Nicky Phillips Before playing a guitar, musicians tune the strings to particular frequencies to get the pitch they want. Starting this week, a team of neuroscientists in Australia will apply a similar tuning process to human brains as part of a study to recalibrate abnormal neural patterns to a healthy state. The group, at Monash University in Melbourne, is conducting one of the first trials to use electrodes on people’s scalps, both to monitor their brain activity and to provide customized electrical stimulation. By tuning groups of neurons to specific frequencies, the team will attempt to alleviate people’s depression and other mood disorders. The Monash team is one of several around the world experimenting with such ‘closed loop’ systems — where stimulation is directed by the patient’s brain activity, which is in turn altered by the stimulation. “They’re doing something right at the cutting edge,” says Charlotte Stagg, a neurophysiologist at the University of Oxford, UK. “It’ll be pretty cool if they can get it to work.” Researchers hope such techniques will offer a better way than current stimulation techniques to correct abnormal brain patterns. Although at an early stage, the approach is a fundamental shift in the field and seeks to offer more personalization than is possible with brain-stimulation treatments routinely used in the clinic. Other teams, in the United States and Europe, have trialled closed-loop brain stimulation to treat Parkinson’s disease and for cognitive training, but the Melbourne team is among the first to use this approach for mood disorders. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 24829 - Posted: 04.06.2018

Joan McFadden When Les Milne was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease aged just 45, his wife Joy was, understandably, devastated. But her sadness wasn’t just down to the fact her husband was in the grip of such a terrible illness but that, when she’d noticed a change in his smell 12 years earlier, she hadn’t realised the two things might be connected. Upon first noticing a “sort of woody, musky odour” Joy “started suggesting tactfully to him that he wasn’t showering enough or cleaning his teeth,” she recalls. “He clearly didn’t smell it and was quite adamant that he was washing properly.” Joy, a former nurse, let the issue lie, occupied with the far more pressing issue of her husband’s rapidly changing character. “He wasn’t the man I’d known since I was 16. About eight years before he was diagnosed he started suffering from mood swings, with bursts of anger which left me dreading what might come next.” When Les was eventually referred for a brain scan, he was told that his symptoms indicated a diagnosis of either a brain tumour or Parkinson’s, which affects one in 500 people in the UK. As medical professionals - Les worked as an anaesthetist - both knew just how serious the diagnosis was, though Joy admits that it was a relief to have one at all. Forced to retire five years later, the pair moved back to Perth from Cheshire, with his growing inability to sleep and diminishing motor skills seeing Les, a former water polo player for Scotland, give up the swimming he loved to do every day. “He was just a completely different person. It was devastating to watch" Joy, now 67, says. © Telegraph Media Group Limited 2018

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Parkinsons
Link ID: 24828 - Posted: 04.06.2018

By Rachel Aviv Before having her tonsils removed, Jahi McMath, a thirteen-year-old African-American girl from Oakland, California, asked her doctor, Frederick Rosen, about his credentials. “How many times have you done this surgery?” Hundreds of times, Rosen said. “Did you get enough sleep last night?” He’d slept fine, he responded. Jahi’s mother, Nailah Winkfield, encouraged Jahi to keep asking questions. “It’s your body,” she said. “Feel free to ask that man whatever you want.” Jahi had begged not to get the surgery, but her mother promised that it would give her a better life. Jahi had sleep apnea, which left her increasingly fatigued and unable to focus at school. She snored so loudly that she was too embarrassed to go to slumber parties. Nailah had brought up four children on her own, and Jahi, her second, was her most cautious. When she saw news on television about wars in other countries, she would quietly ask, “Is it going to come here?” Her classmates made fun of her for being “chunky,” and she absorbed the insults without protest. A few times, Nailah went to the school and asked the teachers to control the other students. The operation, at Oakland’s Children’s Hospital, took four hours. When Jahi awoke, at around 7 p.m. on December 9, 2013, the nurses gave her a grape Popsicle to soothe her throat. About an hour later, Jahi began spitting up blood. The nurses told her not to worry and gave her a plastic basin to catch it in. A nurse wrote in her medical records that she encouraged Jahi to “relax and not cough if possible.” By nine that night, the bandages packing Jahi’s nose had become bloody, too. Nailah’s husband, Marvin, a truck driver, repeatedly demanded that a doctor help them. A nurse told him that only one family member was allowed in the room at a time. He agreed to leave. © 2018 Condé Nast.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 24827 - Posted: 04.06.2018

