Ashley Yeager During her time as a postdoc at the University of Basel in Switzerland, Sarah Shahmoradian decided to study the abnormal aggregates of protein that develop inside nerve cells and contribute to Parkinson’s disease. The protein clumps develop over time in the brains of Parkinson’s patients, leading some scientists to think they wreak havoc on nerve cells, causing severe damage and hastening their death. A fresh look at the clumps, called Lewy bodies, with cutting-edge microscopy tools could reveal insights that might lead to new treatments for Parkinson’s, Shahmoradian recalls thinking. “The original goal was to really find out what the building blocks of Lewy bodies are, what they are made of, and what they actually look like.” The clumps were first identified in the early 1900s, appearing as abnormal material in nerve cells viewed under a microscope. Additional studies using antibodies that bound to various proteins revealed that the clumps contained a protein called α-synuclein, and after more work probing Lewy bodies, scientists developed a rough sketch of their structure—essentially, a dense mass surrounded by a halo of twisted filaments of α-synuclein. It’s these filaments, known as fibrils, that Shahmoradian and her colleagues were most interested to analyze in postmortem human brains. Fibrils had been repeatedly produced in cultured cells and in animal models, but no one had ever gotten a clear view of them in human brain tissue. “We were originally looking for fibrils,” Shahmoradian says, “but unexpectedly, we found an abundance of . . . mitochondria, other organelles, and lipid membranes [in the Lewy bodies].” The researchers also found evidence of lysosomes, organelles that facilitate cellular waste removal. They did see α-synuclein in the Lewy bodies, as well, but the cores of the structures weren’t composed of twisted and tangled fibrils as researchers had thought. Instead, the protein was intermingled with other cellular material. © 1986–2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 26669 - Posted: 10.03.2019

By Lisa Sanders, M.D. “I don’t know what’s going on,” the 19-year-old exclaimed in a panicked voice as his parents entered the nearly deserted emergency room of a hospital in Eau Claire, Wis. He was a freshman at the university there. A high school friend, now at the university with him, had called them with a strange story. She told them that their son had been uncharacteristically quiet for a couple of days — he had a terrible headache. But that morning, he felt well enough to go with her to pick apples. He had been a little out of it all morning, but suddenly he was totally gone — just standing in the orchard staring into space. He wouldn’t even respond to his name. That’s when she called his mother. Take him to the emergency room, the mother instructed. She and her husband drove 90 minutes from their home near Minneapolis to meet them. The doctors there had ordered tests but gotten no answers. A head CT scan was normal; so were the basic blood tests looking for signs of an electrolyte abnormality or infection. There was no evidence that drugs were involved. The young man had been there for a couple of hours, and he seemed a little more engaged. Though the doctors weren’t sure what was going on, they felt that he wasn’t in danger and said he could go home. But he is not O.K., the mother protested; he had no history of mental illness or drug use. The doctors replied that she should take him to his primary-care doctor in the next couple of days. The young man was quiet on the drive home. He couldn’t articulate how he felt. At home, he continued to act strange. He didn’t even recognize the family dog. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26668 - Posted: 10.03.2019

By Jonathan Lambert Your dog’s ability to learn new tricks may be less a product of your extensive training than their underlying genetics. Among 101 dog breeds, scientists found that certain behavioral traits such as trainability or aggression were more likely to be shared by genetically similar breeds. While past studies have looked into the genetic underpinnings of dog behaviors for certain breeds, this research — published October 1 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B — is the first to investigate a wide swath of breed diversity and find a strong genetic signal. “Anecdotally, everyone knows that different dogs have different behavioral traits,” says Noah Snyder-Mackler, a geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “But we didn’t know how much or why.” Humans and dogs have lived together for at least 15,000 years (SN: 7/6/17). But only within the last 300 years or so have breeders produced varieties such as Chihuahuas and Great Danes. So, Snyder-Mackler and his colleagues considered how 101 dog breeds behave while searching for genetic similarities among breeds sharing certain personality traits. Data came from two dog genotype databases and from C-BARQ, a survey that asks owners to rank their pure-bred dog’s propensity for certain behaviors, like chasing or aggressiveness toward strangers. As a result, the study didn’t have genetic and behavioral data from the same canine individuals, which could help highlight rare genetic variants that may be nonetheless important to diversity in behaviors. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2019

