By Bruce Bower Way back in the day, females came from far away and males didn’t stray — not far, anyway. That’s the implication, with apologies to Dr. Seuss, of a new study of members of two ancient species in the human evolutionary family. Adult females in both hominid lineages often moved from the places where they were born to distant locations, presumably to find mates among unrelated males, say anthropologist Sandi Copeland of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and her colleagues. Most males in both hominid species spent their entire lives in a home region that covered no more than about 28 square kilometers, or about half the area of Manhattan, Copeland’s team proposes in the June 2 Nature. These ancient “home boys” might have occasionally gone further afield, exploiting resources along wooded areas atop bands of bedrock that extend about 30 kilometers in opposite directions from the South African cave sites where the fossils were found. It’s not clear how far females traveled to reach new groups, only that they did not grow up where they died. “We have the first direct glimpse of early hominids’ geographic movements,” Copeland says. “Ranging differences between males and females were surprising.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15389 - Posted: 06.02.2011

By Nathan Seppa A simple DNA test of saliva from a newborn can reveal whether the baby has a viral infection that can cause deafness in some cases. The DNA test is simpler and faster than the assay currently available and catches more than 97 percent of such infections, researchers report in the June 2 New England Journal of Medicine. “This is really exciting,” says Elizabeth Stehel, a pediatrician at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, who wasn’t involved in the study. Such a test “would fill the need that many people feel we have — to screen babies to detect a virus that contributes to so much hearing loss.” Cytomegalovirus is in the herpes virus family. Although it is common in the population and typically innocuous, cytomegalovirus can be dangerous to babies born with the infection, causing hearing loss in 10 to 15 percent of infected newborns. It is among the leading causes of deafness in children. Hospitals can spot some cytomegalovirus infections, particularly those that cause severe disabilities. Doctors routinely test all newborns for genetic conditions such as sickle cell disease by sending dried blood samples to a state’s central laboratory. Yet few hospitals test for congenital cytomegalovirus in babies who appear healthy, even though it is present in about 0.5 to 1 percent of such newborns. Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham recently found that blood tests of newborns often can’t predict whether the child is infected with the virus. Cytomegalovirus apparently doesn’t always get into the bloodstream in newborns, says Suresh Boppana, a pediatrician and infectious disease researcher at the UAB School of Medicine. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 15388 - Posted: 06.02.2011

By Andrew Newberg The article, “Religious factors and hippocampal atrophy in late life,” by Amy Owen and colleagues at Duke University represents an important advance in our growing understanding of the relationship between the brain and religion. The study, published March 30 in PLoS One, showed greater atrophy in the hippocampus in individuals who identify with specific religious groups as well as those with no religious affiliation. It is a surprising result, given that many prior studies have shown religion to have potentially beneficial effects on brain function, anxiety, and depression. A number of studies have evaluated the acute effects of religious practices, such as meditation and prayer, on the human brain. A smaller number of studies have evaluated the longer term effects of religion on the brain. Such studies, like the present one, have focused on differences in brain volume or brain function in those people heavily engaged in meditation or spiritual practices compared to those who are not. And an even fewer number of studies have explored the longitudinal effects of doing meditation or spiritual practices by evaluating subjects at two different time points. In this study, Owen et al. used MRI to measure the volume of the hippocampus, a central structure of the limbic system that is involved in emotion as well as in memory formation. They evaluated the MRIs of 268 men and women aged 58 and over, who were originally recruited for the NeuroCognitive Outcomes of Depression in the Elderly study, but who also answered several questions regarding their religious beliefs and affiliation. The study by Owen et al. is unique in that it focuses specifically on religious individuals compared to non-religious individuals. This study also broke down these individuals into those who are born again or who have had life-changing religious experiences. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15387 - Posted: 06.02.2011

