Some Data Link Use of Antidepressants, Suicidal Thoughts By Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post Staff Writer A government panel of doctors will meet today to weigh disturbing but ambiguous evidence that widely used antidepressants may make some children suicidal, concerns that peaked in December when British authorities warned doctors not to prescribe the drugs to children. Clinical trials conducted by the drug industry in recent years have produced a steady drumbeat of data suggesting that suicidal thoughts and behavior are slightly more likely to develop in depressed children who take antidepressants such as Paxil, Zoloft and Effexor than in children who get dummy pills, according to several scientists who have analyzed many of the studies. The Food and Drug Administration, after concluding that the numbers in each trial were too small to settle the question, has mounted its own detailed review of the studies and convened the expert panel to advise it on how to evaluate the data. © 2004 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 4906 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Some eye diseases can trigger serious sleep disorders, a study by doctors in the United States suggests. They say people with damage to their optic nerve, which connects the eye to the brain, can have problems sleeping. They can have difficulty falling asleep and can wake up at strange times. They can also be sleepy during the day and suffer from insomnia at night. Writing in the journal Ophthalmology, they say the findings highlight the need to treat these patients early. Dr Russell van Gelder and colleagues at Washington University Medical School in St Louis studied 25 visually impaired young people between the ages of 12 and 20. Half had optic nerve damage while the remainder had other eyesight problems. (C) BBC

Keyword: Vision; Sleep
Link ID: 4905 - Posted: 02.02.2004

Genetic analyses should take into account cause of death. HELEN PEARSON Researchers have opened a window into the state of the human brain at the moment a person dies. The findings call into question previous reports based on brain autopsy tissue. Richard Myers of Stanford University in California and his colleagues found that a coma patient fires up a different set of genes in the brain than one who dies quickly from a heart attack. The group stumbled on the discovery when studying preserved human brain tissue. Using a chip carrying thousands of genes, the researchers analysed which ones are active in the brains of 40 people with depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or none of these. They were searching for genes that were activated abnormally and therefore might underlie the disorders. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4904 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sheep study spies on what a fetus can hear. MICHAEL HOPKIN A team of US researchers has made an inventive attempt to discover how much an unborn baby can hear in the womb — by making recordings from the inner ear of a fetal sheep. They found that low frequencies reach the womb with ease, whereas higher-pitched sounds are more muffled. This implies that vowel sounds — the 'melody' of speech — reach the fetus's ears, says Ken Gerhardt of the University of Florida, who led the study. But consonants, which are spat out at higher frequencies, are obscured. "A fetus would hear the low notes on a piano but probably not the higher ones," Gerhardt says. The researchers made the recordings by removing a sheep fetus from the womb and inserting tiny electrodes into its inner ear. The implants picked up the electrical signals generated in the ear in response to sound. The team then returned the fetus to the womb and played it human speech through a loudspeaker next to its mother's body. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

