by Lindsey Bever A rare, brain-damaging virus has killed at least 10 people in southern India, where medical crews are scrambling to manage the spread of the deadly disease — and to minimize panic. Health officials said Tuesday that 10 people who were exposed to the Nipah virus and showed symptoms have died. Two others have tested positive for Nipah and are considered critically ill, and more than three dozen people have been put into quarantine since the outbreak began in the Indian state of Kerala, according to BBC News. “This is a new situation for us; we have no prior experience in dealing with the Nipah virus,” said K.K. Shailaja, health minister of the state, according to Reuters. “We are hopeful we can put a stop to the outbreak.” Shailaja had said earlier the outbreak had been “effectively” contained and that there was no need for the public to panic. But the virus's spread — and the rapidly rising death toll — have prompted concern in the outbreak's epicenter, Kozhikode, a coastal city in Kerala, where people have been “swarming” hospitals with fevers and other illnesses to ensure they do not have the virus, a local government official told Reuters. “We’ve sought the help of private hospitals to tide over the crisis,” said the official, U.V. Jose. Gulf News reported that Kerala “is in a state of panic after many cases of the killer Nipah virus were detected.” © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 25009 - Posted: 05.23.2018

By Ashley Yeager Twenty years ago, Ilyce Randell and her husband received devastating news: their son Maxie, who was a little over four months old at the time, had Canavan disease. Maxie would never walk or talk, and he likely wouldn’t live past age 10. Not much could be done to help their son, the couple was told, though a geneticist offhandedly remarked that researchers were developing a gene therapy that might lessen Maxie’s symptoms or extend his life. But the Randells also learned that there was no funding available for a clinical trial on the gene therapy. Recently married, the couple contacted the same people they had invited to their wedding. Randell wrote a letter describing her son’s illness and included a photo of Maxie grinning. “That was my first fundraising campaign,” she says. It was also the start of Canavan Research Illinois, the Randell family’s foundation. Canavan disease is caused by mutations to the ASPA gene, which encodes an enzyme, aspartoacylase, that breaks down N-acetyl-L-aspartic acid. Without aspartoacylase, the acid builds up in the brain’s neurons and prevents their axons from being coated in fatty myelin sheaths. As a result, electrical signals don’t travel as efficiently from nerve cell to nerve cell. Neurons in the brain break down, leaving the organ spongy and leading to intellectual disabilities, loss of movement, abnormal muscle tone, and seizures, among other symptoms. In the first US trial of a gene therapy for Canavan, researchers tried encasing healthy copies of ASPA in liposomes and injecting them into the brain through an intraventricular catheter attached to a small, plastic, dome-shaped reservoir placed just beneath the scalp. The researchers injected the gene therapy into the reservoir, and it then diffused into the cerebrospinal fluid. In 1999, Maxie became one of 16 patients to receive the treatment. Maxie and his cohort showed some improvements in vision and movement, but the children weren’t cured. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25008 - Posted: 05.23.2018

Nicola Davis Many people complain they do not get enough sleep, and it seems they are right to be concerned. Researchers have found that adults under the age of 65 who get five or fewer hours of sleep for seven days a week have a higher risk of death than those who consistently get six or seven hours’ shut-eye. However the effect of short sleeps over a few days may be countered by a later lie-in. The research found that individuals who managed just a few hours’ sleep each day during the week but then had a long snooze at weekends had no raised mortality risk, compared with those who consistently stuck to six or seven hours a night. “Sleep duration is important for longevity,” said Torbjörn Åkerstedt, first author of the study, at the Stress Research Institute, Stockholm University, and Karolinska Institute, also in the Swedish capital. The study, published in the Journal of Sleep Research, is based on data from more than 38,000 adults, collected during a lifestyle and medical survey conducted throughout Sweden in 1997. The fate of participants was followed for up to 13 years, using a national death register. Åkerstedt said researchers had previously looked at links between sleep duration and mortality but had focused on sleep during the working week. “I suspected there might be some modification if you included also weekend sleep, or day-off sleep.” Once factors such as gender, body mass index, smoking, physical activity and shift work, were taken into account, the results revealed that those under the age of 65 who got five hours of sleep or under that amount seven days a week had a 65% higher mortality rate than those getting six or seven hours’ sleep every day. But there was no increased risk of death for those who slept five or fewer hours during the week but then managed eight or more hours’ sleep on weekend days. 'Western society is chronically sleep deprived': the importance of the body's clock © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Sleep; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 25007 - Posted: 05.23.2018

