Obesity Spreads In Social Circles As Trends Do, Study Indicates By Rob Stein Obesity appears to spread from one person to another like a virus or a fad, researchers reported yesterday in a first-of-its-kind study that helps explain -- and could help fight -- one of the nation's biggest public health problems. The study, involving more than 12,000 people tracked over 32 years, found that social networks play a surprisingly powerful role in determining an individual's chances of gaining weight, transmitting an increased risk of becoming obese from wives to husbands, from brothers to brothers and from friends to friends. The researchers found that when one spouse became obese, the other was 37 percent more likely to do so in the next two to four years, compared with other couples. If a man became obese, his brother's risk rose by 40 percent. The risk climbed even more sharply among friends -- between 57 and 171 percent, depending on whether they considered each other mutual friends. Moreover, friends affected friends' risk even when they lived far apart, and the influence cascaded through three degrees of separation before petering out, the researchers found. "It's almost a cliche to speak of the obesity epidemic as being an epidemic. But we wanted to see if it really did spread from person to person like a fashion or a germ," said Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard Medical School, who led the study, being published tomorrow in the New England Journal of Medicine. "And the answer is, 'Yes, it does.' We are finding evidence for a kind of social contagion." © 2007 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 10533 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Many people believe potentially harmful myths about epilepsy, a study from University College London suggests. A third would put something in the mouth of a person having a seizure to stop them swallowing their tongue - but doing so could block their airways. And 67% of the 4,605 people asked would call an ambulance immediately, Epilepsy and Behavior journal reports. This is only needed for first seizures, those lasting over five minutes, if the person is hurt or has several seizures. The authors questioned 4,605 staff and students from the university on what happens when someone has a seizure and how they should be helped. Seizures are caused by sudden bursts of electrical activity in the brain, which stops the brain communicating normally with the body, and epilepsy is diagnosed in people who have regularly recurring seizures. Symptoms depend on the type of seizure, and experts recommend that if someone has a seizure, objects around them are removed and their head is cushioned if they are on the floor. Apart from that the seizure should be allowed to run its course. The authors focused on four key myths surrounding seizures: the need to call an ambulance, the need to put something in their mouth so they do not swallow their tongue, and the incidence of foaming at the mouth and violence in seizures. In fact, foaming and violence are not common symptoms of seizures but many people still believed these myths. (C)BBC

