By Kara Manke A single season of high school football may be enough to cause microscopic changes in the structure of the brain, according to a new study by researchers at UC Berkeley, Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A 3D representation of a magnetic resonance imaging scan, showing areas in the front and rear of the brain lit up. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans have revealed that playing a single season of high school football can cause microscopic changes in the grey matter in young players’ brains. These changes are located in the front and rear of the brain, where impacts are most likely to occur, as well as deep inside the brain. The researchers used a new type of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to take brain scans of 16 high school players, ages 15 to 17, before and after a season of football. They found significant changes in the structure of the grey matter in the front and rear of the brain, where impacts are most likely to occur, as well as changes to structures deep inside the brain. All participants wore helmets, and none received head impacts severe enough to constitute a concussion. The study, which is the cover story of the November issue of Neurobiology of Disease, is one of the first to look at how impact sports affect the brains of children at this critical age. © 2018 UC Regents

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25740 - Posted: 12.01.2018

Ashley Westerman A single season playing football might be all it takes to change a young athlete's brain. Those are the preliminary findings of research presented this week in Chicago at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. Researchers used special MRI methods to look at nerve bundles in the brain in a study of the brains of 26 young male football players, average age 12, before and after one season. Twenty-six more young males who didn't play football also got MRI scans at the same time to be used as a control group. In the youths who played football, the researchers found that nerve fibers in their corpus callosum — the band that connects the two halves of brain — changed over the season, says lead study author Jeongchul Kim, a research associate in the Radiology Informatics and Imaging Laboratory at Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C. "We applied here two different imaging approaches," he says. One analyzed the shape of the nerve fibers and the other focused on the integrity of the nerves. Kim says the researchers found some nerve bundles grew longer and other bundles became shorter, or contracted, after the players' initial MRI scans at the beginning of the season. He says they saw no changes in the integrity of the bundles. The team says these results suggest that repeated blows to the head could lead to changes in the shape of the corpus callosum, which is critical to integrating cognitive, motor and sensory functions between the two hemispheres of the brain, during a critical time for brain development in young people. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25739 - Posted: 12.01.2018

By Neuroskeptic The science story of the past week was the claim from Chinese scientist He Jiankui that he has created gene-edited human babies. Prof. He reports that two twin girls have been born carrying modifications of the gene CCR5, which is intended to protect them against future HIV risk. It’s far from clear yet whether the gene-editing that He described has actually taken place – no data has yet been presented. The very prospect of genetically-modifying human beings has, however, led to widespread concern, with He’s claims being described as “monstrous“, “crazy” and “unethical”. All of which got me wondering: could there ever be a neuroscience experiment which attracted the same level of condemnation? What I’m asking here is whether there are neuroscience advances that would be considered inherently unethical. It would, of course, be possible to carry out any neuroscience experiment in an unethical way, by forcing or tricking people into participation. But are there experiments which would be unethical even if all the participants gave full, informed consent at every stage? Here are a couple of possibilities: Intelligence enhancement: Suppose it were possible to substantially boost human intelligence through some kind of technological means, perhaps a drug, or through brain stimulation. I suspect that many people would see this prospect as an ethical problem, because it would give users a definite advantage over non-users and thus, in effect, force people to use the technology in order to keep up. It would be a similar situation to the problem of doping in sports: if doping were widespread, it would be very difficult for non-dopers to compete.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Intelligence
Link ID: 25738 - Posted: 12.01.2018

Susan Milius Mom nurses her young for weeks on milk that has four times the protein of a cow’s. Yet this mother’s not a mammal. She’s a jumping spider with eight legs and a taste for fruit flies. We mammals have named ourselves after our mammary glands. Yet other animals, from tsetse flies to pigeons, secrete their own versions of milk for their babies. The newly discovered nursing in Toxeus magnus could be the most mammal-like of all, a research team from China proposes in the Nov. 30 Science. Biologists have recognized T. magnus as a species since 1933, but a small spider’s mothering habit was easy to miss. The spiders hunt beasts such as fruit flies and will retreat to a little nest, perhaps attached to a leaf, to raise a family. Study coauthor Zhanqi Chen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Menglunzhen, who studies spider behavior, noticed several T. magnus sharing a nest in 2012 and wondered if the species had some sort of extended parental care. It was another five years before he spotted the nursing behavior, when a spiderling clamped itself against mom’s underside one exciting July night in 2017. With a T. magnus female under a microscope, a gentle finger push on the underside of the abdomen will squeeze a tiny bead of white liquid out of a crease called an epigastric furrow, the researchers say. For the first week or so after eggs hatch, a spider mom leaves milk droplets around the nest for the crawling dots of her young to drink. Then nursing turns more mammalian, with little ones pressing themselves against their mother’s body. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 25737 - Posted: 11.30.2018