By Carl Zimmer James Priest couldn’t make sense of it. He was examining the DNA of a desperately ill baby, searching for a genetic mutation that threatened to stop her heart. But the results looked as if they had come from two different infants. “I was just flabbergasted,” said Dr. Priest, a pediatric cardiologist at Stanford University. The baby, it turned out, carried a mixture of genetically distinct cells, a condition known as mosaicism. Some of her cells carried the deadly mutation, but others did not. They could have belonged to a healthy child. We’re accustomed to thinking of our cells sharing an identical set of genes, faithfully copied ever since we were mere fertilized eggs. When we talk about our genome — all the DNA in our cells — we speak in the singular. But over the course of decades, it has become clear that the genome doesn’t just vary from person to person. It also varies from cell to cell. The condition is not uncommon: We are all mosaics. For some people, that can mean developing a serious disorder like a heart condition. But mosaicism also means that even healthy people are more different from one another than scientists had imagined. In medieval Europe, travelers making their way through forests sometimes encountered a terrifying tree. A growth sprouting from the trunk looked as if it belonged to a different plant altogether. It formed a dense bundle of twigs, the sort that people might fashion into a broom. Germans call it Hexenbesen: witches’ broom. As legend had it, witches used magic spells to conjure the brooms to fly across the night sky. The witches used some as nests, too, leaving them for hobgoblins to sleep in. In the 19th century, plant breeders found that if they cut witches’ broom from one tree and grafted it to another, the broom would grow and produce seeds. Those seeds would sprout into witches’ broom as well. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epigenetics
Link ID: 25006 - Posted: 05.22.2018

Nicola Davis With 26% of adults classified as obese in the UK in 2016, the hunt for causes and solutions to expanding waistlines is on. While public health messages have focused largely on the food we eat, some scientists suspect there is another factor at play: substances being dubbed as “obesogens” – found in our packaging, household goods and furnishings that might affect our hormones and the buildup of fat in the body. However, experts are sceptical, particularly in the light of one report this week. It has made the bold claim that “removing shoes when entering the house and swapping carpet for wooden floors could help people stay slim”, citing a talk by researchers at the universities of Aveiro and Beira Interior in Portugal, who have suggested that preventing obesogens accumulating in the house by frequently sweeping and dusting could stop us gaining weight. As Prof Russell Viner, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, says: “For some medical reasons, such as protection against allergies, yes, it’s advised to keep a dust-free home and so, too, is removing shoes to avoid bringing in dirt from outside, but these things will not make you a healthy weight. Only a balanced diet and regular exercise will do that.” It is not the first study to moot the idea of the existence of obesogens. Earlier this year, researchers at Harvard University suggested compounds called perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) – widely used in products such as stain repellents and known to have a number of negative effects on human health – might lead to weight gain. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 25005 - Posted: 05.22.2018

