Liberal Democrat MP Dr Evan Harris has called for an independent inquiry into research that led to links being made between autism and the MMR vaccine. The medical journal that featured the study has said that, with hindsight, it would not have published the research. Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, told the BBC the researchers had a "fatal conflict of interest". But Dr Andrew Wakefield, the researcher at the centre of the study, has rejected the journal's claims. The paper, published six years ago, prompted many parents to reject the three-in-one jab, even though most experts say it is safe. The Lancet launched an investigation into the way the study was carried out after it received an "allegation of research misconduct" from the Sunday Times. The allegations do not cover the actual findings of the study. (C) BBC

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 5018 - Posted: 02.21.2004

Leopards may never change their spots, but some mammals can adjust the sex of their offspring, according to a study by biologists. Experts from Edinburgh and Oxford Universities have found that some species are capable of influencing whether to produce sons or daughters. Species examined for the study included zebras, gazelles, deer and goats. The full results of the research are due to be published in the American Naturalist journal next week. It will explain in full why some species are capable of producing sons when conditions are conducive to childbearing, and daughters at less favourable times. Although the characteristic is well known in bees and wasps, the study is the first to offer conclusive proof of the trait in a range of ungulates - herbivorous mammals with hooved feet. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 5017 - Posted: 02.21.2004

Bruce Bower Seniors interested in pumping up their brains and maintaining an attentive edge might consider taking this inexpensive prescription: Go for a walk every 2 or 3 days. Don't sweat it, but make an effort. Limit each walk to between 10 and 45 minutes. That's the conclusion, at any rate, of two new studies that demonstrate for the first time in people that physical fitness, whether achieved on one's own or through a brief aerobic-training course, induces brain changes associated with improved performance on an attention-taxing task. "Even moderate cardiovascular activity of the sort that is within reach of most healthy older adults results in improved neural functioning and may help to extend or enhance independent living," says neuroscientist Arthur F. Kramer of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Kramer directed the new studies with his colleague Stanley J. Colcombe. Copyright ©2004 Science Service.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 5016 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Taking cocaine could cause irreversible brain damage, scientists from Edinburgh University have warned. Tests on genetically modified mice showed that cocaine inhibited the brain by destroying a key protein responsible for learning and memory. Abusing the highly addictive drug can lead to long-term memory loss and learning difficulties, say experts. One of the scientists behind the study said prolonged abuse could even affect long-term career prospects. Scientists have already shown that cocaine gives users a "high" by stimulating the area of the brain known as the striatum and leads to a craving for more of the Class A drug. Now, researchers at the University of Edinburgh, the Cambridgeshire-based Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and US scientists have shown that levels of the protein PSD-95 - directly linked to learning and long-term memory - dropped by half when exposed to cocaine in laboratory tests. (C) BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 5015 - Posted: 02.20.2004

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE A type of self-renewing cell found in the adult human brain may have the potential to repair brain damage or disease, scientists reported yesterday. The cells, neural stem cells, have been known about for some time. But their function has been a mystery. Researchers theorized that the cells, as in rats and monkeys, generated new neurons that migrated to olfactory regions, helping maintain the sense of smell. But the study, reported yesterday in Nature, indicates that in humans, the stem cells behave differently. They form ribbons that produce different types of brain cells, including neurons. The new neurons do not migrate to olfactory regions, and they are not involved in the human capacity for smell, the study found. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stem Cells; Regeneration
Link ID: 5014 - Posted: 02.20.2004

Do canines have character? As this ScienCentral News video reports, according to one psychologist, personality testing is going to the dogs. Ask most dog owners, and you'll find no doubts that their canine companions have personalities. But many scientists have typically dismissed this idea. "Scientists have been very mixed in their response to the idea of animal personality," says Sam Gosling, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin currently on sabbatical at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. "If somebody says 'Rover is friendly,' what scientists believe, I think, is that we're learning more about the owner than we are learning about Rover, and therefore they think that such a description such as 'Rover is friendly' is not the correct type of information that a serious scientist should be using." © ScienCentral, 2000-2003.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 5013 - Posted: 06.24.2010

