More than four million people die from smoking-related causes each year, making nicotine addition a leading cause of preventable mortality worldwide. But nicotine's highly addictive nature makes kicking the smoking habit very difficult. A report published today in the journal Science identifies brain receptors in mice that may help explain why it's so hard to quit, and help scientists develop new drugs to help smokers butt out. Receptors embedded in the surface of neurons allow compounds such as nicotine to act on brain cells. Researchers had previously identified so-called nicotinic acetylcholine receptors as important in cigarette addiction. Henry A. Lester of the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues created genetically engineered mice that had alterations in these receptors. They found that animals with a mutation in the “alpha4” subsection were particularly sensitive to nicotine's effects. Mice with the alpha4 mutation showed signs of addiction at lower doses than did normal mice and, once exposed to the chemical, the altered neurons responded more strongly to large doses of it than regular neurons did. © 1996-2004 Scientific American, Inc

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 6373 - Posted: 06.24.2010

For those who have wondered why they like or dislike certain things, or how they decide what to order from a menu, a team of researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder says it's dopamine. A CU-Boulder team studying Parkinson's disease patients found strong evidence that dopamine in the brain plays a key role in how people implicitly learn to make choices that lead to good outcomes, while avoiding bad ones. The finding could help researchers understand more about how the brain works and could lead to a better understanding and treatment of brain disorders like schizophrenia, according to CU-Boulder psychology graduate student Michael Frank, who led the study. A paper on the subject by Frank, CU-Boulder psychology Associate Professor Randall O'Reilly and Lauren Seeberger of the Colorado Neurological Institute's Movement Disorders Center appears in the Nov. 5 issue of Science Express, an online version of Science magazine. Often people will get a "gut feeling" that allows them to make a choice depending on how often it was associated with positive outcomes in the past. But people with Parkinson's disease often have difficulty making these kinds of choices, Frank said. To understand why, they developed a computer model of the effects of Parkinson's disease and the medications used to treat it in the brain. From this model they predicted that Parkinson's patients would differ in their decision making depending on whether or not they were taking their medication, which they confirmed in a subsequent study.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 6372 - Posted: 11.06.2004

Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal that food cravings activate brain areas related to emotion, memory and reward – areas also activated during drug-craving studies. Study lead author Marcia Levin Pelchat, PhD, a Monell Center sensory psychologist, comments, "This is consistent with the idea that cravings of all kinds, whether for food, drugs, or designer shoes, have common mechanisms." Studies of food craving, possibly the evolutionary basis of all craving behavior, may provide insight into drug craving and how it contributes to maintenance and relapse of drug addiction. Pelchat notes, "Identifying the brain regions involved can tell us a great deal about the normal and pathological neurochemistry of craving, and in turn, lead us to better pharmacological treatments for obesity and drug addiction." During food craving episodes, craving-specific activation was seen in three regions of the brain: the hippocampus, insula, and caudate. These same three areas have also been reported to be involved in drug craving. In the study, to be published in the December 2004 issue of NeuroImage, 10 healthy volunteers were not permitted to consume anything other than a vanilla nutritional supplement beverage for the one-and-a-half days before the imaging session. The researchers used the monotonous diet to increase the probability of cravings during fMRI sessions. Previous findings had shown that consuming a monotonous diet leads to large increases in the number of food cravings.

Keyword: Obesity; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 6371 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Gulf war syndrome may have been caused by exposure to the nerve gas sarin, according to reports. The New Scientist journal has reported a leak of a US inquiry into the ill-health of veterans of the 1991 war. The US Department of Veterans Affairs' Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses is due to publish its findings next week. But the magazine said researchers have found neural damage consistent with the nerve agent used by Saddam Hussein. The link is said to have been "crucial" to a change of heart by the US authorities over Gulf war syndrome. The New York Times newspaper reported last month that US scientists believed the syndrome did exist and was caused by "toxic exposure" but it was not clear whether this was from drugs or nerve agents. The UK government has always insisted a unique Gulf war syndrome does not exist. But campaigners say 6,000 British war veterans are suffering from the syndrome, with symptoms ranging from mood swings, memory loss, lack of concentration, night sweats, general fatigue and sexual problems since the war. According to the New Scientist report "a substantial proportion of Gulf war veterans are ill with multi-system conditions not explained by wartime stress or psychiatric illness". Instead, the magazine reported the ill-health could have been caused by low level exposure to sarin. Three research groups had independently found specific kinds of neural damage that could explain some of the veterans' symptoms. (C)BBC

