By Emily Underwood Adrenaline. The word is synonymous with any activity that gets our blood racing, whether it be encountering a rattlesnake or watching the latest horror movie. But a new study reveals that when it comes with our body’s stress response, adrenaline may be less important than another hormone, one that seeps out of our bones. Our skeleton is much more than a rigid scaffold for the body, says geneticist Gérard Karsenty of Columbia University. Our bones secrete a protein called osteocalcin, discovered in the 1970s, that rebuilds the skeleton. In 2007, Karsenty and colleagues discovered that this protein acts as a hormone to keep blood sugar levels in check and burn fat. Later, his group showed that the hormone is important for maintaining brain function and physical fitness, restoring memory in aged mice and boosting performance during exercise in old mice and people. The findings led Karsenty to hypothesize that animals evolved bony skeletons to escape danger. The new study furthers that argument. Karsenty and colleagues exposed mice to several stressors, including a mild electric shock to the foot and a whiff of fox urine, a scent that triggers an innate fear response. Then, the researchers measured the osteocalcin in the animals’ blood. Within 2 to 3 minutes of being exposed to a stressor, levels of osteocalcin in the mice quadrupled, the team reports today in Cell Metabolism. A classic stressor in people had a similar effect: When the researchers asked volunteers to speak in front of an audience, osteocalcin levels also spiked. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Stress
Link ID: 26609 - Posted: 09.13.2019

By Maanvi Singh The world’s most widely used insecticides may delay the migrations of songbirds and hurt their chances of mating. In the first experiment to track the effects of a neonicotinoid on birds in the wild, scientists captured 24 white-crowned sparrows as they migrated north from Mexico and the southern United States to Canada and Alaska. The team fed half of those birds with a low dose of the commonly used agricultural insecticide imidacloprid and the other half with a slightly higher dose. An additional 12 birds were captured and dosed with sunflower oil, but no pesticide. Within hours, the dosed birds began to lose weight and ate less food, researchers report in the Sept. 13 Science. Birds given the higher amount of imidacloprid (3.9 milligrams per kilogram of body mass) lost 6 percent of their body mass within six hours. That’s about 1.6 grams for an average bird weighing 27 grams. Tracking the birds (Zonotrichia leucophrys) revealed that the pesticide-treated sparrows also lagged behind the others when continuing their migration to their summer mating grounds. The findings suggest that neonicotinoid insecticides, already implicated in dropping bee populations, could also have a hand in the decline of songbird populations across North America. From 1966 to 2013, the populations of nearly three-quarters of farmland bird species across the continent have precipitously dropped. The researchers dosed the birds in the lab with carefully measured amounts of pesticide mixed with sunflower oil. In the wild, birds might feed on seeds coated with imidacloprid. The highest dose that “we gave each bird is the equivalent of if they ate one-tenth of [a single] pesticide-coated corn seed,” says Christy Morrissey, a biologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. “Frankly, these were minuscule doses we gave the birds.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2019.

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Obesity
Link ID: 26608 - Posted: 09.13.2019

By Kenneth Shinozuka What is consciousness? In a sense, this is one of the greatest mysteries in the universe. yet in another, it’s not an enigma at all. If we define consciousness as the feeling of what it’s like to subjectively experience something, then there is nothing more deeply familiar. Most of us know what it’s like to feel the pain of a headache, to empathize with another human being, to see the color blue, to hear the soaring melodies of a symphony, and so on. In fact, as philosopher Galen Strawson insightfully pointed out in a New York Times opinion piece, consciousness is “the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know.” This is a crucial point. We don’t have direct access to the outer world. Instead we experience it through the filter of our consciousness. We have no idea what the color blue really looks like “out there,” only how it appears to us “in here.” Furthermore, as some cognitive scientists like Donald Hoffman have argued in recent years, external reality is likely to be far different from our perceptions of it. The human brain has been optimized, through the process of evolution, to model reality in the way that’s most conducive to its survival, not in the way that most faithfully represents the world. Science has produced an outstandingly accurate description of the outer world, but it has told us very little, if anything, about our internal consciousness. With sufficient knowledge of physics, I can calculate all the forces acting on the chair in front of me, but I don’t know what “forces” or “laws” are giving rise to my subjective experience of the chair. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 26607 - Posted: 09.13.2019

