By Ryan Cross Researchers have discovered tell-tale signs of Alzheimer’s disease in 20 elderly chimpanzee brains, rekindling a decades-old debate over whether humans are the only species that develop the debilitating condition. Whether chimps actually succumb to Alzheimer’s or are immune from symptoms despite having the key brain abnormalities is not clear. But either way, the work suggests that chimps could help scientists better understand the disease and how to fight it—if they could get permission to do such studies on these now-endangered animals. A definitive diagnosis of Alzheimer’s includes dementia and two distortions in the brain: amyloid plaques, sticky accumulations of misfolded pieces of protein known as amyloid beta peptides; and neurofibrillary tangles, formed when proteins called tau clump into long filaments that twist around each other like ribbons. Many other primates including rhesus monkeys, baboons, and gorillas also acquire plaques with aging, but tau tangles are either absent in those species or don’t fully resemble those seen in humans. In the new study, researchers led by biological anthropologist Mary Ann Raghanti at Kent State University in Ohio turned to our closest relative, chimpanzees. In 2015, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared all U.S. chimps endangered, effectively ending all invasive research on them. But thanks to a newly founded center that collects brains from chimps that die at zoos or research centers, the team was able to examine the brains of 20 chimps aged 37 to 62—the oldest recorded age for a chimp, roughly equivalent to a human at the age of 120. Of these chimps, 13 had amyloid plaques, and four also had the neurofibrillary tangles typical of more advanced stages of Alzheimer’s in humans, the team writes [DATE TK] in Neurobiology of Aging. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 23906 - Posted: 08.01.2017

Laura Sanders The company mice keep can change their behavior. In some ways, genetically normal littermates behave like mice that carry an autism-related mutation, despite not having the mutation themselves, scientists report. The results, published July 31 in eNeuro, suggest that the social environment influences behavior in complex and important ways, says neuroscientist Alice Luo Clayton of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative in New York City. The finding comes from looking past the mutated mice to their nonmutated littermates, which are usually not a subject of scrutiny. “People almost never look at it from that direction,” says Clayton, who wasn’t involved in the study. Researchers initially planned to investigate the social behavior of mice that carried a mutation found in some people with autism. Studying nonmutated mice wasn’t part of the plan. “We stumbled into this,” says study coauthor Stéphane Baudouin, a neurobiologist at Cardiff University in Wales. Baudouin and colleagues studied groups of mice that had been genetically modified to lack neuroligin-3, a gene that is mutated in some people with autism. Without the gene, the mice didn’t have Neuroligin-3 in their brains, a protein that helps nerve cells communicate. Along with other behavioral quirks, these mice didn’t show interest in sniffing other mice, as expected. But Baudouin noticed that the behavior of the nonmutated control mice who lived with the neuroligin-3 mutants also seemed off. He suspected that the behavior of the mutated mice might be to blame. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017.

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 23905 - Posted: 08.01.2017

Emily Siner The Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tenn., is country music's Holy Land. It's home to the weekly radio show that put country music on the national map in 1925. And it's where this summer, 30 people with Williams syndrome eagerly arrived backstage. Williams syndrome is a rare genetic disorder that can cause developmental disabilities. People with the condition are often known for their outgoing personalities and their profound love of music. Scientists are still trying to figure out where this musical affinity comes from and how it can help them overcome their challenges. That's why 12 years ago, researchers at Vanderbilt University set up a summer camp for people with Williams syndrome. For a week every summer, campers come to Nashville to immerse themselves in country music and participate in cutting-edge research. This isn't the only summer camp for people with Williams syndrome, but it is unique in its distinctive country flair. It's organized by the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center, whose faculty and staff focus on developmental disabilities. Eight years ago, the Academy of Country Music's philanthropic arm, ACM Lifting Lives, started funding the program. Campers spend the week meeting musicians and visiting recording studios, even writing an original song. This year, they teamed up with one of country's hottest stars, Dierks Bentley, on that. And they get a backstage tour of the Grand Ole Opry led by Clancey Hopper, who has Williams syndrome herself and attended the Nashville camp for eight years before applying for a job at the Opry. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23904 - Posted: 08.01.2017

