By Jeanna Bryner Getting up close and personal with a furry tarantula is probably the very last thing someone with a spider phobia would opt for, but the encounter may be the ticket to busting the brain's resistance to arachnids. A tried-and-true exposure therapy, this one lasting just hours, changed activity in the brain's fear regions just minutes after the session was complete, researchers found. "Before treatment, some of these participants wouldn't walk on grass for fear of spiders or would stay out of their home or dorm room for days if they thought a spider was present," said lead study author Katherina Hauner, postdoctoral fellow in neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, in a statement. After a single therapy session lasting up to three hours, "they were able to walk right up and touch or hold a tarantula. And they could still touch it after six months," Hauner said. Spider phobia is a type of anxiety disorder called specific phobia, which also includes phobias of blood, needles, snakes, enclosed places and others. About 9.4 percent of the U.S. population has experienced a specific phobia at some point in their lifetime, Hauner said. Hauner told LiveScience she hopes people who have specific phobias, particularly of spiders, will realize that successful treatments are out there, and that their phobias can take just hours to cure (though some cases can take a couple weeks to cure, she noted). "It's still not easy. It involves being motivated to overcome your fear." © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16828 - Posted: 05.23.2012

by Michael Balter Many studies in humans and animals suggest that chronic stress is bad for one’s health, in part because it suppresses the immune system. But nearly 30 years of data on wild baboons shows that top-ranking males, despite showing signs of increased stress, recover more quickly than low-ranking baboons from wounds and illness. The results may help explain why some people escape from the negative effects of stress while others do not. Most studies in humans have shown a clear correlation between higher socioeconomic status and lower risk of death or illness from stress-related diseases such as heart attacks and diabetes. Some of the most famous of these are the so-called Whitehall studies of the British Civil Service, which showed that death and illness rates decreased in a step-wise fashion the higher an employee was on the service’s 6-grade pay and responsibility scale. These and other studies also have found that being at the bottom of the totem pole leads to greater stress as a result of increased work loads and time pressures, as well as more job insecurity. But studies of animals, especially other primates, have shown that the relationship between stress and status largely depends on the social organization of the species in question. For example, in species such as baboons that have rigid social rankings and hierarchies, with so-called alpha males dominating other males and females over extended periods of time, it can apparently be more stressful at the top. In a study reported last year in Science, a team that included ecologist Jeanne Altmann of Princeton University revealed that baboon alpha males had the highest levels of glucocorticoid hormones, such as cortisol, as well as testosterone in their feces, indicators that they were under greater stress than lower-ranking individuals. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Stress; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 16827 - Posted: 05.22.2012

By DOUGLAS QUENQUA If alcoholism is a disease, is there hope of finding the cure in a pill? Yes and no. Having mapped the physical changes the brain undergoes with years of habitual drinking, researchers in recent years have discovered a handful of promising — and some say underused — drugs that, combined with therapy, help alcoholics break the cycle of addiction. To those for whom such remedies work, they certainly can feel like a cure. “I felt like I had found something that finally helped me through the cravings,” said Patty Hendricks, 49, who used one such drug, naltrexone, to help control her drinking habit after four failed rehab attempts. “I don’t think I could have gotten sober without it.” The problem is that alcoholics, like cancer patients, are not a homogeneous group. People drink compulsively for any number of reasons, from genetics to anxiety to post-traumatic stress disorder. The pill that helped Ms. Hendricks get sober might do nothing for, say, a veteran who drinks to ward off nightmares. “Just as breast cancer isn’t just one type of breast cancer,” said Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, “alcoholism is heterogeneous as a disorder, so there’s clearly not one drug that is going to work for everybody.” Instead, some addiction experts now envision a future — possibly no more than a decade away — in which treatment for alcoholism mirrors contemporary approaches to depression: Patients will choose from a range of drugs to find the one that best suits them, then couple it with therapy and other tools to achieve long-term recovery. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16826 - Posted: 05.22.2012

