By Austin Frakt New graduates of Fayetteville State University last month in North Carolina. A college degree is linked to higher life expectancy, but does it cause it?CreditTravis Education is associated with better health outcomes, but trying to figure out whether it actually causes better health is tricky. People with at least some college education have mortality rates (deaths per 1,000 individuals per year) less than half of those without any college education, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In addition, people who are more educated exhibit less anxiety and depression, have fewer functional limitations, and are less likely to have a serious health condition like diabetes, cardiovascular disease or asthma. But causality runs both ways. People in poor health from a young age may be unable to pursue education as much as those with better health. On the other hand, a person who tends to focus on long-term outcomes may be motivated to develop healthier habits like regular exercise — even if blocked from a pursuit of higher education. Some clever studies have teased out the causal effects of education by exploiting natural experiments. One, by the U.C.L.A economist Adriana Lleras-Muney, relied on state compulsory education laws enacted between 1915 and 1939. These laws required some children to obtain more education than they might have otherwise, resulting in longer lives for those that did so. According to the study, having an additional year of education by 1960 increased life expectancy at age 35 by 1.7 years. Studies that relied on inducements for greater education because of a poor labor market or as a way to avoid the Vietnam draft found that increased education led to better health and a lower likelihood of smoking. This finding is one clue about how education may improve health. It can reduce people’s engagement in risky behaviors, perhaps because those behaviors could threaten the higher income that greater education typically confers. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 26289 - Posted: 06.03.2019

Coffee lovers who drink up to 25 cups a day can rest assured the drink is not bad for their heart, scientists say. Some previous studies have suggested that coffee stiffens arteries, putting pressure on the heart and increasing the likelihood of a heart attack or stroke, with drinkers warned to cut down their consumption. But a new study of more than 8,000 people across the UK found that drinking five cups a day, and even up to 25, was no worse for the arteries than drinking less than a cup a day. The research, part-funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF), is being presented at the British Cardiovascular Society conference in Manchester. Get Society Weekly: our newsletter for public service professionals Read more Experts from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) divided 8,412 people into three groups for the study. The first group was of those who drink less than one cup of coffee a day, the second was of those who drink between one and three cups a day, and the third was those who drink more than three. Some people in the latter group drank up to 25 cups a day, although the average number for people in this group was five cups a day. Researchers found that even those drinking up to 25 cups of coffee a day were no more likely to have stiffening of arteries than those who drank less than one cup a day.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26288 - Posted: 06.03.2019

By Veronique Greenwood After a long hike on a hot day, few things are more rewarding than a tall, frosty glass of water. The rush of pleasure that comes with a drink might feel like a sign from your body that you’ve done the right thing, a reward for remedying your dehydration. But that pleasing sensation isn’t actually linked to your real need for a drink. In a study published Wednesday in the journal Neuron, a group of scientists who have studied how thirst works in the bodies of mammals report that the neural systems related to the feeling of reward work independently of those involved in monitoring water intake. Staying hydrated is high on most organisms’ list of priorities. Mammals have multiple ways of tracking the water they’ve consumed, a subject Yuki Oka, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology, has long studied in mice. The mechanisms in other mammals, including humans, may be similar. One method he and colleagues explored in earlier research involves the gulping motion made by the throat as liquid is swallowed. That gulping sends a message to the brain that water has been consumed, quieting the neurons that generate the urge to drink. But that happens regardless of whether the substance gulped was water or oil, suggesting that the act of gulping only briefly convinces your brain that your thirst is quenched. The body also tracks the presence of water in the gut, and when it becomes clear that water is not arriving, thirst returns. Dr. Oka and colleagues report in their latest study that injecting water directly into the stomachs of mice did quench thirst, albeit after a longer lag. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26287 - Posted: 06.01.2019

