By Susan Milius In females of the beetle Onthophagus sagittarius, competition for dung to wrap eggs and feed young favors the evolution of exaggerated horns. Sean Stankowski So many moms, so little fresh excrement. Though male animals are usually the ones to sport horns and other weapons, in one species of beetle battle armor comes in handy for the ladies, who use their oversized horns in fights over dung. Females of the species Onthophagus sagittarius who had heftier horns won control of more available dung and thus laid more eggs, evolutionary biologists Nicola Watson and Leigh Simmons of the University of Western Australia in Crawley found in lab tests. Competition for quality dung is the evolutionary force selecting for feminine weaponry in this species, the researchers conclude in a paper to be published online the week of March 2 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. “It’s a rare example of this type of evolutionary event for sure,” says biologist Ted Stankowich of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Horns on bulls, antlers on stags and other guy weapons have preoccupied scientists who study evolution, Stankowich says. Darwin proposed that male weaponry arose from the struggle between rivals for access to females, and later work has found plenty of examples that fit that scenario. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 13833 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Greg Miller Alzheimer's researchers have faced a series of frustrations in recent years as one promising compound after another has flopped in late-stage clinical trials. Unfortunately, the string continues with the announcement today that another closely watched trial—for a drug called dimebon—has failed. Dimebon was something of a dark horse. An antihistamine introduced in Russia in 1983, it turned up in a screen for potential Alzheimer's drugs and led to a clinical trial that yielded remarkably encouraging results: In 2008, researchers reported in The Lancet that 78 people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease who took dimebon showed significant improvements in memory and cognition, as well as the ability to carry out the activities of daily life. The new study was led by Medivation, a San Francisco, Californai-based biopharmaceutical company, and Pfizer (which reportedly paid $225 million to license the drug). It enrolled 598 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's. This time, there were no significant differences between the dimebon and placebo groups. "The results ... are unexpected, and we are disappointed for the Alzheimer's community," Medivation's president and CEO, David Hung, said in a statement. Some researchers who study the mechanisms of Alzheimer's aren't surprised, however. "I think a lot of us have been saying the same thing ... that it looks too good to be true, but let's hope not for the sake of patients," says Harvard University's Rudolph Tanzi. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 13832 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katie Moisse Our bodies are wired to move, and damaged wiring is often impossible to repair. Strokes and spinal cord injuries can quickly disconnect parts of the brain that initiate movement with the nerves and muscles that execute it, and neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) draw the process out to the same effect. Scientists have been looking for a way to bypass damaged nerves by directly connecting the brain to an assistive device—like a robotic limb—through brain-computer interface (BCI) technology. Now, researchers have demonstrated the ability to nonintrusively record neural signals outside the skull and decode them into information that could be used to move a prosthetic. Past efforts at a BCI to animate an artificial limb involved electrodes inserted directly into the brain. The surgery required to implant the probes and the possibility that implants might not stay in place made this approach risky. The alternative—recording neural signals from outside the brain—has its own set of challenges. "It has been thought for quite some time that it wasn't possible to extract information about human movement using electroencephalography," or EEG, says neuroscientist and electrical engineer Jose Contreras-Vidal. In trying to record the brain's electrical activity off the scalp, he adds, "people assumed that the signal-to-noise ratio and the information content of these signals were limited." Evidently, that is not the case. In the March issue of The Journal of Neuroscience, Contreras-Vidal and his team from the bioengineering and kinesiology departments at the University of Maryland, College Park, show that the noisy brain waves recorded using noninvasive EEG can be mathematically decoded into meaningful information about complex human movements. © 2010 Scientific American

Keyword: Robotics; ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 13831 - Posted: 06.24.2010

With its generalized symptoms of pain, fatigue and digestive issues, fibromyalgia can often hide as something else for many years. Worse, some professionals doubt the existence of this condition, which can also cause chest pains, brain fog and depression. Here, six men and women speak about living with fibromyalgia. What is it like to live with a chronic disease, mental illness or confusing condition? In Patient Voices, we feature first person accounts of the challenges patients face as they cope with various health issues. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Emotions
