By Sandi Doughton, Seattle Times staff reporter The woman treated at Harborview Medical Center this summer for a mysterious brain ailment related to mad-cow disease has died. An autopsy was performed, and should help national experts in their quest to identify the disease, said epidemiologist Dr. Jo Hofmann, of the Washington Department of Health. "There will be brain tissue obtained from multiple parts of the brain, that will definitely provide more information," Hofmann said. The tissue will be sent to the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. The woman, who Hofmann said was under the age of 60, was not a resident of Washington and did not die here. The woman has not been identified to protect her family's privacy. She was treated at Harborview, where doctors performed a brain biopsy, collecting a tiny sample of brain tissue they hoped would help them diagnose the baffling illness, characterized by dementia.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 6020 - Posted: 08.26.2004

By BENEDICT CAREY Debates about the safety and effectiveness of treatments for depression miss a basic reality about the disease: most people affected by it do not seek help at all, and those who do commonly neglect to complete counseling or drug regimens recommended by doctors. For at least a third of the people who try them, treatments of any kind fall short, surveys show. But improving success rates may be a matter of picking up the phone, according to a report today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In a large-scale, 18-month study, doctors in Seattle found that they could significantly increase recovery rates for patients taking antidepressants by providing several 30- to 40-minute counseling sessions over the phone. In previous studies, researchers showed that phone calls from nurses or other clinic staff members providing emotional support could help people trying to quit smoking, stay on medication or shake low moods. The Seattle study is the first to test the effect of a standardized form of counseling, cognitive behavior therapy, delivered entirely over the phone. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 6019 - Posted: 08.25.2004

By HENRY FOUNTAIN People yawn because they're tired, bored or nervous, but sometimes they yawn just because they've seen someone else do it. This behavior, contagious yawning, has now been documented for the first time in another species, chimpanzees. Dr. James Anderson of the University of Stirling in Scotland and colleagues in Japan demonstrated that a third of adult chimps exposed to videos of yawning chimps will yawn themselves. While no one knows precisely why people yawn contagiously, recent research suggests that the roughly 50 percent of adults who show the trait are more empathetic and score higher on self-recognition tests. Dr. Anderson said there is evidence that chimps demonstrate empathy, too. "And I knew that chimps showed self-recognition in a mirror or a photograph," he added. "So if they showed self-recognition, they were likely to show contagious yawning." In the study, six female chimps at the Kyoto University Primate Research Institute watched the videotapes while in an experimental cubicle. All the chimps yawned somewhat, which was not unexpected, Dr. Anderson said. "Usually when they go into this experimental setup they are asked to do a cognitive task," he said. "Here they were asked to do nothing, so they may have been bored. But in two of the adult chimps, there was just an overwhelming increase in the frequency of yawning." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 6018 - Posted: 08.25.2004

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Researchers in Italy have observed significant reductions of gray matter volume in areas of the brain associated with language processing among people with a family history of dyslexia in comparison with controls with no reading problems. Published in the August 24 issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology, the study also lends support to previous studies suggesting intensive reading therapy activates areas of the brain necessary for word de-coding. The study of 10 people with familial dyslexia and 11 controls was the first to employ an advanced testing method – voxel-based morphometry (VBM) – which allows more in-depth detection and measurement of gray-white tissue volume and density differences than other testing tools, including magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI. The brain is made up of gray matter, where the brain cells reside, and white matter, where the nerve tracts that allow connections between different parts of the brain and spinal cord reside. The study also was the first to account for variabilities in whole brain volume, age of the subjects and differences in brain shape. Each of the subjects with dyslexia had at least one close relative with either clinically evident dyslexia or a long history of reading problems.