By DENISE GRADY A new study may help explain why some military personnel exposed to blasts have symptoms of brain injury even though their CT and M.R.I. scans look normal. Using a highly sensitive type of magnetic resonance imaging, researchers studied 63 servicemen wounded by explosions in Iraq or Afghanistan and found evidence of brain injuries in some that were too subtle to be detected by standard scans. All the men already had a diagnosis of mild traumatic brain injury (synonymous with concussion), based on symptoms like having lost consciousness in the blast, having no memory of it or feeling dazed immediately afterward. About 320,000 American troops have sustained traumatic brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them mild, according to a 2008 report by the RAND Corporation. The injuries are poorly understood, and sometimes produce lasting mental, physical and emotional problems. “This sort of mild traumatic brain injury has been quite controversial,” said Dr. David L. Brody, an author of the new study and an assistant professor of neurology at Washington University in St. Louis. “Is it due to structural abnormalities in the brain, chemical dysregulation, psychological factors or all three? We show that at least in some there are structural abnormalities.” The pattern of the damage differed from that found in head injuries not caused by blasts, and matched computer simulations predicting how explosions would affect the brain, Dr. Brody said. If the new findings hold up, he added, they may eventually influence the design of helmets to provide more protection against blasts. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 15386 - Posted: 06.02.2011

By JANE E. BRODY In my younger years, I regarded sleep as a necessary evil, nature’s way of thwarting my desire to cram as many activities into a 24-hour day as possible. I frequently flew the red-eye from California, for instance, sailing (or so I thought) through the next day on less than four hours of uncomfortable sleep. But my neglect was costing me in ways that I did not fully appreciate. My husband called our nights at the ballet and theater “Jane’s most expensive naps.” Eventually we relinquished our subscriptions. Driving, too, was dicey: twice I fell asleep at the wheel, narrowly avoiding disaster. I realize now that I was living in a state of chronic sleep deprivation. I don’t want to nod off during cultural events, and I no longer have my husband to spell me at the wheel. I also don’t want to compromise my ability to think and react. As research cited recently in this newspaper’s magazine found, “The sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are.” Studies have shown that people function best after seven to eight hours of sleep, so I now aim for a solid seven hours, the amount associated with the lowest mortality rate. Yet on most nights something seems to interfere, keeping me up later than my intended lights-out at 10 p.m. — an essential household task, an e-mail requiring an urgent and thoughtful response, a condolence letter I never found time to write during the day, a long article that I must read. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 15385 - Posted: 05.31.2011

By KIM LUTE “First off,” the counselor began, her lips pursed in disdain, “it’s important you understand that I don’t have a nickel in the dime” — an addiction therapist’s way of saying this was my fight, not hers. It was my first day at the Peachford rehab clinic for addiction to the prescription painkiller tramadol. I wound up spending 72 hours detoxing in a sparse room where everything but a Bible was bolted to the floor. The blinds were drawn tight against the sun — which, along with just about everything else, inexplicably offended me to the point of tears. Every nerve ending in my body felt electrified. When I broke the clinic rules by trying to shave my legs on a Monday instead of a Tuesday, I was treated like a criminal, so irresponsible I couldn’t be trusted alone with shoestrings or sharp objects. In truth, I had been acting foolishly. Seven years after successfully undergoing two liver transplants and bowel surgery for ulcerative colitis, I found myself furtively buying more than 400 pills a month online. Soon, I was pilfering my dog’s pain medicine. None of my friends and family knew of my addiction. The shame and guilt, coupled with the fear of having to withstand the pain of withdrawal, sapped what little resolve I had left to reach out for help. It took two years before I realized I was out of step with real time, in debt and in danger of damaging the organs that had been graciously given to me. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15384 - Posted: 05.31.2011

