By Nikhil Swaminathan Ask Michael Wigler about the genetic basis of autism, and he will tell you that the standard genetic methods of tracing disease-causing mutations in families with multiple affected members are not working. Although most scientists agree that environmental influences play a role in disease onset, autism has a strong genetic component: among identical twins, if one is autistic, there is a 70 percent chance the other will show the disease, a risk factor nearly 10 times that observed in fraternal twins and regular siblings. Yet years of time and bags of money have been spent unsuccessfully looking for genes linked to the condition. To Wigler, a geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, the key to unlocking autism’s genetic mystery lies in spontaneous mutations—alterations in the parental germ line that are novel in offspring. Last year he proved that spontaneous events contribute to some cases of au­­tism and then formed a controversial theory for the genetics of the disorder. It suggests, among other things, that females, who develop autism with a quarter of the frequency with which males do, may carry the genetic profile for the illness, which they then pass on to their children. As Wigler sees it, conventional genetic studies have failed because they have corralled families that have more than one autistic child to search for differences in one base along the genetic code. These differences, which are presumed to affect neural connectivity, can be an addition, a deletion or a substitution of a base and are known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). In autism research, uncovering SNPs shared by affected people would enable scientists to determine who would have an elevated risk for acquiring the disease or passing it on. © 1996-2007 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11216 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Kerri Smith A drug has been found that treats chronic pain in mice, without the usual painkiller side effects of sedation, addiction or developing tolerance. Whether the compound has the same effect in people remains to be seen, but researchers are approaching the drug's target with "cautious optimism". The compound comes from a well-known class of drugs, the benzodiazepines, that are widely used for sedation or to treat anxiety. Benzodiazepines act on brain pathways involved with pain perception, but have not been very effective at relieving pain. A team led by Hanns Ulrich Zeilhofer of the University of Zurich in Switzerland wanted to know why. They first tested diazepam — commonly known as valium — by injecting it into the spines of mice. The spine is one of the body's direct pain highways, so blocking pain signals here might help avoid side effects that turn up when a drug hits the brain. In this system the researchers found that diazepam could indeed relieve pain — mice that either endured a painful injection or had a nerve squeezed to simulate chronic pain were less bothered if they received the spinal injections. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11215 - Posted: 06.24.2010

These days, it’s tough to know what to worry about. Resistant bacteria? Cancer? Global warming? As it turns out, you’re not going to get any extra help from your brain. Although the human brain is well adapted to respond to risk, it’s not so skilled at sorting out which modern risks to worry about. The current issue of Psychology Today explains why in its article “10 Ways We Get the Odds Wrong.'’ “Our biases reflect the choices that kept our ancestors alive. But we have yet to evolve similarly effective responses to statistics, media coverage, and fear-mongering politicians….Though emotions are themselves critical to making rational decisions, they were designed for a world in which dangers took the form of predators, not pollutants.” Part of the problem is that our emotions have evolved to help our brains make “lightning fast” assessments about risk before we have a chance to think. Things that have been around awhile — snakes and spiders, for instance, scare us. But bigger risks, such as fast driving, don’t trigger the same instinctive response. “Our emotions push us to make snap judgments that once were sensible — but may not be anymore,'’ the author, Maia Szalavitz, writes. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11214 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NEW YORK - Some elderly adults may be more susceptible to fraud because of changes in their brain that affect judgment and decision-making, researchers said on Tuesday. In a series of tests they tried to identify common traits among seniors who had difficulty making decisions and spotting anything misleading to determine what makes them vulnerable to deception. "Our research suggests that elders who fall prey to fraudulent advertising are not simply gullible, depressed, lonely or less intelligent. Rather, it is truly more of a medical or neurological problem," said Natalie Denburg, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa. "Our work sheds new light on this problem and perhaps may lead to a way to identify people at risk of being deceived," she added in a statement. Denburg and her colleagues studied 80 healthy seniors with no apparent neurological problems to see how they make decisions. Their findings were published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Copyright 2008 Reuters.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 11213 - Posted: 01.17.2008