Keyword: Aggression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 26667 - Posted: 10.03.2019

Heidi Ledford An outbreak of deadly lung injuries in vapers in the United States — many of them adolescents — shows no signs of stopping. So far, 805 e-cigarettes users have fallen ill, 12 of whom have died. The illnesses are fuelling a push among lawmakers and regulators to rein in the sale of e-cigarettes, in particular those with flavours that could be contributing to a worrying surge in youth vaping. It’s illegal for vendors in the United States to sell e-cigarettes to those younger than 18; in some states and cities, the age limit is 21. Yet more than a third of the sick vapers are younger than 21, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Public-health officials have yet to find a definitive cause for the lung injuries, according to the CDC. And they worry that some of the affected adolescents might never fully recover. But it’s unclear what impact, if any, the new restrictions on e-cigarette sales will have on the health crisis or the problem of youth vaping. In response to the recent spate of lung injuries, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — which regulates tobacco products including e-cigarettes — announced on 11 September that it plans to remove flavoured devices from the market, at least temporarily. The decision came as the agency was already seeking to regulate e-cigarettes after years of lax enforcement. Under FDA regulations, e-cigarette manufacturers must apply for agency approval to market their products. So far, none of the companies has submitted an application, but the FDA has nevertheless allowed their devices to stay on the market. The agency has given manufacturers until May 2020 to submit applications to continue selling their products.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26666 - Posted: 10.03.2019

Catherine Offord When Lilian Calderón-Garcidueñas discovered abundant hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease in a batch of human brain samples a few years ago, she initially wasn’t sure what to make of it. The University of Montana neuropathologist had been studying the brains as part of her research on environmental effects on neural development, and this particular set of samples came from autopsy examinations carried out on people who had died suddenly in Mexico City, where she used to work as a researcher and physician. Although Calderón-Garcidueñas had collected much of the tissue herself while attending the autopsies in Mexico, the light-microscope slides she was analyzing had been prepared by her colleagues, so she was in the dark about what patient each sample came from. By the end of the project, she’d identified accumulations of the Alzheimer’s disease–associated proteins amyloid-ß and hyperphosphorylated tau in almost all of the 203 brains she studied. “When I started opening envelopes to see who [each sample] belonged to . . . I was devastated,” she says. The people whose brains she’d been studying were not only adults, but teens and even children. The youngest was 11 months old. “My first thought was, ‘What am I going to do with this? What am I going to tell people?’” she says. “I was not expecting such a devastating, extreme pathology.” Despite her shock, Calderón-Garcidueñas had a reason to be on the lookout for signs of a disease usually associated with the elderly in these samples. For the last three decades, she’d been studying the health effects of Mexico City’s notoriously polluted air—a blight that earned the capital the dubious distinction of most polluted megacity on the planet from the United Nations in 1992. During that time, she’s discovered many links between exposure to air pollution and signs of neural damage in animals and humans. Although her findings are observational, and the pathology of proteins such as amyloid-ß is not fully understood, Calderón-Garcidueñas argues that air pollution is the most likely culprit behind the development of the abnormalities she saw in her postmortem samples—plus many other detrimental changes to the brains of Mexico City’s residents. © 1986–2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Alzheimers
Link ID: 26665 - Posted: 10.02.2019

