A multinational research team led by scientists at the National Institutes of Health has found that a genetic variant of a brain receptor molecule may contribute to violently impulsive behavior when people who carry it are under the influence of alcohol. A report of the findings, which include human genetic analyses and gene knockout studies in animals, appears in the Dec. 23 issue of Nature. "Impulsivity, or action without foresight, is a factor in many pathological behaviors including suicide, aggression, and addiction," explains senior author David Goldman, M.D., chief of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics at the NIH’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). "But it is also a trait that can be of value if a quick decision must be made or in situations where risk-taking is favored." In collaboration with researchers in Finland and France, Dr. Goldman and colleagues studied a sample of violent criminal offenders in Finland. The hallmark of the violent crimes committed by individuals in the study sample was that they were spontaneous and purposeless. "We conducted this study in Finland because of its unique population history and medical genetics," says Dr. Goldman. "Modern Finns are descended from a relatively small number of original settlers, which has reduced the genetic complexity of diseases in that country. Studying the genetics of violent criminal offenders within Finland increased our chances of finding genes that influence impulsive behavior."

Keyword: ADHD; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14829 - Posted: 12.29.2010

by Tim Wall When someone starts getting a little too sloshed at a New Year's Eve party, you can tell them to stop acting like an animal, literally. Many animals seem to enjoy getting a good buzz on just as much as humans. In fact, some animals may have introduced humans to a number of drugs, including psychedelic mushrooms, alcohol, caffeine, and cocaine. Even the legend behind Santa's flying reindeer may have its roots in a psychedelic experience. Reindeer are known to feed on the fly agaric mushroom (Amanita muscaria), then stumble about, twitching and making strange noises. The mushrooms contain the hallucinogen muscimol. It is unknown whether the reindeer also enjoy listening to eight hours of Grateful Dead recordings while playing with glow-in-the-dark objects. Humans can trip on fly agaric mushrooms as well, but the fungi can also be poisonous. Long ago, people noticed that the reindeer's bodies filter out the toxins, leaving only the hallucinogen. So reindeer herders in the far north learned to collect the urine from mushroom-munching reindeer. The llamas of Peru may have introduced the people of South America to the use of coca leaves about 7000 years ago. Legend holds that the llamas ate coca leaves when their normal foods were unavailable, wrote Haynes. The llama herder, like Khaldi the goatherd, noticed the friskiness of his animals after they partook. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Evolution
Link ID: 14828 - Posted: 12.29.2010

By ASHLEE VANCE CAMBRIDGE, Mass — Dr. Jeff Lichtman likes his brains sliced thin — very, very thin. Dr. Lichtman and his team of researchers at Harvard have built some unusual contraptions that carve off slivers of mouse brains as part of a quest to understand how the mind works. Their goal is to run slice after minuscule slice under a powerful electron microscope, develop detailed pictures of the brain’s complex wiring and then stitch the images back together. In short, they want to build a full map of the mind. The field, at a very nascent stage, is called connectomics, and the neuroscientists pursuing it compare their work to early efforts in genetics. What they are doing, these scientists say, is akin to trying to crack the human genome — only this time around, they want to find how memories, personality traits and skills are stored. They want to find a connectome, or the mental makeup of a person. “You are born with your genes, and they don’t change afterward,” said H. Sebastian Seung, a professor of computational neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is working on the computer side of connectomics. “The connectome is a product of your genes and your experiences. It’s where nature meets nurture.” The task is arduous and years from fruition, and even the biggest zealots acknowledge that their work may not pay off. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14827 - Posted: 12.29.2010

