By SHERRY ARRIA as told to LIZ WELCH For the past two years, I've been telling my 10-year-old daughter, Briana, that she's not fat -- a little overweight, yes, athletic, strong, even chunky -- but not fat. Then in June, I received a letter from Cambridge's Public Health Department. It was a ''health report card'' and part of a plan to help parents in our city identify and help their overweight or underweight children. I knew that Briana was the biggest girl in the fourth grade. She is five feet tall and weighs 128 pounds. What I didn't realize until I opened the letter and saw it staring me in the face was that she is also in the 97th percentile based on her height and weight among girls her age. That number was like a kick in my stomach. Before that moment, I kept telling myself that it was a phase she would grow out of. I even found myself comparing her to other overweight kids I'd see and thinking to myself, Briana is not that big. I'd been living in total denial. In retrospect, it's odd. I discovered that I had diabetes when I was Briana's age. My mother thought I was going through a lethargic stage. I was taking naps in the afternoon while all my friends were outside playing. She was clueless. A diabetic neighbor noticed that I was thirsty all the time and suggested that my mother have me tested for the disease, but my mother never followed through. I guess she didn't want to even think I might have been in trouble. No mother wants to admit that. Thankfully, our neighbor was persistent. My mom finally took me to a diabetes center. Within minutes, nurses were whipping the soda and Doritos out of my hands and hooking me up to insulin. I was so sick that the doctor said if I had gone another day I would have fallen into a coma. My mother burst into tears. Now I understand how she must have felt. Briana has been a great eater since birth, but because I don't give her junk food or any sugar, I never considered it a problem. Looking back now, there were so many clues that it was and is. I even have a video of her at Thanksgiving when she was 5. She ate two full plates of food and went back for more mashed potatoes. Then, we all thought it was hilarious. My friends were even slightly jealous -- their kids would no sooner eat a carrot than turkey and all the fixings. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 4223 - Posted: 09.07.2003

By JON GERTNER If Daniel Gilbert is right, then you are wrong. That is to say, if Daniel Gilbert is right, then you are wrong to believe that a new car will make you as happy as you imagine. You are wrong to believe that a new kitchen will make you happy for as long as you imagine. You are wrong to think that you will be more unhappy with a big single setback (a broken wrist, a broken heart) than with a lesser chronic one (a trick knee, a tense marriage). You are wrong to assume that job failure will be crushing. You are wrong to expect that a death in the family will leave you bereft for year upon year, forever and ever. You are even wrong to reckon that a cheeseburger you order in a restaurant -- this week, next week, a year from now, it doesn't really matter when -- will definitely hit the spot. That's because when it comes to predicting exactly how you will feel in the future, you are most likely wrong. A professor in Harvard's department of psychology, Gilbert likes to tell people that he studies happiness. But it would be more precise to say that Gilbert -- along with the psychologist Tim Wilson of the University of Virginia, the economist George Loewenstein of Carnegie-Mellon and the psychologist (and Nobel laureate in economics) Daniel Kahneman of Princeton -- has taken the lead in studying a specific type of emotional and behavioral prediction. In the past few years, these four men have begun to question the decision-making process that shapes our sense of well-being: how do we predict what will make us happy or unhappy -- and then how do we feel after the actual experience? For example, how do we suppose we'll feel if our favorite college football team wins or loses, and then how do we really feel a few days after the game? How do we predict we'll feel about purchasing jewelry, having children, buying a big house or being rich? And then how do we regard the outcomes? According to this small corps of academics, almost all actions -- the decision to buy jewelry, have kids, buy the big house or work exhaustively for a fatter paycheck -- are based on our predictions of the emotional consequences of these events. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 4222 - Posted: 09.07.2003

Even though many well-respected people have a history of stuttering, including actress Marilyn Monroe, actor Bruce Willis and singer Carly Simon, the speech condition has had a bad rap. Many people have long blamed emotional or personality factors as the cause and believed that it could be easily overcome with a change in attitude. But now accumulating research indicates that stuttering actually erupts from disturbances in brain function. The new work, based on studies that image the brain, finds that brain anatomy and brain activity is awry in stutterers. Methods that counter these biological disturbances might mend the underlying deficits and treat a large number of people. “On Aaaaaaaapril 30, 1789, George Washington was in-in-inaugurated first pres-pres-pres-pres . . . ,” the student reads aloud. “My gosh, just spit it out,” interrupts another pupil. Many people have assumed that nerves or some flaw in disposition causes stuttering speech, characterized by awkward pauses, dragging out parts of words and repeating certain sounds. Their solution? Snap out of it. Copyright © 2003 Society for Neuroscience

