Stimulating brain region elicits illusion often attributed to the paranormal. HELEN PEARSON Activity in one region of the brain could explain out-of-body experiences. Researchers in Switzerland have triggered the phenomenon using electrodes1. People describe out-of-body experiences as feeling that their consciousness becomes detached from their body, often floating above it. Because these lucid states are popularly linked to the paranormal, "a lot of people are reluctant to talk about them", says neurologist Olaf Blanke of Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland. Blanke found that electrically stimulating one brain region — the right angular gyrus — repeatedly triggers out-of-body experiences. Blanke and his team were using electrodes to excite the brain of a woman being treated for epilepsy. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2002

Keyword: Epilepsy; Miscellaneous
Link ID: 2667 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Drinking heavily during pregnancy may cause serious health problems in some - but there may be subtle signs of brain damage even in those spared this. A UK expert says that the latest evidence suggests that it may be safer for women to abstain completely during pregnancy. Cases of "foetal alcohol syndrome" are well documented. Babies of heavy-drinking mothers can develop a wide range of physical and neurodevelopmental problems. However, some babies appear to be far less affected, and it can be harder to measure the extent of the problem. Even children with equivalent IQ may have different levels of damage. A team of scientists from San Diego State University has used the reaction time of children to check for subtle brain damage perhaps sustained during pregnancy. (C) BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 2666 - Posted: 09.18.2002

(Little Rock) Back in the mid-1980s, W. Sue T. Griffin had a wild idea: What if functions of immune molecules in the brain contributed to Alzheimer's disease? She has come a long way. Today, scientists widely accept the theory that first met with laughter. Moreover, Dr. Griffin has moved on from explaining how Alzheimer's disease occurs and predicting who will get the disease to finding how to prevent it. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently awarded her and her colleagues at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) another $7 million to continue her work on Alzheimer's disease and related problems of aging. Dr. Griffin earned a Ph.D. in physiology at the University of Rochester in 1974 and in the mid-1980s was doing research in developmental neurobiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Dallas. She noticed that the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease and Down's syndrome had a similar excess of cytokines, immune signal proteins that cause inflammation and - sometimes - the death of neighboring neurons.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 2665 - Posted: 09.18.2002

The treatment of neuropsychological deficits that follow stroke or head injury comes under scrutiny at an international conference-aimed of determining which treatments work, how well they work and for whom. The 600 delegates at the Effectiveness of Rehabilitation for Cognitive Deficits conference, organised by Cardiff University’s School of Psychology are drawn from all sectors of health care management and include medical doctors, clinical psychologists, research neuropsychologists, therapists, insurers, lawyers, patients and their families. “The volume of interest that the conference has generated reflects the originality and significance of the theme,” said conference organiser, Professor Peter Halligan. “As far as we are aware, there has never been a formal international meeting dedicated to considering the efficacy of existing treatments and employing an evidence based approach for cognitive disorders in patients following brain damage”. Rehabilitation for brain injury is expensive and time consuming.

Keyword: Regeneration; Stroke
Link ID: 2664 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Penn scientists map and measure the seat of impulsive behavior in the brain (Philadelphia, PA) -- There is a sound neurological basis for the cliché that men are more aggressive than women, according to new findings by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, the Penn scientists illustrated for the first time that the relative size of the sections of the brain known to constrain aggression and monitor behavior is larger in women than in men. The research, by Ruben C. Gur, PhD, and Raquel E. Gur, MD, PhD, and their colleagues in Penn's Department of Psychiatry and the Department of Epidemiology, is published in the recent issue of the Journal of the Cerebral Cortex.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Brain imaging
Link ID: 2663 - Posted: 09.18.2002

Cultural differences that discourage alcohol misuse among Jews may be backed up by a gene that has much the same effect, say scientists. Statistics suggest that Jews have fewer problems with alcohol than Caucasians in general. Deborah Hasim, from Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, looked at the genetic makeup of 68 Israeli Jews aged between 22 and 65. They were also quizzed on their alcohol consumption. They were looking for a variation of a gene called ADH2 which appears to have a role in the way the body metabolises alcohol. Previous studies have suggested that one in five Jews have this gene variation - higher than in a Caucasian population. The Columbia research found that their participants with the gene variation were far less likely to have suffered alcohol dependence. (C) BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 2662 - Posted: 09.17.2002