By Sandra G. Boodman, When she heard her younger son’s quavery cry of “M-o-o-o-m-m-m” drifting down the hall in the middle of the night, Jocelyn Mathiasen stiffened, braced for what lay ahead. Sometimes the little boy would awaken just before dawn shaky and weak, complaining of hunger or thirst; after consuming something he would quickly recover. But on the bad nights Peter Dawson would spend hours lying on the floor of the bathroom clutching his stomach, vomiting intermittently and refusing to drink anything. It took him hours to rebound — and it was never clear what had made him so sick. Mathiasen did not know what to make of these episodes, which at first were only mild and infrequent, blips in the life of her otherwise healthy child. But when Peter turned 5 in 2006 and the family moved to Easton, Conn., from Seattle, Mathiasen asked her new pediatrician whether the episodes were normal. Leveling a hard look at her, he told her that what she was describing was definitely not normal — and might signify a serious problem, such as juvenile, or Type 1, diabetes. But after tests for diabetes were negative, the search for the underlying cause of Peter’s odd problem floundered. It would take nearly five years for a specialist eight states away to figure out what was wrong. The solution was a surprisingly cheap and prosaic remedy — but one that recently drew attention in an airport security line. As an infant, Peter would periodically wake up in the morning in obvious distress, grabbing his bottle and sucking down the contents “in one gulp, like he was desperate,” his mother recalled. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16825 - Posted: 05.22.2012

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Some studies have linked dietary fat to the development of dementia later in life. A new study suggests that the risk may depend on the type of fat consumed. Scientists studied 6,183 women over age 65, tracking their fat consumption and changes in their mental abilities over four years. The women completed a food questionnaire at the start of the study, then periodically took tests of mental ability. The researchers assigned a “change score” to each volunteer, summarizing changes in memory and abstract thinking over time — the lower the score, the greater the decline. The study appeared online Thursday in the journal Annals of Neurology. After controlling for many health and socioeconomic factors, the researchers found that women who consumed the most saturated fat were 60 percent more likely than those consuming the least to have change scores that put them below the 10th percentile. On the other hand, women who reported consuming the most monounsaturated fat were 44 percent less likely to have change scores in lowest one-tenth. Consumption of polyunsaturated fats and trans fats was not associated with any change, nor was total fat. “People might consider making changes or substitutions in their diet, switching out saturated fats in favor of monounsaturated fats,” said the lead author, Dr. Olivia I. Okereke, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Obesity
Link ID: 16824 - Posted: 05.22.2012

By Daisy Yuhas Worrywarts, beware: all that fretting may be for naught. Anxiety has long been interpreted as a symptom of hyperawareness and sensitivity to danger, but a study published last December in Biological Psychology turns that logic on its head. Tahl Frenkel, a graduate student in psychology at Tel Aviv University, asked 17 students who had anxious per­sonalities and 22 students who were more mellow to identify when they detected fear in a series of increasingly frightened faces. As expected, the anxious group spoke up before their calmer counterparts. The twist, however, came from the volunteers’ brain activity, recorded with electrodes on each student’s scalp. The brains of anxious subjects barely responded to the images until the frightened face had reached a certain obvious threshold, at which point their brains leapt into action as though caught off guard. Meanwhile nonanxious respondents showed increasing brain activity earlier in the exercise, which built up subtly with each increasingly fearful face. Although their behavioral response was slower, their brain activity suggests that the mellow subjects picked up on subtle differences in the images more quickly. The result implies that worriers are less aware of potential danger—challeng­ing the common theory that anxious individuals are hypervigilant. Frenkel be­lieves that worrywarts’ low sensitivity to external warning signs causes them to be startled frequently by the seemingly sudden appearance of threats, which leaves them in a state of chronic stress. The brain activity in nonanxious subjects, Frenkel explains, may be evidence of an “early subconscious warning mechanism,” which keeps them cool, calm and collected. [For more on how to ease chronic worrying, see “Why We Worry,” by Victoria Stern; Scientific American Mind, November/December 2009.] © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 16823 - Posted: 05.22.2012

