In 2003, ScienCentral interviewed researcher Michael Kaplitt, assistant professor of neurological surgery at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, and co-founder of Neurologix, Inc. Kaplitt and his team had gotten approval for a Phase 1 study to determine the safety of gene therapy in patients with Parkinson's disease and had performed the world's first gene therapy surgery on a patient with the disease. The findings of the completed study are published in the June 23 issue of the British medical journal The Lancet. The video to the right includes excerpts from our 2003 interview with Kaplitt. For more information on the newly published study, read on. The study reported positive results from the first ever gene therapy trial for Parkinson's disease. The clinical trial studied 12 patients, 11 men and one woman, ranging in age from 50 to 67, who had advanced Parkinson's disease. It was a "Phase 1" study, meaning it was designed primarily to test and prove that the therapy is safe. Kaplitt and his team used a harmless virus called an adeno-associated virus (AAV) as a sort of cargo ship for the corrective gene they wanted to deliver to the patient's brains. The virus carrying the gene called "GAD" (glutamic acid decarboxylase) was injected into a part of the brain called the subthalamic nucleus (STN), which usually has abnormally high activity in Parkinson's patients. This heightened activity leads to the loss of muscle control that is a hallmark of Parkinson's. © ScienCentral, 2000-2007

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 10419 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Patrick Barry For the first time, scientists have selectively ferried a drug across the blood-brain barrier to treat a neurological disease in mice. The new method could eventually make new treatments possible for a wide range of brain disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease. The walls of capillaries that carry blood into the brain control whether molecules larger than a few hundred atoms, such as antibodies and proteins, can pass into the spaces between neurons. This capillary barrier can stymie doctors' efforts to cure neurological diseases because most medicines can't get through. However, some viruses, including rabies, have molecules that trick the barrier into allowing them to pass. Researchers attached a molecule from the rabies virus to a drug and found that the coupled molecules got through the capillary walls and into the brain. A drug delivered in this way kept 80 percent of mice infected with Japanese encephalitis alive for at least 30 days, while all of the experiment's untreated mice died, the scientists report online and in an upcoming Nature. "I think the potential [of this technique] is enormous," says Manjunath Swamy, senior researcher for the group at the Immune Disease Institute at Harvard Medical School in Boston. ©2007 Science Service.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10418 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Kerri Smith The way that people talk about 'high' and 'low' notes makes it sound as though musical pitch has something to do with physical location. Now it seems there may be a reason for this: the same bit of our brain could control both our understanding of pitch and spatial orientation. The result comes from a study of tone-deaf people — also known as 'amusics' — which shows that they have poorer spatial skills than those who have no problem distinguishing between two musical notes. Amusics are unable to tell whether a particular musical note is higher or lower than another. The condition has puzzled neuroscientists, because the way in which the brains of amusics process auditory information seems to be no different from normal. Researchers from the University of Otago in New Zealand were keen to investigate. David Bilkey and his student Katie Douglas (who, as a member of the New Zealand Youth Choir, is particularly interested in how the brain processes music) had noticed that music is often described using spatial references, such as 'high' and 'low' notes — with higher notes literally sitting higher on a stave. The same is true in many different languages. So they decided to test the spatial skills of amusic people. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 10417 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Boys with autism and autism spectrum disorder had higher levels of hormones involved with growth in comparison to boys who do not have autism, reported researchers from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and the University Of Cincinnati College Of Medicine. The researchers believe that the higher hormone levels might explain the greater head circumference seen in many children with autism. Earlier studies had reported that many children with autism have very rapid head growth in early life, leading to a proportionately larger head circumference than children who do not have autism. The researchers found that, in addition to a larger head circumference, the boys with autism and autism spectrum disorder who took part in the current study were heavier than boys without these conditions. “The study authors have uncovered a promising new lead in the quest to understand autism,” said Duane Alexander, M.D., Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the NIH institute that funded the study. “Future research will determine whether the higher hormone levels the researchers observed are related to abnormal head growth as well as to other features of autism.” Autism is a complex developmental disorder that includes problems with social interaction and communication. The term autism spectrum disorder (ASD) refers to individuals who have a less severe form of autism.

