(HealthDay News) -- A hormone called ghrelin enhances the nose's ability to sniff out food, researchers report. It was already known that ghrelin promotes hunger and fat storage. The new study suggests that the hormone may increase the ability to use smell to detect food and link that input with the body's natural regulation of metabolism and body weight, said University of Cincinnati scientists. Click here to find out more! The study, which included experiments with humans and rats, appears in the April 13 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. It was led by Dr. Jenny Tong and Dr. Matthias Tschop, both of the university's endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism division. "Smell is an integral part of feeding, and mammals frequently rely on smell to locate food and discriminate among food sources. Sniffing is the first stage of the smell process and can enhance odor detection and discrimination," Tong said in a university news release. "Other studies have shown that hunger can enhance odor detection and sniffing in animals," Tschop added in the release. "Since ghrelin is a hunger-inducing stomach hormone that is secreted when the stomach is empty, this hormone pathway may also be responsible for the hunger-induced enhancement of sniffing and odor detection." The researchers plan further research to identify the exact molecular pathways through which ghrelin affects sniff behavior. © 2011 HealthDay.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Obesity
Link ID: 15209 - Posted: 04.14.2011

By Rachael Rettner A drug frequently prescribed to treat people with mild Alzheimer's disease does not appear to be an effective therapy for many of these patients, according to a new study. The results show the drug, memantine, is no better than a dummy pill when it comes to ameliorating disease symptoms, including the decline of mental abilities, the researchers say. There is also meager evidence that the drug works for patients with moderate Alzheimer's, the researchers say. Memantine is approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat patients with moderate and severe Alzheimer's. However, physicians often prescribe it off-label to those with mild forms of the disease. About 19 percent of U.S. patients with mild Alzheimer's disease take the drug, the researchers say. The drug is intended to improve cognitive functions and make it easier for patients to perform daily activities. Though there is no proof that the drug thwarts disease progress, some physicians may prescribe it, and some patients may take it, "under the hopes that it's better to treat with this drug now rather than it is to wait until somebody becomes severe and then treat them," said study researcher Dr. Lon Schneider, of the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles. Doctors should take into account these new findings when they consider treating mild and moderate Alzheimer's patients with memantine, Schneider said. Additional studies should be conducted looking at the effects of memantine on patients with mild disease, Schneider said. © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15208 - Posted: 04.12.2011

By PERRI KLASS, M.D. It opened on East 62nd Street in February 1921, its mission to remove the tonsils and adenoids of poor children on the East Side of Manhattan, thereby preventing sore throats and streptococcal infections and all their serious consequences in an era without antibiotics. Parents saw scarlet fever, named for its red, sandpapery rash, as a frightening and dangerous childhood illness; rheumatic fever, which sometimes followed strep, could seriously damage the heart. But times have changed. Built on studies of throat infections and tonsillectomies, new guidelines from the American Academy of Otolaryngology, issued in January, suggest tonsillectomy for recurrent sore throats only if frequent or severe. At the same time, the academy now recommends that the operation be considered for children who have trouble breathing while they sleep. The new guidelines reflect changes in clinical practice, and attempt to bring scientific evidence to bear on an operation at times popular to the point of ubiquity. In the era of the Tonsil Hospital, pretty much all children got tonsillectomies. Consider “Cheaper by the Dozen”: The 1948 memoir about two efficiency experts and their 12 children happens to contain the single funniest tonsillectomy chapter in literature (granted, competition is limited). © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 15207 - Posted: 04.12.2011

by Clare Wilson I'M WATCHING this revolution exploding around me," says Mark George, a neuropsychiatrist at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. "I'm like a kid in a candy store." George is referring to his role as editor-in-chief of Brain Stimulation, a journal launched three years ago to cover the growing list of technologies that can alter the brain's electrical activity. The tools involved range from electrodes and optical fibres to magnetic fields and sound waves, but they all give neuroscientists the power to fine-tune the brain's activity, making them computer hackers of the mind. Fifteen years ago, only a couple of such technologies existed and they were seen as experimental techniques on the fringes of neuroscience. Today there are at least eight methods, all with their own pros and cons, and some are on the verge of becoming mainstream treatments for Parkinson's disease, epilepsy and depression. Innumerable more uses are being explored. Until recently the only treatments available for conditions affecting the brain were drugs or surgery - a "hammer over the head approach", according to William Tyler, a biomedical engineer at Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute in Roanoke and a pioneer of the new brain stimulation techniques. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 15206 - Posted: 04.12.2011

