By Susana Martinez-Conde If you’re older than forty, chances are that reading texts or playing with your smart phone is now harder than it used to be. Such difficulty with near focusing is usually the result of presbyopia, the hardening of the lens of the eye that starts to take place in middle age. From eyeglasses to refractive surgery, many available solutions allow GenXers and baby boomers to read small print and conduct other near-vision tasks to their hearts’ content. The problem is, one of the most prevalent treatments for presbyopia could make you less safe on the road. Broadly, people suffering from presbyopia can opt for eyeglasses, contact lenses or surgery. Eyeglasses include reading glasses (used for close-up vision only), as well as glasses with bifocal, multifocal or progressive lenses (which are worn all day and allow vision at a range of distances). Contact lens correction can work just like with eyeglasses, but it also offers an alternative solution for presbyopia, called monovision. In monovision, one eye is corrected for close-up viewing, and the other eye for long-distance viewing. Thus, at any distance (near or far), at least one eye offers clear vision even when the image from the other eye is blurred. Eventually, the brain learns to suppress the blurred images and rely on the crisp images only, so people can enjoy clear vision at all distances. Finally, those with presbyopia can opt for refractive eye surgery, including monovision LASIK, which typically corrects the nondominant eye for near vision while leaving the dominant eye able to see long distance. Among baby boomers, monovision is the most popular contact lens correction for presbyopia, and monovision LASIK is also on the rise for eligible people over the age of 40. Yet, according to new research by Johannes Burge, Victor Rodriguez-Lopez, and Carlos Dorronsoro at the University of Pennsylvania, monovision corrections could present previously unidentified safety concerns, especially while driving. The reason is related to a century-old illusion called the Pulfrich effect. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 26489 - Posted: 08.12.2019

By Jane E. Brody Early to bed, early to rise — a fine plan for a dairy farmer who has to get up long before dawn to milk the cows. But if you’re someone who works all day with stocks and clients and may want to enjoy an evening out now and then, it would be better not to be getting up at 2 a.m. and have to struggle to stay awake through dinner or a show. Such is the challenge faced by a friend who has what sleep specialists call an advanced sleep phase. Her biological sleep-wake cycle, or circadian rhythm, is out of sync with the demands of the modern world. My friend, who asked to remain anonymous, has always been an early riser, even as a teenager. Getting up at 5 was an advantage in high school — she never had to worry about being late. But as she aged, her nights kept getting shorter. Now at age 63 she’s ready to go to sleep before 9 p.m., but that rarely fits with the demands of her life. No matter how delayed her bedtime, she gets up by 4 in the morning — and sometimes as early as 1:30 — and can’t get back to sleep. She said that given her stimulating job as an investment products specialist, she’s not sleepy during the day, nor does she nap. Still, she’s concerned about her short nights, partly because she’s read that insufficient sleep — especially not enough REM sleep, when dreams occur — has been linked to a possible increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease. She knows that late dinners, especially with wine, contribute to her sleep problem. But it’s also likely that her lifelong dairy-farmer sleep pattern is programmed by her genes, not the result of unavoidable disruptions or unwise living habits. And, it seems, her early-to-sleep, early-to-wake rhythm may not be as extremely rare as has long been believed. In a new study in the journal Sleep by researchers in San Francisco, Salt Lake City and Madison, Wis., of more than 2,400 patients who visited a sleep clinic for complaints like sleep apnea or insomnia, a small number of them were found to have a previously unrecognized familial form of advanced sleep phase, a kind of permanent jet lag that the study showed often runs in families. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 26488 - Posted: 08.12.2019