Keyword: Autism; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 10416 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Hiroko Tabuchi, Associated Press — Forget the clicker: A new technology in Japan could let you control electronic devices without lifting a finger simply by reading brain activity. The "brain-machine interface" developed by Hitachi Inc. analyzes slight changes in the brain's blood flow and translates brain motion into electric signals. A cap connects by optical fibers to a mapping device, which links, in turn, to a toy train set via a control computer and motor during one recent demonstration at Hitachi's Advanced Research Laboratory in Hatoyama, just outside Tokyo. "Take a deep breath and relax," said Kei Utsugi, a researcher, while demonstrating the device on Wednesday. At his prompting, a reporter did simple calculations in her head, and the train sprang forward — apparently indicating activity in the brain's frontal cortex, which handles problem solving. Activating that region of the brain — by doing sums or singing a song — is what makes the train run, according to Utsugi. When one stops the calculations, the train stops, too. Underlying Hitachi's brain-machine interface is a technology called optical topography, which sends a small amount of infrared light through the brain's surface to map out changes in blood flow. © 2007 Discovery Communications

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 10414 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A twin brother can reduce his female twin's chances of having children, say scientists at Sheffield University. Women were 25% less likely to have children if their twin was male the study, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded. Although other factors could play a part - the women were less likely to marry - the team blamed exposure in the womb to the male hormone testosterone. Experts have agreed testosterone might potentially damage female fertility. They said animal work supported this. But they said more work was needed to look at human mechanisms. Both testosterone and the female hormone oestrogen can cross the womb. A female twin foetus is therefore exposed to a brother's testosterone and a male twin foetus to a sister's oestrogen. However, male and female foetuses have similar oestrogen levels, so a female is more likely to be affected, according to Dr Virpi Lummaa's team. Experts already know certain characteristics, including facial features, can be changed by exposure to sex hormones from opposite sex foetuses. To investigate the effect testosterone might have on fertility, the researchers looked back at Finnish medical records spanning 1734 to 1888. They chose this preindustrial population because they argue fertility data on modern Western societies would be skewed by advanced healthcare and assisted conception treatments, such as IVF. (C)BBC

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 10413 - Posted: 06.18.2007

By TINA ROSENBERG Ronald McIver is a prisoner in a medium-security federal compound in Butner, N.C. He is 63 years old, of medium height and overweight, with a white Santa Claus beard, white hair and a calm, direct and intelligent manner. He is serving 30 years for drug trafficking, and so will likely live there the rest of his life. McIver (pronounced mi-KEE-ver) has not been convicted of drug trafficking in the classic sense. He is a doctor who for years treated patients suffering from chronic pain. At the Pain Therapy Center, his small storefront office not far from Main Street in Greenwood, S.C., he cracked backs, gave trigger-point injections and put patients through physical therapy. He administered ultrasound and gravity-inversion therapy and devised exercise regimens. And he wrote prescriptions for high doses of opioid drugs like OxyContin. McIver was a particularly aggressive pain doctor. Pain can be measured only by how patients say they feel: on a scale from 0 to 10, a report of 0 signifies the absence of pain; 10 is unbearable pain. Many pain doctors will try to reduce a patient’s pain to the level of 5. McIver tried for a 2. He prescribed more, and sooner, than most doctors. Some of his patients sold their pills. Some abused them. One man, Larry Shealy, died with high doses of opioids that McIver had prescribed him in his bloodstream. In April 2005, McIver was convicted in federal court of one count of conspiracy to distribute controlled substances and eight counts of distribution. (He was also acquitted of six counts of distribution.) The jury also found that Shealy was killed by the drugs McIver prescribed. McIver is serving concurrent sentences of 20 years for distribution and 30 years for dispensing drugs that resulted in Shealy’s death. His appeals to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and the Supreme Court were rejected. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 10412 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Dana Priest and Anne Hull Army Spec. Jeans Cruz helped capture Saddam Hussein. When he came home to the Bronx, important people called him a war hero and promised to help him start a new life. The mayor of New York, officials of his parents' home town in Puerto Rico, the borough president and other local dignitaries honored him with plaques and silk parade sashes. They handed him their business cards and urged him to phone. But a "black shadow" had followed Cruz home from Iraq, he confided to an Army counselor. He was hounded by recurring images of how war really was for him: not the triumphant scene of Hussein in handcuffs, but visions of dead Iraqi children. In public, the former Army scout stood tall for the cameras and marched in the parades. In private, he slashed his forearms to provoke the pain and adrenaline of combat. He heard voices and smelled stale blood. Soon the offers of help evaporated and he found himself estranged and alone, struggling with financial collapse and a darkening depression. At a low point, he went to the local Department of Veterans Affairs medical center for help. One VA psychologist diagnosed Cruz with post-traumatic stress disorder. His condition was labeled "severe and chronic." In a letter supporting his request for PTSD-related disability pay, the psychologist wrote that Cruz was "in need of major help" and that he had provided "more than enough evidence" to back up his PTSD claim. His combat experiences, the letter said, "have been well documented." © 2007 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 10411 - Posted: 06.24.2010

