By Craig H. Kinsley and R. Adam Franssen What turns a young female concerned mainly about herself into a good mother who will make sure her offspring survive in an otherwise hostile world? The bodily changes of childbearing are obvious, but as we are discovering, the changes in the brain are no less dramatic. The maternal brain is a formidable object, a singular entity forged by hormones, neurochemicals, and exposure to the ravening demands and irresistible cuteness of offspring. During pregnancy, the female brain is effectively revving up for the difficult tasks that await. A mother-to-be may most notice her cravings for ice cream and pickles, but inside her head, a transformation is afoot in fundamental functions ranging from attention to memory. As an intriguing new paper demonstrates, even her sensitivity to others' emotions increases. Before we describe the new paper, let us contemplate the maternal brain in all of its wet majesty. Among its remarkable changes are those that allow the mother to focus on her infant in the persistent attempt to puzzle out the child’s needs and wants. As any parent knows, the infant is inscrutable – indeed, the child remains so for much of the parent’s life – and intuition is the mother’s best friend. The parent tests hypotheses: Is the baby hungry? Tired? A sensitized brain facilitates these “experiments.” In humans, rodents and other animals, we find data showing that the mother’s interest in, and motivation toward young increases dramatically as pregnancy nears term, and still further immediately following birth. © 2010 Scientific American

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 13693 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Sujata Gupta Always stunk at video games? Perhaps you've been cursed with a small striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning and memory. Researchers have found that college students with relatively large striatums learned how to play a challenging video game faster than their small-striatum peers. Large-striatum individuals were also better at shifting priorities from, say, shooting a target to outrunning an enemy--abilities that could translate to the real world. The game isn't exactly Halo or Assassin's Creed. Instead, Space Fortress looks a lot like the very first arcade games, with geometric shapes subbing for spaceships and buildings. "The graphics stink," admits Arthur Kramer, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who designed the game in the early 1980s. Gameplay is fairly complex, however: Players must shoot down a fortress with their ship while avoiding enemies, the bad guys look a lot like the good guys, and the ship has no brakes. Over the years, researchers have used the game to study memory, motor control, and learning speed. The U.S. Air Force and the Israeli air force have even changed their training regimens based on how cadets fared as players. Recent studies have suggested that players appear to heavily utilize their striatum during gameplay. So Kramer and Kirk Erickson, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, decided to investigate whether the size of the striatum alone might be responsible for these abilities. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13692 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By GARDINER HARRIS Despite the Obama administration’s tacit support of more liberal state medical marijuana laws, the federal government still discourages research into the medicinal uses of smoked marijuana. That may be one reason that — even though some patients swear by it — there is no good scientific evidence that legalizing marijuana’s use provides any benefits over current therapies. Lyle E. Craker, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Massachusetts, has been trying to get permission from federal authorities for nearly nine years to grow a supply of the plant that he could study and provide to researchers for clinical trials. But the Drug Enforcement Administration — more concerned about abuse than potential benefits — has refused, even after the agency’s own administrative law judge ruled in 2007 that Dr. Craker’s application should be approved, and even after Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in March ended the Bush administration’s policy of raiding dispensers of medical marijuana that comply with state laws. “All I want to be able to do is grow it so that it can be tested,” Dr. Craker said in comments echoed by other researchers. Marijuana is the only major drug for which the federal government controls the only legal research supply and for which the government requires a special scientific review. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13691 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ABBY ELLIN The year was 1988, and I was a college student on my junior year abroad, traveling aimlessly through the Middle East and Europe. My backpack was crammed with shorts and T-shirts, bathing suits and sarongs, my Walkman and Grateful Dead tapes. And oh, yes, a scale, buried deep beneath layers of socks. Having been a chubby adolescent — and having spent six summers at fat camp — I was terrified of gaining weight. Unfortunately, nothing gave me as much pleasure as eating, which I did with abandon. To maintain some semblance of control, I divided my eating into Food Days and Nonfood Days: that is, days when I consumed vast amounts, and days when I policed my caloric intake with military precision. The routine kept my weight in check, more or less. Never mind that it was insane. No one at my college health center knew what to do with me. Clearly, I wasn’t anorexic; I was slightly round, in fact. I didn’t purge, so bulimia was out. To my distress, the counselors told me there was nothing they could do for me and sent me on my way. Today, I would probably qualify for a diagnosis of “eating disorder not otherwise specified,” usually known by its acronym, Ednos. In the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it encompasses virtually every type of eating problem that is not anorexia or bulimia. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 13690 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JONATHAN DIENST My son Jared lay in a bed at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital, limp and pale, his 7-year-old body tethered to a tangle of tubes and monitor wires. A neurologist, Dr. Maurine Packard, stood to his left. “Jared,” I recall her saying. “Pay attention to what I say.” And then, in a strong, firm voice: “The barn is red.” She waited a few moments and asked, “What color is the barn?” Jared started to answer, then froze. My wife and I, sitting behind Dr. Packard, froze too. Two days before, he had been a happy, athletic second grader, a beautiful boy who loved playing baseball and basketball in the park. Now he couldn’t walk; he had to struggle to remember the color of a barn. He tried again, and then replied in a weak, slurred voice. “No,” Jared said. Dr. Packard nodded, as if that was the answer she had expected. Before June 23, 2008, my wife, Victoria, and I had never heard of a child’s having a stroke. Most people, many doctors included, still haven’t. In the agonizing months that followed, we heard it over and over: “But children don’t have strokes.” How little we knew. It turns out that stroke, by some estimates, is the sixth leading cause of death in infants and children. And experts say doctors and hospitals need to be far more aggressive in detecting and treating it. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13689 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By MARK DERR Scientists have linked a gene to compulsive behavior — in dogs. Researchers studied Doberman pinschers that curled up into balls, sucking their flanks for hours at a time, and found that the afflicted dogs shared a gene. They describe their findings — the first such gene identified in dogs — in a short report this month in Molecular Psychiatry. Dr. Nicholas Dodman, director of the animal behavior clinic at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, in North Grafton, Mass., and the lead author of the report, said the findings had broad implications for compulsive disorders in people and animals. Estimates have obsessive-compulsive disorder afflicting anywhere from 2.5 percent to 8 percent of the human population. It shows up in behavior like excessive hand washing, repetitive checking of stoves, locks and lights, and damaging actions like pulling one’s hair out by the roots and self-mutilation. The disorder has been used in popular movies and television shows to define characters like the reclusive writer Melvin Udall, played by Jack Nicholson, in “As Good as It Gets” and Adrian Monk, played by Tony Shaloub, in the television series “Monk.” Similar disorders are known in dogs, particularly in certain breeds, including Dobermans. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13688 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Allison Bond Inflammation in the body has gotten a bad rap recently, thanks to the exacerbating role it may play in health problems such as heart disease and cancer. Now there may be one more malady to add to the list: Alzheimer’s disease. When inflammation arises in the body as a result of infection or injury, the immune response also appears to accelerate memory loss in people with Alzheimer’s, according to a recent study published in the journal Neurology. In this study of changes in patients’ cognitive abilities over a span of six months, Alzheimer’s patients who had chronic (ongoing) inflammation as a result of, for instance, obesity or arthritis experienced four times the amount of memory loss as compared with patients without such inflammation. And those with chronic inflammation who also experienced an acute immune response (short-term, such as from an infection) were even worse off: their memory loss accelerated 10 times faster than patients without any inflammation. “When we started the study, we thought short-lived events would be impor­tant,” says lead author Clive Holmes, a professor of biological psychiatry at the University of Southampton in England. “We hadn’t realized how important chronic inflammation was going to be.” So how does inflammation, whether from an infection or from chronic dis­ease, damage the brain? The answer lies in the body’s immune response, which launches an attack on invading pathogens, releasing inflaming proteins such as tumor necrosis factor, or TNF. This molecule causes the vagus nerve, which extends from the brain to the abdomen and controls vital functions such as heartbeat, to send an electrical im­pulse to the brain, thereby directing the brain to secrete its own immune messengers. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Alzheimers; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 13687 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katherine Harmon Like a lot of humans, monkeys might not be able to do calculus. But a new study shows that they can learn and rapidly apply abstract mathematical principles. Previous work has shown that monkeys and birds can count, but flexible applications of higher mathematic rules, the study authors asserted, "require the highest degree of internal structuring"—one thought largely to be the domain of only humans. So researchers based at the Institute of Neurobiology at the University of Tubingen in Germany set out to see whether rhesus monkeys could learn and flexibly apply the greater-than and less-than rule. They tested the monkeys with groups of both ordered and random dots, many of which were novel combinations to ensure that the subjects couldn't have simply memorized them. The monkeys were cued into applying either the greater-than or less-than rule by the amount of time that elapsed between being shown the first and second group of dots. "The monkeys immediately generalized the greater than and less than rules to numerosities that had not been presented previously," the two researchers, Sylvia Bongard and Andreas Nieder, wrote. "This indicates that they understood this basic mathematical principle irrespective of the absolute numerical value of the sample displays." In other words: "They had learned an abstract mathematical principle." But the researchers were after more than simple ape arithmetic. "If and how mathematical rules can be represented by single neurons," they wrote, "has remained elusive." So during the experiment, they recorded the activity of randomly selected neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortexes of the rhesus monkeys. They chose that region of the brain because functional imaging (fMRI) studies have shown that rule-based arithmetic activates that part of the brain in humans, too. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 13686 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower Within a week after birth, babies inhale new memories at their mothers’ breasts. Newborns who whiff a specific odor while breast-feeding, even if they smell it for only eight days, prefer that same odor over others a year or more later, reports a team led by physiologist Benoist Schaal of the European Center of Taste Sciences in Dijon, France. Like other infant mammals such as rats and pigs, human newborns easily learn and remember smells associated with breast-feeding, the scientists conclude in a paper scheduled to appear in Developmental Science. These types of odor memories form most robustly during the first week after birth, the researchers propose. Odor memories acquired during breast-feeding can be reactivated and influence behavior until at least toddlerhood, in their view. Related research has focused on infants’ memories for food flavors, which simultaneously engage the brain’s taste and smell systems. “These new findings add to a growing body of scientific data showing the saliency of odors for mother-infant interaction and for forming memories throughout infancy,” remarks biopsychologist Julie Mennella of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. Other recent studies suggest that babies favor odors and flavors experienced prenatally in amniotic fluid as a result of a mother’s diet, Mennella notes. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13685 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Del Quentin Wilber and Lyndsey Layton A federal judge ruled Thursday that the Food and Drug Administration may not block the importation of "electronic cigarettes," battery-powered versions of conventional smokes. The FDA has confiscated imports of the devices since at least 2008, and two suppliers, Smoking Everywhere and Sottera, sued to halt the agency's action. In ruling for the companies, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon determined that electronic cigarettes are tobacco products and are not subject to such restrictions. "This case appears to be yet another example of FDA's aggressive efforts to regulate recreational tobacco products as drugs or devices," Leon wrote in a 31-page opinion that granted the companies' request for a temporary injunction against the FDA. The judge called the FDA's efforts a "tenacious drive to maximize its regulatory power." In a statement, the FDA said it was reviewing the ruling. "The public health issues surrounding electronic cigarettes are of serious concern to the FDA," the statement said. In court papers, the FDA said it considers the devices, also known as e-cigarettes, to be unapproved drug-delivery gadgets. E-cigarettes are the size of regular cigarettes and deliver a vaporized nicotine mixture to users. © 2010 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13684 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Kate Devlin Our animal ancestors, and most of their descendants, laughed simply because they were enjoying themselves, according to a new study. But over millions of years humans have perfected how to use the sound to wound as well. Great apes which roamed the earth 16 million years ago are thought to be the first who developed the ability to laugh. Modern-day Orangutans, the only species of Asian great ape, laugh when they are having fun, while African great apes, which include gorillas and chimpanzees, have learned that the sound can be used to influence others, but still only use laughter while playing. However, human have gone much further, using laughter for a range of negative emotions, including to ridicule or sneer. Researchers carried out "tickling sessions" on gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans and compared the sounds to recordings of humans laughing. Dr Marina Davila Ross, from the University of Portsmouth, who led the research, said: “Humans and the African ape developed laughter further than the Asian great ape to have an effect on others. “But something happened in the last five million years which means humans use laughter for a much wider range of situations than our primate ancestors. “Laughter occurs in close to every imaginable form of human social interaction, including to mock others.” © Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2010

Keyword: Emotions; Aggression
Link ID: 13683 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Charles Q. Choi With its winners and losers, politics is a lot like sports. Now biologists have the testosterone—or lack thereof—to prove it. Specifically, they have found that male voters who back a losing candidate experience a drop in the hormone. Immediately before and after the 2008 U.S. presidential election result, neuroscientists from Duke University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor collected the saliva of 163 college-age participants to determine the amount of testosterone in their systems. Male voters for winner Barack Obama had stable levels of testosterone, but the hormone rapidly declined in males who cast ballots for losers John McCain and Robert Barr. Female voters showed no significant testosterone changes after victory or defeat of their candidate. Past research has shown that winning and losing in sports matches and other competitions affect testosterone levels in men. The new findings, published online October 21 by PLoS ONE, reveal that politics can influence testosterone in men “just as if they directly engaged head to head in a contest for dominance,” says Kevin LaBar of Duke, the study’s senior researcher. In separate work, anthropologist Coren Apicella of Harvard University and her colleagues obtained similar results with a smaller group, findings they will publish this year. “It’s an exciting time for people who study political behavior, where biological factors have largely been ignored,” she notes. “Political scientists are starting to recognize the role of biology, and more and more research is showing there may be some reciprocal interactions between how elections make one feel and how feelings can affect political behavior.” © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 13682 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katherine Harmon Hunting for a misplaced set of keys or a dead cell phone can be a