By SHEILA KAPLAN WASHINGTON — A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel on Thursday unanimously recommended approval of an epilepsy medication made with an ingredient found in marijuana. If the agency follows the recommendation, as is expected, the drug would be the first cannabis-derived prescription medicine available in the United States. The drug, called Epidiolex, is made by GW Pharmaceuticals, a British company. Its active ingredient, cannabidiol, also called CBD, is one of the chemical compounds found in the cannabis plant, but it does not contain the properties that make people high. That makes it different from the “medical marijuana” allowed by a growing number of states. In those cases, certain patients are legally authorized to smoke or ingest marijuana to treat severe pain, nausea and other ailments. There are already several drugs on the market that are derived from synthetic versions of THC and other chemicals of the cannabis plant, generally used to ease nausea in cancer patients, and to help AIDS patients avoid weight loss. Advocates for development of marijuana-based treatments, and those pushing for better treatments of epilepsy, were pleased with the panel’s recommendation. “This is a very good development, and it basically underscores that there are medicinal properties to some of the cannabinoids,” said Dr. Igor Grant, director of the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research at the University of California San Diego. “I think there could well be other cannabinoids that are of therapeutic use, but there is just not enough research on them to say.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epilepsy; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24889 - Posted: 04.21.2018

BREANNE SEARING, Evergreen reporter As more states have legalized recreational cannabis, it has grown more popular among pregnant women. A WSU undergraduate researcher thinks the scientific community needs to take a closer look at the behavior of adults who were exposed to cannabis while in the womb. Neuroscience senior Collin Warrick has conducted research on the effects of prenatal cannabis vapor on the cognitive flexibility of rats. Warrick said cannabis is the most common illicit drug among pregnant women. Despite this, little to no research has been done on its effects on offspring cognition as they mature. Warrick said the lack of medical warnings on legal cannabis products comes from this lack of research. “I have not come across anything that has been black labeled,” Warrick said, “there is no Surgeon General’s warning against cannabis, I think primarily because there hasn’t been enough studies looking at the negative effects.” Ryan McLaughlin, an assistant professor of integrative physiology and neuroscience who worked with Warrick, said long-term ramifications of cannabis vapor on developing offspring are unknown. “Now that cannabis is legal for the next generation of mothers,” McLaughlin said, “they may see less of a stigma and less of a perceived harm associated with smoking a joint during pregnancy, as they would maybe from having a drink of wine or smoking cigarettes.” © 2018

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24888 - Posted: 04.21.2018

by Amy Ellis Nutt In a study published this week in the American Journal of Psychiatry, researchers report that an esketamine trial resulted in a “rapid improvement in depressive symptoms” in people with severe, treatment-resistant depression. Forty-nine patients completed the four-week trial. Doses were administered twice weekly, and the esketamine quickly showed an effect. Just four hours after the initial dose, people receiving the drug experienced a significant reduction in depressive symptoms. Carla Canuso, who was one of the lead researchers in the study and works with Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals, called the results “robustly significant.” But a rare editorial signed by the majority of the board of the American Journal of Psychiatry that appeared in the same issue as the study expressed deep concerns about the danger of a drug with a history of abuse. “We felt it was a problem that really needed particular attention [because] it at least has the potential for causing similar problems to the opioids,” said Robert Freedman, editor of the journal. “That was our single overriding concern.” Ketamine was approved as a rapid-onset anesthetic decades ago and was an important battlefield tool for medics during the Vietnam War. During the 1970s and '80s, it became better known as Special-K for its psychedelic properties and later, more notoriously, made headlines as a date-rape drug. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24887 - Posted: 04.21.2018

By Matt Warren There is no one gene that, when mutated, causes autism. But over the past decade, researchers have identified hundreds of gene variations that seem to affect brain development in ways that increase the risk of autism. However, these scientists mainly searched for variants in the DNA that directly encodes the building blocks of proteins. Now, a new study probing so-called noncoding DNA has found that alterations in regions that regulate gene activity may also contribute to autism. And surprisingly, these variations tended to be inherited from fathers who aren’t autistic. “This is a really good article—it’s somewhat provocative and it makes us think about [autism genetics in a] different way,” says Lucia Peixoto, a neuroscientist and computational biologist at Washington State University in Spokane, who was not involved in the research. “I think it’s a great contribution to the field.” Research into the genetic risk for autism has mainly focused on how mutations that arise spontaneously in an individual’s genome—rather than being inherited from a parent—disrupt protein-coding regions and lead to the condition. That’s because these sporadic mutations have relatively large effects and studies have shown that such mutations, although individually rare, together contribute to about 25% to 30% of cases, says Jonathan Sebat, a geneticist at the University of California, San Diego. But only about 2% of the genome consists of protein-coding areas. Sebat says the large noncoding portion of our DNA—often previously referred to as “junk DNA”—has so far been ignored in autism research. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Autism; Epigenetics
Link ID: 24886 - Posted: 04.21.2018

