By Steve Connor, Science Editor A revolutionary way of screening the entire human genome for the genetic signposts of disease has produced its latest success – the first inherited link to common migraine and a possible reason for extreme headaches. The technique, which scans all 23 pairs of human chromosomes in a single sweep, has found the first genetic risk factor that predisposes someone to the common form of migraine, which affects one in six women and one in 12 men. The discovery has immediately led to a new possible cause of migraine by alerting scientists to DNA defects involved in the build-up of a substance in the nerves of sufferers that could be the trigger for their migraines. Scientists believe the findings could lead both to a better understanding as well as new treatments for the chronic and debilitating condition which is estimated to be one of the most costly brain-related disorders in society, causing countless lost working days. Scanning the entire blueprint of human DNA by genome-wide association studies (GWAS) has had a profound effect on the understanding of a range of other medical conditions over the past few years, from heart disease and obesity to bipolar disorder and testicular cancer. The study of migraine, published in the journal Nature Genetics, was an archetypal example of the new approach of medical genetics using the GWAS technique. Scientists analysed the genomes of some 5,000 people with migraine and compared their DNA to that of unaffected people to see if there were any significant differences that could be linked statistically to the condition. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14407 - Posted: 08.30.2010

Lauran Neergaard, Associated Press Scientists have created a new kind of artificial cornea, inserting a sliver of collagen into the eye that coaxes corneal cells to regrow and restore vision. It worked in a first-stage study of 10 patients in Sweden, researchers reported Wednesday. While larger studies are needed, it's a step toward developing an alternative to standard cornea transplants, which aren't available in much of the world because of a shortage of donated corneas. "We're trying to regenerate the cornea from within," said Dr. May Griffith, senior scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute in Canada and a professor of regenerative medicine at Linkoping University in Sweden. Vision depends on a healthy cornea, the filmlike covering of the eye's surface that helps it focus light. Corneas are fragile and easily harmed by injury or infection. About 42,000 people in the United States receive transplanted corneas every year. While that's considered an adequate supply in this country, donated corneas aren't available in many countries for the estimated 10 million people worldwide with corneal blindness. Transplants also bring risk of rejection. The new work, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, is a bioartificial cornea - an attempt to use the same natural substances that make up a real cornea to induce healing. © 2010 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 14406 - Posted: 08.30.2010

By GUY DEUTSCHER Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think. In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew. Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 14405 - Posted: 08.30.2010

By GINA KOLATA BETHESDA, Md. — The scene was a kind of science court. On trial was the question “Can anything — running on a treadmill, eating more spinach, learning Arabic — prevent Alzheimer’s disease or delay its progression?” To try to answer that question, the National Institutes of Health sponsored the court, appointing a jury of 15 medical scientists with no vested interests in Alzheimer’s research. They would hear the evidence and reach a judgment on what the data showed. For a day and a half last spring, researchers presented their cases, describing studies and explaining what they had hoped to show. The jury also heard from scientists from Duke University who had been commissioned to look at the body of evidence — hundreds of research papers — and weigh it. And the jury members had read the papers themselves, preparing for this day. The studies included research on nearly everything proposed to prevent the disease: exercise, mental stimulation, healthy diet, social engagement, nutritional supplements, anti-inflammatory drugs or those that lower cholesterol or blood pressure, even the idea that people who marry or stay trim might be saved from dementia. And they included research on traits that might hasten Alzheimer’s onset, like not having much of an education or being a loner. It is an issue that has taken on intense importance because scientists recently reported compelling evidence that two types of tests, PET scans of Alzheimer’s plaque in the brain and tests of spinal fluid, can find signs of the disease years before people have symptoms. That gives rise to the question: What, if anything, can people do to prevent it? Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 14404 - Posted: 08.30.2010

