By Rob Stein, Washington Post Staff Writer According to the Bible, "a merry heart doeth good like a medicine." Now, modern science may be validating that Old Testament proverb -- a good laugh may actually help fend off heart attacks and strokes. "We believe laughing is good for your health," said Michael Miller of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, who led the research. "And we think we have evidence to show why that's the case." A growing body of other evidence has suggested that negative emotions, particularly depression and stress, can be harmful, making people more prone to illness, more likely to experience suffering from their ailments and less likely to recover as quickly, or at all. One recent study even found sudden emotional shock can trigger life-threatening heart symptoms that many doctors mistake for a classic heart attack. Miller himself, along with his colleagues, had done a study that found people who have a negative reaction to social situations tend to be more prone to heart disease. But far less has been done to examine whether positive emotions can reduce the risk and complications of illness. © 2005 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Emotions
Link ID: 7029 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jennifer Couzin, Special to The Washington Post At 13, I teamed up with my best friend Jill on Halloween: She was a nurse, and I dressed as an injured person. Though we wrapped my body in white gauze and Ace bandages, some of my outfit was not part of the costume. I was in my second month on crutches then, for a painful knee problem that had lingered since August, a case of bone outpacing muscle as it grew. By spring doctors could explain why my knees had taken so long to improve: My legs didn't harbor the only bones growing astray. In May 1990, the month of my 14th birthday, I was diagnosed with scoliosis, a curvature of the spine. The development, my doctor believed, had further unbalanced my knees. Most cases of scoliosis are mild but a minority are not, and I stumbled headfirst into that category. Within months the condition worsened. Pain radiated through my back, my ribs, my hips, my chest. Its demands for attention intruded at the most inopportune times: during French class, a Halloween party, gossip about boys. What I didn't know then was that kids like me were everywhere. "Most people don't think of kids as having chronic pain, but there are tragically thousands and thousands of kids who are eligible," said Laura Tosi, an orthopedic surgeon at Children's Hospital in the District. © Copyright 1996-2005 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 7028 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Plans to withdraw four key drugs used to treat Alzheimer's disease from the NHS have been met with opposition from government ministers. Aricept, Exelon, Reminyl and Ebixa are the only drugs licensed in Britain for the treatment of the disease. The National Institute for Clinical Excellence, in its draft guidance, said the drugs were not cost-effective. But health minister Stephen Ladyman told the Observer Nice needs to look at the wider impact of its decision. The drugs, which campaigners estimate cost £2.50 per day per patient, improve memory and can make daily living tasks easier. The plans have sparked outrage from campaigners, who say they will adversely affect thousands of people with dementia and could discourage further research into the area. Nice has already stated that patients already taking the drugs would not have them withdrawn. It added that it was only draft guidance at present and patients would not be affected until the final decision in July when the consultation had been finished. A Department of Health spokesperson said: "The government respects the independence of Nice. "However, in view of the public concern over the draft proposals, the government will want to ensure that all aspects have been fully considered." He said the Department of Health will be asking Nice if it has taken into account "the wider social implications of not approving the drugs' use, especially the benefits and costs to carers as well as patients". Mr Ladyman said his department will submit a report in the coming week emphasising the benefits of the drugs. (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 7027 - Posted: 03.14.2005

By SARAH KERSHAW SALEM, Ore. - Next to the old mortuary, where the dead were once washed and prepared for burial or cremation, is a locked room without a name. Inside the room, in a dim and dusty corner of one of many abandoned buildings on the decaying campus of the Oregon State Hospital here, are 3,489 copper urns, the shiny metal dull and smeared with corrosion, the canisters turning green. The urns hold the ashes of mental patients who died here from the late 1880's to the mid-1970's. The remains were unclaimed by families who had long abandoned their sick relatives, when they were alive and after they were dead. The urns have engraved serial numbers pressed into the tops of the cans. The lowest number on the urns still stored in the room is 01, the highest 5,118. Over the decades, about 1,600 families have reclaimed urns containing their relatives' ashes, but those left are lined up meticulously on wood shelves. Short strips of masking tape with storage information are affixed to each shelf: "Vault #2, Shelf #36, plus four unmarked urns," one piece of tattered tape says. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 7026 - Posted: 03.14.2005