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 6370 - Posted: 11.04.2004

During a football game early last season, Virginia Tech Hokie linebacker Brandon Manning took a hard hit that shook him up a little bit. But he shook it off and stayed in the game. "It wasn't necessarily a matter of me not wanting to tell them," says Manning. "I just maybe didn't realize it. I'm worked up, I'm in the game, and I'm maybe able to put some things behind me and continue to play like I hope I can. It wasn't really till the next day when I came in to watch film that I found I didn't really remember half the plays that I was in [in] the game. I started to see myself but I didn't really remember what I was doing, and that's when I really sort of realized that I had had a concussion." Micky Collins, a concussion specialist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Sports Medicine Concussion Program, says Manning's continued play put him in great danger, especially if he had gotten hit again. "The worst that can happen is second impact syndrome, when you have two concussions in relatively short duration," says Collins. "That can cause death in an athlete." Now the Hokies are participating in a study that might help team trainers spot these dangerous collisions right away. The team's helmets are rigged with tiny sensors—like the ones that deploy airbags in cars—called accelerometers, which measure the impacts to the helmets. During play, a transmitter immediately sends real-time information about the force of a collision to a laptop computer on the sideline. The system is called HITS—Head Impact Telemetry System—and is manufactured by Simbex. © ScienCentral, 2000- 2004.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 6369 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jonathan Knight George W. Bush has won the presidential election. But Republicans are not the only ones celebrating the poll results: biologists who wish to pursue human embryonic stem-cell research have also had good news. All they have to do is move to California, if they aren't already there, and apply for a share of the $3 billion that voters have just approved for their field. By 59% to 41% of votes, Californians said "yes" to Proposition 71, the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative, which will raise around $300 million a year for a decade through bond sales. The money will pay for research that has not been eligible for government money since 9 August 2001, when President George W. Bush limited federal spending on human embryonic stem-cell research to cell lines in existence as of that date. The creation of new cell lines involves the destruction of a days-old human embryo. Most biomedical researchers believe that the number of lines available under the 2001 rule will be inadequate to realize the potential of stem-cell research, which might give insight into the causes of degenerative diseases such as muscular dystrophy and Parkinson's. Such discoveries may to lead to new treatments, and therapies that use embryonic stem cells themselves to replace damaged tissues could also emerge. ©2004 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Stem Cells
Link ID: 6368 - Posted: 06.24.2010

East Hills, NY (- - There is increasing evidence that infectious prions that can cause variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), the human form of "mad cow" disease, can be transmitted through blood transfusion, according to Roger Eglin, Ph.D., Head of National Transfusion Microbiology Laboratories for the English National Blood Service. He spoke at a symposium on Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs) where he was joined by prominent government, public health and blood safety experts from around the globe, including the U.S. and Canada, who raised concerns about a second wave of the disease brought about by human-to-human transmission via blood transfusions. The panelists convened to discuss the adequacy of safeguards and precautionary measures to prevent human-to-human transmission of this fatal, neurodegenerative prion disease at a symposium held last night at the annual AABB blood banking conference in Baltimore, Maryland. The symposium was sponsored by Pall Corporation (NYSE: PLL), the global leader in filtration technology. Citing two confirmed cases in the UK, where vCJD was transmitted via blood transfusions from donors who were young and apparently healthy at the time of donation, Dr. Eglin said the current decline in reported cases could be followed by a new wave of vCJD infections around the world of unknown magnitude. These concerns were echoed by the panelists, who noted the increase of vCJD in France from six to eight cases in just the past few months and the news that blood from a vCJD-infected donor was transfused to 10 people and used to manufacture medicines.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 6367 - Posted: 11.04.2004

Babies who continue to cry excessively for no obvious reason can go on to have difficulties in childhood, according to a new study. Excessive, uncontrolled crying that persisted beyond three months of age was linked with behavioural problems and lower IQ at the age of five. The US National Institutes of Health study, in Archives of Disease in Childhood, supports prior UK findings. Experts said most crying was normal and parents should not be unduly concerned. The NIH team, working with researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, looked at 327 babies and their parents. They assessed the babies' crying patterns at six and 13 weeks of age and whether or not the crying could be explained by simple colic. When the children were five years old, the researchers assessed their intelligence, motor abilities and behaviour. The children who had continued to cry beyond three months of age as infants, which was not due to colic, had intelligence scores (IQs) nine points lower than the other children studied. Prolonged crying was also linked with poorer fine motor abilities, hyperactivity and discipline problems in childhood. In 2002, a team of UK researchers, led by Professor Dieter Wolke at Bristol University, found children who had cried excessively as babies, beyond three months, were 14 times more likely to develop attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and do worse at school as eight year olds. Professor Wolke said: "This confirms what we found. "Now there really is more certainty there is really something going on." He believes the core of the problem is one of under-regulation. "With ADHD you can't regulate your attention. You can't concentrate, for example. The same thing is happening with crying. (C)BBC

