By JANE E. BRODY Chronic pain suffered by 30 million Americans robs people of their dignity, personality, productivity and ability to enjoy life. It is the single most common reason people go to doctors, contributing to an overall cost to the economy of billions of dollars a year. Yet chronic pain, whether caused by cancer or a host of nonmalignant conditions, is seriously undertreated, largely because doctors are reluctant to prescribe — and patients are reluctant to take — the drugs that are best able to relieve persistent, debilitating, disabling pain that fails to respond to the usual treatments. These drugs are called opioids, which are natural and synthetic compounds related to morphine, generally known as narcotics. Many studies have indicated that ignorance and misunderstanding seriously impede their appropriate use. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 1387 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS WADE Is true harmony between lovers forged not in the conscious mind but in the deep recesses of the genes? And could it be that people ferret out the compatible genetic status of prospective mates by something so animal as their odor? Evidence that women prefer the odor of men who are genetically similar to themselves — though not too similar — has emerged from a study at the University of Chicago reported in today's issue of Nature Genetics. A further twist in the study, which was based on having women sniff T- shirts that a man had worn for two days, is that their preferences were based on the man's genetic match to each woman's paternal genes, not genes from her mother. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 1386 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Emma Young Doses of testosterone might prevent a key brain abnormality associated with Alzheimer's disease, say US researchers. Their work in rats suggests that older women as well as men should be given testosterone to help prevent or treat the disease, they say. Sozos Papasozomenos and Alikunju Shanavas at the University of Texas-Houston Medical School first induced a process called tau hyperphosphorylation in female rats. In people, this chemical over-reaction can create so-called tau tangles - bundles of tau protein. These bundles, along with plaques of beta amyloid protein, are a key characteristic of the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease. Papasozomenos and Shanavas found that safe doses of testosterone prevented tau hyperphosphrylation in the rats by blocking the action of an enzyme involved in the process. Oestrogen in combination with testosterone - but not oestrogen alone - had the same effect. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 1385 - Posted: 06.24.2010

THE WOODLANDS, Texas, -- Lexicon Genetics Incorporated (Nasdaq: LEXG) today announced that the Company has discovered and validated in vivo a new drug target, named LG527, to develop potential treatments for depression. Lexicon scientists discovered the human gene encoding the new target using Lexicon's gene trap technology. The Company found that mice lacking the enzyme LG527 showed a dramatic increase in activity levels and mobility. This type of response indicates a potential role for the new enzyme in the treatment of depression because typical symptoms of the disease include decreased energy, activity and mobility. Scientists at Lexicon are currently working to discover a drug that inhibits the LG527 enzyme, which could lead to new therapy for depression. "We are very pleased to announce this latest target from our drug discovery pipeline and to further substantiate the critical mass of in vivo validated targets that we are advancing into our pharmaceutical division for drug screening," said Arthur T. Sands, M.D., Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of Lexicon. "This discovery demonstrates the power of our gene knockout technology to determine how genes function to control the physiology of the mammalian brain. Our pipeline of targets in cardiology, immunology, neurology, oncology, and metabolism demonstrates the broad applicability of our gene knockout technology for the discovery of new therapeutics."

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 1384 - Posted: 01.22.2002

This Neuropsychiatrist Thinks a Lot About the Mind. Just Ask His Parrot. By Linton Weeks Washington Post Staff Writer You can tell a lot about a man by the company he keeps. Richard Restak, for instance, is pals with a parrot. Neuropsychiatrist, expert witness, professor at George Washington University Medical Center and card-carrying magician, Restak is also the author of more than a dozen books, including the just-published "Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot: Unleashing Your Brain's Potential," and the companion book to the five-part TV series "The Secret Life of the Brain," which begins tonight on PBS. But enough about Restak. What about his parrot, a 15-year-old African gray named Toby? For some reason, he seems to be one of Restak's best friends. The two spend large amounts of time together. The workaholic Restak, 59, does much of his writing in the loft office of his home, which is just off Foxhall Road. Toby's cage is nearby and the two talk. © 2002 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 1383 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers have come up with hard evidence that what women really want from a mate is somebody who reminds them of their father. They have discovered that women sniff out men whose body odour is similar to that of their fathers. The theory is that a man who smells similar to a woman's father is likely to have a compatible immune system. The nature odours that all humans produce are called pheromones. They are influenced to a degree by a cluster of genes related to the immune system called the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC). (C) BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 1382 - Posted: 01.21.2002