Jerome Burne Sixty years ago, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle published his famous attack on Cartesian dualism, The Concept of Mind, which claimed to find a logical flaw in the popular notion that mental life has a parallel but separate existence from the physical body. Among other effects it provided sophisticated support for the psychological behaviourists, then in the ascendant, who asserted that since we could not objectively observe mental activity it was not really a fit subject for scientific investigation. Nowhere was the notion of banning mental states taken up more enthusiastically than by the emerging discipline of neuropsychiatry. If consciousness and all its manifestations were "merely" the firing of neurons and the release of chemicals in the brain, what need was there to focus on mental states? Once the physical brain was right, the rest would follow. It was an approach that has spawned a vast pharmaceutical industry to treat any pathological psychological state – anxiety, shyness, depression, psychosis – with a variety of pills. The underlying promise is that scientifically adjusting the levels of various brain chemicals will bring relief and a return to normality. The biggest-selling class of these drugs are the anti-depressant SSRIs – brands include Prozac, Seroxat and Lustral. A recent report revealed that they were the most widely prescribed drugs in America, with an estimated global market value of over $20 billion. However, as is set out calmly and clearly in Irving Kirsch’s The Emperor’s New Drugs, it would seem that the whole golden edifice is based on a lie. © Times Newspapers Ltd 2010

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 14403 - Posted: 08.30.2010

By Jim Nash Treatment of severe depression with magnetic stimulation is moving beyond large mental health centers and into private practices nationwide, following more than two decades of research on the treatment. Yet even as concern about its efficacy fades, one potential side effect—seizures—continues to shadow the technology. Called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), the noninvasive technique uses electromagnets to create localized electrical currents in the brain. The gentle jolts activate certain neurons, reducing symptoms in some patients. Eight psychiatrists contacted for this article, all of whom use rTMS to treat depression, say it is the most significant development in the field since the advent of antidepressant medications. The prevailing theory is that people with depression do not produce enough of certain neurotransmitters, which include serotonin and dopamine. Electricity (administered in combination with antidepressants) stimulates production of those neurotransmitters. A National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) study released this spring shows that 14 percent of patients with drug-resistant major depressive disorder experience a remission of symptoms after rTMS treatment compared with a control group, which reported a 5 percent rate of remission. Physicians and researchers say those results are similar to the success rate of antidepressants. No notable side effects occurred during the study, according to its authors, who include Mark George, an early rTMS researcher and a professor of psychiatry, radiology and neurosciences at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. They have suggested that higher levels of electrical stimulation might attain better results. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 14402 - Posted: 08.30.2010

By Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Diane Rogers-Ramachandran Imagine that you are looking at a dog that is standing behind a picket fence. You do not see several slices of dog; you see a single dog that is partially hidden by a series of opaque vertical slats. The brain’s ability to join these pieces into a perceptual whole demonstrates a fascinating process known as amodal completion. It is clear why such a tendency would have evolved. Animals must be able to spot a mate, predator or prey through dense foliage. The retinal image may contain only fragments, but the brain’s visual system links them, reconstructing the object so the animal can recognize what it sees. The process seems effortless to us, but it has turned out to be one of those things that is horrendously difficult to program computers to do. Nor is it clear how neurons in the brain’s visual pathways manage the trick. In the early 20th century Gestalt psychologists were very interested in this problem. They devised a number of cunningly contrived illusions to investigate how the visual system establishes the continuity of an object and its contours when the object is partially obscured. A striking example of amodal completion is an illusion devised by Italian psychologist Gaetano Kanizsa. In one view, you see a set of “chicken feet” arranged geometrically. But if you merely add a set of opaque diagonal bars, a three-dimensional cube springs into focus seemingly by magic, the chicken feet becoming cube corners. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 14401 - Posted: 08.30.2010