By Ariana Eunjung Cha By now, the connection between sleep and weight gain has been well established. Numerous studies have provided evidence that sleeping too little — less than five hours — messes with your hormones, slows down your metabolism and reprograms your body to eat more. But just how serious are the consequences in terms of numbers? A new study published in PLOS One takes a stab at this question by studying the relationship between sleep duration and a number of quantifiable factors: waist circumference, blood pressure, lipids, glucose, thyroid hormones and other important measures of a person's metabolic profile. The research, led by the Leeds Institute of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine and the School of Food Science and Nutrition, involved 1,615 people ages 19 to 65 in Great Britain. The most striking suggestion was that getting insufficient sleep may make you go up a clothing size. People in the study who were sleeping an average of six hours each night had waist measurements about 1.2 inches (or 3 centimeters) more than those getting nine hours of sleep a night. Those with less sleep also weighed more. The relationship between more sleep and smaller waists and a lower body mass index (BMI) appeared to be almost linear, as shown below. The findings appear to contradict other studies that show that too much sleep — nine hours or more — might have a similar impact on the body as too little sleep. This new study appears to show that waist circumference and BMI are lowest for those with 12 hours of sleep. The theory of why this relationship exists has to do with two hormones that help tell you when to eat and when to stop. Less sleep upsets the balance, making you eat more. Combine that with the slower metabolism that people with lack of sleep appear to have it's no wonder that people are prone to becoming larger and gaining weight. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sleep; Obesity
Link ID: 23903 - Posted: 08.01.2017

By Giorgia Guglielmi After a 5-month road trip across Asia in 2010, 22-year-old college graduate Matthew Lazell-Fairman started feeling constantly tired, his muscles sore and head aching. A doctor recommended getting a gym membership, but after the first training session, Lazell-Fairman’s body crashed: He was so exhausted he couldn’t go to work as a paralegal for the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C., for days. Lazell-Fairman has never fully recovered. He can now do a few hours of light activity—cooking, for example—per day but has to spend the rest of his time lying flat in bed. Lazell-Fairman is among the estimated 17 million people worldwide with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), a disease whose trigger is unknown and for which there are neither standard diagnostic tools nor effective treatments. In the largest study of its kind, researchers have now found that the blood levels of immune molecules that cause flulike symptoms such as fever and fatigue track the severity of symptoms in people who have received a diagnosis of CFS. The results may provide insight into the cause of the mysterious illness, or at least provide a way of gauging its progress and evaluating treatments. “This work is another strong piece of evidence that there is a biologic dysfunction at the root of the disease,” says Mady Hornig, a physician scientist at Columbia University whose research has also identified potential biomarkers for CFS. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Depression; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 23902 - Posted: 08.01.2017

Ashlie Stevens Ah, the brain freeze — the signature pain of summer experienced by anyone who has eaten an ice cream cone with too much enthusiasm or slurped down a slushie a little too quickly. But have you ever stopped mid-freeze to think about why our bodies react like this? Well, researchers who study pain have, and some, like Dr. Kris Rau of the University of Louisville in Kentucky, say it's a good way to understand the basics of how we process damaging stimuli. But first, a lesson in terminology. "There's a scientific medical term for ice cream headaches which is sphenopalatine ganglion neuralgia," Rau says. Try breaking that out at your next ice cream social. Anyway, to understand how brain freeze happens, it helps to think of your body and brain as a big computer where everything is hooked together. In this case, you see an ice cream truck. You get some ice cream. And then your brain gives you the go-ahead and you dive face-first into a double-scoop of mint chocolate chip. "Now on the roof of your mouth there are a lot of little blood vessels, capillaries," Rau says. "And there's a lot of nerve fibers called nociceptors that detect painful or noxious stimuli." The rush of cold causes those vessels to constrict. "And when that happens, it happens so quickly that all of those little pain fibers in the roof of your mouth — they interpret that as being a painful stimulus," Rau says. A message is then shot up to your brain via the trigeminal nerve, one of the major nerves of the facial area. The brain itself doesn't have any pain sensing fibers, but its covering — called the meninges — does. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 23901 - Posted: 08.01.2017

