Certain variations in a gene that helps regulate response to stress tend to protect adults who were abused in childhood from developing depression, according to new research funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health. Adults who had been abused but didn't have the variations in the gene had twice the symptoms of moderate to severe depression, compared to those with the protective variations. "People's biological variations set the stage for how they respond to different environmental factors, like stress, that can lead to depression," said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D. "Knowing what those variations are eventually could help clinicians individualize care for their patients by predicting who may be at risk or suggesting more precise avenues for treatment." Almost 15 million U.S. adults have major depression. The new report adds to evidence that a combination of gene variations and life experiences promote the disorder or protect people from it. Variations in many genes are thought to be involved, but few of them have been identified. The study also supports previous evidence that a stress hormone, corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), plays a role in depression. The variations are in a gene that makes a receptor for the hormone. Receptors are proteins that act as binding sites, in or on cells, for chemical messengers that affect cell function. The receptor for CRH is called CRHR1.

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11277 - Posted: 02.05.2008

Fitting in at school can be tough for children with attention problems.(Phil Marino for The New York Times)What does it feel like to have attention deficit disorder? The answer to that question can be found in a fascinating new report from the Journal of Pediatric Nursing called “I Have Always Felt Different.'’ The article gives a glimpse into the experience of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D., from a child’s perspective. Assistant professors Robin Bartlett and Mona M. Shattell, from the School of Nursing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, interviewed 16 college students who had been diagnosed with A.D.H.D. as children. The investigators talked to them about how the disorder affected life at home, school and friendships. Like most kids, the students described a life of both conflict with and support from their parents. But in their case, fighting with parents was often triggered by attention-related problems like failing to complete laundry chores or cleaning their rooms. Doing things for my parents and being aware of what needs to be done around the house, that’s the only time it really gets to me or hurts me. Despite the conflict, many students viewed their parents as supportive. One student noted that support from parents often felt like “nagging,'’ but they had little choice. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 11276 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A short afternoon nap can boost a person's ability to perform memory-based tasks, but only if they've learned the task well beforehand, says a U.S. study. Harvard Medical School researchers showed that subjects who took a 45-minute nap between memory tests were more likely to improve their scores the second time than those who remained awake. The catch is that only those who scored well on the tests before their nap — that is, those who learned the tasks well — showed real improvement in their repeat performances. Those who did well on the initial test but were not allowed to sleep did not see the same improvement in the second round. Those who did not do well in the first memory tests were not helped by taking a nap. Their re-test results were similar to those who likewise did poorly on the first tests and then stayed awake. The study, published Friday in the peer-reviewed journal SLEEP, followed 11 men and 22 women with an average age of 23. The participants were trained in various memory tasks, including learning their way through a maze and pairing words. Shortly afterward, 16 subjects took a 45-minute afternoon nap while 17 remained awake in the lab. After the nap, all subjects remained in the lab until the retest about two hours later. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11275 - Posted: 06.24.2010

WASHINGTON - Government regulators said Friday the connection between Pfizer's anti-smoking drug Chantix and serious psychiatric problems is "increasingly likely." The Food and Drug Administration began in November investigating reports of depression, agitation and suicidal behavior in patients taking the popular twice-daily pill. The agency's announcement comes two weeks after Pfizer added stronger warnings to the drug. In doing so, the company stressed that a direct link between Chantix and the reported psychiatric problems has not been established, but could not be ruled out. In a public advisory released Friday, FDA said patients taking Chantix should tell their doctor about any history of mental illness. "Chantix may cause worsening of current psychiatric illness even if it is currently under control," reads the statement. "It may also cause an old psychiatric illness to reoccur." Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11274 - Posted: 02.04.2008