Diana Kwon A few years ago, officials at Switzerland’s Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office approached Hanno Würbel, the head of the animal welfare division at the University of Bern, with the task of examining the quality of experimental design in the country’s animal research. Growing public awareness of the reproducibility crisis in science—which has emerged as researchers discover that a large proportion of scientific results cannot be replicated in subsequent experiments—had put pressure on the government authority to examine this issue, Würbel says. “They wanted to know, what is the situation in Switzerland . . . and is there anything that we need to improve?” To address this question, Würbel and his colleagues examined scientific protocols in 1,277 applications for licenses to conduct animal research that were submitted to and approved by the Swiss Food Safety and Veterinary Office (FSVO). Their analysis, published in PLOS Biology in 2016, concluded that most of the experiments described in approved applications lacked scientific rigor. Only a fraction of the protocols included important measures against bias, such as blinding, randomization, or a clear plan for statistical analysis. It’s now one of several studies that have pointed to critical flaws in the way animal experiments are designed—and many researchers argue that these flaws are major contributors to the reproducibility crisis plaguing published pre-clinical research. In 2011, for example, scientists at the pharmaceutical company Bayer reported that they were unable to reproduce the findings from 43 of 67 projects on potential drug targets in oncology, cardiology, and women’s health. Meanwhile, a 2015 PLOS Biology paper reported that more than 50 percent of preclinical research is not reproducible. The latter study’s authors highlighted poor experimental design as one of the main causes of the problem and estimated that, in the United States alone, approximately $28 billion is spent each year on preclinical experiments that cannot be replicated. © 1986–2019 The Scientist.

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 26606 - Posted: 09.13.2019

By Temma Ehrenfeld One night in her Nashville apartment, Bre Banks read a comment from her boyfriend on Facebook. They were in a shaky spell, and his words seemed proof she would lose him. She put her laptop down on the couch and headed to the bedroom to cry. “My legs seized up, and I fell,” she recalled. With her knees and forehead pressing into the carpet, she heard a voice that said, “Slit your wrists, slit your wrists.” She saw herself in the bathtub with the blood flowing. She was terrified that if she moved she would die. In one study, about a quarter of the suicide attempts were made by people who reported zero suicidal thoughts. Banks, then 25, was a disciplined graduate student with a job and close friends and had no psychiatric history. “I had never considered suicide an option,” she says. But for the next three days, she couldn’t sleep while the voice and disturbing images persisted. After seeing a therapist, she decided to teach herself techniques from dialectical behavior therapy, one of the few treatments shown to reduce suicidality. The voices and images came back over the next few months, but eventually faded. Eight years later, Banks now evaluates suicide prevention programs across Tennessee as a manager at the large mental health provider Centerstone’s research institute, and she and the same boyfriend just celebrated their 10th anniversary. Copyright 2019 Undark

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 26605 - Posted: 09.12.2019

Salvatore Domenic Morgera The human brain sends hundreds of billions of neural signals each second. It’s an extraordinarily complex feat. A healthy brain must establish an enormous number of correct connections and ensure that they remain accurate for the entire period of the information transfer – that can take seconds, which in “brain time” is pretty long. How does each signal get to its intended destination? The challenge for your brain is similar to what you’re faced with when trying to engage in conversation at a noisy cocktail party. You’re able to focus on the person you’re talking to and “mute” the other discussions. This phenomenon is selective hearing – what’s called the cocktail party effect. When everyone at a large, crowded party talks at roughly the same loudness, the average sound level of the person you’re speaking with is about equal to the average level of all the other partygoers’ chatter combined. If it were a satellite TV system, this roughly equal balance of desired signal and background noise would result in poor reception. Nevertheless, this balance is good enough to let you understand conversation at a bustling party. How does the human brain do it, distinguishing among billions of ongoing “conversations” within itself and locking on to a specific signal for delivery? My team’s research into the neurological networks of the brain shows there are two activities that support its ability to establish reliable connections in the presence of significant biological background noise. Although the brain’s mechanisms are quite complex, these two activities act as what an electrical engineer calls a matched filter - a processing element used in high-performance radio systems, and now known to exist in nature. © 2010–2019, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 26604 - Posted: 09.12.2019

