By Brian Alexander When news broke that singer Sheryl Crow has a benign brain tumor called a meningioma, her representative swatted away concern by saying that “half of us are walking around with [a meningioma] but you don’t really know unless you happen to have an MRI.” Well, no. Despite that unnamed representative’s effort to make a brain tumor sound like a pimple, meningiomas are not anywhere near so universal, and, despite the “benign” designation, can be dangerous, leading to severe disabilities, and, in rare cases, death. “About 2 to 3 percent are malignant,” Dr. Elizabeth Claus, director of medical research at the Yale School of Public Health, a neurosurgeon at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the principal investigator for the multi-institution Meningioma Consortium, explained in an interview. “Then that is a very serious situation because there’s not much in the way of great treatments. They can metastasize, say to the lungs, and no chemotherapy will work for it.” As the name indicates, a meningioma is a cancer of the meninges, the protective lining that surrounds the brain and spinal cord, often also called the dura. It’s true that meningiomas are one of the most common types of brain tumors, comprising about one-third of all benign brain tumors, but meningiomas are not nearly as common as Crow’s rep would have you believe. As of 2005, approximately 138,000 Americans were known to have been diagnosed of meningioma. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16882 - Posted: 06.07.2012

Experts are warning that the public dangerously underestimates the health risks linked to smoking cannabis. The British Lung Foundation carried out a survey of 1,000 adults and found a third wrongly believed cannabis did not harm health. And 88% incorrectly thought tobacco cigarettes were more harmful than cannabis ones - when the risk of lung cancer is actually 20 times higher. The BLF said the lack of awareness was "alarming". Latest figures show that 30% of 16-59 year-olds in England and Wales have used cannabis in their lifetimes. A new report from the BLF says there are established scientific links between smoking cannabis and tuberculosis, acute bronchitis and lung cancer. Cannabis has also been shown to increase chances of developing mental health problems such as schizophrenia. Part of the reason for this, say the experts, is that people smoking cannabis take deeper puffs and hold them for longer than when smoking tobacco cigarettes. This means that someone smoking a cannabis cigarette inhales four times as much tar as from a tobacco cigarette, and five times as much carbon monoxide, the BLF says. Its survey found that young people are particularly unaware of the risks. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 16881 - Posted: 06.06.2012

  By Suzanne Koven When I first went into practice, over 20 years ago, all my patients were eating pretzels. Also Entenmann’s fat-free cake. And jelly beans. It was the era of the low-fat craze, not to be confused with the low-carb crazes that preceded and followed it. That my patients were not losing weight on these diets didn’t surprise me, not because of my vast knowledge of nutrition (about which physicians receive notoriously scant training), but because I wasn’t faring too well on them myself. You see, dear reader, when it comes to dieting — to paraphrase the men’s hair commercial — I’m not only a professional, I’m also a member of the club. I remember the precise moment I first decided to lose weight. I was 12½ and had lied to my parents about where I would be spending the evening: I said Susie’s. It was actually Teddy’s. As I dressed for my clandestine outing, I gazed at a reflection of myself in a pair of purple striped hip-huggers and resolved to be thinner. I devised a diet that seemed sensible: 400 calories a day. It didn’t take me too long to figure out that this was not enough to sustain a growing adolescent (or the average cocker spaniel, for that matter). What took me decades to figure out, though, was that my impulse to diet had more to do with shame, specifically shame about desire (See above: Teddy) than with what I actually weighed — which wasn’t much. © 2012 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16880 - Posted: 06.06.2012

