By LAURIE TARKAN A new study of twins suggests that environmental factors, including conditions in the womb, may be at least as important as genes in causing autism. The researchers did not say which environmental influences might be at work. But other experts said the new study, released online on Monday, marked an important shift in thinking about the causes of autism, which is now thought to affect at least 1 percent of the population in the developed world. “This is a very significant study because it confirms that genetic factors are involved in the cause of the disorder,” said Dr. Peter Szatmari, a leading autism researcher who is the head of child psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at McMaster University in Ontario. “But it shifts the focus to the possibility that environmental factors could also be really important.” As recently as a few decades ago, psychiatrists thought autism was caused by a lack of maternal warmth. And while that notion has been discarded in favor of genetic explanations, there has been growing acceptance that genes do not tell the whole story, in part because autism rates appear to have increased far faster than our genes can evolve. “I think we now understand that both genetic and environmental factors have to be taken seriously,” said Dr. Joachim Hallmayer, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford and the lead author of the new study, which is to be published in the November issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15524 - Posted: 07.05.2011

by Sally Adee ROSALIND PICARD'S eyes were wide open. I couldn't blame her. We were sitting in her office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and my questions were stunningly incisive. In fact, I began to suspect that I must be one of the savviest journalists she had ever met. Then Picard handed me a pair of special glasses. The instant I put them on I discovered that I had got it all terribly wrong. That look of admiration, I realised, was actually confusion and disagreement. Worse, she was bored out of her mind. I became privy to this knowledge because a little voice was whispering in my ear through a headphone attached to the glasses. It told me that Picard was "confused" or "disagreeing". All the while, a red light built into the specs was blinking above my right eye to warn me to stop talking. It was as though I had developed an extra sense. The glasses can send me this information thanks to a built-in camera linked to software that analyses Picard's facial expressions. They're just one example of a number of "social X-ray specs" that are set to transform how we interact with each other. By sensing emotions that we would otherwise miss, these technologies can thwart disastrous social gaffes and help us understand each other better. Some companies are already wiring up their employees with the technology, to help them improve how they communicate with customers. Our emotional intelligence is about to be boosted, but are we ready to broadcast feelings we might rather keep private? © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions; Robotics
Link ID: 15523 - Posted: 07.05.2011

by Michael Balter Most researchers regard language as unique to humans, something that makes our species special. But they fiercely debate how the ability to speak and listen evolved. Did speech require our species to evolve novel capabilities, or did we simply combine and enhance various abilities that other animals have, too? A new study with a language-trained chimp suggests that when it comes to understanding speech, the basic equipment might already have been present in our apelike ancestors. The notion that language evolved only in the human lineage and has no parallels in other animals has long been attributed to the linguist Noam Chomsky, who argued beginning in the 1960s that humans had a special "language organ" unique to us. But more recent studies have shown that other species are surprisingly good at communication, and many researchers have abandoned this idea—even Chomsky himself no longer holds to it strictly. However, some scientists continue to argue that humans have evolved unique ways to perceive and understand speech that allows us to use words as symbols for complex meanings. These contentions are based in part on a notable human talent: We can recognize words and understand entire sentences, even if the sounds of the words have been dramatically altered until they are a pale shadow of their linguistically meaningful selves. So a team of researchers turned to Panzee, a 25-year-old chimpanzee, to test the assumption that only humans have this talent. Humans raised Panzee from the age of 8 days, and her caregivers exposed her to a rich diet of English language conversation about food, people, objects, and events. Panzee can't talk, so she communicates with those around her using a lexigram board of symbols corresponding to English words (see photo). She can point to 128 different lexigrams when she hears the corresponding spoken word. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 15522 - Posted: 07.02.2011

