By Emily Willingham In their October 23 opinion piece “Why Does Autism Impact Boys More Often Than Girls?” Renee Joy Dufault and Steven G. Gilbert attempt to argue that autism diagnoses are on the increase because of inorganic mercury content in processed foods. Going a step further, they try to construct a rationale for blaming mercury for the perceived bias in autism rates among boys compared to girls. Using the example of one observational study reporting that mercury affects chemical tagging of a single gene in one cell type differently in boys and girls, the pair constructs a fragile chain of putative links between this single study and their claim that “inorganic mercury has been rising for many years in American blood.” The claims are problematic on many levels, but let’s just take a trip to the ground floor: evidence. First, mercury levels in “American blood” and urine are decreasing, not increasing. The latest analysis of values of inorganic mercury in urine and total blood mercury, published online September 6 in Environmental Toxicology and Pharmacology, finds that from 2005 to 2012 among all age groups, urinary inorganic mercury decreased. Total blood mercury, which includes organic (carbon-bound) and inorganic forms, also decreased in all age groups during that time. These conclusions are based on data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Meanwhile, other CDC data indicate that autism prevalence has increased. The trends for autism prevalence and mercury levels in people living in the United States are in opposite directions. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 24287 - Posted: 11.04.2017

By Giorgia Guglielmi The popular claim that women in their fertile days prefer men with more masculine faces may not be true. That’s the conclusion of the largest study to analyze how sex hormones influence women’s preference for men’s faces. Researchers first created 10 prototype male faces by averaging 50 photos of young white men. Then, they tweaked the prototype faces to create a more masculine and a more feminine version of each (pictured, masculine version on the left, feminine version on the right). Finally, the scientists asked nearly 600 heterosexual women to look at these photos and rate men’s attractiveness for either a fling or a long-term relationship. The women also provided saliva samples, which the researchers tested for sex hormones such as estradiol and testosterone. Hormone levels were not significantly related to women’s preference for manly faces, the team reports on the preprint server bioRxiv. The researchers also didn’t find evidence that women using the birth control pill prefer more feminine faces, as had been suggested. However, women did prefer masculine faces over feminine ones, especially for short-term relationships. This could be because manly traits, like a large jaw and jutting cheekbones, signal good heritable characteristics, such as a strong immune system, but have also been linked to people that are less willing to invest time in personal relationships, the scientists say. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Scien

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 24286 - Posted: 11.04.2017

By NICHOLAS ST. FLEUR Swallowed by a sinkhole. Washed away by a mudflow. Drowned after falling through thin ice. These are the fates that many unlucky mammoths suffered in Siberia thousands of years ago. Their well-preserved fossils have provided paleobiologists with insight into their prehistoric lives. Now, after performing a genetic analysis on the remains from the furry victims of natural traps, a team of scientists made a striking discovery: Most were male. “In many species, males tend to do somewhat stupid things that end up getting them killed in silly ways, and it appears that may have been true for mammoths also,” said Love Dalén, an evolutionary biologist from the Swedish Museum of Natural History. In a study published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, he and his colleagues analyzed DNA from nearly 100 mammoth bones, teeth and tusks, and found that about two-thirds came from males. They speculate the reason for the skewed sex-ratio may have to do with the risky behavior that young males take after leaving the protection of their mothers to live on their own. “Old females are very knowledgeable, they know best,” he said. The finding was an accident, according to Patrícia Pečnerová, a doctoral student at Stockholm University and lead author on the study. It came while she was entering data for a different project on mammoth genetics. “While filling this in on the spreadsheet we saw that there were too many males, more than there should be,” she said. “We were really surprised to see there were more than twice as many males as females because there was no previous research or indication that that should be the case.” The 98 specimens that the team had analyzed came from across the northern part of Siberia and had been collected over the course of four decades. The oldest were more than 60,000 years old, and the youngest, a specimen known as “Lonely Boy,” was about 4,000 years old. The genetic data did not provide insight into how old the mammoths were when they died, only their sex. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24285 - Posted: 11.03.2017

