By Ford Vox Late last year, the world was captivated by the story of Rom Houben, a Belgian man who suffered a traumatic brain injury and was misdiagnosed for 23 years as being in a vegetative state. In fact, media outlets reported breathlessly, Houben had been conscious the whole time, trapped inside his motionless body, until a heroic doctor used cutting-edge scans to find normal brain activity. What's more, that doctor discovered a way for Houben to communicate, allowing the "locked-in" man to tell his harrowing tale to visiting reporters (Houben reportedly has a book on the way). It was a fantastic story that ruled the headlines for a few days, but unfortunately, it was only partly true, and the resulting media circus distorted the work of Houben's doctor, Steven Laureys. In reality, Laureys didn't need advanced technology to diagnose Houben, who doesn't meet the definition of a locked-in patient. Laureys actually can't verify that the patient was fully conscious for all those 23 years. Nor did Laureys acquaint Houben with "facilitated communication," a controversial aided-speech method that has Houben reliant on the hand of a therapist to peck out letters on a keyboard. (This method has been debunked time and again, including in a famous series of child-abuse trials involving severely autistic children.) But as the story gained more and more media attention, the narrative changed, and Laureys's work was increasingly misinterpreted. The doctor now sees his name linked to facilitated communication and seems driven to defend the method, even though the case is more accurately seen as a vindication for a simple but elegant observational test that can be used to determine a patient's level of consciousness. Laureys, who directs the Coma Science Group at the University of Liege, Belgium, is well regarded for his research on consciousness in brain-injury patients, especially for devising new ways to distinguish patients in a vegetative state from a minimally conscious one (the latter sees waxing and waning of awareness). It's an important distinction: minimally conscious patients have a better chance of recovery than vegetative ones. © 2010 Newsweek, Inc.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 13653 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Coloured lights could be used to find treatments for brain disorders such as epilepsy, a study has suggested. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology team discovered a way to shut down brain activity using flashes of yellow and blue lasers. They hope to adjust this to switch off neurons that generate an electrical impulse abnormally, causing seizures. This could help experts understand how the brain works and, ultimately, offer treatment targets, Nature reports. The work relies on two genes found in natural organisms like algae that need light to make energy. These genes, known as Arch and Mac, contain the genetic code for light-activated proteins. The MIT team engineered brain neurons to express Arch and Mac. By doing this, they were able to control the brain cells of mice and monkeys using light. Light activates proteins which, in turn, lowers the voltage in the neurons and prevents them from generating an electrical signal, known as firing. Arch responds to blue light, Mac to yellow, and both recover afterwards. Now the researchers plan to closely examine the neural circuits of the brain in the lab to find targets that, when shut down, could treat epilepsy as well as other conditions including Parkinson's disease and chronic pain. Ed Boyden, who led the research, said: "Silencing different sets of neurons with different colours of light allows us to understand how they work together to implement brain functions. These tools will help us understand how to control neural circuits, leading to new understandings and treatments for brain disorders." (C)BBC

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 13652 - Posted: 01.09.2010

Philip Ball Why does Handel's Water Music and The Beatles' 'Here Comes The Sun' sound happy, while Albinoni's Adagio and 'Eleanor Rigby' sound sad? Some might say it's because the first two are in major keys, while the second two are in minor keys. But are the emotional associations of major and minor intrinsic to the notes themselves, or are they culturally imposed? Many music psychologists suspect the latter, but a new study now suggests that there's something fundamentally similar about major or minor keys and the properties of happy or sad speech, respectively. Neuroscientist Daniel Bowling and colleagues at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, compared the sound spectra — the profiles of different acoustic frequencies – of speech with those in Western classical music and Finnish folk songs. They found that the spectra in major-key music are close to those in excited speech, while the spectra of minor-key music are more similar to subdued speech 1. Most cultures share the same acoustic characteristics of happy or sad speech, the former being relatively fast and loud, and the latter slower and quieter. There's good reason to believe that music mimics some of these universal emotional behaviours, supplying a universal vocabulary that permits listeners sometimes to deduce the intended emotion in unfamiliar music. References 1. Bowling, D. L. et al. Acoust. Soc. Am. 127, 491- 503 (2010). © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 13651 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ray Tallis MOST neuroscientists, philosophers of the mind and science