By Melissa Dahl If you can't stomach the thought of guzzling down eight glasses of water every single day, here's some good news: You're off the hook, more health experts are saying. A new editorial in an Australian public health journal is the latest to bust the widely-repeated health myth we need to guzzle 64 ounces, or eight 8-ounce glasses, of water each day just to stave off dehydration. Actually, we get enough fluids to keep our bodies adequately hydrated from the foods we eat and the beverages we drink -- even from caffeinated drinks like coffee and tea. Turns out, the whole "eight glasses a day" thing "really is no longer the recommendation; the recommendation is drinking to thirst," explains Madelyn Fernstrom, a registered dietitian and TODAY's diet and nutrition editor. Drink when you're thirsty! What a novel idea. It's not a bad idea to consume 64 ounces of fluid a day, but it's not a scientifically proven idea, either. It likely comes from a 1940s recommendation from the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research Council, which said that adults should ingest about 2.5 liters of water a day. "But the often ignored second half of that statement pointed out that most of the water you need is in the foods you eat," explains Dr. Aaron Carroll, associate professor of Pediatrics and the associate director of Children's Health Services Research at Indiana University School. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16879 - Posted: 06.06.2012

By Gareth Cook How aware are plants? This is the central question behind a fascinating new book, “What a Plant Knows,” by Daniel Chamovitz, director of the Manna Center for Plant Biosciences at Tel Aviv University. A plant, he argues, can see, smell and feel. It can mount a defense when under siege, and warn its neighbors of trouble on the way. A plant can even be said to have a memory. But does this mean that plants think — or that one can speak of a “neuroscience” of the flower? Chamovitz answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. 1. How did you first get interested in this topic? My interest in the parallels between plant and human senses got their start when I was a young postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Xing-Wang Deng at Yale University in the mid 1990s. I was interested in studying a biological process that would be specific to plants, and would not be connected to human biology (probably as a response to the six other “doctors” in my family, all of whom are physicians). So I was drawn to the question of how plants sense light to regulate their development. It had been known for decades that plants use light not only for photosynthesis, but also as a signal that changes the way plants grow. In my research I discovered a unique group of genes necessary for a plant to determine if it’s in the light or in the dark. When we reported our findings, it appeared these genes were unique to the plant kingdom, which fit well with my desire to avoid any thing touching on human biology. But much to my surprise and against all of my plans, I later discovered that this same group of genes is also part of the human DNA. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 16878 - Posted: 06.06.2012

By Branwen Jeffreys Health correspondent, BBC News Combining exercise with conventional treatments for depression does not improve recovery, research suggests. In the NHS-funded study - published in the British Medical Journal - some patients were given help to boost their activity levels in addition to receiving therapy or anti-depressants. After a year all 361 patients had fewer signs of depression, but there was no difference between the two groups. Current guidelines suggest sufferers do up to three exercise sessions a week. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) drew up that advice in 2004. At the time it said that on the basis of the research available, increased physical activity could help those with mild depression. The latest study, carried out by teams from the Universities of Bristol and Exeter, looked at how that might actually work in a real clinical setting. All 361 people taking part were given conventional treatments appropriate to their level of depression. But for eight months some in a randomly allocated group were also given up advice on up to 13 separate occasions on how to increase their level of activity. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 16877 - Posted: 06.06.2012

Talking to a psychologist on the phone as therapy for depression may work as well as meeting face-to-face, according to a new study. Depression is common in the general population and psychotherapy is considered an effective treatment that some patients prefer to antidepressant medications. The convenience of phones could make psychotherapy more readily available.The convenience of phones could make psychotherapy more readily available. (Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press) But about 75 per cent of patients with depression in previous studies said barriers like time constraints, lack of available and accessible services, transportation problems and cost stop them from going for treatment. In Wednesday's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers compared treatments by randomly assigning 325 patients at community clinics in Chicago to face-to-face therapy or telephone therapy for 18 weeks. "Our study found psychotherapy conveniently provided by telephone to patients wherever they are is effective and reduces dropout," the study's lead author, David Mohr, a professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, said in a release. The results showed 20.9 per cent of the people who had therapy over the phone dropped out compared with 32.7 per cent for face-to-face therapy. But those in the telephone group scored three points higher on a depression scale than those who met in person. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 16876 - Posted: 06.06.2012