Saba Salman As a graduate in the 1980s, Simon Baron‑Cohen taught autistic children at a special school in London. Little was known about autism then, and people often misheard him, assuming he taught “artistic children”. “People would be ashamed if they had an autistic child, or ashamed of saying, ‘I am autistic’, whereas now it’s treated as more ordinary and there’s less judgment,” he says. “In the 1980s, autism was seen as categorical, so ‘you either have it or you don’t’ … nowadays, we talk about a spectrum.” Today, Baron-Cohen, 61, is a world expert on autism, a Cambridge professor and director of the university’s influential Autism Research Centre. There is also greater awareness of autism, a lifelong condition affecting how people interact or process information. Estimates suggest one in every 100 people is on the autism spectrum (700,000 adults and children), from those with severe developmental disabilities needing intense support, to those with milder traits. Well-known autistic people include campaigner Greta Thunberg (who calls her “difference” a superpower). As a cognitive neuroscientist, Baron-Cohen has helped focus attention, from his pioneering psychological studies (autism was first diagnosed in the 1960s in the UK) to founding the UK’s first diagnosis clinic in Cambridge 20 years ago with charitable funding (today the centre is NHS-run). Yet his latest research reflects how improved awareness and understanding of autism have not led to improvements in the lives of people with autism. In the studyexploring how autistic adults experience disproportionately more “negative life events”, 45% of the 426 participants say they often lack money to meet basic needs (compared with 25% of non-autistic people) and 20% have been sexually abused by a partner (compared with 9%). The research, involving questionnaires created with autistic people, suggests why those with autism may experience more depression. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 26664 - Posted: 10.02.2019

By Kelly Servick The brain has a way of repurposing unused real estate. When a sense like sight is missing, corresponding brain regions can adapt to process new input, including sound or touch. Now, a study of blind people who use echolocation—making clicks with their mouths to judge the location of objects when sound bounces back—reveals a degree of neural repurposing never before documented. The research shows that a brain area normally devoted to the earliest stages of visual processing can use the same organizing principles to interpret echoes as it would to interpret signals from the eye. In sighted people, messages from the retina are relayed to a region at the back of the brain called the primary visual cortex. We know the layout of this brain region corresponds to the layout of physical space around us: Points that are next to each other in our environment project onto neighboring points on the retina and activate neighboring points in the primary visual cortex. In the new study, researchers wanted to know whether blind echolocators used this same type of spatial mapping in the primary visual cortex to process echoes. The researchers asked blind and sighted people to listen to recordings of a clicking sound bouncing off an object placed at different locations in a room while they lay in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. The researchers found that expert echolocators—unlike sighted people and blind people who don’t use echolocation—showed activation in the primary visual cortex similar to that of sighted people looking at visual stimuli. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Hearing; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 26663 - Posted: 10.02.2019

By Gretchen Reynolds Physically fit young adults have healthier white matter in their brains and better thinking skills than young people who are out of shape, according to a large-scale new study of the links between aerobic fitness and brain health. The findings suggest that even when people are youthful and presumably at the peak of their mental prowess, fitness — or the lack of it — may influence how well their brains and minds work. We already have plenty of tantalizing evidence that aerobic fitness can beneficently shape our brains and cognition. In animal experiments, mice and rats that run on wheels or treadmills produce far more new neurons in their brains than sedentary animals and perform better on tests of rodent intelligence and memory. Similarly, studies involving people show strong relationships between being physically active or fit and having greater brain volume and stronger thinking abilities than people with low fitness or who rarely exercise. But most of these past studies focused on middle-aged or older adults, whose brains often are starting to sputter and contract with age. For them, fitness and exercise are believed to help slow any decline, keeping brain tissue and function relatively youthful. Much less has been known about whether fitness likewise might be related to the structure and function of healthy, younger people’s brains. So, for the new study, which was published last month in Scientific Reports, scientists at the University of Münster in Germany decided to look inside the skulls of a large group of young adults. They began by turning to a hefty trove of data gathered as part of the Human Connectome Project, an international collaborative effort that aims to help map much of the human brain and tease out how it works. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26662 - Posted: 10.02.2019