By David Brown Fittingly, the first person to detect a faint signal in all the noise was the interpreter. The 33-year-old woman who worked for eight years working with Spanish-speaking patients at a medical clinic in southern Minnesota noticed something familiar as she translated the story of a young meatpacker last September. Earlier last summer, she had heard a version of it from two other workers at the same slaughterhouse, and had told it to their doctors, who were different from her current patient's. When the consultation was over, she pointed this out. The interpreter's insight set in motion a story, still unfolding, that may be making envious the ghost of Berton Roueche, the legendary chronicler of medical mysteries at the New Yorker magazine. A new disease has surfaced in 12 people among the 1,300 employees at the factory run by Quality Pork Processors about 100 miles south of Minneapolis. The ailment is characterized by sensations of burning, numbness and weakness in the arms and legs. For most, this is unpleasant but not disabling. For a few, however, the ailment has made walking difficult and work impossible. The symptoms have slowly lessened in severity, but in none of the sufferers has it disappeared completely. © 2008 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11273 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Joan Raymond Are men smarter than women? No. But they sure think they are. An analysis of some 30 studies by British researcher Adrian Furnham, a professor of psychology at University College London, shows that men and women are fairly equal overall in terms of IQ. But women, it seems, underestimate their own candlepower (and that of women in general), while men overestimate theirs. Furnham talks to NEWSWEEK's Joan Raymond about his findings and why perceived IQ matters. Excerpts: NEWSWEEK: Many studies show that men score slightly higher in IQ tests. Is this significant? Adrian Furnham: Universally, men tend to score higher on certain specialized skills, such as spatial awareness. In the real world, that means they might be better at reading maps or navigating. Women score higher in terms of language development and emotional intelligence. But most experts agree there is no real, important overall difference when it comes to gender and intelligence. But women think they aren't as smart as men? That's the conundrum. What I study is "perceived intelligence," essentially how smart people think they are. I analyzed 30 international studies, and what I found was that women, across the world, tend to underplay their intelligence, while men overstate it. © 2008 Newsweek, Inc.

Keyword: Intelligence; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11272 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers using MRI imaging have gone from studying peoples' brains to identifying specific thoughts, allowing them to tell which of 10 similar objects a person is viewing or thinking about. Functional MRI imaging has shown a lot about how our brains respond to pleasure and rewards, and has revealed brain processes and areas involved in deception. And neuroscientists have been wiring the brain's motor neurons to enable paralyzed patients to control prosthetics, computers and robots. But the new research is aimed at the biology underlying thoughts-- or, as scientists call them, "cognitive processes." Carnegie Mellon cognitive psychologist Marcel Just teamed up with machine learning expert Tom Mitchell to conduct the research. They scanned the brains of people who looked at sets images of similar objects-- like 10 types of tools, or 10 types of homes. The researchers excluded the vision area of the brain from the scans "because it's almost too easy a target," explains Just. "The visual cortex really contains a very faithful, accurate representation of a shape that your looking at-- whatever is on your retina gets translated to your visual cortex at the back of your brain. And if you look for that pattern, that's a lot easier, so we can be very accurate there." © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 11271 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers have found that in mice, the brain responds to aggression in the same way as other pleasures. Craig Kennedy, chairman of the Special Education Department at Vanderbilt University, says the work shows, "for mice aggression is rewarding and that dopamine's involved in that rewarding affect in the same areas of the brain that's rewarding for drugs, sex, can't say rock and roll with mice, but anything that seems to be pleasant." Whenever we do something we like, brains in both animals and people release a drug called dopamine. When it attaches to receptors in the brain, it creates a pleasure circuit, sending out a signal of good feeling. Researchers are studying the role dopamine plays in a number of activities ranging from alcohol, drugs, and gambling, to food and even exercise. As an educator interested in students with special needs, Kennedy has seen children with autism who show aggression towards other people. He's spent much of the past 25 years trying to understand what he calls the "neurobiology of aggression." He says, "that's led us to working with mice in the lab to try to ask some questions about what goes on in the brain during aggression." He notes that aggression is present in "all kinds of animals, from flies to monkeys," and adds, "Being aggressive can be very adaptive (useful) in the wild. It allows you to gain access to food, maintain territory, access to mates, protect offspring; so it's a very adaptive set of behaviors." Kennedy emphasizes, however, that when too much aggression shows up in today's humans, it sometimes presents a problem. © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Aggression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11270 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A species of hummingbird makes a chirping noise with its tail feathers, not its throat, a study using high-speed video has suggested. The exact source of the noise from male Anna's hummingbirds has been the subject of debate among researchers. By using specialised footage, a team of US scientists were able to show that male hummingbirds' tail feathers vibrated during high-speed dives. The findings appear in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal. The loud chirp sound is produced by male Anna's hummingbirds (Calypte anna) as the birds dive towards the ground at speeds that exceed 50mph (80km/h) during their displays for nearby females. The researchers, Chris Clarke and Teresa Feo from the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in their paper that they had gathered evidence that put an end to the uncertainty surrounding the source of the sound. "Production of the sound was originally attributed to the tail, but a more recent study argued that the sound was vocal. "We use high-speed video of diving birds, experimental manipulation on wild birds and laboratory experiments on individual feathers to show that the dive sound is made by tail feathers," they explained. The pair added that while bird vocalisation had received considerable attention, non-vocal or "mechanical" sounds had been "poorly described". "A diverse array of birds apparently make mechanical sounds with their feathers. Few studies have established that these sounds are non-vocal, and the mechanics of how these sounds are produced remain poorly studied," the scientists wrote. (C)BBC