By CEYLAN YEGINSU A new study has shed more light on the revelations that Hans Asperger, the Austrian pediatrician for whom a form of autism is named, had collaborated with the Nazis and actively assisted in the killing of disabled children. Published on Wednesday in the journal Molecular Autism by the medical historian Herwig Czech, the report relies on eight years of research that included the examination of previously unseen Nazi-era documents. The study concludes that though Dr. Asperger was not a member of the Nazi Party, he had participated in the Third Reich’s child-euthanasia program, which aimed to establish a “pure” society by eliminating those deemed a “burden.” Dr. Asperger referred disabled children to the notorious Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna, where hundreds were either drugged or gassed to death from 1940 to 1945. “The picture that emerges is that of a man who managed to further his career under the Nazi regime, despite his apparent political and ideological distance from it,” Mr. Czech, of the University of Vienna, wrote in his study. Asperger syndrome is a lifelong developmental disability associated with autism that affects perception and social interaction. About one in 68 children in the United States have been identified with Autism Spectrum Disorder. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 24885 - Posted: 04.21.2018

Jaclyn was diagnosed with myopia, or nearsightedness, at the age of age four. "I was surprised to learn that she needed glasses," recalled her mother, Ellen Rosenberg, in Toronto. Jaclyn wears glasses all the time at school, where they help her to read and write, she said. Her vision isn't so poor that she trips on things when she takes them off to play sports, Rosenberg said. But in a recent study, more than 30 per cent of young Canadian children walked around with fuzzy vision because of myopia that, unlike Jaclyn's, went undiagnosed. Now experts are exploring a simple way to turn the tide on the worsening problem. Myopia is "increasing globally at an alarming rate," according to the World Health Organization. It affects an estimated 1.89 billion people worldwide, and if rates don't change, that could rise to 2.56 billion by 2020 — a third of the population. Research suggests spending time outdoors protects against myopia. (Pond5) In what they call the first study of its kind in Canada, optometrists in Waterloo, Ont., found the rate of myopia was six per cent in children aged 6 to 8. That soared to 28.9 per cent in children aged 11 to 13. In myopia or nearsightedness, the eyeball doesn't get enough light and elongates. The condition isn't innocuous, said study author Debbie Jones, a clinical professor of optometry at the University of Waterloo and a scientist at the Centre for Ocular Research & Education. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24884 - Posted: 04.21.2018

Bruce Bower Ancient surgeons may have practiced dangerous skull-opening procedures on cows before operating on people. A previously excavated cow skull from a roughly 5,400- to 5,000-year-old settlement in France contains a surgically created hole on the right side, a new study finds. No signs of bone healing, which start several days after an injury, appear around the opening. One or more people may have rehearsed surgical techniques on a dead cow, or may have tried unsuccessfully to save a sick cow’s life in what would be the oldest known case of veterinary surgery, researchers conclude online April 19 in Scientific Reports. Evidence of skull surgery on humans, whether for medical or ritual reasons, goes back about 11,000 years (SN: 5/28/16, p. 12). Ancient surgeons needed to know how and where to scrape away bone without harming brain tissue and blood vessels. So practicing bone removal on cows or other animals is plausible. The ancient cow’s skull opening, shaped almost in a square and framed by scrape marks, resembles two instances of human skull surgery from around the same time in France, say biological anthropologists Fernando Ramirez Rozzi of CNRS in Montrouge, France, and Alain Froment of IRD-Museum of Man in Paris. Microscopic and X-ray analyses found no fractures or splintered bone that would have resulted from goring by another cow’s horn. No damage typical of someone having struck the cow’s head with a club or other weapon appeared, either. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018. All

