Scientists have identified a gene which causes some cases of Parkinson's Disease. The findings could open up new avenues of research into other genetic factors which cause or predispose people to develop the disease. Researchers at London's Institute of Neurology say in Science that they could also lead to new treatments. Parkinson's is a degenerative, neurological condition for which there is currently no cure. It is not generally a genetic condition, but there are some cases where it does run in families. This is the first time a Parkinson's gene has been identified by researchers in the UK. (C)BBC

Keyword: Parkinsons; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5298 - Posted: 04.16.2004

By GARDINER HARRIS Top Food and Drug Administration officials admitted yesterday that they barred the agency's top expert from testifying at a public hearing about his conclusion that antidepressants cause children to become suicidal because they viewed his findings as alarmist and premature. "It would have been entirely inappropriate to present as an F.D.A. conclusion an analysis of data that were not ripe," Dr. Robert Temple, the Food and Drug Administration's associate director of medical policy, said in an interview. "This is a very serious matter. If you get it wrong and over-discourage the use of these medicines, people could die." Dr. Temple was seeking to quell a growing controversy into whether the agency's warnings on March 22 that antidepressant therapy could lead patients to become suicidal were sufficient. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 5297 - Posted: 04.16.2004

Scientists try to get a grip on love through MRI scans By ROWAN HOOPER This column is often concerned with the evolution of sexual behavior and sexual anatomy, but instead of attributing everything to sex, for once let's accept a view like that of Bertrand Russell. "Love," he said, "is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives." So if love is about something other than getting more sex, what is that thing? And -- as this is Natural Selections -- how did love evolve? Until recently, the questions were entirely metaphysical. That is, we could argue about them but couldn't really answer them, at least not with any scientific rigor. The whole subject was best left to philosophers like Russell. But -- it will be no surprise to learn -- scientists are closing in on love. Before long there should be a framework in place which will help us explain the nature of love and understand its evolution. The Japan Times 2004 (C) All rights reserved

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Brain imaging
Link ID: 5296 - Posted: 04.16.2004

Implanting electrodes in the lower back to stimulate spinal nerves could help people suffering from bowel incontinence, suggests a new study of the technique. The results offer hope to the millions of people who suffer from the involuntary voiding of their bowels. Overall, two people in a hundred are affected by the condition. But as people age, the condition becomes increasingly common - affecting up to 11 per cent of men, and 26 per cent of women over the age of 50. Now an international team has shown that implanting electrodes to stimulate the sacral spinal nerve greatly improves the condition and the quality of life of the sufferer. Stimulating the nerve helps to control the anal sphincter, the muscles which regulate the passage of the faeces. "Our trial has shown a convincing benefit of sacral nerve stimulation," writes the team led by Klaus Matzel, at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in Erlangen, Germany. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5295 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Atorvastatin unclogs arteries and may help memory too. ERIKA CHECK People with Alzheimer's disease may benefit from taking a popular cholesterol-lowering medication, scientists announced on Wednesday. In a study of 63 people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease, the performance of those who took a drug called atorvastatin declined less on tests of memory and brain function than that of those who did not take the drug. The researchers, led by Larry Sparks of the Sun Health Research Institute in Sun City, Arizona, say the result is a sign that atorvastatin and similar drugs might slow the devastation caused by Alzheimer's disease. "This fact that this trial showed a benefit is very exciting," says Benjamin Wolozin, a professor of pharmacology at the Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. "But it is not big enough to be definitive," he adds. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 5294 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Indianapolis -- A research team headed by Indiana University School of Medicine scientists has identified a gene that is strongly linked to an individual's risk of developing alcoholism. The gene identified, GABRA2, is one of several genes that produce parts of the receptor for the brain's primary inhibitory neurotransmitter, GABA. GABA is a chemical messenger that carries information between nerve cells; when GABA binds to the GABA-receptors on a nerve cell, it inhibits the firing of that cell. GABA is known to be involved with some of the body's responses to alcohol consumption, such as loss of physical coordination, effect on mood, and alcohol withdrawal symptoms. Alcoholism, which affects nearly 14 million Americans and can cause many social and health problems costing society an estimated $185 billion annually, is what scientists call a "complex" disease, meaning that many genes as well as environmental factors play a role in whether a person develops the disease. While there is not one single "gene that causes alcoholism" the statistical link between this gene and the risk for alcoholism is powerful, said Howard J. Edenberg, Ph.D., Chancellor's Professor at the IU School of Medicine. Edenberg was the lead researcher for the study, which appears in the April issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5293 - Posted: 04.16.2004