By Jonathan Ore, Dawna Dingwall & Dr. Brian Goldman In his youth, Dayton Wilson was a free spirit, an aspiring rap artist with a burgeoning talent at playing the electric guitar. That all changed in September 2016, when a fentanyl overdose left him with brain damage. Wilson's speech and balance were most greatly affected after the overdose. His movements are as slow and deliberate as the way he talks. His vocabulary remains intact, but he speaks as though a recording of his voice is being played at half-speed. Today it takes the 24-year-old a few moments to find the words he wants to say. "Sometimes it's too loud. Sometimes I can't find an opportune moment to try to say [the right word]," Wilson said in an interview with White Coat, Black Art. His hands often involuntarily clench into fists. He's likely permanently lost the dexterity that allowed him to play the guitar. While most news headlines centre on the thousands of deaths that have resulted from opioid-related overdoses, advocates say those who survive, like Wilson, are largely forgotten, even as they're left struggling to deal with the life-changing aftermath. "The death numbers are what's reported and people, I think, get the impression that you have a drug overdose, you get naloxone and you survive. Or you do not get naloxone … and you die," said Dr. Delbert Dorscheid, a critical care physician at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26286 - Posted: 06.01.2019

Kerry Grens In mice whose sense of smell has been disabled, a squirt of stem cells into the nose can restore olfaction, researchers report today (May 30) in Stem Cell Reports. The introduced “globose basal cells,” which are precursors to smell-sensing neurons, engrafted in the nose, matured into nerve cells, and sent axons to the mice’s olfactory bulbs in the brain. “We were a bit surprised to find that cells could engraft fairly robustly with a simple nose drop delivery,” senior author Bradley Goldstein of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine says in a press release. “To be potentially useful in humans, the main hurdle would be to identify a source of cells capable of engrafting, differentiating into olfactory neurons, and properly connecting to the olfactory bulbs of the brain. Further, one would need to define what clinical situations might be appropriate, rather than the animal model of acute olfactory injury.” Goldstein and others have independently tried stem cell therapies to restore olfaction in animals previously, but he and his coauthors note in their study that it’s been difficult to determine whether the regained function came from the transplant or from endogenous repair stimulated by the experimental injury to induce a loss of olfaction. So his team developed a mouse whose resident globose basal cells only made nonfunctional neurons, and any restoration of smell would be attributed to the introduced cells. © 1986–2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Stem Cells
Link ID: 26285 - Posted: 06.01.2019

By JoAnna Klein Say you are prescribed medication for depression, anxiety or even just to sleep. Would you want to take it if you knew that the drug had only been tested on men and male animals? Rebecca Shansky, a neuroscientist at Northeastern University in Boston, thinks you might not. When she tells nonscientific audiences that researchers “for the most part don’t study female animals, people are blown away,” she said. She added: “It seems like such an obvious thing to a normal person. But when you come up in the academic and science world, it’s like, ‘Oh no, females are so complicated, so we just don’t study them.’” In 2016, the National Institutes of Health and its Canadian counterpart mandated that all preclinical research they fund must include female subjects. Now, Dr. Shansky and other scientists wonder if that requirement will do enough to improve how research is conducted. In an essay published Thursday in Science, Dr. Shansky questions whether simply adding female organisms to experiments or looking for sex differences misses the point. She warns that this is a public health problem — with implications beyond neuroscience — and says scientists should design experiments better suited to both biological sexes. If scientists don’t stop looking through a male lens, outdated gender stereotypes will continue to foster dangerous assumptions about the brain and behavior, resulting in clinical studies and eventual treatments that don’t work equally for all people on the gender spectrum. Basic research is the foundation for clinical studies and practice, and that often begins with animals, which offer controlled settings for research of human diseases. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 26284 - Posted: 05.31.2019