By Larry O'Hanlon There are theories galore about why some dog breeds appear to be smarter than others, but new research suggests that size alone might make a difference. All larger dogs appear to be better at following pointing cues from humans than smaller dogs, which makes them appear smarter. It's possible that bigger dogs appear smarter not just because they are bred for taking orders, but because their wider set eyes give them better depth perception. As a result, they can more easily discern the direction a person is pointing. This latter hypothesis was tested by researchers in New Zealand, who think there might be something to it. "We do know that dog breeds are different," said William Helton of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Human breeding has created dogs with huge physical differences, like shorter snouts for more powerful bites. Even the internal structure of dogs eyes can vary among some breeds, he said. But can something as simple as the distance between the eyes be a factor too? To see if all larger dogs in general were better at discerning human pointing cues, Helton and his colleagues put 104 dogs to the test -- 61 large dogs (greater than 50 lbs) and 43 small dogs (less than 50 lbs). © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 14400 - Posted: 08.30.2010

by David Robson Can you tell a snake from a pretzel? Some can't – and their experiences are revealing how the brain builds up a coherent picture of the world AFTER her minor stroke, BP started to feel as if her eyes were playing tricks on her. TV shows became confusing: in one film, she was surprised to see a character reel as if punched by an invisible man. Sometimes BP would miss seeing things that were right before her eyes, causing her to bump into furniture or people. BP's stroke had damaged a key part of her visual system, giving rise to a rare disorder called simultanagnosia. This meant that she often saw just one object at a time. When looking at her place setting on the dinner table, for example, BP might see just a spoon, with everything else a blur (Brain, vol 114, p 1523). BP's problems are just one example of a group of disorders known collectively as visual agnosias, usually caused by some kind of brain damage. Another form results in people having trouble recognising and naming objects, as experienced by the agnosic immortalised in the title of Oliver Sacks's 1985 best-seller The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Agnosias have become particularly interesting to neuroscientists in the past decade or so, as advances in brain scanning techniques have allowed them to close in on what's going on in the brain. This gives researchers a unique opportunity to work out how the brain normally makes sense of the world. "Humans are naturally so good at this, it's difficult to see our inner workings," says Marlene Behrmann, a psychologist who studies vision at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Cases like BP's are even shedding light on how our unconscious informs our conscious mind. "Agnosias allow us to adopt a reverse-engineering approach and infer how [the brain] would normally work," says Behrmann. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 14399 - Posted: 08.30.2010

By Rebecca Kessler In greylag geese, nearly a fifth of all long-term couples are composed of two males. They're not alone: More than 130 bird species are known to engage in homosexual behavior at least occasionally, a fact that has puzzled scientists. After all, in evolutionary terms same-sex mating seems to reduce the birds' chances of reproductive success. But that's not necessarily so, according to a new study. In a given species, the sex with lighter parental duties tends to mate more, period whether with the same or the opposite sex. Birds engage in all kinds of same-sex hanky panky, from elaborate courtship displays to mounting and genital contact to setting up house together. In some species the same-sex pairs even raise young (conceived with outside partners, obviously) and stay together for several years. In 2007, a team led by Geoff MacFarlane, a biologist at the University of Newcastle in Australia, reported that male homosexual behavior was more common in polygynous bird species, where males mate with numerous females, and that female homosexual behavior was more common in monogamous species. Intrigued, MacFarlane looked for help explaining the pattern in a theory predicting that whichever gender spends less time caring for young tends to have sex with more partners. © 2010 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 14398 - Posted: 08.24.2010

By KATHERINE BOUTON “Delusions of Gender” takes on that tricky question, Why exactly are men from Mars and women from Venus?, and eviscerates both the neuroscientists who claim to have found the answers and the popularizers who take their findings and run with them. The author, Cordelia Fine, who has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from University College London, is an acerbic critic, mincing no words when it comes to those she disagrees with. But her sharp tongue is tempered with humor and linguistic playfulness, as the title itself suggests. Academics like Simon Baron-Cohen and Dr. Louann Brizendine will want to come to this volume well armed. So would Norman Geschwind if he were still alive. Popular authors like John Gray (“Men are from Mars”), Michael Gurian (“What Could He Be Thinking?”) and Dr. Leonard Sax (“Why Gender Matters”) may want to read something else. Sometimes all it takes is their own words, as in this example from Dr. Brizendine’s 2007 book “The Female Brain”: “Maneuvering like an F-15, Sarah’s female brain is a high-performance emotion machine — geared to tracking, moment by moment, the nonverbal signals of the innermost feelings of others.” Is Sarah some kind of psychic? Dr. Fine clarifies: “She is simply a woman who enjoys the extraordinary gift of mind reading that, apparently, is bestowed on all owners of a female brain.” Experts used to attribute gender inequality to the “delicacy of the brain fibers” in women ; then to the smaller dimensions of the female brain (the “missing five ounces,” the Victorians called it); then to the ratio of skull length to skull breadth. In 1915 the neurologist Dr. Charles L. Dana wrote in this newspaper that because a woman’s upper spinal cord is smaller than a man’s it affects women’s “efficiency” in the evaluation of “political initiative or of judicial authority in a community’s organization” — and thus compromises their ability to vote. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14397 - Posted: 08.24.2010