nuisance. But for people who search for concealed weapons or malignant tumors, finding a target—and one they're not sure is even there—could be a matter of life or death. Unfortunately, research has shown that the rarer an item has proved to be, the less likely people are to find it when it is there. "We know that if you don't find it often, you often don't find it," Jeremy Wolfe, a professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School, said in a prepared statement. Likewise, searches for common objects tend to turn up way more false positives. So are people as hasty to judge that an inspected bag doesn't contain a weapon (a rare item), as they are to assume it has a more common item? Wolfe and his colleague, Michael Van Wert of the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Cambridge, were determined to hunt down an answer to how reaction times changed based on what people were used to finding. Their results were published online January 14 in Current Biology. Their experiment, in which two dozen participants looked for weapons in simulated baggage, showed that people do not adapt their searching time equally to different odds of finding items. Individuals were given a consistent likelihood of finding an object, say 98 percent, and were judged both on the time it took them to declare whether a bag contained a weapon—and whether they were correct. Those in experiments who are faced with consistently 50-50 odds of finding a target might be expected to take the longest to arrive at an answer, and those with very rare or very frequent incidences of finding weapons should be the fastest. That is, with similarly slim odds of finding or not finding a target, people might be expected to make decisions rapidly about whether they see it or not. © 2010 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 13681 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Jessica Hamzelou Drinking too much during pregnancy can harm offspring permanently. Now experiments in mice suggest this may be because alcohol chemically alters the fetus's DNA, affecting how genes are expressed. It's well known that fetal alcohol syndrome occurs when pregnant women drink excessively and causes behavioural and physical harm to the child after birth. But we know little about the molecular mechanisms underlying the condition. Previous studies have shown that factors in the mother's environment during pregnancy can cause "epigenetic" modifications to the fetus's DNA. These don't alter the genetic code itself but might switch certain genes on or off, or increase or decrease their expression. To see whether a mother's alcohol consumption might affect the way her child's genes are expressed, Suyinn Chong at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Herston, Australia, and her colleagues turned to mice with genes for brown and yellow fur that are known to be modified by environmentally induced epigenetic changes. "It's a good model to use because you can tell whether a mouse's environment is affecting the expression of its genes just by looking at its coat colour," says Chong. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13680 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Andy Coghlan, reporter The scientist sacked by the British government for allegedly criticising government drugs policy today made good on his promise to set up his own committee to investigate and publicise the science of recreational drugs. "We will provide the truth about drugs unfettered by any political interference," said David Nutt of Imperial College London, and the former head of the government's Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) until he was asked to leave last October by Home Office minister, Alan Johnson. Now, true to his promise, Nutt is chairman of his newly created Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, and today proudly announced that its first meeting took place yesterday. So far it has 14 members, including four of the five who resigned from the ACMD last October in protest at the sacking of Nutt. "This is the strongest grouping of scientists we've ever had in this country [who are experts on recreational drugs]," said Nutt. "The best science will come from us." Already, the new committee has decided on its first three programmes. The first will investigate the dangers of "legal highs"; recreational substances that are not outlawed but which may be causing serious harm to users who buy them freely on the internet. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13679 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Greg Miller If you have a hard time shaking your phobias--whether they be of spiders or confined spaces--you may have a genetic quirk that alters your brain's fear circuitry. New research that links a small DNA substitution with abnormal brain activity and fear responses represents a small but encouraging step, experts say, toward understanding how genes may contribute to anxiety disorders. Although many mental disorders run in families, tracking down the genes responsible has been tremendously difficult. It's even harder to show how those genes interfere with brain function. Complicating matters further is the uncertainty involved in assessing the mental state of mice, researchers' animal of choice for studying the genetics of psychiatric disorders. The new study, published online today in Science, examines the role of the gene for brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Several years of research have implicated this gene and the growth factor it encodes in mood disorders. Up to 30% of Caucasians have an alteration in the BDNF gene that causes the amino acid methionine to be substituted for valine at a particular place in the protein. In 2006, a team led by Francis Lee at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City reported that genetically engineered mice with this so-called Met substitution appeared to be more anxious than other mice. But studies with humans have been inconclusive, says BJ Casey, a neuroscientist at Cornell who collaborated with Lee on the new study. Having the Met variation doesn't doom someone to a life of anxiety, Casey says, but it may exert a subtle influence. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13678 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A simple eye test might be able to detect Alzheimer's and other diseases before symptoms develop, according to UK scientists. The technique uses fluorescent markers which attach to dying cells which can be seen in the retina and give an early indication of brain cell death. The research has been carried out on mice, but human trials are planned. Scientists from University College London hope this could lead to a high street opticians test for the disease. The research, which is published in the journal, Cell Death and Disease, could enable scientists to overcome the difficulty of investigating what is happening inside the brains of those with Alzheimer's. They currently have to rely on expensive MRI scans or post-mortems. This new technique enables scientists to track the progress of brain disease by looking at dying cells in the retina. The cells show up as green dots because they absorb the fluorescent dye. The research has so far been carried out on mice, but the team is optimistic that the technique can be translated to humans. Professor Francesca Coredeiro, lead author from University College London Institute of Opthalmology said: "Few people realise that the retina is a direct, albeit thin, extension of the brain. It is entirely possible that in the future a visit to a high-street optician to check on your eyesight will also be a check on the state of your brain. I hope that screening for Alzheimer's will be available on the high street within five years." (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 13677 - Posted: 01.14.2010

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO - Antidepressants fail to help about half of the people who take them, and a study in mice may help explain why. Most antidepressants — including the commonly used Prozac and Zoloft — work by increasing the amount of serotonin, a message-carrying brain chemical made deep in the middle of the brain by cells known as raphe neurons. Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center in New York said on Wednesday that genetically engineered mice that had too much of one type of serotonin receptor in this region of the brain were less likely to respond to antidepressants. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here "These receptors dampen the activity of these (serotonin-producing) neurons. Too much of them dampen these neurons too much," Rene Hen of Columbia, whose study appears in the journal Neuron, said in a telephone interview. "It puts too much brake on the system." Hen said the finding may be useful in giving doctors an idea of whether a patient will respond to an antidepressant. And it could also help drugmakers populate better clinical trials to help identify new drug compounds that work for people who are unlikely to benefit from conventional antidepressants. Copyright 2010 Reuters

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 13676 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By David Brown WASHINGTON - More than 200 years after it was isolated from poppies, morphine remains one of medicine’s best painkillers. But that isn’t its only use. Physicians sometimes include morphine in a cocktail of drugs given to people having heart attacks. It can relieve the breathlessness of pulmonary edema. It decreases diarrhea. A famous physician of the early 20th century, William Osler, once called morphine “God’s own medicine.’’ Research published this week suggests the compound may have at least one more use, too. In a study of about 700 members of the military wounded in Iraq, those who got morphine soon after their injuries were about half as likely to develop posttraumatic stress disorder as those who didn’t get the drug. Whether morphine’s apparently protective effect arises directly from the relief of traumatic pain, or indirectly by blocking the establishment of traumatic memory, isn’t known. Both the researchers and outside specialists agreed the effect would have to be proved virtually beyond doubt before morphine was routinely given to prevent the mental disorder. “I would be very reluctant to suggest any change in clinical practice,’’ said Troy Lisa Holbrook of the Naval Health Research Center, in San Diego, who headed the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. “We need to understand a great deal more how this appears to work.’’ © Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company

Keyword: Stress; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 13675 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Erika Check Hayden . Julia lies with her eyes closed in an incubator, twitching her tiny limbs in a quiet, sedated sleep. Like the other babies in this intensive-care unit, she is surrounded by a phalanx of machinery. But unlike her nursery mates, this baby isn't wrapped in a warm blanket. Her doctors at the Children's Hospital of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have left most of her days-old body bare and placed her on a blue mat that is cooling her to a hypothermic 33.5 °C. Gauze wrapping holds a network of electrodes against her skull. The electrodes are sending a stream of signals to a nearby monitor, which is being watched carefully by David Rowitch. Like a growing number of babies in the United States, Julia (not her real name) is at risk of permanent brain damage. The trend is driven by increasing rates of preterm births coupled with medical advances that allow the survival of very premature babies — and also full-term babies such as Julia, whose births were not straightforward. Although these advances have focused on babies' hearts and lungs, they have largely ignored the newborn brain. Rowitch, a neonatologist, is one of a handful of doctors around the world who hope to reverse this trend by using advances in basic neuroscience to develop treatments for injured newborn brains. He and Donna Ferriero, chief of paediatric neurology at the hospital, founded the university's Newborn Brain Research Institute in 2006. Two years later they created one of the nation's first neurointensive-care nurseries, where Julia is now sleeping. They and other scientists are pushing to get treatments into clinics as soon as possible to make up for what they call years of inadequate funding for research into brain damage in babies. © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Stress; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 13674 - Posted: 06.24.2010