By JAN HOFFMAN WEST ORANGE, N.J. — In the therapy gym for the minimally functional, Jodi Levin props a patient between cushions, kneels behind him and then braces him with her arms. She directs his mother to select photos of his brother and his father. At the coaxing of Ms. Levin, an occupational therapist on the brain injury unit of Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation, the mother holds one photo to the left side of the patient’s head, the other to the right. “Look at Dad’s picture,” Ms. Levin urges. “Dad’s on the left. Find Dad. You can do it!” The patient, wobbly and glazed, tries mightily to understand her command and then heed it by compelling his neck to turn. He almost makes it. Gently letting him go, catching him as he flops, Ms. Levin explains to his mother, “Now I’m working on trunk control.” The man flinches. “It’s the basis of everything,” she continues. “For getting in and out of bed, brushing teeth, getting dressed.” Eight weeks earlier, the patient, 18, wearing a helmet and protective leather gear, had been riding his motorcycle to community college. As he came over a hill, the car in front slowed abruptly; to avoid hitting it, the teenager swerved and was hit by an oncoming car. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 11212 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Aggressive behaviour is very rewarding from a cognitive perspective, with the brain interpreting it as a pleasurable activity on par with sex or recreational drugs, a new mouse study suggests. "It is well known that dopamine is produced in response to rewarding stimuli such as food, sex and drugs of abuse," Maria Couppis, who conducted the study as her doctoral thesis at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, said in a release. "What we have now found is that it also serves as positive reinforcement for aggression." Dopamine is a hormone-like substance that acts as neurotransmitter — translating the effects of things like drugs into sensations. The study of mice involved placing a female and male mouse in a cage, with five other mice in a separate enclosure. In the course of the experiment, the female mouse would be removed from the cage and temporarily replaced with an "intruder" mouse. The aggressiveness of the male mouse was then observed. Over time, the male mouse, trained to poke a target with its nose if it wanted the intruder to arrive again, increasingly signalled it wanted the other mouse to return and that it perceived the encounter as a reward. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Aggression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11211 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE On Thursday, the 12-pound, 32-inch monkey made a 200-pound, 5-foot humanoid robot walk on a treadmill using only her brain activity. She was in North Carolina, and the robot was in Japan. It was the first time that brain signals had been used to make a robot walk, said Dr. Miguel A. L. Nicolelis, a neuroscientist at Duke University whose laboratory designed and carried out the experiment. In 2003, Dr. Nicolelis’s team proved that monkeys could use their thoughts alone to control a robotic arm for reaching and grasping. These experiments, Dr. Nicolelis said, are the first steps toward a brain machine interface that might permit paralyzed people to walk by directing devices with their thoughts. Electrodes in the person’s brain would send signals to a device worn on the hip, like a cell phone or pager, that would relay those signals to a pair of braces, a kind of external skeleton, worn on the legs. “When that person thinks about walking,” he said, “walking happens.” Richard A. Andersen, an expert on such systems at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who was not involved in the experiment, said that it was “an important advance to achieve locomotion with a brain machine interface.” Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 11210 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Sandra G. Boodman One of the most horrifying medical treatments of the 20th century was carried out not clandestinely, but with the approval of the medical establishment, the media and the public. Known as the transorbital or "ice pick" lobotomy, the crude and destructive brain-scrambling operation performed on thousands of psychiatric patients between the 1930s and 1960s was touted as a cure for mental illness. The story of how Freeman sold his procedure to credulous colleagues, assiduously courted the press and convinced desperate families that sticking an ice pick through a patient's upper eye sockets and twirling it like a swizzle stick through brain matter would cure psychosis, depression or troublesome behavior is the ultimate in cautionary medical tales. As the riveting hour-long "American Experience" documentary "The Lobotomist" (scheduled to air Jan. 21 at 9 p.m. on WETA and other PBS stations) makes clear, Freeman's operation reflected the neurologist's peculiar combination of zealotry, talent, hubris and, as one of his trainees noted, craziness. Sometimes Freeman, who relished putting on a show, used a carpenter's mallet instead of a surgical hammer during demonstrations of his operation. At other times, he would operate left-handed rather than right-handed. © 2008 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 11209 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LAURA BLUE It's no secret that men with angry, explosive personalities are at a higher risk of a heart attack. But they're not alone: Nervous, withdrawn and chronically worried people are courting coronary problems, too, according to a new long-term study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Of 735 American middle-aged or elderly men who had good cardiovascular health in 1986, those who scored highest on four different scales of anxiety were far more likely to suffer heart attacks later in life. Men in the top 15% on any of the four scales, or on a combined scale of all four, had a 30% to 40% greater chance of heart attack than their less anxious peers. Researchers have long known that problems of the mind can affect health. Other studies have looked at the relationships between heart-attack risk and factors like "Type A" personality, anger or depression. But "very few studies look at many psychological factors at one time," says Biing-Jiun Shen, lead author on the anxiety paper and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Southern California. "I think that's a unique part of this study." Using data from the U.S. Normative Aging Study, Shen reviewed the men's responses to a series of questions on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (a commonly administered personality test), and pulled out their scores on four separate anxiety scales that measured obsessive or compulsive thoughts; introversion and social exclusion; phobias; and a predisposition to become tense or have a physical reaction, like nausea or hyperventilation, to stressful situations. © 2008 Time Inc

