By Richard Klasco, M.D. Q. I have completely lost my sense of smell and can taste only a few things. I have seen doctors and taken tests, but no answers. I know I’m not the only one with this problem. Any ideas? A. Humans are able to perceive an astounding one trillion odors. But our sense of smell is fragile. About a quarter of adults, and more than half of those over 80, have some degree of olfactory impairment. The sense of taste is often affected at the same time, as the neural pathways of smell and taste commingle in the brain. Having an impaired sense of smell may be more than a nuisance. Studies have linked a decreased sense of smell to a heightened risk for Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis and premature death. Common causes of a decreased sense of smell include nasal problems, such as deviated septum and nasal polyps; viruses, such as rhinovirus and Epstein-Barr virus; chronic sinusitis; head injury; and certain cancers. Environmental exposure to cigarette smoke, alcohol, air pollution and toxins further increase the risk. Yet, in about 16 percent of people, no cause can be identified. Eating nuts and fish has been associated with protection against smell impairment, as have exercise and use of cholesterol-lowering drugs and oral steroids. It is unknown, however, whether changing one’s dietary or exercise habits will improve the sense of smell. Medical evaluation typically begins with an otolaryngologist, an ear, nose and throat doctor who will use a standardized scratch-and-sniff test to assess any olfactory deficits. Laboratory tests of blood and nasal mucus and imaging studies, such as CT or M.R.I. scans, are often needed. In some cases, endoscopic surgery, a flexible camera inserted into the nose, may aid in diagnosis and provide therapeutic benefits. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 26062 - Posted: 03.22.2019

By Kelly Servick “Futile”—that’s the devastating label now attached to two highly anticipated clinical trials of a drug that targets β-amyloid, the neuron-killing protein fragment littering the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. Biogen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Eisai in Tokyo, the pharmaceutical partners developing the drug, called aducanumab, today announced their decision to halt a pair of ongoing phase III trials after seeing the results of a “futility analysis,” in which an independent committee found that the drug was unlikely to slow cognitive decline as intended. This latest blow to the β-amyloid approach has left researchers asking: Do any of the remaining antiamyloid drug trials have a better chance, or is it time to declare the whole approach, well, futile? “Amyloid definitely has something to do with Alzheimer’s—there’s far too much evidence to dismiss,” organic chemist Derek Lowe wrote today on his drug industry blog In the Pipeline. (The blog is hosted by Science Translational Medicine, which, like ScienceInsider, is published by AAAS.) “But the situation is clearly more complicated than people have hoped, because otherwise, all the attempts to address amyloid … would have yielded some tiny bit of clinical benefit.” There were reasons to think that aducanumab might succeed where antiamyloid drugs from Merck & Co., Eli Lilly and Company, and others had failed. The drug is an antibody designed to bind to and eliminate sticky β-amyloid plaques that build up around neurons, block their communication, and, ultimately, kill them. And it was clear from a smaller clinical trial that this drug was very effective at clearing plaques—“that’s one of the reasons we were sanguine about this trial,” says neurologist Dennis Selkoe of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who treats patients who were enrolled in one of the trials. Studies also suggest aducanumab can attack the most noxious form of amyloid—so-called oligomers—that other drugs may have left untouched. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26061 - Posted: 03.22.2019

Jef Akst A robot interacting with young honey bees in Graz, Austria, exchanged information with a robot swimming with zebrafish in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the robots’ communication influenced the behavior of each animal group, according to a study published in Science Robotics today (March 20). “It’s the first time that people are using this kind of technology to have two different species communicate with each other,” says Simon Garnier, a complex systems biologist at New Jersey Institute of Technology who did not participate in the study. “It’s a proof of concept that you can have robots mediate interactions between distant groups.” He adds, however, that the specific applications of such a setup remains to be seen. As robotics technology has advanced, biologists have sought to harness it, building robots that look and behave like animals. This has allowed researchers to control one side of social interactions in studies of animal behavior. Robots that successfully integrate into animal populations also provide scientists with a means to influence the groups’ behavior. “The next step, we were thinking . . . [is] adding features to the group that the animals cannot do because they don’t have the capabilities to do so,” José Halloy, a physicist at Paris Diderot University who has been working on developing robots to interact intelligently with animals for more than a decade, writes in an email. “The simple and striking thing is that robots can use telecommunication or the Internet and animals cannot do that.” © 1986 - 2019 The Scientist.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 26060 - Posted: 03.22.2019