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 4221 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. A leading scientific journal yesterday retracted a paper it published last year saying that one night's typical dose of the drug Ecstasy might cause permanent brain damage. The monkeys and baboons in the study were not injected with Ecstasy but with a powerful amphetamine, said the journal, Science magazine. The retraction was submitted by the team at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine that did the study. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 4220 - Posted: 09.06.2003

Faulty cells, not chemistry, may underpin brain disorder. HELEN PEARSON Faulty brain cells may cause schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, according to a UK study. The report is helping to rewrite scientists' view of the diseases. The world's 24 million schizophrenia sufferers experience disrupted thoughts and behaviour and sometimes psychotic episodes such as delusions. For years doctors suspected that abnormal levels of certain brain chemicals underlie the disorder because antipsychotic drugs to treat the condition alter activity of these molecules. The latest report backs the idea that a class of brain cells called oligodendrocytes, which help nerves to transmit electrical pulses, are to blame instead. A team led by Sabine Bahn of the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, UK, found that at least 11 oligodendrocyte genes are suppressed in post-mortem brains of 15 schizophrenic patients1. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Glia
Link ID: 4219 - Posted: 06.24.2010

In 2002, an estimated 22 million Americans suffered from substance dependence or abuse due to drugs, alcohol or both, according to the newest results of the Household Survey released today by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). There were 19.5 million Americans, 8.3 percent of the population ages 12 or older, who currently used illicit drugs, 54 million who participated in binge drinking in the previous 30 days, and 15.9 million who were heavy drinkers. The report highlights that 7.7 million people, 3.3 percent of the total population ages 12 and older, needed treatment for a diagnosable drug problem and 18.6 million, 7.9 per cent of the population, needed treatment for a serious alcohol problem. Only 1.4 million received specialized substance abuse treatment for an illicit drug problem and 1.5 million received treatment for alcohol problems. Over 94 percent of people with substance use disorders who did not receive treatment did not believe they needed treatment. There were 362,000 people who recognized they needed treatment for drug abuse. Of them, there were 88,000 who tried but were unable to obtain treatment for drug abuse in 2002. There were 266,000 who tried, but could not obtain treatment for alcohol abuse.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 4218 - Posted: 09.06.2003

Option Can Increase Number of Patients Seeking Treatment The recent U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of buprenorphine and of a combination product containing buprenorphine and naloxone, developed through more than a decade of research supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, has opened the door to mainstream medical treatment for people addicted to opiates, such as heroin and morphine. Now, results of a 2-part, multicenter, clinical trial published in the September 4 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, provides additional insight into the utility of this treatment outside the traditional addiction treatment clinic setting. "Buprenorphine represents a major step forward in the treatment of opiate addiction," says Dr. Nora D. Volkow, NIDA Director. "It allows physicians to treat patients for this disease in the same manner that other people are treated for such other chronic illnesses as diabetes or high blood pressure. Office-based buprenorphine increases the availability of therapy by offering patients greater flexibility in treatment scheduling and integration with the mainstream public for their health services." "Other agonist therapy for opiate addiction is given in a highly regulated setting, which may dissuade many addicted people from seeking help," say lead authors Dr. Paul J. Fudala and T. Peter Bridge.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 4217 - Posted: 09.06.2003

Schizophrenia and manic depression could have similar genetic causes, researchers suggest. The flaw appears to lie in genes which affect how the central nervous system develops. Researchers from the University of Cambridge say the findings are surprising because the conditions are so different. Schizophrenia and manic depression, or bipolar disorder, affect around 2% of the population. The researchers looked at the brains of 15 people who had had schizophrenia, 15 who had had bipolar disorder, and 15 who had been healthy. They looked at genes associated with the formation of the myelin sheath which covers and protects nerves and enables the efficient conduction of electrical impulses through the nervous system. (C) BBC

