By Erin Blakemore Drug overdoses were once spoken about in whispers. Social stigma cast a dark shadow over them because they were seen as the natural, even deserved, consequence of illicit drug use. So why are they spoken about so openly today? Science historian Nancy D. Campbell has an answer: naloxone. The miraculous-seeming drug, which reverses opioid overdoses, was first approved in 1971. In “OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose,” Campbell tracks how it helped turn overdose from an unmentionable affliction to an experience that is now seen as both common and preventable. In the days before overdose reversal, ODs were understudied and barely reported. Drug users faced harsh punishments. Heroin and other opioid overdoses were cast as a problem that mostly affected people of color, even though the majority of opioid users were white, Campbell says, and “overdose deaths occurred at or beyond the margins of respectability.” But armed with naloxone and a vision of a world without overdoses, scientists, health-care workers and community advocates began to push for more data, treatment and prevention. Campbell’s deeply researched book is driven by her desire to understand why it took so long for naloxone, and overdose prevention, to hit the mainstream. She discovered a group of varied protagonists — drug users, advocates, scientists and others — whose stories illustrate how naloxone, scientific progress and advocacy slowly shifted social attitudes.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 27085 - Posted: 03.03.2020

By Matthew Cobb We are living through one of the greatest of scientific endeavours – the attempt to understand the most complex object in the universe, the brain. Scientists are accumulating vast amounts of data about structure and function in a huge array of brains, from the tiniest to our own. Tens of thousands of researchers are devoting massive amounts of time and energy to thinking about what brains do, and astonishing new technology is enabling us to both describe and manipulate that activity. A neuroscientist explains: the need for ‘empathetic citizens’ - podcast We can now make a mouse remember something about a smell it has never encountered, turn a bad mouse memory into a good one, and even use a surge of electricity to change how people perceive faces. We are drawing up increasingly detailed and complex functional maps of the brain, human and otherwise. In some species, we can change the brain’s very structure at will, altering the animal’s behaviour as a result. Some of the most profound consequences of our growing mastery can be seen in our ability to enable a paralysed person to control a robotic arm with the power of their mind. Every day, we hear about new discoveries that shed light on how brains work, along with the promise – or threat – of new technology that will enable us to do such far-fetched things as read minds, or detect criminals, or even be uploaded into a computer. Books are repeatedly produced that each claim to explain the brain in different ways. And yet there is a growing conviction among some neuroscientists that our future path is not clear. It is hard to see where we should be going, apart from simply collecting more data or counting on the latest exciting experimental approach. As the German neuroscientist Olaf Sporns has put it: “Neuroscience still largely lacks organising principles or a theoretical framework for converting brain data into fundamental knowledge and understanding.” Despite the vast number of facts being accumulated, our understanding of the brain appears to be approaching an impasse. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 27084 - Posted: 02.28.2020

By Kelly Servick The dark side of opioids’ ability to deaden pain is the risk that they might kill their user. The same brain receptors that blunt pain when drugs such as morphine or oxycodone bind to them can also signal breathing to slow down. It’s this respiratory suppression that causes most overdose deaths. So scientists have hoped to design opioids that are “biased” toward activating painkilling signals while leaving respiratory signaling alone. Several companies have cropped up to develop and test biased opioids. But two new studies in mice contest a key hypothesis underlying these efforts—that a signaling protein called beta-arrestin2 is fundamental to opioids’ effect on breathing. “It seems like the premise was wrong,” says Gaspard Montandon, a neuroscientist and respiratory physiologist at the University of Toronto. He and others doubt that the good and bad effects of opioids can be disentangled. Hopes first arose in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as neuroscientist Laura Bohn, biochemist Robert Lefkowitz, and colleagues at Duke University explored the cascades of signals triggered when a drug binds to muopioid receptors on a neuron. This binding changes the receptor’s structure and its interactions with two types of proteins inside the cell—signaling molecules known as G-proteins, and beta-arrestins, which, among other effects, inhibit G-protein signaling. It’s still not clear how the resulting signal cascades influence cells or brain circuits. But the researchers reported in 1999 that mice engineered to lack the gene for beta-arrestin2 got stronger and longer lasting pain relief from morphine. And in 2005, Bohn and her colleagues at Ohio State University found that two morphine-induced side effects, constipation and slowed breathing, were dramatically reduced in these “knockout” mice. The findings suggested that a drug able to nudge the mu-opioid receptors toward G-protein signaling and away from beta-arrestin2 signaling would prompt more pain relief with fewer risks. © 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 27083 - Posted: 02.28.2020