MADISON, Wis. -- There is more to beauty than meets the stranger's eye, according to results from three studies examining the influence of non-physical traits on people's perception of physical attractiveness. The results, which show that people perceive physical appeal differently when they look at those they know versus strangers, are published in the recently released March issue of Evolution and Human Behavior. In many studies evaluating physical attractiveness, people are often shown an array of strangers' photos, computer-generated images or line drawings and asked to identify which ones, based on differences in physical features, are most attractive. Results from these studies suggest that physically attractive traits include high degrees of bilateral facial symmetries, such as eyes that are identical in shape and size, and waist-to-hip ratios of 0.7 for women and 0.9 for men. "You can find study after study that focuses on which waist-to-hip ratios or particular facial features people find physically attractive, and these studies have captured popular attention," says Kevin Kniffin, an honorary fellow in the anthropology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an adjunct assistant professor at Binghamton University. Copyright © 2004 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 5292 - Posted: 06.24.2010

(Kingston, ON) – Queen's psychologists have discovered that our ability to assess how other people are feeling relies on two specific areas of the brain. The findings, published in the April issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, are expected to have implications for the treatment of developmental disorders such as autism. Led by Mark Sabbagh, the study is supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). Also on the team, from the Queen's Psychology Department, are Margaret Moulson and Kate Harkness. The study helps us understand the neural bases of everyday "theory of mind": our ability to explain behaviour in terms of mental states like intentions and desires. "What we're showing is that an important first step [in theory of mind] is being able to decode other people's mental states, and that this skill is carried out within a very specific neural pathway,"says Dr. Sabbagh. The researchers used a technique called event-related potential.This involves fitting people with what looks like a hairnet containing 128 sponge electrodes that attach to their scalps and record electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Images of eyes conveying different emotions (e.g. anger, sadness, embarrassment) are shown to the subjects, who are then asked to identify both the mental state and gender of the person in each picture, based solely on seeing that person's eyes.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 5291 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ANNE McILROY Young children with sleep problems are more likely to grow up into teens who drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes and use illegal drugs, a new study has found. Researchers have already made the connection with sleep problems and alcohol abuse in grownups, but this is the first study to draw the link between children who have trouble sleeping and the later use of alcohol and drugs. Maria Wong, a researcher in the psychiatry department at the University of Michigan, looked at data from a study of 275 boys that began 16 years ago. When the boys were aged three to five, their mothers were asked if their child had had trouble sleeping in the past six months, or if he seemed overtired. When the boys were adolescents, aged 12 to 14, they answered questions about how much they smoked, drank alcohol and used illegal drugs. (They were guaranteed anonymity.) It turned out that the boys who had had trouble sleeping as toddlers were twice as likely to smoke cigarettes or marijuana, drink alcohol or use other drugs early in their adolescence. © Copyright 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sleep
Link ID: 5290 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Patients describe it as like being buried alive. The worse part is not the pain, they say, although that can be excruciating, but the horror of being paralysed, unable to talk and yet totally aware of what the surgeon is doing to you. Suffering like this could be greatly reduced. A large international trial has proved that a simple "awareness" device, called a BIS monitor, can cut the number of cases of awareness during surgery by 80 per cent. The device is already used to monitor the depth of anaesthesia in some hospitals in the US, but few anaesthetists in the UK or Australia use it. The trial was run by Paul Myles of the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, and Kate Leslie of the Royal Melbourne Hospital. Leslie says that the evidence is so compelling that BIS monitoring should always be used during the 5 per cent or so of operations where there is a high risk of awareness. Myles goes further, arguing that it should be used for the 50 per cent of operations where there is a chance of awareness occurring. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5289 - Posted: 06.24.2010

