I am lying on a couch on my side when suddenly the white wall opposite me becomes a mosaic. Alarmed, I get up and walk around. All the walls are mosaics. My world has been transformed into a cubist painting. I call my aunt in Manchester. She is a glaucoma sufferer who is constantly urging me to get my eyes checked in case I have inherited the disease. She has always warned me to be vigilant about any change in my vision in case it signaled impending blindness. I tell her what's happening. "Go to the doctor NOW!" she pleads. That was five years ago, near midnight, in provincial France. A relief GP was summoned. This young man, straight out of medical school, took my blood pressure. It was normal. But he told me to get to the nearest hospital as a precaution. There, the medics were also baffled. They suggested an urgent trip to the eye specialist. The next morning his diagnosis was: "Ophthalmic migraine. Nothing you can do but wait." It wore off and, since this attack, I've never seen mosaics. It left me wondering why none of the medics recognised the symptoms. And so I wanted more people to know about ophthalmic migraines. Ophthalmic migraines are not that rare, though the more classic storm-in-the-head type has been part of my life since my mid-twenties. Once the migraine starts, I yearn for a dark room and utter quiet for 12-36 hours. It begins with the sensation of a white-hot needle passing through my left eye and across the left side of my face. I can't bend my head or turn it without intense pain. I shiver and then sweat. Sometimes there are sneezing bouts and dizziness. Once, I fainted. ©2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 6076 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nearly half of people with epilepsy have problems learning something new and feel they cannot think quickly enough, a survey has found. An even higher proportion of respondents said that they regularly feel sleepy and lethargic. The survey, by the International Bureau for Epilepsy, found 56% of respondents blamed their problems on their medication. Many said it blighted work, personal relationships and leisure activities. Problems such as the inability to recall names and faces, or access memories, were often reported. Some said slowness of thought prevented them from completing their education, or securing rewarding jobs, and from fulfilling basic tasks such as remembering a shopping list, or a friend's telephone number. The results, based on a poll of 425 people with epilepsy in five European countries, appear to confirm long-standing concerns that epilepsy drugs do have a negative impact on brainpower. Hilary Mounfield, chair of the European Committee of the International Bureau for Epilepsy, said: "We hear of far too many people whose lives are blighted not only by their epilepsy, but also by the drugs they are prescribed to treat it. (C)BBC

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 6075 - Posted: 09.07.2004

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. One night, asking his wife about their dinner plans, Stephen R. Anderson, a Yale professor of linguistics and psychology, got the reply: "I want to go out." The next night, he found the cat clawing the rug near the door. His wife calmed him down by translating: "She's saying, 'I want to go out.' " So do we conclude, Dr. Anderson asks, that the cat can talk? The answer, he argues, is no - although, as a human, he could say the same thing by shaking his head, rolling his eyes or even saying sarcastically, "Yeah, sure." Dr. Anderson is the author of "Doctor Dolittle's Delusion," to be published by Yale University Press in November. The book is a linguistics-based argument that if kindly John Dolittle of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh was hearing voices, they weren't coming from Jip the dog or Gub-Gub the pig. The idea that animals have all-but-human mental lives, emotions and powers of communication has become increasingly fashionable, after centuries in which such notions were considered absurd. Since the 1970's, as animal behaviorists have trained apes to make requests by stringing gestures or ideograms together and acousticians have detected that both whales and elephants make subsonic calls, suspicions have arisen that animals have more to say than humans realized. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 6074 - Posted: 09.07.2004

Mystery of consciousness PHILIP MARCHAND Scientists who have been trying to understand the brain have recently tried to measure neural activity of Republicans and Democrats to see if political affiliations had anything to do with brain chemistry. The results were inconclusive. (I think the Democrat brains were more active in the "I feel your pain" part of the limbic system.) What really caught my eye about a New York Times Magazine article on the topic was the following statement: "One of the most celebrated insights of the past 20 years of neuroscience is the discovery — largely associated with the work of Antonio Damasio — that the brain's emotional systems are critical to logical decision-making. People who suffer from damaged or impaired emotional systems can score well on logic tests but often display markedly irrational behaviour in everyday life." I'm sure Damasio has done good work, rooting around the neocortex. But what does it say for neuroscience that one of its "most celebrated insights" is something we've known for three or four millennia? "Imagination does not breed insanity," G.K. Chesterton wrote around the beginning of the 20th century. "Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess players do." Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 6073 - Posted: 06.24.2010

