Children under the age of 18 should not take the anti-depressant drug Efexor, government experts have said. The drug is not licensed for use in under 18s. However, doctors are prescribing it to an estimated 3,000 youngsters across the UK. But experts have now ruled that there is not enough evidence to show it is safe or effective for this age group. They said young people on the drug should not stop taking it but should discuss their options with their GP. The Department of Health set up an expert working group to look at the safety of certain antidepressants earlier this year. It followed claims from patient groups that some of these drugs have serious side-effects and are addictive. In June, the group issued a statement saying that children under the age of 18 should not be given Seroxat. (C) BBC

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 4283 - Posted: 09.20.2003

By Jonathan Amos, BBC News Online science staff The largest marsupial that ever lived was even bigger than we thought, Australian scientists say. New information on the immense wombat-like Diprotodon optatum indicates it reached more than two and a half tonnes on average - nearly double some previous estimates. If that was the case, researchers say, it gives the lie to a popular theory that weak vegetation growing on Australia's poor soils during the last ice age stunted the continent's big beasts. With its gigantic bulk, D. optatum would also have been a mighty handful to hunt, suggesting humans were probably not the main cause behind its extinction more than 30,000 years ago. The new assessment of this pouched behemoth is provided by Dr Stephen Wroe, from the University of Sydney, and colleagues. They did their calculation by comparing the beast's fossil remains with the known bone dimensions and body masses of several living marsupials and other mammals. (C) BBC

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 4282 - Posted: 09.18.2003

By Caroline Ryan, BBC News Online health staff Many people tell the odd white lie - taking a day off "sick" or halving the amount they spend on a shopping trip. But most feel a little bit guilty about the deception. Scientists have now found that twinge of conscience can be seen in increased activity in the brain. In short, it takes more effort to lie than to tell the truth. But people with psychopathic tendencies find lying as easy as telling the truth. The reason is that when children develop the ability to deceive - around the age of three of four - they also develop the ability to empathise. But researchers say people with aggressive and antisocial personality disorders do not develop this ability, and therefore they have no moral compass. (C) BBC

Keyword: Aggression; Emotions
Link ID: 4281 - Posted: 09.18.2003

Capuchin umbrage suggests sense of fairness extends beyond humans. John Whitfield Monkeys strike for equal pay. They down tools if they see another monkey get a bigger reward for doing the same job, US researchers have found1. The experiments show that notions of justice extend beyond humans, says Sarah Brosnan of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. This is probably an innate ability that evolved in our primate ancestor, she believes: "You need a sense of fairness to live in large, complex groups." Brosnan and her colleague Frans de Waal taught brown capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) to swap plastic tokens for food. Normally, monkeys were happy to exchange a token for some cucumber. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 4280 - Posted: 06.24.2010

ATLANTA – In the first experimental demonstration of its kind, researchers led by Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal, PhD, at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University, and the Living Links Center, have shown nonhuman primates respond negatively to unequal reward distribution, a reaction often seen in humans based on their universal sense of fairness. While researchers have long recognized the sense of fairness within the human species, Brosnan and de Waal are the first to confirm this trait in nonhuman primates. The findings appear in the September 18 issue of Nature. These new findings, coupled with previous scientific data that demonstrate a direct link between nonhuman primate behavior and that of humans, support a new school of thought that economic decision-making is based as much on an emotional sense of fairness as on rational considerations. Identifying similar reactions in nonhuman primates as in humans offers insight into how such emotional reactions developed, providing researchers and economists new perspective on why humans make certain economic decisions in relation to efforts, gains and losses of others.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 4279 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists have developed a way to reduce the risk of contracting CJD from surgical instruments. The prion proteins that cause the brain disease can stick to instruments and be passed on to others who subsequently undergo surgery. Cleansing chemicals have proved to be ineffective, or harmful, to the equipment and the environment. However, the Health Protection Agency in Porton Down has developed an enzyme-based treatment that safely digests the rogue proteins. When prions are exposed to the solution at a temperature of 60C, they become almost a million times less infectious. The active component comes from bacteria found in volcanic pools. Researcher Dr Neil Raven said: "We have developed a safe and inexpensive, but highly sensitive, method that enables us to detect tiny amounts of these prion proteins. (C) BBC

