Not all fat is created equal. Accumulating most of your fat around your waistline, or having what's often called an "apple shape," is known to be more dangerous than storing fat around your hips and buttocks, known as having a "pear shape." That's because they are actually two different kinds of fat. The fat in your abdomen tends to be visceral fat, which builds up around your organs, as opposed to subcutaneous fat, or fat under the skin. Visceral fat is strongly linked to metabolic syndrome, the insulin resistance that increases our risk of heart disease, cancer, and all sorts of diseases associated with aging. Obesity researcher Daniel Eitzman says that makes it tricky to study the effects of the fat itself. "When we look at obese humans or animal models of obesity, they develop other well-established risk factors such as diabetes or elevated blood cholesterol that can affect heart disease," he explains. "So it's difficult to tease apart the specific role of the belly fat from these other associated risk factors that are triggered by obesity." But in a new study in mice, Eitzman and his team at the University of Michigan were able to control for those factors. © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 11632 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jocelyn Kaiser A daring attempt to use gene therapy to treat a rare, devastating disorder that destroys the brains of children has shown signs of slowing the disease's progression, according to a new paper. However, some experts aren't convinced that the treatment, which involved dripping a virus into young patients' brains, actually worked. The children all have late infantile neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis (LINCL), a form of the neurodegenerative disorder Batten disease. They were born without a working copy of CLN2, a gene whose protein helps lysosomes--the cell's garbage-disposing structures--break down a waste product called lipofuscin. As a result, lipofuscin builds up and eventually destroy neurons, causing the brain to shrink. Children with LINCL seem normal at birth but by age 2 to 4 show signs of developmental problems and often have seizures. Eventually blind and confined to a wheelchair, they usually die by 8 to 12 years of age. A few years ago, gene therapy researcher Ronald Crystal and colleagues at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City successfully slowed LINCL in mice using gene therapy in the brain. To test the safety of the approach in humans, the team treated 10 LINCL patients ranging in age from 3 to 10 years, starting in 2004. After anesthetizing the children, the researchers drilled six 2-mm-wide holes in their skulls. They then dripped in a solution of a harmless virus that had been modified to carry a good copy of the CLN2 gene. Four children had an immune response, but it was mild. One patient developed seizures 2 weeks later and died 49 days after the surgery. However, she did not have brain inflammation, and Crystal says it was not clear whether her death had anything to do with the gene therapy. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 11631 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jim Schnabel Blindness leaves its hallmark on the brain even after sight returns.GettyTwo people have been found to retain a mark of blindness years after their sight was partially restored. A part of their visual cortex that normally responds to visual motion now also responds to auditory motion. Researchers who have studied the pair suspect that the subjects have an enhanced ability to track moving sounds, although they have yet to test this. The brains of people who lose their sight at a young age have long been known to turn parts of the visual cortex to non-visual tasks, making use of its spare capacity to handle the processing of auditory and tactile inputs. But it is hard to study exactly how this happens or which subregions are involved, says Melissa Saenz, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who led the team that conducted the study. “There’s a lot of variability in the brain from one person to another, and in this large region [the visual cortex] particularly. And obviously if a subject is blind, you can’t use visual stimuli to make a functional map of his or her visual cortex.” Saenz found two very rare patients who had lost their sight at an early age but partly recovered it in their 40s: one following a cataract operation, the other after an experimental stem-cell therapy and a corneal transplant. The latter individual, Mike May, now 54, has had his sight-recovery experience portrayed in a book and a television documentary. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Vision; Hearing
Link ID: 11630 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Elsa Youngsteadt It's time to retract those disparaging comments about sloths: They actually don't sleep all the time. Sloths are certainly not insomniacs, but a new miniature brain-recording device shows that, in nature, the animals snooze a respectable 9.6 hours per day. Researchers previously believed that sloths slept nearly 16 hours per day. That figure was based on studies of captive sloths using electroencephalograms (EEGs), which detect brain activity associated with slumber. The animals might sleep differently in nature, but good luck keeping a wild sloth wired to the usual heavy EEG equipment. Enter the portable EEG recorder. Developed in part by neurophysiologist Alexei Vyssotski of the University of Zürich, Switzerland, the apparatus is housed in a cap that fits on top of an animal's head. Small wires placed just under the skin of the scalp detect brain waves and send the numbers to a data logger hidden inside the device. A team led by Niels Rattenborg, a sleep researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Starnberg, Germany, caught three brown-throated three-toed sloths (Bradypus variegates) in Panama and installed the mini