By Martin Portner She did not often have such strong emotions. But she suddenly felt powerless against her passion and the desire to throw herself into the arms of the cousin whom she saw at a family funeral. “It can only be because of that patch,” said Marianne, a participant in a multinational trial of a testosterone patch designed to treat hypoactive sexual desire disorder, in which a woman is devoid of libido. Testosterone, a hormone ordinarily produced by the ovaries, is linked to female sexual function, and the women in this 2005 study had undergone operations to remove their ovaries. After 12 weeks of the trial, Marianne had felt her sexual desire return. Touching herself unleashed erotic sensations and vivid sexual fantasies. Eventually she could make love to her husband again and experienced an orgasm for the first time in almost three years. But that improvement was not because of testosterone, it turned out. Marianne was among the half of the women who had received a placebo patch—with no testosterone in it at all. Marianne’s experience underlines the complexity of sexual arousal. Far from being a simple issue of hormones, sexual desire and orgasm are subject to various influences on the brain and nervous system, which controls the sex glands and genitals. And many of those influences are environmental. Recent research, for example, shows that visual stimuli spur sexual stirrings in women, as they do in men. Mari­anne’s desire may have been invigorated by conversations or thoughts about sex she had as a result of taking part in the trial. Such stimuli may help relieve inhibitions or simply whet a person’s appetite for sex. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 11638 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Last summer, Mark Cheslen noticed that his dog Roxi was having trouble playing fetch at the local lake. Soon, Roxi’s vision deteriorated “to the point where she couldn’t see anything straight ahead, to the point that we’d walk out of the room and she’d still be looking up just to think we were still there,” Chelsen says. The vet’s diagnosis: a degenerative retinal disease with no known cure. That’s a hard answer for any pet owner to hear, and for Chelsen, more bad news was coming. Over the next few months, his nine-year old golden retriever also was found to have a brain tumor and a lung problem that eventually caused her death this past winter. But during Roxi’s last weeks, Chelsen did have a source of comfort: Roxi could see. Under the care of researcher and veterinary ophthalmologist Sinisa Grozdanic at Iowa State University, Roxi was the first dog to receive an experimental treatment for her retinal degeneration disease, a condition which can afflict dogs of any age. Grozdanic says after that the treatment, Roxi “pretty much recovered the vision to the point of a healthy dog.” Mark Chelsen says that as Roxi passed away, she “watched us as if to say good bye. Imagine if she could not see.” Grozdanic cautions that Roxi’s result may not be typical. But in her case at least, the result of the eye treatment was dramatic. “If somebody told me that this is possible, a month ago, I would say that it’s just a pure lie,” says Grozdanic. © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Vision; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 11637 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower Just because there’s no patent office in the jungle doesn’t mean that its inhabitants are uninventive. Japanese researchers working in a forested region of Guinea, West Africa, have issued a rare description of a chimpanzee creating a new form of tool use and later instituting improvements to the technique. In March 2003, a team led by primatologist Shinya Yamamoto of Kyoto University saw a 5-year-old male chimp known as JJ sitting in a tree, fishing carpenter ants out of a hollow in the trunk with a long stick. During the researchers’ 27 years of studying chimps almost year-round in Guinea’s Bossou community, they had never observed such behavior. Bossou chimps prefer to poke long sticks into nests of driver ants on the ground and then swipe the ant-coated tools across their mouths for a quick snack. This behavior is called ant-dipping. JJ’s initial forays into what’s called ant-fishing, a behavior typical of some chimp communities elsewhere in Africa, achieved limited success. He managed to capture and consume ants on only three of 14 attempts, using roughly 34 centimeter–long sticks. Each attempt lasted 10 to 13 minutes. JJ also received three painful ant bites for his trouble. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Evolution; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11636 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Susan Levine When Chuck Jackson takes his seat this morning before a U.S. Senate committee, he'll not lack for names or faces as he talks about the devastation that a disease called Alzheimer's has visited upon his family. His grandfather John. A dozen aunts and uncles. His mother, Rachel; a brother, Danny. Plus every year, a growing list of cousins. For decades, he'll say, most of them knew it only as the "family disease." It struck them almost always at young ages. Jackson's mother was 44 when she said, "I'm not right in the head anymore," and her son, barely into his teens, became the default caregiver on their small farm in the Oklahoma Panhandle. He will tell the Special Committee on Aging about the sometimes bizarre symptoms, the inexorable losses. He will also tell the panel how Alzheimer's overshadows his own life. His illness was diagnosed four years ago, when he was 50. His generation is at least the fifth to bear such a burden. "Enough generations," he said. Jackson is speaking out as few of his relatives ever dared to do. He is part of a nascent self-advocacy movement in Washington and other cities, an assertion of courage, even defiance, given the stigma attached to dementia. For most people, Alzheimer's is a synonym for fear and despair. © 2008 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 11635 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jerry Adler With eight months left in 2008, it might be premature to choose the weirdest book of the year, but "The Woman Who Can't Forget," the memoir of a 42-year-old California woman named Jill Price, will be hard to beat. It poses a thought-provoking question—what would it be like to recall almost every day of your life since childhood?—and then unintentionally answers: it's like being stuck on an airplane watching an endless loop of security-camera video. Oddly, in this era of luridly factitious memoirs, Price's comes with unimpeachable credentials. She first came to public attention in 2006 as "AJ," the pseudonymous subject of a paper in the journal Neurocase entitled "A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering." The lead author, James L. McGaugh, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine, spent five years bombarding Price with psychological, neurological and physiological tests to investigate what was going on inside her otherwise quite ordinary mind. He coined a new term for her condition, "hyperthymestic syndrome." It means "overdeveloped memory," but of a very particular kind. Price has no special aptitude for memorizing lists of words or numbers, or for facts or stories or languages. She was an average student. What Price does remember—obsessively, uncontrollably and with remarkable accuracy—is stuff that happened to her. Price's memory, which she describes as "shockingly complete" beginning in 1974, when she was 8, and "near perfect" from 1980 on, appears to be organized like a diary. Given a date from the last 30 years, she can instantly summon up the day of the week, and usually at least some tidbit of biographical trivia. "On Friday afternoon, October 19, 1979," she writes, "I came home from school and had some soup because it was unusually cold that day." © 2008 Newsweek, Inc.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11634 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rick Hanley and Debi Roberson How do we perceive a rainbow? And does everyone perceive a rainbow in the same way? These seemingly simple questions can reveal some interesting features of the human brain. For instance, is the “striped” appearance of the rainbow—the seven distinct bands of color that we see—a construct of our higher mental processes, or do the mechanics of human color vision determine it at a very early perceptual level? If your language does not have separate words for “blue” and “green” (and many languages, including Welsh, do not), do you perceive these shades as more similar than a speaker of English? Searching for answers to these questions, in recent years many scientists have concluded that speakers of languages that label color in ways distinct from those used in English may see a different rainbow from that of English speakers. Recent studies have claimed that language processing is automatically involved in perceptual decisions about color in the brains of adults, even when hues are visible only briefly (100 milliseconds) or when decisions do not require participants to name colors verbally. Moreover, these effects are language-specific, so speakers of Russian or Korean show a different pattern of responses to color than speakers of English. A recent study in PNAS by researchers at the University of Surrey challenges this view, however. It suggests an intriguing and novel account of color categorization in infants. In this study 18 English-speaking adults and 13 four-month-old infants were shown a colored target on a colored background. Adults were faster to initiate eye-movements toward the target when the target and background colors came from different color categories (for example, blue target, green background) than when both target and background were the same color (such as different shades of blue). © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 11633 - Posted: 06.24.2010

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