PORTLAND, Ore. -- Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University's Neurological Sciences Institute (NSI) have shed light on the brain cell damage caused by Alzheimer's disease. The researchers hope that by gaining a better understanding of the disease's cellular impacts, progress can be made towards developing a treatment. The research is reported in the current edition of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, published by IOS publishers. While the cognitive and behavioral impacts of Alzheimer's can be clearly witnessed in patients, the disease's cellular function and methods for disrupting thought and memory have not been well understood. By conducting this research, NSI scientists and their collaborators have demonstrated how proteins involved in brain cell communications, called synaptic proteins, decrease in the brains of Alzheimer's patients when compared to healthy brains from people in the same age range. "More importantly, we found that the decrease of synaptic protein levels in the frontal cortex of the brains of Alzheimer's patients was more severe than in other portions of the brain," explained P. Hemachandra Reddy, Ph.D., scientist at the Neurological Sciences Institute and first and corresponding author of the paper. "Because the frontal cortex is home to important brain functions such as reasoning, planning, and abstract thought – all affected by Alzheimer's – this finding appears to be significant. Furthermore, we noticed that synaptic protein levels were even lower in the brains of patients in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. This suggests to us that the loss of these important proteins happens very early in the disease process."

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 7149 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi A compound derived from the cannabis plant protects blood vessels from dangerous clogging, a study of mice has shown. The discovery could lead to new drugs to ward off heart disease and stroke. The compound, called delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), combats the blood-vessel disease atherosclerosis in mice. This disease occurs when damage to blood vessels, by nicotine from cigarettes, for example, causes an immune response that leads to the formation of fatty deposits in arteries. These deposits form because the immune cells can linger too long, recruiting others and leading to an inflamed blockage that snares fatty molecules. The disease is the leading cause of heart disease and stroke in the developed world. THC seems to tone down this immune response, report François Mach of the University Hospital Geneva, Switzerland and his colleagues. The compound binds to a protein called CB2 that is present on the surfaces of certain immune cells. ©2005 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stroke
Link ID: 7148 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Women undergoing IVF treatment are much less likely to succeed if they smoke, according to a large Dutch study. The effect of smoking on fertility was found to be so pronounced that it was equivalent of adding more than 10 years to a woman’s reproductive age. “Our study found that the effect of smoking more than one cigarette a day for a year reduced women’s chances of having a live birth through IVF by 28% - that’s the same percentage disadvantage that occurs between a 20-year-old woman and a 30-year-old woman,” says Didi Braat, professor of gynaecology at the University Medical Centre in Nijmegen, where the study was carried out. Braat and colleagues analysed medical data and questionnaire responses from nearly 8500 women aged 20 to 45, who had undergone IVF treatment at centres in The Netherlands between 1983 and 1995. More than 40% of the women were smokers and at least 7% were overweight - with a body mass index of 27kg/m2 or higher - at the time of their first IVF attempt. The women’s subfertility was attributed to one of four causes: fallopian tube problems, male partner subfertility, unexplained subfertility and other causes - mainly polycystic ovarian syndrome or endometriosis. “Smoking had the greatest effect on those women with unexplained fertility problems, where IVF treatment led to 20.7% of non-smokers achieving a live birth, compared with just 13.4% of smokers,” says Braat. “These results indicate that smoking may actually be causing the infertility problems these women were experiencing.” © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 7147 - Posted: 06.24.2010

US scientists have designed a bionic eye to allow blind people to see again. It comprises a computer chip that sits in the back of the individual's eye, linked up to a mini video camera built into glasses that they wear. Images captured by the camera are beamed to the chip, which translates them into impulses that the brain can interpret. The device has been designed by Professor Gislin Dagnelie at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Professor Dagnelie unveiled details at a Royal National Institute for the Blind conference in London on Monday. Human trials will begin within a year, hopes Professor Dagnelie. Although the images produced by the artificial eye are far from perfect, they could be clear enough to allow someone who is otherwise blind to recognise faces, he said. The breakthrough is likely to benefit patients with the most common cause of blindness, macular degeneration, which affects 500,000 people in the UK. This occurs when there is damage to the macular, which is in the central part of the retina where light is focussed and changed into nerve signals in the middle of the brain. The implant bypasses the diseased cells in the retina and stimulates the remaining viable cells. (C)BBC