By Julie Wan, For many years, scientists agreed that human tongues perceived four basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty and bitter. Then in 2002, receptors were confirmed for a taste called umami — first proposed by a Japanese chemist in 1908 and commonly described as meatiness or savoriness — and it became widely accepted as the fifth basic taste. Since then, molecular biologists have theorized that humans may have as many as 20 distinct receptors for such tastes as calcium, carbonation, starch and even water. The data supporting each vary widely, but one contender for a sixth taste has begun to stand out from the rest: fat. The growing evidence is intriguing to scientists and food developers, who hope that a better understanding of our perception of fat will have applications in health and obesity management. But that’s far down the road. Currently, the debate is still over whether fat is a taste, and studies are increasingly likely to say that it is. In 2010, for example, researchers at Deakin University in Australia found that people were able to detect the taste of fatty acids. This year, researchers at the Center for Human Nutrition at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis said they had discovered that some people may be more sensitive to the presence of fat in foods than others. For the latter study, published in March in the Journal of Lipid Research, 21 people with a body mass index of 30 or more — considered clinically obese — tasted three solutions with a similarly viscous texture and were asked to identify the one that was different. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Obesity
Link ID: 16875 - Posted: 06.05.2012

Content provided by Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience People prone to depression may struggle to organize information about guilt and blame in the brain, new neuroimaging research suggests. Crushing guilt is a common symptom of depression, an observation that dates back to Sigmund Freud. Now, a new study finds a communication breakdown between two guilt-associated brain regions in people who have had depression. This so-called "decoupling" of the regions may be why depressed people take small faux pas as evidence that they are complete failures. "If brain areas don't communicate well, that would explain why you have the tendency to blame yourself for everything and not be able to tie that into specifics," study researcher Roland Zahn, a neruoscientist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, told LiveScience. Zahn and his colleagues focused their research on the subgenual cingulated cortex and its adjacent septal region, a region deep in the brain that has been linked to feelings of guilt. Previous studies have found abnormalities in this region, dubbed the SCSR, in people with depression. The SCSR is known to communicate with another brain region, the anterior temporal lobe, which is situated under the side of the skull. The anterior temporal lobe is active during thoughts about morals, including guilt and indignation. © 2012 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 16874 - Posted: 06.05.2012

By ALASTAIR GEE In November 2008, when he was just 6, William Moller had his first epileptic seizure, during a reading class at school. For about 20 seconds, he simply froze in place, as if someone had pressed a pause button. He could not respond to his teacher. This is known as an absence seizure, and over the next year William, now 10, who lives with his family in Brooklyn, went from having one or two a day to suffering constant seizures. Not all were absence seizures; others were frightening tonic-clonics, also known as grand mals, during which he lost consciousness and convulsed. The seizures often came while he was eating. As his body went rigid, William dropped his food and his eyes rolled back into their sockets. If he seized while standing, he suddenly crashed to the ground — in a corridor, in the driveway, on the stairs. “It’s the scariest thing for any mother to hear that thump, and each time he would hit his head, so it only made things worse and worse,” said his mother, Elisa Moller, a pediatric nurse. William is among the one-third of epilepsy sufferers who do not respond, or respond only poorly, to anti-epileptic medications. Now he and others with refractory epilepsy are benefiting from treatment that targets inflammation, the result of new research into how epilepsy damages the brain. “Many of us theorize that the two are tied — inflammation causes seizures, and seizures cause inflammation,” said Orrin Devinsky, director of the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at the New York University Langone Medical Center and William’s doctor. “Over time, both of them may feed off each other.” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epilepsy; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 16873 - Posted: 06.05.2012