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 4216 - Posted: 09.05.2003

NewScientist.com news service Giving obese people top-ups of a naturally occurring gut hormone could help fight obesity, suggests a new study. The research revealed that obese people have a third less of the hunger-beating hormone PYY3-36 in their blood than their leaner contemporaries. And giving both obese and slim people infusions of the hormone cut their appetites by about a third when offered an eat-as-much-as-you-like buffet, says the team from Imperial College London and the Hammersmith Hospital, also in London, UK. "The discovery that obese people have lower levels of PYY3-36, an important factor limiting appetite, suggests a possible new treatment for the millions suffering from obesity," says Steve Bloom, a member of the team at Imperial. "These new findings suggest boosting PYY3-36 offers a novel approach towards treating the epidemic of obesity in our society." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 4215 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Elizabeth Loftus was enjoying her life researching the unreliability of memory in adults and children, and was often called as an expert witness in major trials such as that of OJ Simpson. By the mid-1980s those cases increasingly involved sexual abuse. But when her own work questioned the theory of repressed memory of sexual abuse, all hell broke loose. A woman hit her with a rolled-up newspaper. Worse, as she told Wendy M. Grossman, the controversy made her enemies - and propelled her out of her much-loved job You do seem to have a lot of critics The American Psychological Association is giving me an award this summer, and some enemies have written complaining about it. It's hard to adjust to having enemies, because they are so vicious. So many hornets. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 4214 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A study conducted by University of Utah genetics researchers shows that the steroid hormone ecdysone controls an important phase in the embryonic development of insects, providing an unexpected parallel with the role of the hormone in controlling metamorphosis. The study's findings also give scientists new insights into how steroids control maturation in higher organisms. Carl S. Thummel, Ph.D., a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and professor of human genetics at the University of Utah School of Medicine, said that although other studies have established a critical role for ecdysone in controlling insect metamorphosis, very little was known about roles for the hormone during embryonic development. To find the answer, Thummel and Tatiana Kozlova, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute research associate, looked at the activation pattern of the receptor for ecdysone. They found that this receptor is highly activated in an extraembryonic tissue called amnioserosa, a tissue that does not itself form part of the embryo, but is nonetheless required for embryonic development. Thummel said the source of ecdysone in the early embryo, prior to the development of the insect endocrine organ, has always baffled scientists. "Our findings suggest that the earliest source of hormone is the amnioserosa," he said, "although other sources are likely to contribute at later times."

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 4213 - Posted: 09.05.2003

La Jolla, CA. -A team of scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) has identified more than 50 previously unknown proteins and associates several of them with rare human muscle and nerve degeneration diseases. The team is publishing their findings this week in the journal Science. Led by TSRI Professors Larry Gerace and John R. Yates III, the team used a technique called subtractive proteomics to identify 62 new proteins in the inner nuclear membrane of the human cell. The team demonstrated that 23 of these proteins are linked with strong probability to 14 rare muscle-wasting diseases such as congenital muscular dystrophy, Limb-Girdle muscular dystrophy, and spinal muscular atrophy, and several forms of the neurodegenerative Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. Knowing the proteins that may cause or contribute to these diseases is a first step in the long process of looking for ways to detect, prevent, or treat them.

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Muscles
Link ID: 4212 - Posted: 09.05.2003

Scientists have uncovered evidence of a link between a common sleep disorder and brain damage. Sleep apnoea occurs when the airways become blocked by the tongue or soft palate, depriving the person of oxygen and briefly waking them. New Scientist magazine says it leads to a loss of brain cells, potentially explaining the memory and learning problems linked to the condition. But experts say more work is needed to confirm there is permanent damage. Up to 2% of adult males - around 300,000 people - in the UK have sleep apnoea. Researchers from the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College, London, carried out Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans of seven patients with sleep apnoea and seven healthy patients. They looked at the patients' brain density. It was found the sleep apnoea patients had less brain density in the left hippocampus, where the storage of memory is co-ordinated. (C)BBC

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Sleep
Link ID: 4211 - Posted: 09.04.2003

The same receptors that sense the burning taste of chilli peppers also sense chest pain during a heart attack, scientists have discovered. The receptors are only present on the outer surface of the heart, which may explain why some "silent" heart attacks produce no pain. The new research also identifies a new target for drugs that alleviate chest pain caused by coronary heart disease, scientists say. Vanilloid receptor 1 (VR1) is a pain sensor that is abundant in the skin and tongue and picks up the searing sensation of chilli peppers. Hui-Lin Pan, at Pennsylvania State University in the US, investigated whether it is also present in the heart. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 4210 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. A new study from Denmark tends to discount widely held fears that a mercury-based preservative formerly used in childhood vaccines may be responsible for the rapid rise in diagnoses of autism. In the study, published this week in the journal Pediatrics, a team of Danish doctors counted all the diagnoses of autism in the country from 1971 to 2000. They found no decrease after 1992, when Denmark became the first country in the world to ban the preservative, thimerosal. Rather, autism diagnoses continued to skyrocket on the same trajectory that began in the late 1980's, rising from less than one case per 10,000 Danish youngsters in 1990 to more than three a decade later. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 4209 - Posted: 09.04.2003