Sacha Pfeiffer There's a new smell tingling tourists' noses in the Big Apple, far above the trash bag-lined sidewalks — and this scent is by design. Atop One World Trade Center, New York City's tallest building, a fragrance carrying hints of citrus, beech trees and red maples wafts through the glass-enclosed observatory deck. When the observatory commissioned the custom scent to diffuse through the floor's HVAC system, Managing Director Keith Douglas told the New York Times that he wanted it to elicit a "positive thought," and offer a "a subtle complement to the experience" of visiting the space. But not everyone is keen on the scent. One tourist described the smell as "sickly," according to the Times, which first documented the new aromatic experience in lower Manhattan. It's a marketing strategy businesses are increasingly deploying to lure customers into stores and entice them to stay longer. The smell of cinnamon fills Yankee Candle stores, Subway pumps a doughy bread scent through its vents. International Flavors & Fragrances, the same company that developed clothing chain Abercrombie & Fitch's notoriously pungent "Fierce" cologne, known to linger on clothes long after their purchase, designed One World's scent. "The quickest way to change somebody's mood or behavior is with smell," says Dr. Alan Hirsch, neurological director of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Emotions
Link ID: 26487 - Posted: 08.12.2019

By Iliana Magra LONDON — On a spring afternoon last year, Neil Fraser was walking down the main shopping street in Aberdeen, a port city in northeastern Scotland, when something strange happened. The bacon-and-chicken sandwich he was halfway through eating suddenly vanished from his hand. The culprit? A hungry bird he hadn’t seen coming. “The sea gull flew in from behind me,” Mr. Fraser, a manager at the Old Schoolhouse pub in the city, said by phone on Wednesday. The bird knocked down his hand and, before he realized what was happening, it was all over: “The sandwich and the sea gull were both gone.” Aggressive gulls trying to snatch people’s food, and at times succeeding, have been a longstanding nuisance in Britain, and various solutions have been proposed over the years, including not feeding the birds, holding a stick or umbrella overhead and installing wires on roofs that they use for nesting. The Old Schoolhouse pub even reportedly offered customers water pistols to deflect the birds. Now, new research proposes a different approach: staring them down. A study published in the journal Biology Letters on Wednesday by the Royal Society, the world’s oldest continuous scientific society, suggested that making eye contact might be key to fending off herring gulls, a familiar sight in British seaside towns. The study, conducted late last year in coastal towns in Cornwall, in southwestern England, focused on that species, which are white-, gray- and black-feathered, with beaks of yellow and red. The researchers tried to test 74 birds by placing potato chips in front of an experimenter. Just 27 of the gulls bit the bait — a factor that the research team attributed to whether the experimenter was facing toward or away from the gull. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 26486 - Posted: 08.12.2019

By Sandra G. Boodman Galen Warden was lying in a hot bath after a punishing week at her demanding marketing job. Her neck and shoulders were, as usual, in knots, so Warden thought she’d expedite the relaxation that a restorative soak usually delivered by sliding under the water. When she sat up about 30 seconds later, Warden recalled, “it felt like my entire scalp was on fire.” Her face, neck and shoulders were unaffected, but her scalp felt as though it had been doused with acid. It would take nearly three months before the cause of Warden’s unusual symptom, which was repeatedly attributed to a tension headache, was revealed. During that time, the emergence of other symptoms failed to prompt the specialist treating her to reconsider her initial diagnosis. If anything, the new problems seemed to harden the doctor’s conviction that Warden’s problem was stress-related. Looking back, Warden said she is struck by what she characterizes as her medical naivete. "It's been a cautionary tale for my friends," she said. "I can't believe I kept going back to a well that was dry." Shocked by the fiery sensation engulfing her scalp, Warden turned on the shower and ran cool water over her head, frantically trying to think about what might have triggered it. She hadn’t rubbed her scalp hard or used a different shampoo or bath product. © 1996-2019 The Washington Post

