A frightening fact: Whether it’s dogs, dating, or driving over bridges, more than 14 million adults in the United States suffer from some type of phobia. The condition—described as an intense, irrational fear of a particular object, situation, or feeling—can sideline daily life activities, relationships, and careers. A dog phobia may make a person shun parks at all costs. Someone who greatly fears social situations, known as social phobia, may never experience a restaurant rendezvous with another. A person with a bridge phobia may repeatedly follow an extended route to work that avoids an overpass even though they struggle to get to their job on time. Some people with phobias may even become housebound. In the past, researchers knew little about how the brain can normally snuff out feelings of fear, which hindered the development of treatments for phobia. Now, increasing discoveries that uncover some of the major biology behind the brain’s ability to overcome the emotion are knocking down this barrier. Copyright © 2004 Society for Neuroscience

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 6909 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Doctors are warning young cannabis users that they could be at an increased risk of having a stroke. Spanish researchers detailed the case of a 36-year-old patient, with no known risk factors for stroke, who had three following cannabis use. The paper in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry said the risk may have been underestimated. But a UK stroke expert urged caution, saying more cases would have been seen if there was a significant link. The Spanish researchers estimated perhaps 15 other cases of stroke had been linked to cannabis use. They called for further research to establish the actual extent of the risk. Frequent cannabis use has in the past been linked to behavioural abnormalities and an increased risk of schizophrenia. The patient who was studied was a primary school teacher, who had been an occasional user of cannabis. He had no known risk factors for stroke, did not use other drugs, and drank only occasionally. The first incident occurred after he had smoked a considerable amount of cannabis combined with three or four drinks at a party. He lost his ability to speak, which was followed, a few hours later, by convulsions. A brain scan revealed one patch of bleeding and another blood clot, but no evidence of narrowed/furred up arteries. He was treated and recovered. (C)BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stroke
Link ID: 6908 - Posted: 02.21.2005

WASHINGTON — New research offers dramatic evidence of how psychiatric disorders are underdiagnosed in hospital emergency departments, affecting an increasing number of Americans who rely on such facilities for much of their primary health care needs. The research appears in this month’s issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA). In their study involving more than 33,000 Caucasian and African American patients from three hospital emergency departments in the Midwest and South, psychologist Seth Kunen, Ph.D., Psy.D., from the Earl K. Long Medical Center and the Louisiana State University Emergency Medicine Residency Program and colleagues confirm earlier reports that a significant psychiatric underdiagnosis is taking place. The researchers observed a psychiatric rate of 5.27% among the emergency department patients, a rate far below the national prevalence rate of 20% to 28%. Comparing national rates of various psychiatric disorders versus the observed emergency department rates, the researchers found the following: mood disorders= 4% (national rate) versus 0.70% (emergency department rate) anxiety= 11-16% versus 1.19% substance use disorders = 7% versus 2.05% tobacco use disorder= 25% versus .23% organic psychosis (psychosis due to brain injury or disease)= diagnostic ratios ranging from 3:1 to 25:1 depending on age group and method of estimation schizophrenia= 1.30% versus 0.32% © 2005 American Psychological Association

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 6907 - Posted: 06.24.2010

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Why do whales in the North Atlantic Ocean seem to be moving together and coherently? What is impelling them forward. How do they communicate with each other, seemingly over thousands of miles of ocean? And how can this acoustical habitat be protected? For nearly nine years Cornell University researcher Christopher Clark -- together with former U.S. Navy acoustics experts Chuck Gagnon and Paula Loveday -- has been trying to answer these questions by listening to whale songs and calls in the North Atlantic using the navy's antisubmarine listening system. Instead of being used to track Soviet subs as they move through the Atlantic, the underwater microphones of the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) can track singing blue, fin, humpback and minke whales. From the acoustical maps he and his colleagues have obtained, Clark has come to realize that he has been thinking about whales at the wrong time scale. "There is a time delay in the water, and the response times for their communication are not the same as ours. Suddenly you realize that their behavior is defined not by my scale, or any other whale researcher's scale, but by a whale's sense of scale -- ocean-basin sized," he says.