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 24883 - Posted: 04.21.2018

Jon Hamilton The words "dog" and "fog" sound pretty similar. Yet even a preschooler knows whether you're talking about a puppy or the weather. Now scientists at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., have identified a two-step process that helps our brains learn to first recognize, then categorize new sounds even when the differences are subtle. And it turns out the process is very similar to the way the human brain categorizes visual information, the Georgetown team reports Wednesday in the journal Neuron. "That's very exciting because it suggests there are general principles at work here of how the brain makes sense of the world," says Maximilian Riesenhuber, an author of the study and a professor in Georgetown University School of Medicine's Department of Neuroscience. The finding also could help explain what goes wrong in disorders like dyslexia, which can impair the brain's ability to make sense of what it sees and hears, Riesenhuber says. The research began as an effort to understand how the brain is able to accomplish feats like recognizing a familiar word, even when it's spoken with an accent or unusual pronunciation. "You hear my voice," says Riesenhuber, who has a slight German accent. "You've probably never heard me before. But you can hopefully recognize what I'm saying." © 2018 npr

Keyword: Animal Communication; Hearing
Link ID: 24882 - Posted: 04.19.2018

Maria Temming There’s a fine line between immersive and unnerving when it comes to touch sensation in virtual reality. More realistic tactile feedback in VR can ruin a user’s feeling of immersion, researchers report online April 18 in Science Robotics. The finding suggests that the “uncanny valley” — a term that describes how humanoid robots that look almost but not quite human are creepier than their more cartoonish counterparts — also applies to virtual touch (SN Online: 11/22/13). Experiment participants wearing VR headsets and gripping a controller in each hand embodied a virtual avatar holding the two ends of a stick. At first, users felt no touch sensation. Then, the hand controllers gave equally strong vibrations every half-second. Finally, the vibrations were finely tuned to create the illusion that the virtual stick was being touched in different spots. For instance, stronger vibrations in the right controller gave the impression that the stick was nudged on that side. Compared with scenarios in which users received either no touch or even buzzing sensations, participants reported feeling far less immersed in the virtual environment when they received the realistic, localized touch. This result demonstrates the existence of a tactile uncanny valley, says study coauthor Mar Gonzalez-Franco, a human-computer interaction researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Emotions
Link ID: 24881 - Posted: 04.19.2018

/ By Madeline Bodin This winter was a little quieter than usual for the folks at Silver Creek Specialty Meats in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. For generations, winter was when hunters would make regular visits to the low-rise white brick facility near the shore of Lake Winnebago, carrying the odds and ends of the deer they had killed the previous fall so it could be turned into venison sausages. This year, though, no hunters came. “It’s not quite black and white. What do we do in the meantime?” In August, Silver Creek Specialty Meats sent out a letter notifying customers that it would no longer accept venison for processing. “As you are probably aware,” the letter said, “chronic wasting disease in the wild deer population of the State of Wisconsin has been steadily spreading. The disease has now been found in wild deer in 19 counties throughout the state. Due to the spread of the disease it has become extremely difficult to screen out any venison coming from CWD infected areas.” Deer with chronic wasting disease, or CWD, tremble and drool. They often cannot hold their heads up. Eventually, they lose so much weight that they are little more than hide and bone. The disease arises from a particular prion — single-protein infectious agents linked to various neurodegenerative diseases in mammals. And prion diseases are always fatal. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 24880 - Posted: 04.19.2018

Tor Wager Two soldiers receive similar injuries in battle. One recovers in months; the other endures excruciating pain for years. Why this difference? The question is pressing. One in five people suffers from chronic pain, affecting every aspect of their lives. Although significant gains have been made with anaesthetics and anti-inflammatory medications, the roots and relief of long-term pain are proving harder to find. Pain is also fuelling a global epidemic of opioid addiction and related deaths. In Chasing Men on Fire, neurologist Stephen Waxman provides a compelling portrait of scientific discovery in this area. Waxman, who works in basic research and clinical medicine, offers an insider’s account of the global search for a pain gene, beginning in 1966. He intertwines descriptions of cross-disciplinary neuroscience with portraits of scientists, and the struggles of people with conditions such as erythromelalgia, or ‘man-on-fire syndrome’, characterized by burning pain in hands and feet. Structurally, the book is innovative: 11 research papers are interlaced with the stories behind them. It is thus both a boon for researchers and an engrossing read for nonspecialists. Humans love simplicity. We want the intricate systems in our brains and bodies to ‘just work’. But Waxman shows that biology is complex, and genetic clues can be elusive. Detecting them relies on finding regularities across many people, which can make it seem impossible to pinpoint a key gene, and the rare mutations in it that lead to disease. As he reveals, it took considerable sifting and coordinated effort on three continents by scientists including pharmacologists, electrophysiologists, molecular biologists and geneticists before a ‘master gene’ for pain was isolated. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 24879 - Posted: 04.19.2018