By Jeannine Stamatakis I met Kim Peek when he gave a presentation at Ohlone College in October 2009, just a few weeks before his passing. During the talk, Peek astonished my students by showcasing his remarkable talent for calendar calculations. Just from knowing my students’ birth dates, Peek was able to determine the day of the week they were born and could recall the front-page news that day. Known as a mega savant or a “Kimputer,” Peek had one of the most impressive memories people have ever seen. Physicians who examined Peek discovered that he had damage to the cerebellum, a brain region that regulates attention and language, as well as emotional reactions, such as pleasure and fear. Perhaps most notably, physicians found that Peek had no corpus callosum, the bundle of nerves that connects the brain’s right and left hemispheres. They speculated that the absence of this critical structure allowed Peek’s neurons to make new and unusual connections between his right and left hemispheres. These novel connections most likely explain his abnormal memory capacity. According to Peek’s father, Peek could memorize every word in the books they read before he was two years old. Peek progressed to reading two pages simultaneously. Although how he did so remains a mystery, some have theorized he read the left page of a book with his left eye and the right page with his right eye. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Laterality; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15521 - Posted: 07.02.2011

By Bob Roehr Chronic pain affects at least one in three adults in the U.S., which is more than the sum total of those with heart disease, cancer and diabetes combined. For many of these 116 million Americans, their pain is severe and eludes available treatments. In addition to the human suffering, the monetary cost of medical treatment and lost productivity has reached $635 billion a year. The U.S. needs "a cultural transformation" in the way we view pain, treat it and conduct research on its causes and treatments, says a new report released June 29 by the Institute of Medicine (IOM). Pain can be protective. Acute pain tells us to pull a finger back from a hot stove, stop walking on a blistered foot or allow a fevered body to rest. It is a warning that bodily injury needs attention and time to heal. But when the pain signal continues for an extended period, "it can become a disease in its own right," Philip Pizzo, dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine and chair of the committee that wrote the IOM report said at the news conference where the report was released. Pain can actually rewire nerve and brain pathways. In much the same way that memories are created, it can become a self-perpetuating loop that continues to feed back on itself long after the original cause for the pain has resolved. Chronic pain can shrink the volume of the brain's gray matter, the portion of the brain devoted to thought. Researchers speculate that this decrease results in part from a limited pattern of stimulation of circuits that are preoccupied with a continuous pain loop that crowds out other activity. In addition to that, continuously stimulating the pathway releases more of the neurotransmitter glutamate, an excess of which can be toxic. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15520 - Posted: 07.02.2011

Sandrine Ceurstemont, video producer It's a well-known effect typically experienced when looking at a waterfall: after staring at a moving scene, stationary objects seem to pulse in the opposite direction when you look away. You can experience the illusion in this video by fixing your eyes on a pattern that moves inwards. When the static image of a bee suddenly appears, it seems to expand. Since it was first documented by Aristotle, the effect has puzzled scientists. Does our brain consciously adapt to a moving scene or is it a subconscious response? Now Davis Glasser and his team from the University of Rochester have gained insight by showing people supershort videos of a moving pattern. They found that the illusion occurs even after watching a scene for a fraction of a second, proving that it's a subconscious response. The team also identified the neurons responsible for the effect, located in an area of the visual cortex involved in motion perception. So it seems that this illusion isn't down to a perceptual oddity but rather the result of a fundamental process that occurs every time we look at moving objects. But according to Glasser, the strength of the effect depends on the amount of time spent looking at a pattern. "In the video above, you're adapting for 30 seconds or more, so the effect is very strong," he says. "You can see illusory motion in almost anything you look at, whether it's the bee that pops up on the screen, or other objects around the room." After watching the short videos in the study, the sensation was much weaker. Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1101141108 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15519 - Posted: 07.02.2011

By Bruce Bower Babies snooze through much of the first month after birth, but don’t call them lazy. One-month-olds doze to discover, with an emphasis on social insights, a new study suggests. Snoozing infants learned to blink in response to three types of sounds, says psychologist Bethany Reeb-Sutherland of the University of Maryland, College Park, and her colleagues. Sleeping babies blinked more readily upon hearing a spoken voice than a tone or a recorded voice played backward, signaling an early aptitude for absorbing social information, the researchers report in a paper published online June 18 in Developmental Science. “Although young infants spend much of their time sleeping, they continue to learn about the environment around them, particularly the social environment,” Reeb-Sutherland says. These findings help to explain how infants come to recognize speech sounds within several months of birth, remarks psychologist Carolyn Rovee-Collier of Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J. “From birth through at least 1 month of age, infants learn while they sleep — an ability that adults lack,” Rovee-Collier says. Sleep bolsters memories and decision making in adults (SN: 4/28/07, p. 260), but no evidence suggests that slumbering grown-ups can learn new information. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15518 - Posted: 07.02.2011