Keyword: Hearing; Language
Link ID: 6906 - Posted: 02.21.2005

WASHINGTON, DC - Parenting. Establishing life partnerships. Getting to know someone else's personality. These experiences feel profoundly human, but they have more in common with the animal world than one might think, researchers said today at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Animal lovers may not be surprised by this news. "I get the most skepticism from scientists," said Samuel Gosling of the University of Texas, Austin. "It's really the human behavior researchers who object most." Gosling and his colleagues have determined that dogs and hyenas have clear personality traits that can be measured like they are in humans. The researchers have studied characteristics such as fearfulness and anxiety, curiosity, and sociability. "Personality is not just unique to humans," Gosling said. Personality measurements have implications for animal welfare, for example when dogs are matched with owners or selected for various types of work. This information should also allow researchers to explore the various biological, genetic and environmental causes for an individual animal's temperament. But, all traits do not appear in all species. Conscientiousness and dependability are only present in chimps and humans, according to Gosling.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6905 - Posted: 02.21.2005

Synthetic sex pheromones are being developed as an ingenious way of luring randy cockroaches to their deaths. For years, scientists have been trying to identify the special chemical emitted by female German cockroaches that brings males running from afar. Now they have, Science magazine reports, and they hope to develop a special trap using the pheromone. The trap would contain a lethal pathogen, which sex-hungry males would pick up and pass through their colony. "We hope we will be able to attract them to traps which contain micro-organisms that will kill them eventually," said Wendell Roelofs, of Cornell University, New York, US. "And cockroaches are very gregarious so they will run back and interact with other members of the colony and they'll pass the pathogen on to them." The idea of using sex pheromones to catch pests is not a new one. It is all very well having an insect trap, but you need an effective bait. Sex pheromones, emitted by most female animals when they are ready to mate, are something that their male counterparts find irresistible. Scientists managed to identify and manufacture sex pheromones specific to certain species of cockroach some time ago. But the most menacing of them all - the German cockroach - remained a tough nut to crack. "The German cockroach is the biggest pest worldwide," said Dr Roelofs. "So people were looking way back in the 70s to see if they could synthesise it - but it eluded their attempts." The problem was nobody could find where the pheromones were being emitted from. (C)BBC

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6904 - Posted: 02.19.2005

By Susan Heavey and Lisa Richwine A veteran U.S. Food and Drug Administration scientist said Thursday the benefits of the pain relievers known as COX-2 inhibitors, a group that includes the withdrawn drug Vioxx as well as Celebrex and Bextra, do not appear to justify the risks of heart damage. Dr. David Graham, associate director for science and medicine at the FDA's Office of Drug Safety, spoke on the second day of an unusual three-day meeting called by the FDA after Merck & Co. pulled Vioxx from the market in late September. The FDA, which has come under fire in recent months as being slow to respond to serious drug side effects of drugs, is asking an advisory panel if COX-2 inhibitors offer enough benefits to stay on the market, if they and other over-the-counter pain relievers need stronger warnings, and if further research is needed. Graham said he saw a "class effect" of heart risk from the COX-2 inhibitors, and it appeared greater with higher doses. But he told the panel of FDA advisers that each drug should be evaluated individually. "The bottom line conclusion I came to is there really doesn't appear to be a need for COX-2 (inhibitors) ... I believe there is a (heart) effect and it's dose related," Graham told an FDA advisory panel. © Copyright 1996-2005 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 6903 - Posted: 06.24.2010

WASHINGTON, DC--Gender, often said to depend solely upon anatomy or hormones, may depend also on hard-wired genetics, according to new research that could help doctors and lawyers better understand the one in 4,000 babies born with both male and female traits. "The biology of gender is far more complicated than XX or XY chromosomes and may rely more on the brain's very early development than we ever imagined," researcher Eric Vilain, M.D., reported today at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. "Surgical sex assignment of newborns with no capacity to consent should never be performed for cosmetic reasons, in my opinion," said Vilain, an associate professor of human genetics who also serves as a chief of medical genetics and director of research in urology and sexual medicine within the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. "We simply don't know enough yet about gender to be making surgical or legal assumptions." Another AAAS speaker, William G. Reiner, M.D., agreed. "The most important sex organ is the brain," said Reiner, a psychiatrist and associate professor in the Department of Urology, Oklahoma University Health Science Center. "We have to let these children tell us their gender at the appropriate time." An estimated 1 in 4,000 to 1 in 5,000 babies may be classified as "gender ambiguous" because intersex conditions affecting their genitalia, reproductive systems or sex chromosomes make an immediate assessment impossible, Reiner explained.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6902 - Posted: 02.19.2005