JoNel Aleccia People who abhor the thought of being kept alive with feeding tubes or other types of artificial nutrition and hydration have, for years, had a way out: They could officially document their wishes to halt such interventions using advance directives. Even patients diagnosed with progressive dementia who are able to record crucial end-of-life decisions before the disease robs them of their mental capacity could write advance directives. But caregivers and courts have rarely honored patients' wishes to refuse food and fluids offered by hand. Margot Bentley, 85, of British Columbia, died last year. She was a retired nurse who had cared for dementia patients before being diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 1999. In 1991, she wrote a statement stipulating that she wanted no nourishment or liquids if she developed an incurable illness. However, the nursing home where she was a patient continued to spoon-feed her, despite her family's protests. A court ruling upheld the nursing home's action, saying that food is basic care that cannot be withdrawn. Nora Harris, 64, of Medford, Ore., died on Oct. 11 after an eight-year struggle with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. More than a year earlier, her husband had gone to court to stop caregivers from spoon-feeding Harris, who had an advance directive that called for no artificial nourishment or hydration. A judge declined, siding with officials who said the state was required to feed vulnerable adults. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 24284 - Posted: 11.03.2017

/ By Elizabeth Svoboda When Gerald Shea was 6 years old, a bout of scarlet fever left him partially deaf, though he was not formally diagnosed until turning 34. His disability left him in a liminal space between silence and sound; he grew used to the fuzzed edges of words, the strain of parsing a language that no longer felt fully native. Years ago, he began combing historical records on deafness to lend context to his own experience. But his research turned up something unexpected: a centuries-long procession of leaders and educators who stifled the deaf by forcing them to conform to the ways of the hearing. That is the driving impetus behind “The Language of Light,” Shea’s history of deaf people’s ongoing quest to learn and communicate in signed languages. “Theirs is not an unplanned but a natural, visual poetry, at once both the speech and the music of the Deaf,” he writes. (He capitalizes the word to refer to people who consider themselves part of the deaf culture and community.) In conveying the unique cadence of this silent music — its intricate grammatical structure, its power to express an infinite array of ideas — Shea underscores the tragedy of its suppression. From the outset, he confronts us with a rogues’ gallery of those who suppressed it. During the Middle Ages, self-appointed therapists crammed hot coals into the mouths of deaf people, pierced their eardrums, and drilled holes into their skulls, all in a vain effort to force them to speak. In what was at the time Holland, Johann Conrad Amman moved the lips of his deaf charges into the shapes needed to make certain sounds, but the effort was largely fruitless because they could not hear the sounds they were making. The “silent voices” of Shea’s title has a double resonance: Not only did many deaf people remain literally mute from their disability; their potential to express their ideas fully through sign language went untapped. Copyright 2017 Undark

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 24283 - Posted: 11.03.2017

Molecular method reveals neuronal basis of brain states – NIH-funded animal study. NIMH-funded scientists revealed the types of neurons supporting alertness, using a molecular method called MultiMAP in transparent larval zebrafish. Multiple types of neurons communicate by secreting the same major chemical messengers: serotonin (red), dopamine and noradrenalin (yellow) and acetylcholine (cyan). Using a molecular method likely to become widely adopted by the field, researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health have discovered brain circuitry essential for alertness, or vigilance – and for brain states more generally. Strikingly, the same cell types and circuits are engaged during alertness in zebra fish and mice, species whose evolutionary forebears parted ways hundreds of millions of years ago. This suggests that the human brain is likely similarly wired for this state critical to survival. “Vigilance gone awry marks states such as mania and those seen in post-traumatic stress disorder and depression,” explained Joshua Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., director of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which along with the National Institute on Drug Abuse, co-funded the study. “Gaining familiarity with the molecular players in a behavior – as this new tool promises – may someday lead to clinical interventions targeting dysfunctional brain states.” For the first time, Multi-MAP makes it possible to see which neurons are activated in a behaving animal during a particular brain state – and subsequently molecularly analyze just those neurons to identify the subtypes and circuits involved.