By JANE E. BRODY Putting carboxymethylcellulose sodium in one’s eyes two, three or more times a day may not sound like a great experience. But I can assure you that it can be. Drops of this chemical, called a topical lubricant, help to keep my eyes from burning, avoiding bright lights, becoming red and itchy, and generally feeling miserable. Like tens of millions of Americans, especially women older than 50, I have dry eye disease, medically known as keratoconjunctivitis sicca. Fortunately, my problem is not severe, certainly not as bad as that of an elderly woman I know who has to use a nightly ointment of mineral oil and Vaseline, which minimizes the dryness but temporarily blurs her vision. The drops I use, an over-the-counter preservative-free product called Refresh Plus (also sold as generic store brands) that I carry with me at all times, are a crucial measure I take to keep my eyes from becoming overly dry and chronically irritated — but not the only one. To minimize the drying effect of wind when driving, cycling or sitting in a room cooled by a fan or air-conditioning, I wear wraparound glasses even when I don’t need them to see clearly. Watertight goggles are de rigueur when swimming, even in fresh water. And I refresh my eyes with drops when I watch a movie, work long hours at the computer, or do any activity that depresses the frequency of blinking, which moistens the eyes. Dry eye is sometimes referred to as “a nuisance complaint — it’s not the sexiest of eye problems,” Dr. Rachel Bishop, chief consulting ophthalmologist at the National Eye Institute, told me. Nonetheless, she said, “Dry eye disease deserves serious professional — and personal — attention. It can be very debilitating and seriously diminish a person’s quality of life.” Tears serve a variety of functions, which accounts for the kinds of complications their deficiency can cause. They lubricate the eye, supply it with nutrients and oxygen, and help to focus images and clear the eye of debris. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 23900 - Posted: 08.01.2017

By Leslie Nemo, Liz Tormes Gray, white and wet, an image of the brain by itself can repulse more often than inspire. But when researchers and artists look past its outward appearance, they can reveal thrilling images of the organ that the rest of us would otherwise never see. Though many of these images resulted from lab work and research into how our nervous system functions, they easily stand alone as art—clearly a neuroscience degree is not necessary to appreciate the brain’s intricacies. For the seventh year in a row, the Art of Neuroscience competition out of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam asked researchers and artists to submit their paintings, renderings, magnifications and videos of animal brains. The committee’s winning entry and honorable mentions are presented below, along with a selection of Scientific American editors’ favorites. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 23899 - Posted: 08.01.2017

By Harrison Smith Marian Diamond, a pathbreaking neuroscientist whose research — including a study of Albert Einstein’s preserved brain — showed that the body’s three-pound seat of consciousness was a dynamic structure of beautiful complexity, capable of development even in old age, died July 25 at an assisted-living community in Oakland, Calif. She was 90. A daughter, Ann Diamond, confirmed her death but did not know the cause. Dr. Diamond, a professor emerita of integrative biology at the University of California at Berkeley, was for decades known on campus as the woman with the hat box. Inside the container, decorated on the outside with a floral print and carried by a bright blue string, was a preserved human brain. It was the crucial prop for a lesson she spent a half century teaching: that the brain was, as she once wrote, “the most complex mass of protoplasm on this earth and, perhaps, in our galaxy.” Dr. Diamond was considered a foundational figure in modern neuroscience. Crucially, she provided the first hard evidence demonstrating the brain’s plasticity — its ability to develop, to grow, even in adulthood. “In doing so,” her colleague George Brooks said in a statement, “she shattered the old paradigm of understanding the brain as a static and unchangeable entity that simply degenerated as we age.” Her breakthrough occurred in the early 1960s, when — building on the work of psychologist Donald O. Hebb — she began studying the brains of lab rats. Rats that were raised alone, in small and desolate cages, had more trouble navigating a maze than did rats that were raised in “enriched” cages, with toys and rat playmates. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23898 - Posted: 08.01.2017

By CADE METZ SAN FRANCISCO — Dawn Jewell recently treated a patient haunted by a car crash. The patient had developed acute anxiety over the cross streets where the crash occurred, unable to drive a route that carried so many painful memories. So Dr. Jewell, a psychologist in Colorado, treated the patient through a technique called exposure therapy, providing emotional guidance as they revisited the intersection together. But they did not physically return to the site. They revisited it through virtual reality. Dr. Jewell is among a handful of psychologists testing a new service from a Silicon Valley start-up called Limbix that offers exposure therapy through Daydream View, the Google headset that works in tandem with a smartphone. “It provides exposure in a way that patients feel safe,” she said. “We can go to a location together, and the patient can tell me what they’re feeling and what they’re thinking.” The service recreates outdoor locations by tapping into another Google product, Street View, a vast online database of photos that delivers panoramic scenes of roadways and other locations around the world. Using these virtual street scenes, Dr. Jewell has treated a second patient who struggled with anxiety after being injured by another person outside a local building. The service is also designed to provide treatment in other ways, like taking patients to the top of a virtual skyscraper so they can face a fear of heights or to a virtual bar so they can address an alcohol addiction. Backed by the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, Limbix is less than a year old. The creators of its new service, including its chief executive and co-founder, Benjamin Lewis, worked in the seminal virtual reality efforts at Google and Facebook. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Emotions
Link ID: 23897 - Posted: 07.31.2017