By RANDI HUTTER EPSTEIN, M.D. NEW HAVEN — Two floors below the main level of Yale’s medical school library is a room full of brains. No, not the students. These brains, more than 500 of them, are in glass jars. They are part of an extraordinary collection that might never have come to light if not for a curious medical student and an encouraging and persistent doctor. The cancerous brains were collected by Dr. Harvey Cushing, who was one of America’s first neurosurgeons. They were donated to Yale on his death in 1939 — along with meticulous medical records, before-and-after photographs of patients, and anatomical illustrations. (Dr. Cushing was also an accomplished artist.) His belongings, a treasure trove of medical history, became a jumble of cracked jars and dusty records shoved in various crannies at the hospital and medical school. Until now. In June 2010, after a colossal effort to clean and organize the material — 500 of 650 jars have been restored — the brains found their final resting place behind glass cases around the perimeter of the Cushing Center, a room designed solely for them. These chunks of brains floating in formaldehyde bring to life a dramatic chapter in American medical history. They exemplify the rise of neurosurgery and the evolution of 20th-century American medicine — from a slipshod trial-and-error trade to a prominent, highly organized profession. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 14396 - Posted: 08.24.2010

By John Biemer, Special to the Chicago Tribune Catholic nuns are known for their acts of charity, but Sister Adrienne Schmidt has found a way to give beyond the grave: She will donate her brain to science. First, though, she is exercising it in an annual battery of memory tests administered by researchers at Chicago's Rush University. Schmidt, 82, repeats two-digit numbers, then three, four, five, six and seven digits. She names as many animals as she can in a minute. She listens to a 30-second story about a school cafeteria cook who is robbed of $56. Half an hour later, she must repeat as many details as she can. The yearly tests are designed to provide a history of how her brain is aging. When the time comes, Schmidt's brain will join hundreds of others in 38 cooling units in a laboratory at the school's medical center. Schmidt is one of the original participants in Rush University's Religious Orders Study, which began in 1993. It is one of a handful of studies nationwide that uses donated brains with a rich and detailed clinical history gleaned from years of memory tests and physical exams. Funding for the study is slated to run out next year, but researchers are preparing a federal grant proposal in hopes of extending the study five years, because it continues to yield a bounty of results. Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 14395 - Posted: 08.24.2010

by Martin Enserink There's a new twist in the ongoing battle over whether a virus is linked to chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). After the journal held it for 2 months, a study supporting a link between a mouse retrovirus and CFS was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS). Many are still doubtful of the link, but they're impressed by the authors' efforts to ensure accuracy. In the new study, conducted by scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Harvard University, researchers scanned for traces of a virus known as XMRV in samples taken from 37 CFS patients, collected by Harvard Medical School CFS specialist Anthony Komaroff in the mid-1990s. They found evidence for the virus in 32 (87%) of the patients, but in only three out of 44 healthy controls (6.8%). It remains to be seen whether the infection causes the disease or vice versa, says NIH virologist and co-author Harvey Alter—but he's "confident" that the findings are correct. XMRV—less succinctly known as xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus—was first implicated for its potential involvement in prostate cancer, a link that's still under intense debate. Then, in a Science paper published last year, a team led by retrovirologist Judy Mikovits of the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease (WPI) in Reno, Nevada, found evidence of infection in 67% of CFS patients, compared with just 3.4% of healthy controls. But since then, four other papers failed to find the link, or any evidence of XMRV infection in humans at all. The last of the four, by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was also held for a while, at the researchers' request, while they tried to figure out how government labs could come to such opposite conclusions. The CDC paper was eventually published on 1 July in Retrovirology. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Stress; Depression
Link ID: 14394 - Posted: 08.24.2010