By Susan Milius Throughout the world, climate change is causing age-old ecological partners to miss their cues as seasons shift. The trend may be so strong at higher latitudes that researchers now propose that some species’ ranges could actually shrink away from the poles. This idea comes from studying broad-tailed hummingbirds that migrate north from Central America each spring to high-altitude breeding sites in the western United States. With only brief mountain summers to raise chicks, male hummingbirds typically arrive in the region before the first flowers bloom and scout for territories. Around the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colo., near the upper limit of the broad-tailed hummingbird breeding range, the gap between the first hummingbird arrival and the first bloom has narrowed by roughly 13 days during the last four decades. Amy McKinney of the University of Maryland in College Park and her colleagues report the discovery online May 14 in Ecology. Glacier lilies start blooming roughly 17 days earlier than they did in the 1970s, but birds haven’t sped up nearly as much. In a few extreme years, lilies have already started blooming before the first hummingbird showed up. Researchers calculate that if the timing trends continue, in about two more decades the males will routinely miss the first flowers. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16822 - Posted: 05.22.2012

Mo Costandi Birds can master new skills without the gradual improvements that normally occur with training. The improvement is all down to an ancient part of the brain that is present in all vertebrate species. Learning complex motor skills such as speech or dance movements involves imitation and trial and error. Young songbirds, for example, learn to sing by copying an adult tutor, and practising the song thousands of times until they have perfected every syllable. The underlying brain mechanisms are unknown, but one influential model states that structures called the basal ganglia generate a variety of movement patterns that are tried out by the motor cortex, which executes the movements. The basal ganglia then reinforce the best pattern by transmitting a rewarding dopamine signal after receiving feedback on the result of the movement from the motor cortex. But research published today in Nature challenges this view. Jonathan Charlesworth, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues trained Bengalese finches (Lonchura striata domestica) to modify the pitch of one song syllable in response to white noise. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16821 - Posted: 05.21.2012

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR Two new studies have found that people with sleep apnea, a common disorder that causes snoring, fatigue and dangerous pauses in breathing at night, have a higher risk of cancer. The new research marks the first time that sleep apnea has been linked to cancer in humans. About 28 million Americans have some form of sleep apnea, though many cases go undiagnosed. For sleep doctors, the condition is a top concern because it deprives the body of oxygen at night and often coincides with cardiovascular disease, obesity and diabetes. “This is really big news,” said Dr. Joseph Golish, a professor of sleep medicine with the MetroHealth System in Cleveland who was not involved in the research. “It’s the first time this has been shown, and it looks like a very solid association,” he said. Dr. Golish, the former chief of sleep medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, said that the cancer link may not prove to be as strong as the well-documented relationship between sleep apnea and cardiovascular disease, “but until disproven, it would be one more reason to get your apnea treated or to get it diagnosed if you think you might have it.” In one of the new studies, researchers in Spain followed thousands of patients at sleep clinics and found that those with the most severe forms of sleep apnea had a 65 percent greater risk of developing cancer of any kind. The second study, of about 1,500 government workers in Wisconsin, showed that those with the most breathing abnormalities at night had five times the rate of dying from cancer as people without the sleep disorder. Both research teams only looked at cancer diagnoses and outcomes in general, without focusing on any specific type of cancer. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 16820 - Posted: 05.21.2012

Analysis by Sheila Eldred What you eat may affect how you learn, say UCLA researchers in a new study on the effects of high fructose corn syrup and omega-3 fatty acids on the behavior of rats. Rats that were fed only high fructose corn syrup and standard rat chow had more trouble navigating a maze at the end of six weeks than rats who were fed a diet supplemented with omega-3 fatty acids, according to results published in the Journal of Physiology. "Our findings illustrate that what you eat affects how you think," said Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, a professor of neurosurgery and integrative biology and physiology. "Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain's ability to learn and remember information. But adding omega-3 fatty acids to your meals can help minimize the damage." The animals trained on a maze with visual landmarks twice daily for five days before starting the experimental diet. Six weeks later, the researchers tested the rats' ability to recall the route and escape the maze. "The second group of rats navigated the maze much faster than the rats that did not receive omega-3 fatty acids," Gomez-Pinilla said. "The DHA-deprived animals were slower, and their brains showed a decline in synaptic activity. Their brain cells had trouble signaling each other, disrupting the rats' ability to think clearly and recall the route they'd learned six weeks earlier." The faster rats received omega-3 fatty acids in the form of flaxseed oil and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), which protects against damage to the brain's synapses, or chemical connections. The DHA-deprived rats also developed signs of resistance to insulin. © 2012 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Obesity
Link ID: 16819 - Posted: 05.21.2012