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR A traumatic brain injury, even a mild concussion, increases the risk for Parkinson’s disease, a new study reports. Researchers identified all patients diagnosed with T.B.I. in a Veterans Health Administration database — 162,935 men and women — and matched them with the same number of people with similar health and behavioral characteristics but who had not had a brain injury. The study is in Neurology. Of the T.B.I. cases, half were mild, involving a blow to the head with some subsequent symptoms but with little or no unconsciousness. The rest were moderate to severe, involving extended unconsciousness or long-term symptoms. After controlling for age, race, income and many medical and psychiatric diseases, they found that compared with those who had had no T.B.I., those with a mild T.B.I. had a 56 percent increased risk for Parkinson’s disease; those with moderate to severe T.B.I. had an 83 percent increased risk. “We don’t have brain biopsies, so we don’t know what the underlying biology is,” said the lead author, Dr. Raquel C. Gardner, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco. “But in Parkinson’s you see abnormal protein accumulation, and there’s some evidence that T.B.I. is linked to deposits of these abnormal proteins.” In any case, she said, “This study provides the most definitive evidence that there is this association.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Parkinsons
Link ID: 24878 - Posted: 04.19.2018

Lynne Peeples Carole Godain remembers a lot of the little details from the clinical trial she took part in nine years ago. There was the blue button she pushed to get her chemotherapy drugs, and the green light that came on to confirm that the medication was dripping into her veins. Then, of course, there was the hour — 10:00 p.m. without fail, for every treatment. By all accounts, Godain’s own time was running short. The first treatment for her colon cancer had failed, and her last body scan had revealed 27 tumours growing inside her liver. So the psychologist from Tours, France, jumped at the opportunity to take part in a trial at Paul Brousse hospital in Villejuif, which aimed to test whether delivering drugs at a specific time of day might make them more effective or reduce their toxic side effects. Ideally, it would accomplish both. “I was interested in increasing my chances of being cured,” says Godain. Today, at the age of 43, she is cancer-free. And Francis Lévi, the oncologist who treated Godain, says that although such an amazing result is anomalous, emerging evidence should encourage more interest in the concept of chronotherapy — scheduling treatments so that they provide the most help and do the least harm. More than four decades of studies describe how accounting for the body’s cycle of daily rhythms — its circadian clock — can influence responses to medications and procedures for everything from asthma to epileptic seizures. Research suggests that the majority of today’s best-selling drugs, including heartburn medications and treatments for erectile dysfunction, work better when taken at specific times of day. “When you give a medication, you always know the dose,” says Lévi, who also now works at Warwick Medical School in Coventry, UK, where he leads a team associated with INSERM, the French national biomedical research agency. “We have found that the timing is sometimes more important than the dose.” © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 24877 - Posted: 04.18.2018

By Ashley Yeager Brain organoids, also known as mini-brains, are tiny clumps of brain cells grown from stem cells that researchers are using to investigate the neural underpinnings of autism and other neurological disorders. But the organoids typically grow in culture for only a few months before they die, limiting their usefulness as models of real brains. Transplanting the three-dimensional clumps of human brain tissue into the brains of mice allows the organoids to continue to develop, sprouting life-sustaining blood vessels as well as new neuronal connections, the new study reports. The work takes a step toward using brain organoids to study complexities of human brain development and disease that can’t be investigated with current techniques. Brain organoid transplantation may even one day offer a treatment option for traumatic brain injury or stroke. “Although organoids are a great advance in human neuroscience, they are not perfect. They are missing blood vessels, immune cells and functional connections to other areas of the nervous system,” Jürgen Knoblich, a molecular biologist at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna who was not involved in the study, tells The Scientist by email. “The goal of the transplantation experiments is to show that integration with those other tissues is possible.” Study coauthor Fred “Rusty” Gage, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues first started thinking about the health of brain organoids a few years ago when they began working with the structures. Many cells in the center of the 3-D clump of tissue would die, Gage tells The Scientist. “Those cells weren’t getting the blood and nutrients they needed to survive.” © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24876 - Posted: 04.18.2018