Keyword: Development of the Brain; ADHD
Link ID: 6366 - Posted: 11.04.2004

It's a nightmare for the exhausted new mother--a constantly squalling infant. And if the baby can't calm down after a few months, it's a bad sign: A new study suggests that prolonged crying may be a sign of future behavioral problems. When newborns cry inexplicably for hours every day, it's called colic. But colic rarely persists beyond 3 months and is not associated with later ill effects. More persistent crying, however, may be a symptom of flawed neurological development, according to a paper in the November Archives of Disease in Childhood. Researchers at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland, analyzed data from a study of normal full-term infants born in Norway and Sweden in the late 1980s. The babies were evaluated periodically in the first 13 months of life, and about 5 years later, 327 children--or 80% of the original sample--were given tests probing their health, IQs, motor abilities, and personalities. Of these, 63 were colicky, and 15 continued to be prolonged criers. The colicky infants showed no decrements on the later tests, but the criers' average IQ was 9 points below that of the other children. The criers also had worse hand-eye coordination and were more likely to be hyperactive or present discipline problems. Copyright © 2004 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 6365 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JAMES GORMAN Yet another species barrier has been broken. Chimpanzees have been videotaped with tool kits. Not just sticks, mind you, but three different kinds of sticks for different purposes, some modified (by chewing on the end, for instance) to make them more efficient. We've known for a while that some other species, like the great apes and crows, use rudimentary tools, but just as a few adjectives are not the same as a sonnet, one stick does not a tool kit make. I know what I'm talking about. For someone who doesn't do much work around the house, I have a lot of tools. I've always felt that this was a kind of tribute to my evolutionary heritage. Tool use is a defining characteristic of the human lineage and, I tell those who wonder why I can't use the wrenches we already have to fix the faucets, I'm every bit as human as all the other people I see shopping for pipe wrenches and pipe on Saturday morning. I have the regular hammers and screwdrivers and electric drills, of course, all of which I used extensively when I tried, over the course of the summer to rehang a screen door. I didn't succeed, but using tools is what makes you human. Nobody ever said you had to be good at it. I also have a variety of tools that are remnants of old habits and interests, like the vintage drawknives I bought on eBay when I was carving yew staves into long bows (a lot easier than hanging a screen door.) Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 6364 - Posted: 11.02.2004

By DENISE GRADY It happened without warning, early one day last summer as they prepared to go out. Gloria Rapport's husband raised his arm to her, fist poised. "He was very close to striking me," she said. What had provoked him? "Nothing," she said. "I asked him to get in the car." Mrs. Rapport's husband, Richard, 71, has Alzheimer's disease. His forgetfulness and confusion began about nine years ago, not long after they married. More recently, emotional troubles have loomed. Anxiety came first: he suddenly feared being left alone in the house. Outbursts of anger followed. The man she had always known to be kind and gentle could in an instant turn "cunning, nasty, aggressive, menacing," she said. "The behavioral changes I've seen are absolutely frightening," she said. "I understand now why so many families institutionalize someone, because I was afraid of him." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 6363 - Posted: 11.02.2004

Male animals tend to be pretty promiscuous and are more likely than their female counterparts to mate with members of other species. But a new study shows that male sailfin mollies produce more sperm when they are around females of their own species than when they're in the company of strangers. The findings suggest that a male's physiology can create a barrier to interspecies mating even when his behavior does not. New species arise when a group of animals becomes reproductively isolated: They no longer mate with closely related animals, or if they do, they don't produce fertile offspring. Scientists believe that one of the most important barriers keeping closely related species apart is mate choice: Most males simply stick to females of their own species. But some are not as picky; they will attempt to get it on with females of related species, especially if they live in close proximity. Copyright © 2004 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6362 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Arline Kaplan Even though more than two out of five adult women and one out of five adult men experience sexual dysfunction in their lifetime, underdiagnosis occurs frequently. To increase recognition and care, multidisciplinary teams of experts recently published diagnostic algorithms and treatment guidelines. The recommendations emanated from the 2nd International Consultation on Sexual Medicine held in Paris from June 28 to July 1, 2003, in collaboration with major urology and sexual medicine associations. Psychiatrists were among the 200 experts from 60 countries who prepared reports on such topics as revised definitions of women's sexual dysfunction, disorders of orgasm and ejaculation in men, and epidemiology and risk factors of sexual dysfunction. Several committees' summary findings and recommendations were published recently in the International Society for Sexual and Impotence Research's inaugural issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Full text of the committees' reports is in Second International Consultation on Sexual Medicine: Sexual Medicine, Sexual Dysfunctions in Men and Women (Lue et al., 2004a). "The First [International] Consultation in 1999 was restricted to the topic of erectile dysfunction. The second consultation broadened the focus widely to include all of the male and female sexual dysfunctions. © 2004 Psychiatric Times. All rights reserved