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 4278 - Posted: 09.17.2003

By DENISE GRADY Lithium, an old and inexpensive drug that has fallen out of favor with many psychiatrists, is better than the most commonly prescribed drug, Depakote, at preventing suicide in people who have manic-depressive illness, researchers are reporting. People with the illness, also called bipolar disorder, swing back and forth between bleak spells of depression and periods of high excitability that may run the gamut from euphoria to rage. From 1.3 percent to 1.5 percent of people in the United States suffer from bipolar disorder, and their risk of committing suicide is estimated to be 10 to 20 times that of the rest of the population. Perhaps because patients are more likely to seek medical help when they are depressed than when they are manic, the disorder is often misdiagnosed at first as depression alone, but antidepressants are not the correct treatment for bipolar disorder and may in fact make it worse. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 4277 - Posted: 09.17.2003

By Luke Timmerman, Seattle Times business reporter Billionaire Paul Allen, in his largest upfront charitable commitment ever, today will announce that he is giving $100 million to start a nonprofit research center that will try to create a definitive map of the mouse brain that researchers can use for further discoveries. The Microsoft co-founder is creating the Allen Institute for Brain Science, in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood. The money will be used to try to build the "Allen Brain Atlas" to show how a list of 30,000 genes can be transformed into a circuit board with a trillion cells. Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4276 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Autism: A study that discounts a suspected cause of the disorder gives way to more questions than answers. By David Kohn, Sun Staff In recent years, autism research has been a battleground. A vocal group of parents, advocates and a few scientists focused on vaccines containing traces of mercury as the lead suspects in the disorder. But most autism researchers were suspicious, arguing that the theory didn't fit the evidence. Now, with a new Danish study offering the strongest evidence yet against the vaccine theory, the controversy may give way to a more baffling question: If vaccines aren't the culprit, then what is? The range of theories underscores how little is known about autism, a developmental illness that afflicts as many as one in 200 American children and makes it difficult for them to connect with the outside world. Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 4275 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists believe that stem cells offer a realistic hope of treatments for Parkinson's disease. At a conference of stem cell experts in London on Monday, Professor Olle Lindvall said that cell transplants could help halt physical decline. Stem cells are the body's "master cells", and could be transformed into new brain cells to replace those lost to illness. The Swedish researcher warned that treatments could take time to arrive. Professor Lindvall, from Lund University, is one of Europe's most respected experts in stem cells. He was addressing a meeting of more than 500 stem cell researchers organised by the UK Medical Research Council. Patients with Parkinson's disease have lost large numbers of a particular key type of brain cell that produces a chemical needed for the body to control muscular movements. (C)BBC

Keyword: Parkinsons; Stem Cells
Link ID: 4274 - Posted: 09.16.2003

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR Backed by millions of dollars in financial support from Paul G. Allen, a founder of Microsoft , a team of scientists has set out to pinpoint the roughly 20,000 genes responsible for building and operating the human brain. From there, the scientists will put together a highly detailed atlas of the mammalian brain and make it available to the public through an online database. To accomplish that goal, they are relying heavily on the genome of the common mouse, which genetically bears remarkable similarities to humans. "It's almost embarrassing when you think about it," said Dr. Mark Boguski, director of the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Brain Science, which is leading the effort. "But we share 99 percent of our genes with mice." Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 4273 - Posted: 09.16.2003