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 11269 - Posted: 02.01.2008

By Chip Walter When passion takes a grip, a kiss locks two humans together in an exchange of scents, tastes, textures, secrets and emotions. We kiss furtively, lasciviously, gently, shyly, hungrily and exuberantly. We kiss in broad daylight and in the dead of night. We give ceremonial kisses, affectionate kisses, Hollywood air kisses, kisses of death and, at least in fairytales, pecks that revive princesses. Lips may have evolved first for food and later applied themselves to speech, but in kissing they satisfy different kinds of hungers. In the body, a kiss triggers a cascade of neural messages and chemicals that transmit tactile sensations, sexual excitement, feelings of closeness, motivation and even euphoria. Not all the messages are internal. After all, kissing is a communal affair. The fusion of two bodies dispatches communiqués to your partner as powerful as the data you stream to yourself. Kisses can convey important information about the status and future of a relationship. So much, in fact, that, according to recent research, if a first kiss goes bad, it can stop an otherwise promising relationship dead in its tracks. Some scientists believe that the fusing of lips evolved because it facilitates mate selection. “Kissing,” said evolutionary psychologist Gordon G. Gallup of the University at Albany, State University of New York, last September in an interview with the BBC, “involves a very complicated exchange of information—olfactory information, tactile information and postural types of adjustments that may tap into underlying evolved and unconscious mechanisms that enable people to make determinations … about the degree to which they are genetically incompatible.” Kissing may even reveal the extent to which a partner is willing to commit to raising children, a central issue in long-term relationships and crucial to the survival of our species. © 1996-2007 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11268 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By GARDINER HARRIS and BENEDICT CAREY Drugs for epilepsy, bipolar illness and mood problems double the risks of suicidal thoughts and behavior, and patients taking them should be watched for sudden behavioral changes, drug regulators have said. The increased risks, while double in relative terms, are small. The Food and Drug Administration undertook a combined analysis of 199 clinical trials with 43,892 patients and found 4 suicides and 105 reports of suicidal symptoms among the 27,863 patients who were given the drugs compared to no suicides and 35 reports of suicidal symptoms among the 16,029 patients treated with placebos. Taken together, the risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior was 0.43 percent for those on drug therapy and 0.22 percent for those given placebos. These medications are primarily used to help epileptics control seizures and to calm the surges in energy and mood that, along with bouts of depression, characterize bipolar disorder. The drugs, which include Depakote, Lamictal, Topamax, Keppra, Lyrica and Neurontin, are sometimes prescribed for chronic pain and headaches, as well. Doctors said Thursday that the increased risk did not outweigh the benefits of the drugs. “What’s really important to say is that bipolar disorder is very difficult to treat, the burden is enormous, and these medications help keep people free of mood and anxiety symptoms and allow them to function,” said Andrew A. Nierenberg, medical director of the bipolar clinic and research program at Massachusetts General Hospital. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epilepsy; Depression
Link ID: 11267 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Douglas E. Vetter The hammer, anvil and stirrup—also known as the malleus, incus, and stapes, respectively, and collectively, as "middle ear ossicles"—are the smallest bones in the human body. Found in the middle ear, they are a part of the auditory system between the eardrum and the cochlea (the spiral-shaped conduit housing hair cells that are involved in transmitting sound to the brain). To understand the role of these bones in hearing requires an understanding of levers. This is because the middle ear ossicles are arranged and interact with each other as a lever system. All levers generate a mechanical advantage. They are used to exert a large force over a small distance at one end of the lever by applying a smaller force over a longer distance at the opposite end. The leveraging capabilities of the middle ear ossicles are needed to generate the large forces that allow us to hear. As terrestrial animals, we live in a gaseous environment. But, our inner ear is filled with fluid, and this represents a problem. As an example, most people have first hand knowledge of hearing underwater. If someone screams at you from above the water's surface, the sounds are tremendously muted, making it difficult to understand or even hear at all. That is simply because most of the sound is reflected off the water's surface. © 1996-2007 Scientific American Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 11266 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Stephen Baker Forget focus groups. Companies that want feedback on a product are getting inside consumers' heads—literally. The latest rage in marketing involves harnessing a test subject to a narrow shelf, securing the head tightly, and introducing the body into the tube of a $3 million functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (FMRI). For about $1,000 per hour, researchers flash images for their tightly trussed subjects, play advertisements, and read promotional literature. All the while, they study the second-by-second response of the brain. This is neuromarketing. And researchers from the consulting firm of FKF Applied Research in Los Angeles to Neurosense in Oxford, Britain, are using the technique to study what happens in different regions of the brain. Activity in the almond-shaped amydala, for example, shows early alerts of fear and danger. The challenge is to use that data to determine whether, say, people are likely to watch an episode of Viacom's (VIA) South Park or buy a fuel-efficient Honda Motor hybrid car (see BusinessWeek.com, 10/08/07). If this sounds like a golden opportunity for marketers to hawk questionable conclusions from brain studies as unfiltered truth, it is. Researchers predict that neuromarketing will produce plenty of hype bordering on fantasy in the coming year or two. Despite this, many swear by the technology. Unlike information culled from traditional focus groups, the signals issuing from the brain can point to what the subjects are really thinking and feeling. Brain scans bypass the pride and shame and peer pressure that lead subjects in focus groups to edit their responses. In that sense, the scans are close cousins of lie detectors. Copyright 2000-2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc

Keyword: Brain imaging; Emotions
Link ID: 11265 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nikhil Swaminathan Scientists have found that a lessened supply of new nerve cells in the adult brain apparently triggers short-term memory loss typically associated with aging, setting the stage for one day developing therapies designed to maintain a steady supply of fresh neurons to keep the mind sharp. "Neurogenesis (nerve-cell production) goes down with age … it's known that with old age there's a decrease in short- term memory," says Ronald Evans, a genetics professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif. "We know that if we can increase the process, we know what the consequence could be in the brain, which would be to increase short-term learning and memory." "New experiences, new memories [and] new learning [are] greatly facilitated by neurogenesis," he adds. "Neurogenesis is in fact a fundamental feature of learning and memory. … Neurogenesis goes down with age; and, it's known that with old age there's a decrease in short-term memory." Evans is co-author of a study published in Nature that shows impaired short-term memory and learning in adult mice, in which scientists blocked the process of neurogenesis. They did this by engineering mice that lacked one copy of the gene responsible for the production of Tlx, a protein that the team had previously determined was crucial to maintaining and renewing the arsenal of neural stem cells. © 1996-2007 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 11264 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Heidi Ledford US soldiers who became concussed during deployment in Iraq are more likely to report poor general health than are veterans with other injuries, a study has found. But questions remain about what causes those lingering health problems: the physical blow to the head, or the emotional trauma associated with violent experiences. A study released today, in the New England Journal of Medicine, notes that the link between concussion and poor health might have resulted from higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder in those with head injuries1. "The possibility that symptoms could be accounted for by emotional disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder is very important for us to know," says Roger Pitman, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. "We have to be very careful about who we call 'brain-damaged', because of the possible adverse effects of labelling people in this way." Traumatic brain injuries are the most common physical injury seen in troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan — largely thanks to improvised explosive devices. They have been designated a 'signature' of the two conflicts. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Stress
Link ID: 11263 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas -- Feline defensive rage, the aggressive cat behavior that recently led to the death of a California zoo visitor by a tiger that felt threatened, is comparable to human rage, both in the way that it emerges and unleashes in the brain, suggests a new study. Because scientists are gaining a better understanding of the mammalian brain's recipe for rage, violent behavior in humans and other mammals may one day be quelled with improved drug therapies. For cats, such a drug could prevent the hissing, back arching, ear retraction, claw extensions and fur standing-on-end that are typical indicators of feline defensive rage. In humans, related anger reveals itself with road rage, an impulsive form of anger that involves little or no thought. "In road rage, the person never thinks about what he is doing but just acts in the way he does because he feels that he has been threatened by someone else and the impulsive behavior represents a way by which he can protect himself from such a threat," co-author Allan Siegel told Discovery News. "In reality, his actions are usually much more dangerous to him than to the person whom he perceived cut him off on the road," added Siegel, a professor in the Department of Neurology & Neurosciences at New Jersey Medical School in Newark. © 2008 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Emotions; Aggression
Link ID: 11262 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Constance Holden Like a skyscraper skeleton that goes up overnight--but doesn't get windows for another decade--languages evolve in fits and starts, according to a new study. The idea that languages evolve in bursts, rather than gradually, isn't new. When applied to species, it's called punctuated evolution. But the idea is controversial in both fields--and proof has been hard to come by. Now, scientists in the United Kingdom say they've mustered the power of mathematics to demonstrate the phenomenon in the evolution of languages. The researchers, headed by evolutionary biologist Quentin Atkinson and mathematician Mark Pagel of the University of Reading, looked at related versions, or homologs, of common words in three of the world's major