by Eliza Strickland Love is celebrated as a many-splendored thing, while lust is commonly regarded as downright primitive. Leave it to a Frenchwoman to discover that sexual desire is actually quite brainy. Stephanie Ortigue, an assistant professor of psychology at Syracuse University, uses brain scans to examine the divine madness of love and the blinding imperative of lust. Her goal: illuminating how these two forms of attraction work by mapping out which brain regions are active when we experience them. Her findings counter the assumption that desire is a simple animal urge motivated primarily by biochemistry and evolutionary directives. Working with her frequent collaborator, psychiatrist Francesco Bianchi-Demicheli of Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland, Ortigue has found that lust involves complicated cognitive processing. Love, too, is not quite what we thought. Both romance and desire, she says, may be expressions of a “top-down” process in which intellect rules over instinct, not the other way around. Love may even make you smarter, by helping your brain process information more quickly. Why do you study the neuroscience of love and sex? I’ve always been interested in the big questions of science, and love is one of the biggest questions in the world. Everyone feels it, knows what it is, but we can’t really define it. I like challenges, and I like to bring some rationality to things that seem irrational. Also, I’ve always been interested in the unconscious and consciousness and how the two interact in our daily life. We’ve found that a lot of unconscious processes are involved in love and desire. © 2010, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14826 - Posted: 12.29.2010

by Carl Zimmer When Charles Darwin listened to music, he asked himself, what is it for? Philosophers had pondered the mathematical beauty of music for thousands of years, but Darwin wondered about its connection to biology. Humans make music just as beavers build dams and peacocks show off their tail feathers, he reasoned, so music must have evolved. What drove its evolution was hard for him to divine, however. “As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life, they must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed,” Darwin wrote in 1871. Today a number of scientists are trying to solve that mystery by looking at music right where we experience it: in the brain. They are scanning the activity that music triggers in our neurons and observing how music alters our biochemistry. But far from settling on a single answer, the researchers are in a pitched debate over music. Some argue that it evolved in our ancestors because it allowed them to have more children. Others see it as merely a fortunate accident of a complex brain. In many ways music appears to be hardwired in us. Anthropologists have yet to discover a single human culture without its own form of music. Children don’t need any formal training to learn how to sing and dance. And music existed long before modern civilization. In 2008 archaeologists in Germany discovered the remains of a 35,000-year-old flute. Music, in other words, is universal, easily learned, and ancient. That’s what you would expect of an instinct that evolved in our distant ancestors. © 2010, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 14825 - Posted: 12.29.2010

by Paul Raeburn Lithium is as puzzling as it is potent. It was the first drug used to treat mental illness, and more than 50 years later, it is still one of the most widely used psychiatric medications. But the doctors who prescribe lithium to their patients still do not know how it works or even why it works. “It is the most mysterious drug in psychiatry,” says De-Maw Chuang, a biologist at the National Institute of Mental Health. “It’s so small, but it is so powerful.” Unlike other psychoactive chemicals—large, complex molecules like Prozac (fluoxetine) or Abilify (aripiprazole)—lithium is extremely simple. It is an element, the lightest of the metals, and its chemical properties are similar to those of the sodium in table salt. Nonetheless, researchers have recently found that lithium could be something close to a psychiatric wonder drug. It has two remarkable powers in the brains of mentally ill patients: protecting neurons from damage and death and alleviating existing damage by spurring new nerve cell growth. Far beyond its current application as a mood stabilizer, lithium could be helpful in treating or preventing Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, stroke, glaucoma, Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), and Huntington’s disease—an impressive tally that earned it the nickname “the aspirin of the brain” in the journal Nature. The mood-stabilizing powers of lithium were discovered by accident in the 1940s by John F. J. Cade, a lone psychiatrist working in Melbourne, Australia. Cade had noticed that some substance in the urine of patients with mania was particularly toxic and was investigating uric acid as the potential culprit. © 2010, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 14824 - Posted: 12.29.2010

By Stephen Smith You could resolve to exercise more (although that home treadmill makes such a lovely clothes rack). You could resolve to eat less (right after polishing off that piping-hot sticky bun). Or, with the bright promise of a new year aborning, you could . . . curl up in bed and sleep your way to a healthier you — although that might require abandoning those Calvinist impulses that sleep is the refuge of the slothful. “Making a resolution to sleep more is almost antithetical to what New Year’s resolutions are about,’’ said Dr. Charles Czeisler, chief of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “Many people don’t realize that by sleeping more, they can achieve so many of those things, and it’s actually pleasant.’’ But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. Many Americans’ lives read like the “Legend of Hollow Sleep.’’ An annual survey, conducted by a polling agency for the National Sleep Foundation and evaluated by university-affiliated specialists, found that most people feel well-rested only a few times a week and that many of us trudge along with fewer than seven hours of sleep, less than what’s considered optimal for most adults. Sometimes, fitful sleep is evidence of a serious medical condition such as sleep apnea, a disruptive disorder tied to erratic or shallow breathing while slumbering. © 2010 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 14823 - Posted: 12.27.2010