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26485 - Posted: 08.12.2019

By Paula Span Juli Engel was delighted when a neurologist recommended a PET scan to determine whether amyloid — the protein clumps associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease — was accumulating in her mother’s brain. “My internal response was, ‘Yay!’” said Ms. Engel, 65, a geriatric care manager in Austin, Tex., who has been making almost monthly trips to help her mother in Florida. “He’s using every tool to try to determine what’s going on.” Sue Engel, who’s 83 and lives in a retirement community in Leesburg, Fla., has been experiencing memory problems and other signs of cognitive decline for several years. Her daughter checked off the warning signs: her mother has been financially exploited, suffered an insurance scam, caused an auto accident. Medicare officials decided in 2013, shortly after PET (positron emission tomography) amyloid imaging became available, that they lacked evidence of its health benefits. So outside of research trials, Medicare doesn’t cover the scans’ substantial costs ($5,000 to $7,000, the Alzheimer’s Association says); private insurers don’t, either. Juli Engel thinks Medicare should reimburse for the scan, but “if necessary, we’ll pay for it out of pocket,” she said. Her mother already has an Alzheimer’s diagnosis and is taking a commonly prescribed dementia drug. So she probably doesn’t meet the criteria developed by the Alzheimer’s Association and nuclear medicine experts, which call for PET scans only in cases of unexplained or unusual symptoms and unclear diagnoses. But as evidence mounts that brain damage from Alzheimer’s begins years before people develop symptoms, worried patients and their families may start turning to PET scans to learn if they have this biomarker. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Brain imaging
Link ID: 26484 - Posted: 08.03.2019

By Michael Buchanan Social affairs correspondent, BBC News Alcohol-related brain damage, a condition similar to dementia, is poorly understood and often missed by health professionals, a study by charity Alcohol Change UK says. And patients struggling with the "double stigma" of brain impairment and alcohol addiction often end up in accident and emergency units because of a lack of community services. The condition affects balance and makes it difficult for patients to process new information. They can also become confused and experience memory loss. At its most basic, the injury is caused by damage to brain cells from alcohol, which causes them to shrink and die or deprives them of vital vitamins. Heavy drinking A man who drinks more than 50 units of alcohol a week, or a woman drinking more than 35 units, for five years or more is at risk of the disease, Alcohol Change says. "You're talking about a condition that's the result of long-term heavy drinking, which a lot of people are going to say, 'Well someone's done that themselves, it's his own fault,'" Andrew Misell, from Alcohol Change UK, said. "And then you're talking about a condition which makes someone's behaviour difficult to manage - people can be aggressive, inappropriate, confused and confusing to others" Last year, the alcohol care team at the Royal Liverpool Hospital treated 79 patients with alcohol-related brain disease. Patients are asked to sit a test used to diagnose dementia, which has been adapted for this condition. A low score can lead to scans to see if the patient's alcohol intake has shrunk their brain. If it has, an occupational therapist is then brought in to find out how the brain damage has affected that person's daily life. © 2019 BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Alzheimers
Link ID: 26483 - Posted: 08.03.2019

By Emily S. Rueb Excessive alcohol consumption is not safe for a person at any age, but it is particularly dangerous for older adults. And according to a study published this week, about one in 10 older adults is considered a binge drinker. “Binge drinking, even episodically or infrequently, may negatively affect other health conditions by exacerbating disease, interacting with prescribed medications and complicating disease management,” said Dr. Benjamin Han, the lead author of the study that was published on Wednesday in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. Alcohol is also a risk factor for injury, Dr. Han said, but the consequences and recovery from a fall are much more serious for an 81-year-old than a 21-year-old. The study defined binge drinking as consuming five or more drinks in a sitting for men, and four or more drinks in a sitting for women. And a drink equaled a can or bottle of beer, a glass of wine or a wine cooler, a shot of liquor, or a mixed drink with liquor in it. Dr. Han’s group analyzed data from the annual U.S. National Survey on Drug Use and Health between 2015 and 2017. In all, the findings included 10,927 adults aged 65 or older who reported their drinking habits in the previous 30 days. The group did not include adults living in long-term-care facilities or nursing homes, Dr. Han added. The prevalence of binge drinking among adults 65 and older is still relatively low compared with other age groups, Dr. Han said. Over 38 percent of college-aged adults, 18 to 25, had recently drunk excessively, the highest prevalence of any age group. Adults ages 26 to 34 had only slightly fewer binge drinkers, and the second highest percentage, the study found. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26482 - Posted: 08.03.2019