by Juli Fraga Individuals with anorexia, binge eating disorder and bulimia often feel anxious and overwhelmed when surrounded by food. This anxiety can make grocery shopping and cooking a challenge. A new form of telemedicine in which people can video-chat with a nutritional counselor while at the supermarket aims to help. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately 1 percent of Americans suffer from anorexia, a sometimes deadly psychiatric illness. Along with anorexia, millions of Americans also struggle with binge eating disorder. Jamie Lynn Pelletier, 28, of Greensboro, N.C., was just 13 when she began counting calories and skipping meals, behavior that eventually led to anorexia, which is characterized by food restriction, extreme weight loss and distorted body image. “In junior high, I began to feel unattractive and self-conscious about my body. To lose weight, I started dieting and overexercising,” Pelletier said. Since 2015, Pelletier has completed several residential and outpatient treatment programs in the battle to stop starving herself. Her struggle shows how tough it can be for anorexics to stop seeing food as the enemy. Recently, Pelletier’s dietitian recommended grocery store therapy, which allows her to connect with a dietitian via video chat. “Going to the grocery store is stressful because seeing foods labeled as low-carb and low-fat can make me feel like buying the real thing is not okay. With virtual therapy, I FaceTime with my dietitian at the store,” said Pelletier, referring to Apple’s video-chat application. “For privacy, I put in my headphones so I can talk to her discreetly while I’m shopping.” © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 25004 - Posted: 05.22.2018

/ By Lynne Peeples Reaching behind a low bookshelf slightly taller than a typical 5-year-old — and one topped with a Seattle Seahawks gnome and stuffed kangaroo — Sara Barbee presses a button labeled “Alert.” Intense bluish light fills her classroom, and nearly all 17 kindergarteners respond with a collective “Whoooaaaaa.” Barbee, their teacher here at Renton Park Elementary School, walks back to the front of the classroom and ushers the students to sit “crisscross applesauce” on the perimeter of a brightly colored alphabet rug. Front-and-center rests a water tank atop a small blue table, which Barbee uses to teach her students about the buoyancy of objects in water. Indeed, it’s not the buoyancy lesson that has drawn me to this school just outside of Seattle, but those funky new lights, which are designed to mimic the shifting colors and intensities of the rising and setting sun. Scientists believe that exposure to bright, blue-rich white light during the day, and to softer, amber hues at night, helps restore the human body’s natural circadian rhythm, a deeply ingrained, physiological drumbeat that, many experts argue, has been disrupted to ill-effect by our constant exposure to standard incandescent or fluorescent lighting — and more recently, to the relentless glow of electronic screens. These are not, of course, new ideas, and doctors have long prescribed light boxes and related paraphernalia for seasonal affective disorder and other forms of depression. But it’s only now, proponents say — amid innovations in light-emitting diode, or LED, technology; amid calls for more energy-efficient lighting infrastructure overall; and amid a renaissance in scientific understanding of how human eyes, brains, and internal clocks interrelate — that a public health revolution, driven by more thoughtful lighting infrastructure, has the potential to unfold. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Depression
Link ID: 25003 - Posted: 05.21.2018

Michaeleen Doucleff Six months ago, Melissa Nichols brought her baby girl, Arol, home from the hospital. And she immediately had a secret. "I just felt guilty and like I didn't want to tell anyone," says Nichols, who lives in San Francisco. "It feels like you're a bad mom. The mom guilt starts early, I guess." Across town, first-time mom Candyce Hubbell has the same secret — and she hides it from her pediatrician. "I don't really want be lectured," she says. "I know what her stance will be on it." The way these moms talk about their secret, you might think they're putting their babies in extreme danger. Perhaps drinking and driving with the baby in the car? Or smoking around the baby? But no. What they're hiding is this: They hold the baby at night while they sleep together in the bed. Here in the U.S., this is a growing trend among families. More moms are choosing to share a bed with their infants. Since 1993, the practice in the U.S. has grown from about 6 percent of parents to 24 percent in 2015. But the practice goes against medical advice in the U.S. The American Academy of Pediatrics is opposed to bed-sharing: It "should be avoided at all times" with a "[full-]term normal-weight infant younger than 4 months," the AAP writes in its 2016 recommendations for pediatricians. The organization says the practice puts babies at risk for sleep-related deaths, including sudden infant death syndrome, accidental suffocation and accidental strangulation. About 3,700 babies die each year in the U.S. from sleep-related causes. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25002 - Posted: 05.21.2018