Bigger is smarter is better. That's the conventional wisdom for why the human brain gradually became three times larger than the ancestral brain. "But bigger brains were not generally smarter brains," said neurobiologist William H. Calvin at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington, D.C. on Friday, Feb. 18. "Thanks to the archaeologists, we know that our ancestors went through two periods, each lasting more than a million years, when toolmaking techniques didn't gradually improve, despite a lot of gradual brain size increase." There is no lack of other candidates for why a bigger brain would be better. Calvin, who is affiliate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, emphasized the detailed planning needed as you get set to throw. "In hunting, you have to be right the first time, or dinner runs away, but there are other strong candidates such as the brain space needed to use words in short sentences," noted Calvin. "You need something similar for extensive sharing. You have to keep track of who owes what to whom, so as to avoid cheaters. And that's a task similar to saying who did what to whom." The problem is that, whatever the drivers were, they didn't produce a general cleverness that showed up in toolmaking techniques. What's even worse for the bigger-is-smarter-is-better hypothesis, Calvin said, is that after Homo sapiens was walking around Africa 200,000 years ago with a brain of our size, we spent – with a few exceptions – the next 150,000 years doing more of the same.

Keyword: Evolution; Intelligence
Link ID: 6901 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A procedure's serendipitous success hints that some headaches start in the heart Ben Harder Neurologist Roman Sztajzel received an unexpected letter in 1999 from a patient he had last seen a year and a half earlier. The Swiss woman thanked him for curing her of migraines, which she had experienced frequently into her early 30s. But Sztajzel hadn't treated her for migraines. He'd seen her because she'd had a stroke. Another stroke soon followed. Neither brain attack showed any sign of a typical cause. In search of an explanation, Sztajzel and his colleagues had screened the woman for an abnormal opening between the heart's upper chambers. That opening functions in human fetuses to let the circulating blood bypass the lungs, which the body doesn't rely on until a newborn starts breathing air. At or shortly after birth, tissue flaps in the heart usually fuse and close the hole. But in about a quarter of the U.S. population, complete closure never occurs. The residual tunnel, called a patent foramen ovale (PFO), can act as a valve. It's normally shut but occasionally shunts blood that's headed to the lungs off to the brain and other parts of the body. Most of the millions of people who have a PFO are never screened for it because doctors rarely suspect it of causing health problems. But in some cases, blood clots passing through the PFO can shoot to the head and trigger strokes. Air bubbles and dissolved chemicals can also slip through the one-way shunt rather than ride to the lungs, where they'd be exhaled or broken down. Copyright ©2005 Science Service.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 6900 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Christen Brownlee By flipping on a gene that's normally active only during embryonic development, researchers have restored hearing to a group of profoundly deaf guinea pigs. The finding may lead to treatments for millions of people with acquired hearing loss, the team says. Like people, guinea pigs use auditory hair cells, found deep inside the inner ear, to detect sounds. When sound waves reach them, the cells' hairlike projections sway with the vibrations and transmit electrical signals to the brain's auditory center. Permanent damage to the sensitive cells by aging, diseases, certain medications, and even loud sounds is the most common cause of acquired hearing loss in people. "The only biological way to induce recovery is by generating new hair cells," says Yehoash Raphael of the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor. Two years ago, Raphael and his colleagues succeeded in regrowing hair cells in adult guinea pigs (SN: 6/7/03, p. 355: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20030607/fob1.asp). However, the team had no evidence that the new hair cells detected sound or connected properly with the brain. Copyright ©2005 Science Service

Keyword: Hearing; Regeneration
Link ID: 6899 - Posted: 06.24.2010

HOUSTON, – If you crammed for tests by pulling 'all nighters' in school, ever wonder why your memory is now a bit foggy on what you learned? A University of Houston professor may have the answer with his research on the role of circadian rhythms in long-term learning and memory. Arnold Eskin, the John and Rebecca Moores Professor of Biology and Biochemistry at UH, was recently awarded two grants totaling $2,472,528 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue pursuing his investigations of memory formation and the impact of the biological clock on learning and memory. Scientists have known for a while that the brain's biological (or circadian) clock influences natural body cycles, such as sleep and wakefulness, metabolic rate and body temperature. New research from Eskin suggests the circadian clock also may regulate the formation of memory at night. This new research focuses on "Circadian Modulation of Long-term Memory Formation" and "Long-term Regulation of Glutamate Uptake in Aplysia," with NIH funding to be disbursed over four years. "There is a lot of research going on in memory," Eskin said. "How do we remember things given that we don't have a camera in our brain to record events? What changes take place in our brains that allow us to remember? These grants are about fundamental learning and memory and about modulation of memory."

