Bradley George All sorts of health information is now a few taps away on your smartphone, from how many steps you take — to how well you sleep at night. But what if you could use your phone and a computer to test your vision? A company is doing just that — and eye care professionals are upset. Some states have even banned it. A Chicago-based company called Opternative offers the test. The site asks some questions about your eyes and overall health; it also wants to know your shoe size to make sure you're the right distance from your computer monitor. You keep your smartphone in your hand and use the Web browser to answer questions about what you see on the computer screen. Like a traditional eye test, there are shapes, lines and letters. It takes about 30 minutes. "We're trying to identify how bad your vision is, so we're kind of testing your vision to failure, is the way I would describe it," says Aaron Dallek, CEO of Opternative. Dallek co-founded the company with an optometrist, who was searching for ways to offer eye exams online. "Me being a lifetime glasses and contact wearer, I was like 'Where do we start?' So, that was about 3 1/2 years ago, and we've been working on it ever since," Dallek says. © 2016 npr

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 22250 - Posted: 05.26.2016

Susan Milius Forget it, peacocks. Nice try, elk. Sure, sexy feathers and antlers are showy, but the sperm of a fruit fly could be the most over-the-top, exaggerated male ornamentation of all. In certain fruit fly species, such as Drosophila bifurca, males measuring just a few millimeters produce sperm with a tail as long as 5.8-centimeters, researchers report May 25 in Nature. Adjusted for body size, the disproportionately supersized sperm outdoes such exuberant body parts as pheasant display feathers, deer antlers, scarab beetle horns and the forward-grasping forceps of earwigs. Fruit flies’ giant sperm have been challenging to explain, says study coauthor Scott Pitnick of Syracuse University in New York. Now he and his colleagues propose that a complex interplay of male and female benefits has accelerated sperm length in a runaway-train scenario. Males with longer sperm deliver fewer sperm, bucking a more-is-better trend. Yet, they still manage to transfer a few dozen to a few hundred per mating. And as newly arrived sperm compete to displace those already waiting in a female’s storage organ, longer is better. Fewer sperm per mating means females tend to mate more often, intensifying the sperm-vs.-sperm competition. Females that have the longest storage organs, which favor the longest sperm, benefit too: Males producing megasperm, the researchers found, tend to be the ones with good genes likely to produce robust offspring. “Sex,” says Pitnick, “is a powerful force.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 22249 - Posted: 05.26.2016

Sara Reardon Children from impoverished families are more prone to mental illness, and alterations in DNA structure could be to blame, according to a study published on 24 May in Molecular Psychiatry1. Poverty brings with it a number of different stressors, such as poor nutrition, increased prevalence of smoking and the general struggle of trying to get by. All of these can affect a child’s development, particularly in the brain, where the structure of areas involved in response to stress and decision-making have been linked to low socioeconomic status. Poor children are more prone to mental illnesses such as depression than their peers from wealthier families, but they are also more likely to have cognitive problems. Some of these differences are clearly visible in the brain structure and seem to appear at birth, which suggests that prenatal exposure to these stressors can be involved2. But neurodevelopment does not stop at birth. Neuroscientist Ahmad Hariri of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, suspected that continual exposure to stressors might affect older children as well. He decided to test this idea by studying chemical tags known as methyl groups, which alter DNA structure to regulate how genes are expressed. There is some evidence that methylation patterns can be passed down through generations, but they are also altered by environmental factors, such as smoking. © 2016 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Depression; Epigenetics
Link ID: 22248 - Posted: 05.25.2016

Dean Burnett A recent report by the National Obesity Forum stated that official advice about low-fat diets is wrong. As ever, there’s now heated debate over how valid/accurate this claim is. But let’s step back a moment and ask a revealing question: why do official government dietary guidelines even exist? Why are they necessary? From an entirely logical position, eating food fulfils several requirements. It provides the energy to do things, helps us build up stores of energy for when needed, and provides the materials required to build and maintain our bodies. Therefore, the human body requires a regular intake of nutrients, vitamins and calories to maintain day-to-day functioning. As a result, the human body has developed an intricate digestive system to monitor and regulate our food intake. The digestive system is quite cool. It has a sophisticated nervous system that can operate pretty much independently, so is often regarded as separate from the main one, leading some to describe it as a “second brain”, there to encourage, monitor and process the consumption and digestion of food. It also utilises hormones, namely leptin and ghrelin, which decrease and increase appetite respectively depending on how much food the body has/needs. It’s a painstakingly complex and precise system that’s evolved over aeons to make sure we eat what and when we need to, and get the most out of our food. However, at some point the human brain got involved, then everything went to hell. This is why we can now be presented with foodstuffs we’re repeatedly told are unhealthy, even dangerous, and say “Thanks. Extra chilli sauce on mine, please”.

