NewScientist.com news service A cellular version of a traffic jam may be what causes neurodegenerative diseases like the one suffered by the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. Using a genetically engineered mouse, researchers in Pennsylvania have shown that clogging up the routes between motor neurons and the muscles they control can be a cause, rather than a symptom, of lost motor control. Motor neurons reside in the brain and spinal cord but control movements in body parts as far away as our toes and fingers. To do this, they have very long projections, or axons, which sometimes stretch up to a metre in length. Good motor control depends on these axons acting as supply routes, to transport proteins and other molecules back and forth. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 2188 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By GINA KOLATA Until recently, a patient like Carolyn E. Hoard would never have been told she was progressing toward Alzheimer's disease. A 61-year-old mental health counselor in Kittanning, Pa., she reported nothing more than a mild loss of memory, particularly when it came to recalling what someone had said in conversation a few minutes ago. Her first neurologist told her she was fine. But the memory lapses persisted, and Ms. Hoard went to a second neurologist, who gave her the news she had been dreading: she suffered from mild cognitive impairment, usually the first sign of Alzheimer's disease. The term is new, having entered the vocabulary of memory specialists in the late 1990's. Now more and more doctors, combining tools as sophisticated as brain imaging and as simple as a short test of word recall, are making the diagnosis. Researchers and drug companies say the new category will enable them to track the progression of Alzheimer's disease and understand it better. They are already testing a wide array of treatments in these patients — from vitamins to hormones to new drugs as well as drugs already approved for Alzheimer's. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 2187 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By WILLIAM J. HOLSTEIN TARRYTOWN, N.Y. -- LEONARD S. SCHLEIFER, the son of a sweater manufacturer who grew up in the Rego Park section of Queens, was on his way to becoming a distinguished scientist. But after he earned an M.D. and a Ph.D. and started a research career in 1984 at Cornell University, he became fascinated with the biotechnology revolution. Though he had never held what he jokingly calls a "real job," he decided to build a company that delivered better drugs to people. So in 1988, he assembled a group of Nobel Prize winners and other researchers and created Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in a former Union Carbide laboratory here. Dr. Schleifer, 49, is now on the brink of one of the biggest victories in the biotechnology race — or one of the most humiliating defeats. His company has consumed hundreds of millions of dollars in investors' capital and has never had a profitable quarter. It developed a protein in the early 1990's to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig's disease, but patients lost too much weight as a side effect. The company halted trials in 1993. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 2186 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Doctors say they have found further evidence to suggest television programmes encourage eating disorders among teenage girls. It follows a major study examining the impact of the introduction of television in two towns in the Pacific islands of Fiji. Dr Anne Becker and colleagues from Harvard Medical School found that levels of poor body image and incidents of eating disorders among girls have increased since they were first exposed to television. In a country where girls traditionally have good appetites and larger body shapes, many girls now vomit to control their weight, are on diets and believe they are too fat. (C) BBC

