Schizophrenia is more common in minority communities Racism and discrimination may be contributory factors in the development of schizophrenia, according to a controversial scientific study. The research suggests for the first time that social factors have a major effect on people from ethnic minority groups with a medical predisposition to mental illness. The team at the Institute of Psychiatry found the rate of schizophrenia in non-white ethnic minorities was highest in those areas where this group comprised a small proportion of the population and lowest where they made up a large population. Scientists believe the higher rate of schizophrenia in such groups may be explained by increased exposure to, and reduced protection against, stress and life events. (C) BBC

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Stress
Link ID: 1141 - Posted: 12.09.2001

Scientists in Sweden have found evidence ultrasound scans may cause brain damage in unborn babies after they found men whose mothers had tests were more likely to be left-handed. They have concluded some male babies' central nervous systems might have been affected by the process. However as of yet there is no indication that harm was done to the babies through the scans, according to an article in a journal. The implications of the study are to be discussed at an international meeting of scientists in Edinburgh this week. A total of 7,000 men were studied whose mothers had scans in the 1970s and compared with 172,000 men whose mothers had not had scans. The journal Epidemology concluded there were some possibilities the ultrasound had affected the brain. (C) BBC

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Laterality
Link ID: 1140 - Posted: 12.09.2001

By David F. Salisbury Critical new data on a complex enzyme that lies at the crossroad between cell suicide and tumor suppression has opened a promising new front in the battle to find effective treatments for stroke and cancer. Scientists at Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University have determined the three-dimensional structure of a critical region of Death Associated Protein Kinase (DAPK) and created a quantitative assay capable of measuring its activity.

Keyword: Apoptosis; Stroke
Link ID: 1137 - Posted: 12.08.2001

Two-photon microscopy shows increase in hippocampal region By Leslie Pray Memory, despite some advances, remains a neurological mystery. While scientists know that people "store memories in the brain either by changing the strength of the synapse or by producing new synapses," says Tobias Bonhoeffer, cellular and systems neurobiology department head at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Munchen-Martinsried, Germany, synapses can weaken over time. With this Hot Paper, Bonhoeffer and co-author Florian Engert showed how new spinal growth occurs in the hippocampal region during memory formation. Neuroscientists have long speculated that information storage would likely be more permanent if changes in synaptic strength were accompanied by some sort of morphological alteration in the brain, in particular among the tiny dendritic protrusions known as spines.1 These specialized structures on the neuron's postsynaptic end are 1 to 2 µm long, and tens of thousands of spines can coat a single neuron, making "the whole dendrite look spiny, like a rose," says Bonhoeffer. The Scientist 15[24]:28, Dec. 10, 2001 © Copyright 2001, The Scientist, Inc. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 1136 - Posted: 12.08.2001

Hippocampus plasticity surprises researchers By Leslie Pray For decades, biologists believed that brain cells didn't regenerate. But over the past several years, researchers from a handful of laboratories across the country, including Elizabeth Gould's lab at Princeton University, proved this opinion to be wrong. Indeed, up to 5,000 new cells are generated in the hippocampus every day, says Tracey Shors, behavioral neuroscientist and associate professor at Rutgers University, and a coauthor on this Hot Paper. The hippocampus, or hippocampal formation, is a region of the mammalian forebrain involved with memory and learning. For Shors and Gould, it was a logical next step to ask whether this new cell growth in the hippocampus was connected with hippocampus-dependent learning. What they discovered was both expected and surprising: Since the hippocampus is the neurological seat of learning, it made sense that the new cell growth was affected, but researchers didn't expect the evidence to be so strong. The Scientist 15[24]:28, Dec. 10, 2001 © Copyright 2001, The Scientist, Inc. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Neurogenesis; Regeneration
Link ID: 1135 - Posted: 12.08.2001