Keyword: Obesity; Attention
Link ID: 22247 - Posted: 05.25.2016

by Bruce Bower For a landmark 1977 paper, psychologist Andrew Meltzoff stuck his tongue out at 2- to 3-week-old babies. Someone had to do it. After watching Meltzoff razz them for 15 seconds, babies often stuck out their own tongues within the next 2½ minutes. Newborns also tended to respond in kind when the young researcher opened his mouth wide, pushed out his lips like a duck and opened and closed the fingers of one hand. Meltzoff, now at the University of Washington in Seattle, and a colleague were the first to report that babies copy adults’ simple physical deeds within weeks of birth. Until then, most scientists assumed that imitation began at around 9 months of age. Newborns don’t care that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. For them, it may be a key to interacting with (and figuring out) those large, smiley people who come to be known as mommy and daddy. And that’s job number one for tykes hoping to learn how to talk and hang out with a circle of friends. Meltzoff suspected that babies enter the world able to compare their own movements — even those they can feel but not see, such as a projecting tongue — to corresponding adult actions. Meltzoff’s report has inspired dozens of papers on infant imitation. Some have supported his results, some haven’t. A new report, published May 5 in Current Biology, falls in the latter group. The study of 106 Australian babies tracked from 1 to 9 weeks of age concludes that infants don’t imitate anyone. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 201

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22246 - Posted: 05.25.2016

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), usually diagnosed in children, may show up for the first time in adulthood, two recent studies suggest. And not only can ADHD appear for the first time after childhood, but the symptoms for adult-onset ADHD may be different from symptoms experienced by kids, the researchers found. “Although the nature of symptoms differs somewhat between children and adults, all age groups show impairments in multiple domains – school, family and friendships for kids and school, occupation, marriage and driving for adults,” said Stephen Faraone, a psychiatry researcher at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York and author of an editorial accompanying the two studies in JAMA Psychiatry. Faraone cautions, however, that some newly diagnosed adults might have had undetected ADHD as children. Support from parents and teachers or high intelligence, for example, might prevent ADHD symptoms from emerging earlier in life. It’s not clear whether study participants “were completely free of psychopathology prior to adulthood,” Faraone said in an email. One of the studies, from Brazil, tracked more than 5,200 people born in 1993 until they were 18 or 19 years old. © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: ADHD; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22245 - Posted: 05.25.2016

by Helen Thompson In hunting down delicious fish, Flipper may have a secret weapon: snot. Dolphins emit a series of quick, high-frequency sounds — probably by forcing air over tissues in the nasal passage — to find and track potential prey. “It’s kind of like making a raspberry,” says Aaron Thode of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. Thode and colleagues tweaked a human speech modeling technique to reproduce dolphin sounds and discern the intricacies of their unique style of sound production. He presented the results on May 24 in Salt Lake City at the annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Dolphin chirps have two parts: a thump and a ring. Their model worked on the assumption that lumps of tissue bumping together produce the thump, and those tissues pulling apart produce the ring. But to match the high frequencies of live bottlenose dolphins, the researchers had to make the surfaces of those tissues sticky. That suggests that mucus lining the nasal passage tissue is crucial to dolphin sonar. The vocal model also successfully mimicked whistling noises used to communicate with other dolphins and faulty clicks that probably result from inadequate snot. Such techniques could be adapted to study sound production or echolocation in sperm whales and other dolphin relatives. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 22244 - Posted: 05.25.2016