Keyword: Attention; Evolution
Link ID: 24282 - Posted: 11.03.2017

By Helen Thomson Do you find it difficult to spot a face in the crowd? Now we know why: people with face blindness seem to have a missing “hub” of brain connections. The discovery could be used to diagnose children with the condition, and teach them new ways to identify faces. People with prosopagnosia, which often runs in families, cannot easily tell faces apart. This can have a significant impact on people’s lives. People with the condition rely heavily on voice recognition, clothes, hairstyle and gait to identify people, but can still fail to recognise family and friends. It can lead to social anxiety and depression, and can often go undiagnosed for many years. Face processing isn’t a function of a single brain region, but involves the coordinated activity of several regions. To investigate what might be causing the problem, Galia Avidan at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, and her colleagues scanned the brains of 10 adults who have reported life-long problems with face processing. They also scanned 10 adults without the condition. During the scan, participants were shown sets of images of emotional, neutral, famous and unfamiliar faces. During the task they were asked to press a button when two consecutive images were identical. Some of the images also included buildings, which people with face blindness do not have any trouble identifying – these acted as a control. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 24281 - Posted: 11.03.2017

By Jocelyn Kaiser CENTREVILLE, VIRGINIA—Nothing unusual jumps out upon meeting Evelyn, a bubbly almost-3-year-old with red curls—except that she should not be here, chatting with a visitor in her family’s living room, twirling in her tights to the Pharrell Williams song “Happy.” Evelyn’s older sister Josephine had spinal muscular atrophy type 1 (SMA1), a genetic disease that gradually paralyzes babies. She died at 15 months. Evelyn was an unexpected pregnancy, but her parents decided to have the baby despite one-in-four odds of a second tragedy. Soon after Evelyn was born in December 2014, they were devastated to learn from genetic testing that she, too, had SMA1. “We knew what we were dealing with: We’ll love her for as long as we can,” says her father, Milan Villarreal. But that same night, frantically searching the internet, they learned about a clinical trial in Ohio and sent an email. At 8 weeks old, Evelyn received a gene therapy treatment that gave her body a crucial missing protein. And now here she is, not so different from any healthy toddler. Although she has weak thighs and can’t run normally or jump, she can walk quickly, dance, trace letters, toss foam blocks, carry a small chair, and climb onto her mother Elena’s lap. After the heartbreak of losing their first baby, the Villarreals have watched in amazement as Evelyn has crawled, walked, and talked. “It was just a miracle. Every milestone was like a celebration. We opened a bottle of wine for every little thing she did,” Milan says. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 24280 - Posted: 11.02.2017

Alison Abbott The first controlled, but controversial and small, clinical trial of giving young blood to people with dementia has reported that the procedure appears safe. It has also hinted that it may even produce modest improvements in the daily lives of people who have Alzheimer's disease. Researchers who conducted the trial and others caution that the results are based on just 18 people and therefore are only a first step in exploring this type of treatment. “This is a really very small trial and the results should not be over-interpreted,” says Tony Wyss-Coray, a neurologist at Stanford University in California who led the study. The trial was conducted by his start-up company Alkahest, which is based in San Carlos, California. The results suggest the procedure is safe and hint that it could even boost the ability of people with dementia to undertake everyday skills, such as shopping or preparing a meal. The team plans to present the results on 4 November at the 10th Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease conference in Boston, Massachusetts. Wyss-Coray and his colleagues tested people aged between 54 and 86 with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease. The team gave the 18 subjects weekly infusions for four weeks. They received either a saline placebo or plasma — blood from which the red cells have been removed — from blood donors aged 18–30. During the study, the team monitored the patients to assess their cognitive skills, mood and general abilities to manage their lives independently. The study detected no serious adverse reactions. It saw no significant effect on cognition, but two different batteries of tests assessing daily living skills both showed significant improvement. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Alzheimers; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 24279 - Posted: 11.02.2017

By SHEILA KAPLAN WASHINGTON — Everyday Advanced Hemp Oil, Bosom Lotion and CBD Edibles Gummie Men may have their fans, but the Food and Drug Administration is not among them. Four companies selling those and dozens of other marijuana-derived dietary supplements have been warned by the F.D.A. to stop pitching their products as cures for cancer, a common but unproven claim in the industry. “Substances that contain components of marijuana will be treated like any other products that make unproven claims to shrink cancer tumors,” said Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the agency’s commissioner, in a news release on Wednesday. “We don’t let companies market products that deliberately prey on sick people with baseless claims that their substances can shrink or cure cancer.” The businesses — Stanley Brothers Social Enterprises, Green Roads of Florida, That’s Natural and Natural Alchemist — each sell products that falsely claim to cure cancer, Alzheimer’s disease or other illnesses, the agency said. The supplements allegedly contain cannabidiol (CBD), a component of the marijuana plant that is not approved by the F.D.A. for any use. Unlike medical marijuana, CBD contains only a fraction of the tetrahydrocannabinol, known as THC, needed to cause a high, according to the manufacturers. The companies sell CBD over the internet in a wide range of oil drops, capsules, syrups, teas and creams. The websites feature endorsements from people — generally identified only by first names and last initials — who claim that they or their loved ones have been miraculously cured of terminal diseases and other illnesses. “There are a growing number of effective therapies for many cancers,” said Dr. Gottlieb, a cancer survivor himself. “When people are allowed to illegally market agents that deliver no established benefit, they may steer patients away from products that have proven, anti-tumor effects that could save lives.” © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24278 - Posted: 11.02.2017