By SIMON ROMERO ALBUQUERQUE, — In the 1960's and 70's, Carlos Castaneda captivated millions of readers with his tales of self-discovery under the influence of peyote, jimson weed and other hallucinogens. His writings have always been controversial among anthropologists. After all, he claimed to have flown and grown a beak, among other things, in his transformation into a sorcerer under the tutelage of Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian shaman he said he met at a bus station in 1960 in Nogales, Ariz., while an anthropology graduate student. But rarely has the profession witnessed anything as fierce as a feud between two anthropologists — one a former associate of Mr. Castaneda, the other a harsh critic — that has now reached the New Mexico Supreme Court. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 4272 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS WADE In lovers' songs, military marches, weddings and funerals — every occasion where a degree of emotion needs to be evoked — music is an indispensable ingredient. Yet the ability to enjoy music has long puzzled biologists because it does nothing evident to help survival. Why, therefore, should evolution have built into the human brain this soul-stirring source of pleasure? Man's faculties for enjoying and producing music, Darwin wrote, "must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed." Music is still a mystery, a tangle of culture and built-in skills that researchers are trying to tease apart. No one really knows why music is found in all cultures, why most known systems of music are based on the octave, why some people have absolute pitch and whether the brain handles music with special neural circuits or with ones developed for other purposes. Recent research, however, has produced a number of theories about the brain and music. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 4271 - Posted: 06.24.2010

How do people subjected to the endless dark days of winter in the far northern latitudes maintain normal daily rhythms? Though many might feel like hibernating, a highly regulated internal system keeps such impractical yearnings in check. From fruit flies to humans, nearly every living organism depends on an internal clock to regulate basic biological cycles such as sleep patterns, metabolism, and body temperature. And that clock runs on similar molecular mechanisms. Specific clusters of neurons in the brain are known to control the biological clock. Scientists believed these brain "clock cells" function as independent units. But new research described in this issue show that the neurons do not act in isolation; rather they collaborate with other neurons in a cell-communication network to sustain the repeating circadian rhythm cycles. Clock cells within the brain maintain an organism's circadian rhythms, even in the absence of cyclical environmental signals like light, in a state scientists call "free running." Though it has long been clear that the circadian rhythms of an organism persist under such free-running conditions (for example, constant darkness), it was thought that the gene-expression patterns within the cells governing these biorhythms did not require any external, or extracellular, signals to continue ticking.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 4270 - Posted: 09.16.2003

DURHAM, N.C. -- Neurobiologists at Duke University Medical Center have found the strongest evidence yet that monkeys show the same keen "social reflexes" that humans do -- shifting their attention in response to the direction of gaze of another individual. The researchers said their findings mean that monkeys can provide a critically important animal model of how the brain controls what humans pay attention to in social situations. Such a model would enable scientists to better understand how processing of social attention works in the brain, and how it can go awry in such disorders as autism. Such basic studies, said the neurobiologists, could lead to better treatments for autism and better methods to teach autistic children. The researchers, post-doctoral fellow Robert Deaner and Assistant Professor Michael Platt, reported their findings in the Sept. 16, 2003, issue of Current Biology. The research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Eye Institute.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 4269 - Posted: 09.16.2003

As ordinary citizens struggled to rebuild their lives after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, well-meaning mental health professionals swarmed New York City to provide aid to the expected millions who would surely need support. These grief and crisis counselors delivered interventions that they believed would mitigate psychological distress and prevent the emergence of posttraumatic stress disorder. The most widely used PTSD intervention, psychological debriefing, seeks to prevent symptoms by having trauma survivors share memories or relive the experience. Unfortunately, a number of scientific studies have raised substantial concerns about the actual impact this and similar methods. A new report examining the current body of research on the efficacy of psychological debriefing found "no convincing evidence that debriefing reduces the incidence of PTSD, and some controlled studies suggest that it may impede natural recovery from trauma." The report, "Does Early Psychological Intervention Promote Recovery From Posttraumatic Stress?" appears in the November issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest , a journal of the American Psychological Society. The authors are Richard J. McNally, Harvard University; Richard A. Bryant, University of New South Wales; and Anke Ehlers, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 4268 - Posted: 09.16.2003