David Cyranoski Beijing has announced plans to build a brain-science centre that will rival in size some of the world’s largest neuroscience organizations. It will also serve as a core facility for the country’s long-awaited brain project — China’s version of the high-profile brain-science initiatives under way elsewhere in the world. The Chinese Institute for Brain Research was officially established in Beijing on 22 March, with an agreement signed by representatives of the Beijing municipality and seven research organizations based in the capital. The agreement named two neuroscientists — Peking University’s Rao Yi and Luo Minmin of the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing — as co-directors. The new Beijing facility will be one of the first concrete developments in the national China brain-research project, which has been under discussion for five years but has yet to be formally announced. The United States and Europe each launched billion-dollar brain initiatives in 2013, and Japan followed with a smaller project the following year. South Korea answered with its own initiative in 2016. The Chinese project is expected to complement these projects with its rapidly growing cadre of top neuroscientists, abundant supplies of research monkeys, the country’s heavy burden of people with neurological diseases and its big investments in brain-imaging facilities. “The brain is such a complex system that significant efforts are needed to tame this complexity at an international level,” says Katrin Amunts, scientific research director of Europe’s Human Brain Project. China has the potential to provide important insights that relate to the work of other projects, she says. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 24826 - Posted: 04.06.2018

By Dina Fine Maron A new report raises questions about whether contracting Zika virus in the months after birth may damage an infected newborn’s brain. Researchers at Emory University injected a small number of infant rhesus macaques with the virus five weeks after birth—an age which roughly correlates with Zika exposure in three-month-old human babies—and found that although the monkeys cleared the infection from their blood as expected, the animals developed brain damage and behavioral problems. “This is the first time [infant infection] has been studied in a controlled fashion. And while it is with a small group of animals, it does make us more concerned about what the long-term behavioral or cognitive issues may be in human infants that might have been similarly exposed,” says Ann Chahroudi, senior author on the study and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine. Advertisement The good news is infected monkeys did not develop the most severe problems seen in humans exposed to Zika prenatally, which include limb deformities, hearing and vision loss, and a small-headed condition that can form in the womb called microcephaly. Yet certain brain areas typically responsible for vision as well as emotional and behavioral responses did not develop normally in infant macaques exposed to Zika, and the animals acted strangely in behavioral tests compared with control animals not exposed to the pathogen. Connections between the amygdala and hippocampus were also weak in the infected macaques, which suggests signals sent between those two areas—ones that would help the infants recognize and respond to stressful situations—would be slow or spotty. © 2018 Scientific American,

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24825 - Posted: 04.06.2018

Dr Sarah Bailey If you have ever taken a medicine, you have benefited from the humane use of animals in medical research. My research at the University of Bath focuses on understanding how the brain responds to stress and how we can use that knowledge to develop new and better antidepressants. We use mice to study how their behaviour changes in response to stress, or potential new drug treatments, and then we analyse their brains to identify affected brain circuits and the molecules involved in those behaviours. Over four million UK adults experience depression at any one time, and only around half of those will respond to the existing medications. There is a vital need to understand more about the brain mechanisms that cause depression in order to develop new and better antidepressants. Animal research plays a key role in this. In the UK the Home Office regulates animal research under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act. At the heart of the legislation is the humane treatment of animals. This is enshrined in “the 3Rs” that regulate all research conducted with animals in the UK – replacement, reduction and refinement. Replacement: the act does not allow animal research to be done where alternatives exist. ● Reduction: the minimum number of animals is used to obtain valid results for any experiment. ● Refinement: all techniques, from picking up an animal to a simple injection, must be done in a way that minimises animal suffering and emphasises the welfare of the animal. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 24824 - Posted: 04.06.2018