Jon Hamilton A song fuses words and music. Yet the human brain can instantly separate a song's lyrics from its melody. And now scientists think they know how this happens. A team led by researchers at McGill University reported in Science Thursday that song sounds are processed simultaneously by two separate brain areas – one in the left hemisphere and one in the right. "On the left side you can decode the speech content but not the melodic content, and on the right side you can decode the melodic content but not the speech content," says Robert Zatorre, a professor at McGill University's Montreal Neurological Institute. The finding explains something doctors have observed in stroke patients for decades, says Daniela Sammler, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Cognition and Neurosciences in Leipzig, Germany, who was not involved in the study. "If you have a stroke in the left hemisphere you are much more likely to have a language impairment than if you have a stroke in the right hemisphere," Sammler says. Moreover, brain damage to certain areas of the right hemisphere can affect a person's ability to perceive music. By subscribing, you agree to NPR's terms of use and privacy policy. NPR may share your name and email address with your NPR station. See Details. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. The study was inspired by songbirds, Zatorre says. Studies show that their brains decode sounds using two separate measures. One assesses how quickly a sound fluctuates over time. The other detects the frequencies in a sound. © 2020 npr

Keyword: Hearing; Language
Link ID: 27082 - Posted: 02.28.2020

By Virginia Morell Dogs’ noses just got a bit more amazing. Not only are they up to 100 million times more sensitive than ours, they can sense weak thermal radiation—the body heat of mammalian prey, a new study reveals. The find helps explain how canines with impaired sight, hearing, or smell can still hunt successfully. “It’s a fascinating discovery,” says Marc Bekoff, an ethologist, expert on canine sniffing, and professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who was not involved in the study. “[It] provides yet another window into the sensory worlds of dogs' highly evolved cold noses.” The ability to sense weak, radiating heat is known in only a handful of animals: Black fire beetles, certain snakes, and one species of mammal, the common vampire bat, all of which use it to hunt prey. Most mammals have naked, smooth skin on the tip of their noses around the nostrils, an area called the rhinarium. But dogs’ rhinaria are moist, colder than the ambient temperature, and richly endowed with nerves—all of which suggests an ability to detect not just smell, but heat. To test the idea, researchers at Lund University in Sweden and Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary trained three pet dogs to choose between a warm (31 C degrees) and an ambient-temperature object, each placed 1.6 meters away. The dogs weren’t able to see or smell the difference between these objects. (Scientists could only detect the difference by touching the surfaces.) After training, the dogs were tested on their skill in double-blind experiments; all three successfully detected the objects emitting weak thermal radiation, the scientists reveal today in Scientific Reports. © 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 27081 - Posted: 02.28.2020

Differences associated with learning difficulties are found less in specific areas of the brain and more in the connections between them, experts say. After scanning 479 children's brains, Cambridge University researchers found they were organised in multiple "hubs". Those with no difficulties - or very specific ones, such as poor listening skills - had well connected hubs. But those with widespread and severe difficulties - 14-30% of all children - were found to have poor connections. It was recently suggested schools were failing to spot ADHD and autism, which could be contributing to a rise in exclusions. Dr Duncan Astle told BBC News: "We have spent decades searching for the brain areas for different types of developmental difficulty such as ADHD and dyslexia. "Our findings show that something which is far more important is the way a child's brain is organised. "In particular, the role that highly connected 'hub' regions play. "This has not been shown before and its implications for our scientific understanding of developmental difficulties is big. "How do these hubs emerge over developmental time? "What environmental and genetic factors can influence this emergence?" "Another key finding is that the diagnostic labels children had been given were not closely related to their cognitive difficulties - for example, two children with ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder] could be very different from each other. "This has been well known in practice for a long time but poorly documented in the scientific literature." Mental-health disorders © 2020 BBC