Robin McKie, science editor Fasting every other day to lose weight could have damaging side effects. That is the conclusion of a group of scientists speaking this weekend at the European Society of Endocrinology’s annual meeting. Their findings suggest that fasting-based diets may impair the action of sugar-regulating hormone insulin, and lead to increased risk of diabetes. Care should be taken before starting such programmes, say researchers. Ana Bonassa, whose team from the University of São Paulo in Brazil carried out the study, said: “This is the first study to show that, despite weight loss, intermittent fasting diets may actually damage the pancreas and affect insulin function in normal healthy individuals, which could lead to diabetes and serious health issues.” Advertisement In recent years intermittent fasting diets have gained popularity. Participants fast for two days out of seven, or on alternate days. However, evidence of their success has been contradictory and there is debate among doctors about their potential to trigger harmful long-term effects. Previous research has also shown that short-term fasting can produce molecules called free radicals, highly reactive chemicals that can cause damage to cells in the body and which may be associated with impaired organ function, cancer risk and accelerated ageing. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 25001 - Posted: 05.21.2018

By Matthew Hutson Parents tend to favor children of one gender in certain situations—or so evolutionary biologists tell us. A new study used data on colored backpack sales to show that parental wealth may influence spending on sons versus daughters. In 1973 biologist Robert Trivers and computer scientist Dan Willard published a paper suggesting that parents invest more resources, such as food and effort, in male offspring when times are good and in female offspring when times are bad. According to the Trivers-Willard hypothesis, a son given lots of resources can outcompete others for mates—but when parents have few resources, they are more inclined to invest them in daughters, who generally find it easier to attract reproductive partners. Trivers and Willard further posited that parental circumstances could even influence the likelihood of having a boy or girl, a concept widely supported by research across vertebrate species. Studying parental investment after birth is difficult, however, and has produced conflicting results. The new study looked for a metric of such investment that met several criteria: it should be immune to inherent sex differences in the need for resources; it should measure investment rather than outcomes; and it should be objective rather than rely on self-reporting. Study author Shige Song, a sociologist at Queens College, City University of New York, examined spending on pink and blue backpacks purchased in China in 2015 from a large retailer, JD.com. He narrowed the data to about 5,000 bags: blue backpacks bought by households known to have at least one boy and pink ones bought by households known to have at least one girl. The results showed that wealthier families spent more on blue versus pink backpacks—suggesting greater investment in sons. Poorer families spent more on pink packs than blue ones. The findings were published online in February in Evolution and Human Behavior. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 25000 - Posted: 05.21.2018

Emine Saner On any given day in Cambridge, you may see numerous people jogging along the towpaths, and it’s not unreasonable to assume neuroscientists may be over-represented. “You see so many,” says Hannah Critchlow, a neuroscientist who likes to jog along the river. Physical fitness may be a secondary consideration, she says; what they are really trying to do is ramp up their neurogenesis – the birth of new nerve cells in the brain. “People used to think that once you were born, that was it, that was all the nerve cells you have throughout life,” she says. “Then, 20 years ago, Rusty Gage [a professor at the Salk Institute in California] discovered that you get neurogenesis in adults, in a region of the brain called the hippocampus, which is involved in learning and memory. It turns out that jogging is really good at increasing neurogenesis in the brain.” And so, Critchlow says with a laugh, she likes to run. “I go: ‘This is wonderful, my neurogenesis is really happy with me at the moment.’” We are sitting in her study at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where Critchlow is outreach fellow, tasked with public engagement. Once described by the Telegraph as “a sort of female Brian Cox”, she has given numerous talks, been a presenter on Tomorrow’s World Live, the interactive version of the BBC science show, appeared on TV, radio and podcasts and was named as a top 100 scientist for her work in science communication. She has just written a book on consciousness – part of the Ladybird Expert series aimed at adults, a brief but mindbending introduction to the brain and the idea of consciousness, taking in philosophy, famous neuroscience breakthroughs and brain facts. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 24999 - Posted: 05.19.2018