By Danna Staaf "You're doing your surgery, but you don't know if the animal still feels it and you've just stolen its ability to respond," says biologist Robyn Crook of San Francisco State University (SFSU) in California. Until recently, researchers working with octopuses, squids, and other cephalopods routinely faced this dilemma, an ethical and, in some cases, legal challenge to studying these intelligent creatures in the laboratory. But Crook has now shown that both ordinary alcohol and magnesium chloride are effective anesthetics—crucial information for scientists pursuing cephalopod research. Cephalopods might not seem to be ideal laboratory animals. They're exclusively marine, so a complex seawater system is needed to keep them alive, and they're disinclined to stay put—octopuses can escape through minuscule holes, while squids may jet right out of their tanks. But their unique biology and behavior have made them indispensable to researchers in many fields. Studies of the squid's giant axon helped spawn modern neuroscience decades ago, and the light organ of the bobtail squid (Euprymna scolopes) powered a revolution in the study of symbiotic host-microbe interactions. Today, some researchers are studying how the animals accomplish their striking feats of regeneration, while others use them in ecotoxicology studies; cephalopods even guide research into the origins of consciousness. Because of their complex brains, cephalopods became the first invertebrates to be protected by laboratory animal laws. In 1991, the Canadian Council on Animal Care decided to extend the standards for vertebrate care to cephalopods, meaning, among other things, that researchers have to get ethical approval for their studies and must use anesthesia, when possible, for procedures that could cause pain. Since then, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and some Australian states have passed similar regulations. The biggest expansion of cephalopod rights came in 2013, when an EU-wide directive gave them the same protections as vertebrates in scientific studies in 28 countries. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science. A

Keyword: Animal Rights; Sleep
Link ID: 24823 - Posted: 04.06.2018

Laura Y. Cabrera Mr. B loves Johnny Cash, except when he doesn’t. Mr. X has watched his doctors morph into Italian chefs right before his eyes. The link between the two? Both Mr. B and Mr. X received deep brain stimulation (DBS), a procedure involving an implant that sends electric impulses to specific targets in the brain to alter neural activity. While brain implants aim to treat neural dysfunction, cases like these demonstrate that they may influence an individual’s perception of the world and behavior in undesired ways. Mr. B received DBS as treatment for his severe obsessive compulsive disorder. He’d never been a music lover until, under DBS, he developed a distinct and entirely new music preference for Johnny Cash. When the device was turned off, the preference disappeared. Mr. X, an epilepsy patient, received DBS as part of an investigation to locate the origin of his seizures. During DBS, he hallucinated that doctors became chefs with aprons before the stimulation ended and the scene faded. In both of these real-world cases, DBS clearly triggered the changed perception. And that introduces a host of thorny questions. As neurotechnologies like this become more common, the behaviors of people with DBS and other kinds of brain implants might challenge current societal views on responsibility. Lawyers, philosophers and ethicists have labored to define the conditions under which individuals are to be judged legally and morally responsible for their actions. The brain is generally regarded as the center of control, rational thinking and emotion – it orchestrates people’s actions and behaviors. As such, the brain is key to agency, autonomy and responsibility. © 2010–2018, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 24822 - Posted: 04.04.2018

