By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS LONDON, — School programs discouraging carbonated drinks appear to be effective in reducing obesity among children, a new study suggests. A high intake of sweetened carbonated drinks probably contributes to childhood obesity, and there is a growing movement against soft drinks in schools. But until now there have been no studies showing that efforts to lower children's consumption of soft drinks would do any good. The study, outlined this week on the Web site of The British Medical Journal, found that a one-year campaign discouraging both sweetened and diet soft drinks led to a decrease in the percentage of elementary school children who were overweight or obese. The improvement occurred after a reduction in consumption of less than a can a day. Representatives of the soft drink industry contested the implications of the results. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 5338 - Posted: 06.24.2010

People linked to animal experimentation who have suffered attacks and intimidation from animal rights extremists have banded together to lobby the UK government for changes in the law. The Victims of Animal Rights Extremism (VARE) group was launched at the British Parliament on Thursday. The 100-strong body of people who have suffered violence and harassment wants the government to crack down on the problem of extremism. "I think there's a tremendous and desperate need for an organisation like this to exist," says Mark Matfield, director of the Research Defence Society, who set up VARE. The voluntary group, which is currently not listed as a charity so that its address does not have to be revealed, aims to also provide support and help for victims of extremism. "The government and police don't seem to be solving this problem," says Matfield. He adds the situation may even be worsening. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 5337 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Adults are as scatterbrained as kids. And the disorder may be rooted in basic biology By Marianne Szegedy-Maszak When Nancy Quinlan was in her early 20s, her 6- year-old son was bouncing off walls. His high intelligence simply couldn't compensate for his utter lack of self-control, and no form of discipline seemed to help. When she finally, in desperation, took him to a doctor, she was told that her son had something called minimal brain dysfunction with hyperactivity. The doctor warned her, however, that nobody--not family, not teachers, not even pediatricians--would take the little-known diagnosis seriously. He nonetheless gave Quinlan a prescription for Ritalin to help calm her son's fevered mind. That was 40 years ago, and that physician was way ahead of his time. Quinlan was, too, in a way: As she filled her son's prescription, she began wondering if this pediatric drug might possibly help her as well. An intelligent woman, she had gone through her school days in utter agony, always struggling to pay attention or to organize herself and her thoughts. She suffered from low self-esteem, and her only pleasure came from thrill-seeking activities like drag racing. Was it possible that she shared her son's affliction? She took a dose of the Ritalin and was stunned. She remembers thinking: "This one pill is what I have been looking for all my life. I can actually concentrate." Copyright © 2004 U.S.News & World Report, L.P.

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 5336 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Larry O'Hanlon, Discovery News A new study by fertility experts on how higher temperatures could have led to too many male and not enough female baby dinos points to another way the dinos could have been wiped out — without an asteroid impact. "Crocodiles and a lot of reptiles use egg incubation temperature as a sex determining factor," said David Miller of the University of Leeds' Department of Pediatrics, Obstetrics and Gynaecology in England. He is the co-author of a paper on the matter in the current issue of Fertility and Sterility. The warmer the eggs, the more males pop out, said Miller. And if the global climate were warming at the end of the Cretaceous 65 million years ago, it could have led to too many males. That, in turn, would have seriously thrown dinosaur populations out of whack and could have wiped out many species. Copyright © 2004 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 5335 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Discovery might help cocaine addicts kick the habit. MICHAEL HOPKIN Researchers have been able to lessen cocaine cravings in rats by blocking certain signals in their brains. The discovery could eventually help recovering human addicts to stave off withdrawal symptoms, says Peter Kalivas of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, who led the work. Current therapies rely on behavioural techniques such as avoiding tempting situations. The researchers studied the brains of cocaine-addicted rats that had been denied the drug for three weeks. The animals produced increased levels of a brain chemical called AGS3, the team reports in the latest issue of Neuron1. AGS3 is produced in a region called the prefrontal cortex, which is linked to the brain's motivational circuitry, says Kalivas. "It is the cortex that decides whether you get cravings or not," he says. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 5334 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The scientists who cloned Dolly the sheep are applying for a licence to clone human embryos. Professor Ian Wilmut, of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, wants to use cloned human embryos to study motor neurone disease (MND). His application to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority is expected to provoke criticism that testing human embryos is immoral. Therapeutic cloning for research has been legal in the UK since 2001. It is designed purely for research. Professor Wilmut has stressed that his team has no intention of producing cloned babies, and said the embryos would be destroyed after experimentation. He told the BBC: "Because at this early stage the embryo does not have that key human characteristic of being aware to me it would be immoral not to take this opportunity to study diseases." Until recently, Professor Wilmut had said he would not work with human embryos. (C)BBC

