By JOHN TIERNEY If you want a truly frustrating job in public health, try getting people to stop smoking. Even when researchers combine counseling and encouragement with nicotine patches and gum, few smokers quit. Recently, though, experimenters in Italy had more success by doing less. A team led by Riccardo Polosa of the University of Catania recruited 40 hard-core smokers — ones who had turned down a free spot in a smoking-cessation program — and simply gave them a gadget already available in stores for $50. This electronic cigarette, or e-cigarette, contains a small reservoir of liquid nicotine solution that is vaporized to form an aerosol mist. The user “vapes,” or puffs on the vapor, to get a hit of the addictive nicotine (and the familiar sensation of bringing a cigarette to one’s mouth) without the noxious substances found in cigarette smoke. After six months, more than half the subjects in Dr. Polosa’s experiment had cut their regular cigarette consumption by at least 50 percent. Nearly a quarter had stopped altogether. Though this was just a small pilot study, the results fit with other encouraging evidence and bolster hopes that these e-cigarettes could be the most effective tool yet for reducing the global death toll from smoking. But there’s a powerful group working against this innovation — and it’s not Big Tobacco. It’s a coalition of government officials and antismoking groups who have been warning about the dangers of e-cigarettes and trying to ban their sale. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16020 - Posted: 11.11.2011

By JEFF Z. KLEIN GREENBURGH, N.Y. — Concussions continued to cast a long shadow over the N.H.L. on Thursday. The Rangers said there was no update on the condition of defenseman Marc Staal, who has not played this season and is still recovering from a concussion sustained in February that the club did not disclose until September. Pittsburgh’s Sidney Crosby, who has been sidelined by a concussion since early January, was cleared for contact a month ago and has practiced all week, including Wednesday, when he took several hard hits. Despite speculation that he would return for Friday’s home game against the Dallas Stars, Coach Dan Bylsma said Crosby would not play in either of the team’s games this weekend. That leaves Tuesday’s game against the Colorado Avalanche as the earliest possible return date for Crosby. Toronto goalie James Reimer has not played since Oct. 22, when he sustained an injury that the Maple Leafs have characterized variously as whiplash, concussion-like symptoms and an upper-body injury. The N.H.L. has earned praise this season for taking measures to reduce concussions, including introducing stronger rules against boarding and checks to the head, and strictly enforcing those rules through fines and suspensions. But questions persist about a league policy that allows teams to be vague about disclosure of injuries, and a recent incident suggested that in-game concussion protocols might be inconsistently applied. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 16019 - Posted: 11.11.2011

By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D. The middle-aged patient with long dark hair made it very clear that this was not her first urinary tract infection. “It’s because when I urinate,” she said, “I need to use a catheter.” She opened the leather satchel on her lap and, to prove her point, pulled out a thin, red sterile length of tube covered in plastic. “Just ask one of the older nurses or doctors,” she said, smiling. “They all know me.” But as I would learn, it was not because of her recurrent infections that so many of my colleagues knew her. Several years earlier, she had come in for a routine operation. The doctor had evaluated her before the operation, learned that she was a homemaker and met her husband. But on the morning of her operation, as he pulled down the sheets to begin inserting the urinary catheter into his now sleeping patient, he was startled to discover that the patient was not exactly who he had assumed she was. She was transgender, and where he had been expecting to find female genitalia, he found male genitals instead. The operation had gone well; but years later the doctor’s glaring oversight continued to haunt the rest of us. The patient had obviously not felt comfortable disclosing her transgender identify, and the doctor had clearly not asked the right questions. We knew that any one of us could have made the same mistake. While we had been trained well in treating cancer with the best chemotherapy regimen, curing flesh-eating infections with the most powerful antibiotics or transplanting organs with the greatest of ease, when it came to caring for patients who were transgender, we were lost. For many of us, the same could be said for lesbian, gay and bisexual patients as well. The only thing most of us knew how to do was ask about a single issue: “Whom are you having sex with? Men, women or both?” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16018 - Posted: 11.11.2011