James Gorman The snow monkeys of Japan are famous, as monkeys go. This troop of Japanese macaques lives in the north, near Nagano, the mountainous, snowy site of the 1998 Winter Olympics. Others of their species live even farther north, farther than any other nonhuman primate, so they are able to adapt to winter weather. But the source of this troop’s fame is an adaptation that only they exhibit: soaking in hot spring bathing pools. Their habitat is full of natural hot springs that tend to be over 140 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature that is apparently uncomfortable for the monkeys. It wasn’t until 1963 that a young female macaque was first observed bathing in a pool built by a hotel, with the water cooled to a temperature comfortable enough for humans and monkeys. At first, one or two monkeys joining human visitors were a curiosity , but eventually they became a nuisance and health hazard, and a park was built with hot spring pools at a comfortable 104 degrees Fahrenheit, for monkeys only. The monkeys have been a long time tourist attraction and favorite of photographers, and it looked like they were trying to stay warm. Only recently have scientists investigated this behavior by measuring levels of stress hormones and observing the effects of social structure. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Evolution
Link ID: 24821 - Posted: 04.04.2018

Kas Roussy · You think you have a dysfunctional clan? Check out the family feud involving Humphrey, Charlie and Hugh. In the early '70s, the trio was part of a tight-knit community of wild chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania. These are some of the same chimps that British primatologist Jane Goodall was studying at the time, looking at social and family dynamics. "Jane and other researchers who came to Gombe initially had this idea that chimpanzees were these idyllic forest-dwelling species that could provide this model for what humanity could be like," says Duke University researcher Joseph Feldblum. "They thought they were peaceful and egalitarian." They were about to get a reality check of the wild kingdom variety. According to a new study, the same things that fuel deadly clashes in humans — like power, ambition, and jealousy — can also tear apart chimpanzees. You'll recall from all those wildlife documentaries that chimps are our closest animal relatives. In Gombe, Goodall and her colleagues watched a once-unified group of chimps disintegrate into two rival factions. "There's still a bit of uncertainty, even with people who were there at the time, about exactly what happened," Feldblum tells CBC News. But thanks to new digitized data taken from Goodall's own field notes from that period, Feldblum and a team of scientists were able to get a clearer, more detailed picture of what they call "the seeds of the conflict." "We were able to examine the course of the split in more detail and pinpoint when it became obvious more precisely," says co-author and Duke anthropologist Anne Pusey. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 24820 - Posted: 04.04.2018

Agence France-Presse How do bowhead whales in the unbroken darkness of the Arctic’s polar winter keep busy during breeding season? They sing, of course. From late autumn to early spring, off the east coast of Greenland, some 200 bowheads, hunted to the edge of extinction, serenade each other with compositions from a vast repertoire of song, according to a study published on Wednesday. “It was astonishing,” said the lead author, Kate Stafford, an oceanographer at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Seattle, who eavesdropped on these subaquatic concerts. “Bowhead whales were singing loudly, from November until April” – non-stop, 24/7 – “and they were singing many, many different songs.” Stafford and three colleagues counted 184 distinct melodies over a three-year period, which may make bowheads one of the most prolific composers in the animal kingdom. “The diversity and inter-annual variability in songs of bowhead whales in this study are rivalled only by a few species of songbirds,” the study found. Unlike mating calls, songs are complex musical phrases that are not genetically hard-wired but must be learned. Only a handful of mammals – some bats and a family of apes called gibbons, for example – vocalise in ways akin to bird song, and when they do it is quite repetitive. The only other whale that produces elaborate songs is the humpback, which has been extensively studied in its breeding grounds near Hawaii and off the coast of Mexico. The humpback’s melody is shared among a given population over a period of a year, and gives way to a new tune each spring. Bowhead whales, it turns out, are far more versatile and would appear to improvise new songs all the time. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 24819 - Posted: 04.04.2018