By Gina Kolata For decades, researchers have sought a blood test for beta amyloid, the protein that is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. Several groups and companies have made progress, and on Thursday, scientists at Washington University in St. Louis reported that they had devised the most sensitive blood test yet. The test will not be available for clinical use for years, and in any event, amyloid is not a perfect predictor of Alzheimer’s disease: Most symptomless older people with amyloid deposits in their brains will not develop dementia. But the protein is a significant risk factor, and the new blood test identified patients with amyloid deposits before brain scans did. That will be important to scientists conducting trials of drugs to prevent Alzheimer’s. They need find participants in the earliest stages of the disease. At present, a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is not easy to make. Doctors rely mostly on tests of mental acuity and interviews with the patient and family members. Studies have shown that community doctors are only 50 to 60 percent accurate in diagnosing the condition — about the same as tossing a coin. Methods that can improve accuracy, like PET scans of the brain, are expensive and often not available. The new test relies on mass spectrometry, a tool used in analytical chemistry that, with recent technical advances, can find elusive beta amyloid molecules in blood with high precision. The lead investigator, Dr. Randall Bateman, a neurologist at Washington University, has been working on a mass spectrometry test for 20 years. He and a colleague, Dr. David Holtzman, founded a company ten years ago and licensed patents from their university to commercialize a mass spectrometry test if they ever developed one. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26481 - Posted: 08.02.2019

Hope Reese Patricia S. Churchland is a key figure in the field of neurophilosophy, which employs a multidisciplinary lens to examine how neurobiology contributes to philosophical and ethical thinking. In her new book, “Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition,” Churchland makes the case that neuroscience, evolution, and biology are essential to understanding moral decision-making and how we behave in social environments. In the past, “philosophers thought it was impossible that neuroscience would ever be able to tell us anything about the nature of the self, or the nature of decision-making,” the author says. The way we reach moral conclusions, Churchland asserts, has a lot more to do with our neural circuitry than we realize. The way we reach moral conclusions, she asserts, has a lot more to do with our neural circuitry than we realize. We are fundamentally hard-wired to form attachments, for instance, which greatly influence our moral decision-making. Also, our brains are constantly using reinforcement learning — observing consequences after specific actions and adjusting our behavior accordingly. Churchland, who teaches philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, also presents research showing that our individual neuro-architecture is heavily influenced by genetics: political attitudes, for instance, are 40 to 50 percent heritable, recent scientific studies suggest. Copyright 2019 Undark

Keyword: Consciousness; Emotions
Link ID: 26480 - Posted: 08.02.2019

By Judith Graham By all accounts, the woman, in her late 60s, appeared to have severe dementia. She was largely incoherent. Her short-term memory was terrible. She couldn’t focus on questions that medical professionals asked her. But Malaz Boustani, a doctor and professor of aging research at Indiana University School of Medicine, suspected something else might be going on. The patient was taking Benadryl for seasonal allergies, another antihistamine for itching, Seroquel (an antipsychotic medication) for mood fluctuations, as well as medications for urinary incontinence and gastrointestinal upset. To various degrees, each of these drugs blocks an important chemical messenger in the brain, acetylcholine. Boustani thought the cumulative impact might be causing the woman’s cognitive difficulties. He was right. Over six months, Boustani and a pharmacist took the patient off those medications and substituted alternative treatments. Miraculously, she appeared to recover completely. Her initial score on the Mini-Mental State Examination had been 11 of 30 — signifying severe dementia — and it shot up to 28, in the normal range. An estimated 1 in 4 older adults take anticholinergic drugs — a wide-ranging class of medications used to treat allergies, insomnia, leaky bladders, diarrhea, dizziness, motion sickness, asthma, Parkinson’s disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and various psychiatric disorders. Older adults are highly susceptible to negative responses to these medications. Since 2012, anticholinergics have been featured prominently on the American Geriatrics Society Beers Criteria list of medications that are potentially inappropriate for seniors. © 1996-2019 The Washington Post