By Ian Randall As if you needed another reason to hate the gym, it now turns out that exercise can exhaust not only your muscles, but also your eyes. Fear not, however, for coffee can perk them right up again. During strenuous exercise, our muscles tire as they run out of fuel and build up waste products. Muscle performance can also be affected by a phenomenon called “central fatigue,” in which an imbalance in the body’s chemical messengers prevents the central nervous system from directing muscle movements effectively. It was not known, however, whether central fatigue might also affect motor systems not directly involved in the exercise itself—such as those that move the eyes. To find out, researchers gave 11 volunteers a carbohydrate solution either with a moderate dose of caffeine—which is known to stimulate the central nervous system—or as a placebo without, during 3 hours of vigorous cycling. After exercising, the scientists tested the cyclists with eye-tracking cameras to see how well their brains could still control their visual system. The team found that exercise reduced the speed of rapid eye movements by about 8%, impeding their ability to capture new visual information. The caffeine—the equivalent of two strong cups of coffee—was sufficient to counteract this effect, with some cyclists even displaying increased eye movement speeds, the team reports today in Scientific Reports. So it might be a good idea to get someone else to drive you home after that marathon. © 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 22243 - Posted: 05.25.2016

By Diana Kwon More than one in 10 Americans older than 12 takes antidepressants, according to a 2011 report by the National Center for Health Statistics. A significant but unknown number of children younger than 12 take them, too. Although most such drugs are not approved for young children, doctors have prescribed them off-label for years because they have been thought to have relatively mild side effects. Yet recent reports have revealed that important data about the safety of these drugs—especially their risks for children and adolescents—have been withheld from the medical community and the public. In the latest and most comprehensive analysis, published in January in the BMJ, researchers at the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen showed that pharmaceutical companies have not been revealing the full extent of serious harm in clinical study reports, which are detailed documents sent to regulatory authorities such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) when applying for approval of a new drug. The researchers examined reports from 70 double-blind, placebo-controlled trials of two common categories of antidepressants—selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs)—and found that the occurrence of suicidal thoughts and aggressive behavior doubled in children and adolescents who used these drugs. The investigators discovered that some of the most revealing information was buried in appendices where individual patient outcomes are listed. For example, they found clear instances of suicidal thinking that had been passed off as “emotional lability” or “worsening depression” in the report itself. This information, however, was available for only 32 out of the 70 trials. “We found that a lot of the appendices were often only available on request to the authorities, and the authorities had never requested them,” says Tarang Sharma, a Ph.D. student at Cochrane and lead author of the study. “I'm actually kind of scared about how bad the actual situation would be if we had the complete data.” © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22242 - Posted: 05.24.2016

By JOHN BRANCH When the N.F.L. agreed in 2012 to donate tens of millions of dollars to concussion research overseen by the National Institutes of Health, it was widely seen as a positive turning point in football’s long history of playing down the long-term effects of brain injuries on players. At the time, the league said that it would have no influence over how the money was used. But the league and its head, neck and spine committee worked to improperly influence the government research, trying to steer the study toward a doctor with ties to the league, according to a study conducted by a congressional committee and released on Monday. “Our investigation has shown that while the N.F.L. had been publicly proclaiming its role as funder and accelerator of important research, it was privately attempting to influence that research,” the study concluded. “The N.F.L. attempted to use its ‘unrestricted gift’ as leverage to steer funding away from one of its critics.” The N.F.L., in a statement, said it rejected the accusations laid out in the study, which was conducted by Democratic members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. “There is no dispute that there were concerns raised about both the nature of the study in question and possible conflicts of interest,” the league said. “These concerns were raised for review and consideration through the appropriate channels.” It is the latest in a long history of instances in which the N.F.L. has been found to mismanage concussion research, dating to the league’s first exploration of the crisis when it used deeply flawed data to produce a series of studies. In this case, some of the characters are the same, including Dr. Elliot Pellman, who led the league’s concussion committee for years before he was discredited for his questionable credentials and his role as a longtime denier of the effects of concussions on players. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 22241 - Posted: 05.24.2016

By Andy Coghlan It’s a tear-jerker worthy of Hollywood – and one of the first examples of compassionate care and grief in a wild monkey. The alpha male of a group of snub-nosed monkeys and his dying partner spent a final, tender hour together beneath the tree from which she had fallen minutes earlier, cracking her head on a rock. Before she succumbed, he gently touched and groomed her. And after she was dead he remained by her side for 5 minutes, touching her and pulling gently at her hand, as if to try and revive her (for a full account of what happened, see “A monkey tends to his dying mate – as it unfolded”, below). “The case we’ve reported is particularly important because of the exclusively gentle nature of the interactions, and the special treatment of the dying female shown by the adult male,” says James Anderson of Kyoto University, Japan. “The events suggest that in the case of strongly bonded individuals at least, monkeys may show compassionate behaviour to ailing or dying individuals.” Together, the reports add to evidence that humans may not be the only species to display grieving behaviour following bereavement, or to show respect for dead individuals with whom they have forged ties. They also hint that animals have some recognition of the finality of death. “It seems likely that in long-lived species such as many primates, repeated exposure to death within the group leads to an understanding of the irreversibility of death,” says Anderson. “I believe the adult male and other members of his unit understood the dead female was no longer alive.” © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 22240 - Posted: 05.24.2016

