By Consumer Reports s has no financial relationship with any advertisers on this site. All medications have the potential to cause unwanted side effects, and depression is among them. One-third of Americans are now taking meds that can cause this mood disorder, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in June. Other research has had similar findings, but this is the largest review on the topic to date. The study authors found that about 200 prescription drugs, including some often used by older adults — such as proton-pump inhibitors (PPIs) to treat acid reflux and beta blockers for hypertension — can lead to depression. But doctors may not know this. “Many physicians may not be aware that several commonly prescribed medications are associated with an increased risk of this disorder,” says study author Mark Olfson, professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York. In the study, the more drugs people took, the higher their depression risk. About 7 percent of those taking one such drug were depressed compared with 15.3 percent of those taking at least three. This is concerning for older adults, who may take multiple medications and are more vulnerable to drug side effects, says Michael Hochman, an associate professor of clinical medicine at Keck Medicine at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25825 - Posted: 12.26.2018

Jon Hamilton It was a question about soccer that got Philip Bayly interested in brain injuries. Bayly, a mechanical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis, was approached by several doctors who wanted advice about some young soccer players they were treating. "They said, 'Well, we've got some kids who have concussions and they want to know if they can go back to play. And we don't know what's happening to their head when they're heading a soccer ball,' " Bayly recalls. Does a header have a big effect or a small one? The doctors thought Bayly might have the answer. "I said, 'That's really interesting. I play soccer and my kids play soccer, and I don't know what's happening when you head a soccer ball either,' " Bayly told them. "But I know how we can find out." So in the early 2000s, Bayly brought soccer players into his lab to figure out precisely how much acceleration their heads experienced when they headed balls hurled at them by a machine. The answer was 15 to 20 times the force of gravity, a relatively minor impact. "Jump up and down you're feeling maybe 4 or 5 G's when you hit the ground," Bayly says. "When you play football, you have a hard collision with someone else, it's maybe 50 to 100 G's." © 2018 npr

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 25824 - Posted: 12.26.2018

By Christina Karns ’Tis the season when the conversation shifts to what you’re thankful for. Gathered with family and friends around a holiday feast, for instance, people may recount some of the biggies — such as their health or their children — or smaller things that enhance everyday life — such as happening upon a great movie while channel surfing or enjoying a favorite seasonal food. Psychology researchers recognize that taking time to be thankful has benefits for well-being. Gratitude not only goes along with more optimism, less anxiety and depression, and greater goal attainment, but also is associated with fewer symptoms of illness and other physical benefits. In recent years, researchers have been making connections between the internal experience of gratitude and the external practice of altruism. How does being thankful about things in your own life relate to any selfless concern you may have about the well-being of others? As a neuroscientist, I’m particularly interested in the brain regions and connections that support gratitude and altruism. I’ve been exploring how changes in one might lead to changes in the other. To study the relationship between gratitude and altruism in the brain, my colleagues and I first asked volunteers questions meant to tease out how frequently they feel thankful and the degree to which they tend to care about the well-being of others. Then we used statistics to determine the extent to which someone’s gratitude could predict their altruism. As others have found, the more grateful people in this group tended to be more altruistic. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 25823 - Posted: 12.26.2018

By Emily Laber-Warren A few years ago, scientists conducted a real-world experiment at a ThyssenKrupp steel factory in Germany. They assigned the day shift to early risers and the late shift to night owls. Soon the steel workers, many of whom had been skeptical at the outset, were getting an extra hour of sleep on work nights. By simply aligning work schedules with people’s internal clocks, the researchers had helped people get more and better rest. “They got 16 percent more sleep, almost a full night’s length over the course of the week,” said Till Roenneberg, a chronobiologist at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, who headed the study. “That is enormous.” In recent years, American educators have been paying increased attention to their students’ sleep needs, with growing debate about delaying school start times. Now a number of businesses are following suit, encouraging their employees to work when their bodies are most awake. “It’s a huge financial burden not to sleep properly,” Dr. Roenneberg said. “The estimates go toward 1 percent of gross national product,” both in the United States and Germany. Emerging science reveals that each of us has an optimal time to fall asleep and wake up, a personalized biological rhythm known as a “chronotype.” When you don’t sleep at the time your body wants to sleep — your so-called biological night — you don’t sleep as well or as long, setting the stage not only for fatigue, poor work performance and errors but also health problems ranging from heart disease and obesity to anxiety and depression. A full 80 percent of people have work schedules that clash with their internal clocks, said Céline Vetter, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and director of the university’s circadian and sleep epidemiology lab. “The problem is huge,” Dr. Vetter said. “If we consider your individual chronotype and your work hours, the chances are very high that there’s quite a bit of misalignment.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Attention
Link ID: 25822 - Posted: 12.26.2018