By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. On a fall afternoon in 1988, Jon Sarkin, a 35-year-old Massachusetts chiropractor, was happily playing the eighth hole on a local golf course when he felt something “twist” in his brain. Three days later he began to hear a high-pitched screech, a siren that only grew louder with the passing weeks. Doctors shrugged; a brain scan suggested a vague abnormality near a nerve at the base of the brain that controls hearing and balance. Eight months later, driven to distraction by the unceasing noise, Dr. Sarkin underwent a controversial operation to “decompress” the small vessels surrounding the nerve. The day after surgery — having woken up long enough to report that the noise had indeed stopped — he was rushed back to the operating room with a major stroke. He didn’t survive, not really, but he did live and slowly came to thrive, and on that tangled paradox Amy Ellis Nutt builds a tale. Ms. Nutt, a staff writer for The Star-Ledger in Newark, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for her detailed account of a shipwreck off the Jersey Shore. Now she has turned to a medical shipwreck in the person of Dr. Sarkin, whose story is both Hollywood-simple (Tom Cruise has, in fact, expressed interest) and dauntingly complex. The Jon Sarkin who emerged from the hospital months after his stroke bore little resemblance to his prior self. He was physically delicate and walked with a cane, but that was the least of it. His personality had morphed into a difficult teenager’s: self-centered, unreliable, obsessive. Bored, he began to doodle one day shortly after he returned home. Two decades later he is still doodling, but now as a full-fledged artist of some renown, having sold small drawings to publications like The New York Times Magazine and large pieces to private collectors for thousands of dollars. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke; Emotions
Link ID: 15383 - Posted: 05.31.2011

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS A cognitive neuroscientist, Ellen Bialystok has spent almost 40 years learning about how bilingualism sharpens the mind. Her good news: Among other benefits, the regular use of two languages appears to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease symptoms. Dr. Bialystok, 62, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, was awarded a $100,000 Killam Prize last year for her contributions to social science. We spoke for two hours in a Washington hotel room in February and again, more recently, by telephone. An edited version of the two conversations follows. Q. How did you begin studying bilingualism? A. You know, I didn’t start trying to find out whether bilingualism was bad or good. I did my doctorate in psychology: on how children acquire language. When I finished graduate school, in 1976, there was a job shortage in Canada for Ph.D.’s. The only position I found was with a research project studying second language acquisition in school children. It wasn’t my area. But it was close enough. As a psychologist, I brought neuroscience questions to the study, like “How does the acquisition of a second language change thought?” It was these types of questions that naturally led to the bilingualism research. The way research works is, it takes you down a road. You then follow that road. Q. So what exactly did you find on this unexpected road? A. As we did our research, you could see there was a big difference in the way monolingual and bilingual children processed language. We found that if you gave 5- and 6-year-olds language problems to solve, monolingual and bilingual children knew, pretty much, the same amount of language. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Alzheimers
Link ID: 15382 - Posted: 05.31.2011

By Karen Weintraub When Kathryn Ham and Amy S. Schneider were diagnosed with diabetes as children decades ago, patients were routinely told the disease would rob them of their fertility and ravage their eyes, kidneys, and nerves. They would be dead within 15-20 years, doctors told devastated parents. Both women defied the predictions. Over a bowl of vegetable soup recently, Schneider, now 55, credited her success to “good doctoring, good parenting, good health, and good luck.’’ Disciplined living made the difference for Ham, 82, though she admits it’s sometimes “a pain in the neck’’ to check her blood sugar four times every day, inject insulin, and eat a careful diet. Now, the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston is studying 650 long-term type 1 diabetes survivors — including Ham, diagnosed 74 years ago, and Schneider, diagnosed a half-century ago — to better understand how they have fared so well for so long. The lesson is: “Diabetes is a controllable disease,’’ said Dr. George L. King, Joslin’s research director. “With the right constellation of proactive activity, you can manage it.’’ The research project — which includes studies of genetics, proteins, family history, and stem cells — marks the first time such a large group of survivors has been examined with records going back decades. © 2011 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 15381 - Posted: 05.31.2011

By JoNel Aleccia Health writer Hundreds of reports of suicides, psychotic reactions and other serious problems tied to the popular stop-smoking drug Chantix were left out of a crucial government safety review because Pfizer Inc., the drug’s manufacturer, submitted years of data through “improper channels.” Some 150 suicides — more than doubling those previously known — were among 589 delayed reports of severe issues turned up in a new analysis by the non-profit Institute for Safe Medication Practices. “We’ve had a major breakdown in safety surveillance,” said Thomas J. Moore, the ISMP senior scientist who analyzed the data. The serious problems — including reports of completed suicides, suicide attempts, aggression and hostility and depression — had been mixed among some 26,000 records of non-serious side effects such as nausea and rashes, with some dating back to 2006, the year Chantix, or varenicline, was approved. They echo previous claims that the drug can induce extreme reactions in people trying to quit cigarettes, including vivid nightmares, crippling depression and sudden, violent outbursts. “It’s really chilling,” said Moore, who analyzed 26 Chantix reactions in a paper published in the September 2010 issue of the Journal of Pharmacotherapy. "This seems to unleash something in people. It can be violence to anything around." © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 15380 - Posted: 05.28.2011