By Shawna Williams | A research funding request to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) may have been quashed as part of an effort to woo industry sponsors of another large study, reports STAT News. The evidence includes an email exchange between the director of the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and an alcohol company executive pledging not to fund the type of study that linked alcohol advertising to teen drinking. The news report builds on earlier revelations by Wired and The New York Times that NIAAA scientists courted industry funders of a study on the health effects of moderate alcohol consumption by emphasizing the probability that the results would favor such consumption. STAT adds fresh evidence that conflicts of interest may have influenced decisions at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest federal funder of biomedical research. In the article published by STAT yesterday (April 2), Michael Siegel, a community health researcher at Boston University School of Public Health, gives an account of a 2015 meeting in which he and a coinvestigator on an NIAAA-funded study were summoned to the institute to discuss the work. In the meeting, George Koob, the NIAAA Director, “kept trying to downplay the importance of this research, insisting it was not advertising that made teenagers drink but peer pressure and parents. He was giving us the industry line,” Siegel tells STAT. A new proposal by the coinvestigator to study social media activity by alcohol companies was rejected soon afterward, despite receiving high marks from reviewers. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24818 - Posted: 04.04.2018

By MAGGIE JONES In 1988, Lauren Slater put a single cream-and-green pill in her mouth and, with a sip of water, became one of the first patients in the United States to take Prozac. She also emerged as one of its most poetic chroniclers when she detailed her heady, complex love affair with the drug in “Prozac Diary” (1998). Thirty years since that first dose, neither Slater nor the drug has aged particularly well. Slater, who has spent much of her life wrestling with bipolar and obsessive-compulsive disorders, jumped from an initial prescription of 10 milligrams to 20 to 30 to 60, landing at 80 mg, which is where she left off in “Prozac Diary.” A doctor eventually upped her dose to 100 mg a day — 20 beyond what’s F.D.A. approved. But the drug that had “so magically removed the dead-weight symptoms so that my whole world became a gorgeous glimmer” ceased working once again. Many psychiatrists theorize that each relapse makes the brain more vulnerable to future episodes and leads to a lifetime of antidepressants for people who have had depressive episodes. At the same time, Slater notes, few studies have examined the long-term side effects of these serotonin boosters. Slater’s current medicine cabinet includes the antidepressant Effexor, the antipsychotic Zyprexa, another antipsychotic, Abilify, the stimulant Vyvanse, the anti-anxiety medication Klonopin, as well as Lisiniprol to combat the high blood pressure caused by Effexor. Add in some of the other psychotropic medications she’s tried — Imipramine, Geodon, Risperdal, lithium — and it starts to read like a pharmacist’s daily fill list. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 24817 - Posted: 04.04.2018

By Ann Gibbons With their opposable toes and flat feet, early human ancestors have often been portrayed as weird walkers, swaying from side to side or rolling off the outside edges of their feet. Now, a new study finds that this picture of awkward upright locomotion is wrong: Early members of the human family, or hominins, were already walking upright with an efficient, straight-legged gait some 4.4 million years ago. The study helps settle a long-standing debate about how quickly our ancestors developed a humanlike gait, and shows that ancient hominins didn’t have to sacrifice climbing agility to walk upright efficiently. For years, some paleoanthropologists argued that hominins like the famous 3.1-million-year-old Lucy weren’t graceful on the ground because they retained traits for climbing trees, such as long fingers and toes. In one famous experiment, researchers donned extra-long shoes—one critic called them clown shoes—to mimic walking with longer toes. The scientists stumbled over their long feet and concluded that early hominins would have been just as clumsy. But other researchers argued that natural selection would have quickly favored adaptations for efficient walking given the dangers on the ground, even while hominins were still scurrying up trees. To test these hypotheses, evolutionary anthropologist Herman Pontzer of the City University of New York (CUNY) in New York City and his team compared how humans, living apes, and monkeys use their hips, leg bones, and muscles when they walk and climb. CUNY graduate student Elaine Kozma filmed chimps, bonobos, gorillas, gibbons, and other primates in zoos so she could measure the precise angles of their legs and hips when they walked upright. She then calculated the stresses on their bones during maximum extension and found that apes put a lot of force on their massive thighs, hamstrings, and knees—forces that also help them power up trees. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 24816 - Posted: 04.03.2018