People with a history of the digestive disorder celiac disease are three times more likely to develop schizophrenia than those without the disease, according to a report by Danish researchers and a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The report is published in the February 21, 2004, edition of the British Medical Journal. Celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder that impairs the body's ability to digest the protein gluten, which is found in grains and many other foods. The condition can lead to diarrhea, weight loss and malnutrition. William W. Eaton, PhD, lead author of the report and interim chair of the Department of Mental Health at the School of Public Health, said, "For years, scientists have suspected a link between celiac disease and schizophrenia. Our research shows that the link is moderately strong." Dr. Eaton and his colleagues examined the records of 7,997 schizophrenic patients admitted to a Danish psychiatric facility for the first time between 1981 and 1998. Those records were compared to Denmark's national patient register to determine if the schizophrenic patients or their parents were previously treated for celiac disease. The researchers also looked for diagnosis of similar digestive disorders not previously associated with schizophrenia, which included dermatitis herpetiformis, Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. The researchers found a small number of schizophrenic patients were previously treated for celiac disease or had a parent treated for celiac disease. Both conditions are rare.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 5012 - Posted: 02.20.2004

Empathy lights up the same parts of the brain as personal injury. LAURA NELSON The ability to appreciate other people's agony is achieved by the same parts of the brain that we use to experience pain for ourselves. When we encounter a painful stimulus, such as an electric shock, signals travel from the site of the stimulus up to the brain. This is then translated into both a physical and an emotional response. Tania Singer, an imaging neuroscientist at University College London, and her colleagues performed an experiment to see whether any parts of this process happens in the brains of people who aren't experiencing the pain themselves, but are simply empathizing with someone who is. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Emotions
Link ID: 5011 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Knowing our partner is in pain automatically triggers affective pain processing regions of our brains, according to new research by University College London (UCL) scientists. The study, published in the 20th February edition of the journal Science, asked whether empathizing with the pain of others involves the re-activation of the entire pain network underlying the processing of pain in our selves. The results suggest that empathy for pain of others only involves the affective, but not sensory component of our pain experience. The team, at UCL's Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, set out to find out what happens to our brains when we empathise with the feelings of others, how the brain understands how something feels for another human, and whether such empathetic responses are triggered rather automatically by the mere perception of someone else being in pain. The UCL team investigated pain-related empathy in 16 couples, under an assumption that couples are likely to feel empathy for each other. Brain activity in the woman was assessed while painful stimulation was applied to her or to her partner's right hand through an electrode attached to the back of the hand. Both hands were placed on a tilted board allowing the subject, with help of a mirror system, to see both hands. Behind this board was a large screen upon which flashes of different colours were presented. The colours indicated whether to expect painful or non painful stimulation. This procedure enabled to measure pain-related brain activation when pain was applied to the scanned subject (the 'pain matrix') as well as to her partner (empathy for pain).

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Emotions
Link ID: 5010 - Posted: 02.20.2004

Scientists hope they'll serve as brain repair kit Carl T. Hall, Chronicle Science Writer A mysterious type of stem cell found in the brain appears to be a possible wellspring of fresh nerve cells and, when something goes haywire, the starting point of a common form of tumor, scientists are reporting. The finding lays new ground for understanding the fundamental biology of stem cells in the adult brain. Scientists hope these cells and the signaling molecules that govern their fate might someday serve as a repair kit for treating brain injury, strokes or neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's. The study resulted from a collaboration of neuroscientists and brain surgeons at UCSF Medical Center, led by Dr. Nader Sanai, a 26-year-old neurosurgery resident. Dr. Mitchel Berger, chair of neurosurgery, and stem- cell expert Arturo Alvarez-Buylla were senior authors. ©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