Keyword: ADHD; Dyslexia
Link ID: 27080 - Posted: 02.28.2020

Douglas Heaven Human faces pop up on a screen, hundreds of them, one after another. Some have their eyes stretched wide, others show lips clenched. Some have eyes squeezed shut, cheeks lifted and mouths agape. For each one, you must answer this simple question: is this the face of someone having an orgasm or experiencing sudden pain? Psychologist Rachael Jack and her colleagues recruited 80 people to take this test as part of a study1 in 2018. The team, at the University of Glasgow, UK, enlisted participants from Western and East Asian cultures to explore a long-standing and highly charged question: do facial expressions reliably communicate emotions? Researchers have been asking people what emotions they perceive in faces for decades. They have questioned adults and children in different countries and Indigenous populations in remote parts of the world. Influential observations in the 1960s and 1970s by US psychologist Paul Ekman suggested that, around the world, humans could reliably infer emotional states from expressions on faces — implying that emotional expressions are universal2,3. These ideas stood largely unchallenged for a generation. But a new cohort of psychologists and cognitive scientists has been revisiting those data and questioning the conclusions. Many researchers now think that the picture is a lot more complicated, and that facial expressions vary widely between contexts and cultures. Jack’s study, for instance, found that although Westerners and East Asians had similar concepts of how faces display pain, they had different ideas about expressions of pleasure. © 2020 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 27079 - Posted: 02.27.2020

Ian Sample Science editor It’s the sort a sneaky trick only a gull would learn: by watching how people handle their food, the birds can work out when there are snacks to be had. Researchers found that herring gulls were more likely to peck at items left on the ground if humans had pretended to eat them first. The study suggests that gulls take cues from human behaviour to help them home in on tasty scraps in the rubbish people leave behind. “People don’t tend to think of wild animals as using cues from humans like this,” said Madeleine Goumas, a researcher at the University of Exeter. “It’s the kind of behaviour that’s more often associated with domesticated animals or those kept in captivity.” Goumas, who has become one of the more prominent gull researchers in Britain, reported last year that maintaining eye contact can deter seagulls from snatching food. In tests with bags of chips in seaside towns, she found that staring the birds out put them off their daring raids. To follow up that work, Goumas wanted to see whether gulls pick up on subtle human cues to help them find their next meal. And so she set off to the Cornish towns of Falmouth, St Ives, Newquay and Penzance, and Plymouth in Devon, armed with shop-bought flapjacks in shiny blue wrappers, a supply of blue sponges, and a pair of dark glasses. For the first experiment, Goumas donned the sunglasses and walked towards her chosen bird, carrying a bucket with a flapjack in each hand. When she was about eight metres from the gull, she sat down, flipped the buckets over so they concealed the snacks, and pushed them out to her sides. She then lifted off the buckets, picked up one of the flapjacks, stood up and pretended to eat it. After 20 seconds, she put the flapjack back and retreated a safe distance. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 27078 - Posted: 02.27.2020

By Gretchen Reynolds Taking up exercise could alter our feelings about food in surprising and beneficial ways, according to a compelling new study of exercise and eating. The study finds that novice exercisers start to experience less desire for fattening foods, a change that could have long-term implications for weight control. The study also shows, though, that different people respond quite differently to the same exercise routine and the same foods, underscoring the complexities of the relationship between exercise, eating and fat loss. I frequently write about exercise and weight, in part because weight control is a pressing motivation for so many of us to work out, myself included. But the effects of physical activity on waistlines are not straightforward and coherent. They are, in fact, distressingly messy. Both personal experience and extensive scientific studies tell us that a few people will lose considerable body fat when they start exercising; others will gain; and most will drop a few pounds, though much less than would be expected given how many calories they are burning during their workouts. At the same time, physical activity seems to be essential for minimizing weight gain as we age and maintaining weight loss if we do manage to shed pounds. Precisely how exercise influences weight in this topsy-turvy fashion is uncertain. On the one hand, most types of exercise increase appetite in most people, studies show, tempting us to replace calories, blunting any potential fat loss and even initiating weight creep. But other evidence suggests that physical fitness may affect people’s everyday responses to food, which could play a role in weight maintenance. In some past studies, active people of normal weight displayed less interest in high-fat, calorie-dense foods than inactive people who were obese. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 27077 - Posted: 02.27.2020