By Daniela Carulli In 1898, Camillo Golgi, an eminent Italian physician and pathologist, published a landmark paper on the structure of “nervous cells.” In addition to the organelle that still bears his name, the Golgi apparatus, he described “a delicate covering” surrounding neurons’ cell bodies and extending along their dendrites. That same year, another Italian researcher, Arturo Donaggio, observed that these coverings, now known as perineuronal nets (PNNs), had openings in them, through which, he correctly surmised, axon terminals from neighboring neurons make synapses. Since then, however, PNNs have been largely neglected by the scientific community—especially after Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a fierce rival of Golgi (who would later share the Nobel Prize with him), dismissed them as a histological artifact. It wasn’t until the 1970s, thanks to the improvement of histological techniques and the development of immunohistochemistry, that researchers confirmed the existence of PNNs around some types of neurons in the brain and spinal cord of many vertebrate species, including humans. Composed of extracellular matrix (ECM) molecules, PNNs form during postnatal development, marking the end of what’s known as the “critical period” of heightened brain plasticity. For a while after birth, the external environment has a profound effect on the wiring of neuronal circuits and, in turn, on the development of an organism’s skills and behaviors, such as language, sensory processing, and emotional traits. But during childhood and adolescence, neuronal networks become more fixed, allowing the individual to retain the acquired functions. Evidence gathered over the past 15 years suggests that PNNs contribute to this fixation in many brain areas, by stabilizing the existing contacts between neurons and repelling incoming axons. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Brain imaging
Link ID: 24815 - Posted: 04.03.2018

Dan Garisto Birds can sense Earth’s magnetic field, and this uncanny ability may help them fly home from unfamiliar places or navigate migrations that span tens of thousands of kilometers. For decades, researchers thought iron-rich cells in birds’ beaks acted as microscopic compasses (SN: 5/19/12, p. 8). But in recent years, scientists have found increasing evidence that certain proteins in birds’ eyes might be what allows them see magnetic fields (SN: 10/28/09, p. 12). Scientists have now pinpointed a possible protein behind this “sixth sense.” Two new studies — one examining zebra finches published March 28 in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the other looking at European robins published January 22 in Current Biology — both single out Cry4, a light-sensitive protein found in the retina. If the researchers are correct, this would be the first time a specific molecule responsible for the detection of magnetic fields has been identified in animals. “This is an exciting advance — we need more papers like these,” says Peter Hore, a chemist at the University of Oxford who has studied chemical reactions involved in bird navigation. Cry4 is part of a class of proteins called cryptochromes, which are known to be involved in circadian rhythms, or biological sleep cycles (SN: 10/02/17, p. 6). But at least some of these proteins are also thought to react to Earth’s magnetic field thanks to the weirdness of quantum mechanics (SN: 7/23/16, p. 8). The protein’s quantum interactions could help birds sense this field, says Atticus Pinzon-Rodriguez, a biologist at the University of Lund in Sweden who was involved with the zebra finch study. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Animal Migration; Vision
Link ID: 24814 - Posted: 04.03.2018

by Nicholette Zeliadt Folic acid, a B vitamin, may lower autism risk and ease features of the condition, according to findings from five unrelated studies published over the past few months. Three of the studies suggest that prenatal supplements of folic acid offset autism risk associated with in utero exposure to epilepsy drugs or toxic chemicals. The supplements are also known to prevent birth defects. Another study found that people with autism and their immediate family members are more likely than those in a control group to carry immune molecules that could block folate’s passage into the brain. “These studies are particularly of interest because they suggest that people could potentially modify their risk of having a child with autism, even in the face of certain adverse exposures or conditions,” says Kristen Lyall, an assistant professor in the Modifiable Risk Factors Program at the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute in Philadelphia, who was not involved in any of the studies. A fifth study reported results from a small clinical trial suggesting that folinic acid — a form of folic acid — can ease language and communication difficulties in people with autism. “It isn’t enough to say that kids with [autism] should be taking folinic acid, necessarily, but it is enough to motivate a larger study,” says Jeremy Veenstra-VanderWeele, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, who was not involved in the trial. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Autism; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24813 - Posted: 04.03.2018