By Kelly Servick Genes are a powerful driver of risk for autism, but some researchers suspect another factor is also at play: the set of bacteria that inhabits the gut. That idea has been controversial, but a new study offers support for this gut-brain link. It reveals that mice develop autismlike behaviors when they are colonized by microbes from the feces of people with autism. The result doesn’t prove that gut bacteria can cause autism. But it suggests that, at least in mice, the makeup of the gut can contribute to some hallmark features of the disorder. “It’s quite an encouraging paper,” says John Cryan, a neuroscientist at University College Cork in Ireland who was not involved in the research. The idea that metabolites—the molecules produced by bacterial digestion—can influence brain activity “is plausible, it makes sense, and it will help push the field forward.” Many studies have found differences between the composition of the gut microbiomes in people with and without autism. But those studies can’t determine whether a microbial imbalance is responsible for autism symptoms or is a result of having the condition. To test the effect of the gut microbiome on behavior, Sarkis Mazmanian, a microbiologist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, and collaborators put fecal samples from children with and without autism into the stomachs of germ-free mice, which had no microbiomes of their own. The researchers then mated pairs of mice colonized with the same microbiomes, so their offspring would be exposed to a set of human microbes early in development. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 26283 - Posted: 05.31.2019

By Cara Giaimo If you’ve ever taken a big bite of wasabi, you know what comes next: a painful zing that creeps over your whole scalp. You aren’t the only animal that feels this way. The condiment’s sinus-burning kick comes from a chemical compound called allyl isothiocyanate, or AITC, that actively damages proteins within cells. Flies and flatworms shun it, as do mice and wolf spiders. “Practically every animal you look at will avoid AITC,” said Gary Lewin, a molecular physiologist at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. But there is one exception. In a paper published Thursday in Science, scientists including Dr. Lewin showed that the highveld mole rat, a rodent found in South Africa, is entirely impervious to the substance. The study “demonstrates the power of studying naturally occurring differences in pain sensitivity,” said Ewan St. John Smith, a neurobiologist at the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the research. The work could eventually lead to more effective pain treatment in humans. The scientists didn’t originally set out to find a wasabi aficionado. They were simply hoping to compare how several mole rat species respond to things that cause pain. Years ago, Dr. Lewin and others discovered that naked mole rats — pink, bucktoothed creatures known for their uncanny longevity, insectlike social cultures and blasé attitude toward oxygen — aren’t sensitive to acid or capsaicin, the compound that gives peppers their burn. To see whether their close relatives shared these traits, they exposed nine species of mole rat to a few pain agents. The naked mole rats didn’t react well to AITC. Neither did most of the other species the group studied, including the humans administering the trials. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26282 - Posted: 05.31.2019

By George Musser, Even the slightest touch can consume Kirsten Lindsmith’s attention. When someone shakes her hand or her cat snuggles up against her, for example, it becomes hard for her to think about anything else. “I’m taken out of the moment for however long the sensation lasts,” she says. Some everyday sensations, such as getting her hands wet, can feel like torture: “I usually compare it to the visceral, repulsive feeling you’d get plunging your hand into a pile of rotting garbage,” says the 27-year-old autistic writer. Stephanie Dehennin, an autistic illustrator who lives in Belgium, detests gentle touches but doesn’t mind firm hugs. “I will feel actual rage if someone strokes me or touches me very lightly,” she says. Dehennin seeks out deep pressure to relieve her stress. “I’ll sit between my bed and my nightstand, for example — squeezed between furniture.” Strong reactions to touch are remarkably widespread among people who have autism, despite the condition’s famed heterogeneity. “The touch thing is as close to universal as they come,” says Gavin Bollard, an autistic blogger who lives in Australia and writes about his and his autistic sons’ experiences. These responses are often described as a general hypersensitivity, but they are more complex than that: Sometimes autistic people crave touch; sometimes they cringe from it. For many people on the spectrum, these sensations are so intense that they take measures to shape their ‘touchscape.’ Some pile on heavy blankets at night for the extra weight; others cut off their clothing tags. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Autism; Emotions
Link ID: 26281 - Posted: 05.30.2019