Children who get insufficient sleep at night are more likely to become overweight, according to researchers in New Zealand. A study, published on the BMJ website, followed 244 children between the ages of three and seven. It said more sleep was linked to a lower weight, which could have important public health consequences. UK experts said there was "no harm" in drawing attention to the link between reduced sleep and ill health. The children were seen every six months when their weight, height and body fat were measured. Their sleeping habits and physical-activity levels were recorded at ages three, four and five. The researchers found that those children who had less sleep in their earlier years were at greater risk of having a higher Body Mass Index at age seven. This link continued even when other risk factors, such as gender and physical activity, were accounted for in their research. Suggested reasons for the link include simply having more time to eat and changes to hormones affecting appetite. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Sleep; Obesity
Link ID: 15379 - Posted: 05.28.2011

by Sara Reardon When Lemuel Gulliver, the protagonist in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels lands on Lilliput, he doesn’t think of himself as a giant. Instead, he assumes everyone around him is tiny. Now, a team of cognitive neuroscientists has shown that we’re all a bit like Gulliver. In a clever experiment, they tricked people into thinking that their size relative to other objects had changed and showed that subjects assumed it was the objects, not themselves, that had been transformed. Do people use their own bodies as meter sticks to estimate the size of things? Or are our brains capable of making such estimates without making comparisons to our bodies? To find out, cognitive neuroscientist Björn van der Hoort and colleagues at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm recruited 198 volunteers and had them lie down with their legs in front of them so that they could see them. Each volunteer donned a headset that played a closed-circuit video of the legs of an adjacent mannequin. Using either his finger or a stick, Van der Hoort touched each volunteer’s leg, which the volunteer couldn’t see, while simultaneously touching the leg of the mannequin, which the volunteer could see. This combination of touch and sight was enough to dupe subjects into thinking the fake legs were their own: Van der Hoort could even make a subject sweat by cutting the mannequin’s legs with a knife. Then things got really weird. The researchers secretly replaced the mannequin legs either with huge legs 400 centimeters long, short ones only 80 centimeters long, or tiny doll legs 30 centimeters long. They dangled a block in front of the camera and asked the subjects to describe how big it was, using both words and gestures. If their new legs were tiny, subjects tended to overestimate the size of the block, whereas if their transformed legs were large, they underestimated the block’s size, typically erring by about 40%. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Vision; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15378 - Posted: 05.28.2011

Ewen Callaway By transforming cells from human skin into working nerve cells, researchers may have come up with a model for nervous-system diseases and perhaps even regenerative therapies based on cell transplants. The achievement, reported online today in Nature1, is the latest in a fast-moving field called transdifferentiation, in which cells are forced to adopt new identities. In the past year, researchers have converted connective tissue cells found in skin into heart cells2, blood cells3 and liver cells4. Transdifferentiation is an alternative to the cellular reprogramming that involves converting a mature cell into a pluripotent stem cell — one capable of becoming many types of cell — then coaxing the pluripotent cell into becoming a particular type of cell, such as neurons. Marius Wernig, a stem-cell researcher at Stanford University in California, and the leader of the study, says that skipping the pluripotency step could avoid some of the problems of making tissues from these induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). The pluripotency technique can also take months to complete. Wernig's team sparked the imaginations of cellular reprogrammers last year, when it transformed cells taken from the tip of a mouse's tail into working nerve cells5. That feat of cellular alchemy took just three foreign genes – delivered into tail cells with a virus – and less than two weeks. "We thought that as it worked so great for the mouse, it should be no problem to work it out in humans," Wernig says. "That turned out to be wrong." © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Stem Cells; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15377 - Posted: 05.28.2011

