By CLAUDIA DREIFUS At his Princeton laboratory, Samuel Wang is searching for basic information on how the brains of humans and dogs work. Dr. Wang, 42, an associate professor at the university, also spends time popularizing breakthroughs in his specialty — neuroscience. His book, “Welcome to Your Brain,” was named 2009 Young Adult Science Book of the Year by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Next semester, he will offer a first for Princeton: an undergraduate course called “Neuroscience and Everyday Life.” Here is an edited version of a four-hour conversation. Q. YOU’RE ALMOST EVANGELICAL ABOUT YOUR WORK. WHY DID YOU BECOME A NEUROSCIENTIST? A. I was at Caltech in 1985, and I took a class in classical mechanics and another in introductory cell biology. And I remember asking this physics instructor about second order corrections in Lagrangian dynamics. He said, “Oh yes, that’s been thought of,” while spewing out a bunch of equations on the blackboard. I then asked my biology instructor a question about neurotransmission. He kind of smirked at me and said, “Nobody knows the answer to that.” That felt great! It was great to ask a basic question and learn the answer wasn’t known. So neuroscience seemed like the way to go. Q. AND NOW IS MORE KNOWN? A. Much more. In the 1980s, we knew some things about how individual neurons, synapses and the brain — or at least regions of it — worked. Today, we have the means to see how they work as a system, together. What has changed is advances in molecular biology, genetics and also technology. In the 1980s, the best tool for looking at neurocircuitry was to take a piece of removed tissue and look at single neurons. We now can see multiple neurons, and we can actually see how the cells talk to one another. Functional magnetic resonance imaging, F.M.R.I., lets you see what’s happening on the whole brain level. In the last three years, we’ve gotten connectomics, where people are taking a bit of tissue and mapping every connection in it. And there’s optogenetics — I’m doing a lot of that — where you express some fluorescent protein in some tissue that allows us to see individual cells and watch the change. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 13753 - Posted: 06.24.2010

— Only some bats and toothed whales rely on sophisticated echolocation, in which they emit sonar pulses and process returning echoes, to detect and track down small prey. Now, two new studies in the January 26th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, show that bats' and whales' remarkable ability and the high-frequency hearing it depends on are shared at a much deeper level than anyone would have anticipated -- all the way down to the molecular level. The discovery represents an unprecedented example of adaptive sequence convergence between two highly divergent groups and suggests that such convergence at the sequence level might be more common than scientists had suspected. "The natural world is full of examples of species that have evolved similar characteristics independently, such as the tusks of elephants and walruses," said Stephen Rossiter of the University of London, an author on one of the studies. "However, it is generally assumed that most of these so-called convergent traits have arisen by different genes or different mutations. Our study shows that a complex trait -- echolocation -- has in fact evolved by identical genetic changes in bats and dolphins." A hearing gene known as prestin in both bats and dolphins (a toothed whale) has picked up many of the same mutations over time, the studies show. As a result, if you draw a phylogenetic tree of bats, whales, and a few other mammals based on similarities in the prestin sequence alone, the echolocating bats and whales come out together rather than with their rightful evolutionary cousins. © 1995-2009 ScienceDaily LLC

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 13752 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Kay Lazar Roughly 8 percent of Americans ages 50 to 59 had used an illicit drug in the past year, according to a recent survey by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Marijuana was the most commonly used, but close behind was abuse of prescription drugs, such as anti-anxiety medications, painkillers, and sleeping pills. The percentage of pot and pill abusers in this age group grew by more than 50 percent between 2002 and 2008, as more baby boomers hit 50. Now, researchers who conducted the survey worry that high rates of lifetime drug use among boomers, that massive, society-altering generation born between 1946 and 1964, is likely to create health complications for millions of aging Americans and swamp the country’s drug-treatment programs. “We are projecting that by the year 2020, we will probably have enough people in the 50-to-59 age group needing [substance abuse] treatment that we will probably need to double the number of treatment facilities,’’ said Peter Delany, the substance abuse agency’s director of the Office of Applied Studies. Delaney said that illicit drugs may cause greater impairment as users get older. “We do know,’’ he said, “that physiology slows down as you age, so the stuff processed out of your body faster when you were younger won’t be processed out so quickly when you are older.’’ © 2010 NY Times Co