By Diana Kwon Few things are more refreshing than enjoying a cool beverage after spending a day under the hot summer sun. But gulping down a drink does not always quench thirst. Seawater, for example, may look appealing to someone stranded in the middle of the ocean, but taking a swig of it will only worsen dehydration. Scientists have now discovered that in rodents, signals from both the throat and gut control feelings of thirst. These distinct pathways may explain why consuming a beverage is typically refreshing but does not always sate one’s thirst, according to a study by Yuki Oka, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology, and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology, published May 29 in Neuron. Last year, Oka’s team reported that the simple act of gulping activated a circuit in the lamina terminalis, a region near the front of the brain, which ultimately led to the suppression of activity in neurons responsible for generating feelings of thirst. This throat-brain pathway, which the researchers identified in mice, switched on regardless of what an animal consumed—water, saline solution and oil produced similar effects. But the fact that all of these substances were able to inhibit the brain’s “thirst” neurons indicated that there was something missing. After all, if any liquid could satisfy an animal’s thirst, it might not consume enough water to remain hydrated. According to Oka, behavioral studies in animals dating back decades suggested that there was an additional mechanism in the gut that signaled the presence of water to the brain. So in their latest investigation, Oka’s team set out to map the brain circuits responsible for receiving these signals. By injecting fluids directly into the guts of mice, the researchers discovered that in order for the rodents to feel fully hydrated, this second gut-based circuit needed to be activated. Without these gastrointestinal signals—which, unlike ones from the throat, selectively responded to the presence of water—the brain’s “thirst” neurons quickly revved up again, driving the animals to drink more. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 26280 - Posted: 05.30.2019

By Malin Fezehai Muazzez Kocek, 46, is considered one of the best whistlers in Kuşköy, a village tucked away in the picturesque Pontic Mountains in Turkey’s northern Giresun province. Her whistle can be heard over the area’s vast tea fields and hazelnut orchards, several miles farther than a person’s voice. When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey visited Kuşköy in 2012, she greeted him and proudly whistled, “Welcome to our village!” She uses kuş dili, or “bird language,” which transforms the full Turkish vocabulary into varied-pitch frequencies and melodic lines. For hundreds of years, this whistled form of communication has been a critical for the farming community in the region, allowing complex conversations over long distances and facilitating animal herding. Today, there are about 10,000 people in the larger region that speak it, but because of the increased use of cellphones, which remove the need for a voice to carry over great distances, that number is dwindling. The language is at risk of dying out. Of Ms. Kocek’s three children, only her middle daughter, Kader, 14, knows bird language. Ms. Kocek began learning bird language at six years old, by working in the fields with her father. She has tried to pass the tradition on to her three daughters; even though they understand it, only her middle child, Kader Kocek, 14, knows how to speak, and can whistle Turkey’s national anthem. Turkey is one of a handful of countries in the world where whistling languages exist. Similar ways of communicating are known to have been used in the Canary Islands, Greece, Mexico, and Mozambique. They fascinate researchers and linguistic experts, because they suggest that the brain structures that process language are not as fixed as once thought. There is a long-held belief that language interpretation occurs mostly in the left hemisphere, and melody, rhythm and singing on the right. But a study that biopsychologist Onur Güntürkün conducted in Kuşköy, suggests that whistling language is processed in both hemispheres. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 26279 - Posted: 05.30.2019

By James Gallagher Health and science correspondent, BBC News Ultra-processed foods - such as chicken nuggets, ice cream and breakfast cereals - have been linked to early death and poor health, scientists say. Researchers in France and Spain say the amount of such food being eaten has soared. Their studies are not definite proof of harm but do come hot on the heels of trials suggesting ultra-processed foods lead to overeating. Experts expressed caution but called for further investigation. What are ultra-processed foods? The term comes from a way of classifying food by how much industrial processing it has been through. The lowest category is "unprocessed or minimally processed foods", which include: • fruit • vegetables • milk • meat • legumes such as lentils • seeds • grains such as rice • eggs "Processed foods" have been altered to make them last longer or taste better - generally using salt, oil, sugar or fermentation. This category includes: • cheese • bacon • home-made bread • tinned fruit and vegetables • smoked fish • beer Then come "ultra-processed foods", which have been through more substantial industrial processing and often have long ingredient lists on the packet, including added preservatives, sweeteners or colour enhancers. Prof Maira Bes-Rastrollo, from the University of Navarra, told BBC News: "It is said that if a product contains more than five ingredients, it is probably ultra-processed." Examples include: • processed meat such as sausages and hamburgers • breakfast cereals or cereal bars • instant soups • sugary fizzy drinks • chicken nuggets • cake • chocolate • ice cream • mass-produced bread • many "ready to heat" meals such as pies and pizza | meal-replacement shakes How bad were the findings? The first study, by the University of Navarra, in Spain, followed 19,899 people for a decade and assessed their diet every other year. There were 335 deaths during the study. But for every 10 deaths among those eating the least ultra-processed food, there were 16 deaths among those eating the most (more than four portions a day). © 2019 BBC