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease ; Stem Cells
Link ID: 5333 - Posted: 04.21.2004

Girls study mothers, while boys play around David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor Chimpanzees and humans, close relatives on the evolutionary tree, are surprisingly similar when it comes to gender differences in early learning ability, according to a young scientist following in the footsteps of chimp research pioneer Jane Goodall. Studies of children have long recognized that young girls learn fine motor skills like writing earlier and more effectively than boys. Now, Elizabeth Lonsdorf has found a corollary among the chimps she studies in Tanzania's Gombe National Park, where Goodall first demonstrated similarities between human and chimp behavior. When it comes to using tools for extracting luscious termites from their jungle mounds, girl chimps study their mothers carefully and succeed, while boy chimps prefer to play games with each other, rarely study and never catch as many of the fat-and-protein-rich insects, Lonsdorf's research discovered. "A sex-based learning difference may therefore date back at least to the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans," she speculates in a report in the April 16 issue of the journal Science. ©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5332 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Birds are pretty far away from humans on the evolutionary ladder. But scientists have found that songbirds have a gene that is important in human language learning. "There is a connection between human language and bird vocal imitation at the genetic level," says Erich Jarvis, a neurobiologist at Duke University. "What we discovered is that songbirds and other birds that have the ability to imitate sounds contain a gene called FoxP2 that is know to be involved in human language. It's the first time we have a gene that we can study now in songbirds that we know is linked to language in humans." The FoxP2 gene was found to be involved in human language several years ago. Its mutation produces an inherited language deficit called an oral apraxia. People with this deficit have an inability to pronounce words correctly, form them into sentences that are grammatically correct, and understand complex language. "We decided to look for this gene in other species of animals who can actually imitate sounds like humans can do," explains Jarvis. "And this is a very rare trait. Only hummingbirds, parrots, and songbirds, as well as bats and dolphins, have this ability. So we studied birds, and what we found is that birds also have this same gene." © ScienCentral, 2000-2004.

Keyword: Language; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5331 - Posted: 06.24.2010

DURHAM, N.C. -- Prenatal exposure to nicotine inflicts lasting damage that might leave the brain vulnerable to further injury and addiction upon later use of the drug, according to animal research conducted by Duke University Medical Center pharmacologists. The team found in rat studies that exposure to nicotine in fetal development alters the brain structures and brain cell activity in regions critical to learning, memory and reward. In turn, those changes influence nicotine's effects on the brain during adolescence, a time when many smokers first take up the habit, the team found. The study in rats might provide a biological explanation for the high incidence of smoking among teens whose mothers smoked during pregnancy, the researchers said. "Teens whose mothers smoked during pregnancy can show signs of nicotine dependence and withdrawal after just a handful of cigarettes," said Theodore Slotkin, Ph.D., professor of pharmacology, psychiatry and neurobiology at Duke. "Our study suggests a biological mechanism to explain that." © 2001-2004 Duke University Medical Center.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 5330 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers have discovered a genetic mutation associated with an inherited form of motor neuron disease in which symptoms first appear in childhood or young adulthood. The finding is slated for publication in the American Journal of Human Genetics. In studying families affected by the disease, researchers detected a mutation in the Senataxin gene. Although this gene's exact function is unknown, scientists think the normal Senataxin gene may play a role in how cells rid themselves of faulty genetic messages during RNA processing, according to Dr. Craig Bennett, University of Washington (UW) research assistant professor of pediatrics, Division of Genetics and Developmental Medicine. The mutation may make it difficult for motor neuron cells to clear out mistakes made during encoding of DNA, and thereby contribute to the degeneration of these nerve cells. The disease studied is a rare type of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Patients with this type of ALS have mild symptoms, a slow progression of muscle weakness, a normal life span, and relatives with the same disorder. In contrast, most ALS disorders appear in middle age or later life and cause paralysis and death within a few years. Only 10 percent of ALS disorders run in families; the rest appear sporadically. ALS claimed the life of baseball star Lou Gehrig, and is often called Lou Gehrig's disease.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease ; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5329 - Posted: 04.20.2004