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 11208 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee When diners order an expensive wine from a restaurant menu, they usually find that it tastes exquisite, harmonious, elegant--in short, much better than the $8 Cabernet they drink at home. A new study suggests that the high price tag could be fooling them into feeling that way by manipulating the brain's pleasure centers. Previous studies have shown that savvy marketing can change how we feel about a product. For example, branding a perfume as classy somehow makes it smell more appealing. Curious about how such marketing affects the brain, researchers led by Antonio Rangel, an economist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and Baba Shiv, a marketing professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of 20 volunteers as they sipped what they thought were five kinds of Cabernet Sauvignon. In reality, the researchers gave the subjects three wines with retail prices of $5, $35, and $90. The cheapest wine was served twice but disguised in one of the servings as a different label costing $45. The $90 vintage also made two appearances, once with its real price and once with a price of $10. The faux marketing worked. Volunteers reported liking the cheap wine better when it had a higher price attached to it and the expensive wine less when it was marked cheaper. What's more, when sipping wines tagged with a higher price, the volunteers showed greater activity in their medial orbitofrontal cortex--a part of the brain believed to be responsible for judging pleasantness of experiences--than when they sipped the cheaply marked wines. The findings, published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that marketing actions such as pricing can have a placebo effect on the brain in the same way that dummy pills have been shown to relieve pain. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11207 - Posted: 06.24.2010

It is no easy task to get rid of an itch but scientists say the answer may be in your genes. Researchers have discovered a defective skin gene in people with an inherited skin disorder, which causes itching, especially on the legs. The findings may provide insights into other kinds of itch and could lead to new treatments. Writing in the American Journal of Human Genetics, the team said experts do not really know what causes itching. Chronic itching can be caused by skin disorders like eczema or can stem from deeper problems such as kidney failure or liver disease. It can also be a serious side-effect of cancer therapies or powerful painkillers like morphine and in severe cases leads to sleep problems and scarring. Although itchy skin is one of the most common problems seen by dermatologists, there are few effective therapies. Professor John McGrath, from King's College London, studied a large Brazilian family who suffered from a condition called primary localised cutaneous amyloidosis (PLCA). It affects several thousand people in the UK but is more common in other parts of the world including South America. He found that the disorder was caused by a defective copy of a skin cell gene called oncostatin M receptor-beta (OSMR). Cells with mutant forms of the gene do not respond properly to signalling molecules which prompt an anti-inflammatory response. Normally, itchiness would be prevented by the anti-inflammatory process. (C)BBC