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6361 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Barbara Geller, M.D., and Rebecca Tillman, M.S. It is clinically well established that adults can be hypersexual and that promiscuity and multiple marriages (without spousal death) are common manifestations of mania in adults. Some practitioners may be somewhat uncomfortable asking about these areas, but hopefully they are aware of the usefulness of covering these issues in psychiatric evaluations of adults. By contrast, hypersexuality is often not covered in psychiatric evaluations of children unless abuse is suspected, and it is likely that mental health care professionals are less comfortable covering this area with children than with adults. Available data, however, show that hypersexuality can be a manifestation of pediatric bipolar disorder (BD). Specifically, in a controlled, blinded study of 93 children with a prepubertal and early adolescent bipolar disorder phenotype, approximately 1% had a history of abuse but 43% were hypersexual (Geller et al., 2000). These data were based upon separate mother and child interviews using the Washington University in St. Louis Kiddie Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia (WASH-U-KSADS) to obtain hypersexuality ratings (Geller et al., 2001). Histories of abuse were obtained separately from parents and children using a comprehensive psychosocial battery (Geller et al., 2000). In addition, reports from pediatricians, family doctors, after-school personnel, school educators and guidance counselors were obtained. This sample of children provides strong support that hypersexuality in child mania occurs in the absence of abuse. © 2004 Psychiatric Times. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6360 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Judy Skatssoon, ABC Science Online — Coral reef fish don't grow up until they find a mate, and when they do, they mature into the opposite sex, a new Australian study shows. Fish who can't find a partner are doomed to die of old age without ever maturing, said PhD student Jean-Paul Hobbs, whose paper is published in the Royal Society of London journal Proceedings: Biological Sciences. Hobbs and colleagues from James Cook University in Townsville tested the hypothesis that the availability of a mating partner directly influenced maturation and sex determination in the coral-dwelling fish Gobiodon erythrospilus. "The juvenile gobies delayed maturing until they found an adult partner and then the sex they decided to be was opposite to that of the partner they found," Hobbs said. "We found fish that were nearly dying of old age and they still hadn't matured because they hadn't found a partner. So you don't want to be a loner if you're a gobie." Copyright © 2004 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6359 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Adults with nicotine dependence and/or psychiatric disorders consume 70 percent of all cigarettes smoked in the United States, according to results of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) study reported in the November issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry (Volume 61). Based on the 2001-2002 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC), the article provides the first national estimates among U.S. adults of the prevalence and co-occurrence of nicotine dependence and a broad array of other psychiatric disorders including alcohol and drug abuse and dependence, mood and anxiety disorders, and personality disorders as defined by the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Fourth Edition (DSM-IV). Nicotine dependence is most prevalent among persons with current drug and alcohol use disorders (52.4 percent and 34.5 percent, respectively) and somewhat lower among persons with any mood or anxiety disorder (29.2 percent and 25.3 percent, respectively) and personality disorders (27.3 percent). Persons with a current psychiatric disorder--whether or not they are nicotine dependent--make up 30.3 percent of the population and consume 46.3 percent of all cigarettes smoked. Nicotine dependent persons with co-existing psychiatric disorders comprise only about 7 percent of the adult population but smoke about 34 percent of all cigarettes. "Until now, surprisingly little has been known about the comorbidity of nicotine dependence and other psychiatric disorders and its role in the national burden of smoking on health," said Ting-Kai Li, M.D., Director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism at NIH.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 6358 - Posted: 11.02.2004