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 2185 - Posted: 06.01.2002

Bruce Bower Naps aren't just for the very young, old, and slothful. Daytime dozing may enhance a person's capacity to learn certain tasks. That, at least, is the eye-opening implication of a new study in which college students were challenged to detect subtle changes in an image during four different test sessions on the same day. Participants improved on the task throughout the first session, says psychologist Sara C. Mednick of Harvard University and her colleagues. The students' speed and accuracy then leveled off during the second session. From Science News, Vol. 161, No. 22, June 1, 2002, p. 341. Copyright ©2002 Science Service. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 2184 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nathan Seppa A drug fashioned from a mouse antibody has halted the progression of diabetes in children and young adults who are newly diagnosed with the disease. By blunting the immune system's attack on insulin-making cells in these patients, the treatment may offer a way to forestall the disease. The work represents the second time in the past 6 months that scientists have reported success in thwarting type I, or juvenile-onset, diabetes in people. In the earlier experiment, patients received a fragment of a protein that protects cells against extreme heat or other stress (SN: 12/1/01, p. 341: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/20011201/fob3.asp). The newer study tested an antibody drug called hOKT3gl (Ala-Ala). In both studies, scientists prevented immune cells from unleashing an attack on insulin-producing islet cells in the pancreas. Insulin is a hormone essential for sugar metabolism. If the islet cells are destroyed, a person needs regular injections of insulin to process sugars and starches. Copyright ©2002 Science Service. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 2183 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Perhaps one of the most astonishing features of the human nervous system is the fact that muscles in one part of the body, for example the feet, can be controlled by neurons whose cell bodies are located extremely far away in the spinal cord. These cell bodies therefore must extend processes incredibly long distances. As most of the proteins in a neuron are made in the cell body, the transport of proteins and other molecules through these very long processes called axons is critically important for proper motor control. In certain neurodegenerative diseases in which motor control is impaired, e.g., amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, traffic along the axons slows down and certain molecules accumulate. Could this cellular “traffic jam” be responsible for the degenerative phenotype and associated muscular atrophy? Copyright © 1995-2002 UniSci. All rights reserved.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 2182 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Homeless youths who are gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender have a perilous existence on the street. Compared to heterosexual homeless youth, they experience more physical and sexual violence, use more drugs and abuse them more frequently, have more sexual partners and have higher rates of mental illness, according to a new University of Washington study. The study appears in the May issue of the American Journal of Public Health. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism funded the research. "A lot of people believe homeless adolescents are on the street by their own choice. That usually isn't the case," said Bryan Cochran, lead author of the study and a UW doctoral student in psychology.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 2181 - Posted: 06.01.2002

James Meikle, health correspondent The Guardian Pregnant women with high anxiety might be passing on future behavioural and emotional problems to their babies, a study has suggested. Researchers who monitored nearly 7,450 women and their offspring from halfway through their pregnancy until the children's fourth birthday found that mothers who reported feeling most anxious 18 or 32 weeks into their pregnancies were two to three times more likely later to have children with difficulties. The behavioural and emotional effects of their mothers' antenatal anxiety and depression were equally strong for boys and girls, although boys were also likely to be hyperactive or inattentive, according to writers in the British Journal of Psychiatry. © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002

Keyword: ADHD; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 2180 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ANNE EISENBERG SURGEONS once had the ultimate hands-on job: spreading the rib cage to gain access to the heart, feeling for lumps in a deflated lung, sewing up blood vessels. But for some operations, like closed-chest coronary bypass surgery, doctors now station themselves not by the patient but at a nearby computer console. With their eyes fixed on a monitor, they use joystick-like controls to guide robotic scalpels, scissors and high-resolution cameras that have been inserted in the patient's body through keyhole-size incisions. However precise and tremor-free these robotic tools are, though, they lack one attribute that surgeons prize: a delicate sense of touch. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Robotics; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 2178 - Posted: 05.31.2002

New Haven, Conn. — Yale researchers have developed a synthetic peptide that promotes new nerve fiber growth in the damaged spinal cords of laboratory rats and allows them to walk better, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Nature. The finding could lead to the reversal of functional deficits resulting from brain and spinal cord injuries and caused by trauma and stroke, or brought about by degenerative diseases, such as multiple sclerosis. The lead author of the study, Stephen Strittmatter, M.D., associate professor of neurology and neurobiology at Yale School of Medicine, said the study confirms which molecules block axon regeneration in the spinal cord and shows that a peptide can promote new growth. Axons are the telephone lines of the nervous system and carry a nerve impulse to a target cell. Copyright © 1995-2002 ScienceDaily Magazine

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 2177 - Posted: 06.24.2010

One of the classic images used in introductory biology and psychology courses is the motor homunculus: a deformed map of the body drawn on the primary motor cortex, showing which brain areas control different body parts. But that map may need to be redrawn now that researchers have discovered a second, fundamentally different type of map in the primary motor cortex. The findings, published in the 30 May issue of Neuron, have mystified and intrigued neuroscientists. Researchers mapped out the motor homunculus decades ago by applying brief--50-millisecond or so--pulses of electricity to different parts of the primary motor cortex in humans who were undergoing brain surgery. Such pulses cause muscle twitches, allowing researchers to associate a particular stimulation with a particular part of the body. Lots of neurons control the hands and the face, they found, so these features of the homunculus are exaggerated, while less nimble body parts, such as the torso, look relatively scrawny. --LAURA HELMUTH Copyright © 2002 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Cerebral Cortex
Link ID: 2176 - Posted: 06.24.2010