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11206 - Posted: 01.14.2008

By ALEX BERENSON Fibromyalgia is a real disease. Or so says Pfizer in a new television advertising campaign for Lyrica, the first medicine approved to treat the pain condition, whose very existence is questioned by some doctors. For patient advocacy groups and doctors who specialize in fibromyalgia, the Lyrica approval is a milestone. They say they hope Lyrica and two other drugs that may be approved this year will legitimize fibromyalgia, just as Prozac brought depression into the mainstream. But other doctors — including the one who wrote the 1990 paper that defined fibromyalgia but who has since changed his mind — say that the disease does not exist and that Lyrica and the other drugs will be taken by millions of people who do not need them. As diagnosed, fibromyalgia primarily affects middle-aged women and is characterized by chronic, widespread pain of unknown origin. Many of its sufferers are afflicted by other similarly nebulous conditions, like irritable bowel syndrome. Because fibromyalgia patients typically do not respond to conventional painkillers like aspirin, drug makers are focusing on medicines like Lyrica that affect the brain and the perception of pain. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11205 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nick Miroff The crowd is gathering early in the dirt parking lot outside the Clinch Valley Treatment Center, the only methadone clinic within 80 miles. Third in line, Jeff Trapp smokes Winstons in his pickup, watching the cars turn off the highway and settle behind him, tires crunching on cold gravel, headlights glaring. It is 2:45 a.m., and Trapp has been awake for two hours. The clinic does not start dosing until 5. Like Trapp, many of the patients who filled the lot one recent morning have jobs at far-off mines that start at 6 or 7. They sleep upright in their vehicles, slumped against the steering wheel, dressed for work in steel-toed black boots and coveralls lined with orange reflective strips. Dark rings circle their eyes where the previous day's coal dust didn't wash off. "Everybody you see here works," says Trapp, his smoke-cured voice a low rumble. A $14 plug-in heater from "Wally" (Wal-Mart) whirs on the dash. "Ain't no spongers. No loafers," he says. Work in the mines hasn't been as good as it is now in a generation. With per-ton prices doubling in the past six years, Virginia unearthed about $1.6 billion worth of coal in 2006, much of it to feed the growing energy demands of the Washington region. © 2008 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11204 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By WILLIAM WEIR | Courant Staff Writer Women tend to recall their dreams more than men do. Their dreams also focus more on people and clothing. Work, sex and physical aggression tend to be the stuff of men's dreams. So concludes one of the papers collected in "The New Science of Dreaming," a three-volume anthology of scholarly studies of dreams. "I've always been fascinated by the properties of REM [rapid-eye movement] sleep, where most dreams come from," says Patrick McNamara, co-editor of the recently published "The New Science of Dreaming" (Praeger Publishers). "You've got a paralyzed body, the sexual system is active, and on top of this, you're forced to watch these dreams. Why would Mother Nature do this? What could possibly be the function of that? And that's what got me interested." McNamara, an assistant professor of neurology at Boston University School of Medicine, is part of a growing academic field focusing on dreams — where they come from and how they serve us. His co-editor, Dierdre Barrett, is an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School. A recent review in Library Journal predicted their book will become "a seminal work on the science of dreaming." Topics covered in the nearly 1,000 pages include "Drugs and Dreaming," "The Social Network of Characters in Dreams" and "A Neurobiological History of Dreaming." The last essay suggests there might be some truth to a centuries-old notion that dreams are a form of temporary madness; neuro-imaging studies indicate a connection between the mental processes of schizophrenia and REM sleep. © 2008, The Hartford Courant

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 11203 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Kari Huus A trial of a controversial drug cocktail designed to treat meth and cocaine addiction has been halted after an audit found that the treatment’s success rate had been “greatly exaggerated.” The action was a major blow to Hythiam Inc., which licenses the “Prometa protocol” to private doctors and stands to benefit financially if it can gain access to public funding of drug treatment across the country. Coupled with subsequent media reports that public officials who championed the pilot program owned stock in Hythiam, the news sent the company’s shares plummeting from more than $8 a share in October to about $2.75 this week. As first reported by msnbc.com in February 2007, the Prometa treatment has stirred both excitement and skepticism since its debut in 2003. Touted by Hythiam as the first effective treatment for methamphetamine and cocaine addiction, it quickly won converts among some drug treatment specialists who reported “phenomenal” results from its use and from investors who know how profitable it would be to have a magic bullet for the drug addiction scourge. Hythiam doesn't own or produce the three drugs used in the treatment – gabapentin, flumazenil and hydroxyzine -- but claims ownership of a proprietary formulation and delivery of them. © 2008 Microsoft