By Adrian Cho BOSTON—MRI scanners can map a person's innards in exquisite detail, but they say little about composition. Now, physicists are pushing MRI to a new realm of sensitivity to trace specific biomolecules in tissues, a capability that could aid in diagnosing Alzheimer's and other diseases. The advance springs not from improved scanners, but from better methods to solve a notoriously difficult math problem and extract information already latent in MRI data. The new techniques, described this month at a meeting of the American Physical Society here, could soon make the jump to the clinic, says Shannon Kolind, a physicist at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, who is using them to study multiple sclerosis (MS). "I don't think I'm being too optimistic to say that will happen in the next 5 years," she says. Sean Deoni, a physicist at Brown University, says that "any scanner on the planet can do this." An MRI scanner uses magnetic fields and radio waves to tickle the nuclei of hydrogen atoms—protons—in molecules of water, which makes up more than half of soft tissue. The protons act like little magnets, and the scanner's strong magnetic field makes them all point in one direction. A pulse of radio waves then tips the protons away from the magnetic field, causing them to twirl en masse, like so many gyroscopes. The protons then radiate radio waves of their own. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Scienc

Keyword: Brain imaging; Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 26059 - Posted: 03.21.2019

By Heather Murphy An essential rite of passage for many an otherwise nonviolent child involves cutting an earthworm down the middle and watching as the two halves squirm. One half — the one with the brain — will typically grow into a full worm. Scientists have now identified the master control gene responsible for that regrowth in one particularly hardy type of worm. How hardy? Chop the three-banded panther worm in halves or thirds — either crosswise or diagonally — and each segment will regenerate just fine, said Mansi Srivastava, a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University. Within eight days, you’ll have two or three fully functioning new worms, mouth, brain and all. “It’s hard to kill them,” she said. Dr. Srivastava and her co-authors published a paper Friday outlining their genetic discovery. The process is known as “full-body regeneration,” and the term has captured the imagination of many individuals ready for a fresh start or second self. “I’ll get a new body right now!!” one person wrote in a lively Reddit thread about the finding, adding “I knew it was coming!!” Another posted: “Two of me working together and sharing our stuff? Count me in!” Headlines suggesting that the scientists have found the DNA switch that could lead to human limb regrowth have fueled hopes that the discovery will offer precisely that. Unfortunately, no one is growing a new arm or getting a second body with the help of marine worm DNA anytime soon, said Peter W. Reddien, a biologist with M.I.T.’s Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and another author of the paper. But he added that he didn’t totally blame people for getting carried away because his field truly is stranger than fiction. “You can damage large amounts of the heart muscle of a fish and the heart will come back,” he said. “You can remove the jaw or even the entire head and some animals will grow it back. It’s amazing.” What’s accurate in this particular case is that a master control gene known as E.G.R. — or early growth response — is present in many kinds of organisms, including humans. An injury that pierces skin often activates it, he said. But activation is just one small piece of a larger puzzle. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26058 - Posted: 03.21.2019

New rules to reduce naturally high testosterone levels in female athletes have been branded "unscientific". Last year, athletics chiefs ruled women with levels of five nanomoles per litre or more must have hormone treatment before being allowed to compete. But experts, reporting in the British Medical Journal, say there is a lack of evidence about testosterone's effects and the cut-off figure is arbitrary. A decision on the legality of the rules is expected later this month. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) delayed implementing its regulations after South African runner Caster Semenya contested the legality of the new rules. She was banned from international competitions for nearly a year for having testosterone levels above the athletics body's limit for female athletes. World athletics bosses have previously said they want to protect the sanctity of fair and open competition. Writing in an editorial in the BMJ, Dr Sheree Bekker, from the University of Bath, and Prof Cara Tannenbaum, from the University of Montreal, say the IAAF's regulations risked "setting an unscientific precedent for other cases of genetic advantage". "The medical profession does not define biological sex or physical function by serum testosterone levels alone," they say. And they warned that the proposed rules could have "far reaching implications" on individuals and societies. Dr Bekker and Prof Tannenbaum argue that testosterone levels vary naturally in men and women, with higher averages among elite athletes. But there is also a big crossover between men and women, with 16% of men classified as having low testosterone and 14% of women having high, according to some definitions. They say testosterone is just one indicator of sports performance and many other factors also play a role. "If more science is needed... then call for health research organisations to deliver on this mandate," they say. © 2019 BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 26057 - Posted: 03.21.2019