If you thought that the point of a "diet pill" is to help you avoid the actual diet, you were wrong, at least in the case of Alli, the first FDA-approved over-the-counter diet drug. The drug's website makes it clear that the pill will only work in combination with "a reduced-calorie, low-fat diet," limited "daily fat intake," and "getting more physical activity." And what does this get you? Study results are hardly mind-blowing. According to a Mayo Clinic web report by Dr. Donald Hensrud, compared to just diet and exercise, using Alli along with diet and exercise will only help you lose an additional three pounds in one year. Alli prevents certain natural enzymes in the digestive system from breaking down some of the fat you eat. This undigested fat then passes through the body naturally. (And based on reported side effects, sometimes in a decidedly indelicate manner. The drug's website says, "In fact, you may recognize it in the toilet as something that looks like the oil on top of a pizza." Ew.) © ScienCentral, 2000-2007.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 10410 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alison Abbott 'Mirror touch' synaesthesia is a strange but real condition, and it might be wide-spread, psychologists have found. So-called mirror-touch synaesthetes actually feel a touch on their own skin when they watch someone else being touched. Perhaps as a consequence, they also show more emotional empathy than normal people. Synaesthesia refers to the merging of senses that are normally experienced separately: 'seeing' music, for example, or experiencing different colours as tastes. Jamie Ward of University College London (UCL) coined the term mirror-touch synaesthesia to describe a different type of sensory mix-up — when people confuse the brain's signal for sensing touch with the 'mirror system' signal that is triggered when watching others being touched. It is known that when we observe others moving, or hear them speak, the same neural circuits are activated in our brains as would be activated if we were moving or speaking ourselves. Scientists suspect that this mirror system may be important in empathy — understanding why others behave as they do. But this is the first time it has been shown that a 'mirror' response can get mistaken for a real one. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Vision; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 10409 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Gisela Telis The next time you miss the forest for the trees, blame your jittery eyeballs. The small, involuntary movements our eyes make when they focus help the brain discern the finer details of an image, according to new research. Although the findings leave several questions unanswered, they mark an important step toward settling a 50-year-old controversy. Most animals with sharp central vision, such as humans, monkeys, and cats, make microscopic eye adjustments when they fix their gaze. These jitters wiggle the image on the retina, and scientists know surprisingly little about why this happens. In the 1950s, vision researchers used cumbersome techniques involving rotating mirrors to negate the jitter when volunteers stared at an image. The volunteers began to see a featureless gray field rather than the image at hand, so scientists concluded that jittering kept the image from fading. But it wasn't clear how, or if, the jitters served other functions. Boston University neuroscientist Michele Rucci and colleagues revisited these questions using a less awkward approach: They used a computer to track the eye's movements. The researchers showed six subjects one of two images on a monitor: a gray background with either thick or thin slanted lines at its center. For each trial, the computer either held the image steady or moved it in tandem with the subject's miniature jitters. The subject then had to tell the researchers which way the lines on the image slanted. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 10408 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Heidi Ledford Whether the pain comes from holding an ice cube for too long or staying out on a frigid winter day, the source is clear: it's the cold that hurts. Now researchers have found a protein responsible for provoking pain in response to extreme cold in mice. The protein, called Nav1.8, was already known to play a role in detecting tissue damage, and was previously associated with inflammation and pain in response to damaged nerves. Now it looks like the same protein gets involved when the temperature plummets. Physiologist Katharina Zimmermann at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, and her colleagues found that mice lacking the protein became impervious to pain from cold. Normal mice placed on a plate chilled to 0°C will hop about and lift their feet, but mice engineered to lack Nav1.8 do not, they found. The results are published this week in Nature.1 The protein works by helping sodium ions to pass through the cell membrane of neurons, a process that is crucial to transmitting signals — including pain signals — along nerve fibres. It works unusually well in the cold; unlike other similar proteins, its activity doesn't decline as the temperature drops. "That goes against what cells are supposed to do in the cold," says Ardem Patapoutian, a cell biologist at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, who was not affiliated with the study. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 10407 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Conrad McCallum High-profile paternity suits point to a trendy obsession for the ultimate proof of biological fatherhood. But to evolutionary psychologists, they're just a recent and hi-tech twist on age-old anxieties. Since hunter-gatherer times, men have relied not on DNA swabs but on a little-understood calculus of physical resemblance to decide whether to invest in little Emma or Ethan. In the infant's upper face and eyes, the skeptical pater familias looks for clues. Comedian Chris Rock probably went through a similar mental process after a Georgia woman claimed he fathered of a child she had 13 years ago. Ditto Larry Birkhead and Howard K. Stern when they first saw Anna Nicole Smith's baby daughter, Dannielynn, born last September. Birkhead, after DNA testing, was determined the biological dad and won custody of his little look-alike following Smith's death last February. The latest study, done early this year by Brock University psychology professor Anthony Volk, show cues of genetic relatedness are more important to men than women. He showed photos of infants' faces to male and female subjects, and asked them to make hypothetical adoption choices. In the journal Evolutionary Psychology, Volk reported that men reacted more positively to children with facial traits resembling them, while women's decisions were influenced more by healthy looks. © Copyright Toronto Star 1996-2007