By Robert Sanders, Media relations Marian Cleeves Diamond, one of the founders of modern neuroscience who was the first to show that the brain can change with experience and improve with enrichment, and who discovered evidence of this in the brain of Albert Einstein, died July 25 at the age of 90 in Oakland. A professor emerita of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, Diamond achieved celebrity in 1984 when she examined preserved slices of Einstein’s brain, finding that he had more support cells in the brain than average. Her main claim to fame, however, came from work on rats, in which she showed that an enriched environment — toys and companions — changed the anatomy of the brain. The implication was that the brains of all animals, including humans, benefit from an enriched environment, and that impoverished environments can lower the capacity to learn. “Her research demonstrated the impact of enrichment on brain development — a simple but powerful new understanding that has literally changed the world, from how we think about ourselves to how we raise our children,” said UC Berkeley colleague George Brooks, a professor of integrative biology. “Dr. Diamond showed anatomically, for the first time, what we now call plasticity of the brain. In doing so she shattered the old paradigm of understanding the brain as a static and unchangeable entity that simply degenerated as we age. ” Her results were initially resisted by some neuroscientists. At one meeting, she later recalled, a man stood up after her talk and said loudly, “Young lady, that brain cannot change!” © 2017 UC Regents

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23896 - Posted: 07.31.2017

Jon Hamilton The human brain knows what it knows. And so, it appears, does a rat brain. Rats have shown that they have the ability to monitor the strength of their own memories, researchers from Providence College reported this month in the journal Animal Cognition. Brain scientists call this sort of ability metacognition. It's a concept that became famous in 2002, when then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld explained to reporters: There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. Rumsfeld wasn't talking about rats. But he could have been, says Michael Beran, a comparative psychologist and associate professor at Georgia State University who was not part of the research. The new study of rats offers "consistent and clear evidence that they have these glimmerings of metacognitive monitoring," Beran says. The finding suggests an ancient evolutionary path that eventually led to humans' highly developed ability to monitor their own thoughts. It also suggests that rats could be valuable animal models for studying diseases like Alzheimer's, which erode metacognition. The study focused on a type of metacognition called metamemory. It's something we depend on to get through the day, says Victoria Templer, the study's lead author and an assistant professor in the psychology department at Providence College. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23895 - Posted: 07.29.2017

By Helen Thomson Have you recently arrived at work naked or turned up for an exam without revising? If you want to avoid having nightmares like these, it might be best to get less than 9 hours’ sleep a night. People often have nightmares following upsetting events, and research into nightmares has mostly focused on people with conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But most people get nightmares at some point, prompting Stephanie Rek at the University of Oxford and her colleagues to perform one of the largest ever studies of nightmares in the general population. Discover the new science of sleep and dreaming: Learn more at New Scientist Live in London The team recruited 846 people through media advertisements and databases of people interested in sleep studies, and asked them to complete an online survey. The participants were asked questions such as how many nightmares they had experienced over the past two weeks, and how bad they were. These answers contributed to an overall score on a “nightmare severity scale”. Each volunteer was also assessed for PTSD and asked about other aspects of their life, such as recent divorces or legal trouble, their tendency to worry, how much sleep they get and how much alcohol they drink. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 23894 - Posted: 07.29.2017