by Rebecca Kessler Most years, Spaniards encounter just one giant squid as long as a city bus along their northern shores—a fisherman might haul one up from the depths accidentally, or beachgoers might stumble across a carcass stranded on a beach. So it was surprising in 2001 when five squid littered the beaches over a 2-month period and in 2003 when four washed up or were found floating at sea near death in a single month. At the time of the strandings, ships offshore were exploring for oil and gas with air guns, which produce high-intensity, low-frequency sounds. Some researchers suspected that the loud noises were harming the squid, just as they are known to harm marine mammals. A new study supports that hunch, reporting massive damage to the sound-detecting structures of squid and other cephalopods that were exposed to loud noises. In recent years, scientists have gathered evidence that sonar and other humanmade noises may hurt everything from whales to crustaceans. But they didn't know whether this audio pollution could perturb cephalopods—the animal group that includes cuttlefish, squid, and octopuses—because researchers have only recently demonstrated their ability to hear. To find out, a team led by marine bioacoustician Michel André of the Technical University of Catalonia in Spain brought 87 wild cephalopods back to laboratory aquariums. For 2 hours, the researchers blared low-frequency sounds that were between 157 and 175 decibels at the animals. For comparison, a supertanker's engine noise might hit 190 decibels in the water 1 meter away from the ship. At intervals up to 96 hours after the sound barrage, the researchers killed the animals and preserved their statocysts—the sound-detecting structures behind their eyes—for microscopic analysis. For controls, the researchers killed and collected the statocysts of 100 wild cephalopods immediately after they were captured. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 15205 - Posted: 04.12.2011

by Greg Miller If you've ever walked to the kitchen to get a snack, been interrupted by a phone call, and then forgotten what you wanted from the fridge, you may have seen a glimpse of your future. A wealth of studies have found that as we age we become more distracted by interruptions and less able to juggle multiple tasks at once. Now neuroscientists have identified a potential explanation: a sticky switch in the neural circuits that coordinate memory and attention. In the new study, published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Wesley Clapp and Adam Gazzaley of the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues recruited 20 healthy adults in their 60s and 70s to play a simple memory game inside a brain scanner. An image of a scene, such as a field or a forest, flashed on a monitor inside the scanner, and volunteers had to keep it in mind for about 15 seconds before indicating whether a second image was a match. In this version of the test, the older volunteers did extremely well, getting 96% correct. But when the researchers added an interruption, the older subjects struggled. When they had to perform a second task while keeping the scene in mind—for example, judging the age and gender of a face flashed on the monitor—their performance on the memory test for the scenes dropped to 88%. A control group of mostly 20-something volunteers was less fazed by the interruption; their performance did not drop significantly. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science. All Rights Reserved.

Keyword: Attention; Alzheimers
Link ID: 15204 - Posted: 04.12.2011

By ABBY GOODNOUGH and KATIE ZEZIMA BANGOR, Me. — The mother got the call in the middle of the night: her 3-day-old baby was going through opiate withdrawal in a hospital here and had to start taking methadone, a drug best known for treating heroin addiction, to ease his suffering. The mother had abused prescription painkillers like OxyContin for the first 12 weeks of her pregnancy, buying them on the street in rural northern Maine, and then tried to quit cold turkey — a dangerous course, doctors say, that could have ended in miscarriage. The baby had seizures in utero as a result, and his mother, Tonya, turned to methadone treatment, with daily doses to keep her cravings and withdrawal symptoms at bay. As prescription drug abuse ravages communities across the country, doctors are confronting an emerging challenge: newborns dependent on painkillers. While methadone may have saved Tonya’s pregnancy, her son, Matthew, needed to be painstakingly weaned from it. Infants like him may cry excessively and have stiff limbs, tremors, diarrhea and other problems that make their first days of life excruciating. Many have to stay in the hospital for weeks while they are weaned off the drugs, taxing neonatal units and driving the cost of their medical care into the tens of thousands of dollars. Like the cocaine-exposed babies of the 1980s, those born dependent on prescription opiates — narcotics that contain opium or its derivatives — are entering a world in which little is known about the long-term effects on their development. Few doctors are even willing to treat pregnant opiate addicts, and there is no universally accepted standard of care for their babies, partly because of the difficulty of conducting research on pregnant women and newborns. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15203 - Posted: 04.11.2011