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Chronic inflammation in middle age may be associated with an increased risk for brain shrinkage and Alzheimer’s disease later in life. A new study, published in Neurology, looked at 1,633 people whose average age was 53 in 1987-89, measuring white blood cell count and various blood proteins that indicate inflammation. They followed the participants for 24 years. In 2011-13, when the subjects’ average age was 77, the scientists measured their brain volume using M.R.I. and tested their mental agility with a word-memorization task. They found that the greater the number of elevated inflammatory markers earlier in life, the smaller the volume of several parts of the brain, including those associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Higher levels of inflammation were also associated with poorer performance on the memory test. The authors acknowledge that they had blood tests for only one point in time, and that they are assuming that brain loss occurred in the years after the inflammatory markers were assessed. “It’s important early in life that we prevent diseases like diabetes, heart disease or hypertension that cause systemic inflammation,” said the lead author, Keenan A. Walker, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins. “This study shows a temporal relationship between early inflammation and later brain volume loss.” © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 24277 - Posted: 11.02.2017

By Emily Underwood In 2003, neurologist Helen Mayberg of Emory University in Atlanta began to test a bold, experimental treatment for people with severe depression, which involved implanting metal electrodes deep in the brain in a region called area 25. The initial data were promising; eventually, they convinced a device company, St. Jude Medical in Saint Paul, to sponsor a 200-person clinical trial dubbed BROADEN. This month, however, Lancet Psychiatry reported the first published data on the trial’s failure. The study stopped recruiting participants in 2012, after a 6-month study in 90 people failed to show statistically significant improvements between those receiving active stimulation and a control group, in which the device was implanted but switched off. Although that decision was “game over” for BROADEN, the story wasn’t finished for some 44 patients who asked to keep the implants in their brains, and the clinicians responsible for their long-term care, Mayberg explained last week to colleagues at a meeting on the ethical dilemmas of brain stimulation research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. The episode highlights a tricky dilemma for companies and research teams involved in deep brain stimulation (DBS) research: If trial participants want to keep their implants, who will take responsibility—and pay—for their ongoing care? And participants in last week’s meeting said it underscores the need for the growing corps of DBS researchers to think long-term about their planned studies. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 24276 - Posted: 11.01.2017

Rachael Lallensack It takes a village to teach a bat how to communicate. Baby Egyptian fruit bats learn calls from their mothers, but research now shows that they can learn new dialects, or the pitch of their vocalizations, from the colony members around them. Learning to communicate by repeating the noises that others make is something only a few mammal groups — including humans, whales and dolphins — are known to do. Researchers call this vocal learning, and it's something that they're starting to study in bats. Findings published on 31 October in PLOS Biology1 show that bats can also pick things up from the group around them, a process that the authors dub crowd vocal learning. Bats are becoming the best organism to use in studies of how mammals learn to vocalize, because they’re more easily manipulated in the lab than whales or dolphins. The latest research underscores their importance, says neuroscientist Michael Yartsev of the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved with the work. Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus) are highly social and live in colonies with dozens to thousands of other bats. To see how the pups learn dialects, researchers caught 15 pregnant Egyptian fruit bats and took them into the lab. To control for potential genetic effects, they ensured that the mothers weren't closely related. The team then split the mothers into three groups of five and put each group into one of three chambers, where the mothers gave birth to their young. The scientists used recordings of wild Egyptian fruit bat colonies that were low in frequency, high or a mix of both frequencies, and then piped one pitch into each chamber. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 24275 - Posted: 11.01.2017