By Laurie McGinley and William Wan An electronic cigarette is demonstrated in Chicago. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File) The Food and Drug Administration said Friday it wants to reduce the nicotine in cigarettes to make them less addictive. The unexpected announcement sent shares of tobacco companies plummeting and sparked praise among some public health advocates. If successful, the effort would be the first time the government has tried to get the Americans to quit cigarettes by reaching beyond warning labels or taxes to attacking the actual addictive substance inside. The FDA rolled out a second major announcement at the same time: It is delaying for several years a key regulation affecting cigars and e-cigarettes, including flavored vaping products that studies show are especially enticing to youth. Specifically, it postponed the requirement that such products be approved by the agency. FDA’s commissioner Scott Gottlieb said both actions are part of a comprehensive plan to eventually wean smokers off conventional cigarettes and steer them toward less harmful alternative forms of nicotine like vaping. “The overwhelming amount of death and disease attributable to tobacco is caused by addiction to cigarettes — the only legal consumer product that, when used as intended, will kill half of all long-term users,” he said. Some health proponents, however, expressed caution, pointing out that the nicotine-reduction proposal could take years to enact and could be derailed by major hurdles, including the significant lobbying power of tobacco industry. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23893 - Posted: 07.29.2017

People who drink three to four times a week are less likely to develop type 2 diabetes than those who never drink, Danish researchers suggest. Wine appears to be particularly beneficial, probably as it plays a role in helping to manage blood sugar, the study, published in Diabetologia, says. They surveyed more than 70,000 people on their alcohol intake - how much and how often they drank. But experts said this wasn't a "green light" to drink more than recommended. And Public Health England warned that consuming alcohol contributed to a vast number of other serious diseases, including some cancers, heart and liver disease. "People should keep this in mind when thinking about how much they drink," a spokeswoman said. Prof Janne Tolstrup, from the National Institute of Public Health of the University of Southern Denmark, who led the research, said: "We found that drinking frequency has an independent effect from the amount of alcohol taken. "We can see it's a better effect to drink the alcohol in four portions rather than all at once." After around five years, study participants were followed up and a total of 859 men and 887 women group had developed diabetes - either type 1 or the more common type 2. The researchers concluded that drinking moderately three to four times a week reduced a woman's risk of diabetes by 32% while it lowered a man's by 27%, compared with people drinking on less than one day a week. Findings also suggest that not all types of alcohol had the same effect. Wine appeared to be particularly beneficial because polyphenols, particularly in red wine, play a role in helping to manage blood sugar. © 2017 BBC.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23892 - Posted: 07.29.2017

By Karl Gruber Are you good with faces? So is the Japanese rice fish – at least, it is if the faces are the right way up. Just like humans, the tiny fish has no problem recognising faces orientated the usual way, but, again like us, it struggles when they are inverted. The finding indicates that the fish may have developed a unique brain pathway for face recognition, just as humans have. We have no problem identifying most objects in our environment – say, a chair – no matter what way up they are. But faces are different. It is relatively easy for us to spot the differences between two faces, even if they are physically similar, if we see them in photographs the right way up. But if the images are upside down, telling them apart gets a bit tricky. “This is because we have a specific brain area for processing faces, and when the face is upside down, we process the image through object processing pathways, and not the face-processing pathways any more,” says Mu-Yun Wang at the University of Tokyo, Japan. Until now, this face-inversion effect was considered exclusive to mammals as it has only been observed in primates and sheep. Enter the Japanese rice fish, also known as the medaka (Oryzias latipes), a 3.5-centimetre-long shoaling fish commonly found in rice paddies, marshes, ponds and slow-moving streams in East Asia. These fish are very social, so identifying the right individuals to associate with is important. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Attention; Evolution
Link ID: 23891 - Posted: 07.28.2017

Sarah Boseley Health editor Men who consume a lot of added sugar in drinks, cakes and confectionery run an increased risk of depression, according to a new study. Researchers from University College London (UCL) looked at sugar in the diet and common mental health problems in a very large cohort of 5,000 men and 2,000 women recruited for the Whitehall II study in the 1980s. Sugar tax must apply to sweets as well as drinks, say campaigners Read more They found a strong association between consuming higher levels of sugar and depression in men. Men with the highest intake – more than 67g a day – had a 23% increased chance of suffering a common mental disorder after five years than those who consumed the lowest levels of sugar – less than 39.5g. The researchers investigated whether men might be eating more sugary foods because they were depressed, but found that was not the case. Lead author Anika Knüppel, of the UCL Institute of Epidemiology and Health, said: “High sugar diets have a number of influences on our health but our study shows that there might also be a link between sugar and mood disorders, particularly among men. There are numerous factors that influence chances for mood disorders, but having a diet high in sugary foods and drinks might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Depression; Obesity
Link ID: 23890 - Posted: 07.28.2017