Jon Hamilton For the first time, the U.S. military is speaking publicly about what it's doing to address potential health risks to troops who operate certain powerful shoulder-mounted weapons. These bazooka-like weapons produce forceful explosions just inches from the operator's head. Though several scientific reports over the past year have noted the possible risk, until now military officials have been reluctant to speak publicly about whether repeated exposure to these blasts might result in injury to a shooter's brain. Tracie Lattimore, who directs the Army's traumatic brain injury program, agreed to an interview with NPR to talk about steps the military is taking. "We are leaning in and trying to do everything in our power to protect soldiers and service members while they continue to get their job done," says Lattimore, who works in the Office of the Army Surgeon General. She describes a wide-ranging effort that's already begun and includes scientific research on troops' exposure to blast during weapons training, enforcing limits on the firing of certain weapons, and even looking into whether special helmets could help stop blast waves. The Army also has plans to monitor service members' total blast exposure during their military careers, Lattimore says. And even as the Army starts to take preventive measures, some basic questions still need answers. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 24998 - Posted: 05.19.2018

Nicola Davis The proportion of young people using marijuana as their first drug doubled in the 10 years from 2004, a US-based study has found. The government study reveals that among people aged between 12 and 21, the proportion of those who tried cigarettes as their first drug fell from about 21% to just under 9% between 2004 and 2014. However, the proportion who turned first to marijuana almost doubled from 4.4% to 8%. While some studies have suggested that, overall, use and abuse of marijuana has fallen among teenagers in the US, the latest research sought to look at trends in which drug, if any, young people turned to first. “We have, particularly in the US, done prevention programmes that are really focused on alcohol and tobacco – and they are relatively easy arguments to make to young people,” said Dr Renee Johnson, a co-author of the study from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. But she said the “fear factor” is less likely to work for marijuana, noting that public programmes need instead to educate young people so they can make good decisions around drugs, and offer support to help them cope with difficulties in life and think about their life plans. “Once we teach young people about that, that will address the unhealthy marijuana use,” she said. The study, published in the journal Prevention Science, is based on an analysis of data from more than 275,000 participants aged between 12 and 21 collected as part of the US national survey on drug use and health – an annual study that involves participants across all 50 states who are interviewed in person. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24997 - Posted: 05.19.2018

By Emily Underwood *Update, 18 May, 10 a.m.: Yesterday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first in a new class of drugs designed to prevent migraines. This feature, originally published on 7 January 2016, describes the history of these drugs, the powerful relief they can bring some patients, and the limitations that still exist with them. As long as she can remember, 53-year-old Rosa Sundquist has tallied the number of days per month when her head explodes with pain. The migraines started in childhood and have gotten worse as she’s grown older. Since 2008, they have incapacitated her at least 15 days per month, year-round. Head-splitting pain isn’t the worst of Sundquist’s symptoms. Nausea, vomiting, and an intense sensitivity to light, sound, and smell make it impossible for her to work—she used to be an office manager—or often even to leave her light-proofed home in Dumfries, Virginia. On the rare occasions when she does go out to dinner or a movie with her husband and two college-aged children, she wears sunglasses and noise-canceling headphones. A short trip to the grocery store can turn into a full-blown attack “on a dime,” she says. Every 10 weeks, Sundquist gets 32 bee sting–like injections of the nerve-numbing botulism toxin into her face and neck. She also visits a neurologist in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who gives her a continuous intravenous infusion of the anesthetic lidocaine over 7 days. The lidocaine makes Sundquist hallucinate, but it can reduce her attacks, she says—she recently counted 20 migraine days per month instead of 30. Sundquist can also sometimes ward off an attack with triptans, the only drugs specifically designed to interrupt migraines after they start. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 24996 - Posted: 05.19.2018