By NANCY WARTIK It's only a short step from feeling angry to feeling angry at someone, especially if that person is of a different social group, sex or ethnicity. At least that is what psychologists who are investigating the link between emotions and prejudice are finding. In a study that measured how emotional states affected views of outsiders, the researchers, from Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, found that anger increased the likelihood of a negative reaction to members of a different group and that sadness or a neutral emotion did not. The study will appear in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science. Taken together with other research, the findings suggest that prejudice may have evolutionary roots, having developed as a quick, crude way for early humans to protect themselves from danger. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 5328 - Posted: 04.20.2004

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE Not long after scientists invented machines that could peer inside people's heads, they began finding huge surprises. The brain's gray matter, or cortex, is normally a crumpled-up sheet of highly uniform cells, arranged in six layers. All human brains, it was thought, followed this design. Yet in the last decade, detailed pictures of human cortices have revealed anatomies reminiscent of a painting by Dalí. Some people walk around with gray matter full of nodules or with cortical layers that are upside down. Others have a double cortex, with two sheets of gray matter instead of one. Still others have cortices that are shrunken or smooth or that poke holes in the brain's casing, flowing like lava, outside the brain cavity. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 5327 - Posted: 04.20.2004

By JAMES GORMAN Amnesia is still popular in the movies, as it always has been. But after watching Drew Barrymore muddle along with an addled memory in "50 First Dates," I realized that even if I had amnesia, much of the information about my life would still be saved somewhere. The data might be on my 256-megabyte thumb drive or my 16-megabyte hand-held digital assistant, on my work, home or traveling laptop computer or deep in the hard drives of government and banking server farms. If I were really important, there might even be satellite surveillance images of my house and garden. People may still lose their own memories but, barring the magnetic pulse of a nuclear explosion, the data dust that accumulates under the radiators and behind the couches of modern life will be preserved. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 5326 - Posted: 04.20.2004

By CAROL KAESUK YOON HAMBURG, Germany, — In a long, crowded room stuffed full of small aquariums at the Zoological Institute of the University of Hamburg, oddities of the fish world swim back and forth behind glass to the background music of bubbling water. Plucked from the pitch-black depths of caves around the world — in Oman, Croatia, Brazil, Mexico — many of these fish are blind, their unseeing eyes staring out, oblivious to the humans that stare in at them or the daylight that pours in the windows. Others are not only blind, but also eyeless, cruising along with their eerily blank heads alongside other bizarre-looking swimmers. Watching these queer creatures, anyone can understand why biologists have long studied the most striking of the physical changes — like eyelessness and loss of coloration to near translucence — that typically accompany the shift from daylight into eternal night. But such a focus has left much of life in caves a biological mystery. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5325 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE Worried that millions of Americans are using prescription opiate painkillers to get high rather than to ease severe chronic pain, drug makers are working on ways to prevent abuse. Cooperating closely with government officials and pain specialists, the companies are educating doctors, rewriting warning labels and tracking pills as they move from pharmacy to patient. They are also reformulating pills with added ingredients. One combination blocks euphoria. Another produces a nasty burning sensation. "The problem of prescription painkiller abuse is much bigger than people realize," said Dr. Clifford Woolf, director of the neural plasticity group and professor of anesthesia research at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 5324 - Posted: 04.20.2004