Betsy Mason Female baboons' cries during sex are longer and livelier when their partner is a higher-ranking male, researchers have discovered. One possible explanation for the baboon behaviour is that the female is trying to avoid being harassed by other potential suitors while she is mating with a choice male, says lead researcher Stuart Semple of the Institute of Zoology in London. However, the reason for the spirited shouting may be purely physical. The females could simply be more stimulated by larger, dominant males, says Semple. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 1381 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Genes mean ladies like friends and partners that smell like their father. HELEN PEARSON Bachelors - ditch the Old Spice and don your prospective father-in-law's clothes. Women prefer the scent of their dad, a study shows, and may choose their friends and partners accordingly. Nervous new boyfriends can live or die by the nod of a date's daunting dad. But Carole Ober and her team at the University of Chicago in Illinois have found a more fundamental fatherly influence: women prefer the smells of men whose gene selection matches their dad's1. Could this be a female Oedipus complex? "It's possible we would choose someone who smells like our dad," says team member Martha McClintock. If so, it could help women choose partners who share a selection of their own healthy genes, rather than a total stranger, whose vigour is unknown. * Jacob, S., McClintick, M.K., Zelano, B., & Ober, C. Paternally inherited HLA alleles are associated with women's choice of male odor. Nature Genetics, DOI: 10.1038/ng830 (2002). © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2002

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 1380 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Deficits linger months into abstinence WASHINGTON — Although women are less likely than men to abuse alcohol, those that do suffer the same kinds of neuropsychological problems as alcoholic men, according to a new study published in the January issue of Neuropsychology. And, the problems, including impaired working memory and visuospatial abilities, remain months after alcoholic women stop drinking. With this research, a team from Stanford University and consulting company SRI International’s Neuroscience Program (based in Menlo Park, Calif.) has further clarified sex differences in alcoholism, which affects about 4.6 million U.S. women (about one third of the estimated U.S. alcohol-abusing or alcohol-dependent population). Neuropsychology is published by the American Psychological Association (APA). Scientists have known how alcoholism damages the nervous system (including the brain) for decades, but primarily in men for two reasons. First, early researchers studied patients at Veterans Administration hospitals, far more likely to be men; second, more men than women abuse alcohol.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 1379 - Posted: 06.24.2010

James Randerson Monkeys at the bottom of the social dominance hierarchy are more prone to cocaine addiction, say researchers. But they caution against making direct comparisons with humans. "The positive spin on our findings is that enriching the environment can produce large and robust changes in the brain," says Michael Nader at Wake Forest University. "These lower the propensity for using drugs." But he rejects the simplistic interpretation that the changes he has identified might underlie any link between cocaine use and social exclusion in humans. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 1378 - Posted: 06.24.2010

'Togo shiccho sho' to replace term deemed misleading Japan's psychiatric society decided Saturday to change the Japanese name of schizophrenia to help dispel prejudice against people with the disorder, sources close to the society said. The Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology will announce the change of the name from "seishin bunretsu byo" (split-mind disorder) to "togo shiccho sho" (loss of coordination disorder) at the World Congress of Psychiatry to be held late August in Yokohama, they said. Schizophrenia is typically characterized by disorganized speech and behavior, hallucinations and delusions. While the cause of the disorder is not known, a dominant theory attributes the illness to an imbalance of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain. The Japan Times: 2002 (C) All rights reserved

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 1377 - Posted: 01.21.2002

Fom a lecture given at the University of Kent by the professor of pharmacology at Oxford University No one would deny that in this coming century people are going to end up living healthier and longer lives as everybody gives up smoking, takes up regular exercise, eats brown rice, and, with increasing ease, engages in organ transplants – below the neck at least. Clearly we are going to be squaring up to being on this planet for longer. Moreover, with the advent of all the gizmos that come on to the market to wow us almost daily, we shall have more leisure time. In itself, this sounds a really good thing; surely all of us would want to spend more time on the beach or at the bar. But do we really want to do that all the time? Just think how we feel sorry for the jaded pop stars, those who through sexual or eating excesses end up prematurely dead. Most of us feel that there is "more to life" – some kind of individual fulfilment. I predict, therefore, that we are going to be asking the kinds of questions that were previously restricted to student rooms late at night, or one's teenage years – we shall be looking introspectively at what our purpose is, expecting to be happy. This means that at centre stage will be the one organ that we would not wish to exchange, the brain. © 2002 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 1376 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By the time they reached adulthood, very-low-birth-weight (VLBW) infants born in the late 1970s lagged behind their normal birth weight counterparts in I.Q. scores and educational achievement, according to a study funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). The researchers also found that, as adults, the VLBW infants were less likely than their peers to engage in drug or alcohol use and less likely to become pregnant before age 20. The study is the largest, most comprehensive followup to date of the first group of very low birth weight infants whose survival was made possible by the advances in newborn care technology that began in the late 1970s. "These results underscore the importance of the NICHD research quest to find the causes of and means to prevent preterm labor," said Duane Alexander, M.D., Director of the NICHD. "Although we don't have all the answers yet, it's encouraging that these adults are doing better in some respects than their counterparts. It's very probable that their avoidance of risky behaviors is due to more attentive parenting. Other NICHD research has shown that children whose parents are actively involved in their lives are less likely to engage in risky behaviors than children whose parents are less involved."