We know them as heroes, but many of the first-responders who survived 9-11 felt far from heroic. Instead they were shattered by post-traumatic stress. As this ScienCentral News video reports, some software engineers scrambled to help. Stephen King, a retired New York City fire fighter, got out of the World Trade Center alive on September 11th, 2001. But the trauma didn't end that day. "It overtook every aspect of my life," says King. "I couldn't enjoy anything, I couldn't get basic necessities like sleep…I was like a walking zombie, literally. All the things that always kept me occupied and busy just nothing seemed to matter anymore." King reached out for help and found out he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. Psychiatrist JoAnn Difede, director of the Program for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Studies and a psychiatry professor at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, began working with King using the first-line, or first choice treatment for PTSD, called imaginal exposure therapy. "We ask the patient to imagine the event as if it were occurring again in their own imagination," she explains. "You want the person to relive the experience and process the memories. If they can't access their memories then they really can't process it and get better." That's what happened to King. He felt he made some initial progress, then "hit a plateau." © ScienCentral, 2000- 2004.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 6072 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Newborn babies prefer to look at attractive faces, says a UK researcher, suggesting that face recognition is hardwired at birth, rather than learned. Alan Slater and his colleagues at the University of Exeter showed paired images of faces to babies as young a one day old and found that they spent more time fixated on the more attractive face. “Attractiveness is not in the eye of the beholder, it’s innate to a newborn infant,” says Slater. Developmental psychologists have known for years that babies have preferences for certain objects, such as high contrast images, and curvy, biological shapes. But where these preferences come from remained unknown. Slater’s research, using extraordinarily young infants, supports the idea that babies are not mere blank slates, but instead come into the world with a fairly well developed perception system. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6071 - Posted: 06.24.2010

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- When it comes to making noise, both parrots and humans rely on extremely specialized vibrating organs in their throats. Now scientists at Indiana University and Leiden University in The Netherlands have shown for the first time that parrots, like humans, also can use their tongues to craft and shape sound. "This is the first direct evidence that parrots are able to use their large tongues to change the acoustic properties of their vocalizations," said IU Bloomington neurologist Roderick Suthers, who participated in the research. "The basic idea here, we believe, is that motor control of tongue movements is an important part of communication, just as it is in humans." It's known that to produce sound, a parrot uses its syrinx, a voice box organ nestled between the trachea and lungs. The lingering question has been: What happens to that sound as it moves up and out of the throat? Ornithologists and bird enthusiasts have long noticed that parrots bob their tongues back and forth while they vocalize, but it wasn't known whether the tongue motions contributed significantly to sound-making.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 6070 - Posted: 09.07.2004

By JANET MASLIN Dr. Marcia Angell is a former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine and spent two decades on the staff of that publication. If much of that time was devoted to reviewing papers on pharmacological research, it must have been spent in a state of near-apoplexy. Her new book, 'THE TRUTH ABOUT THE DRUG COMPANIES', is a scorching indictment of drug companies and their research and business practices. "Despite all its excesses, this is an important industry that should be saved - mainly from itself," she writes. This turns out to be one of her book's more forgiving pronouncements, since the rest of it is devoted to assertions of shady, misleading corporate behavior. If she is accurate in her assumptions about big drug companies' feistiness and tenacity, Dr. Angell is likely to be on the receiving end of angry rebuttals. She is sometimes vague enough to leave room for such attacks. ("I have heard that morale in some parts of the F.D.A. is extremely low, and I can certainly understand why it might be.") But over all, Dr. Angell's case is tough, persuasive and troubling. Arguing that in 1980 drug manufacturing changed from a good business into "a stupendous one," thanks to changes in government regulations. She adds, "Of the many events that contributed to their sudden great and good fortune, none had to do with the quality of the drugs the companies were selling." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous; Depression
Link ID: 6069 - Posted: 09.07.2004