By Jason G. Goldman When is a yawn just a yawn? When is a yawn more than a yawn? Contagious yawning – the increase in likelihood that you will yawn after watching or hearing someone else yawn – has been of particular interest to researchers in fields as varied as primatology, developmental psychology, and psychopathology. At first, scientists thought that yawning was a mechanism designed to keep the brain cool. However, it turns out that there is a correlation between the susceptibility for contagious yawning and self-reported empathy. Humans who performed better at theory of mind tasks (a cognitive building block required for empathy) also yawn contagiously more often (PDF). And two conditions that have been associated with poorer performance on theory of mind tasks are also associated with reduced or absent contagious yawning: schizotypy and autism. In 2008, psychologist Ramiro Joly-Mascheroni and colleagues from the University of London showed, for the first time, that human yawns are contagious for domestic dogs. Dogs’ unique social skills in interacting with humans is probably the result of selection pressures during the domestication process. Therefore, they reasoned, it is possible that as a result of that process, dogs may have developed the capacity of empathy towards humans. And if so, it is further possible that they may yawn when they see and hear humans yawn. In one condition, the experimenter, who was a stranger to the dogs, attracted the dogs’ attention and then initiated a genuine yawn. The yawn was repeated for five minutes after re-establishing eye contact with the dog, which meant that the number of yawns varied between ten and nineteen per individual. In the control condition, the experimenter displayed a fake yawn, which mimicked the mouth opening and closing actions, but not the vocalization or other subtle muscular changes. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Emotions; Autism
Link ID: 16818 - Posted: 05.19.2012

by Sara Reardon Preventing obesity may be down to timing, in mice, at least. Mice allowed meals only within an 8-hour period were healthier than those that munched freely through the day, even when they consumed more fat. A link between obesity and the time you eat meals makes sense, says Satchidananda Panda of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, as food choices generally get less healthy as the day progresses. Breakfast may include healthy fruits and grains, but late-night snacks are more likely to involve high-fat ice cream or high-calorie alcohol. Furthermore, research has shown that our internal clocks are closely tied to our metabolism; disrupting them can cause weight gain and diabetes. Panda and colleagues fed two groups of mice a high-fat diet. One group could snack whenever they liked, the other could only eat during an 8-hour window. Both groups consumed the same number of calories each day. Two other groups were fed a healthy diet under the same conditions. Three months later, the weight of mice on the all-day, high-fat diet had increased by 28 per cent. Their blood sugar levels had gone up – a risk factor for diabetes – and they also had liver damage. In contrast, mice eating a high-fat diet for only 8 hours a day stayed healthy and didn't become obese. They also had better balance than mice on a healthy diet. Journal reference: Cell Metabolism, DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2012.04.019 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16817 - Posted: 05.19.2012

By BENEDICT CAREY PRINCETON, N.J. — The simple fact was that he had done something wrong, and at the end of a long and revolutionary career it didn’t matter how often he’d been right, how powerful he once was, or what it would mean for his legacy. Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, considered by some to be the father of modern psychiatry, lay awake at 4 o’clock on a recent morning knowing he had to do the one thing that comes least naturally to him. He pushed himself up and staggered into the dark. His desk seemed impossibly far away; Dr. Spitzer, who turns 80 next week, suffers from Parkinson’s disease and has trouble walking, sitting, even holding his head upright. The word he sometimes uses to describe these limitations — pathetic — is the same one that for decades he wielded like an ax to strike down dumb ideas, empty theorizing and junk studies. Now here he was at his computer, ready to recant a study he had done himself, a poorly conceived 2003 investigation that supported the use of so-called reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality for people strongly motivated to change. What to say? The issue of gay marriage was rocking national politics yet again. The California State Legislature was debating a bill to ban the therapy outright as being dangerous. A magazine writer who had been through the therapy as a teenager recently visited his house, to explain how miserably disorienting the experience was. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16816 - Posted: 05.19.2012