By BENEDICT CAREY In a widely read article on antidepressant withdrawal published on April 8, The New York Times invited readers to describe their experiences coming off the drugs. More than 8,800 people responded — teenagers, college students, new mothers, empty-nesters retirees. Dozens did write in to say the drugs had been lifesaving, literally so. “You fail to acknowledge that mood disorders can be lifelong, debilitating diseases requiring lifelong medical treatment,” wrote Rachel S., of New York. A different kind of reader query would likely have attracted thousands of responses of gratitude for drugs that offered relief to tens of millions of people with chronic mood problems. Some doctors chimed in, too, more than one calling our focus on withdrawal irresponsible and unduly alarming to those who might benefit from antidepressants. The volume and diversity of the other responses painted a different picture, showing how modern antidepressants, beginning with Prozac in 1987, have percolated through our culture and have shaped public understanding of mental health. These stories traced sharp demographic fault lines: Readers of different generations came to antidepressants, and tried to quit them, for different reasons. Readers in my age group and older (I’m 58) often came of age in an era in which depression was considered somehow a lapse in character. These readers typically reported having started on Prozac or one of its early competitors — Paxil, Zoloft — very often after a major setback like divorce, or the loss of a job, spouse or child. “My G.P. put me on Zoloft 28 years ago to deal with my husband’s cancer diagnosis,” wrote Carole Wilson, 74, of Alburnett, Iowa. Her husband has since died. “I have cut down from 200 milligrams to 100, but when I go lower I get horrible side effects, like nausea, jumpiness, crying a lot which I never do. I’m nearly 75; at this point I will continue because I cannot go through the withdrawal.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 24875 - Posted: 04.18.2018

by Lauren Neergaard It’s pretty extraordinary for people in their 80s and 90s to keep the same sharp memory as someone several decades younger, so scientists are peeking into the brains of“superagers” who do to uncover their secret. The work is the flip side of the disappointing hunt for new drugs to fight or prevent Alzheimer’s disease. Instead of tackling that problem, “why don’t we figure out what it is we might need to do to maximize our memory?” said neuro­scientist Emily Rogalski, who leads the SuperAging study at Northwestern University in Chicago. Parts of the brain shrink with age, one of the reasons that most people experience a gradual slowing of at least some types of memory late in life. But it turns out that superagers’ brains aren’t shrinking nearly as fast as their peers’. And autopsies of the first superagers to die during the study show they harbor a lot more of a special kind of nerve cell in a deep-brain region that’s important for attention, Rogalski told a recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. These elite elders are “more than just an oddity or a rarity,” said neuroscientist Molly Wagster of the National Institute on Aging, which helps fund the research. “There’s the potential for learning an enormous amount and applying it to the rest of us, and even to those who may be on a trajectory for some type of neurodegenerative disease.” © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 24874 - Posted: 04.17.2018

Mariarosaria Taddeo and Luciano Floridi. Cyberattacks are becoming more frequent, sophisticated and destructive. Each day in 2017, the United States suffered, on average, more than 4,000 ransomware attacks, which encrypt computer files until the owner pays to release them1. In 2015, the daily average was just 1,000. In May last year, when the WannaCry virus crippled hundreds of IT systems across the UK National Health Service, more than 19,000 appointments were cancelled. A month later, the NotPetya ransomware cost pharmaceutical giant Merck, shipping firm Maersk and logistics company FedEx around US$300 million each. Global damages from cyberattacks totalled $5 billion in 2017 and may reach $6 trillion a year by 2021 (see go.nature.com/2gncsyg). Countries are partly behind this rise. They use cyberattacks both offensively and defensively. For example, North Korea has been linked to WannaCry, and Russia to NotPetya. As the threats escalate, so do defence tactics. Since 2012, the United States has used ‘active’ cyberdefence strategies, in which computer experts neutralize or distract viruses with decoy targets, or break into a hacker’s computer to delete data or destroy the system. In 2016, the United Kingdom announced a 5-year, £1.9-billion (US$2.7-billion) plan to combat cyber threats. NATO also began drafting principles for active cyberdefence, to be agreed by 2019. The United States and the United Kingdom are leading this initiative. Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Spain are also involved (see go.nature.com/2hebxnt). © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Intelligence; Robotics
Link ID: 24873 - Posted: 04.17.2018