Keyword: Dyslexia
Link ID: 6017 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Ethan Remmel When I teach about the mind/body issue, I am often struck by how many of my students are dualists. I'm not talking about modern hedged positions such as property dualism or explanatory dualism; I'm talking about good old–fashioned Cartesian substance dualism, which maintains that our physical bodies/brains are inhabited by immaterial souls/minds and that body and soul are intimately linked, yet distinct and dissociable (at death, for example, when the soul may depart the body). And these students are not wild–eyed religious evangelists; they are sober–minded science majors. I pose what seem to me to be serious problems with this position: For example, how could material and immaterial substances interact? But many of these students seem unable even to see the problem. I end up perplexed by their lack of perplexity. Paul Bloom has an explanation. In his new book, Descartes' Baby, he maintains that dualism is innate—that is, not learned. We naturally see the world as containing both material objects, which are governed by physical laws, and mental entities, whose behavior is intentional and goal–directed. Some things in the world, such as people, can be seen either way, as physical bodies or as intentional agents. However, as Bloom describes, we tend toward the latter interpretation whenever possible, even attributing intentions to animated shapes on a computer screen if they move in certain ways. According to Bloom, dualism is the product not of nurture but of nature—specifically, evolution by natural selection. It was adaptive for our ancestors to be able to predict the behavior of physical objects and social creatures (especially conspecifics). © Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

Keyword: Intelligence
Link ID: 6016 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Last month, the case against Patrizia Reggiani was reopened in Italy. She is serving a 26-year jail sentence for having ordered the killing of her husband, the fashion supremo Maurizio Gucci. At the first trial in 1998, expert witnesses dismissed her lawyers' claims that surgery for a brain tumour had changed her personality. The new trial has been granted because her lawyers believe that brain imaging techniques developed since then will reveal damage that was previously undetectable, and strengthen their case for an acquittal. The idea that someone should not be punished if their abnormal neural make-up leaves them no choice but to break the law is contentious but not new. However, one prominent neuroscientist has sparked a storm by picking it up and turning it round. Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany's leading newspapers, Wolf Singer argued that crime itself should be taken as evidence of brain abnormality, even if no abnormality can be found, and criminals treated as incapable of having acted otherwise. His claims have brought howls of outrage from academics across the sciences and humanities. But Singer counters that the idea is nothing but a natural extension of the thesis that free will is an illusion - a theory that he feels is supported by decades of work in neuroscience. © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 6015 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Huntington's Disease is a devastating inherited disorder in which brain cells are genetically programmed to degenerate. The disease, which can cause dementia, memory loss, loss of movement control, and ultimately death, can strike people as young as 30; there is currently no cure. But now, genetics researchers at the University of Iowa have shown they can rescue mice from a disease similar to Huntington's using gene therapy. Humans have two copies of most genes. Huntington's disease is one of several neurodegenerative diseases in which an error in the DNA code of just one copy of a gene causes the disease. While the normal gene tells brain cells how to build a needed protein, and the bad copy results in a toxic protein that kills brain cells. Beverly Davidson, professor of internal medicine, physiology and biophysics, and neurology at the University of Iowa, and her group treated young mice with another dominant genetic neurodegenerative disease called spinocerebellar ataxia type 1 (SCA1). They reported in the journal Nature Medicine that they treated the mice with a technique called RNA interference, or RNAi, which uses small sequences of the genetic material RNA designed to block the cell's machinery from making a protein encoded by a specific gene—in this case, halting the production of the toxic protein. The researchers used a harmless virus to carry the RNA into brain cells. © ScienCentral, 2000- 2004.

Keyword: Huntingtons; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 6014 - Posted: 06.24.2010