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV Think this animated man is running to the left? Switch your point of view and you may change your mind. Created by Steven Thurman and Hongjing Lu from the University of California, Los Angeles, the animation is most commonly seen as a man running to the left when viewed directly. But by fixing your eyes on the red cross so that it appears in your peripheral vision, the man seems to move to the right. According to the researchers, they manipulated the animation to induce the switch by adjusting features of the discs making up the man's body. Their orientation and drifting speed represent what our brain would expect from a person walking to the right. The illusion was one of the finalists in this year's Best Illusion of the Year Contest. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16815 - Posted: 05.19.2012

By Daisy Yuhas Thinking of something else is a time-honored method for coping with pain. Indeed, psychologists have demonstrated repeatedly that what you think about can modulate the pain you experience. But what's less clear is how exactly that effect plays out in the body. In a study published today in Current Biology, neuroscientists have found that distraction does more than merely divert your mind; it actually sends signals that bar pain from reaching the central nervous system. "This study connects two important fields of pain research," says lead author Christian Sprenger, a physician and neuroscientist at the University Medical Center Hamburg–Eppendorf in Germany. "There are many studies describing the sensitization processes of the spinal cord. On the other hand, it is well known that certain psychological factors are good predictors of the development of pain." Sprenger and his colleagues told 20 male volunteers they would be participating in an experiment that would study concentration and memory. Each subject, while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map their neural activity, used a computer screen to take a memory test called an "n-back test." In such a test, subjects recall a specific letter either one or two letters back from the end of a series. As initial sessions confirmed, remembering a letter two-back is more challenging than a letter one-back. Researchers gave volunteers either the one- or two-back test so that they could study the nervous system under two levels of cognitive load. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Attention
Link ID: 16814 - Posted: 05.19.2012

by Helen Thomson In 1848, 25-year-old railroad supervisor Phineas Gage was using a 3 foot 7 inch iron rod to pack blasting powder into a rock when he triggered an explosion that shot the rod straight through his left cheek and out of the top of his head. His survival and subsequent change in personality made him one of neuroscience's most famous case studies – one of the first to highlight that specific areas of the brain affect particular aspects of behaviour. Now, for the first time, researchers have reconstructed a model of the damage caused to the pathways that connected regions of Gage's brain. The result not only adds dimension to the historical case but also provides insights into conditions such as Alzheimer's disease that result in similar personality changes. Due to the absence of Gage's original brain tissue and lack of a recorded autopsy, estimating the extent of brain damage has been difficult. In 2001, researchers at Harvard University were the last to be given permission by the Warren Anatomical Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to scan Gage's skull. They used computed tomography – essentially a 3D X-ray – but the scans were lost after the researchers left the university. Through some "persistent cajoling" John Van Horn at the University of California, Los Angeles and colleagues recently unearthed the scans. "I just thought it's an absolute shame that this is one of the most valuable pieces of data in the history of neuroscience and it's lying in someone's desk drawer," says Van Horn. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions; Brain imaging
Link ID: 16813 - Posted: 05.19.2012

Elizabeth Armstrong Moore After a stroke, it is often possible -- with months of therapy and determination -- for the brain to relearn how to control a weakened limb. Finding the resources (therapist, finances, time) can be the bigger hurdle. Enter Circus Challenge, the first in a coming suite of action video games designed by Newcastle University stroke experts and the new company Limbs Alive to provide extra in-home therapy. "Eighty percent of patients do not regain full recovery of arm and hand function and this really limits their independence and ability to return to work," pediatric neuroscience professor Janet Eyre at Newcastle, who set up Limbs Alive to produce the games, said in a news release. "Patients need to be able to use both their arms and hands for most everyday activities such as doing up a zip, making a bed, tying shoe laces, unscrewing a jar. With our video game, people get engrossed in the competition and action of the circus characters and forget that the purpose of the game is therapy." Patients use wireless controllers to learn various circus-related skills, from lion taming and juggling to high diving and trapeze work. As they succeed at various tasks, they go on to more challenging quests that involve greater skill, strength, and coordination. © 2012 CBS Interactive.