Scientists at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have used RNA interference in transgenic mice to silence a mutated gene that causes inherited cases of amytrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), substantially delaying both the onset and the progression rate of the fatal motor neuron disease. Their results will be published in the April issue of Nature Medicine, and in the journal's advanced online publication March 13. In addition to silencing the mutated gene that causes ALS, the EPFL researchers were able to simultaneously deliver a normal version of the gene to motor neuron cells using a single delivery mechanism. "This is the first proof of principle in the human form of a disease of the nervous system in which you can silence the gene and at the same time produce another normal form of the protein," notes Patrick Aebischer, EPFL President and a co-author of the study. ALS is a progressive neurological disease that attacks the motor neurons controlling muscles. Although its victims retain all their mental faculties, they experience gradual paralysis and eventually lose all motor function, becoming unable to speak, swallow or breathe. Known also as Lou Gehrig's disease, from the baseball player who succumbed to it, this harrowing disease has no cure and its pathogenesis is not very well understood.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 7025 - Posted: 03.14.2005

WASHINGTON — College seems to pay off well into retirement. A new study from the University of Toronto sheds light on why higher education seems to buffer people from cognitive declines as they age. Brain imaging showed that in older adults taking memory tests, more years of education were associated with more active frontal lobes – the opposite of what happened in young adults. It appears possible that education strengthens the ability to “call in the reserves” of mental prowess found in that part of the brain. A full report appears in the March issue of Neuropsychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association (APA). A team of psychologists led by Mellanie Springer, MSc, chose a memory task because even normal aging brings some memory loss. They were intrigued by how highly educated patients with Alzheimer’s disease appear to be better able than less educated patients to compensate for brain pathology, which suggested that education somehow protects cognition. To understand the mechanism, the researchers studied the relationship between education and brain activity in two different age groups: 14 adults of ages 18 to 30, with 11 to 20 years of education, and 19 adults of age 65 and up, with eight to 21 years of education. Springer and her colleagues ran each participant through several memory tests while scanning his or her brain with functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). © 2005 American Psychological Association