By HAROLD VARMUS THE pilot episode of "Medical Investigation," NBC's new medical science series, retells a famous old New York story about a rare type of food poisoning that produces blue patients. (The pilot will be broadcast on Thursday night at 10 Eastern; the following night at the same time, the show will assume its regular slot). Though its source isn't credited, the episode (written by Jason Horwitch) is an homage to "Eleven Blue Men," the great medical journalist Berton Roueché's classic account of a mysterious food poisoning that literally turned 11 New York City alcoholics blue. Well, perhaps "homage" isn't the right term. Roueché's account, first published in The New Yorker in 1947, is careful and understated. As the narrator, he solicits the facts retrospectively from two seasoned, courteous investigators from the New York City public health department who seem to be competing for a modesty award. They have obviously done a clever, systematic and ultimately revealing investigation, working in collegial fashion with the doctors and nurses caring for the patients. And they succeeded: all but one patient survived, and the two sleuths traced the source of the toxic substance to bowls of oatmeal and a single salt shaker that contained sodium nitrite (rather than regular sodium chloride) from a mislabeled package. But the detectives also admit, with humility, to a few loose ends to their story; the survivors were discharged from the hospital before they could verify that they had eaten at the same table and used the salt shaker vigorously. In Roueché's account, as in real-life medicine, good investigators are left with a few nagging doubts. The pilot's first departure from its source material is its setting. "Medical Investigation" features doctors from an elite (and fictional) unit of the National Institutes of Health. The producers say that the show is meant to celebrate the agency, and indeed, the opening credits mention that N.I.H. has spent more than 100 years improving the world's health. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Miscellaneous
Link ID: 6068 - Posted: 09.05.2004

By JAMES GORMAN I have to admit that the first sentence caught my eye. It's not often that you find a scientific article that begins, "Can relief from pain be a pleasure?" When I started reading, however, I soon discovered that this was not research in the long and honorable tradition of Kinsey. There wasn't a dominatrix to be found. No one dressed in leather. In fact there was no sex at all. You can imagine my relief. Instead of some lurid tale of domination and submission, the article was all about fruit flies - their pain, their pleasure and what neurological pathways mediate the experience. What the scientists, at the University of Würzburg in Germany, discovered is that it really does feel good when you stop beating your head against the wall. I mean that figuratively, of course. The researchers didn't really beat the flies' tiny heads against tiny brick walls. That would have been too weird, more appropriate for a flea circus, which seems to be the theatrical parallel to scientific insect training. The scientists, who published their findings in the current issue of Nature, were far more clinical. They used electric shocks and odors to train the flies. The researchers first showed that when the flies were exposed to an odor and then a shock, they connected the smell with the pain and learned to avoid that odor. So far, no surprise. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 6067 - Posted: 09.05.2004

Nathan Seppa A diet that includes a key omega-3 fatty acid found in fish and canola oil prevents some memory loss in mice that develop a disease similar to Alzheimer's, researchers report in the Sept. 2 Neuron. The finding is consistent with previous research suggesting that fish oil supplements might reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease in people. Other work has shown that the fatty acid, called docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), is essential to brain function and that Alzheimer's patients have low concentrations of it in their blood. The early memory and learning problems that mark the disease occur because damaged brain cells fail to transmit messages consistently to each other across junctions called synapses. To assess what role DHA might have in maintaining this transmission, Greg M. Cole, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and his colleagues used old mice—17 months on average—that were genetically engineered to develop waxy protein plaques in their brains, much as Alzheimer's patients do. Copyright ©2004 Science Service.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 6066 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Hyperactive fish, stupid frogs, fearless mice and seagulls that fall over. It sounds like a weird animal circus, but this is no freak show. Animals around the world are increasingly behaving in bizarre ways, and the cause is environmental pollution. The chemicals to blame are known as endocrine disruptors, and range from heavy metals such as lead to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and additives such as bisphenol A. For decades, biologists have known that these chemicals can alter the behaviour of wild animals. And in recent years it has become clear that pollutants can cause gender-bending effects by altering animals' physiology, particularly their sexual organs. But now two major reviews have revealed that the chemicals are having a much greater impact on animal behaviour than anyone suspected. Low concentrations of these pollutants are changing both the social and mating behaviours of a raft of species. This potentially poses a far greater threat to survival than, for example, falling sperm counts caused by higher chemical concentrations. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 6065 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Injections of a hormone made by fat cells can jump-start an idling reproductive system, research shows. Twice-daily injections of leptin restored menstruation in female athletes who had become so lean that their periods had stopped. The Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center team said the injections might also prevent bone loss and treat the eating disorder anorexia nervosa. Their findings are reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. Leptin is known to regulate appetite and weight and tells the brain how much energy is available in the body. It's role in obesity has already been studied. Leptin is made by the body's fat and, therefore, women who are particularly thin, such as athletes with rigorous training programmes or women on very restrictive diets, produce less leptin. In extreme cases, the woman's body enters a state of 'negative' energy balance and her reproductive system shuts down to prevent a pregnancy and conserve energy. This is called hypothalamic amenorrhoea or dysfunction. These women also risk bone loss because of the resultant lack of female hormones, which can lead to osteoporosis and an increased risk of fractures. (C)BBC