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 6898 - Posted: 06.24.2010

WASHINGTON, DC - Researchers have noted a higher incidence of depression among patients with epilepsy than the general population or others with chronic conditions such as diabetes. For a long time, depression was thought to be a complication of epilepsy. But there is evidence that the connection between epilepsy and depression may be a two-way street, according to research carried out in Sweden and the United States and reviewed at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). "People with a history of depression have a 3 to 7 times higher risk of developing epilepsy," said Dr. Andres Kanner, a specialist on epilepsy at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. "This kind of information is forcing us to take a second look at the interaction between depression and epilepsy." Since depression affects about 5.3 percent of the U.S. population and epilepsy about 0.5 to 1 percent, session organizers said, knowledge of any relationships between the two disorders could help physicians find ways to improve care for both groups. The two-way relationship between epilepsy and depression could mean common pathogenic mechanisms are at work, Kanner said.

Keyword: Epilepsy; Depression
Link ID: 6897 - Posted: 02.19.2005

Shared properties of human languages are not the result of universal grammar but reflect self-organizing properties of language as an evolving system The forces of variation and selection which shape human language have become issues of extensive research. Documentation of sounds and sound patterns, and their evolution over the past 7000-8000 years allows linguists to quantify the important role of human perception, articulation and imperfect learning as language is passed from one generation to the next. At this year's AAAS conference in Washington, DC, Juliette Blevins, senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, presents a new approach to the problem of how genetically unrelated languages across the world often show similar sound patterns, without invoking innate mechanisms specific to grammar. Languages as far apart as Native American, Australian Aboriginal, Austronesian and Indo-European show similar patterns of vowel and consonant inventory and distribution, but exceptions to sound patterns regarded as universal show that these similarities are best viewed as the result of convergent evolution. A new model of sound change shows that evolutionary principles can account for striking phonetic similarities across unrelated languages, as well as the rarity of certain sounds. German and Russian are not the only languages in the world where sounds like b, d, and g lose their characteristic vocal fold 'buzz' at the end of the word. Dozens of unrelated languages, from Afar on the sands of Ethiopia, to Ingush in the northern Caucasus have similar sound patterns.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 6896 - Posted: 02.19.2005

A drug used to treat patients with Alzheimer's disease could actually make their condition worse, a study says. Quetiapine (Seroquel) is commonly used in nursing homes to combat agitation, a common symptom of Alzheimer's. But research by Institute of Psychiatry experts in the British Medical Journal online suggests it could significantly speed up the rate of patients' decline. However, a spokesman for AstraZeneca, which makes Seroquel, said the drug was safe and effective. Antipsychotic drugs such as quetiapine are used in up to 45% of nursing homes to treat agitation, which is a common and distressing symptom of dementia. They are also used to treat schizophrenia. Ninety-three patients at care homes in the north-east of England who had Alzheimer's, dementia and significant levels of agitation were studied over six months. They were split into three groups. One was given a daily dose of quetiapine, another was given the "anti-dementia" drug rivastigmine, and the third a dummy pill. Researchers then assessed their agitation levels and cognitive abilities, such as memory skills, throughout the study. Forty-six patients completed cognitive assessments after six weeks. The 14 who were taking quetiapine registered an average drop of around 14 points on the scale used to assess decline, compared to almost no change for those taking the dummy pill. (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 6895 - Posted: 02.18.2005