By Jill U. Adams, Special to the Los Angeles Times Maraschino cherries, Cheetos, Gatorade and Froot Loops. The rainbow of colors in candies and decorated birthday cakes. The colors of these foods are not from nature — and depending whom you talk to, they are harmless fun or making kids bounce off walls. Late last month, an advisory panel for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration concluded there was enough evidence to say that foods containing artificial food dyes may trigger hyperactivity in a small percentage of children with behavioral problems such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) but that there was not enough to say that food dyes cause hyperactivity in the general population. Without clear evidence of harm, the panel voted against recommending warning labels for food products containing artificial colors. "There's not any convincing data that it's something we need to remove from the diet," says Dr. Wesley Burks, a pediatric allergist at Duke University in Durham, N.C., who served on the FDA panel. Still, critics of food dyes note that there's no health benefit to having artificial colors in foods, so any risk is unacceptable. "Allowing the use of artificial dyes violates the FDA's mandate to protect consumers from unsafe products," wrote two fierce proponents of an FDA ban — psychiatrist David Schab and consumer advocate Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest — in a Washington Post opinion article in March. Los Angeles Times Copyright 2011

Keyword: ADHD; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 15202 - Posted: 04.11.2011

SYMPTOMS of Alzheimer's disease in mice have been eased by extra supplies of "heat shock" proteins, which re-fold or dispose of proteins implicated in the disease. Tohru Mizushima of Kumamoto University, Japan, and his colleagues used mice bred to mimic symptoms of Alzheimer's. Half the mice were also engineered to make extra supplies of heat shock protein (HSP) 70 in their brains. The HSP70-boosted mice were much better than the others at finding their way around mazes, and post-mortems showed their brains to be free of the characteristic beta-amyloid plaques that clog the brains of people with Alzheimer's. That's because the boosted mice produced normal - rather than high - levels of the amyloid precursor proteins from which plaques are made. What's more, any plaques that did form were more readily removed. Mizushima's team says that HSP70 amplifies the expression of chemicals such as insulin-degrading enzyme and transforming growth factor beta 1, linked to the destruction of the beta-amyloid proteins (Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.5478-10.2011). Elsewhere in the field, Nature Genetics carries reports of four new genes linked with Alzheimer's disease by consortia in the US (DOI: 10.1038/ng.801) and Europe (DOI: 10.1038/ng.803). These genetic discoveries reinforce earlier gene studies implicating abnormal inflammation and fat metabolism in the disease. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15201 - Posted: 04.11.2011

by Greg Miller In 1688, an Irish polymath named William Molyneux wrote the English philosopher John Locke a letter in which he posed a vexing question: Could a blind person, upon suddenly gaining the ability to see, recognize an object by sight that he'd previously known by feel? The answer has potentially important implications for philosophers and neuroscientists alike. Now, researchers working with a medical charity that provides surgery to restore vision in blind children say they've found the answer to Molyneux's question. It's "no" but with a twist. Molyneux posed his question in the midst of a philosophical debate about how we comprehend the world around us. An affirmative answer to the question would support the argument that we possess innate (and presumably God-given) concepts that are independent of the senses—for example, that we possess a concept of a sphere, regardless of whether we have only seen one, only felt one, or both. A negative answer to Molyneux's question would support the alternative argument that any concept of a sphere or other object must be tied to sensory experience. In that view, a blind person would have only a tactile concept of a sphere that would be of no use in recognizing the shape by sight. For modern neuroscientists, Molyneux's question raises issues about how the brain integrates information from the different senses, says Richard Held, a professor emeritus of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. In search of the elusive answer, Held teamed up with MIT colleague Pawan Sinha, who founded an organization in 2003 to help blind children in India. Called Project Prakash, after the Sanskrit word for "light," the group collaborates with Indian surgeons who operate to restore sight in children who've been blind from cataracts or other curable causes. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Vision
Link ID: 15200 - Posted: 04.11.2011