Keyword: Obesity; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 6064 - Posted: 09.04.2004

Psychopharmaceuticals and brain imaging could make prisoner interrogation more humane. Should we use them? By Harvey Rishikof and Michael Schrage The Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal won't be lawyered or PR-ed away. Pvt. Lynddie England faced a pre-court martial hearing last week. Four other defendants face similar hearings next week. They'll likely claim a Nuremberg defense and argue they were "just following orders" when they humiliated and abused their Iraqi charges. Their legal maneuverings and public protests of innocence highlight America's ambivalence over how to balance the rights of detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo with the nation's legitimate security concerns. Who knows precisely when "pressure" and "discomfort" actually become "abuse"? Don't America's military and intelligence communities have a sworn obligation to obtain information from detainees that can save the lives of innocents? How far can they go to get it? Abu Ghraib represents far more than disgraceful lapses in military supervision and honor. Its all-too-graphic institutional excesses signal that America must consider different ways to procure valuable information from terrorists, unlawful combatants, and insurgents. ©2004 Microsoft Corporation.

Keyword: Aggression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 6063 - Posted: 06.24.2010

(Philadelphia, PA) – Later this fall, emergency-medicine physicians enter into what they call the "CO season" – a time when faulty furnaces and other mechanical mishaps lead to a spike in cases of carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning. CO poisoning is the leading cause of injury and death by poisoning worldwide, with about 40,000 people treated in the U.S. annually. Brain damage occurs – days to weeks later – in half of the patients with a serious case of CO poisoning. The physiological causes of this delayed decline were not well understood until now. A team led by Stephen R. Thom, MD, PhD, Professor of Emergency Medicine and Chief of Hyperbaric Medicine, at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, report this week online in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, that CO causes profound changes in myelin basic protein (MBP) – a major protein constituent of myelin, the protective sheath surrounding neurons. Using an animal model, they showed that the CO-induced changes in MBP set into motion an autoimmune response in which lymphocytes, triggered to eliminate altered MBP, continue to attack normal MBP. Specifically, the researchers found that by-products of CO metabolism in the brain alter the charge and structure of MBP. "These changes in MBP have also been demonstrated in multiple sclerosis, which is why we paralleled the study along those lines," says Thom.

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 6062 - Posted: 06.24.2010

COLLEGE STATION, - With studies showing smoking could be on the rise despite the fact that the self-destructive habit is projected to kill nearly a third all cigarette smokers, research at Texas A&M University reveals that one of the most widely used forms of treatment - nicotine replacement therapy (NRT), or nicotine chewing gum and 'the patch' - may be less effective for women than men. Antonio Cepeda-Benito, an associate professor of psychology at Texas A&M who studies drug addiction and nicotine dependency and treatment, says women using NRT generally find it harder than men to quit smoking. Cepeda-Benito, along with colleagues Jose T. Reynoso and Stephen Erath, conducted an analysis of several major smoking studies and found NRT was equally helpful to men and women in the short term, but in the long term, women were less likely than men to remain smoke-free. Their research appears in the August issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association. "We found that NRT given with low-adjunct support was efficacious across all follow-up periods for men only," he says. "At midterm follow-up, NRT was efficacious for women if the treatment was given only in conjunction with an intensive treatment approach. At long-term follow up, men benefited and women did not benefit from NRT regardless of whether or not they received the treatment in conjunction with high or low levels of support."