By Diana Kwon For almost a decade, cleaning rituals ruled Kathrine’s life. The middle-aged resident of Bergen, a coastal town in the southern tip of Norway, was consumed by a fear of germs and contamination that led to endless cycles of tidying, vacuuming and washing. “I realized that I was facing a catastrophe,” Kathrine Mydland-aas, now 41, recalls. “I couldn’t help the kids with homework, couldn’t make dinner for them, couldn’t give them hugs. I didn’t do anything but cleaning. I tried to quit, but the rituals always won.” Last year, around nine years after Mydland-aas’s cleaning rituals began, a psychologist diagnosed her with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and referred her to a clinic at the Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen. There, a team was administering a behavioral therapy for the condition that, to Mydland-aas’s surprise, was only four days long. “I thought, what can they do in four days?” she says. “[But] it changed my life.” Mydland-aas is one of more than 1,200 people who have received the Bergen four-day treatment for OCD, a concentrated form of exposure therapy designed by two Norwegian psychologists, Gerd Kvale and Bjarne Hansen. The four-day protocol has recently gained international attention for its effectiveness and efficiency—last month Time magazine named the pair, who are both currently affiliated with the Haukeland University Hospital and the University of Bergen, as two of this year’s 50 most influential people in healthcare. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25736 - Posted: 11.30.2018

Jon Hamilton There's new evidence that mild pulses of electricity can relieve depression — if they reach the right target in the brain. A study of 25 people with epilepsy found that those who had symptoms of depression felt better almost immediately when doctors electrically stimulated an area of the brain just above the eyes, a team reported Thursday in the journal Current Biology. These people were in the hospital awaiting surgery and had wires inserted into their brains to help doctors locate the source of their seizures. Several of the patients talked about the change they felt when the stimulation of the lateral orbitofrontal cortex began, says Kristin Sellers, an author of the paper and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. One person's response was: "Wow, I feel a lot better. ... What did you guys do?" The stimulation only lasted a few minutes. After it stopped, the effect on mood quickly faded. To be sure that the effect was real, the researchers also pretended to stimulate the lateral OFC in the same patients without actually running current through the tiny wires implanted in their brains. In those sham treatments, there was no discernible change. DBS is an approved treatment for tremors, including those associated with Parkinson's disease. But results with depression have been less consistent, and DBS isn't approved for this purpose by the Food and Drug Administration. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25735 - Posted: 11.30.2018

By Abby Ellin The issue was peanut butter. No matter what form it took — creamy, crunchy, straight from the jar or smeared between two slices of bread — it caused Sunny Gold enormous anxiety. In fact, the gooey spread posed such a threat that during her first few years of recovery from binge eating disorder, between 2006 and 2007, Ms. Gold, 42, a communications specialist in Portland, Ore., couldn’t keep it around the house. It was one of her favorite foods, and she feared she would binge on it. Just knowing it was there, lurking in her cupboard, made her feel “unsafe,” as she put it. And that’s when things got really tricky. Because her boyfriend at the time, John Pavlus, didn’t think twice about peanut butter — or any food, for that matter. When Ms. Gold, the author of “Food: The Good Girl’s Drug,” told him that it would be a casualty of her getting healthy, he was taken aback. “It was a bit uncomfortable for me at first,” Mr. Pavlus, a 40-year-old writer and filmmaker, admitted. He knew that Ms. Gold had grappled with binge eating since she was a teenager, but food was something they’d bonded over. So when she decided that she needed to “cut herself off,” he felt that he was losing something, “less for the practical inconvenience than the unexpected feeling of being subtly disconnected from her,” he said. “It was strange to think of these parts of our shared reality as being so radically — to me — redefined. Is peanut butter literally dangerous now? Does that mean I have to treat it that way too? Will it be like this forever?” Mr. Pavlus’s reaction is echoed by many romantic partners of someone with an eating disorder, many of whom — though certainly not all — are women. Partners often want to help, but simply don’t know how. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 25734 - Posted: 11.30.2018