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26479 - Posted: 08.02.2019

By Simon Makin Can an Illusory World Help Treat Psychosis's Real-World Delusions? Scenes of everyday living within a virtual-reality simulation attempt to lessen social anxiety for people with psychosis. Credit: University of Oxford/Oxford VR Many people with psychosis suffer from persecutory delusions—beliefs that terrible things will happen to them in everyday situations, such as people trying to harm them. The disorder causes social anxiety, which can be exacerbated by other symptoms, such as hearing voices. All of this makes ordinary activities such as shopping or going to the doctor challenging. Often a person just withdraws entirely from social contact. In a vicious cycle, the ensuing isolation and rumination can exacerbate other symptoms, including those causing the withdrawal. The idea behind a virtual-reality system called gameChange is to help patients learn to feel safer, allaying social anxiety by putting them in simulations of situations they fear in which their worst dread does not materialize. Last month, clinical psychologist Daniel Freeman of the University of Oxford and his colleagues launched a clinical trial of gameChange, the biggest such trial to date of a VR treatment for schizophrenia. It will enroll 432 people with psychosis from five National Health Service (NHS) centers across the U.K. Researchers will assess participants’ avoidance and distress in real-world situations, using an established measure, before and after treatment and then do so again six months later. The hope is that the treatment will reduce participants’ anxiety, which will, in turn, improve other symptoms, particularly persecutory delusions. Freeman co-founded an Oxford spin-off company, Oxford VR, to develop and commercialize the technology. And if the trial is successful, gameChange could be rolled out by the NHS. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 26478 - Posted: 08.02.2019

By Katie Camero For humans, slight variations in temperature don’t mean much. But for some turtles, they mean the difference between whether embryos come out male or female. Now, scientists have evidence that these embryos have some power over their sexual destiny: By moving to slightly warmer or cooler spots inside their eggs, freshwater turtle embryos can help determine their own sex. Not everyone is convinced. But if the new finding holds, this behavior could potentially save some turtle species from extinction by balancing their sex ratios. A reptile’s sex depends on hormones produced during development. For crocodiles, many fish, some lizards, and most turtles, those hormones in turn depend on external temperatures. Cooler temperatures typically lead to more males, and warmer temperatures generally lead to more females. That means a shift of just 2°C can make all of the offspring one sex. As average global temperatures rise, such a strategy could doom some species, including the already-endangered Chinese pond turtle (Mauremys reevesii). As weather warms, warmer eggs produce more and more females—leaving them fewer males to mate with. Wondering whether turtle embryos could respond to rapidly changing temperatures, scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing examined the behavior of the Chinese soft-shelled turtle (Pelodiscus sinensis). They discovered that the embryos could in fact move between cooler and warmer spots inside their paperclip-size eggs, they reported in 2011 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 26477 - Posted: 08.02.2019

By Knvul Sheikh It’s a myth that black widow female spiders always kill and consume their mates. But courtship remains perilous for males, cannibalism or no. The terrain, navigated in the dark, is challenging. The female’s web releases come-hither pheromones, but only about 12 percent of prospective males manage to reach it. And once there, they can expect to face male rivals competing to pass their genes on to the next generation. Usually, this results in wild displays of machismo. The males slash the female’s webs to make them less enticing to others. They deposit “mating plugs” in the female’s body to block rival sperm. Why not simply avoid the competition and seek out females’ webs empty of other males? But male black widows actually seem to thrive on the competition, according to a study published Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Researchers found that male black widows find potential mates faster by following the silk trails left behind by other males. “Males have to race to find females,” said Catherine Scott, an arachnologist at the University of Toronto Scarborough in Canada and the study’s lead author. “It makes sense for them to try to use all the tricks they can to find females as soon as possible, even if there are other males that have already found her.” If a male arrives an hour or two late at a female’s web, he still has a chance to interrupt the courting rituals of other males, and could still be the first to mate with the female, Ms. Scott said. Males typically make their way to a rendezvous by following female pheromones back to their source. But those signals must be at just the right distance, and uninterrupted by shifting winds and other factors. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 26476 - Posted: 08.01.2019