Keyword: Stroke; Regeneration
Link ID: 16812 - Posted: 05.19.2012

by Debora MacKenzie OUR core physiology relies on subtle organic timers: disrupt them, and effects range from jet lag to schizophrenia. Exactly how and when life began keeping time is unclear, but a candidate for the original biological clock may solve the mystery. Biological clocks are ubiquitous in nature, so the first clock should pre-date the evolutionary parting of the ways that led to modern groups of organisms. All the clocks found so far are unique to different groups of organisms, though. Not so the clock discovered by Akhilesh Reddy at the University of Cambridge and colleagues. In an enzyme called peroxiredoxin (PRX), they seem to have found a grandfather clock - one that is common to nearly all life. PRX gets rid of poisonous, highly reactive oxygen (ROS), which is produced by oxygen-based metabolism. And the enzyme oscillates: it flits between an active and inactive state, depending on whether oxygen is bound to the active site. Using antibodies that bind only to the oxidised enzyme, the team found that PRX oxidation keeps cycling independently on a 24-hour cycle, even when organisms were kept in constant light or constant dark. Moreover, they found this PRX cycle in mice, fruit flies, a plant, a fungus, an alga, bacteria and even in archaea - the most primitive of all cellular life (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature11088). That suggests PRX evolved early in life's history. A gene sequence analysis suggests it did so 2.5 billion years ago, during the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE) - a critical interval when the oxygen released by photosynthesis began to accumulate in the atmosphere. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Evolution
Link ID: 16811 - Posted: 05.17.2012

by Jamie Condliffe Soldiers experience high-pressure shock waves and immense forces during explosions in the field, but research suggests brain trauma is caused merely by the sudden head movements. It has been unclear whether trauma from explosions is caused through high-pressure shock waves penetrating the skull, or through another mechanism. Now a team of researchers from Boston University have performed post mortems on soldiers to establish how traumatic brain injury occurs during explosions. Many blast victims develop symptoms consistent with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease that can cause memory problems, depression and learning difficulties. However, CTE is usually caused by repeated concussions such as those experienced by American football players – not one-off blasts. "The damage in football players has been linked to acceleration forces due to head impact," explains Robin Cleveland, a medical engineer who worked on the project at Boston University before moving to the University of Oxford. "Our goal was to see if the same mechanism was responsible for blast injury." Cleveland and his colleagues performed a post mortem analysis of brains from four soldiers who had experienced blasts. They compared the brains to those of American footballers and a wrestler who all had a history of repetitive concussive injury, as well as with a person with no brain trauma. They found firm evidence of CTE, as indicated by abnormal deposits of the protein tau in the brain of the soldiers, which was indistinguishable from CTE in the athletes. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 16810 - Posted: 05.17.2012

by Greg Miller Autopsies of four U.S. military veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan reveal features of the same neurodegenerative disease found previously in athletes, researchers report. Experiments with mice suggest that the underlying mechanisms may be similar. In the past 10 years, the widely reported suicides and accidental deaths of professional football players and other athletes—such as that of Junior Seau earlier this month -- have sparked inquiries into whether even seemingly minor blows to the head can cause personality changes, dementia, and brain degeneration later in life. Autopsies of dozens of former players have revealed a condition known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Its hallmark is the abnormal accumulation of a protein called tau. Many of the athletes diagnosed with CTE on autopsy (currently the only definitive test) had a history of problems with anger, rash and risky decision-making, impairments of memory and attention, and alcohol or drug abuse. Clinicians and researchers working with troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have seen similar symptoms. The new study, led by Lee Goldstein, a physician-scientist who focuses on neurodegenerative disease at Boston University, and Ann McKee, a neuropathologist at the Bedford Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Massachusetts, ties these troublesome threads together. McKee examined the brains of four veterans, men between the ages of 22 and 45, who suffered from various combinations of cognitive, emotional, and impulse-control problems before dying from suicide or other causes. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Stress; Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 16809 - Posted: 05.17.2012