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11202 - Posted: 06.24.2010

You might not expect a neuroscientist and his lab team to take a field trip to the amusement park Astroworld. Then again, you might not expect volunteers in his experiments to be dropped from a 150-foot height in a freefall. But Baylor College of Medicine Assistant Professor David Eagleman explains that it was all part of a reality check. "What we're trying to figure out is how the brain represents time and one of the common anecdotal reports is that time seems to go in slow motion when people are in fear for their lives—when they are in a car accident or getting mugged or something like that. And so this is the first time that we've put that to the study. And we've actually put people in a situation that's completely safe but extremely scary and we were able to measure whether time actually slows down for people," says Eagleman. "In The Matrix, for the main character, Neo, time actually slows down. He sees things in bullet time– as the bullets are coming towards him he can see it in slow motion and dodge out of the way," Eagleman adds. "And so the question is, does that actually happen to people? Can people actually perceive the world in slow motion like that?" Eagleman decided to do an experiment to find out. © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11201 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Devin Powell When a hungry sparrow hawk is nearby, the Siberian jay sounds an alarm. But not every call is a simple code red. New research reveals that the jays tailor their warnings to reveal whether a predator is hunting, attacking, or just hanging out. The finding, the researcher says, is the first to show such subtle distinctions among avian alarm calls. Scientists have known for 30 years that small birds often use different calls to relay information about predators. The chickadee, for example, gets its name from the harsh "chick-a-dee-dee-dee" sound it makes when it discovers a predatory owl or hawk perched in a tree (ScienceNOW, 23 June 2005). This noise signals other birds to mob the resting raptor, and they scream and dive-bomb the predator to drive it out of their territory. But the chickadee shows more caution when it spots a flying hawk on the hunt. It uses a different call, a high-pitched "seet" sound, to signal that it's time to hide and to keep as still as possible. Michael Griesser, a population biologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, noticed similar behavior among the jays he studies. The birds call out a steady, low-pitched sound while hiding from a hunting hawk and an excited, high-pitched call to gather a mob against a perched hawk. But they also have a third call--a combination of low and high sounds--that distinguishes a hunting hawk in the sky that is looking for prey from a hawk that has spotted its next meal and has begun a downward attack dive. Instead of hiding, Griesser reports in the 8 January issue of Current Biology, the jays react to an attacking hawk by hopping to the exposed tops of trees, where they can search for the predator and prepare for a swift escape. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 11200 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower As scientists inch closer to unraveling autism's causes, this perplexing developmental condition increasingly shows its diverse roots. Consider two new genetic investigations. One finds that spontaneous alterations to a tiny stretch of chromosome 16 contribute to about 1 percent of childhood autism cases. Either a deletion or a duplication of this DNA section raises a child's susceptibility to autism and related disorders, report geneticist Mark J. Daly of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and his colleagues. The researchers plan to determine how tweaks to the DNA segment, which contains about 25 genes, promote autism. Their findings appear online and in an upcoming New England Journal of Medicine. "This is one piece in the autism puzzle, but it's one of the few pieces that we have," Daly says. The group of developmental disorders that includes autism affects as many as 1 in 150 children by age 3. Daly's team used novel DNA-screening techniques to identify variations in the number of copies of each gene in the genomes of members of 751 families. Each family included two or more children diagnosed with autism or a related disorder, for a total of 1,441 affected youngsters. ©2008 Society for Science & the Public

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11199 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Karen Schrock Have you ever emerged from a matinee movie, squinted into the sudden burst of sunlight and sneezed uncontrollably? Up to a third of the population will answer this question with an emphatic "Yes!" (whereas nearly everyone else scratches their head in confusion). Sneezing as the result of being exposed to a bright light—known as the photic sneeze reflex—is a genetic quirk that is still unexplained by science, even though it has intrigued some of history's greatest minds. Aristotle mused about why one sneezes more after looking at the sun in The Book of Problems: "Why does the heat of the sun provoke sneezing?" He surmised that the heat of the sun on the nose was probably responsible. Some 2 ,000 years later, in the early 17th century, English philosopher Francis Bacon neatly refuted that idea by stepping into the sun with his eyes closed—the heat was still there, but the sneeze was not (a compact demonstration of the fledgling scientific method). Bacon's best guess was that the sun's light made the eyes water, and then that moisture ("braine humour," literally) seeped into and irritated the nose. Humours aside, Bacon's moisture hypothesis seemed quite reasonable until our modern understanding of physiology made it clear that the sneeze happens too quickly after light exposure to be the result of the comparatively sluggish tear ducts. So neurology steps in: Most experts now agree that crossed wires in the brain are probably responsible for the photic sneeze reflex. © 1996-2007 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11198 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Tom Simonite Physically disabled people must be able to switch on brain-computer interfaces without external help if the futuristic devices are to give them greater freedoms, say researchers beginning to study the little-addressed problem. Brain computer interfaces (BCI) allow incapacitated people to control robotic limbs, steer wheelchairs, type messages, and even walk through a virtual worlds using their brain activity instead of a physical control. Typically, such machines use an EEG machine to sense a person's brain waves via electrodes in a skullcap. But the newfound freedoms offered by these interfaces rely on having someone around to boot up the equipment first. So Reinhold Scherer at Graz University of Technology, Austria, and colleagues have started testing ideas that could solve this problem for EEG-based interfaces. Scherer notes that shutting down a BCI is relatively simple since the user can manoeuvre a thought-controlled cursor or operate a keyboard to enter the necessary command. "It is switching it on that is not so simple," he says. "We want these interfaces to improve quality of life and give independence," Scherer continues. "But every time you want to use them you rely on others." Journal reference: Journal of Neural Engineering (10.1088/1741-2560/4/4/L01) © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 11197 - Posted: 06.24.2010