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

By Sheila Kaplan and Matt Richtel Dr. Scott Gottlieb became commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration in 2017 with an ambitious plan to reduce cigarette smoking, a habit that kills nearly half a million Americans each year, by shifting smokers to less harmful alternatives like e-cigarettes. But he was quickly embroiled in an unexpected crisis: the explosion of vaping among millions of middle and high school students, many of whom were getting addicted to nicotine. Dr. Gottlieb will depart at the end of this month, following his sudden announcement last week that he would resign, with his plans to toughen regulation of both vaping and smoking unfinished and powerful lobbying forces quietly celebrating the exit of a politically canny administrator who aggressively wielded his regulatory powers. Opponents are already swooping in, making their case to Congress and reaching out to the White House. A coalition of conservative organizations that oppose government intervention in the marketplace has harshly criticized Dr. Gottlieb’s crackdown on e-cigarettes. Retailers, including convenience store and gas station owners, are on Capitol Hill lobbying against guidelines Dr. Gottlieb proposed on Wednesday to restrict sales of most flavored e-cigarettes to separate adult-only areas and to require age verification of customers. And major tobacco companies are likely to seize on his departure to try to scuttle his long-term plans to lower nicotine levels in cigarettes to nonaddictive levels and to ban menthol cigarettes, which make up more than a third of the cigarette market and dominate sales to African-Americans. Some longtime officials inside the F.D.A. said privately that they fear these ideas could be delayed indefinitely. “There have been well-intentioned commissioners before Gottlieb,” said Jonathan Havens, a former F.D.A. tobacco lawyer now in private practice. “But they were not as good at capturing the attention of the nation, of the stakeholders. I think that momentum could very well stall on some of these products, or be lost completely.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26042 - Posted: 03.16.2019

Patricia Neighmond A study published Thursday in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology finds the percentage of U.S. teens and young adults reporting mental distress, depression and suicidal thoughts and actions has risen significantly over the past decade. While these problems also increased among adults 26 and older, the increase was not nearly as large as among younger people. The study findings suggest a generational shift says psychologist Jean Twenge, with San Diego State University who headed the study and is author of the book iGen. To see a significant increase in negative psychological states "among our vulnerable population of teens and young adults is absolutely heartbreaking," she says. Twenge and her colleagues analyzed data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a government survey that tracks mental health and substance use in individuals age 12 and over in the U.S. They looked at survey responses from more than 200,000 adolescents ages 12 to 17 and almost 400,000 young adults ages 18 and over between 2005 and 2017. They found the rate of individuals reporting symptoms consistent with major depression over the past year increased 52 percent in teens and 63 percent in young adults over a decade. Girls were more vulnerable than boys. By 2017 one out of every five teenage girls had experienced major depression in the last year.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 26041 - Posted: 03.16.2019

By Pam Belluck Could people’s eyes and ears help fix the damage Alzheimer’s disease does to the brain? Just by looking at flashing light and listening to flickering sound? A new study led by a prominent M.I.T. neuroscientist offers tantalizing promise. It found that when mice engineered to exhibit Alzheimer’s-like qualities were exposed to strobe lights and clicking sounds, important brain functions improved and toxic levels of Alzheimer’s-related proteins diminished. What’s more, the rapid-fire soundtrack appeared to make mice better at cognitive and memory skills, like navigating mazes and recognizing objects. Of course, mice are not people. And many drugs that have helped Alzheimer’s-engineered mice haven’t done much for people with Alzheimer’s, which affects 44 million people worldwide, including 5.5 million Americans. Also, because the technique didn’t have long-lasting effects — results faded about a week after the sensory stimulation was stopped — any therapy developed from the research might have to be repeated regularly. Still, seeing that a noninvasive daily dose of light and sound could have such significant effects in mice give some experts reason for optimism. “It’s exciting, I think,” said Dr. Lennart Mucke, director of the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease, who was not involved in the study. “Reading the paper made me quite enthusiastic about seeing this move forward into some well-crafted clinical trials.” The experiments were led by Li-Huei Tsai, director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. She and her colleagues showed that light and sound delivered to mice at a certain frequency — 40 hertz or 40 flashes or clicks per second — appears to synchronize the rhythm of the brain’s gamma waves, which is disrupted in patients with Alzheimer’s. Gamma waves are among several types of electrical brain waves believed to be involved in concentration, sleep, perception and movement. The experiment setup where flickering light and sound were delivered to Alzheimer’s-engineered mice in the tubs.CreditPicower Institute for Learning and Memory, M.I.T. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 26040 - Posted: 03.15.2019

