By Lenny Bernstein Forty million American adults have lost some hearing because of noise, and half of them suffered the damage outside the workplace, from everyday exposure to leaf blowers, sirens, rock concerts and other loud sounds, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday. A quarter of people ages 20 to 69 were suffering some hearing deficits, the CDC reported in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, even though the vast majority of the people in the study claimed to have good or excellent hearing. The researchers found that 24 percent of adults had “audiometric notches” — a deterioration in the softest sound a person can hear — in one or both ears. The data came from 3,583 people who had undergone hearing tests and reported the results in the 2011-2012 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). The review's more surprising finding — which the CDC had not previously studied — was that 53 percent of those people said they had no regular exposure to loud noise at work. That means the hearing loss was caused by other environmental factors, including listening to music through headphones with the volume turned up too high. “Noise is damaging hearing before anyone notices or diagnoses it,” said Anne Schuchat, the CDC's acting director. “Because of that, the start of hearing loss is underrecognized.” The study revealed that 19 percent of people between the ages of 20 and 29 had some hearing loss, a finding that Schuchat called alarming. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 23197 - Posted: 02.08.2017

By JANE E. BRODY Dizziness is not a disease but rather a symptom that can result from a huge variety of underlying disorders or, in some cases, no disorder at all. Readily determining its cause and how best to treat it — or whether to let it resolve on its own — can depend on how well patients are able to describe exactly how they feel during a dizziness episode and the circumstances under which it usually occurs. For example, I recently experienced a rather frightening attack of dizziness, accompanied by nausea, at a food and beverage tasting event where I ate much more than I usually do. Suddenly feeling that I might faint at any moment, I lay down on a concrete balcony for about 10 minutes until the disconcerting sensations passed, after which I felt completely normal. The next morning I checked the internet for my symptom — dizziness after eating — and discovered the condition had a name: Postprandial hypotension, a sudden drop in blood pressure when too much blood is diverted to the digestive tract, leaving the brain relatively deprived. The condition most often affects older adults who may have an associated disorder like diabetes, hypertension or Parkinson’s disease that impedes the body’s ability to maintain a normal blood pressure. Fortunately, I am thus far spared any disorder linked to this symptom, but I’m now careful to avoid overeating lest it happen again. “An essential problem is that almost every disease can cause dizziness,” say two medical experts who wrote a comprehensive new book, “Dizziness: Why You Feel Dizzy and What Will Help You Feel Better.” Although the vast majority of patients seen at dizziness clinics do not have a serious health problem, the authors, Dr. Gregory T. Whitman and Dr. Robert W. Baloh, emphasize that doctors must always “be on the alert for a serious disease presenting as ‘dizziness,’” like “stroke, transient ischemic attacks, multiple sclerosis and brain tumors.” © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 23196 - Posted: 02.07.2017

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News website Deaf mice have been able to hear a tiny whisper after being given a "landmark" gene therapy by US scientists. They say restoring near-normal hearing in the animals paves the way for similar treatments for people "in the near future". Studies, published in Nature Biotechnology, corrected errors that led to the sound-sensing hairs in the ear becoming defective. The researchers used a synthetic virus to nip in and correct the defect. "It's unprecedented, this is the first time we've seen this level of hearing restoration," said researcher Dr Jeffrey Holt, from Boston Children's Hospital. Hair defect About half of all forms of deafness are due to an error in the instructions for life - DNA. In the experiments at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, the mice had a genetic disorder called Usher syndrome. It means there are inaccurate instructions for building microscopic hairs inside the ear. In healthy ears, sets of outer hair cells magnify sound waves and inner hair cells then convert sounds to electrical signals that go to the brain. The hairs normally form these neat V-shaped rows. But in Usher syndrome they become disorganised - severely affecting hearing. The researchers developed a synthetic virus that was able to "infect" the ear with the correct instructions for building hair cells. © 2017 BBC.