By Nathan Seppa In case it isn’t already clear that amphetamine abuse is a bad idea, researchers now report that abusers face more than three times the risk of developing a tear in the aorta, the huge artery carrying blood out of the heart. Physicians consider such a tear an emergency with catastrophic potential. The new findings appear in the August American Heart Journal. An aortic tear, also called aortic dissection, brings on “the most horrible chest pain imaginable,” says David Waters, a cardiologist at San Francisco General Hospital and the University of California, San Francisco. “Patients say, ‘I think I’m going to die,’ and they’re right,” he says. Without treatment, the fatality rate is ultimately about 75 percent, according to the Merck Manual Online. In the new study, researchers scanned the medical records of nearly 31 million patients nationwide, ages 18 to 49, who were hospitalized between 1995 and 2007. Codes on these records showed that 3,116 had an aortic dissection. The researchers also took note of codes that revealed amphetamine abuse or dependence. Use of methamphetamines, an increasingly popular street drug, would show up in the codes as amphetamines. Amphetamine abusers faced 3.3 times the risk of developing a torn aorta that nonusers did, the data showed. Researchers calculated that amphetamine abuse or dependence accounted for slightly less than 1 percent of all aortic dissections in the database. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 14393 - Posted: 08.24.2010

Women who report feeling stressed early in their monthly cycle were more likely than those who were less stressed to report more pronounced symptoms before and during menstruation, according to a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and other institutions. The association raises the possibility that feeling stressed in the weeks before menstruation could worsen the symptoms typically associated with premenstrual syndrome and menstruation. Women who reported feeling stressed two weeks before the beginning of menstruation were two to four times more likely to report moderate to severe symptoms than were women who did not feel stressed. Premenstrual syndrome (http://www.nichd.nih.gov/health/topics/menstruation_and_the_menstrual_cycle.cfm.)is a group of physical and psychological symptoms occurring around the time of ovulation, which may extend into the early days of menstruation. Symptoms include feelings of anger, anxiety, mood swings, depression, fatigue, decreased concentration, breast swelling and tenderness, general aches, and abdominal bloating. "We were interested in identifying factors that might predict who might be most at risk for having more severe symptoms," said Audra Gollenberg, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in NICHD's Division of Epidemiology, Statistics and Prevention Research. "It may be possible to lessen or prevent the severity of these symptoms with techniques that help women to cope more effectively with stress, such as biofeedback, exercise, or relaxation techniques."

Keyword: Stress; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 14392 - Posted: 08.24.2010

By Nicholette Zeliadt Our sleep patterns, eating habits, body temperature and hormone levels are driven by the rhythmic activity of body's circadian clock. Travel across time zones or shift work can knock those rhythms out of whack, possibly leading to sleep problems, bipolar disorder, metabolic syndrome and even cancer. The lack of convenient and reliable methods to monitor the internal clock's activity has severely limited the study of circadian-related disease, but now, scientists report that they can easily track the circadian rhythms by analyzing a person's plucked hairs. The finding could one day help doctors diagnose and treat patients suffering from circadian dysfunction. The body's master clock, located in the brain region called the hypothalamus, is set by light, which activates clock genes that are responsible for keeping this timekeeper ticking correctly. Within the past decade, scientists have discovered that organs outside the brain (such as the skin, liver and pancreas) also keep track of time with 24-hour fluctuations in clock gene expression. Previous studies have attempted to monitor molecular timekeeping in blood cells or in cells lining the mouth, but these approaches are technically challenging. In an attempt to develop a simpler, noninvasive method to clock circadian rhythms, researchers led by Makoto Akashi of the Research Institute for Time Studies at Yamaguchi University in Japan obtained hairs plucked from volunteers' heads or chins and analyzed clock gene expression in hair follicle cells. They report online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the patterns of circadian gene expression in the hair follicle cells accurately reflected the subjects' behavioral rhythms, "demonstrating that this strategy is appropriate for evaluating the human peripheral circadian clock." © 2010 Scientific American

