By ELISSA ELY, M.D. The death report was asking the wrong questions — whether the patient had drunk four to eight glasses of water daily, whether his diet was low in saturated fats and salt. Death had not been a result of junk food; it had been a result of suicide. When it is your patient who has died, there is a fugitive quality to it: someone has fled, and you were unable to capture or return him alive. Diet and fluids are the least of the problem. My patient had been an educated man, full of yearning. He wanted a mate and a job. Schizophrenia made both hard to find. I knew about his voices, and sometimes knew what his voices told him, but had come to believe that voices and patient coexisted in a delicate yet stable ecosystem. It was a false belief. No one is immune from contemplating suicide. Demographic studies show that the population most at risk is single, urban, substance-abusing older white men with physical illness, few supports and low incomes. We memorize the characteristics in residency training and recall them in evaluations to figure out how frightened we ought to be. The criteria are so specific it’s like putting pins in a war map. By these criteria, my patient could not be found on the map (though psychosis is also a high risk factor). Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 10191 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA With grim humor, some doctors in New York call them “frequent fliers” — addicts who check into hospital detoxification units so often that dozens of them spend more than 100 nights a year in those wards. Through its Medicaid program, New York spends far more than other states on drug and alcohol treatment, including more than $300 million a year paid to hospitals for more than 30,000 detox patients. One reason for the high cost is that $50 million is spent just on the 500 most expensive patients, at a cost of about $100,000 a person. These patients check in and out of detox wards, on average, more than a dozen times a year — a practice that experts say would not be tolerated in most states. In the state’s 2004 fiscal year, one patient was admitted to such units 26 times at 17 different hospitals around New York City, spending a total of 204 nights, Medicaid records show. In fiscal year 2005, there was one patient who spent 279 nights in detox wards, at a cost of about $300,000. New York State spends more than enough money to provide all the needed treatment, but “the dollars are being spent in the wrong settings,” said Deborah S. Bachrach, the state’s Medicaid director. In Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s campaign to overhaul Medicaid, she said, “this is very high on our agenda.” Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 10190 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD CHICAGO — Observed in the wild and tested in captivity, chimpanzees invite comparison with humans, their close relatives. They bear a family resemblance that fascinates people, and scientists see increasing evidence of similarities in chimp behavior and skills, making some of them think on the vagaries of evolution. For some time, paleontologists and evolutionary biologists have known that chimp ancestors were the last line of today’s apes to diverge from the branch that led to humans, probably six million, maybe four million years ago. More recent examination shows that despite profound differences in the two species, just a 1.23 percent difference in their genes separates Homo sapiens from chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes. And certain similarities between the two species, scientists say, go beyond expressive faces and opposable thumbs. Chimps display a remarkable range of behavior and talent. They make and use simple tools, hunt in groups and engage in aggressive, violent acts. They are social creatures that appear to be capable of empathy, altruism, self-awareness, cooperation in problem solving and learning through example and experience. Chimps even outperform humans in some memory tasks. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 10189 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JANE E. BRODY Every so often, seemingly normal people suddenly walk out of their lives and disappear, with no recollection of who they are, where they are from or what their previous life was like. It is the stuff of fiction, but it happens in real life too. Last year a Westchester County lawyer — a 57-year-old husband and father of two, Boy Scout leader and churchgoer — left the garage near his office and disappeared. Six months later he was found living under a new name in a homeless shelter in Chicago, not knowing who he was or where he came from. Library searches and contact with the Chicago police did not help the man. His true identity was uncovered through an anonymous tip to “America’s Most Wanted.” But when he was contacted by his family, he had no idea who they were. On the fictional side is a play called “Fugue,” now on stage at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York. In it, a woman found wandering homeless in Chicago is interviewed by a psychiatrist. She does not know her name and can recall nothing about her life before landing in Chicago. The rest of this most interesting play by Leonora Thuna is an exploration of a rare but intriguing emotional disorder, known technically as dissociative fugue or dissociative amnesia. (C) New York Times