It strikes without warning, harpooning its prey and injecting a toxic cocktail that paralyzes its victim. Despite its small size—only a few inches in length—predatory cone snails wield a venom weapon deadly enough to kill a human. Together, the chemicals in a cone snail's venom do serious damage, but each one on its own can actually do some good. Cone snail venom is just one example of toxic tinctures researchers are turning into therapeutic treatments for chronic pain. One such drug, called Prialt, is poised for approval by the US Food and Drug Administration this fall. Roughly 50 million people in the United States suffer from pain lasting more than three to six months. "There's been a big venom movement in the chronic pain field," says Michel Dubois, director of NYU Medical Center's Pain Program. "That's some kind of reflection on the fact that our patients are quite desperate for treatment." According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, chronic pain is usually caused by nerve signals misfiring in the central nervous system that continuously send pain messages to the brain. © ScienCentral, 2000- 2004.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 6013 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Heather Catchpole, ABC Science Online — Robots need to think like cockroaches if they want to walk up and down stairs, an international conference will hear this week. Neuroscientist Roy Ritzmann and robot researcher Roger Quinn, both from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, present their research this week at the Insect Sensors and Robotics conference in Brisbane, Australia. The researchers found that cockroaches can't walk over ramps and barriers without using their brain. This means that to climb up stairs, robots will need a brain. Current robots have limited locomotion and most can only walk over flat surfaces using a system of sensors in their legs, the researchers said. Insects are good models for understanding how to make a robot walk, according to Ritzmann. Insects have their skeleton on the outside, so researchers can see how their exoskeleton moves without using X-rays; they have sensors on the outside of their bodies that can be used to measure strain; and they have fewer motor neurones per muscle than vertebrates, making it easier to see which neurones are activated as the insects walk. Copyright © 2004 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 6012 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Fruit flies have sex for longer if their internal body clock is impaired, reveals a new study. The finding is the first time that so-called “clock genes” have been shown to affect activity on the minute-by-minute timescale. The chance discovery came while researchers were looking at the effect on fruit flies’ reproduction of the removal of the genes timeless or period, which are involved in regulating daily wake-sleep cycles known as circadian rhythms. A student noticed the mutant males copulated for 30 to 50 per cent longer than the 15 minutes that other fruit flies mated. “They lost track of time,” says Jaga Giebultowicz of Oregon State University, Corvallis, US, who led the study. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 6011 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Hopkin Sometimes it can be worth judging by appearances: it seems that people with less symmetrical features are likely to be more aggressive. In a study of stressful telephone conversations, those with uneven faces and bodies were more prone to angry reactions. A lack of symmetry is known to be a hallmark of slightly imperfect development, so the researchers speculate that people with ill-matched external features may also have small defects in their nervous systems, which impair their ability to control aggressive impulses. A link between asymmetry and aggression has been suggested before but never properly tested. Previous attempts have relied on subjects to report faithfully their own levels of aggression, or used violent offenders who are often abnormally aggressive. Zeynep Benderlioglu of Ohio State University in Columbus and her colleagues got around the problem by recruiting 100 volunteers and tricking them. After measuring their ears, wrists, palms, ankles, feet and elbows to quantify their symmetry, the researchers told the subjects that they were testing the influence of symmetry on persuasive skills. ©2004 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Aggression; Laterality
Link ID: 6010 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Helen Pilcher Exposing isolated sheep to photos of other sheep lowers their stress levels, shows a recent study. Researchers suggest the practice could be used to soothe solitary and sick animals and hope the work will help elucidate the brain mechanisms behind the ability to link faces with emotion. Like many of us, sheep do not like being alone. They are also excellent at recognizing individual faces, and can remember the features of up to 50 sheep and 10 humans over a two-year period1. So Keith Kendrick and colleagues from the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, UK, wondered if photos of sheep faces could be used to appease lonely bleaters. Their findings are reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B2. The team took 40 sheep of a Welsh lowland breed called Clun Forest, and isolated them one at a time in a funnel-shaped enclosure. For the first 15 minutes, four identical pictures of a white inverted triangle were projected on to the rear wall. For the next 15 minutes, the animals were shown either four photos of an unfamiliar sheep face or four photos of an unknown goat face. ©2004 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 6009 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Does language sometimes define the content of thought? Are there people who cannot entertain certain ideas because their language does not have the words to express them? Are there concepts that cannot be translated into some languages? These questions have vexed linguists and neuroscientists for years. The general feeling has been that language does not limit cognition. However, a new study in the online version of Science suggests that the prevailing notion may not be correct. Peter Gordon, a behavioral scientist at Columbia University, conducted an unusual set of experiments with seven adults of the 200-member Piraha tribe of Amazonian Indians in Brazil. The tribe's counting system consists of three words -- one that means "roughly one," one that means "a small quantity" and one that means "many." Gordon asked the Piraha subjects to perform various tasks in which performance would be greatly enhanced by the ability to count. These included laying out the same number of nuts or sticks that he had laid out; distinguishing two boxes whose only difference was the number of fish drawn on their tops; and knowing when a tin can was empty after watching the researcher put nuts into the can and then withdraw them one by one. © 2004 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Language; Intelligence
Link ID: 6008 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By STEVEN JOHNSON A few months before retiring from public office in 2002, the House majority leader Dick Armey caused a mini-scandal when he announced during a speech in Florida, ''Liberals are, in my estimation, just not bright people.'' The former economics professor went on to clarify that liberals were drawn to ''occupations of the heart,'' while conservatives favored ''occupations of the brain,'' like economics or engineering. The odd thing about Armey's statement was that it displayed a fuzzy, unscientific understanding of the brain itself: our most compassionate (or cowardly) feelings are as much a product of the brain as ''rational choice'' economic theory is. They just emanate from a different part of the brain -- most notably, the amygdala, the almond-shaped body that lies below the neocortex, in an older brain region sometimes called the limbic system. Studies of stroke victims, as well as scans of normal brains, have persuasively shown that the amygdala plays a key role in the creation of emotions like fear or empathy. If amygdala activity is a reliable indication of emotional response, a fascinating possibility opens up: turning Armey's muddled poetry into a testable hypothesis. Do liberals ''think'' with their limbic system more than conservatives do? As it happens, some early research suggests that Armey might have been on to something after all. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Intelligence
Link ID: 6007 - Posted: 08.25.2004