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 7024 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The hallmark of Alzheimer's disease - amyloid plaques in the brain - can be detected in living mice using a new technique based on magnetic resonance imaging. The finding raises the possibility that people without overt symptoms could one day be diagnosed and treated early. Currently, the standard way to confirm the presence of the plaques, and thus the disease, is by autopsy. Amyloid plaques are insoluble protein clumps in the brain which form early on in Alzheimer's disease and can precede dementia by many years. Identifying people with Alzheimer's while they are still asymptomatic means the disease could in theory be slowed, or even halted, before irreversible neuron loss takes place. Other attempts to use brain scans, including PET and SPECT, have had some success. But PET, for example, is fifty times as expensive as MRI, has lower resolution and exposes patients to radiation. Takaomi Saido at the Riken Brain Science Institute in Wako, Japan, and his colleagues, have developed a new, non-toxic tracer that attaches itself to the amyloid plaques in the brain and can be detected by regular MRI scanners. The tracer is made from a form of fluorine that is a common additive in drinking water, and a form of hydrogen, which is known to bind to amyloid. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 7023 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Just why are we suddenly spending so much money on studying the brain? Is science making its final push to crack the riddle of human consciousness? Or is the answer rather more sinister? In the 1960s, Yale University neuroscientist Jose Delgado stood in a Spanish bullring clutching a radio transmitter in one hand, a toreador cape in the other. The bull came charging. But Delgado had implanted a set of electrodes in the centre of its brain. A single push of a button brought the bull to a halt. A second saw it meekly turn and trot away. As Steven Rose, director of the brain and biology research group at the Open University, notes, this was not the bravura performance of some lone scientific crank. Delgado was part of a generation of mind researchers who felt they were close to control over the brain. Leucotomies - the cutting of swaths of connections in the frontal brain - were already standard practice for dealing with mental patients. Prison doctors were writing enthusiastically about the possibility of similar surgery on the emotion centres to tame their more violent inmates. Memos put the cost at just $1,000 an individual. Together with the rise of new drugs and sophisticated psychological conditioning techniques, many like Delgado hailed the coming of a technologically "psychocivilised" society. It didn't happen then, but could it happen now? Neuroscience has been talked up as science's final frontier. Huge amounts of money have poured into the field as the 90s decade of the brain became the 2000s decade of the mind. But, asks Rose, are we funding "interesting" research for which later we will be paying the consequences? © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 7022 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By IRENE LACHER LOS ANGELES - Aldous Huxley long ago warned of a future in which love was beside the point and happiness a simple matter of consuming mass-produced goods and plenty of soma, a drug engineered for pleasure. More than 70 years later, Dr. Peter C. Whybrow, the director of the Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles, has seen the future, and the society he describes isn't all that distant from Huxley's brave new world, although the soma, it seems, is in ourselves. In his new book, "American Mania: When More Is Not Enough" (W. W. Norton & Company), Dr. Whybrow argues that in the age of globalization, Americans are addictively driven by the brain's pleasure centers to live turbocharged lives in pursuit of status and possessions at the expense of the only things that can truly make us happy: relationships with other people. "In our compulsive drive for more," writes Dr. Whybrow, 64, a professor of psychiatry and bio-behavioral science, "we are making ourselves sick." His book is part of a new critical genre that likens society to a mental patient. The prognosis is grim. In "American Mania," he argues that the country is on the downswing of a manic episode set off by the Internet bubble of the 1990's. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Emotions
Link ID: 7021 - Posted: 03.14.2005

A drug can reduce the disability associated with treatment for Parkinson's disease, research suggests. Doctors at University Hospital, Toulouse, gave the drug, rasagiline, to Parkinson's patients already taking levodopa to control their symptoms. It helped to reduce the impaired and abnormal movements which develop in most patients who take levodopa over a long period. The research is published in The Lancet medical journal. Parkinson's disease is a degenerative disease of the nervous system associated with trembling of the arms and legs, stiffness and rigidity of the muscles and slowness of movement. Drugs such as levodopa, which boost levels of a brain chemical called dopamine, can improve symptoms and reduce the risk of fatal complications. But when used over a long period the drug will begin to impair patients' movements. Several drugs, including pergolide, pramipexole, ropinirole, entacapone and tolcapone, have been shown to reduce this problem - but with only limited success. The French team compared the effect of using rasagiline and entacapone alongside levodopa in a study of 687 Parkinson's patients recruited from centres in Israel, Argentina and Europe. Both drugs reduced the length of time each day that patients suffered from impaired movement. Rasagiline appeared to be safe, and was particularly well tolerated by older people. (C)BBC

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 7020 - Posted: 03.12.2005

Scanners can help combat depression, a US study of rats shows. Harvard Medical School researchers found MRI scanners, which take internal images of the body, can have the same effect as standard anti-depressants. The team employed a rarely-used type of scan known as EP-MRSI which tends to be used for brain scans. But UK experts said they were sceptical about the findings and said more research was needed. The team found rats experiencing stress and exhibiting helplessness - the rat equivalent of despair - recovered significantly when exposed to EP-MRSI, the journal Biological Psychiatry reported. The scientists carried out the study after doctors reported similar effects in human patients with bipolar disorder. Lead researcher Dr Bruce Cohen, a psychiatrist at the McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, which is affiliated to Harvard Medical School, said the findings had the potential to revolutionise depression treatment. "The rats behaved as if they had received an anti-depressant. It's a non-drug way to change the firing of nerve cells. "That's why the implications of this work have the potential to be so profound." But William Carlezon, who also took part in the study, added it could also mean that some forms of MRI could be damaging to patients. "Renewed caution is warranted when high-speed MRI is used to diagnose or study disorders involving the brain. People assume when they are getting an MRI that nothing is happening, that you are simply getting a picture of the brain. But in actuality the body is being exposed to magnetic and electrical fields. They may cause other effects we don't understand yet." (C)BBC