By Eva Frederick As the weather cools, one species of squirrel in the U.S. Midwest is gearing up for one of the most intense naps in the animal kingdom. For up to 8 months, the tiny mammals won’t eat or drink anything at all—and now scientists know how they do it. Most squirrels don’t hibernate—instead, they stash food for the cold season and spend the winter snug in their nests. Not the 13-lined ground squirrel (Ictidomys tridecemlineatus), whose heart rate, metabolism, and body temperature dramatically plummet during their long rest—similar to bears, woodchucks, and other hibernating animals. To find out how the squirrels suppress their thirst—a powerful force that could potentially wake them up—researchers measured the blood fluid, or serum, of dozens of squirrels, divided into three groups: those that were still active, those that were in a sleep-of-the-dead hibernation state called torpor, and those that were still hibernating, but in a drowsy in-between state. Generally, a high serum concentration makes animals, including humans, feel thirsty. The sleeping squirrels’ serum concentration was low, preventing them from waking up for a drink. Even when researchers roused the torpid squirrels, they wouldn’t drink a drop—until the team artificially increased the concentration of their blood serum. Next, the researchers wanted to know how the squirrels’ blood concentration dropped so low. Perhaps the squirrels drank a lot of water prehibernation to dilute their blood, the researchers thought. But when they filmed squirrels preparing for their winter snooze, they found the animals actually drank less water than they normally did. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26661 - Posted: 10.02.2019

Patti Neighmond Many American teenagers try to put in a full day of school, homework, after-school activities, sports and college prep on too little sleep. As evidence grows that chronic sleep deprivation puts teens at risk for physical and mental health problems, there is increasing pressure on school districts around the country to consider a later start time. In Seattle, school and city officials recently made the shift. Beginning with the 2016-2017 school year, the district moved the official start times for middle and high schools nearly an hour later, from 7:50 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. This was no easy feat; it meant rescheduling extracurricular activities and bus routes. But the bottom line goal was met: Teenagers used the extra time to sleep in. Researchers at the University of Washington studied the high school students both before and after the start-time change. Their findings appear in a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. They found students got 34 minutes more sleep on average with the later school start time. This boosted their total nightly sleep from 6 hours and 50 minutes to 7 hours and 24 minutes. "This study shows a significant improvement in the sleep duration of students, all by delaying school start times so they're more in line with the natural wake-up times of adolescents," says senior author Horacio de la Iglesia, a University of Washington researcher and professor of biology. The study also found an improvement in grades and a reduction in tardiness and absences.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26660 - Posted: 10.01.2019

Nicola Davis A possible explanation for one of biology’s greatest mysteries, the female orgasm, has been bolstered by research showing that rabbits given antidepressants release fewer eggs during sex. The human female orgasm has long proved curious, having no obvious purpose besides being pleasurable. The scientists behind the study have previously proposed it might have its evolutionary roots in a reflex linked to the release of eggs during sex – a mechanism that exists today in several animal species, including rabbits. Since humans have spontaneous ovulation, the theory goes that female orgasm may be an evolutionary hangover. They say the new experiment supports the idea. “We know there is a reflex [in rabbits], but the question [is] could this be the same one that has lost the function in humans?” said Dr Mihaela Pavličev a researcher at the University of Cincinnati who co-authored the study. To explore the question the team gave 12 female rabbits a two-week course of fluoxetine (trade name Prozac) – an antidepressant known to reduce the capacity for women to orgasm – and looked at the number of eggs released after the animals had sex with a male rabbit called Frank. The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that rabbits given the antidepressants released 30% fewer eggs than nine rabbits that were not given Prozac but still mated with Frank. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 26659 - Posted: 10.01.2019