by Nic Fleming Breastfeeding improves later academic performance in boys but appears to have no such effect in girls. Wendy Oddy at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in Subiaco, Western Australia, and colleagues, examined whether having been breastfed affected the test scores of over 1000 10-year-olds. Studies have suggested that children who were breastfed have higher IQs than those who were not, but few separated out boys and girls. Mothers who breastfeed are on average wealthier and more educated, so Oddy's team accounted for these factors. Boys who were mainly breastfed for at least six months scored 9 per cent higher in mathematics and writing tests, 7 per cent higher in spelling and 6 per cent higher in reading, compared with boys fed with formula milk or breastfed for shorter periods. There were no significant differences in results for girls. "We know that breast milk contains the optimal nutrients for development of the brain and central nervous system," says Oddy, but the gender differences were surprising. Oddy points out that other studies have suggested boys are more vulnerable to stress and adversity during critical periods of brain development. She speculates this could be because girls seem to be protected by higher levels of oestrogen during childhood. She says the improved academic performance of boys could be explained by oestrogen in breast milk having similar neuro-protective effects. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 14822 - Posted: 12.27.2010

By Rachael Rettner Too much fried fish may contribute to the high rate of stroke in America's "stroke belt," according to a new study. The results showed that people living in the stroke belt — including residents of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana — were about 30 percent more likely to eat two or more servings of fried fish every week than those living in the rest of the country, the researchers said. And blacks who are known to have an increased risk of stroke regardless of where they live, were more than 3.5 times more likely to eat two or more servings of fried fish per week than whites. Inhabitants of the stroke belt are 20 percent more likely to die from stroke than those living in the rest of the country. And those in the stroke "buckle" — an area of the stroke belt that includes the coastal plains of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia — are 40 percent more likely to die from stroke, said study researcher Fadi Nahab of Emory University in Atlanta. Fried fish, Nahab said, may be contributing to these racial and geographic disparities. MyHealthNewsDaily Copyright © 2010.

Keyword: Stroke; Obesity
Link ID: 14821 - Posted: 12.27.2010

Janelle Weaver How many friends do you have? A rough answer can be predicted by the size of a small, almond-shaped brain structure that is present in a wide range of vertebrates, scientists report today in Nature Neuroscience. The researchers studied the amygdala, which is involved in inter-personal functions such as interpreting emotional facial expressions, reacting to visual threats and trusting strangers. Inter-species comparisons in non-human primates have previously shown that amygdala volume is associated with troop size, suggesting that the brain region supports skills necessary for a complex social life1. On the basis of these past findings, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, wondered whether a larger amygdala size allows some humans to build a richer social world. Barrett's team measured the amygdala volume in 58 healthy adults using brain images gathered during magnetic resonance imaging sessions. To construct social networks, the researchers asked the volunteers how many people they kept in regular contact with, and how many groups those individuals belonged to. They found that participants who had bigger and more complex social networks had larger amygdala volumes. This effect did not depend on the age of the volunteers or their own perceived social support or life satisfaction, suggesting that happiness is not the underlying causal factor that links the size of this brain structure in an individual to their number of friends2. © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 14820 - Posted: 12.27.2010