Canadian and U.S. researchers have been able to predict what hand movement a person is going to make by reading a scan of their brain. The scientists at the University of Western Ontario and the University of Oregon scanned the brains of nine volunteers at the Robarts Research Institute in London, Ont. They found they were able to distinguish somewhat accurately among plans to make three hand movements that were only slightly different from one another: Jody Culham and Jason Gallivan at the University of Western Ontario were the two lead authors of the study. Jody Culham and Jason Gallivan at the University of Western Ontario were the two lead authors of the study. (University of Western Ontario)"We're showing that you can decode little subtle differences in finger movements based on the goal of the movement," said Jason Gallivan, a Ph.D. student in neuroscience at the University of Western Ontario and the lead author of a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience this week. Previously, scientists had only been able to make similar predictions for animals with electrodes inserted in their brains. Funcational magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, is far less intrusive, said Jody Culham, a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario who is Gallivan’s supervisor and co-author. That made it possible to do such an experiment in humans. While the new discovery may bring to mind Minority Report, the 2002 movie starring Tom Cruise where criminals are caught before the crimes they commit, Gallivan said that type of scenario is a long way off. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 15517 - Posted: 07.02.2011

By Janet Raloff An ingredient in many clear plastics also renders some gender-linked behaviors plastic, at least in mice. Two new studies link feminized behaviors in adult males with exposures during development to bisphenol A, a weak estrogen-mimicking chemical. In one study, some behaviors in BPA-exposed females morphed into features characteristic of males. The findings come from laboratory studies conducted in different species. Each experiment also exposed animals at a different time during development — one from the womb through weaning, the other during the rodent equivalent of adolescence and early adulthood. The trials therefore identify different periods during which the brain appears vulnerable to pollutants that mimic or alter the activity of sex hormones. Because early BPA exposures left no lasting changes in sex hormone levels, the authors of each study note, the behavioral changes they observed in adulthood probably trace to an earlier rewiring of brain circuitry — most likely in an area known as the hippocampus. Cheryl Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri–Columbia and her colleagues added BPA to the chow they fed to pregnant deer mice. BPA concentrations in the moms peaked at around 9 nanograms per milliliter, Rosenfeld says, “which is in the range of what’s been measured in humans.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 15516 - Posted: 06.30.2011

By Tina Hesman Saey The high-risk version of a gene associated with Alzheimer’s disease hinders the brain’s ability to clear out a troublesome protein, a new study finds. Researchers have known that people who carry the e4 version of the gene APOE are at higher risk for Alzheimer’s disease and more likely to have cell-killing plaques in their brains than people who have the e3 or e2 versions. But it hasn’t been clear whether people with the e4 version made more of the plaque protein — called amyloid-beta — or if the stuff just stuck around in their brains longer. Now researchers led by David Holtzman of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have directly measured levels of amyloid-beta in the brain fluid of mice. The measurements, reported in the June 29 Science Translational Medicine, show that mice with the e4 version of APOE make amyloid-beta at the same rate and in the same amount as mice with different versions of the gene, but don’t clear the protein out of their brains as efficiently. The study will probably draw more attention to the role amyloid-beta clearance plays in Alzheimer’s disease, says Caleb Finch, a neurobiologist and codirector of the Alzheimer Disease Research Center at the University of Southern California. “I think this is a valuable contribution,” he says. It is not yet clear how different forms of the protein made by APOE govern clearance of amyloid-beta from the brain, says Joseph Castellano, a neuroscientist working in Holtzman’s lab. “We don’t understand that at all,” he says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15515 - Posted: 06.30.2011