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 10532 - Posted: 07.25.2007

Randy Harris THE first farm animal Gene Baur ever snatched from a stockyard was a lamb he named Hilda. That was 1986. She’s now buried under a little tombstone near the center of Farm Sanctuary, 180 acres of vegan nirvana here in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. Back then, Mr. Baur was living in a school bus near a tofu factory in Pennsylvania and selling vegetarian hot dogs at Grateful Dead concerts to support his animal rescue operation. Now, more than a thousand animals once destined for the slaughterhouse live here and on another Farm Sanctuary property in California. Farm Sanctuary has a $5.7 million budget, fed in part by a donor club named after his beloved Hilda. Supporters can sign up for a Farm Sanctuary MasterCard. A $200-a-seat gala dinner in Los Angeles this fall will feature seitan Wellington and stars like Emily Deschanel and Forest Whitaker. As Farm Sanctuary has grown, so too has its influence. Soon, due in part to the organization’s work, veal calves and pregnant pigs in Arizona won’t be kept in cages so tight they can’t turn around. Eggs from cage-free hens have become so popular that there is a national shortage. A law in Chicago bans the sale of foie gras. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 10531 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nikhil Swaminathan In work that may one day lead to earlier detection of children at risk of developing autism, a team of scientists has devised a genetic model for the enigmatic disorder. The two-tiered theory integrates families with one or more autistic children. An estimated one in every 150 children born in the U.S. develops autism, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); it is four times more prevalent in boys than in girls. The condition is characterized by cognitive deficiencies and symptoms ranging from antisocial (not responding to one's name and / or avoiding eye contact) to obsessive, repetitive behavior. The most popular theory about its genesis is that there are flaws in several genes passed down through generations of a family that culminate to predispose a child to the disorder, especially if exposed to certain environmental factors such as toxic chemicals or a lack of oxygen at birth. "People thought there was this uniform risk—if you have an autistic child, then there's some uniform, but fairly low, risk that you'll have another one," says Michael Wigler, a professor of genomics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in Long Island, N.Y., and senior author of the new model described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. "None of the population geneticists, in my experience, had thought that there might be two classes of families: low risk and high risk." The team determined that most cases of autism arise from novel, spontaneous mutations passed down from one or both parents, resulting in large gaps in a person's genome often encompassing several genes, which are then disrupted or inactivated. In most instances, this mutation will result in an autistic child. However, in some cases—more likely in girls than boys—the recipient of this mutation will not produce any symptoms. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 10530 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A new study has revealed more about how the medication ketamine, when used experimentally for depression, relieves symptoms of the disorder in hours instead of the weeks or months it takes for current antidepressants to work. While ketamine itself probably won’t come into use as an antidepressant because of its side effects, the new finding moves scientists considerably closer to understanding how to develop faster-acting antidepressant medications — among the priorities of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health. Ketamine blocks a receptor called NMDA on brain cells, an earlier NIMH study in humans had shown, but the new study in mice shows that this is an intermediate step. It turns out that blocking NMDA increases the activity of another receptor, AMPA, and that this boost in AMPA is crucial for ketamine’s rapid antidepressant actions. The study was reported online in Biological Psychiatry on July 23, by NIMH researchers Husseini K. Manji, MD, Guang Chen, MD, PhD, Carlos Zarate, MD, and colleagues. “Our research is showing us how to develop medications that get at the biological roots of depression. This new finding is a major step toward learning how to improve treatment for the millions of Americans with this debilitating disorder; toward eliminating the weeks of suffering and uncertainty they have to endure while they wait for their medications to work,” said NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, M.D. Almost 15 million American adults have a depressive disorder. During the long wait to begin feeling the effects of conventional medications, patients may worsen, raising the risk of suicide for some.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 10529 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Shirley Wang Anthony Mauger woke up at 5 a.m. one morning nearly 10 years ago and heard a message in his head telling him to kill himself. He wrote a goodbye note to his wife, then jumped off the back deck of their Kensington home, falling the 14 feet hard enough to wake her with the sound of his thud. The 66-year-old organic chemist succeeded only in smashing his knees and skull. After surgery at Suburban Hospital, he was transferred to Potomac Valley Nursing and Wellness Center in Rockville for intensive psychiatric care. Mauger had been depressed for about six months, his wife, Inge, remembers. His sleep had been poor, and he was making strange claims that he could not go on vacation or walk. The slew of antidepressants Mauger tried made no difference. After four more months watching her husband deteriorate, Inge Mauger was desperate. "Nothing is happening," she said to his psychiatrist. "Isn't there anything you can do?" "We can try ECT," he replied. Better known as shock therapy and seared into our collective consciousness as the involuntary procedure depicted in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," electroconvulsive therapy remains a controversial treatment, often used, as in Mauger's case, only after other treatments fail. Its popularity has waxed and waned in its 70-year history, but an estimated 100,000 Americans undergo ECT each year, according to a 1995 survey of more than 17,000 psychiatrists, and its use appears to be steady or increasing since then. © 2007 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 10528 - Posted: 06.24.2010

James Randerson, science correspondent Scientists have successfully tested a treatment in mice that stops the progression of Alzheimer's and even sends the disease into reverse. It will be several years before the experimental treatment can be used on humans but one advantage is that it works at a very early stage. It is hoped the breakthrough could one day enable doctors to stop the disease in its tracks before patients suffer the worst effects. The treatment is a protein, specifically designed for the job, based on the three-dimensional structure of two other proteins involved in the progression of the disease. It works by sticking to one of these proteins so that it cannot bind with the other - a step that triggers a succession of biochemical events that lead to the death of the nerve cell and ultimately to the patient's symptoms. Most cases of Alzheimer's develop in those aged 65 or over - affecting about one in 20. But by 85 nearly half will have the disease. There are currently about 500,000 Alzheimer's patients in the UK. Scientists studying the disease have established that Alzheimer's patients produce abnormally large quantities of the proteins amyloid - which forms the plaques in the brain typical of the disease - and ABAD. When amyloid and ABAD combine this triggers a cascade of changes leading to the death of the nerve cell. © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 10527 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Leigh Dayton SUE Woolfe had a problem. The author of successful novels Painted Woman and Leaning Towards Infinity was stuck. The unlikely image of a cleaning lady puttering about in a biology laboratory kept going around in her brain, like an annoying jingle. Her usual trick of scribbling and sighing had produced nothing but more scribbles and more sighs for years. Desperate to break the loop and boot her recalcitrant brain into action, she set aside her world of fiction and dipped an intellectual toe into the world of fact. "I took to wondering whether neuroscience could rescue me," Wolfe writes. "Not a rescue of the mind; I knew that wasn't what was needed. In the midst of all the imperatives of the outside world -- wars, revolutions, all those small and large acts of betrayal -- I needed to understand what we, the people who sit in rooms making up stories, are doing with our minds." In other words, what's going on in the brain when it's busy being creative or, conversely, stubbornly ordinary? At a more practical level, Woolfe wondered if understanding her brain's biochemical ebbs and flows might suggest a way to part company with her tiresome cleaning lady. "Absolutely," answers Evian Gordon enthusiastically. As a painter known internationally for his "brain art", as well as an integrative neuroscientist, Gordon should know. "The brain is the essence of creativity," says Gordon, head of Sydney's Brain Resource Company, which works with researchers here and abroad to understand the inner workings of brains and to develop brain-oriented commercial products, such as new drug-testing procedures. Copyright 2007 News Limited.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10526 - Posted: 07.24.2007