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 10188 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - People who commit mass murders like the one at Virginia Tech university often are frustrated loners bent on revenge who blame others for their own failures, experts in such crimes said on Tuesday. When Charles Whitman shot dead 13 people from a University of Texas tower in 1966, he triggered "an age of mass murder" in the United States, said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston. Since then, there have been about two dozen U.S. cases annually of murders with at least four victims, Fox said. The frequency of these crimes has remained steady over four decades, but the lethality has risen with the greater availability of high-powered firearms, Fox said. Authorities identified the gunman in Monday's Virginia Tech killings as student Cho Seung-Hui, 23, a South Korean who was a legal U.S. resident. They say he killed 32 people and himself. "What motivates most mass murderers is the desire for revenge. They see themselves as victims. They see injustice around them and that they've been dealt a raw deal," Fox said. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 10187 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Associated Press — The first dozen Parkinson's patients to have holes drilled in their skulls for a novel gene therapy attempt weren't harmed — and hints at some improvement have researchers embarking on a larger study to see if the treatment really may work. Doctors reported initial results of the closely watched experiment at a neurology meeting Monday, but cautioned that it's far too soon to raise hopes. At issue: Using a nerve growth factor to try to rescue dying brain cells. Some 1.5 million Americans have Parkinson's, a disease that gradually destroys brain cells that produce dopamine, a chemical crucial for the cellular signaling that controls muscle movement. Too little dopamine causes increasingly severe tremors and periodically stiff or frozen limbs. Standard treatments can control tremors for a while but can't stop the disease's inevitable march. So scientists are hunting ways to protect remaining dopamine-producing neurons, and rescue dying ones. Previous attempts with growth factors haven't panned out. The new approach uses gene therapy — injecting a virus that carries a gene that in turn produces the growth factor neurturin — to try to get the protective protein right where it's needed. © 2007 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Trophic Factors
Link ID: 10186 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Heidi Ledford A re-evaluation of clinical data suggests that although antidepressants do promote suicidal tendencies in a small percentage of children and adolescents — as widely reported a few years ago — the benefits of the drugs for the treatment of depression and anxiety disorders almost always outweigh the risks. The new study, published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, makes use of data that were not available when the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) evaluated the drugs for their safety in children in 2004. The findings from that evaluation led to the placement of a so-called 'black box' warning label on antidepressants, cautioning consumers that the drugs could cause suicidal tendencies in individuals under the age of 18. Black-box warnings are the strongest alerts the agency can assign before banning a drug. After the FDA review, Jeffrey Bridge, an epidemiologist at Ohio State University in Columbus, and his colleagues worried that the negative publicity surrounding the drugs had shifted attention away from any benefit the treatments might offer to children suffering from depression and other anxiety disorders. "The black-box warning showed us that there was a risk of suicidal thinking and behaviour, but it didn't take benefit into account," says Bridge. "We wanted to balance the discussion." ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 10185 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Tom Simonite A computer system that can rival some doctors' ability to diagnose early-stage Alzheimer's is being trialled in the US. It analyses a person's brain waves as they tackle a number of simple sound-based tests. An estimated 24 million people worldwide suffer the dementia caused by Alzheimer's disease. Early diagnosis is difficult and remains one of the greatest challenges in both patient care and the search for new treatments. The only way to make a definite diagnosis is to find the telltale plaques of protein in a person's brain after death. Prior to this, memory and cognition tests are used to diagnose sufferers. But not everyone gets access to the right expertise and a US study published in 1999 found that community health centres only spot around 75% of Alzheimer's cases, while specialist centres, including large hospitals, are 85% to 90% accurate. Now a team of US researchers have developed a computer system that could help close this gap. Developed by computer engineer Robi Polikar of Rowan University, in New Jersey, neurologist Christopher Clark from the Alzheimer's Disease Center in Pennsylvania and psychologist John Kounios at Drexel University in Philadelphia, the machine shows better accuracy than the average community centre. It uses an electrode cap to monitor a person's brain waves as they take a sound-based test. The person is played a series of low tones, with a much higher "oddball" tone occurring intermittently. When the oddball tone occurs, they must press a button, and their brain's response is also recorded. © Copyright Reed Business Information Lt

Keyword: Alzheimers; Hearing
Link ID: 10184 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have discovered how a defect in a single master gene disrupts the process by which several genes interact to create myelin, a fatty coating that covers nerve cells and increases the speed and reliability of their electrical signals. The discovery has implications for understanding disorders of myelin production. These disorders can affect the peripheral nervous system — the nerves outside the brain and spine. These disorders are known collectively as peripheral neuropathies. Peripheral neuropathies can result in numbness, weakness, pain, and impaired movement. They include one of the most common genetically inherited disorders, Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, which causes progressive muscle weakening The myelin sheath that surrounds a nerve cell is analogous to the insulating material that coats an electrical cord or wire, keeping nerve impulses from dissipating, allowing them to travel farther and faster along the length of the nerve cell. The researchers discovered how a defect in just one copy of the gene, known as early growth response gene 2 (EGR2) affects the normal copy of the gene as well as the functioning of other genes, resulting in peripheral neuropathy. “The researchers have deciphered a key sequence essential to the assembly of myelin,” said Duane Alexander, M.D., Director of the NICHD, the NIH institute that funded the study. “Their discovery will provide important insight into the origins of disorders affecting myelin production.”