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 1375 - Posted: 01.20.2002

By JODI WILGOREN HERCULANEUM, Mo., Jan. 18 — Carol Miller's family lives in the world of no. No playing on the swing set until someone washes off the black dust. No barbecues at Grandma's, where the view from the picnic table is of an enormous slag pile. No digging in the backyard. No using the ceiling fan or opening windows in the Millers' cramped house here in the shadow of the nation's largest lead smelter, whose 550-foot smokestack towers over this Mississippi River town 30 miles south of St. Louis. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 1370 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BARRY MEIER Moving against what law enforcement officials say is a boom in "pill mills," prosecutors are charging doctors with murder or manslaughter in the deaths of patients from overdoses of prescription drugs, including the powerful painkiller OxyContin. In a Florida courtroom this week, Dr. James Graves went on trial on manslaughter charges stemming from the overdose deaths of four people for whom he had prescribed OxyContin and other drugs; next month in a California state court, a similar case is to begin against Dr. Frank B. Fisher. Last year, Florida prosecutors charged Dr. Denis Deonarine with first-degree murder in connection with a fatal overdose. Legal experts said it was extremely rare for a doctor to be charged with murder or manslaughter because of their prescribing practices. Doctors accused of improperly dispensing drugs have usually been charged with fraud or with illegally prescribing controlled substances. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 1369 - Posted: 01.19.2002

Results Hold Possibilities For Treating Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s Disease HOUSTON, Jan. 18, 2002 – New research from University of Houston scientists may lead to techniques for jump-starting the faulty "wiring" in damaged nerve cells, and suggests possible avenues for treating spinal cord injuries, Parkinson’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. University of Houston scientists studying how spinal nerve cells in chicken embryos develop and function have found that chemicals called growth factors play a key role in regulating how embryonic nerve cells acquire the ability to start processing information. "In some cases, when nerves are damaged or succumb to neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS and Parkinson’s, they don’t die, but they quit working and may actually revert to an immature embryonic-like state," says Stuart Dryer, a neuroscientist in the department of biology and biochemistry at UH. Embryonic nerve cells are able to fire electrical impulses shortly after the cells have divided for the last time – after they are "born." But these impulses are extremely generic, and not necessarily specialized for the kind of information the cell is going to eventually process, Dryer says.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease ; Parkinsons
Link ID: 1368 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers discover that our perception of diagnostic features is controlled by single neurones. Perception is something that must be learned. As we recognize things in our environment we gather experience and this experience in turn colours our perception. This is nothing new, of course. But brain researchers are going one step further to ask how different kinds of information are integrated in the brain and what principles govern how perceived objects are represented there. Scientists at Tuebingen's Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics have carried out experiments that prove that single nerve cells in the brain are responsible for controlling our perception by drawing on prior experience. They report their findings in the January 17, 2002 issue of the journal Nature. Our perception of objects depends on our prior experience with them. What most people would call a bird is "obviously" a sparrow, sandpiper, or cockatiel for a birdwatcher. Expertise sharpens our ability to notice details. The more we learn about objects and the more familiar they become, the more details we recognize. Thus, we continue to make generalizations, but these generalizations get better and more accurate all the time. A research group at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics has studied what happens in the brain when we familiarize ourselves with objects. To do this they first taught rhesus monkeys to categorize objects according to specific features. Monkeys are ideal subjects for such experiments, for they are able to master a variety of visual categorization tasks and the organization of their visual system is strikingly similar to that of humans.