* By Rachel Zurer Blind Mexican cavefish sleep much less than closely related species that live near the surface, according to a study that involved shaking aquariums to keep fish awake. By breeding the fish with their sighted counterparts, scientists determined that the difference in their sleep patterns is genetic. The discovery may help identify genes and pathways involved in insomnia and other sleep disorders in humans. “Fish are really not so very different than humans,” said biologist Richard Borowksy of New York University, co-author of the study published April 7 in Current Biology. Like all animals, fish need to sleep. But over years of working with fish, Borowsky noticed that Astyanax mexicanus seemed to stay much more active at night than other species. Because many species of cavefish have adapted genetically to life in the deep and dark, losing their eyesight and pigmentation, he wondered if their sleep habits were also genetic. Borowsky’s team brought related but evolutionarily separated populations of A. mexicanus into the lab, including three groups of blind fish from different Mexican caves and a still-sighted group that lived near the surface. To evaluate fish sleep patterns, the researchers first had to find a way to tell when fish are asleep. It turns out sleeping fish have a stereotypical posture: They stop moving, drop to the bottom of the tank and drop their tail. The scientists found that once a fish had been in this position for 60 seconds, it was definitely in a different state: Like rousing a sleepy teenager, it took three times as many taps on its tank to get a sleepy fish moving after that 60-second mark. Wired.com © 2010 Condé Nast Digital.

Keyword: Sleep; Evolution
Link ID: 15199 - Posted: 04.09.2011

By LISA SANDERS, M.D. Symptoms A healthy 10-year-old girl told her mother that she was losing a lot of hair when she showered. Her mother didn’t give it much thought, until one morning when she saw for herself how much hair remained on her hands after making a ponytail for her daughter. Looking at her child’s head in the sunlight later that morning, the mother thought that maybe her hair was thinning. She took her to see Dr. Kathryn Italia, their pediatrician in Exton, a suburb of Philadelphia, that afternoon. The Exam Although the child seemed well, the doctor was concerned. The girl’s mother, who had two other children, was not a big worrier. There were no other symptoms, but the mother reported that her daughter might have been a little more tired lately. Italia examined the child but found nothing unusual. Possible Diagnoses Thyroid disease: Can cause hair loss and fatigue. Lupus and other immune-system diseases: Can also cause hair loss. Metabolic disease: Can disrupt any of the multiple processes the body uses to get energy from food. Testing of blood, kidneys and liver will often reveal its presence. Results All tests were unremarkable except for two enzymes (ALT and AST) that signal liver injury and were four times higher than normal. The Follow-Up Italia ordered an ultrasound of the liver and a repeat of the liver-function tests. (A mild viral infection can frequently cause a transient elevation in these enzymes.) Additional tests looked for other common infections and diseases that can cause abnormal liver enzymes in children: Epstein-Barr virus (the infectious cause of mononucleosis); viral hepatitis; celiac disease, a disorder in which the immune system attacks the small intestine in response to a food component known as gluten. Results The tests revealed that only the liver enzymes were abnormal. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15198 - Posted: 04.09.2011

by Arran Frood Psychedelic drug users throughout the ages have described their experiences as mind-expanding. They might be surprised, therefore, to hear that psilocybin – the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – actually decreases blood flow as well as connectivity between important areas of the brain that control perception and cognition. The same areas can be overactive in people who suffer from depression, making the drug a potential treatment option for the condition. The study is the first time that psilocybin's effects have been measured with fMRI, and the first experiment involving a hallucinogenic drug and human participants in the UK for decades. Robin Carhart-Harris at Imperial College London and colleagues recruited 30 volunteers who agreed to be injected with psilocybin and have their brain scanned using two types of fMRI. Half of the volunteers had their blood flow measured during the resulting trip; the rest underwent a scan that measured connectivity between different regions of the brain. Less blood flow was seen in the brain regions known as the thalamus, the posterior cingulate and the medial prefrontal cortex. "Seeing a decrease was surprising. We thought profound experience equalled more activity, but this formula is clearly too simplistic," says Carhart-Harris. "We didn't see an increase in any regions," he says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Brain imaging
Link ID: 15197 - Posted: 04.09.2011