By Frankie Schembri Fruit flies might not sing songs, make art, or don traditional garments, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have culture. New evidence suggests female fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) can create unique dating customs based on the partners they see other female fruit flies select. Cultural traditions—the traits and behaviors that are handed down across generations and spread through social learning—have been found in the grooming patterns of certain apes and the songs of some whales and birds. But scientists had little proof that smaller creatures such as insects could have culture. So researchers set up a series of experiments in which one “observer” female fruit fly watched a “demonstrator” fly pick between two males that differed only in their color—pink or green. When it was their turn to mate, observers chose the same color of mate more than 80% of the time, compared with random chance, researchers report today in Science. The team also tested how reliably preferences were passed to the next generation by placing 12 observers in the center of a hexagonal container surrounded by six demonstrators who went exclusively for either pink or green males. In the next round of mating, the first observers to mate became the demonstrators. Over the course of 36 trials, the pink or green preference “trickled down” to the eighth generation of flies before they started to choose randomly again. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25733 - Posted: 11.30.2018

By Roni Caryn Rabin A. A deficiency of vitamin B12 can cause neurological and psychiatric problems that “can progress if left untreated, and can lead to irreversible damage,” said Dr. Donald Hensrud, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Healthy Living Program. Fortunately, it can be reversed fairly easily with vitamin pills or injections. Vitamin B12 is required for proper red blood cell formation, nerve function and DNA synthesis. It is naturally present in fish, meat, eggs and dairy products, as well as some fortified breakfast cereals and nutritional yeast products. Strict vegans who avoid animal products can develop a deficiency of B12 over time if they don’t take a supplement. But two-thirds of cases occur in the elderly, who are susceptible because they may not absorb adequate amounts of B12 from foods but who are not routinely tested, Dr. Hensrud said. Consequences of B12 deficiency can cause a range of symptoms that include fatigue, weakness, constipation, loss of appetite and weight loss. Other symptoms include difficulty maintaining balance, depression, confusion, dementia, poor memory and soreness in the mouth or tongue. B12 deficiency may also result in a form of anemia called megaloblastic anemia, which can also result from a deficiency of folic acid, another B vitamin. If anemia is detected on blood tests, levels of both vitamins should be checked. Neurological symptoms can, however, occur in the absence of anemia. Early treatment is critical to avoid potentially irreversible damage. Older adults are susceptible to B12 deficiency because they may have decreased secretion of hydrochloric acid in the stomach, which makes it difficult to absorb B12. Also vulnerable to B12 deficiency are those with gastrointestinal disorders like celiac disease or Crohn’s disease; those who have had weight loss or other gastrointestinal surgery; and those who use certain acid reflux drugs or the diabetes drug metformin. Individuals with pernicious anemia, which affects up to 2 percent of older adults, are also susceptible. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25732 - Posted: 11.30.2018

By R. Douglas Fields SAN DIEGO—In the textbook explanation for how information is encoded in the brain, neurons fire a rapid burst of electrical signals in response to inputs from the senses or other stimulation. The brain responds to a light turning on in a dark room with the short bursts of nerve impulses, called spikes. Each close grouping of spikes can be compared to a digital bit, the binary off-or-on code used by computers. Neuroscientists have long known, though, about other forms of electrical activity present in the brain. In particular, rhythmic voltage fluctuations in and around neurons—oscillations that occur at the same 60-cycle-per-second frequency as AC current in the U.S.—have caught the field’s attention. These gamma waves encode information by changing a signal’s amplitude, frequency or phase (relative position of one wave to another)—and the rhythmic voltage surges influence the timing of spikes. Heated debate has arisen in recent years as to whether these analog signals, akin to the ones used to broadcast AM or FM radio, may play a role in sorting, filtering and organizing the information flows required for cognitive processes. They may be instrumental in perceiving sensory inputs, focusing attention, making and recalling memories and coupling various cognitive processes into one coherent scene. It is thought that populations of neurons that oscillate at gamma frequencies may unite the neural activity in the same way the violin section of an orchestra is coupled together in time and rhythm with the percussion section to create symphonic music. When gamma waves oscillate in resonance, “you get very rich repertoires of behaviors,” says Wolf Singer, a neuroscientist at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, who researches gamma waves. Just as your car’s dashboard will vibrate in sync with the motor vibrating at a resonant frequency, so too can separate populations of neurons couple in resonance. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 25731 - Posted: 11.29.2018