By Roni Dengler | Testosterone often gets a bad rap. The hormone responsible for male sexual development has been linked in studies to aggression and a lack of empathy. People with autism – a developmental condition that can lead to anxiety and trouble interacting with others – also have a hard time empathizing. Since the condition is four times more common in boys than girls, scientists once thought testosterone might reduce our ability to tell how others are feeling. But now, researchers find that’s not the case. “Of course, the primary suspect when we have something that is sharply differentiated by sex is testosterone,” University of Pennsylvania marketing professor Gideon Nave, who led the work, said in a press release. In the new study, Nave and colleagues report men given extra testosterone were able to read emotions just as well as those with typical hormone levels. The findings contrast a prevailing hypothesis that testosterone challenges men’s ability to empathize. Emotional Eyes In previous studies, other scientists tested whether testosterone influences empathy. They gave a few dozen women testosterone and then tested their ability to infer emotions by looking at pictures of people’s eyes. The studies concluded the testosterone lowered the women’s ability to empathize. The findings lent support for what’s known as the “extreme male brain hypothesis.” The hypothesis posits that men and women process and experience the world differently – women empathize and men systemize. Another study linking prenatal testosterone levels to autism added weight to the hypothesis.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 26603 - Posted: 09.12.2019

Bahar Gholipour The death of free will began with thousands of finger taps. In 1964, two German scientists monitored the electrical activity of a dozen people’s brains. Each day for several months, volunteers came into the scientists’ lab at the University of Freiburg to get wires fixed to their scalp from a showerhead-like contraption overhead. The participants sat in a chair, tucked neatly in a metal tollbooth, with only one task: to flex a finger on their right hand at whatever irregular intervals pleased them, over and over, up to 500 times a visit. The purpose of this experiment was to search for signals in the participants’ brains that preceded each finger tap. At the time, researchers knew how to measure brain activity that occurred in response to events out in the world—when a person hears a song, for instance, or looks at a photograph—but no one had figured out how to isolate the signs of someone’s brain actually initiating an action. The experiment’s results came in squiggly, dotted lines, a representation of changing brain waves. In the milliseconds leading up to the finger taps, the lines showed an almost undetectably faint uptick: a wave that rose for about a second, like a drumroll of firing neurons, then ended in an abrupt crash. This flurry of neuronal activity, which the scientists called the Bereitschaftspotential, or readiness potential, was like a gift of infinitesimal time travel. For the first time, they could see the brain readying itself to create a voluntary movement.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 26602 - Posted: 09.11.2019

By Laura Sanders Two artists who paint with their toes have unusual neural footprints in their brains. Individual toes each take over discrete territory, creating a well-organized “toe map,” researchers report September 10 in Cell Reports. Similar brain organization isn’t thought to exist in people with typical toe dexterity. So finding these specialized maps brings scientists closer to understanding how the human brain senses the body, even when body designs differ (SN: 6/12/19). “Sometimes, having the unusual case — even the very rare one — might give you important insight into how things work,” says neuroscientist Denis Schluppeck of the University of Nottingham in England, who was not involved in the study. The skills of the two artists included in the study are certainly rare. Both were born without arms due to the drug thalidomide, formerly used to treat morning sickness in pregnant women. As a result, both men rely heavily on their feet, which possess the dexterity to eat with cutlery, write and use computers. The brain carries a map of areas that handle sensations from different body parts; sensitive fingers and lips, for example, have big corresponding areas. But so far, scientists haven’t had much luck in pinpointing areas of the human brain that respond to individual toes (although toe regions have been found in the brains of nonhuman primates). But because these men use their feet in unusually skilled ways, researchers wondered if their brains might represent toes a bit differently. The two artists, along with nine other people with no special foot abilities, underwent functional MRI scans while an experimenter gently touched each toe. For many people, the brain areas that correspond to individual toes aren’t discrete, says neuroscientist Daan Wesselink of University College London. But in the foot artists’ brains, “we found very distinct locations for each of their toes.” When each toe was touched, a patch of brain became active, linking neighboring toes to similarly neighboring areas of the brain. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2019

