Human Pheromone Link May Have Been Found By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Scientists have identified the first human gene that may be linked to pheromones, the odorless molecules that in other animals trigger primal urges including sex, defense and kinship. Experts described the discovery as possibly opening a new door into the role of pheromones in human development.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 29 - Posted: 10.20.2001

See hear People born deaf are more aware of objects in their peripheral vision, Helen Gavaghan reports. 26 September 2000 HELEN GAVAGHAN People who are born deaf are more aware of what is happening in their peripheral vision than are people who can hear, new research shows. Eventually, this finding may help deaf people to read, a task that is difficult for them. Although reaction times to peripheral movement have previously hinted that people born deaf develop improved peripheral vision, neuroscientists have had little idea of how the brain does this until now.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 28 - Posted: 10.20.2001

Saving the Heart Can Sometimes Mean Losing the Memory By SANDEEP JAUHAR James Haneman believes his surgeons sacrificed his mind in saving his heart. In 1989, Mr. Haneman had a law practice in New Orleans, earned a six-figure salary and sat on several important state and federal law committees. Then he had a heart attack and surgery to bypass blockages in his coronary arteries.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25 - Posted: 10.20.2001

Monkeys May Tune In to Basic Melodies Bruce Bower Some tunes stick in one's memory, sometimes with remarkable persistence. Think of "Happy Birthday," "Old MacDonald," and "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." In laboratory experiments, even infants exhibit a keen memory for such songs. A dozen of these childhood classics prove as memorable to rhesus monkeys as they do to people, a new study finds. This represents the first well-controlled demonstration that any nonhuman animal perceives simple melodies, say psychologist Anthony A. Wright of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston and his colleagues. Their report appears in the September Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 24 - Posted: 10.20.2001

Movement Disorders: Less of a Black Box Barcelona conference highlights new research findings By Jean McCann Shake the family tree of a patient with a movement disorder, and more and more genes are apt to tumble out. Parkinson's disease and many less well-known movement disorders are now considered to be more familial than scientists had previously thought. "When it comes to Parkinson's disease, the important role of genetics as a decisive factor in the appearance and evolution of the disease is gaining more and more ground," says Eduard Tolosa, chairman of the department of neurology at the University of Barcelona and chairman of the recent Sixth International Congress of Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders, held in Barcelona, Spain. Recessive parkin genes have now been implicated in early-onset Parkinson's disease (PD), and mutations in genes coding for alpha synuclein and ubiquitin carboxy terminal hydrolase in families with the autosomal dominant type of PD, according to speaker Mihael Polymeropoulos of Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 23 - Posted: 10.20.2001

Science panel backs EPA stand on threat posed to fetuses
Marla Cone, Los Angeles Times
Wednesday, July 12, 2000 - An estimated 60,000 babies born each year in the United States face a serious threat of learning disabilities or other neurological damage because their mothers ate fish contaminated with mercury during their pregnancies, a panel of scientists reported yesterday.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22 - Posted: 10.20.2001

By Julia Campbell N E W Y O R K, July 10, 2000 - Ricky Burrows, a young California-based musician who once had an obsession with the grunge band Nirvana, got hooked on heroin at 17. “Heroin has a fascination about it before you do it,’’ says Burrows, now 21. "I watched my friend do it, and the next thing I know, I'm the one with a needle in my arm."

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 21 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS WADE
There are few things more creepy than alien possession, the notion of one creature taking over another's body and bending it to different purposes. Though this may happen every day on other planets, an egregious example has come to light on earth too, and as close to home as the forests of Costa Rica. Here lives an orb-weaving spider, so called because of the perfect roundness of the web it industriously rebuilds every day. A serious hazard of the spider's busy life is that it is hunted by an ichneumon, or parasitic wasp.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 20 - Posted: 10.20.2001

Anorexia Can Strike Boys, Too By HOWARD MARKEL, M.D. An emaciated boy named Michael sits in a hospital bed, intently playing a video game. Only 15, he looks like a wizened old man: the color of his skin gray, his hair falling out and the his arm and leg muscles all but melted away. He was referred for a possible diagnosis of anorexia nervosa.

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 19 - Posted: 10.20.2001

UF Researcher: Gene Therapy Effective In Animal Studies Of Parkinson's Disease GAINESVILLE, Fla.---An international team of scientists has reversed some of the effects of Parkinson's disease in rats with a drug-induced form of the progressive movement disorder. By inserting corrective genes into the brain, researchers were able to trigger the regeneration of a critical bundle of nerve fibers. The new growth was linked to significant - but not complete - recovery of the animals' ability to use their paws spontaneously, said Ronald J. Mandel, a University of Florida scientist who was part of the team and a co-author of a recent Journal of Neuroscience article describing the research.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 18 - Posted: 10.20.2001

Narcolepsy The incurable sleep disorder, narcolepsy, has long mystified scientists. But recently, several discoveries culled from animal research indicate that molecular brain malfunctions may participate in the development of the ailment. The new insights are focusing the search for targeted human treatments for narcolepsy as well as other types of sleeping problems. Dramatically drowsy during calculus class? Maybe it's the monotone teacher, an overdose of David Letterman or, perhaps, narcolepsy. This brain disorder, which afflicts an estimated 200,000 Americans, is marked by an uncontrollable, overwhelming desire to sleep during the day. The attacks can occur at any time, even in the middle of a conversation about yesterday's homework.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 17 - Posted: 11.06.2001