By Scicurious Most of us will suffer sleep deprivation at one time or another. I’m not talking our usual state of broken sleep, 5 hours a night, or something else. I’m talking a full night without sleep, the kind many people experience in the army, with a brand new (or not so brand new) baby, or more frivolously (I hope), in college. We all know what sleep deprivation does to us. We’re unable to pay attention. We’re often cold or hot. We can’t think straight, we start doing very strange things (you would not BELIEVE the crazy dances I’ve made up…), and of course, we’re really, really tired. But why do these symptoms happen? What’s going on in the brain during sleep deprivation to explain this behavior? Well, in part, it might be changes in your D2 receptors. There are lots of signs that point toward the involvement of the neurotransmitter dopamine in wakefulness. Drugs that increase levels of dopamine in brain (including, but not limited to, drugs like cocaine, amphetamine, meth, and Ritalin) also increase feelings of wakefulness. Increasing dopamine in the brain via genetic alterations, like getting rid of the dopamine transporter in a mouse, stopping dopamine from getting recycled, produces a mouse that sleeps less. Diseases that are characterized by low dopamine levels, like Parkinsons, also have daytime sleepiness. But a neurotransmitter is only as good as its receptor. Dopamine has two main types of receptors, and the current hypothesis is that the wakefulness promoting effects of dopamine may be controlled partially by the D2 type receptor. Antipsychotics, which block D2 type receptors, make people sleepy, and previous studies showed decreased D2 binding in the brains of sleep deprived people. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Sleep; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 16872 - Posted: 06.05.2012

By Morgen E. Peck Like a musician tuning a guitar, adults subconsciously listen to their own voice to tune the pitch, volume and pronunciation of their speech. Young children just learning how to talk, however, do not, a new study suggests. The result offers clues about how kids learn language—­and how parents can help. Past studies have shown that adults use aural feedback to tweak their pronunc­iation. Ewen MacDonald, a professor at the Center for Applied Hearing Research at the Technical University of Denmark, decided to see if toddlers could do this as well. He had adults and children play a video game in which they guided the actions of a robot by repeating the word “bed.” Through headphones, the players heard their own voice every time they spoke—but with the frequency spectrum shifted so they heard “bad” instead of “bed.” MacDonald found that adults and four-year-old kids tried to com­pensate for the error by pronouncing the word more like “bid,” but two-year-olds never budged from “bed,” suggesting that they were not using auditory feedback to monitor their speech. Although the toddlers may have been suppressing the feedback mechanism, MacDonald thinks they might not start listening to themselves until they are older. If that is the case, they may rely heavily on feedback from adults to gauge how they sound. In­deed, most parents and caregivers naturally repeat the words toddlers say, as praise and encouragement. “I think the real take-home message is that social interaction is important for the development of speech,” MacDonald says. “The general act of talking and interacting with the child in a normal way is the key.” © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16871 - Posted: 06.05.2012

Lauren Gravitz In an advance that could transform our understanding of the complex cellular dynamics underlying development of animals, researchers have developed a method to track individual cells in a developing fly embryo in real time. Two papers published on the Nature Methods website today describe similar versions of the microscopic technique1, 2. Understanding how an embryo develops from two parental germ cells into an organism with an organized, communicating and interactive group of systems is a difficult task. To date, most studies have only been able to track pieces of that development in animals such as the zebrafish Danio rerio or the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster. A more comprehensive understanding of the whole process and what drives it could inform research on diseases such as cancer, and help in the development of regenerative stem-cell therapies. Current light-sheet microscopy techniques involve illuminating one side of the sample. Either one side of a developing organism is imaged continuously, or two sides are viewed alternately, with the resultant data reconstructed to form a three-dimensional view. However, viewing from one side at a time means that the cells cannot be tracked as they migrate from top to bottom, and rotating the sample to view both sides takes so much time that when the next image is taken the cells have changed, so that they no longer line up. Simultaneous multi-view imaging solves this problem by taking images from opposing directions at the same time and piecing data together in real time. This required massive computing power. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16870 - Posted: 06.05.2012