by Helen Thomson FOR some people, seeing pain in someone else is more than emotionally distressing: they feel the pain in their own body too. Now some of the pathways involved have been identified. "Synaesthetic pain" occurs mainly in people who have lost a limb. Some amputees are already known to experience phantom limb pain - a feeling of pain in a limb that is no longer there - but synaesthetic pain is different. Rather than occurring spontaneously, it is triggered by observed or imagined pain. "When I hear my husband's power tools, or see a knife, I often get a sharp pain through my phantom leg," says Jane Barrett, who has experienced synaesthetic pain since losing her leg in a motorcycle accident. When we observe or imagine pain, it activates areas of the brain involved in the processing of real pain. This is called the mirror neuron system and is thought to help us to understand other people's actions and emotions. But the activation is not as strong as that caused by real pain because inhibitory mechanisms normally dampen the response. Bernadette Fitzgibbon at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues, think those inhibitory mechanisms are themselves inhibited in pain synaesthetes. They used EEG to record brain activity in eight amputees who experience both phantom and synaesthetic pain, 10 amputees who experience just phantom pain and 10 healthy people with no amputations while they looked at images of hands or feet in potentially painful and non-painful situations. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Emotions
Link ID: 15376 - Posted: 05.28.2011

by Jessica Griggs Reindeer see their world in glorious ultraviolet, helping them find food and avoid predators. Most mammals, including humans, see using light from the visible part of the spectrum; ultraviolet light, which has a shorter wavelength, is invisible. But not so reindeer, says Glen Jeffery of University College London. The frozen wastes of the Arctic reflect around 90 per cent of the UV light that hits them; snow-free land typically reflects only a few per cent. So Jeffery and colleagues wondered whether reindeers had adapted to their UV-rich world. In dark conditions, they shone LED lights of different wavelengths, including UV, into the eyes of 18 anaesthetised reindeers while recording with an electrode whether nerves in the eye fired, indicating that the light had been seen. The UV light triggered a response in the eyes of all the reindeer. "Since migrating to the Arctic 10,000 years ago, these animals have adapted incredibly quickly," says Jeffery. The team's experiments with a UV camera in the Arctic suggest why. They showed that urine – a sign of predators or potential mates – and lichens – a major food source for reindeers in the winter months – absorb UV light, making them appear black in contrast to the UV-reflecting snow. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 15375 - Posted: 05.28.2011

By Neil Bowdler Science reporter, BBC News A Californian team say they have managed to convert human skin cells directly into functioning brain cells. The scientists manipulated the process by which DNA is transcribed within foetal skin cells to create cells which behaved like neurons. The technique had previously been demonstrated in mice, says the report in Nature. It could be used for neurological research, and might conceivably be used to create brain cells for transplant. The scientists used genetically modified viruses to introduce four different "transcription factors" into foetal skin cells. These transcription factors play a role in the "reading" of DNA and the encoding of proteins within the cell. They found the introduction of these four transcription factors had the effect of switching a small portion of the skin cells into cells which functioned like neurons. Unlike other approaches, the process did not involve the reprogramming of the skin cells into stem cells, but rather the direct transformation of skin cells into neurons. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Stem Cells
Link ID: 15374 - Posted: 05.28.2011

By Devin Powell SEATTLE — About a year and a half after her stroke, a 36-year-old professor started to feel sounds. A radio announcer’s voice made her tingle. Background noise in a plane felt physically uncomfortable. Now Tony Ro, a neuroscientist at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, might have figured out the cause of this synesthesia. Sophisticated imaging of the woman’s brain revealed that new links had grown between its auditory part, which processes sound, and the somatosensory region, which handles touch. “The auditory area of her brain started taking over the somatosensory area,” says Ro, who used diffusion tensor imaging, which focuses on the brain’s white matter connections, to spot the change. This connection between sound and touch may run deep in the rest of us as well, Ro and colleagues said during presentations May 25 at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Both hearing and touch, the scientists pointed out, rely on nerves set atwitter by vibration. A cell phone set to vibrate can be sensed by the skin of the hand, and the phone’s ring tone generates sound waves — vibrations of air — that move the eardrum. Elizabeth Courtenay Wilson, a neuroscientist who did not attend the Seattle meeting, has also seen strong connections between areas of the brain that process hearing and touch. “We’re suggesting that the ear evolved out of the skin in order to do more finely tuned frequency analysis,” adds Wilson, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Hearing; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15373 - Posted: 05.28.2011