by Martin Enserink Confronted with a patient suffering from pain or a chronic disease for which no drugs are effective, doctors sometimes prescribe a sugar pill or vitamin. Although these "medications" have no active ingredients, patients often feel better. It's called the "placebo effect," and most scientists would say that it works only if the patient doesn't know the pill is fake. But a new clinical trial shows that patients can get better on a placebo even if they know the truth. "It's a fascinating, innovative, and important study," says Klaus Linde, who studies complementary and alternative medicine at the Technical University in Munich, Germany. Lead author Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard Medical School in Boston says he set up the trial in part because doctors seem to be struggling with the placebo problem. In a survey among 1200 internists and rheumatologists that Kaptchuk and others published in 2008, roughly half of participants admitted having prescribed placebos. Sometimes, these were truly inactive pills, but very often, they were "impure placebos": vitamins, over-the-counter pain killers, antibiotics, or even sedatives that the physicians believed had no specific action on the disease but might provide a placebo benefit. Few were upfront with the patients about this, the study showed: Many described the treatment as "a medicine not typically used for your condition that might benefit you,” or words to that effect. That kind of mild deception is widely considered unethical, says Kaptchuk. It also may be unnecessary, according to the new study. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Depression
Link ID: 14819 - Posted: 12.27.2010

by Allison Bohac Most people know how hard it can be to stick to a diet. But for children with epilepsy, maintaining a restrictive high-fat, low-carbohydrate regimen known as the ketogenic diet is far more difficult than any weight-loss plan. Someday, however, they may be able to control seizures with a simple supplement instead, if a new finding in mice holds up in humans. Almost a third of epilepsy patients, many of them children, don't respond to antiseizure drugs. For reasons that are not well understood, the ketogenic diet can prevent seizures for some of these children. But it's by no means an easy fix. Patients need to eat 80% to 90% of their daily calories as fat, usually in the form of vegetable oil or butter. Only some versions of the diet allow any carbohydrates at all, and sugary desserts are off-limits. "Eating a cookie can break the effect of the diet, resulting in a seizure," explains Karin Borges, a neurobiologist at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, in Australia. Hoping to design a more palatable alternative to the ketogenic diet, Borges and her colleagues began experimenting with a synthetic oil often found in antiwrinkle creams and other cosmetics. The compound, called triheptanoin, is already used to treat certain metabolic disorders; researchers believe it works because it replenishes specific molecules needed to produce the energy-carrying molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Borges reasoned that these metabolites, which are also the building blocks for certain chemical messengers in the brain, might be depleted by the flurry of brain activity that occurs during a seizure. Lower ATP levels in the brain can destabilize neurons, triggering more seizures. Borges hoped that a diet supplemented with triheptanoin would replenish the brain's supply of metabolites and boost ATP production, helping to control epileptic bursts. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 14818 - Posted: 12.27.2010

By Nathan Seppa Epilepsy that strikes in childhood and lingers into adulthood triples an individual’s risk of dying, researchers find. But children who “outgrow” epilepsy and see their seizures fade as adults don’t have this added mortality risk, researchers report in the Dec. 23 New England Journal of Medicine. The findings, from a 40-year study in Finland, provide a long-term look that doctors can use as they puzzle over whether to recommend surgery for patients or continue with medication, says neurologist David Ficker of the University of Cincinnati, who wasn’t involved in the study. “We probably should be treating epilepsy aggressively in people who aren’t seizure-free,” he says. Doctors tracked the fate of 245 children diagnosed with epilepsy in the early 1960s. Half of the patients had epilepsy stemming from no clear cause and were neurologically normal, apart from having seizures. The other half had a clear epilepsy trigger, such as severe head trauma, brain injury from meningitis or encephalitis, or other brain damage that was identifiable on scans such as magnetic resonance imaging. All the patients got checkups every five years until 2002. By then, 60 had died, a rate three times the average for people in Finland of comparable age, ranging up to 54 years. Of those 60 deaths, 51 occurred in the 107 patients who were still having seizures. Only five occurred in the 35 who had been in remission for five years or more with the help of medication, and four deaths occurred in the 103 people whose seizures had been in remission for that long without medication. Overall, 33 deaths were tied to epilepsy. The other deaths were mainly due to pneumonia and heart disease. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Epilepsy; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14817 - Posted: 12.27.2010