journalists feel the time is near when we will be able to explain the mystery of human consciousness in terms of the activity of the brain. There is, however, a vocal minority of neurosceptics who contest this orthodoxy. Among them are those who focus on claims neuroscience makes about the preciseness of correlations between indirectly observed neural activity and different mental functions, states or experiences. This was well captured in a 2009 article in Perspectives on Psychological Science by Harold Pashler from the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues, that argued: "...these correlations are higher than should be expected given the (evidently limited) reliability of both fMRI and personality measures. The high correlations are all the more puzzling because method sections rarely contain much detail about how the correlations were obtained." Believers will counter that this is irrelevant: as our means of capturing and analysing neural activity become more powerful, so we will be able to make more precise correlations between the quantity, pattern and location of neural activity and aspects of consciousness. This may well happen, but my argument is not about technical, probably temporary, limitations. It is about the deep philosophical confusion embedded in the assumption that if you can correlate neural activity with consciousness, then you have demonstrated they are one and the same thing, and that a physical science such as neurophysiology is able to show what consciousness truly is. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 13650 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Linda Geddes PARENTS hoping to shield their children from sex stereotypes by giving them gender-neutral toys may be fighting a losing battle, especially if their offspring are boys. It seems that hormones released both before birth and well into the first few months of life may dictate the type of toys and play that boys are drawn to. By the age of 3, boys and girls show differences in their play preferences. Boys are more strongly drawn to balls, vehicles and construction toys than girls and tend to prefer playing with larger groups, whereas girls are more likely to prefer play with a few individuals. To what extent these differences are biologically programmed rather than a result of social pressure is hotly debated. Recent research hints that exposure to differing levels of hormones in the uterus might sway the preferences that both boys and girls have for "boy-like" toys later on. No one had looked at whether the surges in testosterone and oestrogen that boys and girls experience in the early months of life also affect behaviour. "We tend to think of early development as a time when hormones aren't having effects," says Gerianne Alexander of Texas A&M University in College Station and colleagues. To investigate the effects of these hormone surges on behaviour, Alexander and her colleagues used eye-tracking software to measure levels of interest in animations of a ball versus a doll and a group of figures versus an individual figure, in 21 boys and 20 girls aged 3 to 4 months. The researchers measured levels of oestrogen in the girls' saliva and testosterone in the boys' and compared the lengths of their index and middle fingers - a guide to prenatal testosterone exposure. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 13649 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Charles Q. Choi Newly discovered painted scallops and cockleshells in Spain are the first hard evidence that Neandertals made jewelry. These findings suggest humanity's closest extinct relatives might have been capable of symbolism, after all. Body ornaments made of painted and pierced seashells dating back 70,000 to 120,000 years have been found in Africa and the Near East for years, and serve as evidence of symbolic thought among the earliest modern humans (Homo sapiens). The absence of similar finds in Europe at that time, when it was Neandertal territory, has supported the notion that they lacked symbolism, a potential sign of mental inferiority that might help explain why modern humans eventually replaced them. Although hints of Neandertal art and jewelry have cropped up in recent years, such as pierced and grooved animal-tooth pendants or a decorated limestone slab on the grave of a child, these have often been shrugged off as artifacts mixed in from modern humans, imitation without understanding, or ambiguous in nature. Now archaeologist João Zilhão at the University of Bristol in England and his colleagues have found 50,000-year-old jewelry at two caves in southeastern Spain, art dating back 10,000 years before the fossil record reveals evidence of modern humans entering Europe. At the Cueva (Cave) Antón, the scientists unearthed a pierced king scallop shell (Pecten maximus) painted with orange pigment made of yellow goethite and red hematite collected some five kilometers from that site. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 13648 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Maia Szalavitz It's hardly a secret that taking cocaine can change the way you feel and the way you behave. Now, a study published in the Jan. 8 issue of Science shows how it also alters the way the genes in your brain operate. Understanding this process could eventually lead to new treatments for the 1.4 million Americans with cocaine problems, and millions more around the world. The study, which was conducted on mice, is part of a hot new area of research called epigenetics, which explores how experiences and environmental exposures affect genes. "This is a major step in understanding the development of cocaine addiction and a first step toward generating ideas for how we might use epigenetic regulation to modulate the development of addiction," says Peter Kalivas, professor of neuroscience at the Medical University of South Carolina, who was not associated with the study. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2009.) Though we think about our genes mostly in terms of the traits we pass on to our children, they are actually very active in our lives every day, regulating how various cells in our bodies behave. In the brain this can be especially powerful. Any significant experience triggers changes in brain genes that produce proteins — those necessary to help memories form, for example. But, says the study's lead author, Ian Maze, a doctoral student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, "when you give an animal a single dose of cocaine, you start to have genes aberrantly turn on and off in a strange pattern that we are still trying to figure out." © 2010 Time Inc.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13647 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Dopamine, a chemical with a key role in setting people's moods, could have a much wider-ranging impact on their everyday lives, research suggests. Experiments show that altering levels of the chemical in the brain influences the decisions people make. One expert said the results showed the relative importance of "gut feeling" over analytical decision making. The Current Biology study could help understand how expectation of pleasure can go awry, for example in addiction. It follows previous research by the University College London team, which, using imaging techniques, detected a signal in the brain linked to how much someone enjoyed an experience. They found that signal could in turn predict the choices a person made. With the suspicion that the signal was dopamine, the researchers set up a study to test how people make complex decisions when their dopamine system has been tampered with. The 61 participants were given a list of 80 holiday destinations, from Greece to Thailand, and asked to rate them on a scale of one to six. They were then given a sugar pill and asked to imagine themselves in each of 40 of the destinations. Researchers then administered L-Dopa, a drug used in Parkinson's disease to increase dopamine concentrations in the brain, before asking them to imagine the other holidays. They rated all the destinations again, and a day later they were asked where they would prefer to go, out of paired lists of holidays. The extra dopamine gave people higher expectations when rating holiday options. And that translated into the choice of trip they made a day later. Study leader Dr Tali Sharot, from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuro-imaging at UCL, said humans made far more complex decisions than other animals, such as what job to take and whether to start a family, and it seemed dopamine played an important part in that. (C)BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Attention
Link ID: 13646 - Posted: 01.09.2010

By Jacqueline Stenson If you’re trying to motivate yourself to get moving in the new year, here’s some added inspiration: Mounting research shows that exercise isn’t just good for the body, it’s also good for the brain — and not just the brains of older folks. While much of the research on the effects of exercise on the mind has focused on countering dementia in seniors, recent studies show that kids and young to middle-aged adults can get a brain boost as well. One large new study, for instance, found that teenage males in the best cardiovascular shape performed better on various cognitive tests at age 18 than their less fit counterparts. And those who improved their fitness levels between the ages of 15 and 18 achieved higher test scores than those who decreased their fitness during that time. What’s more, the fittest 18-year-olds were more likely to achieve both higher educational and socioeconomic status later in life, according to results published in December in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We cannot determine from this study alone that physical fitness causes better cognitive functioning,” says study author Georg Kuhn, a professor at the Center for Brain Repair and Rehabilitation at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “But taken together with other studies, we can assume that better cardiovascular fitness may optimize cognitive performance and academic achievements.” © 2010 msnbc.com

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 13645 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Emily Laut When it came to insect penises, Charles Darwin had it right. The famed naturalist suspected that insect genitalia, which are frequently festooned with bizarre combinations of hooks, spines, and knobs, essentially functioned like peacock tails. That is, they helped males beat out their rivals for females. Now, researchers have confirmed this hypothesis by zapping fly penises with a laser. Darwin's hypothesis relies on something called preinsemination sexual selection. Basically, the idea holds that the male with the most effective strategy for getting a female to mate with him--attractive plumage, for instance--is most likely to pass on his genes to the next generation. But since then, studies in various insects have suggested that sexual selection can happen during or even after