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13751 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY The assorted mystics, philosophers, theologians and, most recently, neuroscientists who have burned a candle searching for the essence of consciousness all started with a simple presumption: Consciousness must begin where unconsciousness ends. Theologians have likened this state of pre-awakening to sleep, to darkness, to life underground. Modern scientists study the neural processes of sleep itself, and the transition to waking; they also have analyzed what happens in the brain when people suddenly become consciously aware of an object that was hidden in plain sight. So far, the precise neural correlates of consciousness — the brain circuits critical to “turning on” conscious awareness — have eluded capture. One reason is that consciousness itself takes many forms, from the gauzy half-dream state between the alarm clock’s bleating and sitting up; and lost stretches of waking life, as when a driver pulls into the driveway with no recollection of the half-hour commute home. The deeper that investigators dig, the more hidden chambers they find. Last Wednesday, scientists in England and Belgium reported that five people with severe brain injuries who had been identified as “vegetative,” beyond reach, showed activity on brain imaging that strongly suggested conscious awareness. One of them, a 29-year-old man thought to be “vegetative” for five years, began to answer yes and no questions by alternately showing brain activity when thinking about tennis (lighting motor areas), then about walking in his house (lighting spatial areas). Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Sleep
Link ID: 13750 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Betting on the Super Bowl, roulette, or even online poker can be thrilling, and with the advent of online gambling, it's easier than ever before. Yet winning and losing can have unexpected effects on the brain that keep people coming back for more, scientists are finding. Gamblers sink an increasing sum of money into their efforts to win. Over the last 20 years legalized betting has grown tremendously; it's now a $100 billion industry. More than 65 percent of Americans gamble, according to Gallup's annual Lifestyle Poll conducted last year, and up to 5 percent of those betters develop an addiction to the activity. "For most individuals, gambling is enjoyable and harmless, but for others, it is as destructive as being addicted to drugs," said Catharine Winstanley, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia's Department of Psychology. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here Kyle Siler, a sociology doctoral student at Cornell University who studied 27 million poker hands online, told LiveScience: "Gamblers have to be honest with themselves and realize when to walk away and when a bet is profitable — even under conditions of uncertainty." Siler's study, published recently in the Journal of Gambling Studies, showed that the more hands of poker someone plays, the higher the chances that he'll walk away with smaller profits. "They might win a lot of small battles, but they're losing the war," he said, adding that people become positively reinforced with each win and more vulnerable to a crushing loss. © 2010 LiveScience.com

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13749 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor Why are we asking this now? Scientists this week announced that they had succeeded in communicating with a man thought to be in a vegetative state, lacking all awareness, for five years following a road accident. Using a brain scanner they were able to read his thoughts and obtain yes or no answers to questions. They asked him to imagine playing tennis if he wanted to answer yes and to imagine walking through his home if he wanted to say no. By mapping the different parts of the brain activated in each case with the scanner, the scientists were able accurately record his reponses. What does this tell us about the brain? That it may still be functioning, generating thoughts and awareness, even when there is no outward sign of consciousness at all. Previously, the only way of telling if someone had any degree of consciousness was by observing how they responded to visual, auditory, tactile or noxious stimuli. If there was no response they were presumed to be in a vegetative state. In vegetative state patients, the eyes are open and they follow the normal cycle of sleeping and waking but they show no sign of being aware of their surroundings, hovering half way between consciousness and unconsciousness. In this patient, the brain scanner showed he was aware even though he showed no outward sign of being so. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 13748 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey Sea slugs make memories with a twist. Screwing a normal nerve cell protein into a distorted shape helps slugs, and possibly people, lock in memories, new research shows. Notably, the shape change also brings a shift in the protein’s behavior, leading it to form clumps. That kind of behavior is the sort seen in prions, the misshapen, infectious proteins that cause mad cow disease, scrapie and other disorders (SN: 7/31/04, p. 67). But the new study, published February 5 in Cell, shows a possible normal function for the shape-shifting, suggesting that twists and clumps don’t necessarily make prions monsters. In one sense, prions are machines of “molecular memory,” says Yury Chernoff, a biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and editor in chief of the journal Prion. The proteins remember what happened to them — changing shapes — and then transmit that change to other proteins. “But the notion of these machines being used for cellular, and therefore organismal, memory is truly amazing,” he says. If further research shows the process works the same way in humans as it does in sea slugs, prionlike proteins might eventually be used in memory-enhancing treatments, Chernoff says. Prions have a bad reputation due to the most famous of the shape-changing proteins, called prion protein or PrP. When PrP switches from its harmless form, which is normally present in nerve cells, into a prion form, it corrupts other PrP molecules that then assemble themselves into nearly indestructible plaques known as amyloids. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Prions; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13747 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by David Kushner On the quarter-mile walk between his office at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and the nerve center of his research across campus, Henry Markram gets a brisk reminder of the rapidly narrowing gap between human and machine. At one point he passes a museumlike display filled with the relics of old supercomputers, a memorial to their technological limitations. At the end of his trip he confronts his IBM Blue Gene/P—shiny, black, and sloped on one side like a sports car. That new supercomputer is the center­piece of the Blue Brain Project, tasked with simulating every aspect of the workings of a living brain. Markram, the 47-year-old founder and codirector of the Brain Mind Institute at the EPFL, is the project’s leader and cheerleader. A South African neuroscientist, he received his doctorate from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and studied as a Fulbright Scholar at the National Institutes of Health. For the past 15 years he and his team have been collecting data on the neocortex, the part of the brain that lets us think, speak, and remember. The plan is to use the data from these studies to create a comprehensive, three-dimensional simulation of a mammalian brain. Such a digital re-creation that matches all the behaviors and structures of a biological brain would provide an unprecedented opportunity to study the fundamental nature of cognition and of disorders such as depression and schizophrenia. Until recently there was no computer powerful enough to take all our knowledge of the brain and apply it to a model. Blue Gene has changed that. It contains four monolithic, refrigerator-size machines, each of which processes data at a peak speed of 56 tera­flops (teraflops being one trillion floating-point operations per second).

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 13746 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A small number of extremely overweight people may be missing the same chunk of genetic material, claim UK researchers. The findings, published in the journal Nature, could offer clues to whether obesity can be "inherited" in some cases. Imperial College London scientists found dozens of people - all severely obese - who lacked approximately the same 30 genes. The gene "deletion" could not be found in people of normal weight. While much of the "obesity epidemic" currently affecting most Western countries has been attributed to a move towards high-calorie foods and more sedentary lifestyles, scientists have found evidence that genes may play a significant role in influencing weight gain in some people. The latest study focused on the "morbidly obese", who have a Body Mass Index (BMI) of more than 40, and who are at the highest risk of health problems. There are an estimated 700,000 of these people in the UK. The first clue came by looking at a group of teenagers and adults with learning difficulties, who are known to be at higher risk of obesity, although the reasons for this are not entirely clear. They researchers found 31 people who had nearly identical "deletions" in their genetic code, all of whom had a BMI of over 30, meaning they were obese. Then a wider scan of the genetic makeup of a mixture of more than 16,000 obese and normal weight people revealed 19 more examples of the missing genes. All of the people involved were classed as "morbidly obese", with a BMI of over 40, and at the highest risk of health problems related to their weight. Most of them had been normal weight as toddlers, but then became overweight during later childhood. None of the people studied with normal weight had the missing code. (C)BBC

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13745 - Posted: 02.04.2010

By OLIVIA JUDSON Among biologists, the Galápagos Islands — an archipelago of volcanic islands that straddle the equator about 600 miles from the coast of mainland Ecuador — are legendary. For when the young Charles Darwin sailed around the world in the 1830s, he visited these islands, and was struck by five things. First, he observed that many of the animals and plants living in the Galápagos are found nowhere else in the world. Examples? Marine iguanas, which swim, eat algae and spend hours basking on the rocks. Darwin, uncharitably, described them as “hideous” and “stupid.” Then there are the giant tortoises (“antediluvian,” said Darwin), the largest of which can weigh as much as 250kg, or 550 pounds. Among the birds, there are flightless cormorants, which have stumpy little wings; and, famously, there are several unique species of finch. Darwin’s second observation was that certain sorts of animals are missing. The islands have no frogs, for example, and until humans came, there were no land-lubbing mammals like rats or cats. Third, he noted that many of the creatures living in the Galápagos resemble, but differ from, those of the nearest continent — South America. Fourth, the inhabitants of one island often differ from those of another. These four observations formed an essential piece of Darwin’s evidence that evolution takes place. Remote volcanic islands can only be reached by certain sorts of life forms — those that can cross hundreds of miles of ocean without perishing. So: birds and bats can fly there. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 13744 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Greg Miller When a brain injury leaves a person unresponsive and unable to communicate, doctors and nurses must provide care without input from their patient, and families agonize over whether their loved one might still have--or someday recover--a flicker of consciousness. A new study provides hope that technology might open a line of communication with some such patients. Researchers report that a man with a severe brain injury can, by controlling his thoughts, influence scans of his brain activity and thereby answer simple questions. The work builds on a 2006 Science paper by Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, U.K., and colleagues. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they tested a young woman diagnosed as being in a vegetative state following a car accident. Although she was unresponsive and apparently unaware of her surroundings, she exhibited distinct patterns of brain activity when asked to imagine herself playing tennis or walking through the rooms of her house. As in healthy volunteers, imagining tennis activated motor planning regions in the woman's brain, whereas picturing her house activated a brain region involved in recognizing familiar scenes. In the new study, published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, Owen and several colleagues used similar methods to examine 53 additional people who were in a vegetative state or in the slightly less severe minimally conscious state, in which patients show occasional flashes of responsiveness. In four of these patients, the researchers found distinct patterns of brain activity during the tennis versus house imagination task, hinting at some level of awareness that could not be detected by observing their behavior, says co-author Steven Laureys, a neurologist at the University of Liège in Belgium. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Attention; Sleep
Link ID: 13743 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway In a new twist on an old illusion, people have been made to feel an "imaginary rabbit" hopping along a stick resting between their fingers. The trick is a variation on a tactile illusion called the cutaneous rabbit in which a series of discrete taps to two areas of skin are perceived as movement between those two areas. For instance, two taps to the elbow followed by a single tap to the wrist will feel as if a "rabbit" is hopping towards the wrist. Makoto Miyazaki, a cognitive neuroscientist at Kochi University of Technology in Japan, was using this decades-old trick to test perception when he realised that the effect seemed to jump from his body onto the object he was holding at the time. To investigate further, Miyazaki used an electrically operated device to administer taps to eight volunteers while they held a 10-centimetre aluminium rod between two fingers. The volunteers were then asked to describe where they felt the taps. The device delivered two taps to the first finger, 800 milliseconds apart, then tapped the second finger 50 or 80 milliseconds later. As with the classical version of the illusion, volunteers did not sense discrete taps to one finger and then the other. Instead, they felt the taps move up or down the stick, depending on the order in which they were delivered. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 13742 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katherine Harmon The most common cause of death of U.S. infants before their first birthday is the nebulous complication known as sudden infant death syndrome (or SIDS), according to the Mayo Clinic. The underlying causes of this condition, in which no immediate cause of death is revealed in an autopsy, remain unknown, vexing scientists and parents alike. Recent research has linked abnormal production of the neurotransmitter serotonin to the occurrence, and a new study underscores that link, reporting that infants who have died of SIDS have about a quarter less serotonin in their brainstems than infants who have died suddenly of other causes or those who have been hospitalized for low oxygen levels. The findings were published online February 2 in Journal of the American Medical Association. Babies with this deadly deficit might not show any differences during waking hours, but in sleep, serotonin plays an important role in regulating temperature and breathing. "Our research suggests that sleep unmasks the brain defect," Hannah Kinney, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and a senior researcher on the study, said in a prepared statement. "When the infant is breathing in the face-down position, he or she may not get enough oxygen. An infant with a normal brainstem would turn his or head and wake up in response. But a baby with an intrinsic abnormality is unable to respond to the stressor." © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13741 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tim Wogan Have you ever noticed that the first cowboy to draw his gun in a Hollywood Western is invariably the one to get shot? Nobel prize–winning physicist Niels Bohr did, once arranging mock duels to test the validity of this cinematic curiosity. Following Bohr's example, researchers have now confirmed that people move faster if they are reacting to another person's movements than if they are taking the lead themselves. The findings may