By Joshua Sokol As an astronomer at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, Lucianne Walkowicz usually has to stretch to connect the peculiarities of space physics with things that people experience on Earth. Then came the email about whales. Sönke Johnsen, a biologist at Duke University, told Dr. Walkowicz that his team had stumbled upon a bizarre correlation: When the surface of the sun was pocked with dark sunspots, an indicator of solar storms, gray whales and other cetacean species seemed more likely to strand themselves on beaches. The team just needed an astronomer’s help wrangling the data. “This was like a dream request,” Dr. Walkowicz said. “And I finally got to do something in marine biology, even though I didn’t study it.” With that assistance, there is some evidence of this peculiar correlation, the researchers said in a paper published Monday in Current Biology. “The study convinced me there is a relationship between solar activity and whale strandings,” said Kenneth Lohmann, a biologist at the University of North Carolina who did not participate in the research. This coincidence across 93 million miles of space is more plausible than it might seem. Sunspots are a harbinger of heightened solar weather, marking times when the tangled plasma of the sun’s atmosphere coughs out more photons and charged particles than usual. These disturbances sail outward and smash into our planet’s magnetic field, creating colorful light shows like the aurora borealis and sometimes disrupting communications. Biologists have already demonstrated that many animals can navigate by somehow sensing Earth’s magnetic field lines. Gray whales, which migrate over 10,000 miles a year through a featureless expanse of blue, might be relying on a similar hidden sense. But unlike a migrating bird, a whale is not easily placed in a magnetized box for controlled experiments. Instead, Jesse Granger, a Duke graduate student, looked at whale strandings, which previous studies had suggested seemed to track with sunspot activity. She narrowed a list of gray whale strandings kept by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to highlight the percentage of whales that were stranded alive, as well as whales that were released back to sea and seemed to recover. In theory, those cases were examples of healthy whales that had merely taken a wrong turn. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Migration
Link ID: 27076 - Posted: 02.27.2020

Ashley Yeager Genes that code for the structure and function of brain regions essential for learning, memory, and decision-making are beginning to be revealed, according to a report published last October in Nature Genetics. Analyzing MRI scans and blood samples from more than 38,000 individuals, as well as gene expression, methylation, and neuropathology of hundreds of postmortem brains, an international team of researchers identified 199 genes that affect the development of the brain, the connections and communication among nerve cells, and susceptibility to neurological disorders. New tools for studying neural tissue, such as RNA sequencing, have spurred a “very strong revival in studying human postmortem brains,” says Sabina Berretta, director of the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center at McLean Hospital in Boston. The Nature Genetics study and others like it have the potential to answer many questions about how the healthy brain functions, but they highlight one of the major challenges neuroscientists face right now—limited access to donated brain tissue, specifically from individuals unaffected by neurological disorders. While the Nature Genetics study included massive amounts of data from scans and blood, the researchers had gene expression data from only 508 postmortem brains. “We are really fortunate to get donations from people with a very large variety of dementias and other neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease,” Berretta says. “But we get very few donations from people that suffer from psychiatric disorders, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, and anxiety, and [even fewer from] unaffected donors.” As a result, brain banks are reaching out to religious groups and also scientific communities not tied to any particular neurological condition to increase donations of healthy brains. © 1986–2020 The Scientist.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 27075 - Posted: 02.27.2020

By Jillian Kramer Scientists often test auditory processing in artificial, silent settings, but real life usually comes with a background of sounds like clacking keyboards, chattering voices and car horns. Recently researchers set out to study such processing in the presence of ambient sound—specifically the even, staticlike hiss of white noise. Their result is counterintuitive, says Tania Rinaldi Barkat, a neuroscientist at the University of Basel: instead of impairing hearing, a background of white noise made it easier for mice to differentiate between similar tones. Barkat is senior author of the new study, published last November in Cell Reports. It is easy to distinguish notes on opposite ends of a piano keyboard. But play two side by side, and even the sharpest ears might have trouble telling them apart. This is because of how the auditory pathway processes the simplest sounds, called pure frequency tones: neurons close together respond to similar tones, but each neuron responds better to one particular frequency. The degree to which a neuron responds to a certain frequency is called its tuning curve. The researchers found that playing white noise narrowed neurons’ frequency tuning curves in mouse brains. “In a simplified way, white noise background—played continuously and at a certain sound level—decreases the response of neurons to a tone played on top of that white noise,” Barkat says. And by reducing the number of neurons responding to the same frequency at the same time, the brain can better distinguish between similar sounds. © 2020 Scientific American,