Using an innovative “NeuroGrid” technology, scientists showed that sleep boosts communication between two brain regions whose connection is critical for the formation of memories. The work, published in Science, was partially funded by the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, a project of the National Institutes of Health devoted to accelerating the development of new approaches to probing the workings of the brain. “Using new technologies advanced by the BRAIN Initiative, these researchers made a fundamental discovery about how the brain creates and stores new memories,” said Nick Langhals, Ph.D., program director at NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. A brain structure called the hippocampus is widely thought to turn new information into permanent memories while we sleep. Previous work by the new study’s senior author, New York University School of Medicine professor György Buzsáki, M.D., Ph.D., revealed high-frequency bursts of neural firing called ripples in the hippocampus during sleep and suggested they play a role in memory storage. The current study confirmed the presence of ripples in the hippocampus during sleep and found them in certain parts of association neocortex, an area on the brain’s surface involved in processing complex sensory information. “When we first observed this, we thought it was incorrect because it had never been observed before,” said Dion Khodagholy, Ph.D., the study’s co-first author and assistant professor at Columbia University in New York.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 24274 - Posted: 11.01.2017

Teens are getting less sleep than they did before smartphones became commonplace, prompting concerns about potentially serious health consequences, researchers say. A study published in the current issue of the journal Sleep Medicine examined data from two surveys of U.S. adolescents conducted over many years and including questions about how many hours of sleep they got. Almost 370,000 adolescents participated. The researchers focused on how much sleep teens reported getting in the years from 2009 to 2015, "when the mobile technology really saturated the market among adolescents," said Zlatan Krizan, a psychologist specializing in sleep and social behaviour at Iowa State University and co-author of the study. Zlatan Krizan, a psychology researcher specializing in sleep, personality and social behaviour at Iowa State University, was one of the authors of a recent study that showed a trend of teens getting less sleep over the years they started using smartphones. (Iowa State University) Krizan and his colleagues found that teens were 16 to 17 per cent more likely to report getting less than seven hours of sleep a night in 2015 than they were in 2009. The recommended amount of sleep for 13 to 18-year-olds is eight to 10 hours per night, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ©2017 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24273 - Posted: 11.01.2017

By Dr Michael Mosley BBC Thanks to the clocks going back, many of us managed to grab a little bit of extra shut-eye over the weekend. And that's no bad thing because, as a country, we seem to be chronically sleep-deprived. According to the Sleep Council, the average Briton gets six-and-a-half hours sleep a night, which for most people is not enough. Lots of studies have shown that cutting back on sleep, deliberately or otherwise, can have a serious impact on our bodies. A few nights of bad sleep can really mess with our blood sugar control and encourage us to overeat. It even messes with our DNA. A few years ago, Trust Me I'm a Doctor did an experiment with Surrey University, asking volunteers to cut down on their sleep by an hour a night for a week. Dr Simon Archer, who helped run the experiment, found that getting an hour's less sleep a night affected the activity of a wide range of our volunteers' genes (around 500 in all) including some which are associated with inflammation and diabetes. Disturbed nights So the negative effects on our bodies of sleep deprivation are clear. But what effect does lack of sleep have on our mental health? To find out Trust Me teamed up with sleep scientists at the University of Oxford to run a small experiment. This time, we recruited four volunteers who normally sleep soundly. We fitted them with devices to accurately monitor their sleep and then, for the first three nights of our study, let them get a full, undisturbed eight hours. For the next three nights, however, we restricted their sleep to just four hours.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 24272 - Posted: 11.01.2017

Susan Milius Kleptopredation klep-toe-preh-day-shun n. A food-gathering strategy of eating an organism and the meal it just ate. A wily sea slug has a way to get two meals in one: It gobbles up smaller predators that have recently gulped in their own prey. “Kleptopredation” is the term Trevor Willis of the University of Portsmouth in England and his colleagues propose for this kind of food theft by well-timed predation. Researchers knew that the small Mediterranean nudibranch Cratena peregrina, with a colorful mane of streamers rippling off its body, climbs and preys on pipe cleaner‒skinny, branched colonies of Eudendrium racemosum hydroids, which are distant relatives of corals. The nudibranchs devour the individual hydroid polyps and, new tests show, prefer them well fed. In experimental buffets with fed or hungry polyps, the nudibranchs ate faster when polyps were fat with just-caught plankton. In this way, at least half of a nudibranch’s diet is plankton. This quirk explains why some biochemical signatures that distinguish predators from prey don’t work out clearly for nudibranchs and hydroids, the researchers report November 1 in Biology Letters. A weird echo of this meal-stealing strategy shows up in certain jumping spiders. The arachnids don’t have the biology to drink vertebrate blood themselves. Instead, they catch a lot of female mosquitoes that have just tanked up (SN: 10/15/05, p. 246). |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 24271 - Posted: 11.01.2017