By Rachel Ehrenberg Even if your baby is very smart, he probably can’t read your mind — he might not even know you have one. New research suggests that infants as young as 7 months are sensitive to the perspectives of others. But more work is needed to demonstrate whether babies fully grasp that others have their own beliefs. The new study, published December 24 in Science, adds to a large body of research exploring when humans first develop the capacity to infer the intentions and perspectives of others, a cognitive ability termed “theory of mind.” Scientists have long debated whether this is an innate ability or one that is arrived at as a young brain gathers information and experience. Previous research suggested that kids can’t distinguish between what other people believe is going on from what is actually going on until the age of 4 or 5. This developmental milestone was explored in classic experiments where children see a boy, Maxie, put chocolate into a kitchen drawer. Maxie then leaves, and someone else comes in and moves the chocolate to a cupboard. Then Maxie comes back inside and wants his chocolate. The children are asked where Maxie will go: the drawer, where he thinks the chocolate is, or the cupboard, where it really is. Young 3-year-olds say Maxie will go to the drawer, says cognitive development specialist Josef Perner of the University of Salzburg, who conducted the Maxie experiments in the early 1980s. “It’s only around 4 or 5 that children realize he doesn’t act according to how the world is, but acts according to his inner world.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14816 - Posted: 12.27.2010

– Psychiatric medicine may be avoided for children with anxiety disorders if a brain scan shows they are likely to respond to “talk therapy,” according to neuroscientists from Georgetown’s Medical Center. In a recent study at the center, brain scans showed that behavior in children and young adolescents naturally veers toward the egocentric. “These results suggest that children develop introspection over time as their brains develop,” says the study’s first author, Stuart Washington, who graduated from the university in 2008 with a Ph.D. in biomedical neuroscience. “Before then they are somewhat egocentric, which is not to mean that they are negatively self-centered, but they think that everyone views the world in the same way they do. They lack perspective in that way.” The researchers’ study, presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego this past fall, shows that children and adolescent ages 8 to 16 who expressed fear while looking at fearful faces are more likely to benefit from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), also known as talk therapy. Children and adolescents who showed fear when looking at happy faces on a screen inside an fMRI scanner had the least success with an eight-week course of CBT. The Fear Center “Anxiety and fear are intrinsically linked, so how the brain’s fear center responds would naturally affect how anxiety disorders manifest,” says the study’s lead author, Steve Rich, a fourth-year medical student.

Keyword: Emotions; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14815 - Posted: 12.27.2010

By Dan Slater What I remember most about my stutter is not the stupefying vocal paralysis, the pursed eyes or the daily ordeal of gagging on my own speech, sounds ricocheting off the back of my teeth like pennies trying to escape a piggy bank. Those were merely the mechanics of stuttering, the realities to which one who stutters adjusts his expectations of life. Rather, what was most pervasive about my stutter is the strange role it played in determining how I felt about others, about you. My stutter became a barometer of how much confidence I felt in your presence. Did I perceive you as friendly, patient, kind? Or as brash and aggressive? How genuine was your smile? Did you admire my talents, or were you wary of my more unseemly traits? In this way I divided the world into two types of people: those around whom I stuttered and those around whom I might not. The onset of my stutter occurred under typical circumstances: I was 4; I had a father who carried a stutter into adulthood; and, at the time, my parents were engaged in a bitter, protracted, Reagan-era divorce that seemed destined for mutually assured destruction. My mother chronicled my speech problems in her diaries from the period. Sept. 26, 1981: "Daniel has been biting his fingernails for the past several weeks; along with stuttering up." July 8, 1982: "After phone call [with his father] Danny stuttering quite a bit, blocking on words." © 2010 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 14814 - Posted: 12.22.2010