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Brain imaging
Link ID: 26601 - Posted: 09.11.2019

Ruth Williams Tau is a structural protein of brain cells that, in various neurodegenerative conditions and as a result of brain injury, can accumulate as tangled toxic deposits. Using a recently developed in vivo imaging technique, researchers have now examined such tau pathology in the brains of patients who, decades earlier, suffered a single head trauma. The results, presented in Science Translational Medicine last week (September 4), reveal not only that tau accumulation can remain unusually high in such patients, but also that tau abundance correlates with neuronal damage. “It’s an important paper that links a single traumatic brain injury that occurred many years ago to long-term neurodegeneration,” says neuropathologist Thor Stein of Boston University who was not involved in the research. It also “looks at important biomarkers that can be detected in life and that will hopefully, down the road, be useful in a clinical setting for earlier diagnosis.” “It’s a very good and scope-broadening research piece. No one has done a study like this,” adds neurologist Steven DeKosky of the University of Florida who also didn’t take part in the study. “It speaks to the longevity of the pathological changes that can occur to people [after an injury].” Tau tangles, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia and neurodegeneration, have been found in the brains of some people who have suffered repeated head traumas, such as boxers and NFL football players, as well as in some people who have suffered a single severe traumatic brain injury. © 1986–2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Alzheimers
Link ID: 26600 - Posted: 09.11.2019

Culture helps shape when babies learn to walk By Sujata Gupta For generations, farther back than anyone can remember, the women in Rano Dodojonova’s family have placed their babies in “gahvoras,” cradles that are part diaper, part restraining device. Dodojonova, a research assistant who lives in Tajikistan, was cradled for the first two or three years of her life. She cradled her three children in the same way. Ubiquitous throughout Central Asia, the wooden gahvora is often a gift for newlyweds. The mother positions her baby on his back with his bottom firmly over a hole. Underneath is a bucket to capture whatever comes out. She then binds the baby with several long swaths of fabric so that only the baby’s head can move. Next, she connects a funnel, specially designed for either boys or girls, to send urine out to that same bucket under the cradle. Finally, she drapes heavy fabric over the handle atop the gahvora to protect the child from bright light and insects. Babies stay in that womblike apparatus for hours on end, with use decreasing as the child ages. When babies fuss, mothers often shush them by vigorously rocking the cradle back and forth or leaning over the side to breastfeed. Besides keeping babies dry and warm, gahvoras provide a sense of safety, Dodojonova says. “It is very nice for children because they are bound and cannot move.” Eventually, they are running and jumping like children everywhere. To the uninitiated, this child-rearing approach may sound odd, or even shocking. Yet cultures should be viewed within their own context, says psychologist Catherine Tamis-LeMonda of New York University. “We engage in practices that fit our needs, our own everyday lives.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2019.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26599 - Posted: 09.11.2019