by Chelsea Whyte Signs of consciousness have been detected in three people previously thought to be in a vegetative state, with the help of a cheap, portable device that can be used at the bedside. "There's a man here who technically meets all the internationally agreed criteria for being in a vegetative state, yet he can generate 200 responses [to direct commands] with his brain," says Adrian Owen of the University of Western Ontario. "Clearly this guy is not in a true vegetative state. He's probably as conscious as you or I are." In 2005, Owen's team, used functional MRI to show consciousness in a person who was in a persistent vegetative state, also known as wakeful unconsciousness – where the body still functions but the mind is unresponsive – for the first time. However, fMRI is costly and time-consuming, so his team set about searching for simple and cost-effective solutions for making bedside diagnoses of PVS. Now, they have devised a test that uses the relatively inexpensive and widely available electroencephalogram (EEG). Owen and his team used an EEG on 16 people thought to be in a PVS and compared the results with 12 healthy controls while they were asked to imagine performing a series of tasks. Each person was asked to imagine at least four separate actions – either clenching their right fist or wiggling their toes. Journal reference: The Lancet, DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(11)61224-5 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16017 - Posted: 11.11.2011

by Nora Schultz Actions speak louder than words. Baby chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans – our four closest living relatives – quickly learn to use visual gestures to get their message across, providing the latest evidence that hand waving may have been a vital first step in the development of human language. After a long search for the origins of language in animal vocalisations, some evolutionary biologists have begun to change tack. The emerging "gesture theory" of language evolution has it that our ancestors' linguistic abilities may have begun with their hands rather than their vocal cords. Katja Liebal and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have found new evidence for the theory by studying how communication develops in our closest living relatives. They discovered that all four great apes – chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans – develop a complex repertoire of gestures during the first 20 months of life. Look at me Those gestures included the tactile pokes and nudges that are expected to effectively capture another's attention in any situation, but they also included visual gestures such as extending the arms towards another ape or head shaking. To be effective communication tools, these visual gestures require that a young ape be aware that another individual is paying attention before using them, if they want to get their message across. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 16016 - Posted: 11.11.2011

By Jason G. Goldman You might have more in common with the chicken on your plate than you realize. Sure, you’ve also got two thighs, two legs, two breasts, and two wings (sort of). But new research suggests that chickens might like to rock out to the same tunes you’ve got on your iPod. The kinds of sounds that humans tend to find pleasant is called consonant, which are different from from unpleasant sounds, which are called dissonant. Think of the difference between a Mozart sonata and fingernails on a chalkboard, and you’re on the right track. Consonant notes sound – to the untrained ear – as if they were a single tone, while a you can identify multiple tones within a dissonant note. This might be related to the human preference for harmonics, since in humans, the preference for consonant sounds are associated with preferences for harmonic spectra (harmonic relationships between frequencies), while dissonant sounds are not. It might be easiest to understand by listening to these melodies. The melodies are the same, but the first one is consonant (composed of minor and major thirds) and the second one is dissonant (composed of minor seconds). Turn your speakers up: Two-month-old human babies prefer to listen to consonant music rather than dissonant music. As early as one to three days after birth, human infant brains can distinguish between consonant and dissonant music – though it is unclear if there is a preference at that early age. Songbirds like Java sparrows (Padda oryzivora) and European starlings (Sternus vulgaris) can distinguish consonant from dissonant music as well, though, like day-old human infants, it is unclear if there is a preference. Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) can distinguish the two types of tones, though no preference has been observed in cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus). There was one human-raised chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) that preferred consonant music. Taken together, the evidence for the musical preferences of humans and non-human animals is a bit…dissonant. No harmony to be found here. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Hearing; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16015 - Posted: 11.11.2011