By JOHN TIERNEY LOS ANGELES, — The political consultants discreetly observed from the next room as their subject watched the campaign commercials. But in this political experiment, unlike the usual ones, the subject did not respond by turning a dial or discussing his reactions with a focus group. He lay inside an M.R.I. machine, watching commercials playing on the inside of his goggles as neuroscientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, measured the blood flow in his brain. Instead of asking the subject, John Graham, a Democratic voter, what he thought of the use of Sept. 11 images in a Bush campaign commercial, the researchers noted which parts of Mr. Graham's brain were active as he watched. The active parts, they also noted, were different from the parts that had lighted up in earlier tests with Republican brains. The researchers do not claim to have figured out either party's brain yet, since they have not finished this experiment. But they have already noticed intriguing patterns in how Democrats and Republicans look at candidates. They have tested 11 subjects and say they need to test twice that many to confirm the trend. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 5323 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Richard J. McNally, Ph.D. Individuals exposed to horrifying, life-threatening events are at heightened risk for posttraumatic stress disorder. Given the substantial personal and societal costs of chronic PTSD, mental health care professionals have developed early intervention methods designed to mitigate acute emotional distress and prevent the emergence of posttraumatic psychopathology. The method most widely used throughout the world is psychological debriefing. Psychological debriefing is a brief crisis intervention usually administered within days of a traumatic event (Raphael and Wilson, 2000). A debriefing session, especially if done with a group of individuals (e.g., firefighters), usually lasts about three to four hours. By helping the trauma-exposed individual "talk about his feelings and reactions to the critical incident" (Mitchell, 1983), the debriefing facilitator aims "to reduce the incidence, duration, and severity of, or impairment from, traumatic stress" (Everly and Mitchell, 1999). The most popular model, Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD), has seven phases (Mitchell, 1983; Mitchell and Everly, 2001) (Figure). The facilitator begins by explaining that debriefing is not psychotherapy, but rather a method for alleviating common stress reactions triggered by critical events (introduction). The facilitator then asks each participant, in turn, to describe what happened during the trauma in order "to make the whole incident come to life again in the CISD room" (fact phase) (Mitchell, 1983). After each participant has done so, the facilitator asks group members to describe their thoughts as the traumatic event was unfolding (thought phase). The facilitator then moves to the phase designed to foster emotional processing of the experience (feeling phase). © 2004 Psychiatric Times. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 5322 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Arline Kaplan A recent Consensus Statement formulated by four major medical associations encouraged physicians to screen and monitor their patients on atypical antipsychotics for signs of rapid weight gain or other problems leading to obesity, diabetes and dyslipidemia. Yet, that same Consensus Statement has potentially evoked disagreements among pharmaceutical companies. The Consensus Statement, published in the February issues of Diabetes Care and Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, was issued by an eight-person panel representing the American Diabetes Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and the North American Association for the Study of Obesity. The panelists not only reviewed clinical studies examining the relationships between second-generation antipsychotics and diabetes, but they also heard presentations from experts in the fields of psychiatry, obesity and diabetes and from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and pharmaceutical company representatives. "Hopefully, [the Consensus Statement] provides a thoughtful summary of the use of these agents, their advantages and limitations, as well as practical guidelines for the use of these agents to avoid or minimize significant metabolic complications that can arise from their use," Eugene Barrett, M.D., panel chairperson, told Psychiatric Times. Barrett is a professor in the department of medicine at the University of Virginia. © 2004 Psychiatric Times. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Obesity
Link ID: 5321 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A brain imaging study has shown that, after they overcome their reading disability, the brains of formerly poor readers begin to function like the brains of good readers, showing increased activity in a part of the brain that recognizes words. The study appears in the May 1 Biological Psychiatry and was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), one of the National Institutes of Health. "These images show that effective reading instruction not only improves reading ability, but actually changes the brain's functioning so that it can perform reading tasks more efficiently," said Duane Alexander, M.D., Director of the NICHD. The research team was led by Bennett Shaywitz, M.D., and Sally Shaywitz, M.D, of Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut. Other authors of the study were from Syracuse University, in Syracuse, New York; Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee; and the NICHD. According to Dr. Sally Shaywitz, the results show that "Teaching matters and good teaching can change the brain in a way that has the potential to benefit struggling readers."

Keyword: Dyslexia; Brain imaging
Link ID: 5320 - Posted: 04.20.2004

Team work is just as important in your brain as it is on the playing field: A new study published online on April 19 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that groups of brain cells can substantially improve their ability to discriminate between different orientations of simple visual patterns by synchronizing their electrical activity. The paper, "Cooperative synchronized assemblies enhance orientation discrimination," by Vanderbilt professor of biomedical engineering A. B. Bonds with graduate students Jason Samonds and Heather A. Brown and research associate John D. Allison provides some of the first solid evidence that the exact timing of the tiny electrical spikes produced by neurons plays an important role in brain functioning. Since the discovery of alpha waves in 1929, experts have known that neurons in different parts of the brain periodically coordinate their activity with their neighbors. Despite a variety of theories, however, scientists have not been able to determine whether this "neuronal synchrony" has a functional role or if it is just a by-product of the brain's electrical activity.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5319 - Posted: 04.20.2004