By MARY DUENWALD College students can recognize signs of stress like headache, upset stomach, fatigue and insomnia. But the worst, said Micaela Mendlow, a physics and music major at Amherst, are anxiety attacks, when it can seem difficult even to breathe. "You feel winded," Ms. Mendlow said, "and you get to the point of tears, where you just can't sort things out and feel like you have a grasp on the work you have to do. It's theoretically manageable, but you just want to cry." Twice when she was a sophomore, anxiety attacks sent her to the campus counseling center. It helped to talk with someone who cared, she said. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Depression
Link ID: 2661 - Posted: 09.17.2002

By JANE E. BRODY John Holman of St. Paul is a very busy man, and he was not accustomed to having to "let things go" because he was too tired to do them. But tired he was, tired driving to and from work, tired during the day at the warehouse company he runs, too tired some days to play his beloved game of tennis after work, and really tired in the evening — in bed by 8:30 to arise at 6. But Mr. Holman, an average-size 67-year-old, did nothing about his fatigue until his wife, Marna, threatened to move out of their bedroom because his snoring was keeping her awake. It was she who suggested that he might have sleep apnea. With it, breathing stops, often for a minute or longer, sometimes hundreds of times a night and resumes each time with a loud snort or snore. So at his wife's urging, Mr. Holman spent a night in the sleep laboratory at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis. Her suspicions were confirmed. Mr. Holman now sleeps with a device that assists his breathing, and both he and his wife, who feared he would fall asleep while driving and kill himself or someone else, are feeling a lot better. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 2660 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Turning up the heat turns mutant male flies on to each other. CHRISTOPHER SURRIDGE Comic-book hero Judge Dredd's arch-enemy Mean Machine Angel could be altered from surly to brutal by turning a dial in his head. Researchers have now modified fruit flies' sexual orientation in a similar way. By turning up the heat, Toshihiro Kitamoto of the Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope, at Duarte, California, reversibly disrupted the function of particular nerve cells in male fruit flies, making the insects attracted to other males1. The mating behaviour and sexuality of fruit flies is under tight genetic control. Mutations in genes with names such as fruitless, dissatisfaction or quick-to-court act in the brain, where they change flies' choice of mates. Until now, scientists have had difficulty studying this behaviour as the mutations can also affect flies' development - rendering them blind, paralysed or forgetful. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2002

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 2659 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers have proven that gene therapy can reverse the pathological features of muscular dystrophy in an animal model. Before, gene therapy had only been able to prevent further muscle-wasting in mice. "We expect to build on these results in the continuing search for a way to treat a horrible disease. Our results indicate that gene therapy could be used not only to halt or prevent this disease, but also to restore normal muscle function in older patients," says Dr. Jeffrey S. Chamberlain, professor of neurology at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. Chamberlain is the senior author of the paper describing the results, which will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online Early Edition the week of Sept. 16 to 20. Duchenne muscular dystrophy is an X-linked genetic disorder that strikes one of every 3,500 newborn boys. The genetic disorder means the body does not produce the dystrophin protein, which is necessary for the structural support of muscle. Without this protein, muscles weaken to the point where the victim cannot survive.

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Muscles
Link ID: 2658 - Posted: 09.17.2002

* Scientists use reaction time to measure neurological deficits related to prenatal alcohol exposure. * One signal and response is called simple reaction time (SRT). * Two or more signals and responses are called choice reaction time (CRT). * Children who were prenatally exposed to alcohol, yet do not have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, have slower information processing and motor responses to CRT tasks. Many individuals who were prenatally exposed to alcohol may not meet the criteria for Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, but nevertheless suffer from a wide range of neurobehavioral effects such as hyperactivity, learning and memory deficits, attention problems, and reductions in IQ. One measure used to examine neurological deficits is reaction time (RT), defined as the interval between perceiving a signal and physically responding to it. A study in the September issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research uses various RT tasks to closely examine information processing and motor responses in children who were prenatally exposed to alcohol. "Reaction time is a measure of the delay in time that occurs between perceiving a signal, such as a light being turned on, and making a physical response to the signal, such as lifting a finger or hand from an electronic switch," explained Roger W. Simmons, professor of exercise and nutritional sciences at San Diego State University - San Diego and lead author of the study. "Since most of the elapsed time between the signal and the response is taken up with the brain processing the signal and deciding what motor response to make, RT is considered to be a generalized measure of decision making."