Bruce Bower Monkeys can keep strings of information in order by using a simple kind of logical thought. Rhesus macaque monkeys learned the order of items in a list with repeated exposure to pairs of items plucked from the list, say psychologist Greg Jensen of Columbia University and colleagues. The animals drew basic logical conclusions about pairs of listed items, akin to assuming that if A comes before B and B comes before C, then A comes before C, the scientists conclude July 30 in Science Advances. Importantly, rewards given to monkeys didn’t provide reliable guidance to the animals about whether they had correctly ordered pairs of items. Monkeys instead worked out the approximate order of images in the list, and used that knowledge to make choices in experiments about which of two images from the list followed the other, Jensen’s group says. Previous studies have suggested that a variety of animals, including monkeys, apes, pigeons, rats and crows, can discern the order of a list of items (SN: 7/5/08, p. 13). But debate persists about whether nonhuman creatures do so only with the prodding of rewards for correct responses or, at least sometimes, by consulting internal knowledge acquired about particular lists. Jensen’s group designed experimental sessions in which four monkeys completed as many as 600 trials to determine the order of seven images in a list. Images included a hot air balloon, an ear of corn and a zebra. Monkeys couldn’t rely on rewards to guide their choices. In some sessions, animals usually received a larger reward for correctly identifying which of two images came later in the list and a smaller reward for an incorrect response. In other sessions, incorrect responses usually yielded a larger reward than correct responses. Rewards consisted of larger or smaller gulps of water delivered through tubes to the moderately thirsty primates. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019

Keyword: Attention; Evolution
Link ID: 26475 - Posted: 08.01.2019

By Lydia Denworth An elderly woman suffering from late-stage Alzheimer’s disease had neither talked to nor reacted to any of her family members for years. Then, one day, she suddenly started chatting with her granddaughter, asking for news of other family members and even giving her granddaughter advice. “It was like talking to Rip van Winkle,” the granddaughter told University of Virginia researchers of her astonishment. Unfortunately, the reawakening did not last—the grandmother died the next week. That event got written up as what the case study authors called terminal lucidity—a surprising, coherent episode of meaningful communication just before death in someone presumed incapable of social interaction. Yet it was by no means unique. Physician Basil Eldadah, who heads the geriatric branch at the National Institute on Aging (NIA), had heard such stories and filed them away as intriguing accounts. But in 2018, spurred by the need to make progress combatting Alzheimer’s, Eldadah began to think it was time to do more and organized a workshop for interested scientists. After all, if the grandmother was able to tap into mysterious neural reserves, cases such as hers might help scientists explore how cognition could possibly be restored—even briefly—in patients with the most advanced neurodegenerative disease. This summer Eldadah and the scientists he assembled have taken the first steps toward systematic and rigorous study of what they are now calling paradoxical lucidity, a broader label intended to capture the dramatic, unexpected and puzzling nature of the phenomenon. The workshop participants published two papers on it in the August issue of Alzheimer’s and Dementia, and the NIA announced plans to fund relevant research next year. The early goals are modest—the formulation of an operational definition and a gauging of the phenomenon’s prevalence. The possible long-term implications, however, are tantalizing. “If the brain were able to access that normal state, even if it’s transient, it would suggest that there’s some requisite level of machinery that can work under some kind of unique circumstance,” anesthesiologist and neuroscientist George Mashour, director of the Center for Consciousness Science at the University of Michigan and lead author of one of the papers, says. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26474 - Posted: 08.01.2019

By Nicholas Bakalar A new study confirms earlier reports that anemia — a condition caused by having too little hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying component of red blood cells — increases the risk for dementia. It found that having high hemoglobin levels does so as well. Dutch researchers looked at 12,305 people without dementia at the start of the study, measuring their hemoglobin levels and following them for an average of 12 years. Over the period, 1,520 developed dementia, including 1,194 with Alzheimer’s disease. The study is in Neurology. The scientists divided the hemoglobin levels into five groups, low to high. Compared with those in the middle one-fifth, those in the highest fifth had a 20 percent increased risk for any dementia type, and a 22 percent increased risk for Alzheimer’s. Those in the lowest were at a 29 percent increased risk for dementia and a 36 percent increased risk for Alzheimer’s. The researchers controlled for education level, blood pressure, diabetes, lipid-lowering medication, alcohol intake and other health and behavioral characteristics. “We don’t have the intervention studies that would show that modifying hemoglobin could prevent dementia,” said the lead author, Frank J. Wolters, a researcher at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, “and we can’t recommend interventions based on this study. In the meantime, given the other beneficial effects of treating anemia, this study provides an extra incentive.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26473 - Posted: 08.01.2019