By Tina Hesman Saey Researchers have grown a mouse pituitary gland for the first time from embryonic stem cells. Or rather, the pituitary gland grew itself, after Japanese researchers coaxed embryonic stem cells to form the type of tissues that normally surround the gland. The accomplishment, reported online November 9 in Nature, could be the first step toward replacement pituitary glands for people. Self-made glands growing in lab dishes may also help researchers learn how the organs develop inside the body. “There’s a lot in it to be excited about, whether you’re a developmental biologist or interested in clinical applications,” says Sally Camper, a developmental geneticist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Camper has tried, and failed, to coax embryonic stem cells to form pituitary glands. “It’s a gorgeous piece of work, and it’s just really, really exciting,” she says. Scientists have persuaded stem cells to form particular types of tissues before, but growing a whole organ in a lab dish has been an elusive goal, says pediatric endocrinologist Mehul Dattani of the University College London Institute of Child Health and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London. What allowed Yoshiki Sasai of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, and colleagues to succeed where others have failed is that the group recreated conditions that exist in the part of the brain where the pituitary normally grows. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16014 - Posted: 11.11.2011

By Nick Bascom Primates may have evolved from living the lonely life to forming complex societies in two major steps, a new study of more than 200 species suggests. Understanding when and why the ancestors of Homo sapiens and its closest cousins adopted different social structures could help reveal more about the evolution of human society. About 52 million years ago, primates — an order of animals that includes, among others, humans and great apes — might have stopped foraging alone and banded together in large, loosely formed, same-sex groups to search for food, anthropologist Susanne Shultz of the University of Oxford and colleagues report in the Nov. 10 Nature. Then around 16 million years ago, primates began forming more stable social groups, such as male-female pairs and harems dominated by one male, the researchers suggest. Teaming up this way may have been prompted by a switch from a nocturnal lifestyle to moving about in the sunshine. “Being active during the day would have allowed primates to travel across larger spaces and exploit their environment more effectively, but it would have also exposed them to a huge predation risk,” says Shultz. To make it through the day, primates would have needed a new defense strategy to deal with both a greater number of predators and also new kinds of hunters. “What’s going to nail you at night is different than what’s going to nail you during the day,” says primatologist Anthony Di Fiore of the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the study. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 16013 - Posted: 11.11.2011

By Bruce Bower People with schizophrenia rapidly and intensely perceive phony replicas of hands as their own, possibly contributing to this mental ailment’s signature hallucinations, a new study suggests. In a series of tests, people with schizophrenia believed a rubber hand placed in front of them was theirs if the visible fake hand and the patient’s hidden, corresponding hand were simultaneously stroked with a paintbrush. Mentally healthy people took longer to experience a less dramatic version of this rubber-hand illusion than schizophrenia patients did, but the effect’s vividness increased among healthy volunteers who reported magical beliefs, severe social anxiety and other characteristics linked to a tendency to psychosis, psychologist Sohee Park of Vanderbilt University in Nashville and her colleagues report online October 31 in PLoS ONE. “Schizophrenia patients may have a more flexible internal representation of their bodies and a weakened sense of self,” Park says. “Even without psychosis, the rubber-hand illusion can be more pronounced in certain personality types.” Mental health clinicians have written for several decades about a disturbed sense of self in schizophrenia. A team led by psychiatrist Avi Peled of Sha’ar Menashe Mental Health Center in Hadera, Israel, first reported a powerful rubber-hand illusion in the illness in 2000. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Attention
Link ID: 16012 - Posted: 11.11.2011

Having a mini-stroke can reduce a person's life expectancy by up to 20 per cent, a new study suggests. In a mini-stroke — known in the medical world as a transient ischemic attack (TIA) — the blood flow to part of the brain is temporarily blocked or reduced. With a mini-stroke, the initial symptoms of blurred vision, numbness, sudden headache, and difficulty speaking or walking (similar to stroke symptoms) soon disappear. In a stroke, the brain incurs permanent damage because the blood flow stays blocked. Having a history of TIA has long been known as a risk factor for strokes. This new study suggests there are also serious impacts on life expectancy. Researchers identified more than 22,000 people hospitalized in Australia because of a mini-stroke between 2000 and 2007 and tracked their medical records for at least two years. Using death registry data from 2009, they then compared this population to those in the general population. Their findings were startling. For those patients who'd had a mini-stroke in 2000, their survival rate nine years later was 20 per cent lower than the population as a whole. Survival rates at the one-year and five year marks were also lower. A year after a mini-stroke, 91.5 per cent of the TIA patients were still alive, versus 95 per cent survival among the general population. Five years after a mini-stroke, 67.2 per cent of the TIA group was alive, compared to 77.4 per cent of the general population. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 16011 - Posted: 11.11.2011