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 2657 - Posted: 09.17.2002

By TOM SIEGFRIED / The Dallas Morning News Some people are born to win, some are born losers. Some people are born writers, others are born to be wild. But everybody is born to die, sooner or later. Death is as sure a thing as politicians' promising to cut taxes. Nobody knows, though, why people don't live forever. And nobody knows why we don't die a lot sooner than we do, either. On the one hand, aging seems to serve no useful purpose. Why should evolution have produced organisms that wear out and die? On the other hand, evolution is concerned only with producing fit offspring. So why do some animals – specifically, humans – live so long beyond their peak reproductive years? ©2002 Belo Interactive

Keyword: Evolution; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 2655 - Posted: 06.24.2010

MGH research finding improves understanding of most common form of disease BOSTON - Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have found that the amount and activity of an enzyme associated with the creation of amyloid-beta protein - the sticky fragments making up the plaques found in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease - are elevated in parts of the brain where those plaques most frequently occur. Levels of the beta-site APP-cleaving enzyme (BACE) were significantly higher in the temporal cortex and frontal cortex of brain tissue from patients with Alzheimer's disease than in control patients. BACE is also known as beta-secretase, one of two enzymes required to clip or cut the larger amyloid percursor protein (APP) into fragments that include amyloid-beta. The report, which appears in the September Archives of Neurology, may improve understanding of the most common form of Alzheimer's disease. "Our key finding is that beta-secretase activity - the efficiency of how the enzyme works - is increased in Alzheimer's diseased brains specifically in those areas affected by the disease," says Michael Irizarry, MD, of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Unit in the MGH Department of Neurology, the paper's senior author.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 2654 - Posted: 09.17.2002

S.F psychologist has made a science of reading facial expressions Julian Guthrie, Chronicle Staff Writer The CIA said thanks but no thanks to San Francisco psychologist Paul Ekman when he offered years ago to teach special agents how to read faces to detect deception. Today, the CIA is one of dozens of agencies and companies calling Ekman, who runs the Human Interaction Lab at UC San Francisco. Law enforcement isn't the only group that's done an about-face on Ekman, who can tick off the Latin names for all 43 facial muscles one moment and identify the precise muscles used by Bill Clinton when he lied about Monica Lewinsky the next. ©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 2653 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Investigators probe effects of left, right stimulation methods By Douglas Steinberg Several years ago, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, an associate professor of neurology and neuroscience at Harvard Medical School, decided on a seemingly bizarre approach to studying people with medication-resistant depression. He asked his subjects to wear goggles that restricted sight to either the right or left visual field. He wanted to alleviate their depression with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and he had a hunch that the goggles might signal which brain hemisphere to treat with this experimental therapy to ensure the greatest clinical benefits. The goggle strategy germinated in discussions with Fredric Schiffer , an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Harvard. From earlier experiments and observations in his private practice, Schiffer had learned that ordinary, taped-up goggles elicit mood changes in many depressed patients.1 Pascual-Leone was initially skeptical but soon changed his tune. "I was surprised and sort of amazed," he recalls, that within seconds of donning the spectacles, "some people really had rather striking and well-defined emotional responses." Recently published, his study suggests that TMS might work better if it targets whichever hemisphere reacts positively to the goggles.2 When people peer out one side of them, one hemisphere is activated more than the other, according to Schiffer, who says he has preliminary data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on four subjects that confirms this effect. Because the axons of many retinal neurons cross the midline, the left brain receives a jolt when the right visual field is stimulated, and vice versa. The finding that such lateralized activation can change patients' moods is consistent with 35 years of research implicating the right hemisphere (RH) in some psychiatric disorders and the left hemisphere (LH) in others. The notion that lateralized activity warrants lateralized treatment, however, is controversial. ©2002, The Scientist Inc.