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 10406 - Posted: 06.24.2010

It may make the stomach turn, but scientists in Norway suggest that taking a spoonful of cod liver oil each day could stave off depression. In a study of almost 22,000 people aged over 40, those who regularly took the oil were less likely to suffer depression than those who did not. The study in the Journal of Affective Disorders also suggested the longer one took it, the less depressed one became. The oil is rich in Omega-3 fatty acids which are linked to various benefits. Children's brains are said to be boosted by Omega-3s, which have also been claimed to reduce the risk of stroke, heart attack and cancer, although some studies have cast doubt on this. In this latest claim, scientists said a spoonful of cod liver oil could reduce the risk of depression by as much as 30%. Depressive symptoms among cod liver oil users was 2.5%, compared to 3.8% in the rest of the population. (C)BBC

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 10405 - Posted: 06.13.2007

By Tan Ee Lyn HONG KONG (Reuters) - Cockroaches have a memory and can be taught to salivate in response to neutral stimuli in the way that Pavlov's dogs would do when the famed Russian doctor rang his bell, Japanese researchers found. Such "conditioning" can only take place when there is memory and learning, and this salivating response had only previously been proven in humans and dogs. Now, cockroaches appear to have that aptitude too. Writing in the latest edition of the online journal Public Library of Science, the researchers said they hoped to learn more about the human brain by exploring what goes on in the simpler brain of the cockroach. (Article is freely available on http://www.plosone.org/doi/pone.0000529) "Understanding the brain mechanism of learning in insects can help us to understand the functionings in the human brain. There are many, many common characteristics," said Makoto Mizunami, of Tohoku University's Graduate School of Life Sciences, in a telephone interview. In the experiment, the scientists exposed a group of cockroaches to an odor whenever they fed them a sugar solution. They found that when they later exposed the cockroaches to the odor alone, they still drooled. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 10404 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Patients taking an obesity pill in clinical trials were more likely to report suicidal thoughts or actions, US drug reviewers have said. A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel will consider on Wednesday whether regulators should approve US sales. The FDA said the 20-milligram dose of the drug, Zimulti, produced clinically significant weight loss over one year. With a low-calorie diet, the drug "was shown to reduce body weight by approximately 5% relative to diet alone during trials of more than 6000 moderately overweight and obese subjects", the FDA reviewers said. Known generically as rimonabant, the drug is already sold in 18 countries under the name Acomplia. The agency has delayed a final decision on rimonabant several times amid concerns about depression and a high drop-out rate in clinical trials. "We remain concerned about rimonabant's adverse event profile, specifically adverse psychiatric reactions," an FDA staff summary said. Psychiatric problems "represent the most common and worrisome rimonabant-induced adverse events", the reviewers said. Depression was roughly twice as high for rimonabant patients compared with others who received a placebo, they said. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity; Depression
Link ID: 10403 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi Mouse mothers show a much stronger brain response to the distress calls of infant mice than their virgin counterparts do, new research shows. The finding suggests that hormonal or behavioural changes linked to motherhood can alter animals' receptiveness to calls. Previous research has demonstrated that when young mouse pups are separated from their mothers, they start making high-pitched noises at around 65 kilohertz – far above the hearing range of a human, which typically peaks around 15 kHz. Listen to the pup calls, slowed down to be audible to humans. "Some scientists have named these noises 'distress calls', but that's been controversial because some people say it's more a physiological response than an emotional response," explains Robert Liu at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US. In the wild, a mother mouse will leave her nest and follow the sound of these high-pitched squeals to find her crying pup. (Watch a lab video of a mother leaving the nest to retrieve a crying pup that has been placed into the cage – .avi format.) Behavioural studies have found that mother mice show twice as much interest in these distress calls than in a simple 20 kHz tone when these sounds are played through different speakers. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hearing