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 26278 - Posted: 05.30.2019

By Sheila Kaplan LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Alex Carll was presenting his research about the impact of e-cigarette smoke on mouse hearts at an American Heart Association conference when a man from Juul Labs approached him and started asking questions. “He seemed genuinely concerned about the health implications of Juul,” said Dr. Carll, who recalled meeting the e-cigarette company’s medical liaison, Jeff Vaughan, in November as he stood by a poster of his research findings. “He said they were looking for people to collaborate with and that they could offer up to $200,000.” As a 37-year-old assistant professor of physiology at the University of Louisville medical school, with his eyes on his own research lab, Dr. Carll was tempted. “Two hundred thousand is a lot, just for supplies and equipment,” Dr. Carll said. “That would get me off the ground and running.” Wary of hurting his reputation, however, Dr. Carll turned Juul down. That scenario is playing out at medical conferences and universities across the country, as the company aggressively recruits scientists to prove to the Food and Drug Administration, and to the public, that “juuling” offers more public health benefit than risk. If it fails to submit proper evidence by 2022, the agency could halt all sales. Company representatives have been stalking e-cigarette researchers at conferences, blitzing speakers with emails and phone calls to ask for meetings and slides, and offering tantalizing amounts of money for academics. But rejections like Dr. Carll’s have created a troubling cycle for Juul, whose popular vaping products have contributed to what health officials have called an epidemic of e-cigarette use and nicotine addiction among teenagers. Because many researchers have spurned the company’s lucrative offers, Juul has had to rely on scientists with tobacco industry ties — further damaging the company’s credibility and making it even tougher to attract independent investigators. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26277 - Posted: 05.29.2019

Nicholas A. Christakis What is our conscience, and where does it come from? In her highly readable Conscience, the philosopher Patricia Churchland argues that “we would have no moral stance on anything unless we were social”. That we have a conscience at all relates to how evolution has shaped our neurobiology for social living. Thus, we judge what is right or wrong using feelings that urge us in a general direction and judgement that shapes these urges into actions. Such judgement typically reflects “some standard of a group to which the individual feels attached”. This idea of conscience as a neurobiological capacity for internalizing social norms contrasts with strictly philosophical accounts of how and why we tell right from wrong. There is a strand of thought in evolutionary biology (advanced, for instance, by the theorist Bret Weinstein) that the capacity for moral debate itself has a social function, binding groups regardless of the topics contested or their abstract moral ‘rightness’. Moreover, many of our moral rules — such as the idea that we should not betray our friends or abandon our children — have clearly been shaped by natural selection to optimize our capacity to live in groups. Other rules, for instance regarding the correctness of reciprocity, are similar: we feel quite intensely and innately that if someone gives us a gift of food, we should reciprocate on a future occasion. © 2019 Springer Nature Publishing AG