By Dean McLaughlin BBC News NI A Londonderry man who was diagnosed with Parkinson's at the age of 30 says more young people need to be aware of the disease. Ronan Coyle first noticed the symptoms at 24 but only found out what the problem was six years later. "People think I'm drunk when I walk down the street," he told BBC Radio Foyle. Now 37, Ronan plays golf and squash and likes to swim to take his mind off the disease. A spokesperson for Parkinson's UK said playing sport "helps ease the mind". Parkinson's is thought to be linked to a chemical called dopamine, which is lacking in the brains of people with the condition. There are more than 40 symptoms and these can include vomiting as the body struggles to process food in the gut. Parkinson's can also affect people's mood. Often a person will feel they have got to grips with their condition and then a new symptom will emerge. It was while studying for his Irish history and politics degree that Ronan first noticed the symptoms. "I was writing notes for an essay and I couldn't write properly," he said. "Come exam time, I was under a lot of stress. It got really bad. "Then I noticed my walking was funny. I went to a couple of neurologists and they more or less said you have a tremor and that it was nothing to worry about." When Ronan turned 30 he was referred to a neurologist in Belfast. After a number of scans it was confirmed that he had the disease. © 2019 BBC

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 26658 - Posted: 10.01.2019

Alex Smith When children are diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, stimulant medications like Ritalin or Adderall are usually the first line of treatment. The American Academy of Pediatrics issued new guidelines on Monday that uphold the central role of medication, accompanied by behavioral therapy, in ADHD treatment. However, some parents, doctors and researchers who study kids with ADHD say they are disappointed that the new guidelines don't recommend behavioral treatment first for more children, as some recent research has suggested might lead to better outcomes. When 6-year-old Brody Knapp of Kansas City, Mo., was diagnosed with ADHD last year, his father, Brett, was skeptical. Brett didn't want his son taking pills. "You hear of losing your child's personality, and they become a shell of themselves, and they're not that sparkling little kid that you love," Brett says. "I didn't want to lose that with Brody, because he's an amazing kid." Brody's mother, Ashley, had other ideas. She's a school principal and has ADHD herself. "I was all for stimulants at the very, very beginning," Ashley says, "just because I know what they can do to help a neurological issue such as ADHD." More and more families have been facing the same dilemma. The prevalence of diagnosed ADHD has shot up in the U.S. in the past two decades; 1 in 10 children now has that diagnosis. The updated guidelines from the AAP recommend that children with ADHD should also be screened for other conditions, and monitored closely. But the treatment recommendations regarding medication are essentially unchanged from the previous guidelines, which were published in 2011. © 2019 npr

Keyword: ADHD; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26657 - Posted: 10.01.2019

Jon Hamilton Too much physical exertion appears to make the brain tired. That's the conclusion of a study of triathletes published Thursday in the journal Current Biology. Researchers found that after several weeks of overtraining, athletes became more likely to choose immediate gratification over long-term rewards. At the same time, brain scans showed the athletes had decreased activity in an area of the brain involved in decision-making. The finding could explain why some elite athletes see their performance decline when they work out too much — a phenomenon known as overtraining syndrome. The distance runner Alberto Salazar, for example, experienced a mysterious decline after winning the New York Marathon three times and the Boston Marathon once in the early 1980s. Salazar's times fell off even though he was still in his mid-20s and training more than ever. "Probably [it was] something linked to his brain and his cognitive capacities," says Bastien Blain, an author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at University College London. (Salazar didn't respond to an interview request for this story.) Blain was part of a team that studied 37 male triathletes who volunteered to take part in a special training program. "They were strongly motivated to be part of this program, at least at the beginning," Blain says. Half of the triathletes were instructed to continue their usual workouts. The rest were told to increase their weekly training by 40%. The result was a training program so intense that these athletes began to perform worse on tests of maximal output. After three weeks, all the participants were put in a brain scanner and asked a series of questions designed to reveal whether a person is more inclined to choose immediate gratification or a long-term reward. "For example, we ask, 'Do you prefer $10 now or $60 in six months,' " Blain says. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 26656 - Posted: 09.28.2019