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 27074 - Posted: 02.26.2020

Eric Westervelt It's recreation time at a Los Angeles County jail known as the Twin Towers. Nearly a dozen disheveled young men stand docilely as they munch on sandwiches out of brown paper bags. They're half-naked except for sleeveless, thick, blanket-like restraints wrapped around them like medieval garments. All are chained and handcuffed to shiny metal tables bolted to the floor. "It's lunchtime and they're actually [in] programming right now," says a veteran guard, LA County Sheriff's Deputy Myron Trimble. Programming, in theory, means a treatment regimen. But it's difficult to determine what treatment they're actually receiving. A whiteboard nearby tracks how many days since guards on this floor had to forcibly restrain anyone: 54. These inmates haven't been violent, he says. So why are all of the men shackled to tables for recreation? "Just to make sure that they're not walking around," Trimble says. "If they don't take their medications, they could be deemed unpredictable." No one is under the illusion that shackles are helping mentally ill inmates get well. "I think everyone can agree that it's rather inhumane to have the inmate handcuffed while out," says LA Sheriff's Capt. Tania Plunkett, with the Twin Towers' Access to Care Bureau. "However, because of spacing and the lack of programming, we're not able to really focus on getting the inmate better to eventually lead to having them in a program without being handcuffed." New inmates with a mental illness arrive daily in the LA County jail system. It now holds more than 5,000 inmates with a mental illness who've had run-ins with the law. Some 3,000 are held in the jail's Twin Towers. © 2020 npr

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 27073 - Posted: 02.26.2020

David Nutt I was a scientific adviser to the UK government from 2000 to 2009. During this time, it became clear to me that drugs policy was being formed, not based on evidence, but on the political expediency of winning votes and pandering to the hysteria whipped up by a media more concerned with increased sales than decreased drug harms. When I was sacked, I wrote Drugs Without the Hot Air and used the proceeds to set up a charity, DrugScience.org.uk, dedicated to researching the truth about drugs. The book is set for its upcoming US release in a revised and updated second edition.The first research funded by DrugScience, published in The Lancet in 2010, quantified the overall harm of 20 drugs in the UK. The scores, which were derived from a powerful new technique called multi-criteria decision analysis, tabulated both the harms done to the users of these drugs and harms done to others. Alcohol topped this list with a score of 72, heroin scored 55, tobacco 26, cannabis in eighth place with 20, and LSD had a score of 7. Another European study in 2013 and Australian research published in 2019 showed strikingly similar patterns. There is evidence in the scientific literature that psychedelics could be helpful in treating depression, alcoholism, and cluster headaches. Similarly, researchers have shown MDMA (ecstasy) to be useful in the treatment of PTSD and alcoholism. Ketamine, a version of which was just FDA approved, is another illegal recreational drug that has shown great promise in treating depression. Is it not utterly inhumane that legal restrictions drive sufferers to be criminals to get the treatment they need? © 1986–2020 The Scientist.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 27072 - Posted: 02.26.2020

By Benedict Carey For years, Claire Bien, a research associate at Yale, strained to manage the gossipy, mocking voices in her head and the ominous sense that other people were plotting against her. Told she had a psychotic disorder, she learned over time to manage her voices and fears with a lot of psychotherapy and, periodically, medication. But sometime in late 1990, she tried something entirely different: She began generating her own voices, internal allies, to counter her internal abusers. “I truly felt I was channeling my father, my ancestors, a wise psychiatrist, giving me advice,” said Ms. Bien, who has written a book about her experience, “Hearing Voices, Living Fully.” She added: “Recovery for me means knowing that my mind is my own, and even when it doesn’t feel that way, I know it’s only temporary. Knowing that allows me to hold a job — a good job — and be productive, respected and even admired by the people with whom I work.” Mental-health researchers have numerous scales to track symptom relief, like the easing of depression during talk therapy, for instance, or the blunting of psychotic delusions on medication. But the field has a much harder time predicting, or even describing, what comes next. How do peoples’ lives change once they have learned to address their symptoms? Mental disorders are often recurrent, and treatment only partially effective. What does real recovery — if that’s the right word — actually look like, and how can it be assessed? This is what people in the thick of mental distress desperately want to know, and a pair of articles in a recent issue of the journal Psychiatric Services shows why good answers are so hard to come by. In one, the first study of its kind, Dutch researchers tested a standard life-quality measure, the Recovery Assessment Scale, that is typically used to rate an individual’s confidence, hope, sense of purpose, willingness to ask for help, and other features of a full, stable life. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 27071 - Posted: 02.25.2020