Sandrine Ceurstemont, video producer In this video, Harry Potter can appear to pass through Dobby the elf, but it's not magic. The illusion, created by Arthur Shapiro and Gideon Caplovitz from the American University in Washington DC, is an example of the different ways our brain can link separate objects in a scene. When watching the video above, focus on the spot where Harry and Dobby meet during the collision. What do you see? The two figures should appear to bounce off each other and return their separate ways. Now take a look at the scene again, this time while looking at something just above the video but keeping the characters in your peripheral vision. This time, Harry and Dobby should appear to pass through each other, even though they are actually bouncing. We experience this phenomenon because our brain processes different features of a scene in parallel. Colour and motion, for example, are analysed separately, even though a moving coloured object would be perceived as a whole. In this case, it shows that features can bind to moving objects in different ways. Shapiro writes: The apparent transfer of features contradicts what would be expected from theories that propose that perception is guided by intelligent inferences about how objects behave in the world © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15372 - Posted: 05.28.2011

By Laura Helmuth 1. We use only 10 percent of our brains. This one sounds so compelling—a precise number, repeated in pop culture for a century, implying that we have huge reserves of untapped mental powers. But the supposedly unused 90 percent of the brain is not some vestigial appendix. Brains are expensive—it takes a lot of energy to build brains during fetal and childhood development and maintain them in adults. Evolutionarily, it would make no sense to carry around surplus brain tissue. Experiments using PET or fMRI scans show that much of the brain is engaged even during simple tasks, and injury to even a small bit of brain can have profound consequences for language, sensory perception, movement or emotion. True, we have some brain reserves. Autopsy studies show that many people have physical signs of Alzheimer’s disease (such as amyloid plaques among neurons) in their brains even though they were not impaired. Apparently we can lose some brain tissue and still function pretty well. And people score higher on IQ tests if they’re highly motivated, suggesting that we don’t always exercise our minds at 100 percent capacity. 2. “Flashbulb memories” are precise, detailed and persistent. We all have memories that feel as vivid and accurate as a snapshot, usually of some shocking, dramatic event—the assassination of President Kennedy, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the attacks of September 11, 2001. People remember exactly where they were, what they were doing, who they were with, what they saw or heard. But several clever experiments have tested people’s memory immediately after a tragedy and again several months or years later. The test subjects tend to be confident that their memories are accurate and say the flashbulb memories are more vivid than other memories. Vivid they may be, but the memories decay over time just as other memories do. People forget important details and add incorrect ones, with no awareness that they’re recreating a muddled scene in their minds rather than calling up a perfect, photographic reproduction.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 15371 - Posted: 05.28.2011

By Laura Sanders Though autism and related disorders vary widely from person to person, certain brain changes may be at the root of the disorder. Changes in genes important for brain-cell development and function contribute to the poorly understood disorder, a study published online May 25 in Nature shows. Finding genetic contributors to the multifaceted disease might help scientists design better ways to treat it. “For us to be able to develop specific therapies that treat the cause, you have to understand the genetics,” says pediatrician and autism researcher Hakon Hakonarson of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. In the study, a team led by Daniel Geschwind of UCLA analyzed post-mortem tissue from the brains of 19 people with autism and 17 without. Patterns of gene activity differed in the two types of brains, as measured by levels of RNA molecules, which shuttle information from DNA to the protein factories in cells. In the healthy brains, hundreds of genes behaved differently depending whether they were found in the frontal or the temporal region of the brain. But in the autistic brains, only a handful of genes acted differently in the two areas. This lack of distinction may be set on course very early in a child’s life, Geschwind says. Many of the genes identified by the research are important for brain development and behavior. What’s more, the changes in the autism spectrum disorder brains were very similar to each other. “It looks like there’s a common pathology in autism, which is a surprising thing,” Geschwind says. “In spite of having many different causes, there’s some shared convergence.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 15370 - Posted: 05.26.2011