How we perceive the brightness of light may reveal how the brain is wired to handle the wide ranges of light stimulation we encounter every minute. A Salk Institute study, published in the April 15 issue of Nature, shows that timing – as well as the intensity of a light and that background it is on-- determines how we judge a light's brightness. Professor Terrence Sejnowski and his colleagues found that the timing of short and long bright light flashes could create optical illusions: when the short light came on at the beginning of the long light it appeared to be dimmer, but when it came on at the end of the long light the short light was brighter. "This study reveals a new way in which the cerebral cortex handles light and suggests that the brain is processing light in the cortex through two parallel streams of nerve cells," Sejnowski says.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 5288 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Daughters pick up their mother's skills, while sons play rough and tumble. MICHAEL HOPKIN Young female chimpanzees are better students than males, at least when it comes to catching termites, according to a study of wild chimps in Tanzania's Gombe National Park. While daughters watch their mothers closely, the boys spend more time monkeying around. The discovery mirrors differences in the learning abilities of human children, says the research team behind the study. Girls tend to catch on faster than boys when learning skills such as writing and drawing, they say. These manual tasks are not dissimilar to the chimps' technique of using a stick to fish for termites, argues Elizabeth Lonsdorf, now at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. Successfully extracting termites from their nest requires a dextrous turn of hand, she says. Lonsdorf's team watched eight young males and six young females who accompanied their mothers to termite nests. Female youngsters enjoyed more success than males in catching termites. They also started younger: females picked up the skill at around 30 months of age, whereas males were usually twice as old as that, the team reports in this week's Nature1. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5287 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Single spot in brain determines size of visual scratch pad. TANGUY CHOUARD The number of things you can hold in your mind at once has been traced to one penny-sized part of the brain. The finding surprises researchers who assumed this aspect of our intelligence would be distributed over many parts of the brain. Instead, the area appears to form a bottleneck that might limit our cognitive abilities, researchers say. "This is a striking discovery," says John Duncan, an intelligence researcher at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK. Most people can hold three or four things in their minds at once when given a quick glimpse of an image such as a collection of coloured dots, or lines in different orientations. If shown a similar image a second later, they will be able to recognise whether three or four of these spots and lines are identical to the first set or not. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Intelligence; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 5286 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The human ability to process information is divided into three stages: stimulus identification/perception, response selection/cognition, and response execution/motor processes. Tasks such as driving a car involve a complicated interaction of all three information-processing components. Researchers know from previous studies that alcohol slows information processing, but the specifics remain unclear. A study in the April issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research has found that alcohol impairs cognitive functioning even when motor functioning appears normal. "Given that most tasks require some information processing and that alcohol is one of the most commonly used recreational drugs, we felt that a more thorough examination of how alcohol disrupts the stream of information processing was warranted," said Tom A. Schweizer, currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto and first author of the study. "What is not clear from earlier studies is whether this disruption is attributable to a specific slowing of one stage – that is, perceptual, cognitive or motor – or a slowing of all stages within the information-processing stream. Also, few studies have looked specifically at the differential effects of alcohol on cognitive functioning during rising and declining blood alcohol concentrations (BACs). One of the goals of this research was to address whether or not cognitive functioning behaves like motor functioning during rising and declining BACs."

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 5285 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Findings could yield clearer view of mate selection, ideas for wildlife conservation ARLINGTON, Va.- When looking for sex partners, younger females prefer males who decorate their place with a little extra blue, be it plastic or feathers. They also prefer males who tone down the intensity of their courtship behavior. At least, that's how it looks for satin bowerbirds, according to research findings published this week in the journal Nature. The study - conducted in New South Wales, Australia, in 1999-2000 - found that not all females find the same traits attractive in mates. As they choose a mate, females make a series of complex decisions related to male courtship behavior and to the colored decorations males collect and place around the bower, a stick structure that protects females during courtship display. Older females focus more on the male's intense courtship display while younger females are attracted by the blue bower decorations. The research, funded by the National Science Foundation's Animal Behavior Program, was conducted by biologists Gerald Borgia, Seth Coleman and Gail Patricelli of the University of Maryland. NSF is an independent U.S. federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 5284 - Posted: 04.15.2004