“I understand how the appearance and texture of food can change the experience,” says food writer and Great British Bake Off finalist Tamal Ray, “but I never really considered how the other senses might have a role to play.” An anaesthetist by day, Ray is best-known for creating spectacular tiered cakes and using a syringe to inject extra, syrupy deliciousness into them. Which is why we introduced him to Oxford psychologist Charles Spence and chef Jozef Youssef – and turned what they taught him about the science of taste into the video above. Part mad professor, part bon vivant, Spence has spent the past 15 years discovering that little of how we experience flavour is to do with our taste buds – smell, vision, touch and even sound dictate how we perceive flavours. Youssef, meanwhile, sharpened his culinary skills at the Fat Duck, the Connaught and the Dorchester, before starting experimental dining outfit Kitchen Theory, where he applies science to meals that play with the multisensory experience of eating. When Spence started studying the sensory science behind flavour perception, it was a deeply unfashionable subject. “There’s some ancient Roman notion that eating and drinking involve lower senses,” he says, “not higher, rational senses like hearing and vision.” Now, the fruits of the research field he calls “gastrophysics” can be seen everywhere from the world’s top restaurants to airline food, via progressive hospital kitchens and multisensory cocktail bars. Spence heads the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the University of Oxford. “Crossmodal”, in this context, means the investigation of how all the senses interact. Although we’re often unaware of it, when it comes to flavour perception, we all have synaesthesia. That is, our senses intermingle so that our brains combine shapes, textures, colours and even sounds with corresponding tastes.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 22239 - Posted: 05.23.2016

Aaron E. Carroll I don’t eat breakfast. It’s not that I dislike what’s offered. Given the choice of breakfast food or lunch food, I’d almost always choose eggs or waffles. It’s just that I’m not hungry at 7:30 a.m., when I leave for work. In fact, I’m rarely hungry until about lunchtime. So, other than a morning cup of coffee, I don’t eat much before noon. This habit has forced me to be subjected to more lectures on how I’m hurting myself, my diet, my work and my health than almost any other. Only a fool would skip the most important meal of the day, right? As with many other nutritional pieces of advice, our belief in the power of breakfast is based on misinterpreted research and biased studies. It does not take much of an effort to find research that shows an association between skipping breakfast and poor health. A 2013 study published in the journal Circulation found that men who skipped breakfast had a significantly higher risk of coronary heart disease than men who ate breakfast. But, like almost all studies of breakfast, this is an association, not causation. More than most other domains, this topic is one that suffers from publication bias. In a paper published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2013, researchers reviewed the literature on the effect of breakfast on obesity to look specifically at this issue. They first noted that nutrition researchers love to publish results showing a correlation between skipping breakfast and obesity. They love to do so again and again. At some point, there’s no reason to keep publishing on this. However, they also found major flaws in the reporting of findings. People were consistently biased in interpreting their results in favor of a relationship between skipping breakfast and obesity. They improperly used causal language to describe their results. They misleadingly cited others’ results. And they also improperly used causal language in citing others’ results. People believe, and want you to believe, that skipping breakfast is bad. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 22238 - Posted: 05.23.2016

By Jessica Hamzelou People who experience migraines that are made worse by light might be better off seeing the world in green. While white, blue, red and amber light all increase migraine pain, low-intensity green light seems to reduce it. The team behind the finding hope that specially developed sunglasses that screen out all wavelengths of light except green could help migraineurs. Many people experience sensitivity to light during a migraine. Photophobia, as it is known, can leave migraineurs resorting to sunglasses in well-lit rooms, or seeking the comfort of darkness. The reaction is thought to be due to the brain’s wiring. In a brain region called the thalamus, neurons that transmit sensory information from our retinas cross over with other neurons that signal pain. As a result, during migraine, light can worsen pain and pain can cause visual disturbance, says Rami Burstein at Harvard University. But not all colours of light have the same effect. Six years ago, Burstein and his colleagues studied migraine in sufferers who are blind, either due to the loss of an eye or retina, or because of retinal damage. They found that people who had some remaining retinal cells had worse migraines when they were in brightly lit environments, and that blue light seemed to have the strongest impact. The finding caused a flurry of excitement, and the promotion of sunglasses that filter out blue light. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Vision
Link ID: 22237 - Posted: 05.23.2016