EEG recorders, a process that took about 1 hour per animal. After 5 days, the researchers tracked down the sloths and retrieved the data loggers. "The thing that really astonished us," Rattenborg says, "was that they slept just nine and a half hours per day." © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 11629 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Results from a large U.S. government experiment are dimming hopes that two common painkillers can prevent Alzheimer's disease or slow mental decline in older people. The arthritis drug Celebrex and the painkiller Aleve showed no benefit for thinking skills, new findings suggest. Aleve is a low-strength version of the prescription drug naproxen sodium, known under the trade names Anaprox and Naprelan, that is sold in the U.S. as an over-the-counter drug. Celebrex is the trade name for the prescription drug celecoxib, known as a cox-2 inhibitor. Earlier results from the same research showed the two drugs didn't prevent Alzheimer's, at least in the short term. The experiment was halted in 2004, several years before the intended end date, when heart risks turned up in a separate study on Celebrex because of an increased risk of cardiovascular events. (Another cox-2 inhibitor, Vioxx, was pulled from the market entirely because of similar heart risks that same year.) Researchers also had noticed more heart attacks and strokes in the people taking Aleve in the Alzheimer's prevention study. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Alzheimers; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11628 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Despite protests calling for a ban on the treatment, electroshock therapy is frequently used by Canadian psychiatrists to treat severe depression. The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) estimates that last year, the procedure, which dates back to 1938 and involves passing electrical currents though the brain to trigger seizures, was used more than 15,000 times in the country. The figure has remained virtually unchanged since 2002, CIHI says, showing that the popularity of the procedure remains strong. A report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal last week shows the procedure is commonly used to treat drug-resistant depression in seniors. However, critics of the procedure believe its usage should be stopped, and it is a painful procedure that leads to brain damage. On Sunday, about a dozen protesters rallied in Ottawa, calling for a ban of the procedure. Protest organizer Sue Clark-Wittenberg had electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) 35 years ago, and says it has kept her from getting an education and a good job. "The bottom line is electroshock always damages the brain. Electroshock always causes memory loss," she says. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 11627 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The anti-impotence drug Viagra may help save people with muscular dystrophy from an early death, a study suggests. Researchers found the way the drug works to combat impotence may also help ward off heart failure in muscular dystrophy patients. Tests on mice with a version of the disease showed the drug helped keep their hearts working well. The Montreal Heart Institute study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Muscular dystrophy is a genetic condition causing wasting of the muscles. The first signs of muscular weakness appear at roughly age five, leading to a progressive loss in the ability to walk by the age of 13. People with the condition are also at a higher risk of heart failure due to a weakening of the muscles which keep the organ pumping strongly. For this reason, many people with Duchenne muscular dystrophy - the most common form of the condition - die in early life, often in their 20s or 30s. The Montreal team found that Viagra - known technically as sildenafil - prevents the loss of a molecule, cGMP, which plays a key role in keeping blood vessels dilated. In the penis, this increases blood flow, and helps to combat impotence. But in the heart it helps to ensure the organ itself receives a proper supply of blood, and remains healthy and strong. With the heart in a strong condition, it is more able to withstand the impact of weakening muscle cells caused by muscular dystrophy. (C)BBC

Keyword: Muscles
Link ID: 11626 - Posted: 05.13.2008

Alison Motluk People who are good at interpreting facial expressions have "mirror neuron" systems that are more active, say researchers. The finding adds weight to the idea that these cells are crucial to helping us figure out how others are feeling. Mirror neurons are brain cells that fire both when you do something and when you watch someone else do the same thing. Because they allow us to mimic what others are doing, it is thought that these neurons may be responsible for why we can feel empathy, or understand others' intentions and states of mind. People with autism, for instance, show reduced mirror neuron activity during social cognition tasks. Now Peter Enticott at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and his colleagues have found evidence supporting this theory. They asked 20 healthy adults to look at pairs of images. In one task, they had to decide if paired images of faces were the same person. In another, they had to decide if both faces were showing the same emotion. In a separate task, volunteers watched video clips of thumb movement, a hand grasping a pen and a hand while writing, while the activity in the primary motor cortex of the brain, which contains mirror neurons, was recorded. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11625 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Lauren Cahoon Female frogs aren't known as great communicators. Although they may squeak when caught by a predator, they spend most of their lives in silence. A new discovery could change this notion: Researchers have found that the female concave-eared torrent frog makes a high-pitched peep to attract nearby males. The call is a genuine siren song: Upon hearing it, males leap toward the source with uncanny accuracy, even in darkness, rivaling the localization abilities of owls, dolphins, and humans. Male concave-eared torrent frogs (Odorrana tormota) communicate their whereabouts and their availability as mates by means of ultrasonic calls. The high frequency of the sound allows the frogs to be heard over the noisy rapids of their home environment, the Huangshan hot springs in China. Biophysicists led by Jun-Xian Shen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing suspected that female frogs were capable of making similar calls when they dissected the females and found that, like the males, they had large larynxes--a trait that separated them from females of other frog species. The team then caught a number of females and brought them into the laboratory to determine if they could sing like males. Sure enough, the female concave-eared torrent frog had the rare ability to call out like males--however, instead of constantly calling like males do, the females only called just before laying their eggs; after that, they stayed silent. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Hearing; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11624 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By KERIDWEN CORNELIUS PHOENIX — Three-year-old Grace Webster perches on the operating table, tiny and cold, covered only by a diaper and her sandy-blond Raggedy Ann hair. Her blue eyes gaze warily at the monster-size machines sprouting tube tentacles that encircle her — machines that will guide surgeons four inches into her brain. M.R.I. scans showed the tumor, a hypothalamic hamartoma, before the surgery, top, and the area of the brain after the tumor was removed. Grace had her first menstrual period at 14 months old. Her body is racked more than 10 times a day with seizures, some of them bizarrely mimicking laughter or rage. The source of her suffering is a hypothalamic hamartoma, or H.H., a tumor on the hypothalamus that strikes only a few thousand people in the world. And while the tumor is not malignant, until five years ago it was considered incurable, even when baffled doctors could diagnose it. Surgery was risky and largely ineffective. Medication seldom helped. Many children were institutionalized. Now, thanks to an innovative surgical procedure, scores of these children have been cured at two centers that specialize in the disease. One is in Melbourne, Australia; the other is the Barrow Neurological Institute here in Phoenix. It is 8 a.m. on April 20, 2007, and on the operating table at Barrow a nurse and a neuroanesthesiologist are trying to coax the anesthesia mask onto Grace’s mouth. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 11623 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ELISSA ELY, M.D. She was never on time to clinic appointments. Leaving her apartment was not simple when it required pushing aside the furniture she had pushed against the front door the night before, and even the furniture was no protection against the threats she perceived. She said strange men burrowed into the apartment after dark, right through the door, the chest of drawers and the armchairs. They entered her body, and then they ate her up from the inside. It took years before she told us this. We might doubt her, but she knew it happened. Numerous expensive antipsychotics made no difference at all. She smoked heavily, partly from anxiety and partly because, like many chronically institutionalized patients, she had been bribed into placidity with cigarettes years earlier. Before her first psychotic break, she had been a singer. Smoking was not good for her voice, of course, but under these harrowing circumstances, quitting was impossible. A few days after an appointment at which she had looked even wearier than usual, she collapsed. In the emergency room, her blood sodium was low. The medical resident decided it was from her psychiatric medication; he discontinued some, decreased others and sent her home. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 11622 - Posted: 05.13.2008

Children whose fathers are depressed have smaller vocabularies than those who do not, a US study suggests. But the Eastern Virginia Medical School study of 5,000 families found language development in children whose mothers had similar symptoms seemed unaffected. Researchers said by the age of two, children with depressed fathers used 1.5 fewer words than the average of 29. This could be because depressed fathers spent less time reading to their children, they wrote in New Scientist. The researchers, led by paediatric psychologist James Paulson, surveyed about 5,000 families. When the children were nine months old, 14% of the mothers and 10% of the fathers were clinically depressed. The researchers assessed the impact on language development by measuring what proportion of 50 common words the children were using at two years of age. On average the children in the study were using 29 of the 50 words by the time they reached two. However, those children whose fathers were depressed when they were nine months old used an average of 1.5 fewer words than those whose fathers were fine. Dr Paulson said the difference might seem small, but when scaled up across a child's complete vocabulary it might make a significant difference. In contrast, there was no difference in the size of the vocabulary of children whose mothers were depressed, and of those whose mothers were not. The researchers found that depressed mothers did not reduce the amount of time they spent reading to their nine-month-old baby, but depressed fathers read on average 9% less than those who had no problem. (C)BBC

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 11621 - Posted: 05.12.2008