Study of stimulant therapy raises concerns B. Bower The first long-term effort to track stimulant therapy in a large population of children has generated disturbing results. In particular, the North Carolina-based study finds that most 9-to-16-year-olds receiving Ritalin or other stimulants don't exhibit attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the only condition for which such drugs are approved. More encouraging, about 3 of 4 kids who were diagnosed with ADHD on the basis of parents' behavioral reports received stimulants, says a team led by psychiatric epidemiologist Adrian Angold of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. Youngsters with ADHD often benefit from these medications, especially if also given behavioral training (SN: 12/18&25/99, p. 388). Still, more than half of all stimulant users in the study fell short of even a relaxed definition of ADHD.

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 15 - Posted: 10.20.2001

Mayo Clinic Researchers Produce Mice With an Important Hallmark of Alzheimer's Disease JACKSONVILLE, Fla., July 31 /PRNewswire/ -- Researchers at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., have successfully bred mice whose brains develop neurofibrillary tangles, one of the major pathological characteristics of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in humans. Producing a mouse model that replicates the human process of neurofibrillary tangle formation is an important step forward for researchers hoping to find ways to prevent or cure AD and other forms of dementia.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 14 - Posted: 10.20.2001

12-Hour Pill for Hyperactivity Is Approved By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 -- The Food and Drug Administration today approved a 12-hour tablet to treat attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. The makers of the drug, Concerta, a form of Ritalin, the most common drug used in treating the condition, said the pill could be taken in the morning, enabling children to avoid trips to the school nurse for medication and to play uninterrupted after classes.

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 13 - Posted: 10.20.2001

Fish DNA Reveals Brain Clues by Mary Ann Swissler 3:00 a.m. Aug. 3, 2000 PDT Research on a 1997 pileup of poisoned fish in Chesapeake Bay is beginning to yield genetic clues into learning disorders. After marine biologists determined that the ocean-borne microbe pfiesteria was killing fish and making the people who ate them sick, they began looking at their data for a different reason. To their surprise, the DNA test used to track down the presence of pfiesteria demonstrated that the cells affected by pfiesteria-induced memory loss have a similar genetic makeup as the brain cells involved in learning disabilities.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 12 - Posted: 10.20.2001

Childhood Abuse and Adult Stress A Study Links Trauma, Depression and Response to Anxiety By ERICA GOODE Women who were physically or sexually abused in childhood show exaggerated physiological responses to stressful events, a new study has found. And this abnormal stress response, the researchers found, appears especially pronounced in women who also have symptoms of clinical depression. When exposed to mild stress induced in a laboratory setting, women in the study who suffered from depression and had a history of childhood abuse showed levels of ACTH, a hormone secreted by the pituitary gland in response to stress, six times as high as those in women without such histories. They also had higher levels of cortisol, another stress hormone, and higher heart rates than women who had not been abused. Women with a history of abuse who were not depressed also showed hypersensitivity to the stress, but to a less extreme degree.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 10 - Posted: 10.20.2001

Study: Brains grow furiously into puberty Children's brains change dramatically in key areas into puberty, researchers report in a new study that contradicts some long-standing assumptions about brain development. The anatomical changes -- described as ``fine-tuning'' -- surprised scientists in the United States and Canada who conducted the study published Thursday in the journal Nature.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 9 - Posted: 10.20.2001

The sudden emergence of a brain cell "chorus" from the cacophony of normal brain cell activity may enable the brain to pay close attention to one item in a flood of incoming sensory information, according to a report in this week's "Nature." The report, based on data acquired from monkeys, suggests that a baseball player tracking a fly ball through a cloud-cluttered sky, a driver reaching into a pocket to feel for keys, and a high-school student seeking a cafeteria dish that smells edible could all have something in common: Some of the nerve cells in the cortex, the sophisticated outer layer of the brain, may be sending messages in unison to allow them to pay attention to a single stream of sensory input.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 7 - Posted: 10.20.2001

Brain Abnormality Linked to Pathology By ERICA GOODE Ask the average social scientist why people become criminals, and the answer is apt to center on poverty and abuse, not brain structure and neurochemicals. But in a new study, appearing in the February issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, researchers report that 21 men with antisocial personality disorder, a psychiatric diagnosis often applied to people with a history of criminal behavior, had subtle abnormalities in the structure of the brain's frontal lobe.

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 6 - Posted: 10.20.2001

N E W Y O R K, Feb. 28 - Taryn Sardis and her parents will never forget November 19, 1997 - on that day it was as if somebody had cast a spell on the 17-year-old. “I went to school and slept through my first-period class, which I don’t do,” Taryn said. Taryn’s father remembers getting a call to bring her home. “I picked her up. She went right back to bed,” Mr. Sardis said. “It was almost impossible to wake her up. And we thought someone had given her something or she had taken something,” Mrs. Sardis said. Ten days later, Taryn suddenly snapped out of it, and everything seemed to go back to normal - but not for long. She would be OK for a few weeks, but then mysteriously Taryn would sleep for about 20 hours a day for weeks at a time.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 4 - Posted: 06.24.2010