DURHAM, N.C. -- Like biochemical alchemists, investigators from Duke University Medical Center and Artecel Sciences, Inc., have transformed adult stem cells taken from fat into cells that appear to be nerve cells. During the past several years, Duke researchers and scientists from Artecel demonstrated the ability to reprogram adult stem cells taken from human liposuction procedures into fat, cartilage and bone cells. All of these cells arise from mesenchymal, or connective tissue, parentage. However, the latest experiments have demonstrated that researchers can transform these stem cells from fat into a totally different lineage, that of neuronal cells. Although it is unclear at this point whether or not the new cells will function like native nerve cells, the researchers are optimistic that if future experiments are as successful as the ones to date, these new cells have the potential to treat central nervous system diseases and disorders.

Keyword: Stem Cells
Link ID: 2175 - Posted: 05.31.2002

HOUSTON-- A random perfume wafting through a garden breeze can suddenly trigger the vivid memory of a summer’s day six months earlier. A musical phrase can recollect an evening of dinner and dancing in the company of good friends. These apparently random remembrances, triggered by a sensory cue representing only a portion of the original memory, appear to be dependent on a particular region of the brain—the CA3 region of the hippocampus, say researchers from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, collaborating with others from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and Hokkaido University School of Medicine in Sapporo Japan. Their findings appear in an article in the Journal Science, available currently (May 30, 2002) at the Science Express web site (www.sciencexpress.org). “It appears that the CA3 region of the hippocampus is essential for the phenomenon called ‘pattern completion’,” said Dr. Dan Johnston, professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine. “That is the ability to recall memories from partial representations of the original.”

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 2174 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Richard Cohen Come with me into Cohen's Lab. We are going to do some cloning. I have a client with Parkinson's disease, and so I take a cell from his tongue, extract the DNA from it, insert it into a human egg, zap the egg with electricity, add some chemicals (sorry, the exact formula is secret), wait about a day, extract the cells my patient needs and inject them into his brain so -- knock on wood -- he will have Parkinson's no more. It is at this point, if certain lawmakers have their way, that the cops will burst in, cuff me -- and throw me in jail for possibly 10 years. How much of this is science fiction? Well, not the very first part about extracting the cell from the tongue and inserting the DNA into an egg. And not, would you believe, the last part, either. If a bill sponsored by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) passes, human cloning of any kind -- even just for medical purposes -- will become illegal. This bill has already passed the House. You might have noticed while in my lab that at no time was my human egg fertilized. So if you believe that life begins at conception, you are not getting life with this process. You might have noticed also that I did not let the process proceed for more than a day or so. I did not implant the egg into a womb, nor did I grow it until term in the lab. Even if I had done so, the bioethicist Arthur Caplan tells me, I probably would not have gotten a child out of the process. © 2002 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Parkinsons; Stem Cells
Link ID: 2172 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The mentally ill are taking charge of their own recovery. But they disagree on what that means By Marianne Szegedy-Maszak Joseph Rogers has languished in both back alleys and back wards. Once, inflamed by the mania of his bipolar disorder, he bought a ticket to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, so that he could personally unearth the land mines in Bosnia. Some psychiatrists remember awkwardly maneuvering around him when–to protest mistreatment by the psychiatric establishment–he led and was arrested at a sit-in during the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Toronto. With his massive build, slightly deranged appearance, unruly beard, and assortment of hats, the formerly homeless Rogers is not a figure one forgets easily. Rogers is no longer using his imposing presence to obstruct the psychiatric establishment. For the past 18 of his 50 years, he has been one of the leaders of the mental health "consumer movement." Since 1997 he has been executive director of the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania, a $12.1 million organization that runs 30 programs for the mentally ill in Philadelphia and surrounding communities. Most of its 326 employees are, like Rogers, consumers (their preferred label, which they consider less stigmatizing than the many others). Says Estelle Richman, Philadelphia's health commissioner: "Without Joe, our system would not be what it is today. It would not be nearly as responsive to the needs of consumers as it is." Rogers is one of thousands of people suffering from brain disorders who have radically changed how services are delivered to the mentally ill. Their mission is simply stated: to encourage self-help, eliminate stigma, emphasize recovery, and provide hope to those with mental illness. The movement is a curious hybrid of the 1960s civil rights movement and more-recent health advocacy efforts–for AIDS and breast cancer, for example. Although it began with a marginalized collection of former mental institution patients demanding the closure of state hospitals, today it's a national, mainstream movement, representing the entire array of psychiatric diagnoses and challenging psychiatrists and other "helping professionals." The first surgeon general's report on mental health, issued in December 1999, stated: "Consumers are now seen as critical stakeholders and valued resources in the policy process." Copyright (c) 2002 U.S. News & World Report, L.P. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 2171 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Imaging technologies are advancing at an incredible pace thanks to faster computers, more powerful magnets and more precise radioactive isotopes. One technique set to move forward is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which has been observed at microtesla fields for the first time. The basis of MRI is that a strong magnetic field applied to randomly spinning protons inside the atoms of the body, particularly hydrogen, will cause them to line up and spin in the same direction. A radio signal beamed into the magnetic field knocks the protons out of alignment, and as they fall back into alignment they release energy in the form of radio waves. The amount of energy released and the time it takes for the protons to line up again is unique for different tissues in the body, so a computer can take this information and create an image of that tissue. Copyright © IOP Publishing Ltd 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002. All rights reserved