Roxanne Khamsi The biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously proposed that if we could "rewind the tape" of evolution and play it again, chance would give rise to a world that was completely different from the one we live in now. But the concept that chance reigns supreme may ring less true when it comes to complex behaviours. A study of the similarities between the webs of different spider species in Hawaii provides fresh evidence that behavioural tendencies can actually evolve rather predictably, even in widely separated places. Todd Blackledge of the University of California, Riverside, and Rosemary Gillespie, of the University of California, Berkeley, studied species of Tetragnatha spiders on different Hawaiian islands. The spiders' webs vary significantly, with tissue-like 'sheet webs', disorganized cobwebs and spiral-shaped 'orb webs' as three of the most common types. Each species had its own characteristic type of web. But the scientists found that in several cases, separate species of Tetragnatha spiders on different islands constructed extremely similar orb webs, right down to the number of spokes, and the lengths and densities of the sticky spiral that captures bugs. Was this an example of similar environments producing the same complex behaviour, or did the spiders with corresponding webs share a common ancestor? ©2004 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 6357 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Seabirds called prions, which mate for life, find their nests by sniffing out their smelly partners, scientists say. The birds make their nests in deep burrows, which are very dark, so they cannot rely on any other sense to find them, Science magazine reports. The birds also actively avoid their own smell, which could be a way of making sure they do not breed with their kin. Although this use of smell has been observed in mammals, it has never before been seen in birds. Antarctic prions, Pachiptila desolata, are so-called tube-nosed seabirds. They are strictly monogamous, although they rarely get to spend any time with their partners. Instead they take it in turns to incubate eggs and find food. "All the shared life of the birds is inside the burrow because they don't stay together at sea - they just alternate on eggs," said co-author Francesco Bonadonna, of CNRS in Montpellier, France. Sometimes a prion will forage at sea for up to two weeks, before returning to the nest to begin a stint of incubation duty. When they fly in from sea, they have to reliably find their own nest among a medley of other nests. But sight is not much use because they tend to come home at night and their nests are submerged in deep burrows. "Their burrows are underground and really, really dark," said Dr Bonadonna. "They have nothing other than odour to find their way." (C)BBC

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6356 - Posted: 10.30.2004

by Dr Michael Fitzpatrick In his decision to publish in the Lancet in February 1998 the paper in which Andrew Wakefield suggested a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, the editor Richard Horton played an important role in launching one of the great health scares of recent years (1). No doubt, as Dr Horton argues in his apologia for his role, the subsequent furore reflects many of the problems of contemporary society. But it raises a much more specific question: how did Dr Wakefield persuade a leading journal of medical science to publish a paper that was both bad science and damaging to public health? The Lancet's difficulties are not resolved by the 'partial retraction' of the Wakefield paper in February 2004 by ten of its signatories (but not including Dr Wakefield himself). This followed the revelation, by Brian Deer in The Sunday Times, that Dr Wakefield had failed to disclose a conflict of interests arising from his receipt of £55,000 from the legal aid board in pursuit of litigation against the manufacturers of MMR. Dr Wakefield should certainly have disclosed his interest, but the key defect of his study was not the fact that its lead author failed such a clear duty, but that the cases included in it were not randomly selected. Many parents brought their children to the Royal Free clinic because of their prior exposure to Dr Wakefield's theories and to the wider anti-MMR campaign (both had received national publicity in the preceding months). Dr Horton argues that, though Dr Wakefield's conflict of interest invalidated his central claim of a link between MMR and autism, his additional claim to have identified a new syndrome (later dubbed 'autistic enterocolitis') remained 'intact'. But the bias in the selection of cases meant that it was impossible to maintain that the results of investigating these dozen children were in any way characteristic of autistic children in general. © spiked 2000-2004 All rights reserved.

Keyword: Autism; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 6355 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Randy Dotinga By one account, the first lie in the history of the world came when Cain invented the "who, me?" defense and denied knowing anything about the murder of his brother, Abel. Ever since then, people have been trying to figure out how to detect when someone -- a spouse, a criminal, a president -- isn't telling the truth. Now, about a century into the scientific exploration of lying, American researchers are exploring lie-detection technologies that may banish polygraph machines to the history books. Today's the Day. At the University of Houston, a computer scientist is trying to uncover lies by measuring heat levels in the face. In South Carolina, a professor hopes she has found the key to deception in brain waves. Elsewhere, researchers are looking at everything from speech patterns to eye movements to "brain fingerprints." Success remains elusive, however, and no newfangled lie-detection machines appear ready for prime time. Skeptics, meanwhile, doubt that any technology will improve much on the mixed record of polygraph machines, which are often used in the United States to screen employees and test the truthfulness of criminal suspects. "A lot of people believe there is some particular reaction that you give when you're lying but not when you're telling the truth, but that's false," said David Lykken, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota. Studies show that polygraphs do a fairly effective job of detecting liars by picking up on stress levels, but they also produce "false positives" -- suggesting that a truth teller is lying -- and appear to be susceptible to manipulation by subjects. © Copyright 2004, Lycos, Inc.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 6354 - Posted: 06.24.2010