To restore movement and sensation, researchers graft a variety of cells By Douglas Steinberg Courtesy of Eric Schwartz and David Hackney MRI of a rat spinal cord that received a transplant of genetically modified fibroblasts into a lateral funiculus lesion site. After spending the early 1970s studying regeneration in the Xenopus frog tadpole's optic nerve, Paul J. Reier began to ponder how mammalian spinal cord injuries (SCIs) might heal. Eventually, the junior professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine chose to enter an emerging field: fetal cell transplantation into the spinal cord. A colleague called the career move crazy--a judgment that Reier now admits wasn't totally unwarranted. "The spinal cord injury field was clouded by pessimism," he explains. "Everything you saw clinically didn't look very promising, and experimentally there were no indications of anything very spectacular on the horizon." © Copyright 2001, The Scientist, Inc. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 1134 - Posted: 12.08.2001

Researchers start to uncover how the sense of smell is involved in complex behaviors By Jennifer Fisher Wilson Editor's Note: This is the final installment of a five-part series on the senses. True to legend, a bloodhound can track someone for miles just by keeping its nose to the ground; that proximity makes it all the easier to smell foot sweat. Akin to a molecular thumbprint, sweat is a cocktail of different odorants, and bloodhounds are particularly adept at discerning the unique mixture of isobutyric acid and isovaleric acid molecules. Their sensitive noses have olfactory acuity that is 100 to 1,000 times greater than humans. Nearly all mammals have a more sensitive sense of smell than humans. In rats, for instance, smell is almost equivalent to face recognition in people, says neurobiologist Larry Katz from Duke University. Simply by smell, he says, they can tell whether another rat is male or female, from the same family or another species. © Copyright 2001, The Scientist, Inc. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 1133 - Posted: 12.08.2001

by Pascal Kurosinski, Mathias Guggisberg and Jürgen Götz Abstract Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD) are the two most common neurodegenerative disorders in humans. They are characterized by insoluble protein deposits; [beta] -amyloid plaques and tau-containing neurofibrillary lesions in AD, and [alpha] -synuclein-containing Lewy bodies in PD. As a significant percentage of patients have clinical and pathological features of both diseases, the patho-cascades of the two diseases might overlap. For the first time, new animal models that express multiple transgenes provide the tools to dissect the pathogenic pathways and to differentiate between additive and synergistic effects. © Elsevier Science Limited 2000

Keyword: Alzheimers; Parkinsons
Link ID: 1132 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Interviewed by Dan Ferber "We live in a world filled with stress," says Huda Akil, the new president elect of the Society for Neuroscience, and she has made a career understanding how our brain deals with it. Growing up in Damascus, Syria, and in Lebanon, she was fascinated by how people think and feel. That early interest led her to study psychology at the American University in Beirut, where she earned an undergraduate degree and did master's work in psycholinguistics. As a graduate student at UCLA and a postdoc at Stanford University School of Medicine, she helped discover the endogenous pain-relief system in the brain, and showed that stress made it kick in. She has done three decades of pioneering work on the neurobiology of stress, pain, and depression, advancing understanding of the role of the brain's own glucocorticoids and endorphins. She and her husband, Stan Watson, are codirectors of the Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan. © Elsevier Science Limited 2000

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 1131 - Posted: 12.08.2001

By David Derbyshire, Science Correspondent MEN are programmed to react badly under pressure, according to a study. Researchers have discovered that male foetuses release more of the stress hormone cortisol in the womb than females when stressed. The findings, from animal experiments, may help explain what many woman suspect - that men are inherently unbalanced and aggressive when things go wrong. The findings are due to be presented at the Society for Endocrinology's hormone conference in London today. Dr Dino Giussani, whose team at Cambridge University's Department of Physiology carried out the study, said: "This may have direct clinical and agricultural implications. We have known for a long time that adult males and females respond differently to stress. "But this work also suggests that males may be more predisposed than females to overreact to stressful conditions later in life. Our results show that there may already be differences between men and women's ability to deal with stress, even before birth." © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2001.