one day inspire new therapies for patients with brain damage, the team speculates. Bohr was seemingly unhappy with the Tinseltown explanation that the good guy, who never shoots first, always wins. Legend has it that he procured two toy pistols and enlisted the aid of fellow physicist George Gamow. In a series of duels, Bohr never drew first but won every time. The physicist suggested that the brain responded to danger faster than it carried out a deliberate intention. Experimental psychologist Andrew Welchman of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom recently learned of the duelling conundrum and also wondered whether it might reveal something about the way our brains are wired to respond to danger. "It would be sensible for the brain to have a reactive system that went a bit faster than a system based on decisions or intentions," says Welchman. Welchman's team organized simulated "gunfights" in the laboratory, with pairs of volunteers competing against each other to push three buttons on a computer console in a particular order. The researchers observed that the time interval between when players removed their hands from the first button and when they pressed the final button was on average 9% shorter for the players who reacted to an opponent moving first. However, those who reacted to a first move were more likely to make an error, presssing the buttons in the wrong order. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 13740 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway Talk about a lousy graduation present. Straight-A students are more likely to develop bipolar disorder than their more mediocre peers, at least in Sweden, according to a new study of more than 700,000 former high-school students. Within 15 years of sitting their final high-school exams, aged 15 and 16, at least 280 of the students were diagnosed with bipolar disorder. After taking into account their parents' income and education – factors that are known to affect exam scores – the highest-achieving students were more than three times more likely to suffer from the mental illness than their average peers. Male overachievers, meanwhile, developed the disease 4.4 times more often than their average male classmates. Good grades don't cause bipolar disorder, but creativity and intelligence could be a reflection of common underlying biological traits, says James MacCabe, an epidemiologist at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, who led the study. The stereotype of the brilliant but tortured artist aside, some aspects of manic episodes could reflect increased intelligence, he says. "People who have a biological predisposition to bipolar disorder have advantages, I suppose you could call them, in that they're able to think clearly, think fast and concentrate," MacCabe says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 13739 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nathan Seppa The Lancet has retracted a 1998 study that kindled a firestorm of opposition to vaccines by suggesting that autism arose in a handful of children because they had received measles-mumps-rubella shots. On January 28, the U.K. General Medical Council sealed the fate of the controversial study, saying its selection of participants may have been biased and that lead author Andrew Wakefield committed several breaches of ethics in his work. The Lancet formally retracted the paper February 2. “It has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al. are incorrect,” the journal editors wrote. They weren’t the first to lose faith in the study. Six years ago, 10 of the 13 coauthors on the report got queasy about the findings and disowned the paper, fearing it could damage public health efforts. Since then the Sunday Times of London has done much of the heavy lifting in bringing down the dubious research, publishing details of recruitment bias and ethics questions. The General Medical Council investigated and agreed, leading to the Lancet retraction this week. Formally, the scientific paper no longer exists. In the original study, the researchers analyzed the health of 12 children who had developed signs of autism and colon inflammation shortly after receiving MMR vaccinations. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 13738 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Alison McCook Over the course of 5 days last summer, an army of researchers and clinicians examined, poked, and prodded 1-year-old Hannah Ostrea at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Experts in neurology, rehabilitation medicine, physical therapy, speech pathology, and anesthesiology gave the little girl an EEG, a test of her heart’s electrical activity (EKG), an MRI, a CT scan, X-rays, and a throat exam (laryngoscopy). All this testing was meant not only to help Hannah but in the hope that her rare disease could reveal something about another condition that affects 1 million Americans: Parkinson’s. Hannah has Gaucher’s disease, and within hours of her birth, it was obvious something was wrong. Looking past her thick head of dark hair, and the fact that she could down an entire bottle of formula in 5 minutes, clinicians quickly saw that her spleen was massive, and her platelet counts were rock bottom. Her liver was expanding—in a few months it looked like she had a volleyball in her stomach. These are the classic signs of Gaucher’s, a rare, recessive genetic disorder in which the body does not produce enough of a lysosomal enzyme that breaks down the fatty substance glucocerebroside, causing it to glob up in cells of the liver, spleen, and other organs—including, sometimes, the brain. But researchers have never seen the combination of mutations Hannah carries, so doctors couldn’t determine if she had the Type 2 or Type 3 form. Children with Type 2 typically die before their third birthdays, while those with Type 3 can live much longer. “They [wouldn’t] give us a prognosis,” Hannah’s mom, Carrie Ostrea, says. “They came out and said that to us. Which is fine by me.” © 1986-2010 The Scientist