language families: Indo-European, Bantu, and Austronesian. Like species, changes in languages can be tracked through the fate of certain words, just as mutations in key genes can tell a species' history. The words the researchers tracked are from the so-called Swadesh lists: compilations of heavily used words denoting things such as numbers or body parts that change little over time and are rarely borrowed, making them good clues about how one language relates to another. An example from the Indo-European language family is the words for "water" in English, German ("Wasser"), Hittite ("watar"), and Russian ("voda"). Despite many borrowings, English is much further from Latin languages such as French, according to the Swadesh lists. Consider, for example, the French for water--"eau." © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 11261 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Dan Jones “It is scientifically incorrect to say that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors … that war or any other violent behaviour is genetically programmed into our human nature … [and] that humans have a 'violent brain'.” These are the ringing words of the 'Seville Statement on Violence', fashioned by 20 leading natural and social scientists in 1986 as part of the United Nations International Year of Peace, and later adopted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It was written to counter the pessimistic view that violence and war are inevitable features of human life. The decades since have not been kind to these cherished beliefs. A growing number of psychologists, neuroscientists and anthropologists have accumulated evidence that understanding many aspects of antisocial behaviour, including violence and murder, requires the study of brains, genes and evolution, as well as the societies those factors have wrought. At the same time, though, historians, archaeologists and criminologists have started to argue that in most places life was more violent — and more likely to end in murder — in the past than it is today. The time span of this apparent decline in violence has been too short for appeals to natural selection to be convincing. If humans have evolved to kill, then it seems that they have also evolved to live without killing, given the right circumstances. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 11260 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Linda Carroll When her 5-year-old son showed up at the door with a black eye and a bloody cut on his head, Brooke Fike knew it was time to take on the bullies. For weeks, several boys at school had been swinging their backpacks into her son's head. One day they dumped a carton of milk over him during lunch. As Fike tried to remedy the problem, she realized that the bullies seemed to be the kids in class who couldn’t sit still and listen. They didn’t do their homework. They were almost constantly in motion. Turns out, those behaviors could have been the first clue to parents and school officials that these boys might be the ones who were going to turn into bullies. A new study shows that children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are almost four times as likely as others to be bullies. And, in an intriguing corollary, the children with ADHD symptoms were almost 10 times as likely as others to have been regular targets of bullies prior to the onset of those symptoms, according to the report in the February issue of the journal Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology. © 2008 MSNBC Interactive

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 11259 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas -- Sperm whales literally drift to sleep, but it's a snooze like no other, according to a recent study that found whales perform slow, rhythmic dives as they slumber. Because these drift dives keep the whales in constant motion as they rest, scientists now think the seafaring mammals sleep with one side of their brain at a time. The two sides alternate until both are rested. Sperm whales might even break a world record for least amount of sleep needed by a mammal. "If the only sleep sperm whales get is during these drift dives, it would be less than any mammal studied so far," lead author Patrick Miller told Discovery News. Miller, a senior research fellow at the University of St. Andrews Gatty Marine Research Institute, and his colleagues affixed suction cups with data-logging tags onto 59 sperm whales at various open-water locations worldwide. The tags allowed the scientists to monitor the whales' movements 24/7. The researchers, whose study was recently published in Current Biology, noticed the whales performed the mesmerizing drift dives 7.1 percent of the time, usually between 6 p.m. and midnight. The scientists observed two types of drift dives. The first, head-up drift dives, happen when a whale's rear end slowly sinks into the water from a horizontal posture. © 2008 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Sleep; Evolution
Link ID: 11258 - Posted: 06.24.2010