Nell Greenfieldboyce The Environmental Protection Agency says it will aggressively reduce the use of animals in toxicity testing, with a goal of eliminating all routine safety tests on mammals by 2035. Chemicals such as pesticides typically get tested for safety on animals like mice and rats. Researchers have long been trying to instead increase the use of alternative safety tests that rely on lab-grown cells or computer modeling. The EPA's administer, Andrew Wheeler, has now set some specific deadlines to try to speed up that transition. Federal Watchdog Warns EPA Is Failing To Enforce Lead Paint Abatement Rules Shots - Health News Federal Watchdog Warns EPA Is Failing To Enforce Lead Paint Abatement Rules In a signed memo made public Tuesday, he's directed the agency to reduce all requests for, and funding of, studies with live mammals by 30 percent by 2025. He says he wants the agency to essentially eliminate all mammal study requests and funding by 2035, with the use of live mammals only allowed after that with special permission. "I really do think that with the lead time that we have in this — 16 years before we completely eliminate animal testing — that we have enough time to come up with alternatives," says Wheeler. He notes that he wrote an op-ed for his college newspaper on the need to reduce animal testing back in 1987. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 26598 - Posted: 09.11.2019

By Anahad O’Connor Dr. Elaine Yu, an endocrinologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, was inundated with volunteers when she put out a call a few years ago for overweight people who were willing to take part in a study of obesity and the microbiome. People as far away as Alaska and Hawaii were eager to enroll. But the most surprising part was what they were willing to do. The study required them to swallow capsules containing stool to test whether gut bacteria from lean donors could improve their metabolic health. “We had this concern that it would be difficult to recruit people because there’s a certain yuck factor with having to take a poop pill,” Dr. Yu said. “But we had an overwhelming number of volunteers wanting to participate.” The link between the gut and metabolic disease is a growing area of obesity research. In recent years, scientists have uncovered clues that the microbiota, the community of trillions of microbes that live in the gut, plays a role in weight gain and metabolic disease. Now, in small studies, they are exploring whether they can spur changes in metabolism and potentially in body weight through a therapy known as fecal microbiota transplants, or F.M.T., which transfers gut bacteria from lean donors to the guts of obese patients. The research, which is still in its infancy, has yielded mixed results and plenty of skepticism. Experts say fecal transplants will never replace diet, exercise, behavioral therapies and other standard interventions for obesity and Type 2 diabetes. But some believe they could lead to the discovery of bacteria that protect against metabolic disease, and perhaps become one of many tools that help obese patients who are struggling to shed pounds. “Obesity is a very complex disorder,” said Dr. Jessica Allegretti, the director of the Fecal Microbiota Transplant Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “Perhaps the microbiome is a contributing part of it, and maybe for everyone it’s slightly different. But even for patients where the microbiome is playing a big part, I think this would be something that is part of a larger weight loss program.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 26597 - Posted: 09.10.2019

/ By Rod McCullom In recent years, a steadily increasing volume of data has demonstrated that peer victimization — the clinical term for bullying — impacts hundreds of millions of children and adolescents, with the effects sometimes lasting years and, possibly, decades. The problem is even recognized as a global health challenge by the World Health Organization and the United Nations. And yet, researchers maintain there is still a limited understanding of how the behavior may physically shape the developing brain. Researchers believe more than 3.2 million American students experience bullying every year. That’s about 1 percent of the nation’s total population. Bullying is usually defined as repeated and intentional verbal, physical, and anti-social behavior that seeks to intimidate, harm, or marginalize someone perceived as smaller, weaker, or less powerful. Among younger children, common forms of bullying include abusive language and physical harm. This behavior may grow subtler with age as adolescent bullies routinely exclude, insult, and mock their targets. Sometimes this behavior escalates into “mobbing” among groups of bullies in school, work, or cyberspace. Researchers believe more than 3.2 million American students experience bullying every year. That’s about 1 percent of the nation’s total population. Among these students, about 10 to 15 percent experience “chronic” or persistent bullying that will last more than six continuous months. Experiencing chronic peer victimization is associated with lower academic achievement, higher unemployment rates, depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, and self-harm and suicidal thoughts. Copyright 2019 Undark

Keyword: Aggression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26596 - Posted: 09.10.2019