Liam Drew A mouse scurries down a hallway, past walls lined with shifting monochrome stripes and checks. But the hallway isn’t real. It’s part of a simulation that the mouse is driving as it runs on a foam wheel, mounted inside a domed projection screen. While the mouse explores its virtual world, neuroscientist Aman Saleem watches its brain cells at work. Light striking the mouse’s retinas triggers electrical pulses that travel to neurons in its primary visual cortex, where Saleem has implanted electrodes. Textbooks say that these neurons each respond to a specific stimulus, such as a horizontal or vertical line, so that identical patterns of inputs should induce an identical response. But that’s not what happens. When the mouse encounters a repeat of an earlier scene, its neurons fire in a different pattern. “Five years ago, if you’d told me that, I’d have been like, ‘No, that’s not true. That’s not possible’,” says Saleem, in whose laboratory at University College London we are standing. His results, published last September1, show that cells in the hippocampus that track where the mouse has run along the hallway are somehow changing how cells in the visual cortex fire. In other words, the mouse’s neural representation of two identical scenes differs, depending on where it perceives itself to be. It’s no surprise that an animal’s experiences change how it sees the world: all brains learn from experience and combine multiple streams of information to construct perceptions of reality. But researchers once thought that at least some areas in the brain — those that are the first to process inputs from the sense organs — create relatively faithful representations of the outside world. According to this model, these representations then travel to ‘association’ areas, where they combine with memories and expectations to produce perceptions.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Vision
Link ID: 26039 - Posted: 03.15.2019

Bruce Bower Humankind’s gift of gab is not set in stone, and farming could help to explain why. Over the last 6,000 years or so, farming societies increasingly have substituted processed dairy and grain products for tougher-to-chew game meat and wild plants common in hunter-gatherer diets. Switching to those diets of softer, processed foods altered people’s jaw structure over time, rendering certain sounds like “f” and “v” easier to utter, and changing languages worldwide, scientists contend. People who regularly chew tough foods such as game meat experience a jaw shift that removes a slight overbite from childhood. But individuals who grow up eating softer foods retain that overbite into adulthood, say comparative linguist Damián Blasi of the University of Zurich and his colleagues. Computer simulations suggest that adults with an overbite are better able to produce certain sounds that require touching the lower lip to the upper teeth, the researchers report in the March 15 Science. Linguists classify those speech sounds, found in about half of the world’s languages, as labiodentals. And when Blasi and his team reconstructed language change over time among Indo-European tongues (SN: 11/25/17, p. 16), currently spoken from Iceland to India, the researchers found that the likelihood of using labiodentals in those languages rose substantially over the past 6,000 to 7,000 years. That was especially true when foods such as milled grains and dairy products started appearing (SN: 2/1/03, p. 67). “Labiodental sounds emerged recently in our species, and appear more frequently in populations with long traditions of eating soft foods,” Blasi said at a March 12 telephone news conference. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 26037 - Posted: 03.15.2019

By Andrew Jacobs What do these ads featuring Joe Camel, Kool-Aid Man and the maniacal mascot for Hawaiian Punch have in common? All three were created by Big Tobacco in the decades when cigarette makers, seeking to diversify their holdings, acquired some of America’s iconic beverage brands. They used their expertise in artificial flavor, coloring and marketing to heighten the products’ appeal to children. That tobacco companies once sold sugar-sweetened drinks like Tang, Capri Sun and Kool-Aid is not exactly news. But researchers combing through a vast archive of cigarette company documents at the University of California, San Francisco stumbled on something revealing: Internal correspondence showed how tobacco executives, barred from targeting children for cigarette sales, focused their marketing prowess on young people to sell sugary beverages in ways that had not been done before. The archive, known as the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents, was created as part of a settlement between major cigarette companies and states that were seeking to recoup smoking-related health care costs. The researchers published their findings on Thursday in the medical publication BMJ. Using child-tested flavors, cartoon characters, branded toys and millions of dollars in advertising, the companies cultivated loyalty to sugar-laden products that health experts said had greatly contributed to the nation’s obesity crisis. At a time of mounting childhood obesity, with nearly a third of children in the United States overweight or obese and rates of type 2 diabetes soaring among adolescents, the study’s authors said it was important to chart how companies created and marketed junk food and sugary drinks to youngsters. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Obesity
Link ID: 26036 - Posted: 03.15.2019

