fractures would force her to give up the instrument for a year. "What was left in my life was rather bleak," Bassett says. Her home-schooled upbringing in rural central Pennsylvania had instilled a love of math, science, and the arts. But by 17, discouraged by her parents from attending college and disheartened at her loss of skill while away from the keys, she expected that responsibilities as a housewife and mother would soon eclipse any hopes of a career. "I wasn't happy with that plan," she says. Instead, Bassett catapulted herself into a life of research in a largely uncharted scientific field now known as network neuroscience. A Ph.D. physicist and a MacArthur fellow by age 32, she has pioneered the use of concepts from physics and math to describe the dynamic connections in the human brain. "She's now the doyenne of network science," says theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston of University College London. "She came from a formal physics background but was … confronted with some of the deepest questions in neuroscience." © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26133 - Posted: 04.12.2019

Jon Hamilton The anesthetic ketamine can relieve depression in hours and keep it at bay for a week or more. Now scientists have found hints about how ketamine works in the brain. In mice, the drug appears to quickly improve the functioning of certain brain circuits involved in mood, an international team reported Thursday in the journal Science. Then, hours later, it begins to restore faulty connections between cells in these circuits. The finding comes after the Food and Drug Administration in March approved Spravato, a nasal spray that is the first antidepressant based on ketamine. The anesthetic version of ketamine has already been used to treat thousands of people with depression. But scientists have known relatively little about how ketamine and similar drugs affect brain circuits. The study offers "a substantial breakthrough" in scientists' understanding, says Anna Beyeler, a neuroscientist at INSERM, the French equivalent of the National Institutes of Health, who wasn't involved in the research. But there are still many remaining questions, she says. Previous research has found evidence that ketamine was creating new synapses, the connections between brain cells. But the new study appears to add important details about how and when these new synapses affect brain circuits, says Ronald Duman, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Yale University. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26132 - Posted: 04.12.2019

By Sam Roberts Ralph Solecki, an archaeologist whose research helped debunk the view of Neanderthals as heartless and brutish half-wits and inspired a popular series of novels about prehistoric life, died on March 20 in Livingston, N.J. He was 101. The cause was pneumonia, his son William said. Starting in the mid-1950s, leading teams from Columbia University, Dr. Solecki discovered the fossilized skeletons of eight adult and two infant Neanderthals who had lived tens of thousands of years ago in what is now northern Iraq. Dr. Solecki, who was also a Smithsonian Institution anthropologist at the time, said physical evidence at Shanidar Cave, where the skeletons were found, suggested that Neanderthals had tended to the weak and the wounded, and that they had also buried their dead with flowers, which were placed ornamentally and possibly selected for their therapeutic benefits. The exhumed bones of a man, named Shanidar 3, who had been blind in one eye and missing his right arm but who had survived for years after he was hurt, indicated that fellow Neanderthals had helped provide him with sustenance and other support. “Although the body was archaic, the spirit was modern,” Dr. Solecki wrote in the magazine Science in 1975. Large amounts of pollen found in the soil at a grave site suggested that bodies might have been ceremonially entombed with bluebonnet, hollyhock, grape hyacinth and other flowers — a theory that is still being explored and amplified. (Some researchers hypothesized that the pollen might have been carried by rodents or bees, but Dr. Solecki’s theory has become widely accepted.) “The association of flowers with Neanderthals adds a whole new dimension to our knowledge of his humanness, indicating he had a ‘soul,’ ” Dr. Solecki wrote. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 26131 - Posted: 04.12.2019

Rhonda Voskuhl & Sabra Klein We are concerned that Lise Eliot’s review of Gina Rippon’s book The Gendered Brain (Nature 566, 453–454; 2019) undermines the premise that sex is a biological variable with respect to many medical conditions and drug responses (see J. A. Clayton and F. S. Collins Nature 509, 282–283; 2014). As president-elect and president, respectively, of the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences, we disagree with Eliot’s claim that the brain is “no more gendered than the liver or kidneys or heart”. We also disagree that sex differences in behaviour are due to cultural effects on newborns, not to biological effects. In our view, these are not mutually exclusive. Sex disparities occur in animal models that are not subject to cultural bias. The brain, like many organs, shows differences attributable to sex, both during health (see, for example, E. Luders et al. J. Neurosci. 29, 14265–14270; 2009) and during disease. Two-thirds of people with Alzheimer’s disease are women; twice as many men as women have Parkinson’s disease (see, for example, L. J. Young and D. W. Pfaff Front. Neuroendocrinol. 35, 253–254; 2014). And multiple sclerosis affects three times more women than men, although men with the condition develop neurological disability more quickly (see, for example, R. R. Voskuhl and S. M. Gold Nature Rev. Neurol. 8, 255–263; 2012). Sex is a modifier of disease risk and progression. © 2019 Springer Nature Publishing AG