Keyword: Emotions; Consciousness
Link ID: 26276 - Posted: 05.29.2019

By Jan Hoffman Opening statements in the country’s first trial over whether a pharmaceutical company is liable for the opioid crisis began as a battle between fire and ice: Lawyers for Oklahoma, a state brought to its knees by addiction and overdose deaths, heatedly accused Johnson & Johnson of creating a deadly demand for the drugs, while the company coolly responded that it had acted responsibly and lawfully in its quest to offer relief to chronic pain patients. The trial, heard by a judge without a jury but livestreamed to the public, is being closely watched not only by those affected by prescription opioid addiction, but also by lawyers in almost 1,900 similar federal and state cases nationwide. Two other defendants who manufacture opioids settled with Oklahoma — Purdue Pharma will pay $270 million, Teva Pharmaceuticals, $85 million — leaving only J & J on trial. The state directly confronted what many legal experts have predicted will be the highest hurdle in the case: connecting one manufacturer of opioids to the cascading harms wrought by the entire industry. J & J pushed back hard, arguing that the state itself looked the other way as its own drug review board and prescription monitoring program for years neglected to swoop down on sources of diverted opioids. In addition, it said, Oklahoma could not tie any death directly to the company’s products — Duragesic, a fentanyl patch, and Nucynta, an opioid pill it no longer makes. “You hear about pill mills,” said Larry D. Ottaway, the lead counsel for a J & J subsidiary, Janssen Pharmaceuticals. “You don’t hear about patch mills.” Indeed both sides introduced what are sure to be their signature earworms, themes that will be echoed throughout the trial, estimated to take about two months. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26275 - Posted: 05.29.2019

Ashley Yeager The US Food and Drug Administration has approved a new treatment for a rare childhood disorder that costs $2.125 million for single dose—the most expensive medicine on the market. The medicine is designed to treat spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a condition driven by defects in the SMN1 gene, which causes afflicted babies to lose muscle control. The illness affects about 400 babies in the US each year and kills those with the most common form of the disease in just a few years. The new treatment is a gene therapy that uses genetically modified viruses to deliver healthy copies of the SMN1 gene to patients’ cells so they can generate a protein that helps the babies develop normally. In tests of the treatment, babies who received it by 6 months of age didn’t have as severe muscle problems as those who didn’t get the drug. Infants getting the drug after six months also didn’t lose muscle control, but they suffered irreversible damage. Babies who got the treatment the earliest were the healthiest, according to the Associated Press. “We saw just remarkable results for these kids,” David Lennon tells NPR. Lennon is the president of AveXis, the company, owned by Novartis that developed the drug, called Zolgensma. It is only the second FDA-approved gene therapy designed to treat a genetic disorder. While the success of the treatment is being celebrated, the price tag is taking heat. “It's absolutely stunning,” Peter Bach, who studies health policy at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, tells NPR. The drug’s price tag, he says, drains resources from society, and it’s not alone. © 1986–2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Muscles
Link ID: 26274 - Posted: 05.29.2019

By C. Claiborne Ray Q. Humans can’t drink seawater. So what do sea lions, whales, dolphins and sea birds drink? A. Marine animals may consume both freshwater and saltwater. They rely on various adaptations for survival when only saltwater is available. Many marine mammals have specialized organs called reniculate kidneys with multiple lobes, increasing their urine-concentrating efficiency beyond that of humans. These animals can handle high concentrations of salt in seawater without becoming dehydrated by salt buildup, as humans would. Experts now believe, however, that many of these creatures drink seawater only occasionally. Instead they get low-salt water from what they eat or manage to produce it on their own. Whales, for example, have the specialized kidneys but need far less water than land mammals. Whales get water mostly from the small sea creatures, like krill, that form much of their diet. Seabirds, on the other hand, have special organs called salt glands above their eyes that extract excess salt from the bloodstream and excrete it through the nostrils. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 26273 - Posted: 05.29.2019