By Giorgia Guglielmi Tits amazing are birds Japanese. If you didn’t get that, you wouldn’t be alone: Humans figure out the meaning of sentences like this using grammatical rules such as word order. It turns out that Japanese tits, social birds that live in Japan and the Russian Far East, do it too. These wild birds respond to calls they’ve never heard before only if the chirps are in the right order, researchers report today in Current Biology. When a predator threatens the flock, Japanese tits produce something called a “mobbing call,” with the sequence ABC-D. By itself, the ABC part of the call means “danger.” But the D part of the call—similar to the “recruitment call” of a close relative, the willow tit—attracts flock members when there’s something to share, such as food. When the two parts are produced together, Japanese tits flock together to mob the intruder. To find out if the order of the calls mattered, researchers created a song that Japanese tits had never heard before—an artificial sequence made up of the Japanese tit’s ABC alert, followed by the willow tit’s recruitment call, tӓӓ. (You can listen to them, above.) They then played it from a loudspeaker for a flock of nearby tits. When Japanese tits heard the ABC- tӓӓ call, they turned their heads, looking for a predator, as they approached the loudspeaker. But when the artificial sequence was reversed (tӓӓ-ABC), the birds didn’t react. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 23889 - Posted: 07.28.2017

By Tara Bahrampour Older patients who become disoriented or confused after surgery are more than three times more likely to develop dementia later, a new study has found. The report, published Friday by the British Journal of Anaesthesia, assesses the effects of post-operative delirium (POD) on people 65 and older who were cognitively normal before their operations. Of 1,152 such patients, 9.5 percent met criteria for mild cognitive impairment or dementia a median of nine months after surgery. The frequency of being diagnosed with MCI or dementia after surgery was much higher – 33.3 percent – among those who had experienced post-operative delirium, compared with 9 percent among those who had not. While earlier studies have showed a relationship between POD and dementia, this is the first to look entirely at subjects who showed no cognitive decline in pre-surgery assessments, said David Warner, an anesthesiologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota and the study’s senior author. Delirium is defined by an acute state of confusion, inattention, disorganized thinking, and a fluctuating mental state. Older patients are more likely than younger ones to develop it after surgery, as are people with lower education levels and those who undergo vascular procedures. Further study is needed to determine whether delirium contributes to later cognitive decline or is an indicator of some underlying factor that made people more likely to develop dementia, Warner said. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 23888 - Posted: 07.28.2017

By BENEDICT CAREY Dr. Herbert Needleman, whose studies of children exposed to low levels of lead prompted regulations that limited or banned the metal in a range of common products, like gasoline and paint, and set a standard for the modern study of environmental toxins, died on July 18 in Pittsburgh. He was 89. His son, Dr. Joshua Needleman, said the cause was lung failure resulting from edema, an excess of fluid. Dr. Needleman was working at a community psychiatric clinic in North Philadelphia after medical school when he met a young man who would become a touchstone for a crusading career. The boy approached Dr. Needleman and explained his ambitions, which were large, even as the boy struggled with words. He was bright and open; nonetheless he had deficits that struck Dr. Needleman as similar to those found in children with lead poisoning. “I thought, how many of these kids who are coming to the clinic are in fact a missed case of lead poisoning?” he said in a later interview. His clinic office overlooked a school playground; the view gave him an idea. Doctors had long known that exposure to high doses of lead caused mental lapses, even permanent brain damage and death. But what about the low-level exposure that many children, like the ones playing in the yard, absorbed every day — merely by living in older urban neighborhoods thick with lead paint and industrial contamination? No one knew. No one could study the effects carefully, because the available tests for lead exposure were of hair, blood, or fingernails — each flawed in its own way. Bone is the most accurate long-term repository: Once absorbed into the body, lead circulates in the blood and accumulates in the skeleton. But taking bone samples — biopsies — is painful and hardly justifiable for the sake of a hypothesis, especially in young children. Yet Dr. Needleman had seen an earlier study of lead poisoning, a small one, which measured accumulated lead exposure in teeth. Teeth are a part of the human skeleton. And young children shed them. “That was the insight that changed everything,” said Dr. Bernard Goldstein, former dean of the University of Pittsburgh’s graduate school of public health. “Herb became the Tooth Fairy.” © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23887 - Posted: 07.28.2017