mating. Researchers noticed, for example, that certain flies engage in courtship displays only after copulation has begun, perhaps as a way to get the female to favor a male's sperm over that of his competitors. (Female flies typically mate with multiple males over a short time period.) They also reasoned that the complicated penis ornaments might help sweep away other males' sperm during mating. But there was no direct way to test this. Enter laser beams. Evolutionary ecologist Michal Polak of the University of Cincinnati in Ohio and entomologist Arash Rashed now of the University of California, Berkeley, modified a laser commonly used to cut very small things, like the nerve cells of nematodes, so that it could zap off the hooks on fruit fly penises. "We can cut the tiniest of structures with the highest of precision," says Polak, all without harming the fly. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 13644 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ANDREW POLLACK It seemed like the offer of a lifetime — earn $2,500 by flying to France aboard a private luxury jet. Even if it wins Food and Drug Administration approval, Nuvigil would have to compete with cheap jet-lag treatments like coffee. But as the fine print made clear, there would be no Eiffel Tower or chateaux, no foie gras or Bordeaux. Travelers were confined to a laboratory in either Toulouse or Rouffach with electrodes attached to their heads, testing whether a drug could keep their jet-lagged bodies awake. That drug, Nuvigil from Cephalon, could become the first medicine specifically approved by the Food and Drug Administration to combat jet lag. A jet-lag antidote might seem to be the latest lifestyle drug, a further step in the “medicalization” of something that is not an illness. But sleep specialists, who call the affliction “jet lag disorder,” say that while not exactly a disease, it is a condition that can be dangerous — as when someone tries to drive a car right after arriving in a distant time zone. For Cephalon, a company in Frazer, Pa., whose business tactics have attracted federal attention, the approval for jet lag is part of a plan to extend patent protection for its core franchise in stay-awake drugs. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sleep
Link ID: 13643 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Sam Kean Here we go again. Late last year, scientists seemed to be homing in on the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS)—excessive tiredness and other symptoms that have no known biological cause--by finding a supposed viral link. But a new paper challenges that link, a development that may plunge the field back into the same confusion and acrimony that has characterized it for years. Many CFS patients report that their symptoms began after an acute viral infection. Yet scientists have been unable to pin CFS on common viruses such as the Epstein-Barr virus. As a result, patients have faced skepticism for years that CFS might not be a real disease, or that it is perhaps a psychiatric disorder. A team of American researchers thought it finally struck pay dirt last October when it reported in Science that it found DNA traces of a virus in the blood cells of two-thirds of 101 patients with CFS, compared with 4% of 218 healthy controls. XMRV is a rodent retrovirus also implicated in an aggressive prostate cancer, though why it might cause or be associated with CFS remains unclear. Other scientists were dubious about the XMRV connection. They criticized the Americans for not explaining enough about the demographics of their patients and the procedures to control for contamination. Several virologists around the world practically sprinted to their labs to redo the experiments, and the discovery that a clinic associated with the Science paper was selling a $650 diagnostic test for XMRV made the issue more pressing. A British team already exploring the XMRV-prostate cancer link won the race, submitting a paper to debunk the claim on 1 December. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Depression; Emotions
Link ID: 13642 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Marla Cone and Environmental Health News California scientists have discovered clusters of autism, largely in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas, where children are twice as likely to have autism as children in surrounding areas. The 10 clusters were found mostly among children with highly educated parents, leading researchers to report that they probably can be explained by better access to medical experts who diagnose the disorder. Because of the strong link to education, the researchers from University of California at Davis said the new findings do not point to a localized source of pollution, such as an industry, near the clusters. “I suspect access to services plays the major role,” said Irva Hertz-Picciotto, senior author of the study published Tuesday in the journal Autism Research. She added, however, that there could be other reasons why higher-educated parents lead to more autism. Environmental exposures, such as chemicals from consumer products, could be more common in those households, she said. “Certainly there may be some consumer products to which more educated persons are more likely to be exposed. There is undoubtedly a possibility of higher exposures in the more educated,” said Hertz-Picciotto, a professor of public health sciences and an autism expert at the UC Davis MIND Institute. For the study, the researchers analyzed the birth records of about 2.5 