By NATALIE ANGIER Between reading recent news reports about altruistic behavior in rats and watching the slickly adorable antics of Remy the culinary rodent in this summer’s animated blockbuster, “Ratatouille,” I’ve had a change of heart. My normal feeling of extreme revulsion toward rats has softened considerably, into something resembling ... a less extreme form of revulsion. O.K., I still don’t like rats, and I’ll never forget the sensation of whiskers brushing my ankles when a rat in Central Park scampered over my feet. There are plenty of reasons to fear rats. They carry diseases like typhus, leptospirosis, hanta virus pulmonary syndrome, rat bite fever, salmonella poisoning, and of course bubonic plague, and they are ravenous Remys every one of them, feasting on our grains and meats, chewing our ratatouille and destroying as much as a third of global food supplies each year. “Over the past century alone,” writes Robert Sullivan in “Rats,” his magisterial history of the urban pest, “rats have been responsible for the death of more than 10 million people.” Yet our ratly transactions are not all woes and buboes. As the first mammals domesticated strictly for research purposes, scientists say, rats in the laboratory may well have saved at least as many human lives through the years as rats in the alley have taken. Rats are the preferred experimental animal for studies of the heart, kidneys, immune system, reproductive system, nervous system and other body sectors, and recent breakthroughs in manipulating the rat genome may soon allow the rat to displace the mouse as the geneticist’s darling, too. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10525 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By HENRY FOUNTAIN Crayfish may be small, but they aren’t stupid. After losing a fight they can remember who beat them, and may use that information to steer clear of another fight against the same opponent. Australian researchers studied fights between males of an aggressive species of freshwater crayfish, Cherax dispar. Like most crayfish, C. dispar fights by locking claws with its opponent and holding on until one creature gives up and slinks away. The crayfish with the stronger claws almost always wins a first fight and, in subsequent fights with the same crayfish, it keeps winning, The loser often slinks away without even fighting. The researchers, Frank Seebacher of the University of Sydney and Robbie S. Wilson of the University of Queensland, wanted to see whether in those subsequent fights the loser just blindly leaped into the fray again or recognized that it was up against a superior opponent. In their experiments, described in Biology Letters, they disabled the claws of the winner of the first fight by supergluing them shut and let the two crayfish go at each other a half-hour later and 24 hours later. Even with its claws disabled, the winner of the first fight kept winning, indicating that the loser somehow remembered that the winner was stronger. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 10524 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Heidi Ledford Half of all cases of male autism may be caused by spontaneous genetic mutations, say researchers who have studied the genetic patterns of the condition. Offspring who inherit such mutations are at a greater risk of having an autistic child themselves. Autistic people have difficulty relating socially with others and tend to focus obsessively on a narrow set of interests. Three to six out of every 1,000 people are expected to have the condition; its cause is unknown but there is thought to be a strong genetic component. "That genetics plays a major role in autism has been obvious now for 20 years or more," says Isabelle Rapin, a neurologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, who was not affiliated with the study. "The evidence for genetics is not controversial." But determining how genes affect autism has been difficult. Autism is a complex disease with a wide range of symptoms and severity. It also affects four times more males than females, for unknown reasons. Earlier this year, a genome-wide scan linked some cases of autism with mutations in the number of copies of certain genes. Ten per cent of autistic patients had copy-number mutations that were not present in either parent, showing that the mutations were spontaneous1. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10523 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Using chemotherapy instead of radiotherapy in children with brain tumours reduces the risk of long-term brain damage, say UK researchers. Radiotherapy was thought to offer the best chance of survival for such tumours, despite a likelihood of future learning difficulties. But a decade-long Lancet Oncology study in young children found safer chemotherapy is as good a treatment. Children under three are particularly vulnerable to radiation side-effects. A total of 89 children aged under three years who had been diagnosed with a type of rare brain cancer called an ependymoma all underwent surgery to try and remove their tumours. They were then given an intensive course of chfmotherapy "the baby brain protocol" to kill off any remaining cancer cells. Radiation treatment was reserved only for those children whose disease had spread or progressed. But of these patients, the chemotherapy treatment managed to delay their need for radiotherapy by more than one and a half years, so the children were older and their brains were more developed. Overall, 42% of the patients did not receive any radiation treatment for their cancer and almost two-thirds of the children - 64% - were still alive five years after diagnosis - similar if not better rate than with radiotherapy alone. (C)BBC