Ian Sample Science editor Scientists have developed a test for Parkinson’s disease based on its signature odour after teaming up with a woman who can smell the condition before tremors and other clinical symptoms appear. The test could help doctors diagnose patients sooner and identify those in the earliest stages of the disease, who could benefit from experimental drugs that aim to protect brain cells from being killed off. Perdita Barran, of the University of Manchester, said the test had the potential to decrease the time it took to distinguish people with normal brain ageing from those with the first signs of the disorder. “Being able to say categorically, and early on, that a person has Parkinson’s disease would be very useful,” she said. Get Society Weekly: our newsletter for public service professionals Read more Most people cannot detect the scent of Parkinson’s, but some who have a heightened sense of smell report a distinctive, musky odour on patients. One such “super smeller” is Joy Milne, a former nurse, who first noticed the smell on her husband, Les, 12 years before he was diagnosed. Milne only realised she could sniff out Parkinson’s when she attended a patient support group with her husband and found everyone in the room smelled the same. She thought little more about it until she mentioned the odour to Tilo Kunath, a neurobiologist who studies Parkinson’s at Edinburgh University. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Parkinsons; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 26056 - Posted: 03.20.2019

By Pam Belluck The first drug for women suffering postpartum depression received federal approval on Tuesday, a move likely to pave the way for a wave of treatments to address a debilitating condition that is the most common complication of pregnancy. The drug works very quickly, within 48 hours — a significant improvement over currently available antidepressants, which can take two to four weeks to have an effect, if they work at all. Experts say the new treatment will provide immediate relief for mothers whose depression keeps them from providing their babies with the care, bonding and nurturing that is crucial for healthy development. As many as one in seven American women experience depression during or after pregnancy. "Postpartum depression is a serious condition that, when severe, can be life-threatening,” Dr. Tiffany Farchione, acting director of the Division of Psychiatry Products at the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a statement. “This approval marks the first time a drug has been specifically approved to treat postpartum depression, providing an important new treatment option.” There are limitations to the new drug, brexanolone, which will be marketed as Zulresso. It is delivered by infusion over 60 hours, during which a new mother must remain in a certified medical center, under supervision should she get dizzy or faint, as several patients did in clinical trials. The infusion will be expensive, averaging $34,000 per patient before discounts, according to Sage Therapeutics, the manufacturer. That does not include the costs of staying in a medical center for two and half days. Company officials say they expect that insurers will cover the treatment; insurers said this week that they are evaluating the drug. A pill made with a similar molecule, which would be much more accessible and easier for patients, is showing promise in its clinical trials and would be submitted for approval in a couple of years if the results are good, according to Sage. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 26055 - Posted: 03.20.2019

Terry Gross When Frans de Waal started studying nonhuman primates, in the Netherlands more than 40 years ago, he was told not to consider the emotions of the animals he was observing. "Thoughts and feelings — the mental processes basically — were off limits," he says. "We were told not to talk about them, because they were considered by many scientists as 'inner states' and you only were allowed to talk about 'outer states.' " But over the course of his career, de Waal became convinced that primates and other animals express emotions similar to human emotions. He's now the director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, where his office window looks out on a colony of chimps. "I am now at the point that I think emotions are more like organs," he says. "All my organs are present in a rat's body, and the same way, I think, all my emotions are probably present in the rat." De Waal writes about primate empathy, rivalry, bonding, sex and murder in his new book, Mama's Last Hug. The title of the book was inspired by a tender interaction between a dying 59-year-old chimp named Mama and de Waal's mentor, Jan van Hooff, who had known Mama for more than 40 years. "People were surprised [by] how humanlike the expression of Mama was and how humanlike her gestures were," de Waal says of the interaction. "I thought, 'Well, everyone knows that chimps are our closest relative, so why wouldn't the way they express their emotions be extremely similar to ours?' But people were surprised by that." © 2019 npr

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 26054 - Posted: 03.20.2019

By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online Smoking potent 'skunk-like' cannabis increases your risk of serious mental illness, say researchers. They estimate around one in 10 new cases of psychosis may be associated with strong cannabis, based on their study of European cities and towns. In London and Amsterdam, where most of the cannabis that is sold is very strong, the risk could be much more, they say in The Lancet Psychiatry. Daily use of any cannabis also makes psychosis more likely, they found. Experts say people should be aware of the potential risks to health, even though the study is not definitive proof of harm. Lead researcher and psychiatrist Dr Marta Di Forti said: "If you decide to use high potency cannabis bear in mind there is this potential risk." Dr Adrian James from the Royal College of Psychiatrists said: "This is a good quality study and the results need to be taken seriously." People experiencing psychosis lose touch with reality, and may hear voices, see things that are not actually there or have delusional, confused thoughts. It is a recognised medical condition and different to getting high on a drug. There is disagreement as to what extent cannabis might cause or worsen mental health problems and many countries have gone ahead and legalised or decriminalised cannabis use. Doctors are concerned about the growing use of high potency cannabis that contains lots of the ingredient THC - the one that gives the high. Skunk-like cannabis with a THC content of 14% now makes up 94% of the drug sold on the streets of London, according to experts. © 2019 BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 26053 - Posted: 03.20.2019