By Natasha Singer CVS Health wants to help millions of American workers improve their sleep. So for the first time, the big pharmacy benefits manager is offering a purely digital therapy as a possible employee benefit. The company is encouraging employers to cover the costs for their workers to use Sleepio, an insomnia app featuring a cartoon therapist that delivers behavior modification lessons. CVS Health’s push could help mainstream the nascent business of digital therapeutics, which markets apps to help treat conditions like schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis. The company recently introduced, along with Sleepio, a way for employers to cover downloads as easily as they do prescription drugs. The company said it had already evaluated about a dozen apps. Some industry executives and researchers say the digital services should make therapy more accessible and affordable than in-person sessions with mental health professionals. Big Health, the start-up behind Sleepio, is one of more than a dozen companies that are digitizing well-established health treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy, or devising new therapies — like video-game-based treatments for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — that can be delivered online. Since last year, a few pharmaceutical companies, including Novartis, announced partnerships with start-ups to develop digital treatments for mental health and other conditions. So far, the use of treatment apps has been limited. But with the backing of CVS Health, which administers prescription drug plans for nearly one-third of Americans, those therapies could quickly reach tens of millions of people. A few employers have started offering Sleepio, and more are expected to sign on this fall, CVS Health said. Like in-person therapy, the insomnia app does not require a prescription. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26655 - Posted: 09.28.2019

By Shraddha Chakradhar, Rockefeller University neuroscientist Vanessa Ruta was just named a member of the latest class of MacArthur “Genius” grant winners. The fellowship offers a five-year grant of $625,000 to individuals “who show exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future,” according to the MacArthur Foundation. Fortuitously, or perhaps by design, creativity has been a guiding principle for Ruta, 45, and her work. Both her parents were visual artists, and Ruta herself grew up as a ballet dancer—and at one point considered it a career path. After making the switch to science, however, she says that creativity—and the freedom that comes with it—still plays a big part in how she goes about her work. Her research now involves better understanding how the nervous system takes in external cues such as smell and processes these stimuli to inspire various behaviors. Advertisement STAT spoke with Ruta to learn more about her life and work. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed. Both your parents were artists. Did they influence how you work? I was strongly influenced by their creative process, which is parallel to how scientists work. There’s a kind of honing in your craft. It’s obvious in the artistic endeavors, whether it’s practicing dancing or something else. But it’s also there in the sciences—you have to be disciplined about pushing through with your experiments. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 26654 - Posted: 09.28.2019

By Laura Sanders Survey any office, and you’ll see pens tapping, heels bouncing and hair being twiddled. But jittery humans aren’t alone. Mice also fidget while they work. What’s more, this seemingly useless motion has a profound and widespread effect on mice’s brain activity, neuroscientist Anne Churchland of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and colleagues report September 24 in Nature Neuroscience. Scientists don’t yet know what this brain activity means, but one possibility is that body motion may actually shape thinking. Researchers trained some mice to lick a spout corresponding to an area where a click or a flash of light originated. To start their task, mice grabbed a handle and waited for the signal. As the mice focused on their jobs, researchers used several different methods to eavesdrop on nerve cell behavior in the animals’ brains. All the while, video cameras and a sensor embedded on a platform under the mice picked up every move the rodents made — and there were a lot. Mice wiggled their noses, flicked their whiskers and fiddled their hind paws while concentrating on finding the sound or light, the team found. Those fidgets showed up in nerve cell activity. When a whisker moved, for instance, nerve cells involved in moving and sensing sprang into action. Fidgets predicted a big chunk of neural behavior, mathematical models suggested. Mice’s fidgets even had stronger effects on brain activity than did the task at hand, the researchers report. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2019