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 7019 - Posted: 03.12.2005

Scientists may have found what makes a tune catchy, after locating the brain area where a song's "hook" gets caught. A US team from Dartmouth College, reported in the journal Nature, played volunteers tunes with snippets cut out. They scanned for brain activity and found it centred in the auditory cortex - which handles information from ears. When familiar tunes played, the cortex activity continued during the blanks - and the volunteers indeed said they still mentally "heard" the tunes. Researchers have previously argued that catchy songs work by causing a "brain itch" that can only be scratched by repeating the tune. The Dartmouth team asked volunteers to listen to excerpts from familiar and unfamiliar songs with lyrics or instrumentals. These included the Rolling Stones' Satisfaction and the theme tune from The Pink Panther. Snippets of the music were removed at different points during the songs and replaced with silent gaps. The researchers used a brain scan called functional magnetic resonance imaging to see which parts of the brain were active while the volunteers listened to the tracks. After the experiment, the volunteers reported hearing a continuation of the song during the silent gaps when the tune was familiar, but not when the song was unfamiliar to them. When the researchers looked at the brain scans they found the individuals had more activity in specific regions of the brain during the silent gaps when the song was familiar, than when it was an unknown tune. (C)BBC

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 7018 - Posted: 03.12.2005

Dov Fox In July 2003, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized pharmaceutical companies to promote human Growth Hormone (hGH) for use in children who are very short but not suffering from any specific illness or medical condition. Parents are now using hGH in record numbers, hoping that hormone treatment will give their kids happier childhoods and more prosperous adulthoods. No one should doubt these parental good intentions. But the normalization of height enhancement reflects a troubling disposition, familiar in our time, to redefine disadvantageous traits as “illnesses” and look to medical techniques for a “cure.” Of course, there are often real benefits to using medical technologies for self-improvement: straighter teeth, clearer complexions, firmer figures. But our technological enhancements to body and psyche may also undermine those human goods that are less obvious but more fundamental—especially parental love for the abnormal child and civic love for the abnormal neighbor. We can hardly expect the FDA as an institution to worry about such matters; its concern is the safety of products not the health of the culture. But when it approved height enhancement for healthy kids, the FDA made a mistake on our behalf. Exploring the nature of this error may help us deal more wisely with the biotechnical enhancements of the future, or at least see more clearly the full meaning of our “improvements.” One can understand the hGH seduction. Short Americans—especially males—often face difficulties ranging from fitting in at school to finding a job or spouse. Studies show that shortness in childhood is correlated with juvenilization, teasing, bullying, and social exclusion, while studies in adults have linked short stature to social isolation, reduced marriage rates, and problems in employment. In one study, several hundred university students rated the qualities of men of varying heights. Short men were regarded as less mature, less positive, less secure, less masculine, less successful, less capable, less confident, and less outgoing.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 7017 - Posted: 06.24.2010