By GINA KOLATA A single infusion of an intestinal hormone made people eat less for the rest of the day, regardless of whether they were fat or thin, researchers are reporting today. The hormone, PYY (for peptide YY 3-36), is of particular interest because it appears to be the intestine's signal of satiety and because overweight people normally make less of it than thin people. Researchers are trying to learn whether some people grow fat because they do not produce enough of it and thus get only a weak chemical signal to stop eating. In the study, whose results appear today in The New England Journal of Medicine, 24 volunteers, half of them overweight and half of them lean, received PYY or a saltwater placebo at 8:30 a.m. An hour and a half later, they were ushered in to a buffet lunch. On average, those who had received PYY ate 30 percent less. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 4208 - Posted: 09.04.2003

By ERIC A. TAUB IT pales in importance when compared with the cloning of Dolly the sheep or the mapping of the human genome, but researchers from the University of Southern California are trying to deconstruct the basis of what makes humans look human. And this time Hollywood directors, not just scientists, care about the results. Once filmmakers can understand what makes people look real and unique to one another, they will be able to recreate reality with ease, inexpensively populating movies with virtual characters - rampaging Mongol hordes, clones of movie stars performing physically impossible feats - whose appearance and actions are as lifelike as a next-door neighbor. In fact, recreating a celluloid duplicate of Humphrey Bogart or Marilyn Monroe will soon be possible, although there is little reason to fear that some cinematic Frankenstein will produce a clone of Elvis that can convince the world he never died. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Biomechanics
Link ID: 4207 - Posted: 09.04.2003

One gene might control both - and explain the divided brain. HELEN PEARSON Right-handed people tend to have hair that swirls clockwise, a US researcher has discovered1. Amar Klar of the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Maryland, surreptitiously inspected people's pates by spying on them in airports and shopping malls - ignoring the long-haired and the bald. More than 95% of right-handers' hair whorls clockwise on the scalp, he found. The locks of lefties and the ambidextrous are equally likely to coil either way. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

Keyword: Laterality
Link ID: 4206 - Posted: 06.24.2010

UCI study identifies how fatty compound curbs hunger, reduces weight Researchers at the UC Irvine College of Medicine have identified how a natural fat compound works to tell the body to stop eating – a discovery that may be the basis for a new class of drugs targeting obesity and other eating disorders. Daniele Piomelli, professor of psychiatry and pharmacology, and colleagues found that the fatty acid, called OEA (oleylethanolamide), activates its cell receptor molecules to regulate hunger and metabolism. The team also discovered that by increasing OEA levels while maintaining normal levels of these cell receptors, they could reduce appetite and weight in rodents, as well as lower their blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels. The study appears in the Sept. 4 issue of Nature. “In earlier studies, we found that OEA can be an important regulator of eating behavior, but we didn't know how it worked,” Piomelli said. “We were excited to find that OEA activates cell receptors that have already been the focus of successful drug development. This gives us hope for a new class of anti-obesity drugs based on natural chemicals.” © Copyright 2002-2003 UC Regents

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 4205 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists and perfumers are searching for the chemical scent that drives humans wild By Cathryn M. Delude, Globe Correspondent, "Warning: Contains pheromones. (Wear if you dare!) May excite wild physical attraction." Thus beckons a suggestively shaped vial of "Chemical: Attraction" in the CVS display. Vogue International offers this fragrance for men and women for just $14.99. Who could resist the temptation to conduct a field test? Pheromones are airborne, mostly odorless chemicals that alter sexual behavior, mark territory, and influence reproduction throughout the animal kingdom. But whether humans send and receive "sex chemicals" is a hot and bothered topic. Recent tantalizing studies suggest that chemicals emanating from our pores do affect the behavior and biochemistry of others. Fragrance companies have caught whiff of this research, and the Internet abounds with products sporting names such as "Primal Instinct" or "Rogue Male" promising to make you an irresistible sex magnet. © 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 4204 - Posted: 06.24.2010