By Jane E. Brody Although the woman in her 50s had been effectively treated for depression, she remained plagued by symptoms that often accompany it: fatigue, sleepiness and lethargy, even though she thought she was getting enough sleep. With depression no longer causing her persistent symptoms, her psychiatrist advised her to consult a sleep specialist. Sure enough, a night in the sleep lab at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine revealed that while the woman was supposedly asleep, she experienced micro-awakenings about 18 times an hour, resulting in sleep that restored neither body nor brain. All night long, she would stop breathing for more than 10 seconds at a time, followed by a mini-arousal and a snore as she gasped for breath to raise the depleted oxygen level in her blood. Diagnosis: Obstructive sleep apnea, an increasingly common yet often missed or untreated condition that can result in poor quality of life, a risk of developing heart disease, stroke, diabetes and even cancer, and perhaps most important of all, a threefold increased risk of often-fatal motor vehicle accidents. Obstructive sleep apnea afflicts about 9 percent of women and 24 percent of men, most of them middle-aged or older, yet as many as 9 in 10 adults with this treatable condition remain undiagnosed, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. The condition is on the rise because the most frequent cause is obesity, which continues its unrelenting climb among American adults. Sleep apnea afflicts more than two people in five who have a body mass index of more than 30, and three in five adults with metabolic syndrome, Dr. Sigrid C. Veasey and Dr. Ilene M. Rosen wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine in April. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26272 - Posted: 05.28.2019

/ By Jennie Erin Smith Piedad’s house sits above the cemetery in Girardota, Colombia, just north of Medellín. From her front porch, the view gives way to green hills, each home to hamlets with sugarcane plots and tile-roofed houses tucked in among the trees. One of these hillside hamlets is where Piedad and her 11 siblings grew up. Their father, Horacio, worked in cane fields and sugar mills, and their mother sold fruit from her orchard; their grandmother made pots from clay she dug across the river. When earthquakes destroyed their home in 1979, the family moved into town and left rural life behind. Why should two families with parallel mutations co-exist in one tiny corner of the Andes? Horacio showed the first symptoms of dementia soon afterward. He ignored the food he was served and got lost returning from church. He grew aggressive and delusional, and Piedad would return from her job at a sugar-packing plant to help bathe him, holding back tears as he kicked and punched. Horacio died in 1984 from what his doctors called senile dementia, the same disease that killed his father and three of his siblings. By the early 2000s, four of Piedad’s own siblings, then in their 40s and 50s, were showing signs of dementia. A local doctor referred them to a group of investigators in Medellín who studied families with a unique genetic mutation that causes early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Nicknamed the Paisa mutation after the people of Colombia’s Antioquia region, who call themselves paisas, it occurred on a gene, called presenilin-1, implicated in familial Alzheimer’s. The families affected tended to be white farmers living in remote mountain towns that felt untouched by time. Copyright 2019 Undark

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 26271 - Posted: 05.28.2019

by Scott Alexander The first thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is its size. By conservative estimates, a quarter of the psychiatrists in the United States are packed into a single giant San Francisco convention center, more than 15,000 people. Being in a crowd of 15,000 psychiatrists is a weird experience. You realize that all psychiatrists look alike in an indefinable way. The men all look balding, yet dignified. The women all look maternal, yet stylish. Sometimes you will see a knot of foreign-looking people huddled together, their nametags announcing them as the delegation from the Nigerian Psychiatric Association or the Nepalese Psychiatric Association or somewhere else very far away. But however exotic, something about them remains ineffably psychiatrist. The second thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is that the staircase is shaming you for not knowing enough about Vraylar®. Seems kind of weird. Maybe I’ll just take the escalator… …no, the escalator is advertising Latuda®, the “number one branded atypical antipsychotic”. Aaaaaah! Maybe I should just sit down for a second and figure out what to do next… AAAAH, CAN’T SIT DOWN, VRAYLAR® HAS GOTTEN TO THE BENCHES TOO! Surely there’s a non-Vraylar bench somewhere in this 15,000 person convention center! …whatever, close enough. You know how drug companies pay six or seven figures for thirty-second television ads just on the off chance that someone with the relevant condition might be watching? You know how they employ drug reps to flatter, cajole, and even seduce doctors who might prescribe their drug? Well, it turns out that having 15,000 psychiatrists in one building sparks a drug company feeding frenzy that makes piranhas look sedate by comparison. Every flat surface is covered in drug advertisements.

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 26270 - Posted: 05.28.2019