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 14391 - Posted: 08.24.2010

by Paul Marks How do you give a robot a sharper sense of smell? By using genetically modified frog cells, according to Shoji Takeuchi, a bioengineer at the University of Tokyo in Japan. Today's electronic noses are not up to the job, he says. Although e-noses have been around for a while – and are used to sniff out rotten food in production lines – they lack accuracy. That's because e-noses use quartz rods designed to vibrate at a different frequency when they bind to a target substance. But this is not a foolproof system, as subtly different substances with similar molecular weights may bind to the rod, producing a false positive. Instead, Takeuchi believes there is nothing quite as good as biology for distinguishing between different biomolecules, such as disease markers in our breath. So he and his team have developed a living smell sensor. First, immature eggs, or oocytes, from the African clawed frog Xenopus laevis were genetically modified to express the proteins known to act as smell receptors. He chose X. laevis cells as they are widely studied and their protein expression mechanism is well understood. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Robotics
Link ID: 14390 - Posted: 08.24.2010

Dr. Shelby Freedman Harris and Dr. Michael Thorpy of Montefiore Medical Center respond: Delayed sleep phase disorder and insomnia are two different disorders. Patients with delayed sleep phase disorder, or D.S.P.D., usually have difficulty falling asleep, but once they fall asleep they have no difficulty obtaining a full night’s sleep and typically sleep until late morning or early afternoon. Those with insomnia, on the other hand, may have difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep, wake too early or feel that sleep is not restorative. Most insomnia patients have a combination of these symptoms, such as difficulty falling asleep as well as staying asleep. Insomnia is also usually due to some specific cause, such as a medical or psychiatric disorder like depression. Our bodies are biologically programmed, through circadian rhythms, to sleep at night and be alert during the day. In some people, these rhythms can shift, causing sleep and wake times to fall outside a desired schedule. In delayed sleep phase disorder, the sleep cycle is pushed later into the night, with a delayed natural morning wake time. Many patients with delayed sleep phase disorder consider themselves “night owls.” It’s common for us to delay our sleep and wake times because of late-night parties and other social activities, but this does not mean we have the disorder. People with delayed sleep phase disorder are unable to return to a normal schedule, despite trying, and end up spending a prolonged time in bed awake before falling asleep. If you are able to fall asleep easily on resuming a normal bedtime after a few late nights, then you do not have delayed sleep phase disorder. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 14389 - Posted: 08.23.2010

By Karen Weintraub It was the week the medication didn’t work that convinced Melissa Zolecki. She thinks her son Matthew got a bottle of inactive dummy pills that week by accident. And the change in his behavior was striking. The MIND Institute at the University of California Davis is testing an antibiotic called minocycline against a placebo in 60 children with Fragile X. The Fragile X Research Foundation of Canada is studying the benefits of the same drug in 20 teenagers and young adults. Seaside Therapeutics is testing the drug arbaclofen , which it is calling STX209, against a placebo in 60 children and adults, to determine its safety and an appropriate dose. Some of those study participants will continue on the drug past the initial four-week trial. Roche is testing a similar drug it is calling RO4917523 against a placebo in 60 adults with Fragile X. Novartis recently completed testing the safety and dosing of a drug called AFQ056 against a placebo in 30 adults with Fragile X. Stanford University researchers are testing the drug donepezil, a medication that enhances the function of the brain chemical acetylcholine. This trial includes 50 patients ages 12 to 21. © 2010 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14388 - Posted: 08.23.2010