Keyword: Stress; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 1130 - Posted: 12.08.2001

PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA ? A study presented today at the annual meeting of the American Epilepsy Society/American Clinical Neurophysiology Society indicates that seizure control improves in patients with epilepsy when vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) increases blood flow in the thalamic areas of the brain. VNS causes activation of synaptic activities at multiple sites in the brainstem and both cerebral hemispheres. The results of the study confirm earlier evidence that showed that altered thalamic processing contributes to the anti-seizure effects of VNS. "The study results are significant because they show that if patients respond to VNS therapy in the short-term they will continue to respond favorably over the long-term,? said Thomas R. Henry, MD, Neurology, Emory University. "In addition, these results also suggest that if patients undergoing VNS therapy show bilateral thalamic activation in the short-term, we can accurately predict long-term seizure control?something that has not been possible up until now.? The study involved 11 patients with partial epilepsy who were uncontrolled with AEDs and who had complex partial and general tonic clonic seizures. During one year of VNS, seizure control improved in most patients compared to baseline seizure rates, with a reduction of up to 91 percent.

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 1129 - Posted: 12.08.2001

UPTON, NY ? A new brain-imaging study at the U.S. Department of Energy?s Brookhaven National Laboratory indicates that some of the damage caused by methamphetamine ? a drug abused by ever-increasing numbers of Americans ? can be reversed by prolonged abstinence from the drug. The results appear in the December 1, 2001 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. ?Methamphetamine is a particularly problematic, highly addictive drug,? said Nora Volkow, who led the study with Linda Chang. Their team had previously shown that methamphetamine abusers have significantly depleted levels of dopamine transporters. These proteins, found on the terminals of some brain cells, recycle dopamine, a brain chemical associated with pleasure and reward and also essential for movement. The study also found that meth abusers had impaired cognitive and motor function (see related information).

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Brain imaging
Link ID: 1127 - Posted: 12.07.2001

Mechanism may knock out brain?s ability to ?just say no.? UPTON, NY ? A new brain-imaging study at the U.S. Department of Energy?s Brookhaven National Laboratory reveals that, compared with people who don?t use drugs, people who abuse methamphetamine have fewer receptors for dopamine, a brain chemical associated with feelings of reward and pleasure. Furthermore, in the drug abusers, low dopamine receptor levels were linked with reduced metabolic activity in a brain region that regulates motivation and ?drive.? ?These findings mirror those from a similar Brookhaven study on cocaine abusers, and may help explain why drugs addicts lose control and take drugs compulsively,? said Nora Volkow, the lead researcher. The new results appear in the December issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Brain imaging
Link ID: 1126 - Posted: 12.07.2001

Nerve cells can break memories, as well as make them. HELEN PEARSON Might the brains of Alzheimer's patients be unable to erase old memories? New brain cells may be needed to erase old memories, suggest US neuroscientists. Implanting stem cells to treat brain disorders might disrupt the brain's memory circuits. Mice engineered to lack a protein called presenilin-1 hang on to memories that others forget, Joe Tsien of Princeton University, New Jersey, and his colleagues have found1. Presenilin-1 is mutated in the majority of early-onset Alzheimer's disease patients. The mutant mice make fewer nerve cells in the hippocampus, an area of the brain associated with learning and memory. New cells might disrupt the connections between memory circuits, ousting outdated memories to make room for new ones, suggests Tsien. * Feng, R. et al. Deficient neuroegenesis in forebrain-specific presinilin-1 knockout mice is associated with reduced clearance of hippocampal memory traces. Neuron, 32, 911 - 926, (2001). * Shors, T.J. Neurogenesis in the adult is involved in the formation of trace memories. Nature, 410, 372 - 376, (2001). © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2001

Keyword: Neurogenesis; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 1125 - Posted: 12.07.2001

BOSTON ? The increased activity of a single enzyme in fat cells may be a common cause of obesity and obesity-linked diseases, including diabetes, according to an animal study conducted by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the University of Edinburgh and published in the Dec. 7 issue of Science. The findings could eventually pave the way for future drug development to curb visceral obesity ? the ?beer belly? fat concentrated in the abdomen. ?Hundreds of studies have led to the conclusion that any fat can be problematic, but it?s much, much more dangerous when it?s accumulated in the abdomen,? notes lead author Jeffrey S. Flier, M.D., an endocrinologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the George C. Reisman Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. ?Pound for pound, intra-abdominal fat is much more likely to cause diabetes, heart disease and other diseases that make up the metabolic syndrome.?