Keyword: Hearing; Regeneration
Link ID: 23195 - Posted: 02.07.2017

By Julia Shaw We all have times of day when we are not at our best. For me, before 10am, and between 2-4pm, it’s as though my brain just doesn’t work the way it should. I labor to come up with names, struggle to keep my train of thought, and my eloquence drops to the level expected of an eight-year-old. In an effort to blame my brain for this, rather than my motivation, I reached out to a researcher in the area of sleep and circadian neuroscience. Andrea Smit, a PhD student working with Professors John McDonald and Ralph Mistlberger at Simon Fraser University in Canada, was happy to help me find excuses for why my memory is so terribly unreliable at certain times of day. Humans have daily biological rhythms, called circadian rhythms, which affect almost everything that we do. They inform our bodies when it is time to eat and sleep, and they dictate our ability to remember things. According to Smit, “Chronotype, the degree to which someone is a “morning lark” or a “night owl,” is a manifestation of circadian rhythms. In a recent study, Smit used EEG, a type of brain scan, to study the interaction between chronotypes and memory. “Testing extreme chronotypes at multiple times of day allowed us to compare attentional abilities and visual short term memory between morning larks and night owls. Night owls were worse at suppressing distracting visual information and had a worse visual short term memory in the morning as compared with the afternoon,” she says. “Our research shows that circadian rhythms interact with memories even at very early stages of processing within the brain.” © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23194 - Posted: 02.07.2017

Aylin Woodward Fearful, flighty chickens raised for eating can hurt themselves while trying to avoid human handlers. But there may be a simple way to hatch calmer chicks: Shine light on the eggs for at least 12 hours a day. Researchers at the University of California, Davis bathed eggs daily in light for different time periods during their three-week incubation. When the chickens reached 3 to 6 weeks old, the scientists tested the birds’ fear responses. In one test, 120 chickens were randomly selected from the 1,006-bird sample and placed one by one in a box with a human “predator” sitting visibly nearby. The chickens incubated in light the longest — 12 hours — made an average of 179 distress calls in three minutes, compared with 211 from birds incubated in complete darkness, animal scientists Gregory Archer and Joy Mench report in January in Applied Animal Behaviour Science. Chickens exposed to lots of light as eggs “would sit in the closest part of the box to me and just chill out,” Archer says. The others spent their time trying to get away. How light has its effect is unclear. On commercial chicken farms, eggs typically sit in warm, dark incubation rooms. The researchers are now testing light's effects in large, commercial incubators. Using light exposure to raise less-fearful chickens could reduce broken bones during handling at processing plants, Archer says. It might also decrease harmful anxious behaviors, such as feather pecking of nearby chickens. G. S. Archer and J. A. Mench. Exposing avian embryos to light affects post-hatch anti-predator fear responses. Applied Animal Behaviour Science. Vol. 186, January 2017, p. 80. doi: 10.1016/j.applanim.2016.10.014. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Emotions
Link ID: 23193 - Posted: 02.07.2017

By Meredith Wadman The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) today put the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) on notice that it intends to use legal tools to force the agency to restore tens of thousands of documents on animal welfare that it removed from its website on Friday. In this letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, the animal welfare organization reminded the government that under the terms of a 2009 legal settlement with HSUS, USDA had agreed to make public some of the records it has now scrubbed from its public database. HSUS, its lawyers write, “is exercising its rights under [the 2009 settlement] and intends to take further action unless USDA agrees to reconsider this bizarre reversal of the agency’s longstanding policy” of making inspection records and others publicly available. The animal organization’s letter notes that under the terms of the 2009 settlement, the two parties, HSUS and USDA, now have 30 days to settle their differences. After that, HSUS can ask the court to reopen the lawsuit. A spokesperson for USDA did not in the course of 3 hours return an email and a call requesting comment. The HSUS letter also argues that USDA’s actions violate laws governing the electronic release of data under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). One of the laws requires agencies to “make available for public inspection … [By] electronic means” all FOIA requests that it releases to anyone and that it determines are likely to be asked for again, by others. When they were public, many of USDA’s inspection reports, especially those of troubled facilities, were accessed repeatedly by a number of different users. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 23192 - Posted: 02.07.2017

Rae Ellen Bichell By the time Kay Schwister got her diagnosis last summer, she couldn't talk anymore. But she could still scowl, and scowl she did. After weeks of decline and no clue what was causing it, doctors had told Schwister — a 53-year-old vocational rehab counselor and mother of two from Chicago — that she had an incurable disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD. The disease was shrinking Kay's brain, and riddling it with holes. She would likely only live a few more weeks, the doctors said. It was a diagnosis that no one could ever want. But the fact that Schwister was able to get a firm diagnosis while still alive is a relatively new development that represents a step forward in understanding a group of devastating neurological disorders. And, some biochemists say, it could lead to better ways of diagnosing brain diseases that are much more common, including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. For Kay Schwister it all started in the spring of 2016, when she started getting headaches and feeling dizzy all the time. Aging, she told herself, just didn't feel very good. Over the next few weeks, she got steadily worse. "She got to the point where she was so nauseous and so dizzy that she stopped driving and actually stopped working," says her husband, Tim Schwister. By the time Kay entered the emergency room last June her speech had changed. She was enunciating things in a strange way, and finishing each sentence on a really high note. Doctors drew blood and spinal fluid and tested it for things like multiple sclerosis and mercury poisoning. Those tests came back negative. Soon, Kay couldn't talk or walk. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 23191 - Posted: 02.06.2017