People born in summer have a sunnier outlook than those born in colder months, the results of a survey show. More than 40,000 members of the public took part in the online survey. Those who were born in May were the most likely to consider themselves lucky while those born in October had the most negative view of their lives. Professor Richard Wiseman, who conducted the research, said people born in winter could improve their luck by being more optimistic. People who took part in the survey gave their birthdates and rated the degree to which they saw themselves as lucky or unlucky. The poll found there was a summer-winter divide between people born from March to August and those born from September to February. Professor Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, launched the research at the Edinburgh International Science Festival and presented the results at the end of the meeting. (C)BBC

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 5283 - Posted: 04.14.2004

Deborah Skinner Buzan for The Guardian By the time I had finished reading the Observer this week, I was shaking. There was a review of Lauren Slater's new book about my father, BF Skinner. According to Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century, my father, who was a psychologist based at Harvard from the 1950s to the 90s, "used his infant daughter, Deborah, to prove his theories by putting her for a few hours a day in a laboratory box . . . in which all her needs were controlled and shaped". But it's not true. My father did nothing of the sort. I have heard the lies before, but seeing them in black and white in a respected Sunday newspaper felt as if somebody had punched me hard in the stomach. Admittedly, the facts of my unusual upbringing sound dodgy: esteemed psychologist BF Skinner, who puts rats and pigeons in experimental boxes to study their behaviour, also puts his baby daughter in a box. This is good fodder for any newspaper. There was a prominent Harvard psychologist whose daughter was psychotic and had to be institutionalised; but it wasn't my father. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5282 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Dutch researcher Niels Prins has discovered that elderly people with a lot of damage to the small blood vessels in the brain have a greater chance of developing dementia or depression. The damage is visible on MRI scans as white matter lesions and infarcts of the brain. Elderly people with serious white matter abnormalities and infarcts were found to deteriorate more quickly in their cognitive functioning than peers with fewer abnormalities. In particular, the processing of information was worse in the group with more white matter lesions and infarcts. This group also had an increased risk of developing dementia and depression. Over a period of three years, one-third of the elderly people investigated exhibited an increase in white matter lesions. These elderly people had an increased risk of developing a stroke and the cognitive functioning deteriorated more quickly. Furthermore, a serious increase in the number of abnormalities in the white matter increased the risk of dementia and depression.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 5281 - Posted: 04.14.2004

Researchers from the University of Toronto and the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute have documented negative mood disturbances such as depression and confusion resulting from sports concussions for the first time. The study, which appears in the March issue of the Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, used injured athletes to chart the course of emotional recovery after a concussion. The researchers found that concussed athletes were not emotionally different from their peers before injury, but were more depressed and confused than their uninjured teammates after sustaining a concussion. "Our results support a causal link between sports injury and subsequent emotional distress," says Lynda Mainwaring, a registered psychologist and associate professor in U of T's Faculty of Physical Education and Health. "Moreover, it highlights emotional changes that result from brain injury, which may help us determine when people are completely healed from a concussion." She notes that there has been little research into the emotional impact of concussions and subsequent recovery.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Emotions
Link ID: 5280 - Posted: 04.14.2004

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Does your dog know if you've had a bad day? Probably, but don't expect your cat to catch on. Do chimpanzees understand why those who can't see them don't offer them treats? Do vampire bats have the ability to show gratitude by returning a favor? The answers depend on what is meant by "think," according to University of Florida psychology Professor Clive Wynne, who writes about these creature features and others in a new 244-page book, "Do Animals Think?" being published this month by Princeton University Press. While animals can do many clever things and even reason, they don't have the ability to reflect on what they are doing, one important element of thinking, said Wynne, who has studied animal behavior for 20 years in a variety of species ranging from pigeons to marsupials. "Animals can learn, but whether learning always implies thinking is the question," he said. "Perhaps the take-home message is that each species thinks in its own way, a way that is adapted to the world it lives in."

Keyword: Animal Rights; Evolution
Link ID: 5279 - Posted: 04.14.2004