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10522 - Posted: 07.21.2007

By BARRY MEIER ABINGDON, Va., — After hearing wrenching testimony from parents of young adults who died from overdoses involving the painkiller OxyContin, a federal judge Friday sentenced three top executives of the company that makes the narcotic to three years’ probation and 400 hours each of community service in drug treatment programs. In announcing the unorthodox sentence, Judge James P. Jones of United States District Court indicated that he was troubled by his inability to send the executives to prison. But he noted that federal prosecutors had not produced evidence as part of recent plea deals to show that the officials were aware of wrongdoing at the drug’s maker, Purdue Pharma of Stamford, Conn. The sentences announced by Judge Jones came at the end of a lengthy and highly emotional hearing at a small brick courthouse in this town in far western Virginia. Parents of teenagers and young adults who died from overdoses while trying to get high from OxyContin arrived here from as far away as Florida, Massachusetts and California. Given the opportunity to speak, they both memorialized their lost children and lambasted Purdue Pharma and its executives, saying they bore a responsibility for those deaths. They also urged Judge Jones to throw out the plea agreements and send the executives to jail. “Our children were not drug addicts, they were typical teenagers,” said Teresa Ashcraft, who said that her son Robert died of an overdose at age 19. “We have been given a life sentence due to their lies and greed.” Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 10521 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Charnicia Huggins NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - New study findings suggest that a preference for nighttime over daytime activities may be associated with antisocial behavior in adolescences, even in children as young as 8 years old. Those who prefer later bedtimes appear to exhibit more antisocial behavior than those who like to wake early and participate in daytime recreational activities, researchers report. "A preference for evening activities and staying up late is related to problem behavior and is evident even in preteens," study co-author Dr. Elizabeth J. Susman, of Pennsylvania State University, told Reuters Health. Staying up late "contributes to lack of sleep and this, in turn, causes problems such as lack of control and attention regulation, which are associated with antisocial behavior and substance use," Susman added in a university statement. Susman and her team investigated the relationship between a preference for morning versus evening activities and antisocial behavior in 111 subjects between 8 to 13 years old. They also correlated morning to afternoon cortisol levels with behavior and noted the age at which the subjects reached puberty. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 10520 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Young children taking Ritalin for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder may experience chemical changes in their brains, say U.S. researchers who expressed concern about long-term prescriptions. In one of the few studies to probe the effects of Ritalin on the neurochemistry of the developing brain, scientists found changes in areas linked to "higher executive functioning, addiction and appetite, social relationships and stress," the study's senior author Dr. Teresa Milner, a neuroscientist at New York's Weill Cornell Medical College, said in a release. The findings, published recently in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggest doctors must be careful in their diagnosis of ADHD before prescribing Ritalin. That's because the brain changes noted in the study might be helpful in battling the disorder but harmful to youngsters with healthy brain chemistry, said Dr. Milner. Ritalin, a stimulant similar to amphetamine and cocaine, remains one of the most prescribed drugs for the behavioural disorder. In the study, researchers gave week-old male rat pups injections of Ritalin twice a day up until they were 35 days old. "Relative to human lifespan, this would correspond to very early stages of brain development," Jason Gray, a graduate student in the program of neuroscience and lead author of the study, said in a release. © CBC 2007