Hormone replacement therapy may not be so bad By Dennis Watkins Postmenopausal women have for decades relied on estrogen supplements to control the hot flashes, memory loss, osteoporosis and other ailments that can occur when their bodies no longer produce the compound. But hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is no longer considered the best way to treat menopause, ever since a report last year found that women receiving a certain type of HRT were at increased risk for dangerous side effects, such as breast cancer. Many health professionals have concluded that altering a woman's physiology will always increase risks over time. But a handful of respected scientists are calling for another look at HRT, arguing that not all therapies are created equal. The largest blow to HRT appeared in the July 17, 2002, Journal of the American Medical Association . It presented important results of the Women's Health Initiative's long-term study of more than 16,000 women taking estrogen and a progesterone derivative. The study was halted prematurely, the authors reported, because too many women were encountering serious medical problems. "I believe that the drug we studied has more harms than benefits when used for the prevention of chronic diseases such as osteoporosis in generally healthy women," notes Jacques Rossouw, project officer of the initiative. In the past year a steady cascade of articles has enumerated all the higher risks that patients in the study experienced: an 81 percent increase in heart disease in the first year of therapy, a 24 percent increase in invasive breast cancer and a 31 percent increase in stroke. The therapy also doubled the risk of dementia. (A study of more than 800,000 women published in Lancet on August 9 also found an increased risk of breast cancer in postmenopausal women receiving a wide variety of HRT but noted that the risk of mortality from breast cancer related to HRT could not be determined.) © 1996-2003 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 4267 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NewScientist.com news service The brain changes that occur during adolescence may mean teenagers smokers are more likely to become seriously hooked than those who take up the habit as adults, suggests a new rat study. Previous studies have suggested that the earlier someone starts smoking, the more likely they are to be life-long smokers and the more trouble they have in kicking their addiction, says Edward Levin, who led the study at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, US. Experiments to distinguish between the various possible causes could not ethically be conducted in humans. But when Levin and his team let teenage rats help themselves to nicotine, they found that female teen rats - at an age equivalent to 14-year-old girls - take twice as much as rats only exposed to nicotine in adulthood. And this insatiable use carries on when they grow up. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 4266 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Patients with chronic alcoholism develop a wide range of brain structural and neuropsychological abnormalities. Deficits in executive functioning - such as problem solving, putting things in order, working memory, and doing multiple tasks at once - have been linked to lesions of the prefrontal cortex. Deficits in balance have been linked to lesions of the cerebellum. A study in the September issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research has found that the circuitry connecting these two spatially disparate brain regions, specifically through the pons and thalamus, may allow lesions to compound their effects on the prefrontal cortex and cerebellum. "Neuropathological, neuroimaging, and neuropsychological studies have shown that the prefrontal cortex and regions of the cerebellum are especially vulnerable to the untoward effects of chronic alcoholism," said Edith Sullivan, a professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine and the sole author of the study. "Other neuroscience research provides evidence that, despite their geographical distance in the brain, the prefrontal cortex, which is at the frontal lobe, and the cerebellum, which is basically the hindbrain, are connected by far-reaching white matter tracts and a structural neural network. It seemed very likely that damage to one node or individual brain structure of this frontocerebellar system could affect other nodes within that circuitry, both structurally and functionally."

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 4265 - Posted: 09.15.2003

Health implications may include sleep disruption, cognitive deficits, diabetes, and mood disturbances Cortisol, known as a "stress hormone," plays an important role in the regulation of emotion, cognition, reward, immune functioning, and energy utilization. A study published in the September issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research has found that long-term chronic drinking produces an increase in cortisol both during intoxication and withdrawal. "It has not been known whether the body adapts to the stress of drinking following daily heavy drinking in the non-laboratory setting, or whether cortisol levels continue to be elevated even after several weeks or months of drinking," said Bryon H. Adinoff, Distinguished Professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, medical director of the Substance Abuse Team at the Veterans Affairs North Texas Health Care System in Dallas, and first author of the study. "In this study, we show that even persons drinking for several months continue to show elevated levels of cortisol. In addition, levels of cortisol increase even further when the drinking stops. This increase occurs even before alcohol is gone from the body. The daily, heavy drinker may therefore have levels of cortisol two to three times the normal amount throughout the day and night."

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 4264 - Posted: 09.15.2003