Children with autism have more brain cells and heavier brains compared to typically developing children, according to researchers partly funded by the National Institutes of Health. Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Nov. 9, 2011, the small, preliminary study provides direct evidence for possible prenatal causes of autism. "Earlier studies of head circumference and early brain overgrowth have pointed us in this direction, but there have been few quantitative neuroanatomical studies due to the lack of post-mortem tissue from children with autism," said Thomas R. Insel, M.D., director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of NIH. "These new results, along with an earlier study[1] reporting altered wiring of the prefrontal cortex, focus our attention on this critical area of the brain in autism." The prefrontal cortex is involved in various higher order functions such as language and communication, social behavior, mood, and attention. Children who have autism tend to show deficits in such functions. Eric Courchesne, Ph.D., of the University of San Diego School of Medicine Autism Center of Excellence, and colleagues conducted direct counts of brain cells in specific regions of the prefrontal cortex in postmortem brains of seven boys who had autism and six typically developing males, ranging in age from 2-16 years. Most participants had died in accidents, but the researchers did not base their selection on causes of death.

Keyword: Autism; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16010 - Posted: 11.09.2011

By Bruce Bower SEATTLE — Good listeners inadvertently turn a deaf ear to unexpected sounds. Attending closely to a conversation creates a situation in which unusual, clearly audible background utterances frequently go totally unheard, says psychologist Polly Dalton of the University of London. This finding takes the famous “invisible gorilla effect” from vision into the realm of hearing, Dalton reported November 4 at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society. More than a decade ago, researchers observed that about half of volunteers watching a videotape of people passing a basketball fail to see a gorilla-suited person walking through the group if the viewers are instructed to focus on counting how many times the ball gets passed (SN: 5/21/11, p. 16). An ability to prioritize what sounds and sights to monitor supports daily activities, but it can also wipe out perceptions of obvious peripheral happenings. “We’re not aware of as much in the world as we think we are,” Dalton said. Dalton and her colleagues created a 69-second recording of two men talking as they prepared food for a party and two women chatting as they wrapped a party gift. Headphones delivered one conversation to each ear of 41 volunteers, creating a sense of the four characters moving around a room as they talked. Partway into the recording, a man dubbed “gorilla man” by the researchers appears in the acoustic scene for 19 seconds saying “I’m a gorilla” over and over. Participants were assigned to pay attention either to the men’s or the women’s conversation. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Attention; Hearing
Link ID: 16009 - Posted: 11.09.2011

By JANE E. BRODY The eyes may be windows to the soul, but the retina is the brain’s window to the world. When the retina is injured, vision is seriously threatened and may be lost entirely if the problem is not quickly addressed. The retina is a layer of tissue at the back of the eye that collects light relayed through the lens. Special photoreceptor cells in the retina convert light into nerve impulses, which are transmitted to the brain. At the retina’s center is an especially critical area called the macula, which enables you to see anything directly in front of you, like words on a page, a person’s face, the road ahead or the image on a screen. When blood flow through the retina is blocked or when the retina pulls away from the wall of the eye, getting the problem properly diagnosed can be an emergency. Modern treatments can do wonders if they are begun before the damage is irreversible. But a delay in getting to a retinal specialist can diminish the ability of even the best therapy to preserve or restore normal vision. As with all living tissue, the retina is highly dependent on a constant supply of oxygen-carrying blood. Should anything disrupt that, vision is at risk. Two retinal mishaps, retinal-vein occlusion and retinal detachment, can occur at any age, but both are more common among older people. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16008 - Posted: 11.09.2011