by Joel Achenbach The National Institutes of Health has ordered a halt to a $100 million, 10-year study of moderate drinking that’s being funded in large part by the alcoholic-beverage industry. Thursday morning’s announcement by NIH Director Francis Collins reflects the seriousness of allegations that surfaced in news reports in recent months, including a story in March in the New York Times that described two scientists and a federal health official pitching the idea for the study to liquor company executives at a 2014 gathering in Palm Beach, Fla. The alcohol industry agreed to fund the research via a private foundation that supports NIH. The goal of the study, which involves 7,000 individuals, is to assess whether moderate drinking — a single drink a day — has a health benefit. Some research has suggested such a benefit, but the conclusion remains controversial, and the U.S. dietary guidelines recommend that people who do not drink alcohol should not start. The Moderate Alcohol and Cardiovascular Health (MACH) trial is based at Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a grantee of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Collins has ordered two reviews of the study. The first, by the Office of Management Assessment, will “determine if any process or conduct irregularities occurred with grants associated with the MACH Trial,” according to NIH. The second review, by an advisory committee to Collins, will examine the scientific merit of the study. “NIH has requested that the grantee, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, pause all study activities until the reviews are completed,” NIH said in a brief announcement that gave no further details on the reasons for the pause. NIH said Thursday that the reviews are expected to be concluded in June. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24995 - Posted: 05.18.2018

By Gina Kolata The first medicine designed to prevent migraines was approved by the Food and Drug Administration on Thursday, ushering in what many experts believe will be a new era in treatment for people who suffer the most severe form of these headaches. The drug, Aimovig, made by Amgen and Novartis, is a monthly injection with a device similar to an insulin pen. The list price will be $6,900 a year, and Amgen said the drug will be available to patients within a week. Aimovig blocks a protein fragment, CGRP, that instigates and perpetuates migraines. Three other companies — Lilly, Teva and Alder — have similar medicines in the final stages of study or awaiting F.D.A. approval. “The drugs will have a huge impact,” said Dr. Amaal Starling, a neurologist and migraine specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix. “This is really an amazing time for my patient population and for general neurologists treating patients with migraine.” Millions of people experience severe migraines so often that they are disabled and in despair. These drugs do not prevent all migraine attacks, but can make them less severe and can reduce their frequency by 50 percent or more. As a recent editorial in the journal JAMA put it, they are “progress, but not a panacea.” Until now, drugs used to prevent migraines were designed to treat other diseases, like high blood pressure. They are not very effective, may work only temporarily, and often are laden with intolerable side effects. In clinical trials, people taking the new drugs reported no more side effects than those taking a placebo. The side effects over the long term and among people with chronic diseases remain to be determined. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 24994 - Posted: 05.18.2018

By Ruth Williams | The sun’s ultraviolet (UV) radiation is a major cause of skin cancer, but it offers some health benefits too, such as boosting production of essential vitamin D and improving mood. Today (May 17), a report in Cell adds enhanced learning and memory to UV’s unexpected benefits. Researchers have discovered that, in mice, exposure to UV light activates a molecular pathway that increases production of the brain chemical glutamate, heightening the animals’ ability to learn and remember. “The subject is of strong interest, because it provides additional support for the recently proposed theory of ultraviolet light’s regulation of the brain and central neuroendocrine system,” dermatologist Andrzej Slominski of the University of Alabama who was not involved in the research writes in an email to The Scientist. “It’s an interesting and timely paper investigating the skin-brain connection,” notes skin scientist Martin Steinhoff of University College Dublin’s Center for Biomedical Engineering who also did not participate in the research. “The authors make an interesting observation linking moderate UV exposure to . . . [production of] the molecule urocanic acid. They hypothesize that this molecule enters the brain, activates glutaminergic neurons through glutamate release, and that memory and learning are increased.” While the work is “fascinating, very meticulous, and extremely detailed,” says dermatologist David Fisher of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, “it does not imply that UV is actually good for you. . . . Across the board, for humanity, UV really is dangerous.” © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Intelligence; Vision
Link ID: 24993 - Posted: 05.18.2018