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 7146 - Posted: 04.05.2005

By BENEDICT CAREY The debate over Terri Schiavo's fate comes at a time when researchers are deepening their understanding of the unconscious brain. Neuroscientists now understand at least some of the physiology behind a wide range of unconscious states, from deep sleep to coma, from partially conscious conditions to a persistent vegetative state, the condition diagnosed in Ms. Schiavo. New research, by laboratories in New York and Europe, has allowed for much clearer distinctions to be made between the uncounted number of people who at some time become comatose, the 10,000 to 15,000 Americans who subsist in vegetative states and the estimated 100,000 or more who exist in states of partial consciousness. This emerging picture should make it easier for doctors to judge which brain-damaged patients have some hope of recovering awareness, experts say, and already it is providing clues to the specific brain processes that sustain conscious awareness. "Understanding what these processes are will give us a better sense of how to help the whole range of people living with brain injuries," said Dr. Nicholas Schiff, an assistant professor of neurology and neuroscience at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital. "That is where this field is ultimately headed: toward a better understanding of what consciousness is." Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 7145 - Posted: 04.05.2005

By CARL ZIMMER The inland taipan, a nine-foot-long Australian snake, is not the sort of creature most people would want to bother. Drop for drop, its venom is the deadliest in the world, 50 times as potent as cobra venom. Its fangs are so long they can poke through the snake's lower jaw. Its victims collapse in seconds and suffer a quick death. Dr. Bryan Fry, a biologist from the University of Melbourne, will readily admit he is not like most people. He not only bothers inland taipans; he hunts them down in dense cane fields, pins them down and bags them. Later he grabs them by the head and squeezes venom from their fangs. Besides inland taipans, Dr. Fry collects venom from death adders, rattlesnakes, king cobras, sea snakes and many others. He estimates that he handles 2,000 to 3,000 snakes a year. "Working with some of these snakes is the biggest adrenaline rush you could ever do," he admitted. "I used to do extreme ski jumping and big wave surfing, but none of that can touch working with some of these animals." Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 7144 - Posted: 04.05.2005

PHILADELPHIA – Cognitive therapy to treat moderate to severe depression works just as well as antidepressants, according to an authoritative report appearing today in the Archives of General Psychiatry. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Vanderbilt University, challenges the American Psychiatric Association's guidelines that antidepressant medications are the only effective treatment for moderately to severely depressed patients. Either form of treatment worked significantly better than a placebo, but the researchers demonstrated that cognitive therapy was more effective than medication at preventing relapses after the end of treatment. "We believe that cognitive therapy might have more lasting effects because it equips patients with the tools they need to learn how to manage their problems and emotions," said Robert DeRubeis, professor and chair of Penn's Department of Psychology. "Pharmaceuticals, while effective, offer no long term cure for the symptoms of depression. For many people, cognitive therapy might prove to be the preferred form of treatment." The study, which follows years of debate on the relative merits of cognitive therapy versus medication for more severe forms of depression, is the largest trial yet undertaken on the topic; it involved 240 depressed patients. The patients were randomly placed into groups that received cognitive therapy, antidepressant medication or a placebo. Patients in the antidepressant group, which was twice as large as the other two, were treated with paroxetine (Paxil). Lithium or desipramine was also given, as necessary.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 7143 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Despite the efforts of advocates such as the late Christopher Reeve pushing for more research to find a cure for spinal cord injuries, international research efforts have been slow to progress out of the lab and into the clinic. According to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, neither the scientific community nor thousands of Americans who have been paralyzed by spinal cord injuries are happy with the limited treatment options currently available. The report points out "an obvious and urgent need to identify and test new interventions and to accelerate the pace of research." "We're talking about a burden here of about 11 thousand new cases a year in this country," says Jeremiah Barondess, President of the New York Academy of Medicine, who served on the IOM committee that produced the report. "It?s a tremendous tragedy, a quarter of a million people are living in the U.S. with chronic spinal injury." The last few decades of research have led to significant progress in the field, improving patient survival and rehabilitation options, as well as emergency medical treatment. Additionally, recent advances in neuroscience research are opening up new opportunities for the development of therapeutic approaches. "I think the field is poised now for really striking advances because of what's been learned in neurobiology in the last ten or a dozen years," Barondess says. (C) ScienCentral, 2000-2005.