What makes a man behave like a man and a woman a woman? The answer may be partly in your genes. Researchers at the University of Virginia Health System have discovered a new twist on the role that estrogens play in the development of behavioral differences between males and females. In laboratory tests on mice, the researchers found evidence that an estrogen receptor in the hypothalamus called ERb regulates defeminization, a process by which males lose the ability to display female-type behavior in adulthood. Defeminization is believed by many experts to be the main neurological process that differentiates males and females before birth. The discovery is detailed in the March 10 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences found at: www.pnas.org. “Our hypothesis is that neonatal males are exposed to the steroid estradiol (a form of natural estrogen) produced by their testes. Estradiol binds to the estrogen receptor (ERb) and this acts to turn on, or turn off, other genes which sculpt the neural architecture required for adult function,” said the study’s main author, Emilie Rissman, PhD, a professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at U.Va. and a specialist in the genetics of mammalian behavior. “We’d like to find out what the genes are, where precisely they reside in the brain, when in development this happens, and what the cellular targets are of these genes,” Rissman said. Interestingly, male fetuses are exposed to estrogen in their normal development and females are not because ovaries don’t fully develop until puberty. © 1998 – 2005 by the Rector & Visitors of the University of Virginia

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 7016 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nathan Seppa People who make a particular form of an immune system protein have a heightened risk of developing old-age blindness, three teams of researchers report in an upcoming Science. In a search for the factors underlying age-related macular degeneration—a deterioration of the eye that is the primary cause of vision loss in the elderly—the researchers have implicated one of several variants of the gene that encodes the protein called complement factor H, or CFH. The scientists hypothesize that this version of CFH fails to rein in inflammatory proteins, the protein's normal role. This braking of inflammation is indispensable to the eyes of some elderly people, the new studies suggest. As people age, microscopic damage accumulates in their eye tissues. In many people, this results in formation of drusen, a yellowish combination of fats, proteins, and cellular debris. In people with macular degeneration, large amounts of drusen destroy eye tissue. Using blood samples, the researchers analyzed the genetics of macular degeneration patients and elderly people who didn't have the condition. "We scanned across the genome to see what contrasts there were … and [the CFH gene] came up," says Yale University statistician Josephine Hoh. Copyright ©2005 Science Service.

Keyword: Vision; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 7015 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Steven Schultz · Recent studies from the lab of neuroscientist Elizabeth Gould are helping to show how major experiences -- such as early-life traumas -- can have a long-term effect on the structure of the brain. In one study published last year, researchers in Gould’s lab found that baby rats that were separated from a care-giving adult for several hours a day formed fewer new neurons in their brains later in life. Another study showed that adult rats that grew up normally produced elevated numbers of new neurons if they achieved social dominance in a small community of rats. “These are different examples of how life experience changes the brain,” said Gould, a professor of psychology at Princeton. Until the last decade, scientists did not believe that the brain changes that Gould and colleagues study were even possible. The conventional view in neuroscience was that once animals, including humans, reach adulthood, they acquire no new neurons, or nerve cells. Gould is a pioneer in showing that several important areas of the brain continue to create neurons throughout life, a process called adult neurogenesis. In recent years, Gould has investigated factors that influence the rate of adult neurogenesis and the roles played by the new brain cells. © 2005 The Trustees of Princeton University

Keyword: Neurogenesis; Stress
Link ID: 7014 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Anthropologists have constructed the world's first complete articulated Neanderthal skeleton to expand public and scientific understanding of the group, as well as of the differences between Neanderthals and modern humans. Their research will be published online March 11, 2005 in The Anatomical Record Part B: The New Anatomist, and will be available via Wiley InterScience (http://www.interscience.wiley.com/journal/ar). Questions about Neanderthals have persisted for nearly 150 years, many based upon an early erroneous stereotype of a slouched, bent-kneed biped with primitive mental capacity. Over the years, many artists have put forth images of Neanderthals, yet no one had ever constructed a complete skeleton using authentic fossil skeletal material. Anthropologists G.J. Sawyer of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Blaine Maley of Washington University in St. Louis, MO set out to be the first, in an attempt to contribute to a more objective understanding of Neanderthals. "The primary purpose was to provide a more scientific understanding of Neanderthal skeletal anatomy based on the totality of available evidence, and to help us get a better estimation of stature differences between modern humans and our Neanderthal cousins," said the authors. "Our results would be used to educate the scientific community and the public on these differences, as well as give us a potential vehicle for undertaking more accurate biomechanical studies on Neanderthal positional and locomotor behaviors."