By Bruce Bower A Swedish expression that translates as “orchid child” refers to a youngster who blossoms spectacularly if carefully nurtured but withers badly if neglected. Scientists have now identified gene variants that may help to cultivate orchid children by heightening their sensitivity to both good and bad parenting. In a group of kids tracked from ages 5 to 17, those who inherited certain forms of a gene involved in learning and memory and had inattentive parents displayed higher rates of delinquency and aggression than their peers, says a team led by psychologist Danielle Dick of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Children who carried the same gene variants but grew up with involved parents misbehaved less often than other kids, the researchers report in a paper to appear in Psychological Science. Dick’s team focused on CHRM2, a gene that modulates brain transmission of acetylcholine, a chemical messenger that boosts brain-cell activity. Other researchers have linked alterations of CHRM2 to a propensity for developing alcoholism, without looking for contributions of disrupted family relationships or other environmental factors to that association. “Our findings suggest that CHRM2 is a plasticity gene involved in creating biological sensitivity to a person’s environmental context,” Dick says. A small but growing number of studies suggest that several genes initially thought to make people prone to developing depression and other disorders do so only in stressful environments, while carriers of the same genes reap benefits in supportive settings (SN Online: 1/29/09), remarks psychologist Jay Belsky of the University of California, Davis. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15196 - Posted: 04.09.2011

by Greg Miller Politics can be a touchy topic, especially when it comes to neuroscience. Researchers who've dared to tackle questions about how people's political leanings might be reflected in the brain have often earned scoffs and scoldings from their colleagues. A provocative new study is likely to be no exception. It claims to find features of brain anatomy that differ between people who identify themselves as politically conservative or politically liberal. Cognitive neuroscientist Ryota Kanai and colleagues at University College London recruited 90 student volunteers and had them rate their political philosophy on a five-point scale ranging from very liberal to very conservative. Then the researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to get a look inside their brains. In a paper published online today in Current Biology, the team reports two main findings: political conservatives tend to have a larger right amygdala, a region involved in detecting threats and responding to fearful stimuli, whereas liberals tend to have a larger anterior cingulate cortex, an area that becomes active in situations involving conflict or uncertainty. There was considerable overlap though. When the researchers looked only at the brain scans, Kanai says they could predict who was liberal and who was conservative with about 75% accuracy—much better than a coin toss but probably not good enough for any high-tech campaign tactics. Kanai is at pains to make clear that the findings don't mean political views are "hard-wired" into the brain. He acknowledges that the data don't prove that these neuroanatomical differences actually cause political differences, but he suspects that they might play a role. He says psychological studies suggest that conservatives are more sensitive to negative emotions like fear and disgust, whereas liberals are more tolerant of situations involving conflict and uncertainty. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 15195 - Posted: 04.09.2011

by Sara Reardon Rats can rummage through a trash heap or scamper through an underground tunnel with their eyes closed. That’s because their whiskers have evolved to give them a detailed sense of their surroundings, even more precise than in animals such as cats and dogs. A new computer model of how our twitchy-nosed friends move their whiskers could lead to a better understanding of how the brain processes the sense of touch and even speed the development of whisker-covered robots. The lack of whiskers is a uniquely human trait among mammals, one that forces us to rely on sensory input from our fingers for most of our tactile information. The problem with studying how these sensations inform the brain in humans, however, is that the hand is extremely complicated. “It has a ton of muscles and skin elasticity, and we don’t know where the sensors are,” says biological and mechanical engineer Mitra Hartmann of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Whiskers, she says, are much simpler. Each one of a rat’s 60 whiskers ends in a follicle below the skin. As the whisker touches an object, the follicle recognizes how much pressure is being applied and how much the whisker has bent. It can then relay this information to the brain, which correlates input from all 60 whiskers to create an idea of the shape of the object the rat is exploring. To recreate this sensation yourself, Hartmann suggests that you close your eyes and pick up a coffee cup from your desk. Consciously or not, your fingers touch the cup one after another in a certain order and at different distances from one another, ascertaining the cup’s size and shape. All the while, your brain is combining this information and turning it into a three-dimensional (3D) perception. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15194 - Posted: 04.09.2011

By Laura Sanders SAN FRANCISCO — When faced with a thorny moral dilemma, what people say they would do and what people actually do are two very different things, a new study finds. In a hypothetical scenario, most people said they would never subject another person to a painful electric shock, just to make a little bit of money. But for people given a real-world choice, the sparks flew. The results, presented April 4 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, serve as a reminder that hypothetical scenarios don’t capture the complexities of real decisions. Morality studies in the lab almost always rely on asking participants to imagine how they’d behave in a certain situation, study coauthor Oriel FeldmanHall of Cambridge University said in her presentation. But these imagined situations are missing teeth: “Whatever you choose, it’s not going to happen,” she said. But in FeldmanHall’s study, things actually happened. “There are real shocks and real money on the table,” she said. Subjects lying in an MRI scanner were given a choice: Either administer a painful electric shock to a person in another room and make one British pound (a little over a dollar and a half), or spare the other person the shock and forgo the money. Shocks were priced in a graded manner, so that the subject would earn less money for a light shock, and earn the whole pound for a severe shock. This same choice was given 20 times, and the person in the brain scanner could see a video of either the shockee’s hand jerk or both the hand jerk and the face grimace. (Although these shocks were real, they were pre-recorded.) © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 15193 - Posted: 04.09.2011