By GARDINER HARRIS A top government scientist who concluded last year that most antidepressants are too dangerous for children because of a suicide risk wrote in a memo this week that a new study confirms his findings. The official, Dr. Andrew D. Mosholder, a senior epidemiologist at the Food and Drug Administration who assesses the safety of medicines, found last year that 22 studies showed that children given antidepressants were nearly twice as likely to become suicidal as those given placebos. His bosses, however, strongly disagreed with his findings, kept his recommendations secret and initiated a new analysis. In his memo, dated Monday, Dr. Mosholder said that the results of the new analysis, undertaken in part at Columbia University, matched his own. Though the two studies used different methods and different numbers, they came to similar conclusions, Dr. Mosholder wrote in the internal memo. A copy of the memo was made available to The New York Times. In the new analysis, Paxil, which is manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline, and Effexor, made by Wyeth, have been found to be even more likely to lead children to become suicidal than Dr. Mosholder's original analysis found, his memo says. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 6006 - Posted: 08.21.2004

Dr. Gabor Maté has lived several lives in one. He's most decidedly a risk-taker: the bestselling author of a controversial book on attention-deficit disorder called Scattered Minds, Maté is a political activist known for his (even more controversial) views on the Middle East, and a physician/psychotherapist who gave up his family practice several years ago to work with HIV-positive heroin addicts on the Vancouver's downtown east side. Unflinching in the face of criticism, this is a man who will not keep silent about his multiple passions. In his latest book, When the Body Says No, he goes out on a medical limb with his passionately-argued thesis that certain types of chronic disease can be triggered by stress. And not the garden variety stress we usually think of (the job, the kids, the mortgage), but internal stress generated by the repression of powerful emotions, particularly anger. In his many years as a palliative care physician, Maté observed in his dying patients certain eerie similarities in personality. Many of them were cheerful and agreeable to a fault, never seemed angry, placed everyone else's needs above their own, and were harshly critical with themselves. Their personal boundaries seemed fragile and uncertain, as if they did not know where they left off and others began. In many cases, it was nearly impossible for them to say "no," to the point that their bodies had to say it for them.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 6005 - Posted: 08.21.2004