To most people, cochlear implants sound like a medical miracle—a device the size of a candy corn that can correct the inability to hear. But many in the Deaf community see the technology as a cultural threat, yet another example of the hearing world’s inability to really listen. When Angie Mucci’s daughter Allie was born nearly three years ago, she knew her little girl was special. What she didn’t know—and wouldn’t discover until a year later, when it was clear Allie wasn’t responding to even the loudest noises—was that her daughter is deaf. Just a few decades ago, children with hearing loss as profound as Allie’s had two choices if they wanted to learn to communicate: lip-reading or sign language. But Allie and her mom were given a third option: surgical implantation of a “bionic ear,” or cochlear implant, that would help Allie hear. “I am all for giving my daughter every opportunity she has out of life,” says Mucci, a twenty-nine-year-old Las Vegas resident who, like an estimated ninety percent of parents with deaf children, can hear. For Mucci, that meant enrolling her daughter in an implant study in San Antonio, Texas, where Allie underwent surgery on her right ear at the age of thirteen months. Before the operation, Allie could hear only sounds that measured at 110 decibels or louder, a sound volume that compares with what you might hear when seated in the front row of a rock concert. With her cochlear implant, and no visual cues, Allie can now detect sounds that clock in at a mere twenty decibels. Mucci is currently scheduling a second surgery, this time on Allie’s left ear, with the doctors who performed the first operation. © 2002 Science & Spirit Magazine.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 6894 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Eating fish is a healthy choice because its' one of the best sources of beneficial fats called omega-3 fatty acids. But some people are also cautioned to watch out for certain fish because of high levels of mercury. "The problem with mercury is, if it's ingested at very high levels, for certain populations it can cause damage to our nervous systems," says Charles Santerre, associate professor of foods and nutrition and food science at Purdue University. "Our greatest concern is women of child-bearing age, because women who become pregnant or are nursing can pass mercury either through the placenta or through their milk, and the levels that get to the fetus or the nursing infant can be high enough, in some instances, to cause injury to the baby." In March of 2004 the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency recommended that sensitive populations—women who are pregnant or might become pregnant, nursing mothers, and young children—should avoid eating large ocean fish like swordfish, tilefish, king mackerel, and shark. But what about the most commonly eaten fish, like tuna? Canned tuna is eaten by 96 percent of American households, and represents the number three item in U.S. grocery stores (behind sugar and coffee) based on dollar sales per linear foot of shelf space. © ScienCentral, 2000- 2005.

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 6893 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post Staff Writer Adults taking popular antidepressants such as Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide as patients given sugar pills, according to an analysis released yesterday of hundreds of clinical trials involving tens of thousands of patients. The results mirror a recent finding of the Food and Drug Administration that the drugs increase suicidal thoughts and behavior among some children, and offer tangible support to concerns going back 15 years that the mood-lifting pills have a dark side. The examination of 702 controlled clinical trials involving 87,650 patients is the most comprehensive look at the subject and is particularly telling because it counted suicide attempts and included patients treated for a variety of conditions, including sexual dysfunction, bulimia, panic disorder and depression. Experts cautioned, however, that the risks should be balanced against the drugs' benefits. They have been shown to be effective against depression and a host of other disorders in adults, a positive track record largely missing in tests of the drugs on children. © Copyright 1996-2005 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 6892 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Following the Asian tsunami, scientists struggled to explain reports that primitive aboriginal tribesmen had somehow sensed the impending danger in time to join wild animals in a life-saving flight to higher ground. While some scientists discount the existence of a sixth sense for danger, new research from Washington University in St. Louis has identified a brain region that clearly acts as an early warning system -- one that monitors environmental cues, weighs possible consequences and helps us adjust our behavior to avoid dangerous situations. "Our brains are better at picking up subtle warning signs than we previously thought," said Joshua Brown, Ph.D., a research associate in psychology in Arts & Sciences and co-author of a study on these findings in the Feb. 18 issue of the journal Science. The findings offer rigorous scientific evidence for a new way of conceptualizing the complex executive control processes taking place in and around the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a brain area located near the top of the frontal lobes and along the walls that divide the left and right hemispheres.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 6891 - Posted: 02.18.2005

Understanding the biology of memory is a major goal of contemporary neuroscientists. Short-term or "working" memory is an important process that enables us to interact in meaningful ways with others and to comprehend the world around us on a moment-to-moment basis. A study published this week in Science (February 18) presents a strikingly simple yet robust mathematical model of how short-term memory circuits in the brain are likely to store, process, and make rapid decisions about the information the brain receives from the world. A classic although purely practical example of working memory is our ability to look up a telephone number, remember it just long enough to dial it, and then promptly forget it. However, working memory is fundamental to many other cognitive processes including reading, writing, holding a conversation, playing or listening to music, decision-making, and thinking rationally in a general sense. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory computational neuroscientist Carlos Brody (brody@cshl.edu) explores how brain neurons interact with each other to form the circuits or "neural networks" that underlie working memory and other rapid and flexible cognitive processes. In the new study, Brody's group developed a mathematical model for interpreting data collected at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México by his collaborator Rodolfo Romo. Romo's group measured brain neuron activity of macaque monkeys while the animals performed a simple task that involves working memory.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 6890 - Posted: 02.18.2005