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 1124 - Posted: 12.07.2001

NEW YORK ? A researcher from the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has observed homosexual behavior among orangutans in Sumatra, marking the first time scientists have witnessed this activity among wild populations of these critically endangered great apes. The researcher, Dr. ElizaBeth Fox, who has studied orangutans since 1994, published her observations in last month?s American Journal of Primatology. ?These observations add orangutans to the list of primates that demonstrate homosexual behavior as part of their natural repertoire of social and sexual behavior,? said Dr. Fox.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 1123 - Posted: 12.07.2001

News source:Gene Therapy ? Over the last few years, scientists have been successful in identifying genes implicated in Alzheimer?s disease, but they are just beginning to piece together what the Alzheimer's-disease-related proteins do in the cell, and how they may cause disease. Now, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Lawrence Goldstein and his colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, report in the December 6, 2001, issue of the journal Nature that several of these proteins are involved in trafficking cargo inside nerve cells. In a related report published in the November 8, 2001, issue of the journal Neuron, a team of researchers led by Goldstein showed that disruption of the transport system caused by defects in these proteins can lead to nerve cell death. ?If you look at the history of breakthroughs in disease, often the understanding of what proteins normally do gives important clues to what is aberrant in disease,? said Goldstein.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 1122 - Posted: 12.07.2001

Memory Enhancers: Firms Say They Do; Experts Warn It's Too Early to Know By Veronica Holland [ABCNEWS.com] B O S T O N, ? Ever have a "senior moment" and wonder if an herbal memory enhancer could help? Experts can't tell for sure if they will. Popular "memory-boosting" supplements such as Focus Factor, Cognita with huperzine and Senior Moment ? part of a $140 million-a-year industry for such supplements ? all claim to promote more efficient memory, concentration and overall mental functioning. But little scientific support for the claims emerged from an informal ABCNEWS survey of more than a dozen top experts on aging, Alzheimer's disease, drug safety and brain research. "While there are reasons to believe that some of the ingredients might work, there is no convincing scientific evidence that they do work to improve or forestall normal age related memory losses," said Dr. Bruce Cohen, president and psychiatrist in chief at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. "There are studies under way of some of the ingredients, but it is too early to predict whether any will be safe and effective." Copyright © 2001 ABCNEWS Internet Ventures.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 1121 - Posted: 12.07.2001

Preschool-age children with autism exhibit no difference in brain activity when they are shown photographs of faces displaying different emotions, and their brains are larger than normal, according to new research at the University of Washington's Autism Center. The findings were reported at the first International Meeting for Autism Research in San Diego last month by Geraldine Dawson, director of the UW Autism Center and a professor of psychology, and Stephen Dager, UW professor of psychiatry and radiology. The autism meeting was held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Both studies used the same pool of 3- and 4-year-old autistic, developmentally delayed and normally developing children. In Dawson's study, the children wore bonnets studded with 64 sensors that monitored brain activity. The children were shown photographs depicting fear and a neutral expression. The brains of normally developing and developmentally delayed children exhibited different activity depending on the picture being viewed. However, the brain activity of the autistic children remained the same when the different pictures were shown.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 1119 - Posted: 12.07.2001

by Terry Devitt In a set of meticulous experiments, scientists have demonstrated the ability of human embryonic stem cells to develop into nascent brain cells and, seeded into the intact brains of baby mice, further develop into healthy, functioning neural cells. In a paper published in the journal Nature Biotechnology (December, 2001), a team of scientists from UW-Madison, along with colleagues from the University of Bonn Medical Center, show that the blank-slate stem cells taken from early human embryos can, in a laboratory dish, be guided down the developmental pathway to becoming precursor brain cells. Transplanted into the brains of baby mice, the precursor cells subsequently showed their ability to further differentiate into neurons and astrocytes, the cell species that populate the different regions of the brain and spinal cord. Copyright © 2001 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.

Keyword: Stem Cells
Link ID: 1116 - Posted: 12.06.2001