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Glia
Link ID: 10183 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JOHN HEILPRIN WASHINGTON -- Companies that make or distribute toys, zippers and other children's products will face tougher government scrutiny to keep out any lead that could poison and kill children or harm their brain development. The Environmental Protection Agency agreed in response to legal pressure to write up to 120 importing and manufacturing companies by the end of the month, instructing them to provide health and safety studies if any lead might be found in the products they make for children. "Parents still need to be vigilant about the recalls on products marketed to children that might contain lead, and take those products away from children as soon as they are recalled," Jessica Frohman, co-chair of the Sierra Club's national toxics committee, said Sunday. The EPA letters are part of a settlement it signed Friday with the Sierra Club and another advocacy group, Improving Kids' Environment. The agency also must tell the Consumer Product Safety Commission "that information EPA has reviewed raises questions about the adequacy of quality control measures by companies importing and/or distributing children's jewelry." Lead, a highly toxic element, can cause severe nerve damage, especially in children. The EPA says lead emissions have dropped more than 90 percent since it was first listed as an air pollutant in 1976, mainly by removing lead from gasoline. Other sources of exposure to it include food and soil, solid waste, coal, oil, iron and steel production, lead smelters and tobacco smoke. © 2007 The Associated Press

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 10182 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Andy Reynolds Spiders love to fly. Hundreds can touch down in an acre of land on a day when conditions are right. And before casting out a silk thread and swooping miles through the air, a spider checks the weather just as a human pilot might do during a pre-flight routine, a new study finds. Spiders somehow consider tradeoffs between wind speed and sunshine, preferring cloudy fall and spring days as the best flight weather, the researchers discovered. Called ballooning, a spider’s mode of transport involves casting out a “dragline” of silk thread, which gets carried by the wind, along with the attached critter. Since wind is the fuel and sunshine leads to updrafts helpful for take-off, scientists figured sunny, windy days would make for perfect ballooning conditions. But a team of biologists and mathematicians with Rothamsted Research in England calculated travel distances under a range of conditions for wind and sun levels. A resulting computer model revealed the best flight weather, from an arachnid's point of view, indeed corresponds with real-life peaks in spider ballooning on cloudy fall and spring days. While hot summer days will spawn more of the updrafts, the associated lack of breeze would mean they couldn’t drift anywhere once aloft, the scientists think. At the other extreme, for instance during winter storms, whipping winds that become too strong would interfere with the updrafts to make any flight impossible. © 2007 MSNBC.com © 2007 Microsoft

Keyword: Animal Migration
Link ID: 10181 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — Humans pride themselves on their intellectual superiority over other animals. When playing a memory game, however, both humans and rhesus monkeys play equally well or, one might say, equally poorly. Each species appears to possess a three- to four-item short-term memory limit, meaning that both monkeys and humans often have trouble remembering details about this number of items. This is especially true when the game involves comparing this amount of stuff with another amount. The mental limit might even be a universal trait possessed by most all creatures. "It looks like both humans and nonhuman animals use the same type of short-term memory system to represent and count things in their environment, with a strict memory limit of three to four items," lead author Justin Wood told Discovery News. "To me, this is quite counterintuitive," Wood, a researcher in the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory and the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, added. "Our visual experience of the world is very rich, yet we can only retain a very small portion of it once we close our eyes!" Wood and colleagues Marc Hauser, David Glynn and David Barner conducted memory game experiments involving free-ranging rhesus macaques living on the island of Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. © 2007 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 10180 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Susan Milius A group of 35 labs this week unveiled a draft of the genome for the rhesus macaque, the most widely used laboratory primate and a close cousin to people. "The big question here is, 'What makes us human?'" says Richard A. Gibbs of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who led the DNA-sequencing project. The rhesus macaque is the third primate to have its genome described. Scientists reported the detailed human sequence in 2003 (SN: 4/19/03, p. 245: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20030419/fob6.asp) and a draft of the chimpanzee genome in 2005 (SN: 9/3/05, p. 147: http://www.sciencenews.org/20050903/fob1.asp). With the macaque, human, and chimpanzee sequences now in hand, researchers can triangulate to learn what genes primates share and what genes are uniquely human. "Just seeing differences in chimpanzees and humans, it's been hard to say what's on the chimpanzee side and what's on the human side," says Gibbs. Chimps share 98 percent of their DNA with people. The consortium reports in the April 13 Science that 93 percent of the macaque genome resembles that of people and chimps. Chimps are so genetically close to people that it's been difficult to tell whether a similarity indicates a sequence valuable enough to persist through evolutionary history or just a happenstance of a shared family background. The macaque's extra bit of difference could help scientists make that distinction, says Gibbs. ©2007 Science Service.