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 26130 - Posted: 04.12.2019

By Ken Belson and Benedict Carey Experimental brain scans of more than two dozen former N.F.L. players found that the men had abnormal levels of the protein linked to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease associated with repeated hits to the head. Using positron emission tomography, or PET, scans, the researchers found “elevated amounts of abnormal tau protein” in the parts of the brain associated with the disease, known as C.T.E., compared to men of similar age who had not played football. The authors of the study and outside experts stressed that such tau imaging is far from a diagnostic test for C.T.E., which is likely years away and could include other markers, from blood and spinal fluid. The results of the study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, are considered preliminary, but constitute a first step toward developing a clinical test to determine the presence of C.T.E. in living players, as well as early signs and potential risk. Thus far, pathologists have been able to confirm the diagnosis only posthumously, by identifying the tau signature in donated brains. Previous studies had reported elevated levels of the tau signature in single cases. The new study is the first to compare the brains of a group of former players to a control group, using an imaging approach that specifically picks up tau and not other proteins in the brain. “What makes this exciting is that it’s a great first step for imaging C.T.E. in the living, not just looking at single instances, but comparing averages and looking for patterns by comparing groups,” said Kevin Bieniek, director of the Biggs Institute Brain Bank Core at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 26129 - Posted: 04.11.2019

By Lydia Denworth The vast majority of neuroscientific studies contain three elements: a person, a cognitive task and a high-tech machine capable of seeing inside the brain. That simple recipe can produce powerful science. Such studies now routinely yield images that a neuroscientist used to only dream about. They allow researchers to delineate the complex neural machinery that makes sense of sights and sounds, processes language and derives meaning from experience. But something has been largely missing from these studies: other people. We humans are innately social, yet even social neuroscience, a field explicitly created to explore the neurobiology of human interaction, has not been as social as you would think. Just one example: no one has yet captured the rich complexity of two people’s brain activity as they talk together. “We spend our lives having conversation with each other and forging these bonds,” neuroscientist Thalia Wheatley of Dartmouth College says. “[Yet] we have very little understanding of how it is people actually connect. We know almost nothing about how minds couple.” That is beginning to change. A growing cadre of neuroscientists is using sophisticated technology—and some very complicated math—to capture what happens in one brain, two brains, or even 12 or 15 at a time when their owners are engaged in eye contact, storytelling, joint attention focused on a topic or object, or any other activity that requires social give and take. Although the field of interactive social neuroscience is in its infancy, the hope remains that identifying the neural underpinnings of real social exchange will change our basic understanding of communication and ultimately improve education or inform treatment of the many psychiatric disorders that involve social impairments. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 26128 - Posted: 04.11.2019

By Gretchen Vogel A research group’s claimed ability to communicate with completely paralyzed people has come under fire, prompting research misconduct investigations at a German university and at Germany’s main research agency, the German Research Foundation (DFG). Two years ago, researchers in Germany and Switzerland claimed that by analyzing blood flow in different parts of the brain with an electronic skullcap, they could elucidate answers to yes or no questions from completely paralyzed people. The find, published in PLOS Biology in 2017, raised hopes for patients with degenerative diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that ultimately leave them without any voluntary muscle control—not even the ability to blink or move their eyes—a condition called a “completely locked-in state.” Now, a simmering controversy about the paper has erupted into public view. As first reported by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, PLOS Biology yesterday published a critique of the paper that claims the authors’ statistical analysis is incorrect. Martin Spüler, an informatics specialist at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany, says his analysis of the data shows no support for the authors’ claim that their system could allow patients to answer questions correctly 70% of the time. His critique, first raised in late 2017, has prompted investigations of possible scientific misconduct at both DFG and the University of Tübingen, where the group studying locked-in patients is also based. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Consciousness; Brain imaging
Link ID: 26127 - Posted: 04.11.2019

By Carl Zimmer In a cave in the Philippines, scientists have discovered a new branch of the human family tree. At least 50,000 years ago, an extinct human species lived on what is now the island of Luzon, researchers reported on Wednesday. It’s possible that Homo luzonensis, as they’re calling the species, stood less than three feet tall. The discovery adds growing complexity to the story of human evolution. It was not a simple march forward, as it once seemed. Instead, our lineage assumed an exuberant burst of strange forms along the way. Our species, Homo sapiens, now inhabits a comparatively lonely world. “The more fossils that people pull out of the ground, the more we realize that the variation that was present in the past far exceeds what we see in us today,” said Matthew Tocheri, a paleoanthropologist at Lakehead University in Canada, who was not involved in the new discovery. In the early 2000s, Armand Salvador Mijares, a graduate student at the University of the Philippines, was digging at Callao Cave, on Luzon, for traces of the first farmers on the Philippines. Soon, he decided to dig a little deeper. Researchers on the Indonesian island of Flores had discovered the bones of an extraordinary humanlike species about 60,000 years old. The scientists named it Homo floresiensis. Some features were similar to ours, but in other ways Homo floresiensis more closely resembled other hominins (the term scientists use for modern humans and other species in our lineage). © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 26126 - Posted: 04.11.2019