Ian Sample Science editor Doctors have turned the brain signals for speech into written sentences in a research project that aims to transform how patients with severe disabilities communicate in the future. The breakthrough is the first to demonstrate how the intention to say specific words can be extracted from brain activity and converted into text rapidly enough to keep pace with natural conversation. In its current form, the brain-reading software works only for certain sentences it has been trained on, but scientists believe it is a stepping stone towards a more powerful system that can decode in real time the words a person intends to say. A neuroscientist explains: the need for ‘empathetic citizens’ - podcast Doctors at the University of California in San Francisco took on the challenge in the hope of creating a product that allows paralysed people to communicate more fluidly than using existing devices that pick up eye movements and muscle twitches to control a virtual keyboard. “To date there is no speech prosthetic system that allows users to have interactions on the rapid timescale of a human conversation,” said Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon and lead researcher on the study published in the journal Nature. The work, funded by Facebook, was possible thanks to three epilepsy patients who were about to have neurosurgery for their condition. Before their operations went ahead, all three had a small patch of tiny electrodes placed directly on the brain for at least a week to map the origins of their seizures. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Brain imaging; Language
Link ID: 26472 - Posted: 07.31.2019

Cassandra Willyard Rob Summers was flat on his back at a rehabilitation institute in Kentucky when he realized he could wiggle his big toe. Up, down, up, down. This was new — something he hadn’t been able to do since a hit-and-run driver left him paralysed from the chest down. When that happened four years earlier, doctors had told him that he would never move his lower body again. Now he was part of a pioneering experiment to test the power of electrical stimulation in people with spinal-cord injuries. “Susie, look, I can wiggle my toe,” Summers said. Susan Harkema, a neurophysiologist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, sat nearby, absorbed in the data on her computer. She was incredulous. Summers’s toe might be moving, but he was not in control. Of that she was sure. Still, she decided to humour him. She asked him to close his eyes and move his right toe up, then down, and then up. She moved on to the left toe. He performed perfectly. “Holy shit,” Harkema said. She was paying attention now. “How is that happening?” he asked. “I have no idea,” she replied. Summers had been a university baseball player with major-league ambitions before the vehicle that struck him snapped all the ligaments and tendons in his neck, allowing one of his vertebra to pound the delicate nerve tissue it was meant to protect. Doctors classified the injury as complete; the motor connections to his legs had been wiped out. When Harkema and her colleagues implanted a strip of tiny electrodes in his spine in 2009, they weren’t trying to restore Summers’s ability to move on his own. Instead, the researchers were hoping to demonstrate that the spine contains all the circuitry necessary for the body to stand and to step. They reasoned that such an approach might allow people with spinal-cord injuries to stand and walk, using electrical stimulation to replace the signals that once came from the brain.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 26471 - Posted: 07.31.2019

By Brooke N. Dulka As you read this article, your brain has begun a series of complicated chemical steps in order to form a memory. How long you keep this memory may well depend on whether you are a man or a woman. Some scientists think that the reason for this difference may be estrogens. Women are disproportionately affected by Alzheimer’s disease, dementia and memory loss. In fact, almost two thirds of Americans living with Alzheimer’s are women. While researchers across the globe are still working to uncover the basic mechanisms of learning and memory, it is now known that estrogens help to regulate memory formation in both males and females. From a cultural and societal standpoint, when people think of estrogen they probably imagine pregnancy, periods and woman-fueled rage. Most people probably don’t consider memory; but maybe it’s time we all start thinking about estrogens’ role in memory a little more. Karyn Frick, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, studies the connection between estrogens and memory. She and her students are among the scientists working to uncover the basic cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying memory formation. Part of Frick’s research focuses on how estrogens enhance memory, particularly through their action in the hippocampus. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 26470 - Posted: 07.31.2019