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 7142 - Posted: 04.05.2005

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Learning disabilities such as dyslexia are believed to affect nearly one in 10 children. To better study them, a Northwestern University research team has developed a data-driven conceptual framework that links two well-established scientific concepts. In doing so, they also have developed a non-invasive diagnostic tool called BioMAP that can quickly identify children with learning disabilities. Scientists have long recognized that children who can best process various aspects of the sounds of language are more likely to read earlier and develop into better readers and writers than those who cannot. After a decade of research, Northwestern Professor Nina Kraus and her colleagues have discovered a subset of learning disabilities that results from a dysfunction in the way the brainstem encodes certain basic sounds of speech. In an article in the April "Trends in Neurosciences," Kraus, who is Hugh Knowles Professor of Communication Sciences and Neurobiology, and senior research analyst Trent Nicol for the first time ever have linked the source-filter model of acoustics with the cerebral cortex's "what" and "where" pathways via the auditory brainstem.

Keyword: Dyslexia
Link ID: 7141 - Posted: 04.05.2005

CHAPEL HILL -- A study commissioned by the American Psychiatric Association and led by a psychiatrist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine has found that light therapy effectively treats mood disorders, including seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and other depressive disorders. A report of the study, which appeared April 1 in the American Journal of Psychiatry, also finds that the effects of light therapy, also known as phototherapy, are comparable to those found in many clinical studies of antidepressant drug therapy for these disorders. The findings were based on a meta-analysis, a systematic statistical review of 20 randomized, controlled studies previously reported in the scientific literature. These represented only 12 percent of 173 published studies that the authors had originally considered for review. "We found that many reports on the efficacy of light therapy are not based on rigorous study designs. This has fueled the controversy in the field as to whether or not light therapy is effective for SAD or for non-seasonal forms of mood disorders," said lead author Dr. Robert Golden, professor and chairman of psychiatry at UNC and vice dean of the medical school.

Keyword: Depression; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 7140 - Posted: 04.05.2005

New York, NY, --- A new brain imaging study of recently diagnosed schizophrenia patients has found, for the first time, that the loss of gray matter typically experienced by patients can be prevented by one of the new atypical antipsychotic drugs, olanzapine, but not by haloperidol, an older, conventional drug. The study, published in today's Archives of General Psychiatry, also confirmed previous studies that show patients who experience less brain loss do better clinically. "This is a really big breakthrough," says the study's leader, Jeffrey Lieberman, M.D., director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute and chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center. "The drugs we have for schizophrenia can't cure people who've been sick for years, but this study shows that the newer atypical drugs, if started early, can prevent the illness from progressing. If our findings are confirmed, one could argue that we should treat new patients with atypical drugs like olanzapine rather than older conventional medications such as haloperidol and chlorpromazine." Gray matter contains the bulk of the brains cell's and the billions of connections among the cells. Loss of gray matter in patients with schizophrenia has been linked to social withdrawal and progressive deterioration in cognition and emotion--which are among the least responsive symptoms to medications.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 7139 - Posted: 04.05.2005

Young children who watch a lot of television are more likely to become bullies, a new study reveals. The authors suggest the increasingly violent nature of children’s cartoons may be to blame. Previous studies have linked television to aggressive behaviour in older children and adolescents. But a team led by Frederick Zimmerman, an economist at the University of Washington in Seattle, US, has now traced the phenomenon to four-year-olds. The researchers used existing data from a national US survey to study the amount of television watched by 1266 four-year-olds. Then they compared that amount with follow-up reports - by the children's mothers - on whether the children bullied or were "cruel or mean to others" when they were between six and 11 years old. The study showed that four-year-olds who watched the average amount of television - 3.5 hours per day - were 25% more likely to become bullies than those who watched none. And children who watched eight hours of television a day were 200% more likely to become bullies. The study did not probe what types of programmes the children were watching, but Zimmerman suggests they were mainly animated videos and cartoons. He says such shows may follow a trend seen in movies and cites a recent study showing the average G-rated kids' movie contains (U-rated in the UK) about 9.5 minutes of violence - up from 6 minutes in 1940. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 7138 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists have shed more light on why smokers find it so hard to give up. A team at Goldsmiths College, London has concluded that being deprived of nicotine makes normally pleasurable things less enjoyable. The research, revealed at the British Psychological Society's Annual Conference, concludes that this may be the reason so many smokers relapse. But anti-smoking groups point out smokers can still give up successfully using nicotine replacement therapy. The research team recruited 200 smokers, all of whom smoked more than 10 cigarettes a day. The volunteers were tested twice, each time after they had refrained from smoking for 12 hours. On each occasion they received a lozenge that either contained nicotine or was a placebo. They were all given a questionnaire assessing how pleasurable they expected certain activities to be, like eating their favourite food, or going out for the evening. The researchers found that the smokers deprived of nicotine expected these things to be less pleasurable than those who were given it. The volunteers were also asked to sort cards, and offered money for doing it. The nicotine-deprived volunteers did not respond to the incentive as well as the others. Dr Lynne Dawkins, who the led the research, said: "These results led us to conclude that giving up smoking must make many other things in life much less fun." The researchers also found that smokers who had not been given nicotine found it harder to resist an impulsive urge - not looking at something that they were specifically told to ignore. (C)BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 7137 - Posted: 04.04.2005