By Gina Kolata Allan Gallup, a retired lawyer and businessman, grew increasingly forgetful in his last few years. Eventually, he could no longer remember how to use a computer or the television. Although he needed a catheter, he kept forgetting and pulling it out. It was Alzheimer’s disease, the doctors said. So after Mr. Gallup died in 2017 at age 87, his brain was sent to Washington University in St. Louis to be examined as part of a national study of the disease. But it wasn’t just Alzheimer’s disease, the researchers found. Although Mr. Gallup’s brain had all the hallmarks — plaques made of one abnormal protein and tangled strings of another — the tissue also contained clumps of proteins called Lewy bodies, as well as signs of silent strokes. Each of these, too, is a cause of dementia. Mr. Gallup’s brain was typical for an elderly patient with dementia. Although almost all of these patients are given a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, nearly every one of them has a mixture of brain abnormalities. For researchers trying to find treatments, these so-called mixed pathologies have become a huge scientific problem. Researchers can’t tell which of these conditions is the culprit in memory loss in a particular patient, or whether all of them together are to blame. Another real possibility, noted Roderick A. Corriveau, who directs dementia research programs at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, is that these abnormalities are themselves the effects of a yet-to-be-discovered cause of dementia. These questions strike at the very definition of Alzheimer’s disease. And if you can’t define the condition, how can you find a treatment? © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Brain imaging
Link ID: 26125 - Posted: 04.09.2019

/ By Jed Gottlieb In 1983, The New York Times published a bombshell report about President Ronald Reagan: Starkey Laboratories had fitted the President, then 72, with a hearing aid. The news was welcomed by health professionals who reckoned it could help to reduce the stigma associated with hearing loss. At the time, one in three people over the age of 60 was thought to have hearing problems, though only around 20 percent who needed hearing aids used them. “The way I do the math, a third of all adults have unaddressed hearing issues. That’s lot of people.” Indeed, Reagan’s handlers knew too well that the revelation risked making the president look like a feeble old man — and worse, someone ill-equipped to run the most powerful nation on earth. “Among Presidential advisers,” The New York Times noted, “Mr. Reagan’s use of a hearing aid revived speculation on whether his age would be an issue if he seeks re-election next year.” Reagan won re-election, of course, but nearly 40 years later, negative perceptions persist — and health advocates are more concerned than ever. Hearing loss, they say, is not just a functional disability affecting a subset of aging adults. With population growth and a boom in the global elderly population, the World Health Organization (WHO) now estimates that by 2050, more than 900 million people will have disabling hearing loss. A 2018 study of 3,316 children aged nine to 11 meanwhile, found that 14 percent already had signs of hearing loss themselves. While not conclusive, the study linked the loss to the rise of portable music players. Copyright 2019 Undark

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 26124 - Posted: 04.09.2019

By Benedict Carey Anyone above a certain age who has drawn a blank on the name of a favorite uncle, a friend’s phone number or the location of a house key understands how fragile memory is. Its speed and accuracy begin to slip in one’s 20s and keep slipping. This is particularly true for working memory, the mental sketch pad that holds numbers, names and other facts temporarily in mind, allowing decisions to be made throughout the day. On Monday, scientists reported that brief sessions of specialized brain stimulation could reverse this steady decline in working memory, at least temporarily. The stimulation targeted key regions in the brain and synchronized neural circuits in those areas, effectively tuning them to one another, as an orchestra conductor might tune the wind section to the strings. The findings, reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience, provide the strongest support yet for a method called transcranial alternating current stimulation, or tACS, as a potential therapy for memory deficits, whether from age-related decline, brain injury or, perhaps, creeping dementia. In recent years, neuroscientists have shown that memory calls on a widely distributed network in the brain, and it coordinates those interactions through slow-frequency, thrumming rhythms called theta waves, akin to the pulsing songs shared among humpback whales. The tACS technology is thought to enable clearer communication by tuning distant circuits to one another. The tACS approach is appealing for several reasons, perhaps most of all because it is noninvasive; unlike other forms of memory support, it involves no implant, which requires brain surgery. The stimulation passes through the skull with little sensation. Still, a widely available therapy is likely years away, as the risks and benefits are not fully understood, experts said. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 26123 - Posted: 04.09.2019