By Michael Allen When a peacock catches the attention of a female, he doesn’t just turn her head—he makes it vibrate. That’s the surprising conclusion of a new study, which finds that a male peafowl’s tail feathers create low-frequency sounds that cause feathers on the females’ heads to quiver. The finding is “fascinating,” says Richard Prum, an evolutionary ornithologist at Yale University who was not involved with the work. As far as he knows, it’s the first demonstration that feathers respond to acoustic communication signals from other birds. Scientists have long known that a bird’s feathers can sense vibrations. Much like a rodent’s whiskers, they are coupled to vibration-sensitive nerve cells, allowing them to sense their surroundings. Feathers can, for example, detect changes in airflow during flight, and some seabirds even use feathers on their heads to feel their way through dark, underground crevices. When peacocks are ready to mate, they fan out their iridescent tail feathers (known as trains), before rushing at females, shaking those feathers to catch their attention. But when researchers discovered low-frequency sounds—which are inaudible to humans—coming from this “train rattle” several years back, no one knew how they worked. All they knew was that peahens perked up and paid attention to recordings of these “infrasounds,” even though they couldn’t see the males. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 25730 - Posted: 11.29.2018

Ashley Yeager About a decade ago, Clemson University chemist John Huffman started getting calls from law enforcement agencies. Officials from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and other federal agencies wanted to know more about JWH-18, a synthetic cannabinoid bearing Huffman’s initials that he’d created in the lab in 2004 and described in scientific paper in 2005. The compound was turning up in incense, which, rather than being burnt for its scent, was being smoked and was making people sick. Huffman’s intent, like other scientists who had generated synthetic cannabinoids over the years, was not to create recreational drugs. It was to study the effects of cannabis in the body and how the cannabinoid system works, as well as to develop molecules to image areas of the brain. “The chemistry to make these things is very simple and very old,” Huffman told The Washington Post in 2015. “You only have three starting materials and only two steps. In a few days, you could make 25 grams, which could be enough to make havoc.” And havoc it’s been. The number of emergency room visits as a result of smoking synthetic cannabinoids, often laced with other drugs, is in the thousands annually, and poison control centers have seen a spike in calls about the compounds in recent years, with nearly 8,000 in 2015. Called K2 or Spice, these synthetic compounds first started sickening Americans in 2008, with illnesses reported in Europe before the drugs reached the US. In 2011, the DEA made it illegal to sell JWH-018 and four related compounds or products that contained them, but that hasn’t kept new synthetic cannabinoids from emerging on the illegal drug market and leading to life-threatening overdoses. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25729 - Posted: 11.29.2018

Aimee Cunningham Children who turn 5 just before starting kindergarten are much more likely to be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder than their oldest classmates. The finding bolsters concerns that the common neurodevelopmental disorder may be overdiagnosed. “We think ... it’s the relative age and the relative immaturity of the August-born children in any given class that increases the likelihood that they’re diagnosed as having ADHD,” says Anupam Jena, a physician and economist at Harvard Medical School. Jena and his colleagues analyzed insurance claims data for more than 407,000 children born from 2007 through 2009. In states that require kids be 5 years old by September 1 to begin kindergarten, children born in August were 34 percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than those born nearly a year earlier in September — just after the cutoff date. For August kids, 85.1 per 10,000 children were diagnosed with ADHD, compared with 63.6 per 10,000 for the September kids, the researchers report in the Nov. 29 New England Journal of Medicine. People with ADHD typically have symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity and impulsiveness that are severe or frequent enough to interfere with their daily lives. In 2011, 11 percent of U.S. children aged 4 to 17 were reported to have an ADHD diagnosis, a rate higher than most other countries. Differences between states also suggest overdiagnosis, says Jena, “unless there’s something so different about kids across different states.” For example, while nearly 19 percent of 4- to 17-year-olds reportedly were diagnosed in Kentucky, the rate was about 12 percent in neighboring West Virginia. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 25728 - Posted: 11.29.2018

David DiSalvo Coffee has been getting considerable attention for a growing list of health benefits, with brain health high among them. While not without a few downsides, studies have shown impressive upsides of moderate coffee consumption, often linked to its high caffeine content. But a new lab study suggests that when it comes to brain health, coffee offers more than the stimulating effects of our favorite legal drug–in fact, decaf could be just as effective. The study began with a question: why has previous research found that coffee consumption correlates with lower risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s? “We wanted to investigate why that is—which compounds [in coffee] are involved and how they may impact age-related cognitive decline," said lead study author Dr. Donald Weaver, co-director of the Krembil Brain Institute in Toronto. To investigate why, the research team evaluated several compounds (including caffeine) released during the roasting process in three types of coffee beans: caffeinated dark roast, caffeinated light roast, and decaffeinated dark roast. The analysis focused on how the compounds interact with amyloid beta and tau, the toxic proteins linked to the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Results from previous studies suggest that coffee compounds could provide a neuroprotective effect by inhibiting these proteins from forming the terminally disruptive clumps and tangles found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. ©2018 Forbes Media LLC