Keyword: Parkinsons; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13737 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By RONI CARYN RABIN Children with the surgically implanted hearing aids called cochlear implants rate their quality of life as highly as children with normal hearing, according to one of the first studies that looked at children as well as their parents. The findings are important, the researchers said, because deaf children often feel socially isolated, have trouble making friends and tend to have low self-esteem as a result. The lead author, Betty A. Loy, said the information would be useful to parents making decisions about cochlear implants for their babies. “They want to know: ‘Is my kid going to be made fun of? Is my kid going to be bullied? How is my kid going to feel about themselves with this apparatus on their head?’ ” said Dr. Loy, of the Dallas Cochlear Implant Program. The researchers asked 84 children with cochlear implants how they felt about themselves, their family lives, their friends and school. Parents were questioned separately, and the responses were compared with those of a control group of 1,501 children the same ages, 8 to 16, with normal hearing. The paper appears in the Feb. 1 issue of Otolaryngology — Head and Neck Surgery. Though the overall quality-of-life scores were very similar to those of the control group, the younger children appeared to be happier than the adolescents but scored their family lives lower than did children with normal hearing. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Robotics
Link ID: 13736 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Taking a daily fish oil capsule can stave off mental illness in those at highest risk, trial findings suggest. A three-month course of the supplement appeared to be as effective as drugs, cutting the rate of psychotic illness like schizophrenia by a quarter. The researchers believe it is the omega-3 in fish oil - already hailed for promoting healthy hearts - that has beneficial effects in the brain. A "natural" remedy would be welcomed, Archives of General Psychiatry says. "The finding that treatment with a natural substance may prevent, or at least delay, the onset of psychotic disorder gives hope that there may be alternatives to antipsychotic drugs," the study authors said. Antipsychotic drugs are potent and can have serious side effects, which puts some people off taking them. Fish oil supplements, on the other hand, are generally well tolerated and easy to take, say the scientists. The international team from Austria, Australia and Switzerland tested the treatment in 81 people deemed to be at particularly high risk of developing psychosis. Their high risk was down to a strong family history of schizophrenia, or similar disorders, or them already showing mild symptoms of these conditions themselves. For the test, half of the individuals took fish oil supplements (1.2 grams of omega-3 fatty acids) for 12 weeks, while the other half took only a dummy pill. Neither group knew which treatment they were receiving. Dr Paul Amminger and his team followed the groups for a year to see how many, if any, went on to develop illness. Two in the fish oil group developed a psychotic disorder compared to 11 in the placebo group. Based on the results, the investigators estimate that one high-risk adult could be protected from developing psychosis for every four treated over a year. They believe the omega-3 fatty acids found in the supplements may alter brain signalling in the brain with beneficial effects. (C)BBC

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 13735 - Posted: 02.02.2010

By EVELYN SHARENOV When the police brought Jane to 3East, the soles of her feet were blistered. Young and pretty beneath a layer of urban grime, she had been picked up for wandering barefoot around Portland, Ore., on a 90-degree August afternoon. She wouldn’t give her name and carried no identification, but went willingly with the young officer. By the time she came upstairs from the emergency room, she had acquired a pair of blue paper slippers, an involuntary psychiatric commitment (she was deemed a danger to herself) and a name: Jane Doe. I greeted her at the locked doors that secured 3East. The chain of custody had passed from a thoughtful cop to a psychiatric nurse. Everyone has a story, but my patients’ histories are often obscured by hallucinations and delusions. In time we can translate their encrypted chatter and make sense of their stories. Jane was my first Ms. Doe. Her story, like her name, was still a mystery. I escorted her to the interview room and brought her a basin of warm water medicated with Epsom salts. She settled her feet in up to her ankles. I introduced myself and asked her name. “Jane,” she said. “Is that your real name?” “Yes, they gave it to me downstairs.” I sat quietly while she smiled, nodded her head and moved her lips, apparently responding to internal voices. She didn’t seem distressed. I was accustomed to patients terrorized by the unpredictable commands and vicious criticism of auditory hallucinations. Jane reminded me of a child chatting with an imaginary playmate. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 13734 - Posted: 06.24.2010