Ian Sample Science editor Society must prepare for a technological revolution in which brain implants allow people to communicate by telepathy, download new skills, and brag about their holidays in “neural postcards”, leading scientists say. While such far-fetched applications remain fiction for now, research into brain implants and other neural devices is advancing so fast that the Royal Society has called for a “national investigation” into the technology. “In 10 years’ time this is probably going to touch millions of people,” said Tim Constandinou, director of the next generation neural interfaces lab at Imperial College London, and co-chair of a new Royal Society report called iHuman. “These technologies are not possible today, but we are heading in that direction.” A neuroscientist explains: the need for ‘empathetic citizens’ - podcast The report foresees a “neural revolution” driven by electronic implants that communicate directly with the brain and other parts of the nervous system. By 2040, the scientists anticipate that implants will help the paralysed to walk, with other devices alleviating the symptoms of neurodegenerative diseases and treatment-resistant depression. The new wave of devices will go beyond existing products such as cochlear implant hearing aids and deep brain stimulators for people with Parkinson’s disease, with gadgets that help the healthy. In research labs, scientists are working on ways for people to type with their brains, and share thoughts by connecting their minds. Other teams are developing helmets and headbands to speed up learning and improve memory. “People could become telepathic to some degree, able to converse not only without speaking but without words, through access to each other’s thoughts at a conceptual level. This could enable unprecedented collaboration with colleagues and deeper conversations with friends,” the report states. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Brain imaging; Depression
Link ID: 26595 - Posted: 09.10.2019

By Emily Oster At some point or another, most books about the brain come back to the story of Phineas Gage. Gage was a railroad worker in the 19th century. In an unfortunate 1848 accident, a large steel spike was driven through his eye and out the other side of his head, taking some of his brain with him (this is the point in the story where my 8-year-old told me to please stop telling it). Amazingly, Gage survived the accident with much of his faculties intact. What did change was his personality, which, by many reports, became more aggressive and belligerent. Gage’s doctor wrote up his case, arguing that it suggested “civilized conduct” was localized in a particular part of the brain — specifically, the part he had lost. Science was off in search of where in the brain various skills were kept, with the idea that the brain was a kind of map, with little areas for, say, walking or talking or hearing or smelling. This proceeded, albeit slowly; for a while, there wasn’t much of a way to study this other than by looking at people with traumatic brain injuries. So it’s understandable that the development of technologies to study intact brains caused a lot of excitement. Generating the most discussion in recent years has been functional magnetic resonance imaging (or fMRI), which allows researchers to measure oxygen flow to the brain and identify which parts activate in response to varying stimuli. These technologies have not always lived up to the hype. The mechanics and statistics of processing fMRI imaging data have turned out to be far more complex than initially imagined. As a result there were many false claims made about which parts of the brain “controlled” different aspects of behavior or actions. The best, or at least funniest, example of this was a paper that showed how cutting-edge statistical analysis of fMRI made it possible to identify parts of the brain that responded differently to happy or sad faces. Sounds good, until you learn that the subject for this experiment was a dead fish. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Brain imaging
Link ID: 26594 - Posted: 09.10.2019

Jon Hamilton The depression drug esketamine, marketed as Spravato, appears to offer quick relief to people who are actively considering suicide. Esketamine, a chemical cousin of the anesthetic and party drug ketamine, reduced depression symptoms within hours in two large studies of suicidal patients, the drug's maker announced Monday. The studies, which included 456 patients who were suicidal, found that after 24 hours, patients who got the drug along with standard treatment were less depressed than people who got standard treatment alone. Surprisingly, though, patients who got esketamine were not significantly less suicidal, even though they had fewer symptoms of depression. The finding came from two studies sponsored by the drug's maker, Johnson & Johnson, and presented at the 32nd European College of Neuropsychopharmacology meeting in Copenhagen. Esketamine "showed a benefit in a very high-risk patient population, which is usually excluded from most clinical trials," says Dr. David Hough, a psychiatrist and esketamine compound development team leader at Janssen Research and Development LLC, a part of Johnson & Johnson. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26593 - Posted: 09.10.2019