By RITCHIE S. KING As plain-tailed wrens dart through Chusquea bamboo in the Andes, they can be heard singing a kind of song that no other bird is known to sing: a cooperative duet. New research shows that male-female pairs take turns producing notes, at a combined rate of three to six per second, to create what sounds like a single bird’s song. Each member of the duo reacts to what the other one does, adjusting the timing and pitch as needed to maintain the melody the two are trying to play together. The duet is like humans dancing, said Eric Fortune, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University and an author of the study, which appeared in the journal Science. The cues between the birds are “continuous and subtle,” and brain scans show that each bird learns the entire duet — as a pair of ballroom dancers learns choreography — instead of only memorizing its individual part. In the world of plain-tailed wrens, it appears that females always lead, singing a simple backbone melody that the males fill in with something more variable, like a guitar solo. The research team suspects that a female engages in cooperative singing to put a male’s chirping prowess to the test and thereby determine his suitability as a mate. While alone, a female wren practices her section of a duet at full volume. But males make more mistakes during cooperative singing, so they tweet much more timidly when they rehearse their part. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16007 - Posted: 11.09.2011

By SAM ROBERTS Election Day is seldom associated with raging hormones. But three professors from Israel, where all politics is vocal, suggest that the very act of voting generates stress levels that could affect the outcome. In an experiment conducted in a small Israeli town during the fiercely contested 2009 national election, the researchers took saliva samples from people who were about to vote. They found higher levels of glucocorticoid hormones, including cortisol, which are secreted by the adrenal glands and are associated with stress. Not only that, but people who planned to vote for the underdog tended to exhibit even more stress — affirming a study from the United States that found Obama voters’ cortisol levels remained steadier than those of McCain voters as the 2008 election results rolled in. “This is the first study to explore the psychological well-being of actual voters through an endocrinal measure at the ballot,” the professors — Israel Waismel-Manor of the University of Haifa and Gal Ifergane and Hagit Cohen of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev — write in a recent edition of the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology. They conducted their experiment in Omer, a small town 70 miles south of Tel Aviv, and hope to replicate it in the United States a year from now, when Americans choose a president. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 16006 - Posted: 11.09.2011

By DENISE GRADY An operation that doctors hoped would prevent strokes in people with poor circulation to the brain does not work, researchers are reporting. A $20 million study, paid for by the government, was cut short when it became apparent that the surgery was not helping patients who had complete blockages in one of their two carotid arteries, which run up either side of the neck and feed 80 percent of the brain. The surgery was a bypass that connected a scalp artery to a deeper vessel to improve blood flow to the brain. The new study, published on Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is the second in recent months to find that a costly treatment, one that doctors had high hopes for, did not prevent strokes. In September, researchers reported that stents being used to prop open blocked arteries deep in the brain were actually causing strokes. That study was also cut short. Both the stents and the bypass operation seemed to make sense medically, and doctors thought they should work. Their failure highlights the peril of assuming that an apparent improvement on a lab test or X-ray, like better blood flow or a wider artery, will translate into something that actually helps patients, warned an editorial that accompanied the new findings. Only rigorous studies can tell for sure. The editorial writer, Dr. Joseph P. Broderick, chairman of neurology at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, also cautioned that other stroke treatments were being used without sufficient study, particularly devices to remove clots. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 16005 - Posted: 11.09.2011