Maria Temming A new analysis of people’s brain waves when surrounded by different magnetic fields suggests that people have a “sixth sense” for magnetism. Birds, fish and some other creatures can sense Earth’s magnetic field and use it for navigation (SN: 6/14/14, p. 10). Scientists have long wondered whether humans, too, boast this kind of magnetoreception. Now, by exposing people to an Earth-strength magnetic field pointed in different directions in the lab, researchers from the United States and Japan have discovered distinct brain wave patterns that occur in response to rotating the field in a certain way. These findings, reported in a study published online March 18 in eNeuro, offer evidence that people do subconsciously respond to Earth’s magnetic field — although it’s not yet clear exactly why or how our brains use this information. “The first impression when I read the [study] was like, ‘Wow, I cannot believe it!’” says Can Xie, a biophysicist at Peking University in Beijing. Previous tests of human magnetoreception have yielded inconclusive results. This new evidence “is one step forward for the magnetoreception field and probably a big step for the human magnetic sense,” he says. “I do hope we can see replications and further investigations in the near future.” During the experiment, 26 participants each sat with their eyes closed in a dark, quiet chamber lined with electrical coils. These coils manipulated the magnetic field inside the chamber such that it remained the same strength as Earth’s natural field but could be pointed in any direction. Participants wore an EEG cap that recorded the electrical activity of their brains while the surrounding magnetic field rotated in various directions. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26052 - Posted: 03.19.2019

By Michael Price Female twins who shared a womb with a brother tend to get less education, earn less money, and have fewer children than girls who shared a womb with another girl, according to an analysis of hundreds of thousands of births over more than a decade. Researchers suspect the cause is testosterone exposure during fetal development, though the exact mechanism remains a mystery. “I think it’s a really interesting look at how this really complicated system might impact females,” says Talia Melber, a biological anthropologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana who wasn’t involved in the study. Still, she cautions, a lot more work needs to be done to establish a causal link. Fraternal twins, in which each of two eggs is fertilized by a different sperm cell, occur in about four of every 1000 births. About half of those result in male-female twin pairs. Typically, about 8 to 9 weeks into gestation, a male fetus begins to produce massive amounts of testosterone, which helps jump-start the development of male reproductive organs and brain architecture; female fetuses receive only modest amounts of the sex hormone. In male-female twins, though, small amounts of the male fetus’s testosterone can seep into the female twin’s separate amniotic sac. Scientists have known about this phenomenon for decades, and have been arguing for just as long over what effects, if any, it has on women later in life. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 26051 - Posted: 03.19.2019

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent Scientists have grown a miniature brain in a dish with a spinal cord and muscles attached, an advance that promises to accelerate the study of conditions such as motor neurone disease. The lentil-sized grey blob of human brain cells were seen to spontaneously send out tendril-like connections to link up with the spinal cord and muscle tissue, which was taken from a mouse. The muscles were then seen to visibly contract under the control of the so-called brain organoid. The research is is the latest in a series of increasingly sophisticated approximations of the human brain grown in the laboratory – this time with something approaching a central nervous system attached. Madeline Lancaster, who led the work at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, said: “We like to think of them as mini-brains on the move.” The scientists used a new method to grow the miniature brain from human stem cells, which allowed the organoid to reach a more sophisticated stage of development than previous experiments. The latest blob shows similarities, in terms of the variety of neurons and their organisation, to the human foetal brain at 12-16 weeks of pregnancy. However, the scientists said the structure was still too small and primitive to have anything approaching thoughts, feelings or consciousness. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26050 - Posted: 03.19.2019