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 2170 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Delaying gratification while working toward a goal appears to have roots in a specific brain circuit. NIMH scientists have discovered a signal in a brain area involved in motivation that strengthens as a monkey performs a task for which it has been trained to expect a reward. Munetaka Shidara, Ph.D, and Barry Richmond, M.D. , NIMH Laboratory of Neuropsychology, trained monkeys to release a lever when a spot on a computer screen turned from red to green. The animals knew they had performed the task correctly when the spot turned blue. A visual cue — a gray bar on the screen — got brighter as they progressed through a succession of trials required to get a juice treat. Though never punished, the monkeys couldn't graduate to the next level until they had successfully completed the current trial. The brain signal boost occurred as the monkey worked harder and more accurately as the reward neared. Emanating from a reward-anticipating circuit in the front top center of the brain, the signal is thought to sustain the goal-driven behavior and then shuts off when the reward is assured. Signal alterations may underlie abnormal activity detected in the brain area, the anterior cingulate cortex, in disorders of motivation and reward expectation, such as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), propose the researchers. They report on their findings in the May 30 Science.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 2169 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition The notion that a strict, possibly even God-fearing, upbringing may contribute to obsessive-compulsive disorder has been boosted by a survey which discovered that devout Catholics were more likely to show symptoms than less religious people. Patients with OCD get caught in a vicious mental cycle that can take over and cripple their everyday lives. For instance, a sufferer may become convinced that everything around them is dirty, and in extreme cases spend up to eight hours a day cleaning in a bid to banish the thought. The causes of the disorder, which affects at least five million Americans and a million Britons, are still obscure. But genes, upbringing, head injuries and emotional trauma have all been implicated. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 2168 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENOIT DENIZET-LEWIS Standing in a circle under the shade of a tall, skinny palm tree, five boys smile in unison as they recount a particularly absurd scene in the teenage comedy ''Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood.'' The boys -- who have watched it countless times on video -- agree that it's a comedy classic, but they can't seem to settle on its funniest scene. ''Man, the whole movie is dope,'' says the tallest of the five, who wears a heavy Starter jacket even though it's 70 degrees outside. It is a bright and sunny morning in California, and this middle-school recess is humming along lazily. Packs of 12-year-olds in dark pants and white-collar shirts (the school uniform) meander about, looking for something to do. Next to the palm tree, three haughty girls with pocket mirrors gossip as they reapply their makeup. A hundred yards away, groups of loud, cocky boys play basketball on outdoor courts. And surveying it all are smiling faculty members with walkie-talkies who easily negotiate this sea of 2,000 mostly Hispanic students. A male teacher leans against a table in the outdoor lunch area, the quietest spot in this expansive courtyard. He is a well-liked teacher who also facilitates the school's discreet weekly support group for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 2167 - Posted: 05.30.2002