Ashley Yeager Brown and yellow mice nestle side by side in their cages in Anne Ferguson-Smith’s molecular genetics lab at the University of Cambridge. The mice are Agouti Viable Yellow, naturally occurring mutants, which, though genetically identical, have coats that vary in color—a phenomenon that researchers have long studied as an example of epigenetic inheritance. All of the mutant mice have a gene, Agouti, that influences coat color, and an adjacent transposable element—a DNA sequence that can move about the genome, creating or reversing mutations—that promotes the gene’s expression. In the brown mice, this element is methylated and, therefore, silenced. But in the yellow mice, it isn’t methylated, meaning that these animals overexpress Agouti signaling protein in many tissues, leading to their yellow hue. Importantly, Ferguson-Smith says, yellow mother mice tend to have yellow baby mice and brown mother mice tend to have brown baby mice, suggesting that the methylation mark—or lack of it—is passed down from generation to generation. This phenomenon has sparked scientists to hypothesize that other methylation marks on transposable elements can also be passed directly from parent to child, raising the possibility that parents’ diet, behavior, and experiences might affect future generations via this route. © 1986 - 2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Epigenetics
Link ID: 26035 - Posted: 03.15.2019

Eating mushrooms more than twice a week could prevent memory and language problems occurring in the over-60s, research from Singapore suggests. A unique antioxidant present in mushrooms could have a protective effect on the brain, the study found. The more mushrooms people ate, the better they performed in tests of thinking and processing. But researchers said it was not possible to prove a direct link between the fungi and brain function. The National University of Singapore study's findings were based on 663 Chinese adults, aged over 60, whose diet and lifestyle were tracked from 2011 to 2017. Over the six-year study the researchers found that eating more than two portions of mushrooms a week lowered the chances of mild cognitive impairment by 50%, compared with those who ate fewer than one portion. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) can make people forgetful, affect their memory and cause problems with language, attention and locating objects in spaces - but the changes can be subtle. It is not serious enough to be defined as dementia. The participants in the study were asked how often they ate six different types of mushrooms: oyster, shiitake, white button, dried, golden and tinned. Mushroom eaters performed better in brain tests and were found to have faster processing speed - and this was particularly noticeable in those who ate more than two portions a week, or more than 300g (10.5oz). "This correlation is surprising and encouraging," said assistant professor Lei Feng, the lead study author, from the university's department of psychological medicine. Image copyright Getty Images "It seems that a commonly available single ingredient could have a dramatic effect on cognitive decline. © 2019 BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 26034 - Posted: 03.15.2019

By Tiffany Hsu Amazon has removed the online listings for two books that claim to contain cures for autism, a move that follows recent efforts by several social media sites to limit the availability of anti-vaccination and other pseudoscientific material. The books, “Healing the Symptoms Known as Autism” and “Fight Autism and Win,” which had previously been listed for sale in Amazon’s marketplace, were not available on Wednesday. The company confirmed that the listings had been removed, but declined to discuss why or whether similar books would be taken down in the future. Several such books were still listed on Wednesday. In an article published this week, Wired magazine noted that Amazon is crowded with titles promoting unproven treatments for autism that include “sex, yoga, camel milk, electroconvulsive therapy and veganism.” There is no cure for autism spectrum disorder, but there are medications that can help address associated symptoms like high energy levels and depression, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency has found that as many as a third of parents with an autistic child have tried treatments that most pediatricians do not recommend, and that up to 10 percent may be using potentially dangerous tactics. The books that were listed on Amazon were both written more than five years ago and have together generated more than 600 customer reviews. “Healing the Symptoms Known as Autism” recommends that autistic children drink and bathe in chlorine dioxide, a compound often referred to as “Miracle Mineral Solution.” In 2010, the Food and Drug Administration described it as “a potent bleach used for stripping textiles and industrial water treatment” that “can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and symptoms of severe dehydration.” Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, wrote an open letter this month to Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, chiding the company about the failure of its algorithms to “distinguish quality information from misinformation or misleading information.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 26033 - Posted: 03.14.2019

Jayshree Pandya Even though neuroscience has made amazing advances, the origin of consciousness in humans -- and its nature and processes -- still remain largely unknown; the underlying physiological mechanisms of generating conscious beings are still not clearly understood. However, with the advances in brain mapping and neuroscience, we are perhaps much closer to finally understanding the fundamentals of consciousness in humans than ever before. It is said that what we cannot create we do not understand. While the very nature of human consciousness is difficult to understand, there is an intense effort going on to build a conscious computer mind out of computer chips (now neuromorphic chips). Understandably, there are growing concerns and questions about building a conscious mind using neuromorphic chips when there is so little clarity about the human mind and the very nature of human consciousness. Now, we can perhaps understand the human brain as a functional computer and compare it with functional computer systems/machines. Now, over the years, we have wondered: to what degree are machines aware of their internal and external surroundings? Are computer systems/machines truly aware? Are self-aware machines already here? The answer to these questions perhaps raises only more questions, as comparing consciousness in functional machines to consciousness in functional humans is more difficult than expected. ©2019 Forbes Media LLC.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 26032 - Posted: 03.14.2019