million babies born in California between 1996 and 2000. Nearly 10,000 were later diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 13641 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Carina Storrs Wolfing down a meal in record time can lead to more than digestive discomfort and possible acclaim in food-eating contests. Studies have warned that speed eaters can easily become overeaters, possibly because they lose track of how sated they are amidst hurried bites. Moreover, the pattern of consuming large portions of food quickly is associated with obesity in children, adolescents and adults. Researchers in Bristol, England, sought to break this pattern in children and adolescents using a machine dubbed the Mandometer, which is designed to manage the pace of meals. The device features a computerized scale that calculates the rate of food intake and, like a hovering mother, constantly reminds the user if he or she should eat slower or faster. The device, first developed to help treat anorexia and bulimia nervosa, actually issues verbal feedback. In a study published January 5 in the British Medical Journal, participants who received Mandometer assistance for one year lost significantly more body mass index (BMI), which is a measure of weight based on height, than those who did not. In fact, the Mandometer group, but not the control group, achieved the reduction in BMI that the authors had previously determined was necessary to lead to a difference in body composition and metabolism. The finding suggests that "modifying eating behavior might provide additional benefits to standard lifestyle modification in treating obese adolescents," the authors wrote, noting that adolescents have been more difficult to treat for obesity through counseling than younger children. The study was led by Julian P.H. Shield, a professor of diabetes and metabolic endocrinology at the University of Bristol. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Obesity; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13640 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The female cane toad can pump herself up to mega-size to throw off smaller males striving to mate with her, Australian biologists reported on Wednesday. The unusual tactic suggests that female anurans, as frogs and toads are called, may have far more power to select their sex partner than thought, according to their study, appearing in the British journal Biology Letters. Female cane toads (Bufo marinus) are typically choosier than males when it comes to reproduction. They discriminate among potential mates by approaching the toad with the best call. But, as they head to a rendezvous with the hunk with the mightiest ribbit, they also have to run the gauntlet of excited rival males. An unwanted suitor will seek to climb on the female's back, grasping her tightly in the armpit or groin, waiting until she starts laying her eggs in order to fertilize them. This is where the pneumatic trick comes in, say the scientists, led by Benjamin Phillips of the University of Sydney. By inflating sacs in her body, the female is able to loosen the grip and the luckless male slides off her body, defeated. © 2009 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 13639 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Aggressive childhood brain tumours could be treatable with a novel combination of two existing cancer drugs, a study suggests. Researchers led by the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) examined 90 tumours from children and found two new genetic abnormalities in nine of them. They were then able to kill these abnormal tumours, in laboratory tests, by combining the two existing drugs. But one expert says the findings remain "far off being applicable to patients". In the UK, about 400 children are diagnosed with brain tumours every year. The research, published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research, brought together scientists from the UK, France, Portugal, Brazil and America. The abnormal tumours - known as glioblastomas, aggressive and often fatal cancers of the brain's glial cells - contained too many copies of the EGFR gene and mutations of the gene the scientists say have never before been found in children. They tried to block the EGFR gene with a drug, erlotinib (Tarceva), used in clinical trials to treat adult glioblastomas, but identified a molecule specific to the children's cells - platelet-derived growth factor receptor (PGFR) - that was making it ineffective. But when they combined erlotinib with a drug, imatinib (Glivec), they hoped would block the PGFR molecules, they killed a significant number of the cancer cells. Dr Chris Jones, who led the research, said it proved "that cancers may look the same, but it is only when you get down to the genetic level that you can truly understand them and devise treatments". (C)BBC

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Glia
Link ID: 13638 - Posted: 01.05.2010