By LIZ SZABO, When she was a young physician, Dr. Martha Gulati noticed that many of her mentors were prescribing vitamin E and folic acid to patients. Preliminary studies in the early 1990s had linked both supplements to a lower risk of heart disease. She urged her father to pop the pills as well: “Dad, you should be on these vitamins, because every cardiologist is taking them or putting their patients on [them],” recalled Dr. Gulati, now chief of cardiology for the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix. But just a few years later, she found herself reversing course, after rigorous clinical trials found neither vitamin E nor folic acid supplements did anything to protect the heart. Even worse, studies linked high-dose vitamin E to a higher risk of heart failure, prostate cancer and death from any cause. Dr. Gulati told her father he “might want to stop taking” the vitamins. More than half of Americans take vitamin supplements, including 68 percent of those age 65 and older, according to a 2013 Gallup poll. Among older adults, 29 percent take four or more supplements of any kind, according to a Journal of Nutrition study published in 2017. Often, preliminary studies fuel irrational exuberance about a promising dietary supplement, leading millions of people to buy in to the trend. Many never stop. They continue even though more rigorous studies — which can take many years to complete — almost never find that vitamins prevent disease, and in some cases cause harm. “The enthusiasm does tend to outpace the evidence,” said Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. There’s no conclusive evidence that dietary supplements prevent chronic disease in the average American, Dr. Manson said. And while a handful of vitamin and mineral studies have had positive results, those findings haven’t been strong enough to recommend supplements to the general American public, she said. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24812 - Posted: 04.03.2018

By Kate Sheridan, As more states legalize medical and recreational marijuana, doctors may be replacing opioid prescriptions with suggestions to visit a local marijuana dispensary. Two papers published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine analyzing more than five years of Medicare Part D and Medicaid prescription data found that after states legalized weed, the number of opioid prescriptions and the daily dose of opioids went way down. That indicates that some people may be shifting away from prescription drugs to cannabis, though the studies can’t say whether this substitution is actually happening or if patients or doctors are the driving force. “In this time when we are so concerned—rightly so—about opiate misuse and abuse and the mortality that’s occurring, we need to be clear-eyed and use evidence to drive our policies,” said W. David Bradford, an economist at the University of Georgia and an author of one of the studies. “If you’re interested in giving people options for pain management that don’t bring the particular risks that opiates do, states should contemplate turning on dispensary-based cannabis policies.” Previous research has pointed to a similar correlation. A 2014 paper found that states with medical marijuana laws had nearly 25 percent fewer deaths from opioid overdoses. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 24811 - Posted: 04.03.2018

In a small room tucked away at the University of Toronto, Professor Dan Nemrodov is pulling thoughts right out of people's brains. He straps a hat with electrodes on someone's head and then shows them pictures of faces. By reading brain activity with an electroencephalography (EEG) machine, he's then able to reconstruct faces with almost perfect accuracy. Student participants wearing the cap look at a collection of faces for two hours. At the same time, the EEG software recognizes patterns relating to certain facial features found in the photos. Machine-learning algorithms are then used to recreate the images based on the EEG data, in some cases within 98-per-cent accuracy. Nemrodov and his colleague, Professor Adrian Nestor say this is a big thing. "Ultimately we are involved in a form of mind reading," he says. The technology has huge ramifications for medicine, law, government and business. But the ethical questions are just as huge. Here are some key questions: What can be the benefits of this research? If developed, it can help patients with serious neurological damage. People who are incapacitated to the point that they cannot express themselves or ask a question. According to clinical ethicist Prof. Kerry Bowman and his students at the University of Toronto, this technology can get inside someone's mind and provide a link of communication. It may give that person a chance to exercise their autonomy, especially in regard to informed consent to either continue treatment or stop. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 24810 - Posted: 04.02.2018