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 10179 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Retinal implant learns to polish the picture Tom Simonite Software that can be taught to refine the information sent from a bionic eye to its wearer is being trialled in Germany. Retinal implants can restore some vision to blind or partially blind people by taking over the job of turning light into signals transmitted to the brain. So far, about 10 people in Germany and 15 in the US have been fitted with such implants although expanded US trials are planned. "These people report seeing light and dark and maybe some limited fuzzy shapes," says Rolf Eckmiller, a computer scientist at Bonn University in Germany. "But they don't have any gestalt perception." Eckmiller says the secret to improving these implants is to match the signals they produce with the signals that a healthy eye sends to the brain. One team in California, US, is trying to do that by building a copy of the retina's neurons in silicon. Eckmiller, along with colleagues Oliver Baruth and Rolf Schatten, plan to use learning software instead. In their system, a camera feeds information to a "retina encoder" - software that mimics the image processing done by a healthy retina. "It has hundreds of different parameters [that can] be properly tuned," says Eckmiller. "But only one setting is appropriate to allow proper perception." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 10178 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alison Abbott Passively listening to Mozart — or indeed any other music you enjoy — does not make you smarter. But more studies should be done to find out whether music lessons could raise your child's IQ in the long term, concludes a report analysing all the scientific literature on music and intelligence, which was published last week by the German research ministry. The ministry commissioned the report — surprisingly the first to systematically review the literature on the purported intelligence effect of music — from a team of nine German neuroscientists, psychologists, educationalists and philosophers, all music experts. The ministry felt it had to tackle the subject because it had been inundated with requests for funding of studies on music and intelligence, which it didn't know how to assess. The interest in this scientific area was first sparked by the controversial 1993 Nature report1 in which psychologist Frances Rauscher and her colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, claimed that people perform better on spatial tasks — such as recognizing patterns, or folding paper — after listening to Mozart for 10 minutes. The 'Mozart effect' remained a marketing tool for the music industry, and some private schools, long after a torrent of additional studies started to cast doubt on the finding. In the wild commercial flurry, which often involved over-interpretation of available data, the issues of listening to music and actively practicing music were frequently mixed up. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Intelligence; Hearing
Link ID: 10177 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Gautam Singh A woman prefers a more masculine man when she is fertile and looking for a fling rather than a mate for life, according to a new study. The finding suggests the value that women place on masculinity changes with context and with women’s reproductive cycles and immediate goals. A woman's preference for manly men also was found to vary based on how attractive she rated herself. And some of a woman's sex drive might involve tricks in the brain over which she has no control. Previous research has shown that women view facial masculinity—square jaws and well-defined brow ridges—as good characteristics for short-term partners, while more feminine traits are perceived as better for long-term mates. Another study found that women smell better to men at certain points in their menstrual cycles. In the new study, researchers asked women who were at different points in their menstrual cycles (and who were not on the pill) to rate their own attractiveness. Then researchers presented them with image pairs representing “feminized” and “masculinized” versions of the same male body. The women were asked to choose the body they thought was most attractive for a short-term relationship and then again for a long-term relationship. © 2007 MSNBC.com © 2007 Microsoft