By: Kelly Howell, Ph.D., Rebecca Gibbs, and Lee L. Rubin, Ph.D. Editor’s Note: Spinal muscular atrophy is the number one genetic cause of infant death. Until recently, half the babies born with it would die before their second birthdays, their hearts and lungs becoming too weak to continue. Medical care improved the odds somewhat, but new discoveries and therapeutic developments have improved survival rates significantly—and more good news may be on the horizon. In 2016, Bloomberg published an article that described Lauren Gibbs, who was born with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) and enrolled in a clinical trial for a drug called nusinersen. The story reported that Gibbs enjoyed wheelchair basketball but was known primarily for her defense because she didn’t have enough strength to heave the ball high enough to reach the rim. “After the second time I got the drug, I hit probably 50 baskets in a row,” said Gibbs, who later attended Baylor University. Later that year, nusinersen became the first SMA treatment to be approved by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA). It is one of many promising developments in the past decade in understanding and treating SMA, a genetic neuromuscular disorder first described in the 1890s by Austrian physicians Guido Werdnig and Johann Hoffman. The pair observed infants with flaccid limb and trunk muscles, accompanied by the degeneration of motor neurons in the spinal cord.1 They learned that the loss of these neurons—specialized nerve cells responsible for stimulating skeletal muscle contraction—results in muscle atrophy and weakness, the hallmarks of SMA. Over the next century, further studies revealed highly variable disease severity and age of onset, making it unclear if SMA was one disease with a broad array of symptoms in different patients, or a number of distinct diseases. © 2019 The Dana Foundation.

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 26049 - Posted: 03.19.2019

Emery N. Brown, Francisco J. Flores General anesthetics work by altering the activity of specific neurons in the brain. One main class of these drugs, which includes propofol and the ether-derivative sevoflurane, work primarily by increasing the activity of inhibitory GABAA receptors, while a second class that includes ketamine primarily blocks excitatory NMDA receptors. The GABAA receptor is a channel that allows chloride ions to flow into the neuron, decreasing the voltage within the cell relative to the extracellular space. Such hyper­polarization decreases the probability that the neuron will fire. Propofol and sevoflurane increase the chloride current going into the cell, making the inhibition more potent. The NMDA receptor allows sodium and calcium ions to flow into the cell, while letting potassium ions out, increasing the voltage within the cell relative to the extra­cellular space and increasing the probability of neural firing. Ketamine blocks this receptor, decreasing its excitatory actions. Anesthetics’ interactions with neural receptors alter how neurons work, and as a consequence, how different brain regions communicate. These alterations manifest as highly structured oscillations in brain activity that are associated with the dramatic behavioral changes characteristic of general anesthesia. © 1986 - 2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26048 - Posted: 03.19.2019

By Haider Warraich The United States uses a third of the world’s opioids but a fifth of Americans still say they suffer from chronic pain. The only demonstrable effect of two decades of widespread prescription of opioids has been catastrophic harm. With more than 47,000 Americans dying of opioid overdoses in 2017 and hundreds of thousands more addicted to them, it was recently reported that, for the first time, Americans were more likely to die of opioids than of car accidents. This has forced many to take a step back and ponder the very nature of pain, to understand how best to alleviate it. The ancient Greeks considered pain a passion — an emotion rather than a sensation like touch or smell. During the Dark Ages in Europe, pain was seen as a punishment for sins, a spiritual and emotional experience alleviated through prayers rather than prescriptions. In the 19th century, the secularization of Western society led to the secularization of pain. It was no longer a passion to be endured but a sensation to be quashed. The concept of pain as a purely physical phenomenon reached its zenith in the 1990s, when medical organizations such as the American Pain Society and the Department of Veterans Affairs succeeded in having pain designated a “fifth vital sign,” alongside blood pressure, temperature and breathing and heart rate. This coincided with the release of long-acting opioids like OxyContin. Doctors believed they now had an effective remedy for their patients’ suffering. While opioids do help many patients with acute pain from injuries, surgeries or conditions like cancer, looking back it’s clear that using opioids to treat chronic pain — backaches, bum knees and the like — might well be considered the worst medical mistake of our era. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26047 - Posted: 03.18.2019