By SHARON LERNER IN the fall, I began to research an article that I gave the working title “The Last Days of Chlorpyrifos.” A widely used pesticide, chlorpyrifos affects humans as well as the bugs it kills. Back in the halcyon days before the election, the optimism of the title seemed warranted. After years of study, the Environmental Protection Agency had announced in October 2015 that it could no longer vouch for the safety of chlorpyrifos on food. The agency had acknowledged for decades that chlorpyrifos can cause acute poisoning and in the early 2000s it had prohibited its use in most home products and reduced the amounts that could be used on some crops. But the 2015 announcement stemmed from the agency’s recognition of mounting evidence that prenatal exposure to chlorpyrifos could have lasting effects on children’s brains. Though the process of re-evaluating the safety of the pesticide had stretched on for years, at long last, chlorpyrifos seemed to be going down. Another report was expected to provide all the ammunition necessary to stop its use on fruits and vegetables, and I was eager to document its demise. For a reporter who covers the environment, this was going to be the rare happy story. The election of President Trump has thrown that outcome — indeed, the fate of many of the E.P.A.’s public health protections — into question. On Monday, Mr. Trump signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to scrap two regulations for every one they institute on small businesses. In its first week, his administration suspended 30 environmental regulations issued under President Barack Obama. And Myron Ebell, who oversaw the agency’s transition team, suggested recently that the E.P.A.’s staff may soon be reduced by as much as two-thirds. How will the agency’s mission “to protect human health and the environment” fare under this assault? What happens with chlorpyrifos may be our best indication. “I think it’ll be a very early test of their commitment to environmental protection,” Jim Jones, who oversaw the evaluation of chlorpyrifos as the E.P.A.’s assistant administrator for chemical safety and pollution prevention, told me, not long after he stepped down on Inauguration Day. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23190 - Posted: 02.06.2017

Diana Steele Generations of gurus have exhorted, “Live in the moment!” For Lonni Sue Johnson, that’s all she can do. In 2007, viral encephalitis destroyed Johnson’s hippocampus. Without that crucial brain structure, Johnson lost most of her memories of the past and can’t form new ones. She literally lives in the present. In The Perpetual Now, science journalist Michael Lemonick describes Johnson’s world and tells the story of her life before her illness, in which she was an illustrator (she produced many New Yorker covers), private pilot and accomplished amateur violist. Johnson can’t remember biographical details of her own life, recall anything about history or remember anything new. But remarkably, she can converse expertly about making art and she creates elaborately illustrated word-search puzzles. She still plays viola with expertise and expression and, though she will never remember that she has seen it before, she can even learn new music. Neuroscientists are curious about Johnson’s brain in part because her education and expertise before her illness contrast sharply with that of the most famous amnesiac known to science, Henry Molaison. Lemonick interweaves the story of “Patient H.M.,” as he was known, with Johnson’s biography. Molaison had experienced seizures since childhood and held menial jobs until surgery in his 20s destroyed his hippo-campus. At the time, in the 1950s, Molaison’s subsequent amnesia came as a surprise, prompting a 50-year study of his brain that provided a fundamental understanding of the central role of the hippocampus in forming conscious memories. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23189 - Posted: 02.06.2017

Sara Reardon The welfare of research animals, including primates, will be much harder for the public to track after a US regulatory agency removes information from its website. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) agency charged with ensuring the humane treatment of large research animals, such as primates and goats, has quietly scrubbed all inspection reports and enforcement records from its website. The move has drawn criticism from animal welfare and transparency activists who say the public has the right to know how their tax dollars are being used. The USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), which also oversees animals in circuses, zoos and those sold commercially as pets, says that making the data publicly available posed a threat to individuals’ privacy. USDA spokesperson Tanya Espinosa would not specify what personal information the agency wanted to protect, but said that it would be impossible to redact it from all the tens of thousands of inspection reports, complaints and enforcement action documents that used to be public. The decision is a result of the USDA’s “commitment to being transparent, remaining responsive to our stakeholders’ informational needs, and maintaining the privacy rights of individuals”, according to a statement on the agency’s website. The records will still be available in redacted form through freedom-of-information requests. ”If the same records are frequently requested via the Freedom of Information Act process, APHIS may post the appropriately redacted versions to its website,” the statement concludes. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 23188 - Posted: 02.04.2017