Keyword: Stem Cells
Link ID: 5009 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By MIREYA NAVARRO With typical bluntness Sue Johanson tells older men and women to get over body image: the "turkey neck," the "wear and tear," the hormonal deficiencies. But in her cheerful, no-nonsense style she adds that there are creams, patches and pills to help them, and if all else fails, that they can always kiss and cuddle. "You can still have a great deal of fun," she said recently in a rare speech before a United States audience, a group of sex-toy saleswomen at a conference in Las Vegas. Ms. Johanson, who won't reveal her age but looks like a 70-something grandmother who knits and makes sourdough biscuits (she does both), is having a lot of fun herself just talking about sex. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5008 - Posted: 02.19.2004

By SAM LUBELL THE red curtain opens to reveal an intimidating auditorium. A bored audience stares back at you. One person in the crowd seems to be falling asleep; another coughs loudly and stretches his neck. You notice that your palms are sweaty. Your stomach is fluttering. You wonder whether you will pass out. But this is no ordinary panic attack: it is a virtual scene that was created to help people overcome anxiety about public speaking. This slice of virtual reality and other similarly stressful scenes are the work of a Georgia-based company called Virtually Better, which creates virtual environments with 3-D imaging software for use by psychologists, psychiatrists and researchers. A few years ago, the full impact of a bored audience could only be imagined by a patient with a therapist's help, or in some cases recreated at great cost with mockups and actors. But with recent advances in research and improvements in hardware and software, virtual reality has become a tool to help patients overcome fears and anxieties. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 5007 - Posted: 02.19.2004

The great unresolved question - where does the mind end and the body begin? - has always intrigued AS Byatt. A S Byatt When I was a student in the 1950s, we did a lot of thinking - in very literary terms - about the body-mind problem. We were in some sense mesmerised by TS Eliot's notion of the dissociation of sensibility that had taken place in the 17th century, and had somehow wrenched apart language, the body, and the thinking mind. Tennyson and Browning, the Victorian stalwarts, Eliot pronounced, were poets, and they thought, but they "did not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose". His phraseology is imagist or symbolist, but the poets who, according to Eliot, did achieve this paradisal, undissociated unity of response were the 17th-century metaphysical wits, Donne, Herbert, Marvell. I started to write a thesis on 17th-century religious metaphor partly because of this paradisal imagery. But also because of a niggling doubt and anxiety. Those religious poems were informed by a set of beliefs that despised the body, its sensual apparatus, and its desires. They dramatised the conflict, it is true. They made delicious sensual metaphors for pure spiritual delights. But it was conflict, not undissociated harmony, that gave them their energy. This is clear in Marvell's "A Dialogue between the Soul and Body" where the soul describes the body as "bolts of bone" and "manacles" of hands, and cries that it is Here blinded with an eye, and there Deaf with the drumming of an ear, A soul hung up as 'twere, in chains Of nerves and arteries and veins... The body, on the other hand, feels it is "impaled" on the upright soul, and built by the soul for sin, So architects do square and hew Green trees that in the forest grew. © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5006 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A new study is showing that the parents of ADHD children may also have attention deficit hyperactive disorder. As this ScienCentral News video reports, that means curing the child may include treating the parent. Lew Mills, a therapist in San Francisco, and his son Matthew have both been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, which has made effective parenting more challenging than it might be under normal circumstances. "I feel like a good parent but I also feel like there are some things I just can't do and I don't know why sometimes," says Mills. "It's frustrating. Because I have ADHD myself it adds onto all the things that I have a hard time getting done and organizing…in my own life and career, so it kind of adds to that load." ADHD affects three to five percent of all children, perhaps as many as two million American children, and two to three times more boys than girls. The most common ADHD behaviors fall into three categories: inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity; people with ADHD can have trouble with things like sitting still and focusing on tasks. In many cases, medications such as Ritalin are prescribed to children with ADHD. © ScienCentral, 2000-2003.

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 5005 - Posted: 06.24.2010

MADISON - Human neural stem cells, exposed in a lab dish to the steroid DHEA, exhibit a remarkable uptick in growth rates, suggesting that the hormone may play a role in helping the brain produce new cells, according to a new study published this week in the online editions of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The new work, conducted by a team of scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, provides some of the first direct evidence of the biological effects of DHEA on the human nervous system, according to Clive Svendsen, the study's senior author and an authority on brain stem cells at UW-Madison's Waisman Center. "What we saw was that DHEA significantly increased the division of the cells," says Svendsen, a UW-Madison professor of anatomy and neurology. "It also increased the number of neurons produced by the stem cells, prompting increased neurogenesis of cells in culture."