Yesterday I phoned our local cinema to book some tickets for The Stepford Wives, a film in which women are ruthlessly replaced by robots. The phone was answered by a computer with a female voice, which failed to understand a word I said. As a roboticist and AI researcher I'm often asked how close we are to achieving the level of artificial intelligence portrayed in The Stepford Wives, I, Robot, or some other film. But what can I say? It doesn't work like that. The invention of the wheel wasn't presaged by months of headlines saying "Axle breakthrough imminent" or "Round is better than square, say scientists". One moment the idea hadn't occurred to anyone and the next it had. AI is much the same, except the right idea still eludes us. AI is to natural intelligence what alchemy was to chemistry: we're valiantly mixing things together to see what happens, but we lack the right conceptual framework; we have no periodic table. If it hadn't been for alchemists there would be no chemistry, so I mean no slur. It's simply that the problem is incredibly difficult. The sad thing is that people really do believe what they see in the movies, and this suggests they badly underestimate their own intelligence. Anyone who thinks they could be replaced by a jumped-up laptop needs help with their self-image. © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Keyword: Robotics; Intelligence
Link ID: 6004 - Posted: 06.24.2010

HANOVER, NH - Seeking a cure for an inherited disease that causes blindness in over one million people worldwide, Dartmouth Medical School researchers have discovered a critical role for zinc in retinitis pigmentosa. The amount of zinc, a trace metal naturally absorbed by the body, can determine whether a key protein for vision functions normally or misfolds, they found. An inability to successfully bind zinc to rhodopsin, a light receptor protein in the eye, can trigger retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a degenerative disease that leaves many patients legally blind by the age of 40. The findings parallel similar progress in harnessing essential trace metals in the body to treat several neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Lou Gehrig's Disease. The research, appearing as the "Paper of the Week" in the August 20 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), is the first confirmation that zinc is present and plays a significant role in the normal folding and functions of rhodopsin, and if defective, leads to retinal degeneration. Copyright © 2004 Trustees of Dartmouth College

Keyword: Vision; Parkinsons
Link ID: 6003 - Posted: 06.24.2010

DALLAS – – Teenagers suffering from depression improved more with a combination of an antidepressant and cognitive-behavior therapy than they did when treated with either separately, a multicenter study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows. Results of a national, yearlong government-funded study in which UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas researchers participated also showed that depressed teens treated only with cognitive-behavior therapy did little better than teens given placebos. Cognitive-behavior therapy is a form of psychotherapy that emphasizes the role of thinking in creating subsequent feelings and behaviors. The study, designated the Treatment for Adolescents with Depression Study (TADS), is the first to directly compare psychotherapy and medication treatment for teenagers, said Dr. Graham Emslie, professor of psychiatry and director of UT Southwestern's child and adolescent psychiatry division.

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 6002 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A clinical trial of 439 adolescents with major depression has found a combination of medication and psychotherapy to be the most effective treatment. Funded by the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the study compared cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) with fluoxetine, currently the only antidepressant approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use in children and adolescents. John March, M.D., Duke University, and colleagues, report on findings of the multi-site trial in the August 18, 2004, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The results of the first 12 weeks of the Treatment for Adolescents with Depression Study (TADS), conducted at 13 sites nationwide, show that 71 percent responded to the combination of fluoxetine and CBT. The other three treatment groups, of participants between the ages of 12 and 17, also showed improvement, with a 60.6 percent response to fluoxetine-only treatment, and 43.2 percent response from those receiving only CBT. The response rate was 34.8 percent for a group that received a placebo. The difference in response rates for the latter two treatment groups was not statistically significant. The $17 million study is the first large, federally funded study using an antidepressant medication to treat adolescents suffering with moderate to severe depression. TADS was conducted between the spring of the year 2000 and the summer of 2003.

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 6001 - Posted: 06.24.2010