Link ID: 10402 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Men who had poor relationships with siblings during childhood are at significantly greater risk for depression in adulthood than those who got along better, a new study has found. Childhood Sibling Relationships as a Predictor of Major Depression in Adulthood: A 30-Year Prospective Study (American Journal of Psychiatry)The researchers emphasize that their findings do not mean that a poor childhood relationship with a sibling causes depression, but they say the two are strongly associated. Moreover, whether the men’s parents did a good or a poor job of raising them seemed to have little effect on their risk of depression. “Poor parenting may be reflected in poor sibling relationships,” said Dr. Robert J. Waldinger, the lead author of the study and an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard. “But once you’ve taken account of the quality of sibling relationships, knowing about the quality of parenting doesn’t add much information.” The findings, published in the June issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry, are based on an analysis of data from 229 men who were followed for more than 30 years beginning at age 18 or 19. They were first assessed in the period 1939-42 by internists, psychiatrists, psychologists and anthropologists, and then they completed questionnaires every other year. Researchers also interviewed their parents. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 10401 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Howard Schneider The People Who Know What's Good For Us have made life progressively difficult, moving from general recommendations such as "maintain ideal weight" to detailed orders for 60 to 90 minutes of exercise every day. You can now add weightlifting to the creeping set of obligations. It's not explicit in the government's overall guidelines, but the more detailed suggestions from agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend a couple of rounds of resistance training each week. (And, yes, Vicky, that includes you cardio junkies out there because aaaallllll thaaaaatttt time on the treadmill won't guarantee that you can sit up straight when 27 becomes 77.) This won't make a lot of us happy. The basic exercise recommendations are pretty easy to cope with: Take a walk. Ride a bike. Lather, rinse, repeat. Weightlifting, on the other hand, conjures the threat of being stuck next to some grunting mesomorph who will one day be governor. The chance of injury is greater. The advice gets confusing and may include a lecture about how, if you don't disrupt the Z lines between your sarcomeres, it's a waste of time. It's manageable, however, if you understand some basics. The reason there is so much varying advice -- over what exercises to do, how frequently and how intensely -- is that this is an enterprise that should be tailored to your goals and your body. Cardio focuses on training just one muscle, the heart. There are more than 600 others that need attention. © 2007 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Muscles
Link ID: 10400 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ELIZABETH SVOBODA When 71-year-old Marilyn Josselyn finished a weeklong cruise on the Volga River in Russia with her husband, Roger, in 1998, she expected to feel like a bobbing buoy for a little while after returning to land. “I felt a rocking sensation, but I thought it was just the usual kind of thing,” she said. But when the feeling persisted for weeks, then months, she began to realize something in her brain was truly off kilter. A smorgasbord of doctor-recommended treatments followed, including medication and vestibular therapy for patients with dizziness. “They’d have me stand in front of a chair, turn around as fast as I could, and then sit down,” she said. “But it made me feel worse instead of better.” Nine years of pitching and rolling have forced Mrs. Josselyn to quit her job as a court reporter and forgo the exotic trips she used to enjoy, and she wants nothing more than to get off the boat. “Landsickness” or “reverse seasickness” is familiar to many people who have taken long cruises — once the body has become accustomed to constant motion, the vestibular system, which controls balance, usually takes a few hours or days to acclimate to being on land again. But in patients like Mrs. Josselyn, who suffer from what is known as mal de débarquement, or debarkation sickness, the brain never seems to readapt. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10399 - Posted: 06.24.2010