Keyword: Stem Cells; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 5004 - Posted: 02.19.2004

UCSF researchers have made a notable advance in the effort to illuminate the existence of adult stem cells in the human brain, identifying a ribbon of stem cells that potentially could be used to develop strategies for regenerating damaged brain tissue - and that could offer new insight into the most common type of brain tumor. The study, conducted by investigators in the UCSF Department of Neurological Surgery, is the cover story in the Feb. 19 issue of Nature. The researchers conducted their study on brain specimens (from neurological resections and autopsies) containing the lining of the brain's fluid-filled cavity, a region known as the subventricular zone. There, they discovered a sheet of the brain's most ubiquitous cell, the astrocyte - traditionally thought of as a supportive cell for neurons in the adult brain – and determined in cell culture studies that the cell has the capacity to function as a neural stem cell. They also detected fresh, young neurons within the astrocytic region that likely are the progeny of these stem cells, the researchers say

Keyword: Stem Cells
Link ID: 5003 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Study hints that prenatal toxins can trigger psychiatric disease. HELEN PEARSON Babies exposed to lead in the womb may be at increased risk of developing schizophrenia as adults, US researchers have revealed. Scientists know that toxins such as lead and alcohol can harm a mother's unborn child and trigger developmental problems during childhood. But the new study is one of the first to show that this damage can precipitate disorders that strike decades later. Schizophrenia is usually diagnosed in the late teens or early twenties. Ezra Susser of Columbia University, New York and his team tested stored blood samples collected from expectant California mothers between 1959 and 1966. They compared the blood lead levels of 44 women whose children went on to develop schizophrenia with 75 others whose children did not. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 5002 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Women scorn each other at certain times of the month in fight for men. We're all guilty of making a snide comment about someone's appearance at one time or another. But a new study hints that women may instinctively use catty comments as a weapon in the dating game. The research shows that when women are at the most fertile point in their monthly cycle they tend to have a lower opinion of other women's looks1. And that's not just because of mood swings. Menstrual phase had no effect on how the same women rated the looks of men, reports Maryanne Fisher of York University in Toronto, Canada. Fisher asked 57 women and 47 men to look at pictures of female and male faces, and rate their attractiveness on a seven-point scale from 'extremely unattractive' to 'extremely attractive'. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 5001 - Posted: 06.24.2010

DURHAM, N.C. -- Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators at Duke University Medical Center have linked a gene previously shown to play a role in learning and memory to the early manifestations of drug addiction in the brain. Although scientists had previously speculated that similar brain processes underlie aspects of learning and addiction, the current study in mice is the first to identify a direct molecular link between the two. The findings suggest new genetic approaches for assessing an individual's susceptibility to drug addiction. They also illuminate the complex series of molecular events that underlie addiction, the researchers said, and ultimately may lead to new therapeutic methods to interfere with that process, thereby curbing the cravings common to addiction. The Duke-based study, which examined genes involved in the brain's response to cocaine, appears in the Feb. 19, 2004, issue of Neuron. The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Zaffaroni Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. © 2001-2004 Duke University Medical Center.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 5000 - Posted: 06.24.2010

EDMONTON - By implanting computer chips in the body, researchers in Alberta hope to make paralysed limbs work again. Scientists at the University of Alberta developed a device to stimulate nerves to take a step. The device helped Edgar Jackson of Calgary regain the ability to walk. Five years ago, a motorcycle accident left him a quadriplegic. A video shows the difference the device made. Jackson went from struggling to put one foot in front of the other to walking with ease. Here's how it works. A sensor attached to Jackson's leg recognizes when his foot is being lifted. Then an electric shock is triggered to stimulate the nerve, moving the foot into position to take a normal step. Copyright © CBC 2004

Keyword: Muscles; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 4999 - Posted: 06.24.2010