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 26653 - Posted: 09.28.2019

By Liz Eavey My brother Roland’s Facebook post set off a flurry of concern throughout his social network. He’d been assaulted, he wrote, by “old-world mentality Agent Smiths who are threatening our ability to bring natural plant-based Medicine and intelligent health care to the world.” In caps, he told his followers to ALERT THE PRESS AND BRING SIGNS OF PROTEST. The yogis sent positive vibes; the rebels cried fight the man; the good Samaritans offered to jump in their cars and rescue him. Except that Roland hadn’t exactly been assaulted. He’d been placed under an involuntary psychiatric hold and forcibly subdued in an emergency room at the same institution where he was training to become a psychiatrist. And, with that, four years ago, Facebook snitched our big family secret: Roland, the literary prodigy, the tenderhearted musician, the Ivy League grad, was bipolar. Roland — who read and approved this essay — is the effortlessly brilliant middle child who takes up a disproportionate amount of space in a room, with a booming voice and the charisma of a megachurch pastor. After college, he moved to Hollywood and landed, with zero experience or connections, a coveted job with an A-list director. Then, he decided to become a doctor, enrolling in a top-tier M.D./M.B.A. program. Everything about my brother is superlative, including his demons: crippling insomnia, legendary alcoholism and a chemical imbalance that has repeatedly imploded his life. I, the firstborn, am diplomatic and obedient, less concerned with standing out than blending in. Just 17 months apart, Roland and I constantly butted heads trying to assert our individuality growing up. In seventh grade, I wrote “An Older Sister’s Guide to Having Younger Brothers,” which began: “A smart idea, which would prevent use of this guide, would be to just not have younger brothers.” Yet, when we weren’t vying for sibling dominance, we were always looking out for each other. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 26652 - Posted: 09.27.2019

By Tina Hesman Saey Mice (and maybe people) may metabolize food according to daily, circadian rhythms set by gut bacteria. Microbes in the small intestine of mice rhythmically dictate when fat is taken up by cells that line the organ, researchers report. The study, described in the Sept. 27 Science, details how gut microbes influence a host’s metabolism. If the findings carry over to people, the research may give clues to why jet lag and night-shift work, which can throw off circadian rhythms, often lead to obesity, diabetes and other health problems. Researchers knew that human cells have molecular clocks that time 24-hour circadian cycles of metabolism (SN: 11/8/18), and that gut microbes in the colon follow their hosts’ biological beat (SN: 10/16/14). But the new study finds that, at least in the small intestine, microbes can set rhythms for host cells to follow. That work was done in mice, but the process may work similarly in people. The new research “is helping us appreciate just how intertwined are the metabolisms of the microbiota and their mammalian hosts,” says microbiologist and immunologist Andrew Gewirtz of Georgia State University in Atlanta who was not involved in the work. “It’s a very intimate interaction, regulating things as basic as circadian rhythms, which was quite a surprise.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2019.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 26651 - Posted: 09.27.2019

By Jill Halper, M.D. Depression is not cancer. It’s a completely different disease. Yet when I look back on my husband’s depression and death by suicide three years ago, it sure looks a lot like cancer to me. As an adolescent medicine physician in Los Angeles, I have cared for many patients with depression and mental illness, and as a pediatric resident in training, I also cared for many children with cancer. But the difference in how people view these illnesses is astounding. Before we met, my husband’s first marriage had ended, and his ex-wife told him that he did not deserve love. Primed by genetics and an abusive childhood, he was convinced he would always be alone. He attempted suicide with an overdose of pills. When he unexpectedly woke up in the morning, he drove to U.C.L.A. and was checked into the psychiatric unit. He was treated, started on medication and improved. Six months later we met, and soon felt that we were soul mates. He realized he did deserve love. We never took the suicide attempt lightly and always had professional support and treatment. We were married for nearly 20 years. We had two children, purchased a home and negotiated our marriage as best we could. We communicated well, and had the support of a couples’ therapist. It seemed his horrible disease was cured — until it wasn’t. He wasn’t cured; as with some cancers, his disease was simply in remission. And while his first suicide attempt was about the fear of never finding love, his second fear, equally unwarranted, was that he was a complete failure as a provider. My husband’s father was not trained in any skill or profession. He was laid off in his 50s, and never worked again. When he died in his 60s, he left behind a financial mess. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 26650 - Posted: 09.27.2019