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25727 - Posted: 11.29.2018

Shawna Williams The sensation of perceiving a smell can be induced in people by using electrodes to stimulate the brain’s olfactory bulb, researchers report today (November 27) in the International Forum of Allergy & Rhinology. The results, they suggest, are a proof of concept that it would be possible to develop an “olfactory implant system” to aid people with an impaired sense of smell, known as anosmia. “Our work shows that smell restoration technology is an idea worth studying further,” says coauthor Eric Holbrook of Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in a press release. “The development of cochlear implants, for example, didn’t really accelerate until someone placed an electrode in the cochlea of a patient and found that the patient heard a frequency of some type.” Holbrook and colleagues enrolled five subjects in the study who were able to smell. Three of them reported perceiving odors not actually present when the researchers stimulated different parts of their olfactory bulbs with electrodes inserted through the nose, a procedure the study authors say caused “minimal discomfort.” Subjects described the smells as “onion-like,” “antiseptic-like,” “sour,” “fruity,” or simply “bad.” The finding follows a report earlier this year that electrically stimulating structures high up in the nasal cavity produced smell sensations. The scientists who conducted that study at Malaysia’s Imagineering Institute aim to one day transmit smells electronically, reportes IEEE Spectrum—for example, to give restaurant-goers a whiff of dishes on the menu as they decide what to order. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 25726 - Posted: 11.29.2018

Abby Olena In 2005, a 23-year-old woman in the UK was involved in a traffic accident that left her with a severe brain injury. Five months after the event, she slept and woke and could open her eyes, but she didn’t always respond to smells or touch or track things visually. In other words, she fit the clinical criteria for being in a vegetative state. In a study published in Science in 2006, a team of researchers tested her ability to imagine herself playing tennis or walking through her house while they observed activity in her brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Remarkably, her brain responded with activity in the same areas of the brains of healthy people when asked to do the same, indicating that she was capable of complex cognition, despite her apparent unresponsiveness at the bedside. The findings indicated that this patient and others like her may have hidden cognitive abilities that, if found, could potentially help them communicate or improve their prognosis. Since then, researchers and clinicians around the world have used task-based neuroimaging to determine that other patients who appear unresponsive or minimally conscious can do challenging cognitive tasks. The problem is that the tests to uncover hidden consciousness can be complex to analyze, expensive to perform, and hard for all patients to access. “You would like to know if people who look like they’re unconscious are actually following what’s going on and able to carry out cognitive work, and we don’t have an efficient way of sorting those patients,” says Nicholas Schiff, a neuroscientist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Consciousness; Brain imaging
Link ID: 25725 - Posted: 11.27.2018

By Bahar Gholipour When Ryan Darby was a neurology resident, he was familiar with something called alien limb syndrome, but that did not make his patients’ behavior any less puzzling. Individuals with this condition report that one of their extremities—often a hand—seems to act of its own volition. It might touch and grab things or even unbutton a shirt the other hand is buttoning up. Patients are unable to control the rebellious hand short of grabbing or even sitting on it. They seem to have lost agency—that unmistakable feeling of ownership of one’s actions and an important component of free will. “It was one of those symptoms that really questioned the mind and how it brings about some of those bigger concepts,” says Darby, now an assistant professor of neurology at Vanderbilt University. Alien limb syndrome can arise after a stroke causes a lesion in the brain. But even though patients who have it report the same eccentric symptoms, their lesions do not occur in the same place. “Could the reason be that the lesions were just in different parts of the same brain network?” Darby wondered. To find out, he and his colleagues compiled findings from brain-imaging studies of people with the syndrome. They also looked into akinetic mutism—a condition that leaves patients with no desire to move or speak, despite having no physical impediment. Using a new technique, the researchers compared lesion locations against a template of brain networks—that is, groups of regions that often activate in tandem. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 25724 - Posted: 11.27.2018