By ANDREW POLLACK For those who don’t like to drool, slur their speech or unknowingly bite their tongue after a visit to the dentist, help might be at hand. A small drug company said it won approval Friday from the Food and Drug Administration to market the first drug meant to undo the effects of local dental anesthesia. In clinical trials, the drug cut the median time it took for full sensation to return to the lips by about 75 to 85 minutes, or by more than half. The drug, called OraVerse, was developed by Novalar Pharmaceuticals, a privately held company in San Diego. The company said it would begin selling the drug to dentists late this year for $12.50 an injection. After a dentist finished a filling or some other procedure, he or she would inject OraVerse into the same spot where the anesthetic had been injected. Is a drug really needed for what seems like a trivial use? Novalar and some dentists who advise the company said it might be useful for children, who can injure themselves by biting their lip or tongue without knowing it. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11620 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By GABRIELLE GLASER IN the YouTube video, Liz Spikol is smiling and animated, the light glinting off her large hoop earrings. Deadpan, she holds up a diaper. It is not, she explains, a hygienic item for a giantess, but rather a prop to illustrate how much control people lose when they undergo electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, as she did 12 years ago. In other videos and blog postings, Ms. Spikol, a 39-year-old writer in Philadelphia who has bipolar disorder, describes a period of psychosis so severe she jumped out of her mother’s car and ran away like a scared dog. In lectures across the country, Elyn Saks, a law professor and associate dean at the University of Southern California, recounts the florid visions she has experienced during her lifelong battle with schizophrenia — dancing ashtrays, houses that spoke to her — and hospitalizations where she was strapped down with leather restraints and force-fed medications. Like many Americans who have severe forms of mental illness such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, Ms. Saks and Ms. Spikol are speaking candidly and publicly about their demons. Their frank talk is part of a conversation about mental illness (or as some prefer to put it, “extreme mental states”) that stretches from college campuses to community health centers, from YouTube to online forums. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 11619 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LISA SANDERS, M.D. The doctor found his 20 year-old son in the bathroom sprawled over the toilet. “Not again?” he asked gently. The young man nodded, tears bright in his eyes, as he rose slowly to his feet. He pressed his hand deeply into his own abdomen, as if holding something in place. “It’s getting worse.” The father was overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness. “Get dressed,” he told his son suddenly. If they rushed to the hospital, maybe they would be lucky enough to catch whatever was causing this pain on an X-ray. The young man had already been imaged a half-dozen times, but never during an attack. But a short time later, as they walked down a quiet hospital hallway, he turned to his father. “I’m sorry, Dad,” he said. “The pain is gone.” As it had so often in the past, the attack ended the way it started — suddenly. The X-ray was normal. The young man’s father, a gastroenterologist, had been trying to figure out the cause of these terrible episodes for months. He was tormented by the possibility that he might have missed something. It was, he thought, time to send his son to another doctor, and so he called an old friend and internist, Andrew Israel. Israel was shocked by how much weight the young man had lost since he’d last seen him. As he hugged him he could feel the bony knobs of his spine beneath his thin shirt. The young man began to describe the strange pain that had come from nowhere and dominated his life for the past three months. It was a tearing, burning pain, always in the upper-left side of his abdomen. And it would come on suddenly — often just after he ate. These excruciating attacks would last a few hours, then, just as unexpectedly, disappear, as if nothing had happened. Recently the attacks were coming more frequently, lasting longer, and were often accompanied by nausea and vomiting. He tried not to eat, since that seemed to be one trigger, but even that wasn’t working anymore. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 11618 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By KEVIN FREKING WASHINGTON -- Families claiming that a mercury-based preservative in vaccines triggers autism will challenge mainstream medicine Monday as they take their case to a federal court. They seek vindication and financial redress from a government fund that helps people injured by shots. Two 10-year-old boys from Portland, Ore., will serve as test cases that determine whether the children and their families in similar situations should be compensated. Attorneys for the boys will attempt to show the boys were happy, healthy and developing normally. But, after being exposed to vaccines with thimerosal, they began to regress and show symptoms of autism. Thimerosal has been removed in recent years from standard childhood vaccines, except flu vaccines that are not packaged in single-doses. The CDC says single-dose flu shots currently are available only in limited quantities. In 2004, a committee with the Institute of Medicine concluded there was no credible evidence that vaccines containing thimerosal caused autism. Overall, nearly 4,900 families have filed claims with the U.S. Court of Claims alleging that vaccines caused autism and other neurological problems in their children. Lawyers for the families will present three different theories of how vaccines caused autism. © 2008 The Associated Press