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 10519 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The link between alcohol and aggression is well known, but a new study says it's possible to calm a belligerent person under the influence if they're given a rewarding task that challenges their powers of concentration. University of Kentucky psychologist Peter Giancola and student colleague Michelle Corman studied men who were each given three to four vodka and orange juice drinks to raise their blood alcohol level to 0.1, slightly over the legal limit for driving, and those who abstained. In the first part of the study, 48 healthy male social drinkers between 21 and 33 were measured for aggressive responses. Researchers set up a response-time competition and told them they could administer shocks if they won — pressing a computer spacebar as prompted — or receive shocks if they lost. Those assessed as the most aggressive gave the most and longest-lasting shocks. "Emotions went through the roof," Giancola told CBC.ca. In the next part of the study, 120 men in the same age group were given a memory test — identified in the study as a distraction — on a computer screen, and told they should focus because they could earn extra money. The lab allowed them to continue administering shocks if they wished. Copyright © CBC 2007

Keyword: Aggression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 10518 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Most children treated in a variety of ways for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (http://www.nimh.nih.gov/healthinformation/adhdmenu.cfm) showed sustained improvement after three years in a major follow-up study funded by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Yet increased risk for behavioral problems, including delinquency and substance use, remained higher than normal. The study followed-up children who had participated in the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (MTA). Initial advantages of medication management alone or in combination with behavioral treatment over purely behavioral or routine community care waned in the years after 14 months of controlled treatment ended. However, Peter Jensen, M.D., Columbia University, and colleagues emphasized that “it would be incorrect to conclude from these results that treatment makes no difference or is not worth pursuing.” Their report is among four on the outcome of the MTA study published in the August, 2007 Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP). “We were struck by the remarkable improvement in symptoms and functioning across all treatment groups,” explained Jensen.

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 10517 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Mary Beckman Researchers have long known that they can make mice live longer by making them superskinny. Now, a genetic modification that makes the brain less responsive to insulin increases the life span of mice while making them fat as well. The results suggest that the brain can regulate life span independently of the body's ability to respond to insulin. Drastically restricting the number of calories mice eat can extend their lives by as much as 50%. Researchers have suspected that the key to this increase in life span is the body's response to insulin, a protein that shuttles sugar from the bloodstream into cells. Diabetics, for example, have high levels of sugar in their blood because their tissues respond weakly to insulin, a condition called insulin-resistance. The half-starved mice are skinny, use insulin efficiently, and have low amounts of insulin in their tissues, suggesting a slowed-down metabolism. Conversely, genetically modifying mice to reduce the amount of insulin in fat tissue also produces long-lived, lean mice--presumably by slowing metabolism as well. A protein called insulin receptor substrate-2 (Irs2) resides on cell surfaces in many tissues, including the brain, and allows the cells to respond to insulin. Morris White, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and colleagues wanted to know whether interfering with this protein could extend life. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 10516 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The brain of a mammal is one of the most complex things in the universe. But studying brains has become easier thanks to some complicated, hi-tech equipment. In this ScienCentral Web Extra video we take a visit to the Tonegawa Lab at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. to see their two-photon microscope and electrophysiology lab. The two-photon microscope has two lasers that intersect in the sample of brain tissue. They excite photons of light which, when amplified, reveal intricate structures. The researchers take snapshots at a range of depths, then combine them to create a layered three dimensional image that reveals features of the spines that protrude from brain cells. Research associate Inbal Israely describes what we're seeing. "So a neuron is like a tree and it has branches, and the branches get finer as you go farther out along the tree. And on the tree you can imagine there are almost like little thorns – they're spines – and the spines are basically the sites of connections between two neurons." © ScienCentral, 2000-2007.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 10515 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Erik Stokstad When a new queen begins her reign over a colony of honeybees, she gives up her virginity with gusto. Venturing outside the hive and flying to a height of 6 meters or more, the queen mates in midair with a dozen or so male bees, called drones, who all die after ejaculating. The reason for this acrobatic orgy--polyandry is the polite term--has long been a puzzle. Here's the conundrum: When the queen buzzes back to the hive and lays eggs, she fertilizes them with sperm from the various drones she mated with. That means many of the female workers will be half-sisters, and these bees should be less likely than full sisters to work for each others’ benefit, at least according to the theory of kin selection. So why doesn’t the queen mate with a single male and keep the hive as one tight family? According to a study in the 20 July issue of Science, a genetically diverse hive can be vastly more productive than a homogenous hive of sisters. Heather Mattila, a postdoctoral fellow in ecology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, was inspired to undertake the research after her adviser, Thomas Seeley, discovered that genetically diverse hives better resisted a common bacterial disease. He and a colleague concluded that disease resistance is an adaption that would favor the evolution of polyandry. Mattila thought there might be more to the story, and Seeley bet her an ice cream there wasn’t. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 10514 - Posted: 06.24.2010