Jordana Cepelewicz Decisions, decisions. All of us are constantly faced with conscious and unconscious choices. Not just about what to wear, what to eat or how to spend a weekend, but about which hand to use when picking up a pencil, or whether to shift our weight in a chair. To make even trivial decisions, our brains sift through a pile of “what ifs” and weigh the hypotheticals. Even for choices that seem automatic — jumping out of the way of a speeding car, for instance — the brain can very quickly extrapolate from past experiences to make predictions and guide behavior. In a paper published last month in Cell, a team of researchers in California peered into the brains of rats on the cusp of making a decision and watched their neurons rapidly play out the competing choices available to them. The mechanism they described might underlie not just decision-making, but also animals’ ability to envision more abstract possibilities — something akin to imagination. The group, led by the neuroscientist Loren Frank of the University of California, San Francisco, investigated the activity of cells in the hippocampus, the seahorse-shaped brain region known to play crucial roles both in navigation and in the storage and retrieval of memories. They gave extra attention to neurons called place cells, nicknamed “the brain’s GPS” because they mentally map an animal’s location as it moves through space. Place cells have been shown to fire very rapidly in particular sequences as an animal moves through its environment. The activity corresponds to a sweep in position from just behind the animal to just ahead of it. (Studies have demonstrated that these forward sweeps also contain information about the locations of goals or rewards.) These patterns of neural activity, called theta cycles, repeat roughly eight times per second in rats and represent a constantly updated virtual trajectory for the animals. All Rights Reserved © 2020

Keyword: Attention; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 27070 - Posted: 02.25.2020

By Sarah Witman Nicole Dodds first noticed her son, Rowan, was having trouble using the right side of his body when he was about 6 months old. Babies typically use both hands to pick up toys and lift their chest off the floor at that age, but Rowan was mostly using his left arm and hand, keeping his right hand balled in a fist. That started a string of doctor visits. Around Rowan’s first birthday, doctors did an MRI and diagnosed his one-sided weakness as hemiplegia, probably caused by a stroke he sustained in utero. This surprised Dodds, since as far as she knew she’d had a totally normal pregnancy and birth Perinatal stroke — when an infant loses blood supply to the brain in late pregnancy, during birth or in the first month of life — is one of the most common causes of hemiplegia in infants, affecting anywhere from 1 in 2,500 to 1 in 4,000 live births in the United States every year. Like adult stroke, perinatal stroke is usually caused by a blood clot that jams brain arteries, or else by bleeding in or around the infant’s brain. Babies with heart disease, clotting disorders such as hemophilia, and bacterial infection among other factors have a higher risk of perinatal stroke, but the exact cause is often unknown. As in the case with Rowan, there are often no outward signs for up to a year that something is amiss, resulting in delayed or inconclusive diagnosis. It’s nearly impossible to detect a stroke in utero, or even in the first few weeks after birth, since the symptoms can seem within the norm for infants: favoring one side, extreme sleepiness, mild seizures that seem like shivering or sudden stiffening. More obvious behaviors such as trouble walking and talking don’t usually become apparent until the child turns 2, and are associated with other childhood problems.

Keyword: Stroke; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 27069 - Posted: 02.25.2020