By Nicholas Bakalar Getting less than six hours of sleep a night, or more than nine hours, might increase the risk for heart attack. Previous observational studies have found an association between sleep duration and heart attack. But for the current study, researchers had DNA data about study participants and knew who had a high or low genetic risk for cardiovascular disease. This allowed them to more clearly identify the role of sleep duration by itself on heart attack risk and provided greater certainty that the relationship might be causal. The study, in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, included 461,347 men and women ages 40 to 69, all of whom were healthy at the start. Over seven years of follow-up, there were 5,218 heart attacks. Comparing people with the same low genetic risk score for cardiovascular disease, they found that those with poor sleep duration — less than six hours or more than nine — had a 32 percent higher risk of having a heart attack. The researchers also compared people with high genetic risk for heart disease. Although their risks were significantly higher than those with low genetic risk, those who tended to get favorable sleep reduced their risk by 18 percent compared with those with unfavorable sleep patterns. The effects of sleep could have a significant impact on health and mortality, because while genes cannot be changed, sleep patterns are modifiable. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26592 - Posted: 09.10.2019

By Matt Richtel and Denise Grady Hundreds of people across the country have been sickened by a severe lung illness linked to vaping, and a handful have died, according to public health officials. Many were otherwise healthy young people, in their teens or early 20s. Investigators from numerous states are working with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration in an urgent effort to figure out why. Here’s what we know so far. Who is at risk? Anyone who uses e-cigarettes or other vaping devices, whether to consume nicotine or substances extracted from marijuana or hemp, may be at risk because investigators have not determined whether a specific device or type of vaping liquid is responsible. The Food and Drug Administration is warning that there appears to be a particular danger for people who vape THC, the psychoactive chemical in marijuana. The F.D.A. said a significant subset of samples of vaping fluid used by sick patients included THC and also contained a chemical called vitamin E acetate. The F.D.A. issued this statement: “Because consumers cannot be sure whether any THC vaping products may contain vitamin E acetate, consumers are urged to avoid buying vaping products on the street, and to refrain from using THC oil or modifying/adding any substances to products purchased in stores.” But some of the patients who have fallen severely ill said they did not vape THC. In 53 cases of the illness in Illinois and Wisconsin, 17 percent of the patients said they had vaped only nicotine products, according to an article published on Friday in The New England Journal of Medicine. The researchers who wrote the journal article cautioned, “e-cigarette aerosol is not harmless; it can expose users to substances known to have adverse health effects, including ultrafine particles, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds and other harmful ingredients.” The health effects of some of those chemicals are not fully understood, the researchers wrote, even though the products are already on the market. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26591 - Posted: 09.09.2019

Giorgia Guglielmi People who have low-risk surgery in Canada and the United States fill prescriptions for opioid painkillers at nearly seven times the rate seen in Sweden, according to recent research1. Studying these differences could help nations such as the United States to develop prescribing guidelines to counteract the surge in opioid use that is devastating some communities, say the study authors. The findings, which are published on 4 September in JAMA Network Open, are the first to quantify the differences in opioid use for people who had similar types of surgery across countries. There’s anecdotal evidence that clinicians tend to prescribe more opioids after surgery in some countries than in others, says Mark Neuman, an anaesthesiologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who led the study. And over-prescription of opioids is associated with an increased risk of developing long-term dependence and addiction, he says. To investigate further, Neuman and his team gathered prescription data from between 2013 and 2016 from Canada, the United States and Sweden. The countries all have similar levels of surgical care as well as detailed data on opioid prescriptions. The team found that nearly 79% of people in Canada and about 76% of those in the United States who had one of 4 operations — and who filled their opioid prescriptions — did so within 7 days of leaving hospital, compared with 11% of people in Sweden (see ‘Painkiller prescriptions’). “That’s a striking difference,” says Gabriel Brat, a surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. The procedures were removals of the gallbladder, appendix, breast lumps or meniscus cartilage in the knee. © 2019 Springer Nature Publishing AG

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26590 - Posted: 09.09.2019