By Abby Olena The gut-brain axis is line of communication between the two organs, involved in everything from brain development to the progression of neurological diseases, with gut microbiota often pitching in to the conversation. In a study published today (May 16) in Nature, researchers present evidence that multiple sclerosis (MS) may also be influenced by commensal microbes in the gut acting upon cells in the brain. They show in a mouse model of the disease that metabolites from gut bacteria alter the behavior of microglia—immune cells that reside in the brain—which in turn regulate the activity of astrocytes to promote or prevent inflammation. The authors also found evidence in vitro and in patient samples that a similar gut-brain connection exists in people with MS, suggesting that microbes and the cells that receive their signals could be targets for disease treatment. “The beauty of this paper is that it provides a very detailed mechanistic understanding of how things work,” Jonathan Kipnis, a neuroscientist at the University of Virginia who did not participate in the study, tells The Scientist. Previous research linked the microbiome and the development of MS in mice, he says, but “we never understood how the gut communicates with the brain.” In work published in Nature Medicine in 2016, Francisco Quintana of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and colleagues found part of the answer to the question of gut-brain communication. In that study, they showed that mouse and human astrocytes—star-shape glial cells—respond to molecules generated by microbes from the intestine. And because prior work from other groups had demonstrated that microglia can regulate astrocyte behavior, Quintana says, “one of the biggest unanswered questions we had is: what mediates the crosstalk between microglia and astrocytes?” © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Glia
Link ID: 24992 - Posted: 05.18.2018

Prion diseases are slow degenerative brain diseases that occur in people and various other mammals. No vaccines or treatments are available, and these diseases are almost always fatal. Scientists have found little evidence of a protective immune response to prion infections. Further, microglia — brain cells usually involved in the first level of host defense against infections of the brain — have been thought to worsen these diseases by secreting toxic molecules that can damage nerve cells. Now, scientists have used an experimental drug, PLX5622, to test the role of microglia against scrapie, a prion disease of sheep. PLX5622 rapidly kills most of the microglia in the brain. When researchers gave the drug to mice infected with scrapie, microglia were eliminated and the mice died one month faster than did untreated mice. The results, published in the Journal of Virology by researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, suggest that microglia can defend against a prion infection and thus slow the course of disease. The scientists hypothesize that microglia trap and destroy the aggregated prion proteins that cause brain damage. The findings suggest that drugs that increase the helpful activity of microglia may have a role in slowing the progression of prion diseases. Researchers are now studying the details of how microglia may be able to destroy prions in the brain. The scientists note that microglia could have a similar beneficial effect on other neurodegenerative diseases associated with protein aggregation, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.

Keyword: Prions; Glia
Link ID: 24991 - Posted: 05.18.2018

By Diana Kwon When Eliza O’Neill was 3 years old, her parents, Glenn and Cara, noted that her development began to diverge from that of her peers. Their once fast-learning, gregarious child faced difficulties in school, and her improvements in areas such as social communication and speech began to slow. It took about six months and multiple visits to the doctor for Eliza to be diagnosed with Sanfilippo syndrome, a rare lysosomal storage disease in which sugar molecules called glycosaminoglycans build up in the central nervous system, destroying cells and eventually causing severe dementia, seizures, and a loss of mobility. The disease strikes between 1 and 9 out of 1,000,000 people, and most children affected do not survive beyond their teens. The diagnosis, which Eliza’s doctors made in July 2013, was like “a lightning bolt out of the sky,” Glenn recalls. “I didn’t even know that a disease as terrible as this could even exist.” In the weeks following Eliza’s diagnosis, the O’Neills combed the scientific literature looking for a way to save their daughter. Their research led them to a potential gene therapy for Sanfilippo under investigation at Nationwide Children’s Hospital (NCH) in Columbus, Ohio. At the time, the work was still in the preclinical stage, but “the data were amazing,” says Cara, a pediatrician. Once she found this study, she contacted Haiyan Fu, a scientist at NCH’s Center for Gene Therapy working on the experiments, who walked her through the research. “That was the first moment that I had a real solid hope in the science,” Cara recalls. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24990 - Posted: 05.18.2018