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent It sounds like torment for the smoker attempting to quit: handling packets of cigarettes and watching footage of people smoking, without being allowed to light up. However, scientists believe that lengthy exposure to environmental triggers for cravings could be precisely what smokers need to help them quit. The technique, known as extinction therapy, targets the harmful Pavlovian associations that drive addiction with the aim of rapidly “unlearning” them. The latest study, by scientists at the Medical University of South Carolina, found that after two one-hour sessions people smoked significantly fewer cigarettes one month after treatment compared to a control group. The study was not an unqualified success – many participants still relapsed after treatment – but the authors believe the work could pave the way for new approaches to treating addiction. Michael Saladin, the psychologist who led the work, said: “When I initially saw the results from this study it was pretty eye-opening.” In smokers, environmental triggers have typically been reinforced thousands of times so that the sight of a lighter, for instance, becomes inextricably linked to the rush of nicotine that the brain has learned will shortly follow. After quitting an addictive substance, these associations fade slowly over time, but people often flounder in the first days and weeks when cravings are most powerful. Saladin and others believe it is possible to fast-track this process in carefully designed training sessions, to help people over the initial hurdle. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23187 - Posted: 02.04.2017

Ah, to sleep, perchance … to shrink your neural connections? That's the conclusion of new research that examined subtle changes in the brain during sleep. The researchers found that sleep provides a time when thebrain's synapses — the connections among neurons—shrink back by nearly 20 percent. During this time, the synapses rest and prepare for the next day, when they will grow stronger while receiving new input—that is, learning new things, the researchers said. Without this reset, known as "synaptic homeostasis," synapses could become overloaded and burned out, like an electrical outlet with too many appliances plugged in to it, the scientists said. "Sleep is the perfect time to allow the synaptic renormalization to occur … because when we are awake, we are 'slaves' of the here and now, always attending some stimuli and learning something," said study co-author Dr. Chiara Cirelli of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Sleep and Consciousness. "During sleep, we are much less preoccupied by the external world … and the brain can sample [or assess] all our synapses, and renormalize them in a smart way," Cirelli told Live Science. Cirelli and her colleague, Dr. Giulio Tononi, also of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, introduced this synaptic homeostasis hypothesis (SHY) in 2003. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23186 - Posted: 02.04.2017

by Bethany Brookshire Gender bias works in subtle ways, even in the scientific process. The latest illustration of that: Scientists recommend women less often than men as reviewers for scientific papers, a new analysis shows. That seemingly minor oversight is yet another missed opportunity for women that might end up having an impact on hiring, promotions and more. Peer review is one of the bricks in the foundation supporting science. A researcher’s results don’t get published in a journal until they successfully pass through a gauntlet of scientific peers, who scrutinize the paper for faulty findings, gaps in logic or less-than-meticulous methods. The scientist submitting the paper gets to suggest names for those potential reviewers. Scientific journal editors may contact some of the recommended scientists, and then reach out to a few more. But peer review isn’t just about the paper (and scientist) being examined. Being the one doing the reviewing “has a number of really positive benefits,” says Brooks Hanson, an earth scientist and director of publications at the American Geophysical Union in Washington, D.C. “You read papers differently as a reviewer than you do as a reader or author. You look at issues differently. It’s a learning experience in how to write papers and how to present research.” Serving as a peer reviewer can also be a networking tool for scientific collaborations, as reviewers seek out authors whose work they admired. And of course, scientists put the journals they review for on their resumes when they apply for faculty positions, research grants and awards. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017.