Keyword: Hearing; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 4903 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Washington, D.C. – Children with cerebral palsy who are severely impaired showed significant improvement in their motor skills using a new experimental physical therapy regimen, said researchers at Georgetown University and University of Alabama at Birmingham. The study – the first randomized, controlled trial of its kind conducted on children – appears in the February 2 issue of the journal Pediatrics. All treated children in this study outperformed the children in conventional therapy across all measures of success, including how well they could move their arms post-therapy and their ability to do new tasks during research and at home with their families. Children with cerebral palsy (CP) exhibit an inability to control their muscles as a result of damage to the region of the brain that controls muscle tone. The result often renders children unable to perform seemingly simple everyday tasks such as picking up a cup, eating finger foods or reaching to be picked up by a parent. Conventional physical therapy interventions have done little to improve motor skills or overall quality of life for children, which led researchers to explore other more intensive and innovative therapies.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 4902 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Robin McKie and Mark Townsend Sweeping new powers against animal rights activists are being prepared by Home Secretary David Blunkett. New legislation would make it an imprisonable offence to intimidate scientists involved in animal research, and prevent large groups gathering outside laboratories. A national police unit dedicated to tackling animal terrorism could be set up. The decision follows last week's announcement that Cambridge University has abandoned construction of its proposed Primate Research Centre. The laboratory, where scientists would have carried out research on Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other brain diseases, was ditched because the costs of protecting buildings and staff from activists protesting about the use of primates in experiments had begun to spiral out of control. The laboratory's price tag had already risen from £24 million to £32 million and was expected to increase even more as security estimates soared. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 4901 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By REUTERS WASHINGTON, — American Indians and Alaska natives are more likely to smoke than any other group in the United States, with 40 percent of adults defined as smokers, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this week. People of Chinese descent were the least likely to smoke, with just 12 percent reporting that they had smoked a cigarette in the past month, said the agency survey, which was released on Thursday. The survey of 74,000 youths ages 12 to 17 and 133,000 adults is the agency's first detailed statistical breakdown by ethnicity of who smokes and who does not, said a spokesman, Joel London. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Dyslexia
Link ID: 4900 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By MELODY PETERSEN THE drug industry has created vast markets for products like Viagra, Celebrex and Vioxx by spending billions of dollars on consumer advertising. But to sell medicines that treat schizophrenia, the companies focus on a much smaller group of customers: state officials who oversee treatment for many people with serious mental illness. Those patients - in mental hospitals, at mental health clinics and on Medicaid - make states among the largest buyers of antipsychotic drugs. For Big Pharma, success in the halls of government has required a different set of marketing tactics. Since the mid-1990's, a group of drug companies, led by Johnson & Johnson, has campaigned to convince state officials that a new generation of drugs - with names like Risperdal, Zyprexa and Seroquel - is superior to older and much cheaper antipsychotics like Haldol. The campaign has led a dozen states to adopt guidelines for treating schizophrenia that make it hard for doctors to prescribe anything but the new drugs. That, in turn, has helped transform the new medicines into blockbusters. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 4899 - Posted: 02.01.2004

Recent experience as the target of anti-gay violence or threats, not identifying as gay, or feeling alienated from the gay community are the major predictors of depression in men who have sex with men (MSM) and public health officials should address these issues by seeking changes in social policies, say UCSF researchers. "Hate-crime laws targeting anti-gay violence, recognition of gay relationships through same-sex marriage or domestic partnership laws, and programs encouraging gay men to 'come out' and to integrate into the gay community should be studied as ways to tackle the public health problem we found of high rates of depression among MSM," says Thomas C. Mills, MD, MPH, a retired associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCSF Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (CAPS) who is prinicpal author of a new study. The study, published in the February issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, found that MSM have depression at a rate three times greater than men in general. Rates of drug and alcohol abuse, HIV status, and socioeconomic variables were not significant predictors of depression in MSM.

Keyword: Depression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 4898 - Posted: 02.01.2004

Experts fear that a hormone replacement therapy trend has gone far beyond the data By Tabitha M. Powledge Fatigued? Depressed mood? Low sex drive? Could be your testosterone is running on empty." This Web sales pitch1 comes not from one of the myriad disreputable companies peddling 21st-century snake oils such as "Libido Enhancement Cream." Rather, the site belongs to Solvay Pharmaceuticals, Marietta, Ga., which produces Androgel, a prescription testosterone-laced gel that received approval from the Food and Drug Administration three years ago. The drug is at the forefront of a campaign to convince men that they must replace the steroid hormones that ebb as they age. But some expert groups fear that the campaign for male hormone replacement therapy is running way ahead of the data, and they have launched a counter-effort to slow it down. Potential consumers need more research, according to "Testosterone and Aging," a recent report from the Institute of Medicine.2 Dan G. Blazer, a psychiatrist at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, NC, who headed the IOM study, estimates that US physicians wrote more than two million prescriptions for testosterone in 2003, excluding Internet sales. That's a dramatic increase (up from 648,000 in 1999). © 2004, The Scientist LLC, All rights reserved.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 4897 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Caroline Ryan, BBC News Online health staff Children with the condition will require many operations When a baby is born, parents eagerly wait to hear if they have a boy or a girl. But in very rare cases, doctors have to help parents decide what gender their child will be. If they are affected by cloacal exstrophy, children's genitals - along with the rest of the pelvis including the bladder and the bowel - do not form normally. It is an extremely serious condition and, in the past, babies affected by it died. Developments in medical technology now mean they can be saved. But when children who are genetically male are affected by the condition, doctors have to decide if they can live as a male, or if surgery is needed to give them female genitals. Experts are divided over how this delicate decision should be approached. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 4896 - Posted: 01.31.2004