Researchers have found a possible link between heavy use of methamphetamines and schizophrenia. Increased risk of the mental illness was discovered in meth users in a study of California hospital records for patients admitted between 1990 and 2000 with a diagnosis of drug dependence or abuse. Scientists at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health compared the drug users to a control group of patients with appendicitis and no drug use. A drug addict prepares a combination of heroin and crystal meth. Scientists at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health say people hospitalized for meth who didn't have a diagnosis of psychotic symptoms had about a 1.5- to threefold risk of being later diagnosed with schizophrenia.A drug addict prepares a combination of heroin and crystal meth. Scientists at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health say people hospitalized for meth who didn't have a diagnosis of psychotic symptoms had about a 1.5- to threefold risk of being later diagnosed with schizophrenia. Guillermo Arias/Associated Press The hospital records were studied for readmissions for up to 10 years after the initial admission. Co-author Russell Callaghan says people hospitalized for meth who didn't have a diagnosis of psychotic symptoms at the start of the study period had about a 1.5- to threefold risk of being later diagnosed with schizophrenia, compared with groups of patients who used cocaine, alcohol or opioid drugs. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16004 - Posted: 11.09.2011

by Jennifer Barone Language seems to set humans apart from other animals, but scientists cannot just hand monkeys and birds an interspecies SAT to determine which linguistic abilities are singularly those of Homo sapiens and which we share with other animals. In August neuroscientists Kentaro Abe and Dai Watanabe of Kyoto University announced that they had devised the next-best thing, a systematic test of birds’ grammatical prowess. The results suggest that Bengalese finches have strict rules of syntax: The order of their chirps matters. “It’s the first experiment to show that any animal has perceived the especially complex patterns that supposedly make human language unique,” says Timothy Gentner, who studies animal cognition and communication at the University of California, San Diego, and was not involved in the study. Finches cry out whenever they hear a new tune, so Abe and Watanabe started by having individual birds listen to an unfamiliar finch’s song. At first the listeners called out in reply, but after 200 playbacks, their responses died down. Then the researchers created three remixes by changing the order of the song’s component syllables. The birds reacted indifferently to two of the revised tunes; apparently the gist of the message remained the same. But one remix elicited a burst of calls, as if the birds had detected something wrong. Abe and Watanabe concluded that the birds were reacting like grumpy middle-school English teachers to a violation of their rules of syntax. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing C

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 16003 - Posted: 11.09.2011

BRAIN not needed: the muscles controlling the slit-like pupil of a cat's eye do not require nerve signals to drive their movement. A light-sensitive pigment in the iris can do the job instead. Mammals were thought to rely on signalling between the eye and brain to resize the pupil and control the amount of light reaching the retina, but King-Wai Yau and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, discovered that eyeballs isolated from animals that are active at night or at dusk and dawn - including cats, dogs and hamsters - continued to respond to light. They traced the effect to melanopsin, a light-sensitive pigment in the iris muscle. Eye tissue from mice lacking the gene for this pigment was unable to respond to light in the same way (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature10567). The pigment is already known to play a similar role in birds, fish and amphibians. Stuart Peirson at the University of Oxford, who was not involved with the study, thinks it might provide dark-loving mammals with an additional pupil-shrinking tool that helps them avoid being dazzled if suddenly exposed to light. The findings also hint at clinical uses of melanopsin in humans. Some forms of blindness result from the loss of light-sensitive rod and cone cells from the retina. Peirson says it might be possible to use melanopsin to make other cells in the retina light-sensitive instead. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16002 - Posted: 11.09.2011

by Jessica Hamzelou How well can you control your thoughts? Mind-control training could improve symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Deep brain stimulation, which involves implanting electrodes in the brain, helps to alleviate problems with movement experienced by people with Parkinson's disease. "If putting in an electrode works, we thought training brains to self-regulate might work as well," says David Linden at Cardiff University, UK. To find out, Linden's team asked 10 people with Parkinson's to think about moving while having their brains scanned by fMRI for 45 minutes. Five were given real-time neurofeedback showing how well they activated a brain region that controls movement. Each participant was then told to practice such thoughts at home. Two months later, movement problems including rigidity and tremor had improved by 37 per cent in the group that received feedback compared with no change in the rest. "Sending signals to brain areas normally deprived of input could be reshaping neural networks," says Linden. Roger Barker, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, points out that the treatment would not work for everyone with Parkinson's disease. "If the person has a bad tremor then it would be difficult to get an image, while others don't like being inside the scanners," he says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 16001 - Posted: 11.09.2011