Link ID: 13830 - Posted: 03.04.2010

by Ewen Callaway A chemical produced during sex and linked to addiction has been visualised in a scanner as it washes across rats' brains. The feat means that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a workhorse of neuroscience, can now be used to observe the flow of brain chemicals, not just oxygen-rich blood. By pinpointing increases in blood oxygenation in the brain in response to different events – a sign that specific groups of neurons are active – fMRI is responsible for some of the hottest findings about the brain. Now Alan Jasanoff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues have extended its power. His team repeatedly mutated a magnetic, iron-containing enzyme that "lights up" in fMRI readings. With each mutation, the researchers tested its tendency to bind to dopamine, a learning and reward chemical in the brain involved in sex and addictive behaviours. Mutations that increased this tendency were combined, resulting in a molecule that was both magnetic and strongly attracted to dopamine. The team injected the molecule into the brains of rats, in a region laden with dopamine-producing cells. When given a chemical that triggers dopamine release, that area "lit up" under fMRI. Because the molecule must be injected into the brain, this kind of chemical-based fMRI won't be applied to humans anytime soon, says Jasanoff, but it could be used to probe addiction and disease using animals. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 13829 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Azadeh Ansari, CNN (CNN) -- Atrazine, a weed killer widely used in the Midwestern United States and other agricultural areas of the world, can chemically "castrate" male frogs and turn some into females, according to a new study. New research suggests the herbicide may be a cause of amphibian declines around the globe, said biologists at the University of California-Berkeley, who conducted the study. The findings are being published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers found that long-term exposure to low levels of atrazine -- 2.5 parts per billion of water -- emasculated three-quarters of laboratory frogs and turned one in 10 into females. Scientists believe the pesticide interferes with endocrine hormones, such as estrogen and testosterone. "The effects of atrazine in the long term have been shown to demasculinize or chemically castrate [frogs], combined with complete feminization of some animals," said lead researcher Tyrone B. Hayes, a biologist and herpetologist at the University of Berkeley. "We need to reconfigure how we evaluate chemicals in the environment and the impact on environmental health and public health," he said. Hayes found that 10 percent of the exposed genetic male frogs developed into functional females who copulated with unexposed males and produced viable eggs. The other 90 percent of the exposed male frogs expressed decreased libido, reduced sperm count and decreased fertility, among other findings. © 2010 Cable News Network.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 13828 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LISA SANDERS, M.D. The middle-aged woman perched on the edge of a plastic chair as the doctor explained his thoughts on why her son was having persistent headaches. Suddenly, she toppled forward, collapsing onto the linoleum floor. Dr. Philip Ledereich hurried over to the woman. “Call 911,” he shouted to his nurse. “The patient’s mother has fainted.” Was the fainting brought on simply by stress? Or could there be an underlying neurological problem? Ledereich, an ear, nose and throat specialist in Clifton, N.J., first met the mother a couple of weeks before, when she herself came in as a patient. She was fainting several times a day, and no one knew why. Ledereich hadn’t been able to figure it out, either. Despite that, she took her son to see him for the treatment of a chronic sinus infection. Ledereich was describing various treatment alternatives when the woman pitched to the floor. She had been having these spells almost daily for the past several months, she told him at their first appointment. She was 49, a nurse, and she considered herself pretty healthy until one Saturday nearly three months earlier. That day she had just put on her shoes to go to a bar mitzvah, and as she straightened up she felt a fluttering sensation in her stomach. The next minute she was on the floor. Her husband rushed to her side. She could hear him calling her name, but she couldn’t answer him; she couldn’t even open her eyes. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Narcolepsy; Sleep
Link ID: 13827 - Posted: 06.24.2010