by Jessica Hamzelou Those who find optical illusions easy to solve might be less inclined to ask themselves why. It seems the human brain may have a trade-off between processing visual information and introspection. Chen Song and her colleagues at University College London found last year that people with more grey matter in the primary visual cortex were better at solving visual illusions. The team has now looked for size differences elsewhere in the brain that correlate with variation in the visual cortex. They used a functional MRI scanner to build a map of the primary visual cortex of 30 volunteers while also capturing a structural image of their brains. Running the images through a computer, Song was surprised to find a relationship between the primary visual cortex and a region at the front of the brain called the anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC). "When people have a bigger anterior prefrontal cortex, they have a smaller visual cortex, and vice versa," she says. Previous research has shown that the size of the aPFC is linked to introspection – individuals with more grey matter in this brain region are better able to assess whether they made the right decision. Song's study suggests that more introspective individuals forego finer aspects of visual perception. The team will now carry out behavioural studies to find out if this is the case. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 15514 - Posted: 06.30.2011

by Michael Marshall If you've ever wondered what crows are saying when they caw at a perceived threat from the treetops, here is a sample: "I'm telling on you!" By watching who their neighbours and parents scold, one group of crows has learned to recognise and scold a dubious human. John Marzluff of the University of Washington in Seattle discovered five years ago that crows can recognise individual humansMovie Camera who posed a threat. He briefly trapped American crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) on his university's campus while wearing a distinctive "caveman" mask. Afterwards, crows that had been trapped scolded anyone they spotted wearing the caveman mask, following them around and cawing harshly, but studiously ignored people wearing a neutral mask. Since then Marzluff has been monitoring the birds' response to the masks. Tests in which researchers toured the campus wearing masks showed that more and more crows had taken to scolding people sporting the caveman mask. Two weeks after the trapping, 26 per cent of crows scolded people wearing the offending mask, but 2.7 years later a remarkable 66 per cent did so. In the fifth year of the study, Marzluff barely got 50 metres out of his office in the caveman mask before a mob of crows started scolding him. The behaviour also gradually spread outwards from the original trapping site. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 15513 - Posted: 06.30.2011

By John Matson As Operation Enduring Freedom , the war on terror in Afghanistan, winds down and some 33,000 U.S. servicemen and servicewomen return from overseas in the next year, a plan announced by President Obama on June 22, the psychological issues that veterans face back home are likely to increase. Some of the key psychological issues affecting the approximately two million American troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 have been traumatic brain injury (TBI), depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—and the diagnoses often overlap. A 2008 report by the RAND Corp. think tank estimated that more than 26 percent of troops may return from the wars on terror with mental health issues. It is reasonable to expect a continuation of these brain and mental health trends, only multiplied by the anticipated dramatic uptick in returning troops. On top of that, such issues also tend to crop up several months or even years after service members settle in, rather than directly after homecoming, as researchers learned following America's wars in the late 20th century. A false honeymoon can deceive health care workers and family into a perception that all is well among members of the military reentering society stateside. After the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers from Vietnam in 1973 "the only thing that happened is that rates of problems went up," says George Mason University assistant professor of clinical psychology Keith Renshaw. "The longer people are back, the more people come forward as potentially struggling." A study in the April issue of the Journal of Affective Disorders showed that among service members injured in Iraq or Afghanistan, health care usage—and psychiatric problems—increased over time. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Stress; Depression
Link ID: 15512 - Posted: 06.30.2011

By Alyssa Danigelis A stroke is like a meteorite impact. There’s a central “core of death” surrounded by silenced neural networks. So far, no one has figured out a way to turn those neurons back on. But by adding adult stem cells to a "brain in a dish" comprised of rat neurons, researchers at the University of Florida could find a way to reboot the brain -- essentially waking up quiet circuits and regenerating the core. “We take normal neurons, simulate a stroke event, and implant adult stem cells,” said Thomas DeMarse, a research scientist at the University of Florida who is working on the transplant model with assistant professor of biomedical engineering Brandi Ormerod and PhD student Crystal Stephens. The brain in the dish, or as the scientists prefer to call it, the "“biologically relevant neural model,” is a computer chip with an array of 60 microelectrodes that measure the action potential of neurons grown on top. The microelectrode array, or MEA, records the brain cell signals so the scientists can analyze them. “The beauty of the MEA is that it doesn’t just tell you the activity of one neuron, it tells you the activity of hundreds at the same time,” DeMarse said. Using MEAs is not new -- DeMarse used one in 2004 to show that brain cells could be used to control a flight simulator -- but adding adult stem cells to the mix in vitro, that is, in an experiment outside the brain, is the new part. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Robotics; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15511 - Posted: 06.30.2011