by Peter Tyson How is it that the dog, alone among Earth's species, comes in so many shapes and sizes? One way to get a feel for just how diverse dogs have become is to jam your fingers down the throat of a Great Dane and then, minutes later, a Chihuahua. This is what I found myself doing at age 16 during my first full-time summer job. A large kennel near my home boarded about 100 dogs, and soon after I started working there I discovered that not only was mine to be the hand that fed and cleaned up after them, but was also to be the one to administer pills to those on medication. Eager to please my first boss, I went at it and soon became a pro at giving the pills, regardless of the patient's breed, demeanor, or jaw size. Before a dog knew what was happening, I would slip into its cage, pry its jaws apart, place the pill deep in its throat, retract my saliva-streaked hand, and rub its neck vigorously to work the pill down. I was only bitten once. Though my thoughts at the time largely ran to girls and sports, I do remember thinking how amazing it was that the Dr. Seussian mélange of creatures in my care all belonged to the same species. If had I stopped to wonder why they and Canis familiaris as a whole came in so many flavors, I probably would have told myself because we've been breeding them for those flavors for thousands of years. ©2004 WGBH Educational Foundation.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 4895 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JANE E. BRODY It is commonly assumed in this therapy-oriented world that nearly every grieving person can benefit from bereavement counseling or therapy. But both the experience of psychologists who provide bereavement services and a thorough review of the literature on the results of grief therapy suggest otherwise. Rather, the findings suggest, a majority of people who suffer the loss of a loved one neither need nor benefit from participation in a bereavement group or from more formal grief therapy. These people experience what might be called a normal grief reaction, and the symptoms of it gradually diminish over 6 to 18 months. "Feeling grief is the burden we face because we're capable of becoming attached and loving people," said Dr. Robert Hansson, a psychologist and student of grief at the University of Tulsa. "It's a natural process. It hurts, but most people can work through it and go on." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Emotions
Link ID: 4894 - Posted: 01.31.2004

Scans have pinpointed circuits in the monkey brain that could be precursors of those in humans for speech and language. As in humans, an area specialized for processing species-specific vocalizations is on the left side of the brain, report Drs. Amy Poremba, Mortimer Mishkin, and colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Warren G. Magnuson Clinical Center (CC), components of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the University of Iowa. An area near the left temple responded significantly more than the same area on the right only to monkey calls, not to other animal calls, human voices or various other sounds. The researchers published their findings in the January 29, 2004 Nature. "Since it's in the left temporal lobe and specialized for vocalizations only, it bears intriguing similarities to human language," noted Mishkin. "Assuming this is an adaptive mechanism, it suggests that vocalizations can be deciphered better if they are processed by only one temporal pole rather than by both." Scientists have known for years that the human brain processes speech on the left side of the brain, but they only had hints that this is also the case for non-human primates. For example, when a monkey hears a call from behind, it characteristically turns its head to the right, suggesting that the primitive vocalizations are being processed in the left hemisphere, which receives greater input from the right ear than from the left. Also, a monkey's ability to perceive such calls is impaired if it lacks the left auditory cortex, but not the right.