/ By Joshua Brockman In May of last year, Dr. Chad Brummett spent part of a weekend in an Ann Arbor high school parking lot ensuring that the no-questions-asked drug take-back program he co-directs — called the Michigan Opioid Prescribing Engagement Network (Michigan OPEN) — went off without a hitch. The program is designed to give consumers in the area a convenient place to drop off unused or excess medications — ostensibly so they don’t end up being dumped or flushed into the environment, or land in the streets as part of the nation’s unchecked opioid epidemic. “We believe these programs may be an effective part of an all-of-the-above strategy.” Among the people stopping by that day, Brummett recalled: his own local pharmacist. “I thought that was really an eye-opening moment when I had my pharmacist attend the event to dispose of his pills,” said Brummett, who is also an associate professor of anesthesiology and the director of the Division of Pain Research at the University of Michigan. “I mean the irony is pretty deep, right?” According to a new analysis from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), some 4 million Americans reported misusing prescriptions in the prior month, and deaths related to opioid abuse are skyrocketing. Most people, the GAO suggests, get these drugs from friends or relatives, so providing a safe and convenient way for consumers to return unused medications, the thinking goes, could help. Currently, there are three approaches to disposing of unused prescription drugs that are sanctioned by the Drug Enforcement Administration. These include special disposal bins installed at pharmacies or other registered entities, mail-back programs, and take-back events like Brummett’s. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Depression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 24872 - Posted: 04.17.2018

By NATALIE ANGIER A friend will help you move, goes an old saying, while a good friend will help you move a body. And why not? Moral qualms aside, that good friend would likely agree the victim was an intolerable jerk who had it coming and, jeez, you shouldn’t have done this but where do you keep the shovel? Researchers have long known that people choose friends who are much like themselves in a wide array of characteristics: of a similar age, race, religion, socioeconomic status, educational level, political leaning, pulchritude rating, even handgrip strength. The impulse toward homophily, toward bonding with others who are the least other possible, is found among traditional hunter-gatherer groups and advanced capitalist societies alike. New research suggests the roots of friendship roots extend even deeper than previously suspected. Scientists have found that the brains of close friends respond in remarkably similar ways as they view a series of short videos: the same ebbs and swells of attention and distraction, the same peaking of reward processing here, boredom alerts there. The neural response patterns evoked by the videos — on subjects as diverse as the dangers of college football, the behavior of water in outer space, and Liam Neeson trying his hand at improv comedy — proved so congruent among friends, compared to patterns seen among people who were not friends, that the researchers could predict the strength of two people’s social bond based on their brain scans alone. “I was struck by the exceptional magnitude of similarity among friends,” said Carolyn Parkinson, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. The results “were more persuasive than I would have thought.” Dr. Parkinson and her colleagues, Thalia Wheatley and Adam M. Kleinbaum of Dartmouth College, reported their results in Nature Communications. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 24871 - Posted: 04.16.2018

Ketamine has "shown promise" in the rapid treatment of major depression and suicidal thoughts, a US study says. Ketamine has a reputation as a party drug but is licensed as an anaesthetic. The study found use of the drug via a nasal spray led to "significant" improvements in depressive symptoms in the first 24 hours. The Royal College of Psychiatrists said it was a "significant" study that brought the drug "a step closer to being prescribed on the NHS". The report by researchers from Janssen Research and Development, a Johnson and Johnson company, and Yale School of Medicine, is the first study into ketamine as a treatment for depression that has been done by a drug company. It is being published in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The trial looked at 68 people at imminent risk of suicide. All patients were treated with a stay in hospital and anti-depressants. In addition, half were given ketamine in the form of esketamine (part of the ketamine molecule) in a nasal spray and half were given a placebo. The study found those using esketamine had a much greater improvement in depression symptoms at all points over the first four weeks of treatment. However, at 25 days the effects had levelled out. The study's authors suggest it could offer an effective rapid treatment for people severely depressed and at imminent risk of suicide and could help in the initial stages of treatment, as most anti-depressants take four to six weeks to become fully effective. The nasal spray is now undergoing phase three trials before it can be licensed for treatment. © 2018 BBC.

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24870 - Posted: 04.16.2018