Keyword: Vision; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 1367 - Posted: 01.19.2002

Nathan Seppa A comparison of Latino, white, and Chinese-American smokers suggests that people of East Asian descent are apt to clear nicotine from their blood more gradually than the other smokers do, thereby staving off a craving for the next cigarette. Researchers recruited 131 smokers—37 Chinese-Americans, 40 Latinos, and 54 whites—for the analysis. Each volunteer gave a blood sample before receiving an intravenous infusion of nicotine. The substance was labeled with deuterium atoms, a heavy form of hydrogen, to make it detectable in the blood. After the injection, the participants provided 10 blood samples at specific intervals over the next 8 hours, then one per day for 4 days. Nicotine is cleared from the blood by liver enzymes that convert it to its metabolite cotinine. Blood analysis showed that it took an average of 152 minutes for half the injected nicotine to degrade in the blood of the Chinese-Americans in this study. Nicotine's half-life in whites and Latinos was 134 and 122 minutes, respectively. Slow metabolism of nicotine draws out its effects, says Neal L. Benowitz, a clinical pharmacologist at the University of California, San Francisco. He and his colleagues report their work in the Jan. 16 Journal of the National Cancer Institute. From Science News, Vol. 161, No. 3, Jan. 19, 2002, p. 38. Copyright ©2002 Science Service. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 1366 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The acetylation state of nuclear proteins could be one key to pathology and treatment By Douglas Steinberg For the first time, a study is suggesting a viable treatment to stop and even reverse Huntington's disease (HD), a lethal disorder afflicting about one of every 15,000 people. This treatment involves a class of drugs already being tested on cancer patients. Typically striking around age 40, HD causes uncontrolled movements, cognitive deficits, and emotional disturbances. Neurons degenerate in certain brain regions. The disease is inevitable if a person inherits a mutant copy of the HD gene in which the first exon contains 40 or more consecutive CAG repeats, each encoding the amino acid glutamine. According to one prominent theory, the gene product, mutant huntingtin (mHTT), folds differently than its wild-type counterpart (the function of which is unknown). As a result, mHTT is cleaved and migrates from the cell's cytoplasm to its nucleus. What happens next has become the focus of intense scrutiny because it is apparently a key to HD pathology. A recent Nature paper reported that mHTT's polyglutamine-containing region binds to the acetyltransferase domains of several transcriptional co-activator proteins and inhibits enzymatic activity.1 Ranked ninth on the Faculty of 1000's December 10th Neuroscience Top 10 list, the paper also disclosed that mHTT reduces acetylation of histones H3 and H4 in a rat cell line. Histone deacetylase inhibitors reversed that process, and when administered to Drosophila models of polyglutamine disease, these inhibitors stopped neuronal degeneration and prevented flies from dying. T S. Steffan et al., "Histone deacetylase inhibitors arrest poly-glutamine-dependent neurodegeneration in Drosophila," Nature, 413:739-43, Oct. 18, 2001. The Scientist 16[2]:34, Jan. 21, 2002 © Copyright 2002, The Scientist, Inc. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 1365 - Posted: 06.24.2010

It's not necessarily about who is better at what, but why the sexes process some stimuli in dissimilar ways By Karen Young Kreeger Stereotypes aside, women and men do process information in singular ways. In the past, tests that tried to pinpoint those variations were fraught with inconsistencies and irregularities. But now, by studying the brain itself, researchers are learning that the sexes use different parts of the brain to handle the same input. A growing number of imaging studies reveal that women and men do not process certain cognitive information in the same way. For instance, researchers have found that women, when trying to exit a virtual 3-D maze, activated the right parietal cortex and right prefrontal cortex; men triggered the left hippocampus alone.1 When viewing emotionally disturbing images, women showed an increase in activity on the amygdala's left side; in men, it was the right side.2 The amygdala is a small brain region associated with mood and feelings. Fertile research ground exists for researchers who want to figure out why and how this processing differs, and more specifically, how hormones are involved. And even bigger questions lie ahead in terms of assigning any adaptive significance to these differences. "I think that it's appropriate that we should expect a fair number of proximate processing differences because the ecology of being male and the ecology of being female has been, through our evolutionary history, so different," says evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecologist Bobbi S. Low, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. G. Gron et al., "Brain activation during human navigation: gender-different neural networks as substrate of performance," Nature Neuroscience, 3:404-8, 2000. The Scientist 16[2]:28, Jan. 21, 2002 © Copyright 2002, The Scientist, Inc. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 1364 - Posted: 06.24.2010