By Maia Szalavitz Ever wonder why French fries, potato chips and Cheetos are so appealing when you're feeling stressed? A new study suggests that elevated levels of salt in the body lower stress hormones and raise levels of oxytocin, a hormone involved in love and other social connections.The research, which was conducted in rats, was published in the Journal of Neuroscience. It found that rats' response to a stressful situation — being tied down — depended on how much salt they had in their bodies. When restrained, rats with high salt levels showed less activity in their brain's stress systems, compared with rats with normal salt levels. Having high salt levels is technically called hypernatremia (geeky fact: the word suggests high levels of NA, the chemical abbreviation for the element sodium, which is an important part of salt), and rats in this state also recovered faster from being stressed. Moreover, the hypernatremic rats had elevated levels of oxytocin — a compound known as the "love hormone" for its role in helping to create social bonds, between friends, lovers or parents and children. Oxytocin is crucial to the processes that allow love and social contact to reduce stress. Not surprisingly, rats with lots of oxytocin showed less anxiety in social interactions. (The effects of oxytocin are complicated, however — it doesn't always produce love and trust — but it is a significant player in those emotions.) Bartenders often provide salty snacks to capitalize on what having hypernatremia is most likely to make you feel: thirst. And indeed, drinking behavior may provide a clue as to why salt may be stress-relieving. © 2011 Time Inc.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 15192 - Posted: 04.09.2011

By Amina Zafar, CBC News The role estrogen plays in women's brains remains murky but researchers are beginning to clarify it. The first Women's Brain Health Academic Symposium in Toronto on Wednesday brought together experts from North America leading a discussion about trying to better understand the female brain. "Seventy per cent of Alzheimer's patients are women," said Lynn Posluns, founder and chair of the Women of Baycrest, which aims to raise $5 million for a research chair devoted to women's brain health. Researchers want to uncover exactly how estrogen affects different regions of the female brain.Researchers want to uncover exactly how estrogen affects different regions of the female brain. Brian Snyder/Reuters Yet most laboratory studies today are done on male rats because female rats are considered too complex, Posluns said. "I'm saying there's a real disconnect here. It is time for scientists to better understand the female brain." At the symposium, Gillian Einstein, a professor of psychology and public health at the University of Toronto, talked about her early findings exploring the role of estrogen on brain functions such as mood and memory. "I want women to be circumspect about the effect of their hormones on their mood and cognition," said Einstein. "It may or may not be PMS that makes you grumpy. It's possible that your husband really did do something crappy, and you have a reasonable response to it. [On the other hand] I also think it's important to think they may be having an effect." © CBC 2011

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Alzheimers
Link ID: 15191 - Posted: 04.07.2011

By David Eagleman A human brain is three pounds of the most complex material in the universe. It is the mission control centre that drives the operation of your life, gathering dispatches through small portals in the armoured bunker of the skull. This pink, alien computational material, which has the consistency of jelly and is composed of miniaturised, self-configuring parts, vastly outstrips anything we’ve dreamt of building. Using those brains, humans have done something unique. As far as we know, we’re the only system on the planet so complex that we’ve thrown ourselves headlong into the game of deciphering our own programming language. Imagine that your desktop computer began to control its own peripheral devices, removed its own cover and pointed its webcam at its own circuitry. That’s us. What we’ve discovered by peering into the skull ranks among the most significant intellectual developments of our species: the recognition that the innumerable facets of our behaviour, thoughts and experience are inseparably yoked to a vast chemical-electrical network called the nervous system. The machinery is utterly alien to us, and yet, somehow, it is us. The first lesson we learn from studying our own circuitry is shocking: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control. The vast jungles of neurons operate their own programs. The conscious you – the I that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning – is the smallest bit of what’s transpiring in your brain. Although we are dependent on the functioning of the brain for our inner lives, it runs its own show. Your consciousness is like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot. © Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2011

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 15190 - Posted: 04.07.2011