Capsaicin, the compound in chillies which gives them their kick, can also turn on the switch. It is believed the study could herald the development of new painkilling drugs. The team looked at the mechanics of the pain gene known as substance-P which was first associated with chronic inflammatory pain more than 30 years ago. Genes need "switches", known as promoters and enhancers, to turn them on in the right place, at the right time and at the right level. One of the major findings of the study was that the switches do not act in isolation and need other switches to "speak to" in order to activate the gene. Researchers based in the university's Kosterlitz Centre for Therapeutics spent five years looking for the switches that turn the substance-P gene on in a group of cells called sensory neurones. Dr Lynne Shanley said: "Finding the switch was like looking for a needle in a haystack. "However, by comparing the genetic sequences of humans, mice and chickens, we were able to find a short stretch of DNA that had remained unchanged since before the age of dinosaurs. "We were delighted when this little bit of DNA turned out to be a genetic switch, or enhancer sequence, which could turn on the substance-P gene in sensory neurones." ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 14813 - Posted: 12.22.2010

By NICHOLAS WADE Working with human brain tissue removed in surgery, researchers have identified the components of a critical part of the brain’s architecture: the synapse, or junction where one neuron makes a connection with another. The work should help in understanding how the synapse works in laying down memories, as well as the basis of the many diseases that turn out to be caused by defects in the synapse’s delicate machinery. The research team, led by Seth Grant of the Sanger Institute near Cambridge, England, compiled the first exact inventory of all the protein components of the synaptic information-processing machinery. No fewer than 1,461 proteins are involved in this biological machinery, they report in the current issue of Nature Neuroscience. They have tied their catalog into the human genome sequence, connecting each protein to the gene that contains instructions for making it. This has allowed them to compare their findings in humans with other species whose genomes have been sequenced, such as the Neanderthals, who “would have suffered from the same range of psychiatric disease as humans,” Dr. Grant said. Each neuron in the human brain makes an average 1,000 or so connections with other neurons. There are 100 billion neurons, so the brain probably contains 100 trillion synapses, its most critical working part. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14812 - Posted: 12.22.2010

by Andy Coghlan The astonishing ability of many children with autism to rapidly locate concealed on-screen symbols falls apart in an experiment that mimics hunting for objects in the real world. The experiment took place on an array of 49 lights resembling a disco dance floor (see picture). For each game, researchers switched on an apparently random pattern of 16 green lights. Children then had to dash around pressing them, searching for one that turned red. Twenty children with autism and 20 without took turns to complete the game as fast as possible. The game was biased so that 80 per cent of the time, the light that turned red was located in a specific half of the room. Children with autism were expected to spot this pattern faster but the reverse happened. Non-autistic children spent 60 per cent of their time searching the target-rich half, compared with 45 per cent for those with autism. The team, led by Liz Pellicano of London's Institute of Education, suggests that while autistic kids may be good at spotting preset visual patterns, they find it harder to work out rules from apparently random events. "The main message is the difference between rule formation and visual pattern detection," says Laurent Mottron of the Fernand-Seguin Research Center in Montreal, Canada. "There's something about strategic search tasks that leans into areas of weakness in autism," says Francesca Happé of the Institute of Psychiatry in London. Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1014076108 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Autism; Vision
Link ID: 14811 - Posted: 12.22.2010

Babies are more likely to die of sudden infant death syndrome on New Year's than other days of the year, a new study suggests. The reasons are not clear but researchers suspect that parents who celebrate the new year with heavy drinking aren't being attentive enough to their children and how they're put to bed. The researchers examined a large U.S. database to explore connections between alcohol and SIDS — the sudden, unexpected death of an apparently healthy infant under one year of age. The spike in deaths is beyond the normal winter increase in SIDS, sociologist David Phillips of the University of California, San Diego, and his co-authors report in this week's issue of the journal Addiction. They analyzed a database of 129,090 deaths from SIDS from 1973 to 2006 and 295,151 other infant deaths in those years. The study doesn't give actual figures for the New Year's Day deaths from SIDS but said the number was about a third higher than would be expected on any other winter day. To see if parental sleeping-in might be a factor rather than intoxication, the researchers checked for shifts in deaths when clocks are set back an hour in the fall. No rise in SIDS was found then. The study doesn't show alcohol consumption is a cause of SID, but the findings raise concerns, Phillips said. Drunk parents could be doing something or not doing something that puts babies at risk, he suggested. © CBC 2010

Keyword: Sleep; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 14810 - Posted: 12.22.2010