Scientists at the National Eye Institute (NEI) have found that neurons in the superior colliculus, an ancient midbrain structure found in all vertebrates, are key players in allowing us to detect visual objects and events. This structure doesn’t help us recognize what the specific object or event is; instead, it’s the part of the brain that decides something is there at all. By comparing brain activity recorded from the right and left superior colliculi at the same time, the researchers were able to predict whether an animal was seeing an event. The findings were published today in the journal Nature Neuroscience. NEI is part of the National Institutes of Health. Perceiving objects in our environment requires not just the eyes, but also the brain’s ability to filter information, classify it, and then understand or decide that an object is actually there. Each step is handled by different parts of the brain, from the eye’s light-sensing retina to the visual cortex and the superior colliculus. For events or objects that are difficult to see (a gray chair in a dark room, for example), small changes in the amount of visual information available and recorded in the brain can be the difference between tripping over the chair or successfully avoiding it. This new study shows that this process – deciding that an object is present or that an event has occurred in the visual field – is handled by the superior colliculus. “While we’ve known for a long time that the superior colliculus is involved in perception, we really wanted to know exactly how this part of the brain controls the perceptual choice, and find a way to describe that mechanism with a mathematical model,” said James Herman, Ph.D., lead author of the study.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 25723 - Posted: 11.27.2018

Jef Akst After publishing a 2014 study showing that noninvasive magnetic stimulation of the brain boosted people’s ability to remember an association between two items, Northwestern University neuroscientist Joel Voss began fielding a lot of questions from patients and their families. “We’re of course guarded in the publication talking about what we found—small but reliable increases in memory ability,” he says (Science, 345:1054–57). But some of the news coverage of that paper alluded to the procedure’s potential to treat Alzheimer’s disease and other memory-related disorders. “I got calls—at least two a day for quite a long period of time—and emails: ‘My loved one is suffering from X, Y, or Z; thank God now you can cure it. How do we get to your lab?’” Voss says. He would have to explain to them that this was a scientific study, not an approved treatment. “There are a million steps between here and there, and maybe it would never work—we don’t really know.” But Voss’s team continues to connect those dots, in hopes that one day the technique—the use of magnetic fields to influence activity in neurons close to the brain’s surface—could help patients with any number of brain disorders, and perhaps cognitively healthy people as well. In August, the researchers reported that transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) could moderately improve episodic memory—the ability to remember people, events, and other things you’ve encountered in your life (as opposed to, say, how to do something)—when targeted at the correct part of the brain. Voss and his colleagues were interested in activating the hippocampus, a structure near the brain’s center that serves as a hub of memory production and storage. Because the hippocampus itself is inaccessible by TMS—the magnetic field falls off precipitously with depth, explains Voss—the researchers instead targeted areas of the brain where activity correlated with activity in the hippocampus, to try to activate the networks that link more-superficial regions with the deep-brain structure. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25722 - Posted: 11.27.2018

By Abby Goodnough DAYTON, Ohio — Dr. Randy Marriott clicked open the daily report he gets on drug overdoses in the county. Only one in the last 24 hours — stunningly low compared to the long lists he used to scroll through last year in a grim morning routine. “They just began to abruptly drop off,” said Dr. Marriott, who oversees the handoff of patients from local rescue squads to Premier Health, the region’s biggest hospital system. Overdose deaths in Montgomery County, anchored by Dayton, have plunged this year, after a stretch so bad that the coroner’s office kept running out of space and having to rent refrigerated trailers. The county had 548 overdose deaths by Nov. 30 last year; so far this year there have been 250, a 54 percent decline. Dayton, a hollowed-out manufacturing center at the juncture of two major interstates, had one of the highest opioid overdose death rates in the nation in 2017 and the worst in Ohio. Now, it may be at the leading edge of a waning phase of an epidemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the United States over the last decade, including nearly 50,000 last year. For the first time in years, the number of opioid deaths nationwide has begun to dip, according to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — with totals for the preceding 12 months falling slightly but steadily between December 2017 and April 2018. The flattening curve — along with declining opioid prescription rates and survey data suggesting far fewer Americans tried heroin last year and more got addiction treatment — is the first encouraging news in a while. While it’s too soon to know if the improvement is part of a long-term trend, it is clear there are some lessons to be learned from Dayton. The New York Times spent several days here interviewing police and public health officials; doctors, nurses and other treatment providers; people recovering from opioid addiction and people who are still using heroin and other drugs. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25721 - Posted: 11.26.2018