Keyword: Language; Laterality
Link ID: 4893 - Posted: 01.31.2004

By DENISE GRADY Responding to criticism from conservatives, the director of the National Institutes of Health has told lawmakers the government should continue to pay for studies of sexual behavior because they could have a powerful impact on public health. Last fall, the Traditional Values Coalition accused the institutes of paying for "smarmy projects" and studies of "bizarre sexual practices with little or no bearing on public health." The group asked Representative Billy Tauzin, a Louisiana Republican who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, to investigate. Among the projects were a study of truckers, prostitutes, drug use and sexually transmitted diseases, and studies of sexual behavior in older men, sexual risk-taking and sexual dysfunction. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 4892 - Posted: 01.30.2004

By JANE GROSS RDSLEY, N.Y., — When Phyllis Lombardi lets her 6-year-old son, Joey, play in her yard here, she cannot take her eyes off him because he is autistic, barely speaks and might bolt into traffic. But a fence costs more than the Lombardis can afford since they moved to this Westchester County village last year. Ardsley has state-of-the-art autism programs, but also real estate prices that have forced the family into a rental just a block from the Saw Mill River Parkway. It was desperation that brought the family here from Rockland County, when Mrs. Lombardi joined an army of parents, their frustration growing as their numbers increased, facing a crisis of supply and demand when their autistic children reach school age. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 4891 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Whether it's English, Chinese, or French, language is part of what makes us uniquely human. Yet monkeys have a vocabulary as well--coos, grunts, screeches, barks, and warbles--and new research suggests that they process these sounds in roughly the same part of the brain that people use to make sense of speech. The findings could have implications for understanding the evolution of human language. Monkeys tend to turn their right ear toward calls from other monkeys. This habit suggests that monkeys, like humans, do most "language" processing on the left side of the brain, which receives input from the right ear. To further investigate how monkey calls are handled in the brain, neuroscientist Amy Poremba of the University of Iowa in Iowa City and collaborators at the National Institute of Mental Health used positron emission tomography to monitor the brain activity of rhesus monkeys as they listened to six types of sounds: monkey calls, nonvocal sounds such as dripping water, human speech, ambient background noise, music, and nonprimate sounds such as those of whales, birds, or dogs, as well as scrambled monkey calls. Copyright © 2004 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 4890 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The National Multiple Sclerosis Society has launched a new initiative to speed research on nervous system repair and protection in MS, a disease that attacks the brain and spinal cord. The Society has invited proposals from research teams to compete for grants of up to $5.5 million each to pave the way for clinical testing of repair and protection strategies in people with MS. "The pace of research in nervous system repair is accelerating dramatically," comments Stephen C. Reingold, PhD, the Society's Vice President of Research Programs. "With this initiative, we are aiming to have in place non-invasive tools that can determine the clinical success of any of several promising repair techniques that may be tested in the future to protect and restore nerve function in persons with MS." These are the largest grants ever offered by any agency for tissue protection and repair in MS, and potentially the most expensive single grants in the 58-year history of the National MS Society. The Society funds more MS research, offers more services for people with MS, and provides more professional education programs than any other MS organization in the world.

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 4889 - Posted: 01.30.2004

Study reveals antibodies can kill brain cells. HELEN PEARSON Antibody therapies designed to treat the human form of mad cow disease could backfire, warn US scientists. The group investigated the proteins called prions that cause the rare brain disorder variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD) and its farmyard equivalent, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). Prions cause disease when they take on a misshapen form, accumulate in the brain and kill off nerve cells. Some research groups are trying to prevent this by using antibodies that grab hold of normal prions and prevent them from transforming into the harmful configuration. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 4888 - Posted: 06.24.2010

MADISON - A pint-sized, tree-dwelling Brazilian monkey has proven to be strikingly similar to humans when it comes to sexual responses, a national research team has discovered. Through functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and collaborating institutions for the first time peered into the brains of fully conscious nonhuman primates to learn what's really on their minds when it comes to sex. The research appears in the February 2004 issue of the Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Common marmosets, like humans, live in family groups and have to make careful choices when confronted with the scent of an attractive female, a team of marmoset experts led by Charles T. Snowdon, UW-Madison professor of psychology, discovered.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 4887 - Posted: 01.30.2004