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 6061 - Posted: 09.04.2004

New research may help unravel the origins of attraction While conservatives continue to stoke the fires of homosexuality as a curable dereliction, folks like New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey and a significant percentage of some animals are still compelled to boff, bed, bang or – gasp! – form lifelong bonds with members of the same sex. Until recently, science didn’t appear to be losing sleep trying to determine whether this predilection is due to biological or social factors – or a confluence of both. Why are some people more attracted to a particular gender? It’s an ancient conundrum in which the answer is as elusive as the origins of the universe or the existence of god. The reason science remains stumped is multifold: funds for this type of research are usually less than forthcoming; the question itself is politically charged (with both gay rights advocates and religious fundamentalists arguing for and against particular outcomes); and a general lack of scientific accoutrements needed to solve the puzzle. However, with support for embryonic stem cell research gaining new momentum, and the discovery of the human genome, a renaissance of research into the origins of sexual orientation may be just around the corner. Copyright © 2003 Uptown Publications

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 6060 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Raymond Tallis Autism, which is a spectrum of disorders ranging from extreme intellectual and behavioural disability to mild social handicap, has now acquired as high a profile as schizophrenia had in the 1960s. The groundless and irresponsible speculations of Andrew Wakefield about a causal relationship with the MMR vaccine have placed autism at the forefront of many parents’ minds. There is also Simon Baron-Cohen’s widely discussed suggestion that autism (which mainly affects males) may represent the extreme expression of maleness in the brain, apparently affirming what some feminists have been hinting at for a while: that men are better equipped for abstract thought or geekish systematization, for philosophizing, engineering and train-spotting, than for showing the empathetic understanding that women value more and all humans need. Recent biographies of many geniuses – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Béla Bartók and Glenn Gould among them – have claimed that their subjects suffered from Asperger’s syndrome, a milder form of autism. And parents of autistic children, dissatisfied with the support they have received from statutory services, have been increasingly vocal. Autism is also intrinsically fascinating. As Charlotte Moore, the mother of the two autists in George and Sam, reflects in her wonderful book, “if you have to have a child with a disability, at least autism’s an interesting one”. Like many neurological conditions, it reveals by default what is presupposed in normal everyday activity, however banal. Our interactions with others depend on our having a sense of who they are and where they are at. This sense, which is admittedly developed to a variable degree in adult humans (as one is reminded when subjected to a pandiculating, one-way communicating bore) is developed hardly at all in autists. Unable to adopt the viewpoint of another, they are “mind-blind”. “The hardest thing for an autist to grasp”, Moore says, “is that other people have different thoughts, different feelings from his own.” Their behaviour is consequently not mended to the requirements of social situations and is often disastrously inappropriate. ©2004 THE TLS

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 6059 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Omega-3 fatty acid may prevent Alzheimer's disease and slow its progression UCLA neuroscientists have shown for the first time that a diet high in the omega-3 fatty acid DHA helps protect the brain against the memory loss and cell damage caused by Alzheimer's disease. The new research suggests that a DHA-rich diet may lower one's risk of Alzheimer's disease and may help slow progression of the disorder in its later stages. The journal Neuron reported the findings on Sept. 2. "This is the first proof that our diets affect how our brain cells communicate with each other under the duress of Alzheimer's disease," explained Greg Cole, Ph.D., senior author and a professor of neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "We saw that a diet rich in DHA, or docosahexaenoic acid, dramatically reduces the impact of the Alzheimer's gene. "Consuming more DHA is something the average person can easily control," added Cole, associate director of the UCLA Alzheimer's Disease Research Center. "Anyone can buy DHA in its purified form, fish-oil capsules, high-fat fish or DHA-supplemented eggs." Cole and his colleagues focused on Alzheimer's damage to synapses – the chemical connections between brain cells that enable memory and learning.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 6058 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Hominids started walking on two legs six million years ago, shortly after diverging from chimpanzees, according to a study of the inner structure of a fossilised thighbone. The finding puts upright posture at the base of the human family tree. The evolution of upright posture is a key issue in anthropology. Together with large brain size, it marks the dividing line between humans and the great apes. Researchers know that upright posture evolved first because the skeleton of famed Australopithecine, Lucy, has a small braincase but modern ankles. Yet with few known fossils older than about four million years, the details of how and when upright posture evolved have been hazy. Over the past few years, however, two important new finds have begun to fill in the gaps. The older animal is Sahelanthropus tchadensis, which lived in Chad six to seven million years ago, but only its hominid cranium was found. More complete is the chimpanzee-sized Orrorin tugenensis, as 20 fossils from at least five individuals have been found in Kenya. These are about six million years old. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 6057 - Posted: 06.24.2010