By JoAnna Novak “U guys I had this awesome thing for dinner,” my little sister texts our family. “ICE CREAM HEHE.” After 20 years of dealing with an eating disorder, recovered-me has a response and sick-me has a response, but neither seems right. My siblings, my mom and I chat all day in our “Fam” text thread. Morning roll call? Check. Terrier on kitchen table? Yep. Food talk? A feast of food talk. Actually, not just talk. And not just food. “Did 74 min on tread,” my sister texts. “Exhausted.” I know. She started 2018 with a goal to lose 20 lingering college pounds, and she’s been in lifestyle-overhaul ever since. Often she calls me post-workout, breathless, gushing endorphins. Other times she sends sports bra selfies. (“Get it,” my mom responds.) She shares meal pics, too, plates of sheet-pan chicken or “healthy” comfort food (turkey hot dogs, cauli-mac and cheese), a latte pink with beet juice, a splurge. (That ice cream she had was Halo Top, which is low in calories and high in protein.) I was buying blue cheese for burgers last week when she said she was 10 pounds from her target. I picked up the Roquefort and blinked off memories of closing in on a number, those hazy promises that, soon, everything might change. “That’s amazing,” I said. “I’m proud of you.” She’d gained so much confidence over the last year; she was already feeling more comfortable in her skin, she said. “You know what I mean.” In a way, I did. It’s a conversation I’d never thought we’d be having, one where my sister trusts me enough to share anxieties about her body and I’m recovered enough to listen. I went on my first diet when she was 5 and I was 12. A few months later she was crying, begging newly anorexic me to eat a canned peach. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 26031 - Posted: 03.14.2019

Text by David Gonzalez When the medical journal The Lancet asked Matthieu Zellweger to photograph any psychiatric condition that intrigued him, he thought of a close friend who has been living with bipolar disorder. He knew how his friend lamented that it was an “invisible handicap” that you couldn’t just snap out of, as some well-meaning but frustrated people would suggest. But Mr. Zellweger also recognized something in his friend that led him to propose a photo essay on bipolar disorder. “I’ve been around him quite a bit,” Mr. Zellweger said. “And the one thing that definitely surprised me is that — let’s face it — very intelligent people are overrepresented among bipolar people. A lot of them are very lucid about their disease. They have thought about how it impacts their lives. It was very stimulating to talk with them.” Mr. Zellweger spent 18 months in Switzerland, where he lives, and in Britain, photographing people with bipolar disorder, as well as their relatives or lovers who accompanied them, as they struggle with manic highs and depressive lows. He sought out subjects through patient advocacy groups and treatment centers who were open to sharing their experiences. “There are so many misconceptions about the disorder that a lot of the patients were happy to dispel that,” he said. “There is such a general stigma around mental disorders. One of the patients told me that when she told her friend about being bipolar, her friend said, ‘Oh, are you going to run after me with an ax?’ People think bipolar patients are uncontrollable or dangerous. But the only aggressive behavior I saw was people being aggressive against themselves.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 26030 - Posted: 03.13.2019

Nicola Davis “Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts,” Marlon Brando once said. But for scientists, working out what is going on in an actor’s head has always been something of a puzzle. Now, researchers have said thespians show different patterns of brain activity depending on whether they are in character or not. Dr Steven Brown, the first author of the research from McMaster University in Canada, said: “It looks like when you are acting, you are suppressing yourself; almost like the character is possessing you.” Character building and what makes a truly great actor Read more Writing in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Brown and colleagues report how 15 method actors, mainly theatre students, were trained to take on a Shakespeare role – either Romeo or Juliet – in a theatre workshop, and were asked various questions, to which they responded in character. They were then invited into the laboratory, where their brains were scanned in a series of experiments. Once inside the MRI scanner, the actors were asked to think about their response to a number of fresh conundrums that flashed up on screen, and which might well have occurred to the star-crossed lovers, such as: would they gatecrash a party? And would they tell their parents that they had fallen in love? Each actor was asked to respond to different questions, based on four different premises assigned in a random order. In one, they were asked for their own perspective; in another, they were asked to say how they thought a particular close friend would react, while in a third, they were asked to respond as though they were either Romeo or Juliet. = © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Attention; Brain imaging
Link ID: 26029 - Posted: 03.13.2019