By Abby Sher The rules were simple. Whenever Madonna sang, we strutted our stuff up and down the matted blue carpet. If the music stopped, we struck a pose in front of the full-length mirror. “Your face is crooked!” my friend Diana shrieked. “Your legs are 10 feet long!” I yelled back. It wasn’t an insult; it was true. The mirror in my bedroom was old and warped, like in a fun house. We spent hours in front of it, jutting out our hips and crossing our eyes; laughing at how ugly we looked. How round and pointy, long and short we could be, all at the same time. I don’t know exactly when it became painful for me to look at my reflection. Maybe when I was told to cover the mirrors in our house for my father’s funeral (a Jewish tradition). I was 11 at the time and couldn’t understand how these pale lips and string bean legs of mine were here, while my dad was forever gone. So I kept staring at my body in that glass, feeling a new kind of grief and confusion rip through me. A few weeks later, I started junior high, where looks were everything. I used a mirror so I could run turquoise eyeliner across my lids or zero in on a blooming pimple. But I got more and more frustrated by what I saw. My splotchy skin and bushy eyebrows felt untamable; my arms too long. By high school, I grew out my frizzy bangs to hide my face and wore baggy overalls with a tiny cowbell around my neck, as if I were lost in the fields and needed to find my way home. It wasn’t until after college that I dove headlong into an eating disorder. There was no definitive moment where I said, I’m going to try starving myself today. Instead it was a gradual whittling away at my body. I became obsessed with shrinking myself down to a size 0; spending hours at the gym until I was dizzy and frantic, fueling myself on coffee and sugarless gum. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia; Attention
Link ID: 27068 - Posted: 02.25.2020

By Susanne Antonetta Last September, I believed my brain was on fire. Not in some metaphorical way. It was, as far as I was concerned, on fire. I am bipolar and I was hallucinating. My hallucinations can be sensory, like the brain burn, but many are auditory — I know hallucinations are coming when I hear birds speak. I can tell you what the birds say, but what matters is how intensely personal it is, being shouted at by a fierce small crowd: persist persist persist from one, six degrees yes yes yes from another. I couldn’t sleep in all the chatter. Then I heard whispering everywhere, semi trucks coming to a halt right under my bedroom window. A small part of me sensed all this was not really happening, but most of me thought it was. There’s another hallucinatory change that’s harder to describe, one that comes every time, mild episode or intense. The world feels malleable, like felt, or soft paper. Walls rock and steady themselves. What’s around me becomes alive, air itself humming and moving. As with the birds, these changes feel intensely personal — everything around me shifts as I watch. During the six months leading up to this brain-fire time, I’d been having milder hallucinations, on and off. I took a medication that controlled my psychotic symptoms until my cholesterol skyrocketed and kept going up. The drugs used to treat people like me — atypical antipsychotics like Zyprexa and the one I take, Seroquel — have metabolic side effects. These include soaring cholesterol and triglycerides, as well as diabetes. There may be no way out of these side effects except dropping the medication, going, as I did, from one that works to one that doesn’t. Doctors, and the occasional friend, kept telling me something meant to be cheering: “This is just a disease, the same as a broken bone or a bout of pneumonia.” As though my antipsychotic could just as easily be penicillin. I’ve heard this statement in one form or another for several decades, since my diagnosis at age 29. I don’t accept this mechanistic view of the brain, which suggests that if you pump in drugs (at levels often determined by drug company-funded research), the cogs will start working smoothly again. This model dismisses patients’ individual experience of medications, which vary wildly. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 27067 - Posted: 02.24.2020

Dominique Sisley Nothing is quite as shattering as a broken heart. A bad breakup has been known to trigger a range of psychological and physical symptoms, from nausea and insomnia to clinical depression. In more extreme scenarios, broken heart syndrome – when a person’s heart stops pumping blood properly after an emotional shock – can lead to death. Fortunately, recent breakthroughs suggest we may soon be able to beat it. In March, a Spanish study found propofol, a sedative used for anaesthesia, may also be able to mute the painful memories that come with heartbreak. Participants were injected with the drug immediately after recalling a distressing story and, when asked to recount it again 24 hours later, they found the memory to be less vivid. Advertisement The principal goal of the research was to relieve the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but it seems there may be scope for the drug to be used to suppress other upsetting memories. An unexpected loss such as heartbreak can also be traumatic, and some people report similar symptoms. Dr Bryan Strange, who led the study, says: “Combining anaesthesia with evoking an emotionally charged memory impairs its subsequent recall. We will need to derive a set of criteria that identify people for whom it works well, and where the benefit justifies the risk of anaesthesia. There may well be those for whom heartbreak is so distressing that the criteria is fulfilled.” In the past year, a wave of apps such as Mend, Rx Breakup and Break-Up Boss have been released, promising guidance, advice and distracting activities to help soothe the pain of heartbreak. It is a lofty promise, but one that appears to be rooted in logic: a study in 2017 found similar brain-training style exercises could help curb embarrassing or impulsive post-breakup behaviour and strengthen self-control. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Depression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 27066 - Posted: 02.24.2020