By Jennifer Lenhart Night falls on the Coleman household in Alexandria, and it's noisy. Startled cries come from a grandfather prone to World War II flashbacks, loud bouts of snoring bedevil the grandmother, shouts of "Quiet!" erupt from the bed-hugging teenage grandson. The family didn't exactly feel like springing forward today. "I hate daylight saving time," said grandmother Ellen Coleman, a State Department employee who recently tested in an overnight sleep lab at Virginia Hospital Center. "I hate it for the morning after. . . . We have to turn the clocks ahead and we're plunged back into darkness." Daylight saving time makes Coleman feel tired. She doesn't get enough sleep, and the sleep she does get is poor. The same is true for most of her family and an estimated 40 million other Americans who have sleep disorders. The nonprofit National Sleep Foundation, in its efforts to raise awareness of the hazards of bad sleep habits, released a poll last week reporting that Americans sleep almost two fewer hours a night than 40 years ago. The consequences of that can be dangerous: Studies show accidents rise in the days after the spring time change and drowsy drivers can be as impaired as drunken drivers. © Copyright 1996-2005 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 7136 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Pope John Paul II was one of the most vigorous, well-traveled popes in history. But in his last years, Parkinson's disease made him frail and weak. People with Parkinson's often experience muscle rigidity, trembling, difficulty walking, and problems with balance and coordination. There is no cure for this progressive neurological disorder. Parkinson's disease is caused by a loss of the brain cells called neurons that produce a chemical called dopamine. Without enough of this important neurotransmitter, parts of the brain become overactive and sufferers lose control of their muscle activity. "We really don’t understand what dopamine does in the normal situation," says Mark West, a psychology professor at Rutgers University. "We know what happens when dopamine's been lost—movement becomes very difficult. In some way then, dopamine helps the brain’s motor system function smoothly. "The typical drug given is L-Dopa, which the brain converts into dopamine, and thus, some of the dopamine that's been lost is replaced," says West. The drug, developed more than 30 years ago, remains the most effective treatment. But doctors admit L-Dopa is only a bandaid for the symptoms and for some patients, it works only temporarily. "It was pretty clear over time," explains Michael Kaplitt, a professor of neurological surgery at New York Presbyterian-Weill-Cornell Medical Center. "Parkinson’s disease patients will suffer with this disorder for a long period of time—for 15, 20, 30 years or more. And after they've taken these drugs for a long period of time, a lot of things can happen. For some patients, they can become increasingly resistant to the medication after years of taking it, so they will require increasing doses of the medication, or they'll require more numerous doses throughout the day. But even with that they continue to worsen." (C) ScienCentral, 2000-2005.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 7135 - Posted: 06.24.2010

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new study in mice suggests that, in certain cases, stress may enhance the body's ability to fight the flu. Short bouts of intense social stress improved the ability in the mice to recover from the flu. The stress apparently did so by substantially boosting the production of specialized immune cells that fought the virus. "Stressed mice had a stronger immune response and were able to fight off the infection faster," said Jacqueline Wiesehan, a study co-author and a graduate fellow in oral biology at Ohio State University. These special immune cells are called T cells and are part of the immune system's memory response. T cells "remember" specific infectious agents and can launch future attacks against these intruders. The researchers hope to learn more about the mechanisms behind the memory response, and to use this information to develop more effective flu vaccines in the future, said David Padgett, a study co-author and an associate professor of oral biology at Ohio State. Wiesehan, Padgett and John Sheridan, the study's lead author and a professor of oral biology at Ohio State, presented their findings on April 3 at the Experimental Biology 2005 conference in San Diego. The three also worked on this study with Michael Bailey, a postdoctoral fellow in oral biology at Ohio State.