By Simon Makin Around a third of people complain of some sleeplessness, and one in 10 meets diagnostic criteria for clinical insomnia. The costs, in terms of well-being, physical health and productivity, are enormous. From twin studies, researchers know the inability to fall or stay asleep has a genetic component, but the identities of the culprits were mostly unknown. Now, two studies published Monday in Nature Genetics provide first peeks at the biological basis of insomnia, implicating specific brain regions and biological processes, and revealing links with heart disease and psychiatric disorders like depression. Both are genome-wide association studies (GWASs), which examine DNA from many thousands of individuals to determine where genetic markers related to health, disease or a particular trait reside. The first study, from a team led by geneticist Danielle Posthuma of Vrije University Amsterdam, analyzed the genomes of over 1.3 million people, making it the largest GWAS of any complex trait to date. They used data from the UK Biobank, a large, long-term genetics project, and from the direct-to-consumer genetics company 23andMe to identify 202 areas of the genome linked to insomnia, implicating 956 genes, a big advance from the seven found previously. “I’m pretty confident the vast majority of these are real,” says geneticist Stephan Ripke, a GWAS expert at the Berlin Institute of Health who was not involved in either study. “But we need to confirm this in more, separate cohorts from different countries and researchers.” © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Sleep; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 26028 - Posted: 03.13.2019

By Matt Richtel Should you pick your nose? Don’t laugh. Scientifically, it’s an interesting question. Should your children pick their noses? Should your children eat dirt? Maybe: Your body needs to know what immune challenges lurk in the immediate environment. Should you use antibacterial soap or hand sanitizers? No. Are we taking too many antibiotics? Yes. “I tell people, when they drop food on the floor, please pick it up and eat it,” said Dr. Meg Lemon, a dermatologist in Denver who treats people with allergies and autoimmune disorders. Advertisement “Get rid of the antibacterial soap. Immunize! If a new vaccine comes out, run and get it. I immunized the living hell out of my children. And it’s O.K. if they eat dirt.” Dr. Lemon’s prescription for a better immune system doesn’t end there. “You should not only pick your nose, you should eat it,” she said. She’s referring, with a facetious touch, to the fact our immune system can become disrupted if it doesn’t have regular interactions with the natural world. “Our immune system needs a job,” Dr. Lemon said. “We evolved over millions of years to have our immune systems under constant assault. Now they don’t have anything to do.” She isn’t alone. Leading physicians and immunologists are reconsidering the antiseptic, at times hysterical, ways in which we interact with our environment. Sign up for Science Times We’ll bring you stories that capture the wonders of the human body, nature and the cosmos. Why? Let us turn to 19th-century London. The British Journal of Homeopathy, volume 29, published in 1872, included a startlingly prescient observation: “Hay fever is said to be an aristocratic disease, and there can be no doubt that, if it is not almost wholly confined to the upper classes of society, it is rarely, if ever, met with but among the educated.” Hay fever is a catchall term for seasonal allergies to pollen and other airborne irritants. With this idea that hay fever was an aristocratic disease, British scientists were on to something. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 26027 - Posted: 03.13.2019

Aimee Cunningham How active a person’s immune system is soon after a stroke may be tied to later mental declines, a new study finds. Researchers took blood samples from 24 stroke patients up to nine times over the course of a year. Twelve of the patients also completed a mental-skills test at four points during that time. Patients who had highly active immune cells on the second day after a stroke were more likely to see their test scores decline a year later, researchers report online March 12 in Brain. “The people who either got better on the task or stayed the same had less of an immune response at day 2 [after the stroke], and the people who had more of an immune response at day 2 were more likely to decline and do worse later,” says study coauthor Marion Buckwalter, a neuroscientist at Stanford University School of Medicine. A stroke occurs when the brain loses oxygen, due to a blocked or burst blood vessel. Buckwalter and her colleagues used a technique called mass cytometry that analyzes thousands of immune cells and their signaling molecules — which indicate how active a cell is — from blood samples of patients who had suffered a stroke. The researchers also tested patients’ memory, concentration, language skills and other thinking skills using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. It’s unclear why some patients have a more active immune response than others in the days after a stroke. But with more research, it’s possible that the response may be a way to predict which patients will fare worse after a stroke, the researchers say. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019

Keyword: Stroke; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 26026 - Posted: 03.13.2019