Keyword: Attention; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 23185 - Posted: 02.04.2017

Carl Zimmer Over the years, scientists have come up with a lot of ideas about why we sleep. Some have argued that it’s a way to save energy. Others have suggested that slumber provides an opportunity to clear away the brain’s cellular waste. Still others have proposed that sleep simply forces animals to lie still, letting them hide from predators. A pair of papers published on Thursday in the journal Science offer evidence for another notion: We sleep to forget some of the things we learn each day. In order to learn, we have to grow connections, or synapses, between the neurons in our brains. These connections enable neurons to send signals to one another quickly and efficiently. We store new memories in these networks. In 2003, Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli, biologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, proposed that synapses grew so exuberantly during the day that our brain circuits got “noisy.” When we sleep, the scientists argued, our brains pare back the connections to lift the signal over the noise. In the years since, Dr. Tononi and Dr. Cirelli, along with other researchers, have found a great deal of indirect evidence to support the so-called synaptic homeostasis hypothesis. It turns out, for example, that neurons can prune their synapses — at least in a dish. In laboratory experiments on clumps of neurons, scientists can give them a drug that spurs them to grow extra synapses. Afterward, the neurons pare back some of the growth. Other evidence comes from the electric waves released by the brain. During deep sleep, the waves slow down. Dr. Tononi and Dr. Cirelli have argued that shrinking synapses produce this change. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23184 - Posted: 02.03.2017

Ian Sample Science editor As an antidote to one of the ills of modern life, it may leave some quite cold. When the lure of the TV or fiddling on the phone keep you up late at night, it is time to grab the tent and go camping. The advice from scientists in the US follows a field study that found people fell asleep about two hours earlier than usual when they were denied access to their gadgets and electrical lighting and packed off to the mountains with a tent. A weekend in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado helped reset people’s internal clocks and reversed the tendency of artificial light to push bedtime late into the night. A spell outdoors, the researchers conclude, could be just the thing for victims of social jetlag who find themselves yawning all day long. “Our modern environment has really changed the timing of our internal clocks, but also the timing of when we sleep relative to our clock,” said Kenneth Wright, director of the sleep and chronobiology lab at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “A weekend camping trip can reset the clock rapidly.” To explore the sleep-altering effects of the natural environment, Wright sent five hardy colleagues, aged 21 to 39, on a six day camping trip to the Rocky Mountains one December. They left their torches and gadgets behind, and had only sunlight, moonlight and campfires for illumination. The campers went to bed on average two and a half hours earlier than they did at home, and racked up nearly 10 hours of sleep per night compared with their usual seven and a half hours. Monitors showed that they were more active in the daytime and were exposed to light levels up to 13 times higher than they typically received at home.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sleep
Link ID: 23183 - Posted: 02.03.2017

By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS During her pregnancy, she never drank alcohol or had a cigarette. But nearly every day, Stacey, then 24, smoked marijuana. With her fiancé’s blessing, she began taking a few puffs in her first trimester to quell morning sickness before going to work at a sandwich shop. When sciatica made it unbearable to stand during her 12-hour shifts, she discreetly vaped marijuana oil on her lunch break. “I wouldn’t necessarily say, ‘Go smoke a pound of pot when you’re pregnant,’” said Stacey, now a stay-at-home mother in Deltona, Fla., who asked that her full name be withheld because street-bought marijuana is illegal in Florida. “In moderation, it’s O.K.” Many pregnant women, particularly younger ones, seem to agree, a recent federal survey shows. As states legalize marijuana or its medical use, expectant mothers are taking it up in increasing numbers — another example of the many ways in which acceptance of marijuana has outstripped scientific understanding of its effects on human health. Often pregnant women presume that cannabis has no consequences for developing infants. But preliminary research suggests otherwise: Marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient — tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC — can cross the placenta to reach the fetus, experts say, potentially harming brain development, cognition and birth weight. THC can also be present in breast milk. “There is an increased perception of the safety of cannabis use, even in pregnancy, without data to say it’s actually safe,” said Dr. Torri Metz, an obstetrician at Denver Health Medical Center who specializes in high-risk pregnancies. Ten percent of her patients acknowledge recent marijuana use. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23182 - Posted: 02.03.2017

By Tiffany O'Callaghan Imagine feeling angry or upset whenever you hear a certain everyday sound. It’s a condition called misophonia, and we know little about its causes. Now there’s evidence that misophonics show distinctive brain activity whenever they hear their trigger sounds, a finding that could help devise coping strategies and treatments. Olana Tansley-Hancock knows misophonia’s symptoms only too well. From the age of about 7 or 8, she experienced feelings of rage and discomfort whenever she heard the sound of other people eating. By adolescence, she was eating many of her meals alone. As time wore on, many more sounds would trigger her misophonia. Rustling papers and tapping toes on train journeys constantly forced her to change seats and carriages. Clacking keyboards in the office meant she was always making excuses to leave the room. Finally, she went to a doctor for help. “I got laughed at,” she says. “People who suffer from misophonia often have to make adjustments to their lives, just to function,” says Miren Edelstein at the University of California, San Diego. “Misophonia seems so odd that it’s difficult to appreciate how disabling it can be,” says her colleague, V. S. Ramachandran. The condition was first given the name misophonia in 2000, but until 2013, there had only been two case studies published. More recently, clear evidence has emerged that misophonia isn’t a symptom of other conditions, such as obsessive compulsive disorder, nor is it a matter of being oversensitive to other people’s bad manners. Some studies, including work by Ramachandran and Edelstein, have found that trigger sounds spur a full fight-or-flight response in people with misophonia. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hearing; Attention
Link ID: 23181 - Posted: 02.03.2017