LONDON - Young people who smoke cannabis or marijuana for six years or more are twice as likely to have psychotic episodes, hallucinations or delusions than people who have never used the drug, scientists said on Monday. The findings adds weight to previous research which linked psychosis with the drug — particularly in its most potent form as "skunk" — and will feed the debate about the level of controls over its use. Despite laws against it, up to 190 million people around the world use cannabis, according to United Nations estimates, equating to about 4 percent of the adult population. John McGrath of the Queensland Brain Institute in Australia studied more than 3,801 men and women born between 1981 and 1984 and followed them up after 21 years to ask about their cannabis use and assessed them for psychotic episodes. Around 18 percent reported using cannabis for three or fewer years, 16 percent for four to five years and 14 percent for six or more years. For most of the study, researchers didn't measure the frequency of cannabis use among subjects, but rather whether they used at all. "Compared with those who had never used cannabis, young adults who had six or more years since first use of cannabis were twice as likely to develop a non-affective psychosis (such as schizophrenia)," McGrath wrote in a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry journal. Copyright 2010 Reuters.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 13826 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JOYCE COHEN For football fans, the indelible image of last month’s Super Bowl might have been quarterback Drew Brees’s fourth-quarter touchdown pass that put the New Orleans Saints ahead for good. But for audiologists around the nation, the highlight came after the game — when Mr. Brees, in a shower of confetti, held aloft his 1-year-old son, Baylen. The boy was wearing what looked like the headphones worn by his father’s coaches on the sideline, but they were actually low-cost, low-tech earmuffs meant to protect his hearing from the stadium’s roar. Specialists say such safeguards are critical for young ears in a deafening world. Hearing loss from exposure to loud noises is cumulative and irreversible; if such exposure starts in infancy, children can live “half their lives with hearing loss,” said Brian Fligor, director of diagnostic audiology at Children’s Hospital Boston. “This message needs to be conveyed to parents over and over again,” Dr. Fligor said. “If a child attends only one loud sporting event, it isn’t a big deal. But for those kids who will be going to football games throughout their lives, as Drew Brees’s kids will, it’s a very big deal. A young, tender ear may not be able to withstand damage.” According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, more than 15 minutes of exposure to 100 decibels is unsafe. The noise in a football stadium can reach 100 to 130 decibels. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 13825 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By TARA PARKER-POPE The basic formula for gaining and losing weight is well known: a pound of fat equals 3,500 calories. That simple equation has fueled the widely accepted notion that weight loss does not require daunting lifestyle changes but “small changes that add up,” as the first lady, Michelle Obama, put it last month in announcing a national plan to counter childhood obesity. In this view, cutting out or burning just 100 extra calories a day — by replacing soda with water, say, or walking to school — can lead to significant weight loss over time: a pound every 35 days, or more than 10 pounds a year. While it’s certainly a hopeful message, it’s also misleading. Numerous scientific studies show that small caloric changes have almost no long-term effect on weight. When we skip a cookie or exercise a little more, the body’s biological and behavioral adaptations kick in, significantly reducing the caloric benefits of our effort. But can small changes in diet and exercise at least keep children from gaining weight? While some obesity experts think so, mathematical models suggest otherwise. The first lady, Michelle Obama, spoke last month at the White House about her “Let’s Move” initiative, which aims to change the way children eat and play. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 13824 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey In the heavyweight division, immune cells embedded in fat pack some extra disease-causing punches, a new study shows. Those punches involve potentially dangerous proteins linked to inflammation, heart disease and diabetes. Something in the adipose tissue, or fat, of overweight people primes immune cells called macrophages nestled within the tissue to release the proteins when the cells sense high levels of fat in the bloodstream, researchers report in the Feb. 24 Science Translational Medicine. The discovery may lead to treatments that could block disease formation in overweight or obese people. Blood levels of free fatty acids, such as triglycerides, rise after a high-fat meal and, in obese people, are often constantly elevated to levels two to three times higher than normal, says Preeti Kishore, an endocrinologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. In the new study, Kishore and her colleagues show that these types of fat particles prod immune cells called macrophages to make PAI-1, a protein linked to heart disease. The protein, whose full name is plasminogen activator inhibitor-1, keeps blood clots, which can cause strokes or heart attacks, from breaking up. The fatty acids also triggered the release of inflammation-causing proteins called TNF-alpha and IL-6, the researchers found. Inflammation caused by those and other proteins is thought to play a role in type 2 diabetes in obese people. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Obesity; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 13823 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Richard L. Doty FOR more than 50 years, researchers - many of them prominent scientists - have assumed that single or small sets of innate biochemicals trigger behavioural and endocrine responses in mammals of the same species. These agents, never chemically identified, were labelled "pheromones". The term was borrowed from insect studies of the early 1930s, where it replaced "ectohormone" (external hormone) to describe the single biochemicals which trigger predictable responses in relatively simple organisms. It was not until the 1960s that the quest to find pheromones in mammals became a really big deal. In Science in 1962, endocrinologists Alan Parkes and Hilda Bruce wrote that "endocrinology has flowered magnificently in the last 40 years; exocrinology is now about to blossom". The father of sociobiology, E. O. Wilson, suggested the possibility that "pheromones are in a special sense the lineal ancestors of hormones" in a 1972 Scientific American article. Even Alex Comfort, author of the 1970s best-seller The Joy of Sex, argued in a Nature paper that pheromones were likely to exist in humans. Since then, a plethora of studies has implicated pheromones in many mammalian activities, including sex, maternal behaviour, fighting, nesting, and the recognition of members of one's own species. Pheromones have been said to accelerate the onset of puberty, block pregnancies and influence oestrous cycles and hormonal surges in a range of mammals, although no one has ever identified the agents involved. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 13822 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By John Kelley Question: Are antidepressants effective or ineffective? Answer: Yes! In my view, both these statements are true: Antidepressants do work. And antidepressants don’t work. Not to put too fine a Clintonian point on it, but determining whether antidepressants work depends on the definition of the word “work.” A controversial article just published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that antidepressants are no more effective than placebos for most depressed patients. Jay Fournier and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania aggregated individual patient data from six high-quality clinical trials and found that the superiority of antidepressants over placebo is clinically significant only for patients who are very severely depressed. For patients with mild, moderate, and even severe depression, placebos work nearly as well as antidepressants. There have been at least four other review articles published in the last eight years that have come to similar conclusions about the limited clinical efficacy of antidepressants, and one of the study authors, psychologist Irving Kirsch, has recently published a book on the topic, provocatively entitled The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. The recent review articles questioning the clinical efficacy of antidepressants run counter to the received wisdom in the psychiatric community that antidepressants are highly effective. Indeed, it wasn’t so long ago that psychiatrist Peter Kramer wrote in his best-selling book Listening to Prozac that this miracle drug made patients “better than well.” Prozac was a Rock Star. Its extraordinary success even led to a photograph of the green and white capsule on the cover of Newsweek Magazine in 1990. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 13821 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Jennifer Couzin-Frankel In 1922, a Toronto teenager with diabetes became the first person to be saved by insulin treatment, and since then injections have sustained millions of diabetics, who don’t make their own hormone. But are there alternatives to a lifetime of insulin therapy? A new study suggests that an appetite-suppressing hormone called leptin is just as effective as insulin at controlling diabetes in mice. The discovery of insulin transformed type 1 diabetes from a fatal to a chronic disease. In this type of diabetes, the body destroys insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, resulting in high blood glucose levels. (The more common form of diabetes, type 2, occurs when the body doesn’t respond properly to its own insulin.) But insulin treatment isn’t perfect. Getting the dose of insulin just right is difficult, and despite their best efforts to manage their disease, many people with diabetes suffer severe complications, including kidney failure, blindness, and limb amputation. Diabetes researchers are considering various replacements for insulin injections: Transplanting new pancreatic islet cells that make insulin, coaxing the patient’s own islets to regenerate, or treating diabetics early in the disease with immune-suppressing therapies to prevent their body from destroying the rest of their pancreatic islets. Some studies have also considered leptin; like insulin, this hormone helps the body reduce glucose levels. Last year, researchers reported that mice with a form of diabetes recovered after receiving leptin gene therapy directly into the brain. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Obesity; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 13820 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D. The patient was already on the operating room table when the other transplant surgeons and I arrived to begin the surgery that would remove his liver, kidneys, pancreas, lungs and heart. He was tall, with legs that extended to the very end of the table, a chest barely wider than his 16-year-old hips, and a chin covered with pimples and peach fuzz. He looked like any one of the boys I knew in high school. Those of us in the room that night knew his organs would be perfect — he had been a healthy teenager before death — but the fact that he had not died in a terrible, mutilating automobile or motorcycle crash made us all that much more certain. The boy had hanged himself and had been discovered early, though not early enough to have survived. While I had operated on more than a few suicide victims, I had never come across someone so young who had chosen to die in this way. I asked one of the nurses who had spent time with the family about the circumstances of his death. Was he depressed? Had anyone ever suspected? Who found him? “He was playing the choking game,” she said quietly. I stopped what I was doing and, not believing I had heard correctly, turned to look straight at her. “You know that game where kids try to get high,” she explained. “They strangle themselves until just before they lose consciousness.” She put her hand on the boy’s arm then continued: “Problem was that this poor kid couldn’t wiggle out of the noose he had made for himself. His parents found him hanging by his belt on his bedroom doorknob.” Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13819 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Carla K. Johnson, Associated Press One in four U.S. parents believes some vaccines cause autism in healthy children, but even many of those worried about vaccine risks think their children should be vaccinated. Most parents continue to follow the advice of their children's doctors, according to a study based on a survey of 1,552 parents. Extensive research has found no connection between autism and vaccines. "Nine out of 10 parents believe that vaccination is a good way to prevent diseases for their children," said lead author Dr. Gary Freed of the University of Michigan. "Luckily their concerns don't outweigh their decision to get vaccines so their children can be protected from life-threatening illnesses." In 2008, unvaccinated school-age children contributed to measles outbreaks in California, Illinois, Washington, Arizona and New York, said Dr. Melinda Wharton of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Thirteen percent of the 140 who got sick that year were hospitalized. "It's fortunate that everybody recovered," Wharton said, noting that measles can be deadly. "If we don't vaccinate, these diseases will come back." Fear of a vaccine-autism connection stems from a flawed and speculative 1998 study that recently was retracted by a British medical journal. The retraction came after a council that regulates Britain's doctors ruled the study's author acted dishonestly and unethically. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 13818 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Stephanie Pappas Sleep is supposed to be a time of peace and relaxation. Most of us drift from our waking lives into predictable cycles of deep, non-rapid-eye-movement sleep, followed by dream-filled rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. But when the boundaries of these three phases of arousal get fuzzy, sleep can be downright scary. In fact, some sleep disorders seem more at home in horror films than in your bedroom. Whether it's running from axe-wielding murderers or showing up naked in the school cafeteria, most of us have been jolted awake by a nightmare at some point. When nightmares move beyond occasional annoyance to near-nightly terror, however, you might have nightmare disorder. People with nightmare disorder often wake in a cold sweat with vivid memories of horrible dreams. Their waking life suffers. They may dread sleep. Stress and sleep deprivation are major nightmare triggers, as are some medications, according to the American Sleep Association (ASA). In severe cases, counseling or sedative drugs might be necessary to soothe the anxiety underlying the bad dreams. For most of us, though, banishing the nighttime axe-murderer is as easy as taking a relaxing bath and going to bed on time. Up to 15 percent of adults occasionally get up and amble around the house in their sleep. In children, the number is even higher. No one knows what makes some sleepers wander, but stress and disturbed sleep are often factors. So is genetics: Close relatives of sleepwalkers are 10 times more likely to sleepwalk than the general population. © 2010 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 13817 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Andrew Bennett Hellman The body's internal clock helps to regulate a water-storing hormone so