Analysis by Jennifer Viegas Monkeys smack their lips during friendly face-to-face encounters, and now a new study says that this seemingly simple behavior may be tied to human speech. Previously experts thought the evolutionary origins of human speech came from primate vocalizations, such as chimpanzee hoots or monkey coos. But now scientists suspect that rapid, controlled movements of the tongue, lips and jaw -- all of which are needed for lip smacking -- were more important to the emergence of speech. For the study, published in the latest Current Biology, W. Tecumseh Fitch and colleagues used x-ray movies to investigate lip-smacking gestures in macaque monkeys. Mother monkeys do this a lot with their infants, so it seems to be kind of an endearing thing, perhaps like humans going goo-goo-goo in a baby's face while playing. (Monkeys will also vibrate their lips to make a raspberry sound.) Monkey lip-smacking, however, makes a quiet sound, similar to "p p p p". It's not accompanied by phonation, meaning sound produced by vocal cord vibration in the larynx. Fitch, who is head of the Department of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna, and his team determined that lip-smacking is a complex behavior that requires rapid, coordinated movements of the lips, jaw, tongue and the hyoid bone (which provides the supporting skeleton for the larynx and tongue). © 2012 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 16869 - Posted: 06.02.2012

By Tina Hesman Saey Bruce Spiegelman isn’t always happy with the way his research gets portrayed. He and colleagues discovered a hormone that muscles make during exercise. When given to mice, the hormone causes the animals to burn more energy and lose weight, and improves their response to insulin — all without changing how much the mice eat or exercise. The press touted the discovery as “exercise in a pill.” “I really hate that,” says Spiegelman, a cell biologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School in Boston. “The goal is not to put exercise in a pill.” His goal, instead, is to harness a special type of fat, called brown fat for its color, to replicate the metabolic benefits that exercise delivers. While some researchers have dismissed this fat as a mostly obsolete relic that makes little if any contribution to people’s energy expenditure, new research shows that it can make humans feel the energy burn. Some scientists have found chemical secrets for activating brown fat already in the body, while others are learning how to turn energy-storing white fat brown. Together, such efforts may help fight the battle of the bulge, reducing obesity and the diseases that go along with it. Turning brown fat on may also benefit people who cannot exercise because of disabilities. For many years scientists have recognized brown fat as an energy-burning powerhouse that helps animals and human babies stay warm. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16868 - Posted: 06.02.2012

by Zoë Corbyn If you want to enhance your memory, consider moving up a mountain. The spatial recall of mountain chickadees – tiny songbirds that inhabit high regions of the western US – is better the higher up they live. Vladimir Pravosudov of the University of Nevada, in Reno, and his colleagues collected 48 juvenile birds (Poecile gambeli) from three different elevations in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Chickadees that lived just 600 metres higher than others had larger hippocampi – a part of the brain strongly linked to memory. Not only that, they were also better at remembering where food was hidden in lab tests. It makes sense that birds living higher up would have a better memory, says Pravosudov. Mountain chickadees are "scatter hoarders", storing their favourite winter food of pine seeds in thousands of different spots among the trees. At higher altitudes, where it stays cold for longer, birds must store more seeds, and remember where they cached them. The effect could apply to other scatter-hoarding species, says Pravosudov, though he rules out most squirrels and rodents, which are either not active during the winter or put everything in one place and so do not need a better memory. Could global warming change things? Very possibly. "The selection pressure that the winter provides will be less, so the birds are going to get dumber," says Pravosudov. Time to consider a simpler pantry? Journal reference: Animal Behaviour, DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.04.018 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 16867 - Posted: 06.02.2012

By Tina Hesman Saey WASHINGTON — A protein famous for slowing aging and increasing life span also acts as a metronome, helping coordinate metabolism and the body’s daily rhythms. SIRT1, one of a group of proteins called sirtuins, plays roles in many cellular processes, including aging. Researchers hope that activating the protein with drugs such as resveratrol can extend life span and improve health for people, as it does in animal studies. Now, researchers at MIT have evidence that SIRT1 may not only help determine long-term health and longevity, but it also has a hand in setting the body’s daily or “circadian” clock. The finding, reported May 31 at the Metabolism, Diet and Disease meeting, could be important for understanding how metabolism and life span are linked. Studies of cells in laboratory dishes had suggested that SIRT1 might work with certain gears of the circadian clock in liver cells. But until now no one has shown that the protein could influence the body’s master clock in the brain, says Raul Mostoslavsky, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School. In the new study, scientists led by Leonard Guarente of MIT monitored the natural activity patterns of mice. Normally, mice’s circadian clocks run just shy of a 24-hour day, at about 23.5 hours. Mice that lack SIRT1 in their brains have a longer internal day, closer to 24 hours, Guarente said. And mice that made twice as much SIRT1 as normal in their brains had a shorter-than-usual day. Mice making five times as much SIRT1 as normal had even shorter natural days. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16866 - Posted: 06.02.2012