Elizabeth Eaton Electronic cigarettes may increase the risk of heart disease, researchers at UCLA report. The team found that two risk factors for heart disease were elevated in 16 e-cigarette users compared with 18 nonsmokers. “The pattern was spot-on” for what has been seen in heart attack patients and those with heart disease and diabetes, says cardiologist Holly Middlekauff, a coauthor of the study published online February 1 in JAMA Cardiology. But because the study only looked at a small number of people, the results are not definitive — just two or three patients can skew results, John Ambrose, a cardiologist with the University of California, San Francisco cautions. Plus, he says, some of the e-cigarette users in the study used to smoke tobacco, which may have influenced the data. Even so, Ambrose called the study interesting, noting that “the medical community just doesn’t have enough information” to figure out if e-cigarettes are dangerous. E-cigarette smokers in the study had heartbeat patterns that indicated high levels of adrenaline — also known as epinephrine — in the heart, a sign of heart disease risk. Researchers also found signs of increased oxidative stress, an imbalance of certain protective molecules that can cause the hardening and narrowing of arteries. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23180 - Posted: 02.02.2017

Jessica Boddy Heading a soccer ball is both a fundamental skill and a dynamic way to score a goal, but research says it could be causing concussions along with player collisions. Players who headed a lot of balls, an average of 125 over two weeks, were three times more vulnerable to concussion than those who headed less than four in that time period, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Neurology. These header-happy players reported having concussion symptoms like headache, confusion and even unconsciousness. This adds more cause for concern regarding traumatic brain injury in soccer, a sport already notorious for high concussion rates. The cause of these concussions, though, has been disputed. One study showed player-player contact was to blame for 69 percent of concussions in boys and 51 percent in girls. So some argue that changing the rules to limit heading would only reduce concussion by a small amount. "Before banning heading, the focus should be to enforce existing rules prohibiting athlete-athlete contact," says Dawn Comstock, an injury epidemiologist at the University of Colorado's School of Public Health who was not involved in the study. "That's the main risk for head injury in soccer." Still, others say that the risk that comes with headers is worth limiting as well—especially when the effects of repeated, low-level head impacts aren't exactly crystal clear. "Over a quarter of a billion people play soccer all across the world," says Michael Lipton, a professor of radiology and psychiatry/behavioral sciences at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and lead author on the study. "So it's key to understand the long term effects of headers, a skill unique to the sport." © 2017 npr

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 23179 - Posted: 02.02.2017

By Emma Hiolski Imagine cells that can move through your brain, hunting down cancer and destroying it before they themselves disappear without a trace. Scientists have just achieved that in mice, creating personalized tumor-homing cells from adult skin cells that can shrink brain tumors to 2% to 5% of their original size. Although the strategy has yet to be fully tested in people, the new method could one day give doctors a quick way to develop a custom treatment for aggressive cancers like glioblastoma, which kills most human patients in 12–15 months. It only took 4 days to create the tumor-homing cells for the mice. Glioblastomas are nasty: They spread roots and tendrils of cancerous cells through the brain, making them impossible to remove surgically. They, and other cancers, also exude a chemical signal that attracts stem cells—specialized cells that can produce multiple cell types in the body. Scientists think stem cells might detect tumors as a wound that needs healing and migrate to help fix the damage. But that gives scientists a secret weapon—if they can harness stem cells’ natural ability to “home” toward tumor cells, the stem cells could be manipulated to deliver cancer-killing drugs precisely where they are needed. Other research has already exploited this method using neural stem cells—which give rise to neurons and other brain cells—to hunt down brain cancer in mice and deliver tumor-eradicating drugs. But few have tried this in people, in part because getting those neural stem cells is hard, says Shawn Hingtgen, a stem cell biologist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Stem Cells; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 23178 - Posted: 02.02.2017