by Valerie Ross According to a study published in January by neuroscientist Valorie Salimpoor at the Montreal Neurological Institute, music can activate the same reward circuits in the brain as food and sex. Participants listened to their songs of choice in a PET scanner, which detects the release of the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine, and again in an fMRI scanner, which measures brain activity. The scans showed that just before feeling enjoyable chills in response to the music, listeners experienced a dopamine rush near the frontal striatum, a brain region associated with anticipating rewards, followed by a flood of dopamine in the rear striatum, the brain’s pleasure center. “It’s like you’re craving the next note,” Salimpoor says. That cycle of craving and fulfillment may be what keeps music lovers coming back for more. Not all music is created equal, of course. Biologist Nick Hudson of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia wondered what distinguishes forgettable tunes from lasting masterpieces. He proposed that one key difference might be found through lossless compression, which exploits repetition and redundancies in music to encode audio data in fewer bits without losing content. When Hudson compared contemporary hits and enduring classics that had been compressed, he found that pop, rock, and techno boiled down to 60 or 70 percent of their original size, while classics such as Beethoven’s Third Symphony shrank much further, to just 40 percent. He suspects that great works’ appeal may stem from a hidden simplicity: “They seem complicated but can be distilled to surprisingly basic terms.” Composers who want to make their mark might do well to create a piece that sounds complex but is actually built on a foundation of simple patterns. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Emotions; Hearing
Link ID: 15510 - Posted: 06.30.2011

By KAY E. HOLEKAMP A couple of days ago my students and I darted a young adult hyena named Dionysus. This is a particularly interesting animal, as it is the youngest adult offspring of our last alpha female, Murphy, who was killed by lions in April. Murphy’s youngest adult male offspring will almost certainly disperse voluntarily to a new clan within the next year or two, but her youngest adult daughter should remain throughout her life in her natal social group, called a “clan,” and take over there as the alpha female. In the latter case, assuming this animal is able to fend off attacks from its very brawny older sisters, Juno and Loki, Dionysus will rank first in a clan of more than 90 hyenas! If Dionysus ranked first, she would be able to usurp food from any other hyena in the clan, live a long life and produce more surviving offspring than any other female. Although spotted hyenas are notoriously difficult to sex, my students and I are typically very good at determining the sex of hyenas using a variety of subtle morphological cues as they move around or engage in “greeting ceremonies” with one another. However, every once in a while a hyena fools us, and an individual believed to be a male for two or three years one day shows up nursing cubs at the den! None of us had ever been able to sex Dionysus with complete certainty, even though this animal will be 2 years old in a few weeks. We had all thus been looking forward to darting Dionysus because we expected this animal would be easy to sex once we could examine it very closely. However, this time, even after the animal fell asleep and we rolled it over so we could examine its genitalia, we continued to get mixed messages. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 15509 - Posted: 06.30.2011