By Lucas Powers, CBC News You're standing on the side of the road, with traffic whizzing past. The police officer who pulled you over suspects you may have smoked the reefer before departing for McDonald's. But she's in a bit of a quagmire, because, really, there's no reliable way to know for sure. Are you high? If you are high, how high are you, really? Or really did you just want those little cheeseburgers (no ketchup and extra pickles)? So she does the most logical thing: a field sobriety test. Tried and true. Walk the line. Touch the tip your nose. Can't do it? That's... suspicious. Maybe a night in the clink? Some Canadian cops also have roadside saliva swabs that can be used to test for the presence of drugs, but they are useless, legally speaking (for now.) Now, had you been quaffing ales before the drive, a breathalyzer — controversial as they can be in terms of accuracy and reliability — would have cleared up the situation pretty quickly. Of course, no such roadside device exists for cannabis and its psychotropic ingredient THC. There's growing evidence that cannabis can impair driving by slowing reaction times and encouraging perplexing moves by drivers, like slowing way down and being reluctant to change lanes. Doctors at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health are doing the world's biggest-ever clinical study, asking exactly what causes this behaviour, and how dangerous it is. Either way, an innovation war worth billions to the victor has been declared over developing a cannabis breathalyzer. ©2016 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 22236 - Posted: 05.23.2016

Sara Reardon Every time something poked its foot, the mouse jumped in pain. Researchers at Circuit Therapeutics, a start-up company in Menlo Park, California, had made the animal hypersensitive to touch by tying off a nerve in its leg. But when they shone a yellow light on its foot while poking it, the mouse did not react. The treatment is one of several nearing clinical use that draw on optogenetics — a technique in which light is used to control genes and neuron firing. In March, RetroSense Therapeutics of Ann Arbor, Michigan, began the first clinical-safety trial of an optogenetic therapy to treat the vision disorder retinitis pigmentosa. Many scientists are waiting to see how the trial turns out before they decide how to move forward with their own research on a number of different applications. “I think it will embolden people if there’s good news,” says Robert Gereau, a pain researcher at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. “It opens up a whole new range of possiblilities for how to treat neurological diseases.” Retinitis pigmentosa destroys photoreceptors in the eye. RetroSense’s treatment seeks to compensate for this loss by conferring light sensitivity to retinal ganglion cells, which normally help to pass visual signals from photoreceptors to the brain. The therapy involves injecting patients who are blind or mostly blind with viruses carrying genes that encode light-sensitive proteins called opsins. The cells fire when stimulated with blue light, passing the visual information to the brain. Chief executive Sean Ainsworth says that the company has injected several individuals in the United States with the treatment, and plans to enroll a total of 15 blind patients in its trial. RetroSense will follow them for two years, but may release some preliminary data later this year. © 2016 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 22235 - Posted: 05.21.2016

By Diana Kwon A number of factors, including elements of the social environment (such as inequality and isolation) and physical stressors (such as pollution and noise) could explain how the city erodes well-being Credit: Thomas Koehler/Getty Images Life in the city can be taxing. City dwellers often face higher rates of crime, pollution, social isolation and other environmental stressors than those living in rural areas. For years studies have consistently linked the risk of developing schizophrenia to urban environments—but researchers are only beginning to understand why this association exists. Addressing the link is increasingly urgent: According to a recent U.N. report, the proportion of people living in cities will rise from 54 percent of the world’s population in 2014 to 66 percent by 2050. Researchers first suggested in the 1930s that urban living might increase schizophrenia risk. Since then many large epidemiological studies have reported an association between the two, primarily in European countries such as Sweden and Denmark. Converging evidence has revealed that growing up in the city doubles the risk of developing psychosis later in life. Studies have also begun to find that urban environments may heighten the risk of other mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. A number of factors, including elements of the social environment (such as inequality and isolation) and physical stressors (such as pollution and noise) could explain how the city erodes well-being. Conversely, people predisposed to mental illness may simply be more likely to move into urban environments. Two studies published this month shed new light on these effects and suggest both scenarios could be involved. © 2016 Scientific American, a Division