Sara Reardon Human genome databases are enabling researchers to take a deeper dive into the evolution of psychiatric disorders. Psychiatric disorders can be debilitating and often involve a genetic component, yet, evolution hasn’t weeded them out. Now, recent work is beginning to reveal the role of natural selection — offering a peek at how the genetic underpinnings of mental illness has changed over time. Many psychiatric disorders are polygenic: they can involve hundreds or thousands of genes and DNA mutations. It can be difficult to track how so many genetic regions evolved, and such studies require large genome data sets. But the advent of massive human genome databases is enabling researchers to look for possible connections between mental illnesses and the environmental and societal conditions that might have driven their emergence and development. Others are looking to Neanderthal genetic sequences to help inform the picture of these disorders, as well as cognitive abilities, in humans. Several of these teams presented their findings at the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) meeting in Orlando, Florida, in late October. One project found that evolution selected for DNA variants thought to protect against schizophrenia. The study, led by population geneticist Barbara Stranger of the University of Chicago in Illinois, looked at hundreds of thousands of human genomes using a statistical method that identified signals of selection over the past 2,000 years1. There were no signs of selection in genetic regions associated with any other mental illness. Many of schizophrenia's symptoms, such as auditory hallucinations and jumbling sentences, involve brain regions tied to speech, says Bernard Crespi, an evolutionary biologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. Over the course of hominid evolution, he says, the ability to speak could have outweighed the small, but unavoidable risk that the genes involved in language could malfunction and result in schizophrenia in a small percentage of the population. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 24270 - Posted: 10.31.2017

Jon Hamilton People who are thinking about killing themselves appear to have distinctive brain activity that can now be measured by a computer. In these people, words like "death" and "trouble" produce a distinctive "neural signature" not found in others, scientists report in the journal Nature Human Behavior. More than 44,000 people commit suicide in the U.S. each year. "There really is a difference in the way [suicidal] people think about certain concepts," says Marcel Just, an author of the paper and the D. O. Hebb professor of cognitive neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University. That difference allowed a computer program to distinguish people who thought about suicide from people who did not more than 90 percent of the time. It also allowed the computer program to distinguish people who had attempted suicide from people who had only thought about it. The results come from a study of just 34 young adults and will need to be replicated, says Barry Horwitz, chief of brain imaging and modeling at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. But he says they hint at a future in which brain scans and computers can help assess a person's mental health. Horwitz was not involved in the study. "Just looking at behavior is probably inadequate for a lot of purposes," he says. "It's much better to be able to see what the brain is doing." © 2017 npr

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 24269 - Posted: 10.31.2017

Christopher French, Alice M Gregory and Dan Denis Of all the sleep disorders, “exploding head syndrome” (EHS) has arguably the most intriguing name. EHS has been described as “a sensory parasomnia characterised by the perception of loud noises and/or a sense of explosion in the head when transitioning to or from sleep. These noises are not associated with significant pain, but lead to abrupt arousal and feelings of fright”. Although this phenomenon was first described as long ago as 1876, it was not given its colourful title until 1988. Despite its long history, it has received very little systematic research attention, with most of our knowledge being based upon small samples of case histories as opposed to large-scale investigations. We, the authors of this piece, along with the world’s leading authority on EHS, Dr Brian Sharpless of Argosy University, Northern Virginia, are hoping to rectify that situation by carrying out a large-scale survey of EHS. We’re also interested in the equally intriguing phenomenon of sleep paralysis, which involves a temporary period of paralysis occurring between sleep and wakefulness, often accompanied by hallucinations. If you have ever experienced either EHS or sleep paralysis, or even if you haven’t, we would love to hear from you. In addition to explosions, other types of loud noise perceived during episodes of EHS include gunshots, fireworks, thunder, doors slamming, clapping, shouting, and the clash of cymbals. There can also be beeps, buzzing and video static. This may be accompanied by “electrical” sensations, palpitations, breathing difficulties, sweating, seeing a flash of light, and twitching. Perhaps unsurprisingly, intense fear caused by the belief that something is seriously wrong is often reported. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 24268 - Posted: 10.31.2017