that nightly dehydration or trips to the toilet are not the norm, research suggests. In an article published in Nature Neuroscience today, neurophysiologists Eric Trudel and Charles Bourque at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre in Montreal, Canada, propose a mechanism by which the body's circadian system, or internal clock, controls water regulation1. By allowing cells that sense water levels to activate cells that release vasopressin, a hormone that instructs the body to store water, the circadian system keeps the body hydrated during sleep. "We've known for years that there's a rhythm of vasopressin that gets high when you're sleeping. But no one knew how that occurred. And this group identified a very concrete physiological mechanism of how it occurs," says Christopher Colwell, a neuroscientist who studies sleep and circadian rhythms at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. The body regulates its water content mainly by balancing water intake through thirst with water loss through urine production. People don't drink during sleep, so the body has to minimize water loss to remain sufficiently hydrated. Scientists knew that low water levels excite a group of cells called osmosensory neurons, which direct another set of neurons to release vasopressin into the bloodstream. Vasopressin levels increase during sleep; clock neurons, meanwhile, get quieter. © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 13816 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Karen Weintraub Ana can sit on the couch for only about five minutes before it’s time to move. First she rides her bright blue unicycle a few times around the dining room table. Then she gets on a swing hung from the doorway and pumps until her feet can touch the ceiling. A few minutes later she’s doing laps around the table on her RipStik - a skateboard-like balance board. Then she runs outside and climbs the back fence (more fun than going through the gate), to jump on a trampoline. After mastering a flip, she manages to climb back into the house through an open window. Life with Ana, who turns 11 this month, is action-packed. The fifth-grader has sensory processing disorder - her brain doesn’t process information from her five senses in a typical way - leaving her unable to sit still (her muscles just have to move), wear socks (they’re too irritating), concentrate in a busy classroom (so much to look at and hear), or be in the same room with a hot pizza (the aroma is overpowering). “You know when you wake up in the morning, if you don’t have your coffee and your car doesn’t work and you get to the office and someone’s given you a new project that’s due today instead of tomorrow - that’s what it’s like for these kids every day,’’ her mother, Pauline Pimlott, said. Getting help for such kids can be tough. Insurance often won’t pick up the tab, because sensory processing disorder isn’t officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, which writes the definitive manual on disabilities such as autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Ana has received specialized occupational therapy on and off for years, but at $175 an hour, it’s too expensive to do often, her mother says. © 2010 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13815 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Manfred Dworschak Neurologists are employing brain electrodes to try to establish contact with people in vegetative and minimally conscious states. This could be the last hope for Belgian Rom Houben, who has been trapped in his own body for 23 years. Attempts to let him communicate by means of a keyboard have failed. Day after day, Marie-Aurélie Bruno attaches caps wired with embedded electrodes to her patients' shaved heads. The neuropsychologist at the University of Liège in Belgium is looking for signals in the quivering readouts of the brain's electrical activity, where there might be a hidden message. Bruno's patients are in a condition marked by both a "vegetative state" (VS) and a "minimally conscious state" (MCS). Most of the time, they seem completely withdrawn from the world, though their eyes remain open. Only occasionally does a blink of the eye or a squeeze of the hand reveal that some of these patients retain a small amount of consciousness. Listening in on their brains directly could allow better access to them. "In some individual cases, we might even be able to establish a channel of communication," says Steven Laureys, director of the research group in Liège. The technique the group is using has its origins in the laboratory of Niels Birbaumer, a neurologist at the University of Tübingen in southwestern Germany. "It has worked out pretty well for us," he says of the treatment he uses on patients with "locked-in syndrome" -- that is, ones who are verifiably fully conscious but paralyzed from head to foot. With the help of electrodes, some patients are able to communicate via a computer. A variety of letters appear on the screen in quick succession. By briefly concentrating on the word "yes," the test subjects can indicate the desired letter. Sometimes they manage this within a few seconds; sometimes it takes a full minute. © DER SPIEGEL 7/2010

Keyword: Attention; Language
Link ID: 13814 - Posted: 06.24.2010