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 7013 - Posted: 03.11.2005

Fascination with oral hygiene is nothing new. Babylonians chewed twigs until the ends frayed enough to provide a good brushing. Chinese ancients crafted the first bristle toothbrush from wild boar. And Greeks of old introduced rough linen cloth to Alexander the Great who, egged on by Aristotle, used it to buff his bicuspids. Today's dental care smorgasbord offers flavored floss, bubble gum toothpaste, whitening mouthwashes and space-age looking toothbrushes angled to get at oral gunk. Now, fresh evidence shows that our long fixation with clean mouths may be doing more than keeping cavities away; it might actually reduce the risk of stroke and heart attack. Infectious disease researcher Moïse Desvarieux, of the Mailman School of Public Health , neurologist Ralph Sacco of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and Panos Papapanou, of Columbia University's School of Dental & Oral Surgery, reported in the journal Circulation that thickening of the carotid artery, at work in stroke and heart attack, is associated with high levels of harmful oral bacteria found in gum disease. "The relationship that we have between gum disease, the bacteria, and the thicker carotid was only present in the bad bacteria and not in the others," says Desvarieux, the study's principal investigator. The team spent five years tracking 657 people over age 55 of mixed race and income, all with no stroke history. In a three part process, they screened patients for diabetes, hypertension, and smoking, stroke and heart disease risks factors, sampled eleven types of oral bacteria, four thought to cause gum disease and seven that are believed to have no role in gum disease, and took ultrasounds to examine carotid artery thickening. © ScienCentral, 2000-2005.

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 7012 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A research group based at the University of Chicago has found that an enriched environment -- in this case more chances to exercise, explore and interact with others – can dramatically reduce the biological hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease in mice that are genetically predisposed to the disorder. In the 11 March 2005 issue of Cell, the researchers show that mice raised in a deluxe setting – large cages filled with running wheels, colored tunnels and multiple toys -- had much less of the beta-amyloid peptides that are characteristic of Alzheimer's disease deposited in their brains and far lower levels of these damaging peptides in their blood than genetically similar mice raised in a standard environment. Mice from enriched settings also had more of an enzyme that breaks down amyloid as well as increased activity of several genes involved in learning and memory, brain cell survival and the growth of new blood vessels. "We have plenty of epidemiological evidence connecting activity, exercise and education with later onset of Alzheimer's, but it has never been clear which came first," said study-author Sangram Sisodia, Ph.D., professor of neurobiology, pharmacology and physiology at the University of Chicago. "Did the active lifestyle delay disease, or was there something inherent in a disease-resistant brain that led to a mentally and physically active lifestyle?"

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 7011 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Hopkin Geneticists have pinpointed a mutation that increases the chances of age-related blindness. The discovery, made by three separate research groups, could help to identify people who are most vulnerable to the condition. Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the chief cause of blindness among the elderly in the developed world, affecting more than 10 million people in the United States alone. The condition involves the deterioration of the central part of the retina, the 'macula', leading to problems distinguishing colours and seeing motion. It ultimately blots out central vision completely. Spotting those most at risk would help to ensure they receive preventative treatment. Although there is no cure, the condition can be slowed by using lasers or drugs to stop damaged, leaky blood vessels from proliferating. The causes of AMD are complicated with experts suspecting the involvement of many factors, both genetic and environmental. Smoking and obesity, for example, are both risk factors. But this picture may not be quite as complex as many had feared, says Albert Edwards of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who led one of the three studies. His team and two other teams have independently pinned down a simple genetic change that could explain around 50% of the variation between people who develop AMD and those who don't. ©2005 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Vision; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 7010 - Posted: 06.24.2010