By James Gallagher Health reporter, BBC News Supportive text messages can double the chance of someone successfully quitting smoking, according to UK researchers. Just over 10% of 2,900 smokers who received encouraging texts such as "you can do it" had quit after six months, but only 4.9% of a similar number who did not have the same support gave up. The study, published in The Lancet, called for texts to be included in services to help people kick the habit. Other scientists said a text service could be offered globally. According to government statistics two-thirds of UK smokers say they want to stop. This study looked at 5,800 of them. Supportive texts were sent to 2,915 of the smokers for six months. The rest received only messages thanking them for taking part. They were sent five texts a day for the first five weeks and then three a week for the next 26 weeks. Participants could also text back for specific advice when they had cravings or had lapsed back into smoking. Saliva tests for cotinine, which is made when nicotine is broken down by the body, were taken to determine if people had really given up. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15508 - Posted: 06.30.2011

by Mitch Leslie African sleeping sickness is one of the most neglected of the neglected diseases. But thanks to a new collaboration, researchers have crafted a compound that kills the parasites that cause sleeping sickness in the blood and the brain. After promising studies in rodents, the compound will enter human safety trials later this year. Human African trypanosomiasis (HAT), the formal name for the disease, sickens an estimated 30,000 people per year. The culprits are two subspecies of the microscopic parasite Trypanosoma brucei. Injected by the bite of the tsetse fly, the invaders first dwell in the blood and then infiltrate the brain, causing confusion, hallucinations, lethargy, and other symptoms. Untreated HAT is fatal, but treatment can be as well. The drug mainstay, melarsoprol, contains arsenic and kills one in 20 people who take it. A newer medicine, eflornithine, isn’t as harsh but is complex to dispense, requiring four intravenous infusions per day for 2 weeks. This bleak situation could be starting to change. Last year, a team led by scientists at the University of Dundee in the United Kingdom reported synthesizing a molecule that killed sleeping sickness parasites in the blood of mice, although it couldn’t enter the brain. Other scientists have resurrected fexinidazole, a compound tested as an antimicrobial in the 1970s and '80s but never developed into a drug. Phase I safety trials of fexinidazole in people recently concluded. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 15507 - Posted: 06.30.2011

Analysis by Marianne English Gene expression plays a larger role than thought in the development of temporal lobe epilepsy, a common form of epilepsy, finds an international team of scientists. The study was published in the journal Annals of Neurology by scientists from France's biomedical institution Inserm, the University of Marseille in France and the University of California-Irvine. Previously, experts thought neurons, or nerve cells, in the brain began acting abnormally after they were damaged by head trauma or previous illnesses that caused high fevers. Healthy neurons normally transmit messages to one another by moving ions -- or charged particles -- back and forth in channels between cells. These coordinated efforts allow humans and animals to do a variety of things, ranging from eating to reading science news articles on the Internet. But for people living with epilepsy, neurons in the brain can behave abnormally, sometimes firing uncontrollably and causing seizures. Though epilepsy can be caused by many things, the majority of cases cannot be traced back to a particular cause. Looking beyond neurons, the research team found that a "master switch" gene called NRSF controls the expression of some 1,800 genes suppressed in patients with epilepsy. Researchers think brain trauma still activates the gene, but there's evidence that keeping its proteins from influencing other genes can prevent brain tissue from becoming epileptic. So what does this mean for the 50 million people worldwide living with epilepsy? © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Epilepsy; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15506 - Posted: 06.30.2011

By Linda Carroll, msnbc.com contributor For years we’ve been told that caffeinated coffee was bad for us. It’s unhealthy and addictive, doctors warned. But as vindication for all who stuck by their energizing elixir, a new study shows that guzzling caffeinated coffee may actually be good for our brains. In fact, it may help keep Alzheimer’s at bay. The study, which was published early online in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, was in mice whose DNA had been tweaked to contain a human Alzheimer’s gene. Just like humans with familial Alzheimer’s, these mice become increasingly forgetful as they age. Amazingly, the equivalent of four to five cups of caffeinated coffee every few days led to much improved memories in the Alzheimer’s mice, says study co-author Gary Arendash, a scientist at the Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center in Tampa. Earlier research by Arendash and his colleagues showed that caffeine could at least partially block the production of beta amyloid, the sticky protein that clogs the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. They also found that a substance called granulocyte-colony stimulating factor, or GCSF, sparked the production of new axons, the communication cables that link nerve cells together, as well as new nerve cells themselves. What’s really interesting is that caffeinated coffee -- but not decaf -- boosted the production of GCSF. © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Alzheimers
Link ID: 15505 - Posted: 06.30.2011