A Canadian-led study has found that men's minds and bodies are more in sync than women's when it comes to sexual arousal. The analysis of previous research on human sexuality found that men's feelings of arousal tend to match their physiological responses, while women's mind and body responses were more often inconsistent. Psychology professor Meredith Chivers of Queen's University led the study, which included researchers from the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group, the University of Lethbridge, the University of Amsterdam and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. "We wanted to discover how closely people's subjective experience of sexual arousal mirrors their physiological genital response — and whether this differs between men and women," Chivers said in a statement. The researchers analyzed the results from 134 previous studies, conducted between 1967 and 2007, collectively involving more than 2,500 women and 1,900 men. Participants in the studies were asked how aroused they felt while watching or listening to sexually explicit content, and sometimes after the exposure to the sexual stimulus. The researchers then compared these descriptions of the participants' feelings with their physiological responses: changes in erection for men and in genital blood flow in women. © CBC 2010

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 13637 - Posted: 06.24.2010

About half of Americans with major depression do not receive treatment for the condition, and in many cases the therapies are not consistent with the standard of care, according to a new study. The study also showed that ethnicity and race were important factors in determining who received treatment, with Mexican Americans and African Americans the least likely to have depression care. While many people can feel sad from time to time, a depressive disorder occurs when these feelings start to interfere with everyday life, preventing someone from functioning normally, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The condition can be debilitating, hindering a person's ability to work, sleep and eat. A combination of factors likely contributes to the disorder, including imbalances in brain chemicals, genetics, and stressful situations, the NIH says. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here Previous research has indicated that many Americans with depression go untreated, but the current study was the first to break down large ethnic and racial groups into subgroups to look at disparities in treatment. The researchers used information from the National Institute of Mental Health's Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys — a combination of three surveys conducted between 2001 and 2003 with a total of 15,762 participants. © 2010 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 13636 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY That most alarming New Year’s morning question — “Uh-oh, what did I do last night?” — can seem benign compared with those that may come later, like “Uh, what exactly did I do with the last year?” Or, “Hold on — did a decade just go by?” It did. Somewhere between trigonometry and colonoscopy, someone must have hit the fast-forward button. Time may march, or ebb, or sift, or creep, but in early January it feels as if it has bolted like an angry dinner guest, leaving conversations unfinished, relationships still stuck, bad habits unbroken, goals unachieved. “I think for many people, we think about our goals, and if nothing much has happened with those then suddenly it seems like it was just yesterday that we set them,” said Gal Zauberman, an associate professor of marketing at the Wharton School of Business. Yet the sensation of passing time can be very different, Dr. Zauberman said, “depending on what you think about, and how.” In fact, scientists are not sure how the brain tracks time. One theory holds that it has a cluster of cells specialized to count off intervals of time; another that a wide array of neural processes act as an internal clock. Either way, studies find, this biological pacemaker has a poor grasp of longer intervals. Time does seem to slow to a trickle during an empty afternoon and race when the brain is engrossed in challenging work. Stimulants, including caffeine, tend to make people feel as if time is passing faster; complex jobs, like doing taxes, can seem to drag on longer than they actually do. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13635 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rachel Saslow Scientists may have created a vaccine against cocaine addiction: a series of shots that changes the body's chemistry so that the drug can't enter the brain and provide a high. The vaccine, called TA-CD, shows promise but could also be dangerous; some of the addicts participating in a study of the vaccine started doing massive amounts of cocaine in hopes of overcoming its effects, according to Thomas R. Kosten, the lead researcher on the study, which was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry in October. "After the vaccine, doing cocaine was a very disappointing experience for them," said Kosten, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Nobody overdosed, but some of them had 10 times more cocaine coursing through their systems than researchers had encountered before, according to Kosten. He said some of the addicts reported to researchers that they had gone broke buying cocaine from multiple drug dealers, hoping to find a variety that would get them high. Of the 115 addicts in the study, 58 were given the vaccine, administered in a series of five shots over 12 weeks, while 57 received placebo injections. Six people dropped out before the end of the study. The researchers recruited the participants from a methadone-treatment program in West Haven, Conn., which made it possible to track them for the full 24 weeks of the study. The patients were addicted to cocaine and heroin; TA-CD is designed to work only on cocaine, including the crack form of the drug. © 2010 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13634 - Posted: 06.24.2010