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV Watching a moving car can sometimes be mind-bending. At certain speeds, the wheels of a forward-moving vehicle can appear to turn backwards due to a common brain trick called the wagon wheel effect. But to confuse your brain even more, a new variation by Arthur Shapiro and his team from the American University in Washington DC shows how adding colour to a wheel can further alter the motion perceived. In the first example in the video, some of the dots in the wheel are coloured, allowing us to perceive the actual clockwise motion as well as the reverse at the same time. The effect is maintained when all of the dots are coloured using hues of the same brightness. However, by changing the brightness of the background, only one type of motion is perceived once again. When the animation is made up of both bright and dark colours, two types of motion are perceived simultaneously once again. But by applying a bright background, the animation appears to flash as both types of motion seem to cancel each other out. The classic monochrome wagon wheel effect occurs since our brain doesn't perceive motion continuously, but instead breaks it down into a series of snapshots, just like a video camera. When a wheel rotates clockwise, anti-clockwise information is sometimes generated after each step, causing our brain to misinterpret the direction of motion. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16865 - Posted: 06.02.2012

By Ferris Jabr The rat stood on its hind limbs at one end of a narrow runway. It wore a tiny black vest attached to a robotic arm that hovered above its head. Without such mechanical support, the rat would have fallen over—its spinal cord had two deep cuts, rendering its back legs useless. Rubia van den Brand, then a doctoral candidate at the University of Zurich, stood at the other end of the runway, urging the animal to walk. Although the robotic arm kept the rat upright, it could not help the creature move; if the rodent were ever to walk again, it would have to will its feet forward. For the first time since van den Brand began her experiments, the rat moved one of its back legs on its own—a small, effortful step. She ran to her boss's office with the news and a crowd immediately gathered in the lab to watch what many had deemed impossible. Van den Brand and Grégoire Courtine, now at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (E.P.F.L.), along with their colleagues, have trained rats with nearly severed spinal cords to walk again. One week after being injured, the rats could not move their hind limbs at all. Six weeks later they could walk, run, climb stairs and even sprint—but only with the support of the robotic arm accompanied by electrical and chemical stimulation of the spinal cord. Rats that trained on a moving treadmill instead of on a stationary runway moved their feet reflexively but never learned to walk voluntarily. Only conscious participation in walking encouraged new connections between the rodents' brains, spinal cords and limbs, which they needed to take those first deliberate steps. "It's kind of like how a toddler learns to walk," Courtine says. "Their spinal cord is full of activity and the brain needs to learn to take control of the spinal cord. As long as the brain has something to control it can learn progressively to communicate again with these cells." © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 16864 - Posted: 06.02.2012

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News Being born prematurely is linked to an increased risk of a range of mental health problems much later in life, according to researchers. Bipolar disorder, depression and psychosis were all more likely, the study in The Archives of General Psychiatry suggested. The overall risk remained very low, but was higher in premature babies. Experts cautioned there have since been significant advances in caring for premature babies. Full-term pregnancies last for around 40 weeks, but one in 13 babies are born prematurely, before 36 weeks. Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden analysed data from 1.3m people born in Sweden between 1973 and 1985. They found 10,523 people were admitted to hospital with a psychiatric disorders, 580 of those had been born prematurely. The academics showed full-term children had a two in 1,000 chance of being admitted. The risk was four in 1,000 for premature babies born before 36 weeks and six in 1,000 for those born before 32 weeks. Very premature babies were more than seven times more like to have bipolar disorder and nearly three times as likely to have depression. One of the researchers, Dr Chiara Nosarti, said the real figures may be higher as milder conditions would not have needed a hospital visit. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 16863 - Posted: 06.02.2012