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 22234 - Posted: 05.21.2016

Bret Stetka We've all been caught in that hazy tug of war between wakefulness and sleep. But the biology behind how our brains drive us to sleep when we're sleep-deprived hasn't been entirely clear. For the first time scientists have identified the neurons in the brain that appear to control sleep drive, or the growing pressure we feel to sleep after being up for an extended period of time. The findings, published online Thursday by the journal Cell, could lead to better understanding of sleep disorders in humans. And perhaps, one day, if the work all pans out, better treatments for chronic insomnia could be developed. To explore which brain areas might be involved in sleep drive, Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Dr. Mark Wu and his colleagues turned to fruit flies, that long tinkered-with subject of scientific inquiry. Despite our rather obvious physical distinctions, humans and fruit flies – or Drosophila – have a good deal in common when it comes to genes, brain architecture and even behaviors. Included in the study were over 500 strains of fly, each with unique brain activation profiles (meaning certain circuits are more active in certain flies). By employing a genetic engineering technique in which specific groups of neurons can be activated with heat, the researchers were able to monitor the firing of nearly all the major circuits in the fruit fly brain and monitor the resulting effects on sleep. Moreover, the neurons of interest were engineered to glow green when activated allowing specific cells to be identified with fluorescent microscopy. Wu found that activating a group of cells called R2 neurons, which are found in a brain region known as the ellipsoid body, put fruit flies to sleep, even for hours after the neurons were "turned off." © 2016 npr

Keyword: Sleep; Evolution
Link ID: 22233 - Posted: 05.21.2016

By Karen Weintraub There are case reports of people with no previously known risks having a heart attack after a nightmare, though they appear to be quite rare. No studies have been done to determine just how rare nightmare-induced heart attacks might be, and experts do not know whether they may result from the pulse-racing effects of the frightening dream itself. Nightmares are more commonly seen in the rapid eye movement, or REM, phase of sleep, which gets longer as the night progresses. Therefore, nightmares are more likely to occur in the early morning hours. Heart attacks, too, are most common in the early morning hours, when internal body clocks start secreting stress hormones and blood pressure tends to rise, said Dr. Mary Ann McLaughlin, a cardiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. If someone is at risk for a heart attack — because of high blood pressure, diabetes, sleep apnea, smoking or other factors — that attack is more likely to occur in the early morning. But “it’s rare for an otherwise healthy person to have a nightmare that causes a heart attack,” said Dr. McLaughlin. Nightmares can be triggered by alcohol, lack of sleep and medications, including some antidepressants and blood pressure medications, she said. Anxiety and depression have also been linked to increased risk of nightmares. On the flip side, patients with heart disease often have sleep apnea, a form of disordered breathing that can lead to fragmented sleep, and potentially more nightmares, said Dr. Neomi Shah, a sleep specialist, also at Mount Sinai. One 2013 study found that apnea patients with regular nightmares woke up more often than those who didn’t. Nightmares disappeared in more than 90 percent of the patients who used a continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, machine to treat their apnea. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 22232 - Posted: 05.21.2016

Laura Sanders In mice, a long course of antibiotics that wiped out gut bacteria slowed the birth of new brain cells and impaired memory, scientists write May 19 in Cell Reports. The results reinforce evidence for a powerful connection between bacteria in the gut and the brain (SN: 4/2/16, p. 23). After seven weeks of drinking water spiked with a cocktail of antibiotics, mice had fewer newborn nerve cells in a part of the hippocampus, a brain structure important for memory. The mice’s ability to remember previously seen objects also suffered. Further experiments revealed one way bacteria can influence brain cell growth and memory. Injections of immune cells called Ly6Chi monocytes boosted the number of new nerve cells. Themonocytes appear to carry messages from gut to brain, Susanne Wolf of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin and colleagues found. Exercise and probiotic treatment with eight types of live bacteria also increased the number of newborn nerve cells and improved memory in mice treated with antibiotics. The results help clarify the toll of prolonged antibiotic treatment, and hint at ways to fight back, the authors write. L. Möhle et al. Ly6Chi monocytes provide a link between antibiotic-induced changes in gut microbiota and adult hippocampal neurogenesis. Cell Reports. Vol. 15, May 31, 2016. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2016.04.074. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016

Keyword: Obesity; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 22231 - Posted: 05.21.2016