Keyword: Depression; Laterality
Link ID: 2652 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Irving Kirsch, Ph.D., and David Antonuccio, Ph.D. Psychiatric Times September 2002 Vol. XIX Issue 9 Antidepressants are widely believed to be exceptionally effective medications. The data, however, tell a different story. Kirsch et al. (2002a) analyzed the data sent to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration by the manufacturers of the six most widely prescribed antidepressants (fluoxetine [Prozac], paroxetine [Paxil], sertraline [Zoloft], venlafaxine [Effexor], nefazodone [Serzone] and citalopram [Celexa]). Their research showed that although the response to antidepressants was substantial, the response to inert placebo was almost as great. The mean difference was about two points on the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HAM-D). Although statistically significant, this difference is not clinically significant (Jacobson et al., 1999). More than half of the clinical trials sponsored by the pharmaceutical companies failed to find significant drug/placebo difference, and there were no advantages to higher doses of antidepressants. The small difference between antidepressant and placebo has been referred to as a "dirty little secret" by clinical trial researchers (Hollon et al., 2002), a secret that was believed by FDA officials to be "of no practical value to either the patient or prescriber" (Leber, 1998, as cited in Kirsch et al., 2002b). Previous reports of vanishingly small drug/placebo differences (Kirsch and Sapirstein, 1998) were met with skepticism (e.g., Klein, 1998). In contrast, the basic findings from this new meta-analysis have been accepted as accurate (e.g., Thase, 2002). © 2002 Psychiatric Times. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 2651 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Jerry Rushton, M.D., M.P.H. Psychiatric Times September 2002 Vol. XIX Issue 9 Despite media and popular stereotypes of moody, apathetic teen-agers, most adolescents are well-adjusted and productive. Nevertheless, many adolescents experience depressive symptoms, and some have episodes beyond transient feelings and normal development. Adolescence is a key period when many mental health disorders--including depression, dysthymia and other comorbid conditions--are often recognized. Although depressive disorders are relatively rare during childhood, by adolescence the prevalence is estimated between 2% to 8% (Burke et al., 1990; Costello et al., 1996; Lewinsohn et al., 1998; Lewinsohn et al., 1994). During early adolescence, a striking gender difference also emerges, with females two to three times more likely to report depression than males (Fleming and Offord, 1990). By 21 years of age, the cumulative prevalence of an episode of major depressive disorder has been reported to be 10% to 20%, with rates reported as high as 35% in young women (Lewinsohn and Clarke, 1999). Depression is associated with suicide, school failure and significant long-term morbidity. The U.S. Surgeon General, the World Health Organization (WHO) and other groups have identified depression as a major public health issue that has tremendous impact on productivity and economics in the United States and worldwide (Murray and Lopez, 1997). Despite the high prevalence and morbidity, growing research and continued innovations can provide great potential for prevention, early intervention and long-term treatment to significantly reduce morbidity and mortality. Understanding the epidemiology and natural course of depressive symptoms and disorders in adolescents is important for clinical care, quality-improvement initiatives and research design. © 2002 Psychiatric Times. All rights reserved

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 2650 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Copyright © 2002 United Press International By HARVEY BLACK, United Press International MADISON, Wis. (- Children whose mothers are chronically stressed during the first year of their lives are likely to have mental and behavior problems, such as withdrawal or aggression, when they themselves are confronted with difficult situations, according to a study by a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "It's the first time in children that we've been able to say what the neo-natal period and stress exposure there mean for the development of a child's stress response system," Marilyn Essex, lead author of the study, told United Press International. The research is reported in a forthcoming issue of Biological Psychiatry. Copyright © 2001 Nando Media

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 2649 - Posted: 06.24.2010

BBC News Online science and technology writer Ivan Noble was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour in August. He has undergone surgery to identify the tumour, and now faces a course of radio- and chemotherapy. Ivan is determined to regain full health, and to share his experiences with others. My life and that of my family has just been turned upside down. Last month I was a healthy young man in my mid-thirties looking forward to working part-time, taking care of our baby daughter and making plans for next year. Now I have just been told that I have a fast-growing tumour inside my brain. (C) BBC

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 2648 - Posted: 09.15.2002

People with motor neurone disease are significantly more likely to have been slim and athletic, research suggests. A form of motor neurone disease called Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis has been associated with many patients who were lean and athletic throughout their lives. In fact, ALS is also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, after the great New York Yankees baseball player whose career was cut short by the disease. Scientists from Columbia University in New York investigated whether the anecdotal evidence of a link to body size could be backed up by hard data. They compared details of 279 patients with motor neurone disease with 152 patients with other neurological conditions. The odds of having motor neurone disease were 2.21 times higher in subjects who had always been slim, and 1.70 times higher among people who had played sport at university representative level. (C) BBC

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 2647 - Posted: 09.15.2002