By Jill U. Adams I hear it often: A friend swears that her running practice staves off bouts of low spirits. Another says going to the gym before work keeps him mentally steady. Perhaps you’ve heard similar stories; perhaps you believe it for yourself. Those anecdotes prompt some questions. Is there evidence to support the idea that exercise can have an effect on depression? And if so, how much exercise? A number of research studies have been done to answer those questions and others. One study assigned participants, 202 depressed adults at least 40 years old, to one of four groups. One group attended supervised group exercise sessions three times per week, where they monitored their heart rate as they walked or jogged on a treadmill for 30 minutes. A second group received similar instructions but were left to work out on their own at home. Groups three and four took pills: either the antidepressant medication sertraline or a placebo. After 16 weeks, researchers rescreened participants for depression and found 45 percent of the people in the supervised exercise group no longer met the criteria for major depression. In the other groups, 40 percent of home exercisers, 47 percent of medicine takers and 31 percent of placebo pill takers were no longer depressed. That’s right, the supervised exercisers did as well as the people who took an antidepressant. As promising as these results were, however, it was a small study. James Blumenthal, a psychologist at Duke University who co-wrote the paper, says there are a number of studies that, like his, support the idea that exercise might be helpful in treating depression. Like his, most of the studies are small. “There are no large, multicenter clinical trials,” he says, which are typical for drug studies funded by pharmaceutical companies.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 26046 - Posted: 03.18.2019

David Cyranoski A Japanese committee has provisionally approved the use of reprogrammed stem cells to treat diseased or damaged corneas. Researchers are now waiting for final approval from the health ministry to test the treatment in people with corneal blindness, which affects millions of people around the world. The cornea, a transparent layer that covers and protects the eye, contains stem cells that repair it when damaged. But these can be destroyed by disease or by trauma from chemicals or burns, which can result in patients losing their vision. Currently, cornea transplants from donors who have died are used to treat damaged or diseased corneas, but good-quality tissue is scarce. A team led by ophthalmologist Kohji Nishida at Osaka University plans to treat damaged corneas using sheets of tissue made from induced pluripotent stem cells. These are created by reprogramming cells from a donor into an embryonic-like state that can then transform into other tissue, such as corneal cells. Nishida’s team plans to lay 0.05-millimetre-thick sheets of corneal cells across patients’ eyes. Animal studies have shown1 that this can save or restore vision. The health ministry is expected to decide soon. If Nishida and his team receive approval, they will treat four people, whom they will then monitor for a year to check the safety and efficacy of the treatment. The first treatment is planned to take place before the end of July. Other Japanese researchers have carried out clinical studies using induced pluripotent stem cells to treat spinal cord injury, Parkinson's disease and another eye disease. © 2019 Springer Nature Publishing AG

Keyword: Vision; Stem Cells
Link ID: 26045 - Posted: 03.18.2019

Jon Hamilton In the U.S., older people with dementia are usually told they have Alzheimer's disease. But a range of other brain diseases can also impair thinking, and memory and judgment, according to scientists attending a summit on dementias held Thursday and Friday at the National Institutes of Health. These include strokes, a form of Parkinson's disease, and a disease that damages brain areas that regulate emotion and behavior. "There's a host of things that can cause loss of cognitive function," says Dr. Julie Schneider, a professor at the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center in Chicago and scientific chair of the NIH summit. And many patients have more than one disease affecting the brain, she says. Most of these diseases can't be stopped, Schneider says. But it's important that families get the right diagnosis in order to get the best care and plan for the future. The emphasis on non-Alzheimer's dementias reflects a change in doctors' understanding of what happens to aging brains. When Schneider was training to be a doctor in the 1980s and '90s, dementia was simple. "We were taught that almost all dementia is Alzheimer's disease," she says. But since then, studies have shown that 20 percent to 40 percent of the nation's 5.8 million dementia patients have some other disease. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26044 - Posted: 03.18.2019

By Jonathan N. Stea Cannabis is deeply misunderstood. It has been hailed as a potential hero in the fight against all ailments, including cancer and the opioid epidemic. It has also been called the devil’s lettuce, with claims that its use will lead to laziness, madness and even murder. In part, this polarization in beliefs can be explained by the complexity of cannabis. It is not helpful or accurate to think about cannabis as a single substance, but rather as a mixture of over 500 chemicals with varying combinations of dosages. Given that cannabis is essentially a chemical soup that until recently had mostly been prepared in the black marketplace, it has been difficult to draw conclusions from research about its effects. This is particularly true in the area of addiction and mental health, where many factors contribute to the muddy the picture of whether cannabis can be helpful or harmful. In recent years, it has been suggested that cannabis could be the white knight of the opioid epidemic. Indeed, recent state regulations in the United States (e.g., Illinois, New York) have explicitly approved medical cannabis as a treatment for opioid addiction. Critics of these policy decisions have argued that there is not yet enough evidence to support and promote cannabis as an effective treatment. They are correct. There have been no randomized controlled trials evaluating cannabis specifically for the treatment of opioid addiction. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26043 - Posted: 03.16.2019