Keyword: Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 7134 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Modern humans may have driven Neanderthals to extinction 30,000 years ago because Homo sapiens unlocked the secrets of free trade, say a group of US and Dutch economists. The theory could shed new light on the mysterious and sudden demise of the Neanderthals after over 260,000 years of healthy survival. Anthropologists have considered a wide range of factors which may explain Neanderthal extinction, including biological, environmental and cultural causes. For example, one major study concluded that Neanderthals were less able to deal with plunging temperatures during the last glacial period. Another possibility is that they were less able hunters as a result of poorer mental abilities, says Eric Delson, an anthropologist at Lehman College, City University of New York, US. But he adds that most theories are reliant on guesswork. Exactly how humans ousted Neanderthals remains a puzzle. “They were successful for such a long time,” he points out. Jason Shogren, an economist at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, US, says part of the answer may lie in humans’ superior trading habits. Trading would have allowed the division of labour, freeing up skilled individuals, such as hunters, to focus on the tasks they are best at. Others, perhaps making tools or clothes or gathering food, would give the hunters resources in return for meat. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 7133 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Adam Summers Paleoanthropologists, the paleontologists of the human lineage, have a tough task. Hominid fossils are scarce, and they’re usually incomplete. Worse, the missing bits are often the ones investigators would most like to find—making it difficult to assemble an evolutionary tree of fossil hominids. But if that’s a tough job, imagine what life is like for anyone seeking to describe how bones and muscles functioned in ancient hominids. The scarcity and incompleteness of hominid fossils has often prolonged biomechanical debates concerning hominids. “Lucy” (Australopithecus afarensis) is a case in point. She was discovered more than thirty years ago, but a disagreement about whether those of her species walked more like a person or more like a chimpanzee was only recently decided in favor of the former. Differences in human and chimpanzee anatomy highlight the human adaptations for long-distance running. There are fewer muscle connections between the head and the shoulders in the human than in the chimpanzee. The weaker connection enables the head to move independently of the shoulder, which rotates while running. In contrast, humans have more connections between the gluteus maximus muscle in the butt and the hip than chimpanzees do, which keeps the trunk and leg moving together. Both the Achilles tendon of the heel and the tendon of the arch of the foot are much smaller in chimpanzees than they are in humans; in a running person they act like springs, absorbing and releasing energy. Copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2004

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 7132 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Many animals may have their own forms of laughter, says a US researcher writing in the magazine Science. Professor Jaak Panksepp says that animals other than humans exhibit play sounds that resemble human laughs. These include the panting sounds made by chimps and dogs when they play and chirping sounds observed in rats. This suggests that the capacity for laughter may be a very ancient emotional response that predates the evolution of humankind, says Panksepp. Research suggests the capacity for human laughter preceded the capacity for speech. Professor Panksepp, of Bowling Green State University in Ohio, US, explains that neural circuits for laughter exist in "ancient" parts of our brain, whose general structure is shared amongst many animals. Young chimps "play pant" as they mischievously chase and tickle each other. And when rats play, they make chirps which some scientists associate with positive emotional feelings. When rats are tickled in a playful way, they become socially bonded to humans and are rapidly conditioned to seek tickles, the US neuroscientist explains in Science. The chirping sounds could be provoked by nerve circuitry in the brain which releases the neurotransmitter dopamine. These dopamine circuits also light up in the human brain during human amusement. "Such knowledge may help to reveal how joking and horsing around emerged in our expansive higher brain regions," Professor Panksepp writes. (C)BBC

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 7131 - Posted: 04.02.2005

Posted by Carl Zimmer Spring is finally slinking into the northeast, and the backyard wildlife here is shaking off the winter torpor. Our oldest daughter, Charlotte, is now old enough to be curious about this biological exuberence. She likes to tell stories about little subterranean families of earthworm mommies and grub daddies, cram grapes in her cheeks in imitation of the chipmunks, and ask again and again about where the birds spend Christmas. This is, of course, hog heaven for a geeky science-writer father like myself, but there is one subject that I hope she doesn't ask me about: how the garden snails have babies. Because then I would have to explain about the love darts. Garden snails, and many other related species of snails, are hermaphrodites, equipped both with a penis that can deliver sperm to other males and with eggs that can be fertilized by the sperm of others. Two hermaphroditic snails can fertilize each other, or just play the role of male or female. Snail mating is a slow, languorous process, but it also involves some heavy weaponry. Before delivering their sperm, many species (including garden snails) fire nasty-looking darts made of calcium carbonate into the flesh of their mate. In the 1970s, scientists sugested that this was a gift to help the recipient raise its fertilized eggs. But it turns out that snails don't incorporate the calcium in the dart into their bodies. Instead, love darts turn out to deliver hormones that manipulate a snail's reproductive organs. Copyright © 2004 Corante.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 7130 - Posted: 06.24.2010