Keyword: Autism; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 11617 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Diane Mapes You’re lying in bed, just starting to wake up, when you realize you can’t move. Your chest is heavy — like somebody’s sitting on it — and you’re overwhelmed with a feeling of dread. Suddenly, out of the corner of your eye, you see something move. It’s a spider. No, two spiders. No three, four, a dozen or more. They’re big as walnuts and slowly crawling up the bed posts of your bed and onto the blankets, scuttling ever closer towards your paralyzed body. Sound like a cross between “Fear Factor” and “The Twilight Zone?” It’s not. It’s the sort of thing people with sleep paralysis have experienced for centuries. Back in the day, the vivid hallucinations that sometimes occur with this disorder were often attributed to supernatural forces. According to Dr. Carol Ash, medical director of the Sleep for Life Center in Hillsboro, New Jersey, there is a powerful force at work, but it’s not otherworldly. It’s called sleep. “Sleep is a fascinating world, a complex set of neural controls,” she says. “When you go into REM sleep, you’ll develop skeletal muscle paralysis and that’s normal. We all do that. If that weren’t the case, you’d get up and start acting out your dreams, physically going through the motions.” © 2008 Microsoft

Keyword: Sleep; Narcolepsy
Link ID: 11616 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By MARTIN DOWNS If you smoke, no one needs to tell you how bad it is. So why haven’t you quit? Why hasn’t everyone? Because smoking feels good. It stimulates and focuses the mind at the same time that it soothes and satisfies. The concentrated dose of nicotine in a drag off a cigarette triggers an immediate flood of dopamine and other neurochemicals that wash over the brain’s pleasure centers. Inhaling tobacco smoke is the quickest, most efficient way to get nicotine to the brain. “I completely understand why you wouldn’t want to give it up,” said Dr. David Abrams, an addiction researcher at the National Institutes of Health. “It’s more difficult to get off nicotine than heroin or cocaine.” Smoking “hijacks” the reward systems in the brain that drive you to seek food, water and sex, Dr. Abrams explained, driving you to seek nicotine with the same urgency. “Your brain thinks that this has to do with survival of the species,” he said. Nicotine isn’t equally addictive for everyone. A lot of people do not smoke because they never liked it to begin with. Then there are “chippers,” who smoke occasionally but never seem to get hooked. But most people who smoke will eventually do it all day, every day. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11615 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Greg Miller Say you have a load of donated food to deliver to an orphanage in Uganda. But due to circumstances beyond your control, you're forced to make a hard choice: give some of the children enough meals to stave off hunger for several days and let the rest go hungry, or evenly distribute a smaller amount of food so that each child feels full for just a few hours. A study published online today in Science is one of the first to investigate how the brain wrestles with such morally charged tradeoffs. Ming Hsu, a behavioral economist now at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and colleagues Cédric Anen and Steven Quartz at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor brain activity in 26 volunteers as they grappled with a version of the orphanage conundrum. The researchers told the subjects they'd arranged to donate 24 meals to each of 60 children at a real Ugandan orphanage, but that some of the meals would have to be taken away. Inside the fMRI scanner, the volunteers then made a series of decisions between pairs of options shown on a computer screen: One option would take a number of meals away from a single child, and a second option would split the loss between two children. Volunteers might be given the choice, for example, of taking 15 meals from child A and taking seven and eight meals away from children B and C, respectively. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11614 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tina Hesman In research circles the debate is settled. Psychiatric illnesses are disorders rooted in biology. As convincing as the evidence is, mysteries still fog our understanding of mental illnesses. Yes, the disorders stem from problems in the brain, but “on the other hand, for time and ages people have been looking at brains under the microscope, and they don’t see much,” says Schahram Akbarian, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. No lesions, malformations, scars or other outward signs distinguish a mentally ill brain from a healthy one. In recent years, researchers have searched the genome for mutations linked to mental illness. The scans have been fruitful, perhaps too fruitful. Hundreds of genes have been implicated in predisposing a person to such disorders as addiction, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression or anxiety. But no gene has been shown to be a master switch. The debate has raged for decades over whether mental illnesses sprout from nature or nurture. Scientists now suspect both. A new field linking genes and environment may chart the way for solving some of the mysteries shrouding mental illness. Genes alone can only explain a few of the reasons people contract mental illnesses, become addicts or have developmental disorders, such as autism. Identical twins share a genetic makeup, so if genes controlled psychiatric disorders, whenever one twin developed a mental illness, the other would too. But that’s not how it happens. Depending on the disorder, both twins develop it only about half the time. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 11613 - Posted: 06.24.2010