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 10176 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By GARDINER HARRIS GAITHERSBURG, Md., — A panel of federal drug advisers voted 20 to 1 Thursday to reject an application by Merck to sell its pain pill Arcoxia because of concerns that the drug could cause as many as 30,000 heart attacks annually if widely used. Food and Drug Administration officials were unusually harsh in their criticism of the medicine. “What you’re talking about is a potential public health disaster” if Arcoxia is approved for sale, Dr. David Graham, an F.D.A. safety officer, told the panel. Arcoxia is a sister to Vioxx, which Merck withdrew in 2004 after a study showed that it also increased the risks of heart attacks and strokes. Merck sells Arcoxia in 63 countries, and the company underwrote an extensive safety testing program that involved 34,000 arthritis patients. The studies showed that Arcoxia caused nearly three times as many heart attacks, strokes and deaths as naproxen, a popular pain pill sold as Aleve, but was no more effective in curing pain. Patients taking Arcoxia suffered worrisome increases in blood pressure. Dr. Peter Kim, Merck’s research chief, told the panel that the nation’s estimated 21 million arthritis patients needed new therapy options. Representatives of his company who followed him said Arcoxia was no more effective than 20 older pain pills already marketed — some for pennies a pill — and just as risky for the heart than all but one of them. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 10175 - Posted: 06.24.2010

West Virginia University neurosurgeon Vince Miele says it's rare for a boxer to be carried out of the ring on a stretcher. More often, by the time a contender who's suffered an acute brain injury seeks treatment, it's become life threatening. That's what happened to his patient, Jennifer Heater, now 28, who in 2002 went to the emergency room the day after leaving a match with a headache that turned out to be a blood clot in her brain. "The size of her clot could have easily been fatal," says Miele. Heater spent a year in the hospital having multiple brain surgeries. "I was so drugged up and just out of my mind, I cannot recall a lot about being in the hospital other than the neurosurgeons coming in at 4:30 in the morning with the flashlights," says Heater. "But afterwards, being so sick, I couldn't eat, it took me a really long time to eat food just regular food and just to be able to walk, and to get my speech back." Miele, who's served as a ringside physician, says it's not easy to protect athletes without any objective way to know when to stop a match. "Right now it's very subjective. You observe the fighters, you examine them before and after the matches, and that's it, really," he says. "You can't go get a CT scan, an MRI scan, you can't do a formal neuro exam during a match. So everything that we use right now to stop a fight or to protect the fighter is subjective." © ScienCentral, 2000-2007.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 10174 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi People with a common gene variation have a 70% increased risk of obesity, according to a large new study of Europeans. Half of white Europeans have one defective copy of the gene FTO, which carries a 30% increased risk of obesity, the researchers found. But around 16% hold two altered copies of FTO, which carries a 70% increased obesity risk, the researchers say. They suspect that a similar proportion of other populations also hold the defective copies of FTO. Mark McCarthy at the University of Oxford in the UK and colleagues analysed the DNA in blood samples from 39,000 white people in the UK and Finland. They compared the genetic data with information about the subjects' physical health. Of the participants in the study, about 25% were obese. Individuals with a body-mass-index of 25 or higher are classified as overweight, while those with a BMI of 30 or more are categorised as obese. BMI is measured by dividing a person's weight by the square of their height. McCarthy's team found that small variations in FTO, which sits on chromosome 16, were more common among the obese subjects. People with two altered copies of the gene had a were three kilograms heavier, on average, than those with normal copies. Only 35% of this white European population had two normal copies of the gene. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10173 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Robynne Boyd Sleepwalkers do the strangest things. Many accounts attest to a somnambulist leaving their house clad only in underpants, or rising to cook a meal and returning to bed without so much as tasting it. A stern warning is frequently tacked onto these tales: waking a sleepwalker could kill them. The chances of killing a sleepwalker due to the shock of sudden awakening, however, is about as likely as somebody expiring from a dream about dying. While it is true that waking a sleepwalker, especially forcefully, may distress them, it is an absolutely false statement that someone would die from shock, says Michael Salemi, general manager at the California Center for Sleep Disorders. "You can startle sleepwalkers, and they can be very disoriented when you wake them up and they can have violent, or confused reactions, but I have not heard of a documented case of someone dying from being woken up." Sleepwalking's hazard is more closely linked to what the sleepwalker may encounter when roaming about in a nocturnal reverie. Sleepwalking, or "somnambulism," is part of a larger category of sleep-related disorders known as parasomnias, which include night terrors, REM behavior disorder, restless legs syndrome and sleepwalking. For the majority of people, sleepwalking consists of mundane activities such as sitting up in bed, ambling around the house or dressing and undressing. A minority of sleepwalkers, however, perform more complex behaviors, including preparing meals, having intercourse, climbing through windows and driving cars—all while actually asleep. These episodes can be as brief as a few seconds or can continue for 30 minutes or longer. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 10172 - Posted: 06.24.2010