By Philippa Roxby Health reporter, BBC News Every year, there are always more baby boys than girls born in England and Wales. Fact. Why? Since records began in 1838, the cries of babies born every year have been predominately male. In not one year, stretching back to the start of Queen Victoria's reign, have girls outnumbered boys at birth. In 2017, in England and Wales, for example, there were 348,071 live male births and 331,035 live female births - a difference of roughly 17,000. And that higher tally of males compared to females born each year is a pattern that has repeated itself for nearly 180 years. In fact, a ratio of roughly 105 male births for every 100 female ones is generally seen as natural and normal. It is fairly consistent around the world, although in some countries like China and India the gap is wider because male offspring are more desirable. More surprisingly, it is a ratio that has been known about since the 17th Century. But why this ratio exists is not yet completely understood - although there are several theories. The first theory is an evolutionary one which says that in order to have an equal number of males and female in adulthood, there have to be slightly more males born. That is because being a male is a dangerous thing. Males are more likely than females to die in childhood and at all stages of life - from accidents, taking risks, suicide and from health problems. © 2018 BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25821 - Posted: 12.26.2018

Alison Abbott A court in Germany has dismissed a high-profile case of alleged animal cruelty brought against neuroscientist Nikos Logothetis, less than three weeks before hearings were scheduled to begin. The administrative court in Tübingen announced the decision on 19 December, citing new information in an expert report commissioned by the defence to review the evidence. The report was provided to prosecutors and the court at the beginning of this month. The charge against Logothetis — who is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (MPI-Biocyb) in Tübingen — was related to an alleged delay in euthanizing three sick research monkeys. Two other staff members, who have not been publicly named, were also accused of the same charge and have had their cases dismissed. The three people must now pay a small settlement, which is not associated with guilt, by mid-January. The case has roots in 2014, when an undercover animal-welfare activist infiltrated the facilities at the MPI-Biocyb and filmed the handling of some of the monkeys used in research in Logothetis’s lab. The German Animal Welfare Federation, a non-profit animal-rights organization in Bonn, used the footage to make multiple allegations of violations of animal-protection laws to police. In August 2017 a Tübingen judge dismissed all but one of the allegations, which related to the three sick monkeys. Two of the monkeys recovered after treatment, and the third was humanely killed after staff decided that it would not recover. © 2018 Springer Nature Publishing AG

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 25820 - Posted: 12.23.2018

By Scott Barry Kaufman In his classic 1923 essay, "Intelligence as the Tests Test It", Edwin Boring wrote "Intelligence is what the tests test." Almost a century of research later, we know that this definition is far too narrow. As long as a test is sufficiently cognitively complex and taps into enough diverse content, you can get a rough snapshot of a person's general cognitive ability-- and general cognitive ability predicts a wide range of important outcomes in life, including academic achievement, occupational performance, health, and longevity. But what about happiness? Prior studies have been mixed about this, with some studies showing no relationship between individual IQ and happiness, and other studies showing that those in the lowest IQ range report the lowest levels of happiness compared to those in the highest IQ group. In one study, however, the unhappiness of the lowest IQ range was reduced by 50% once income and mental health issues were taken into account. The authors concluded that "interventions that target modifiable variables such as income (e.g., through enhancing education and employment opportunities) and neurotic symptoms (e.g., through better detection of mental health problems) may improve levels of happiness in the lower IQ groups." One major limitations of these prior studies, however, is that they all rely on a single measure of happiness, notably life satisfaction. Modern day researchers now have measures to assess a much wider array of indicators of well-being, including autonomy, personal growth, positive relationships, self-acceptance, mastery, and purpose and meaning in life.

Keyword: Intelligence; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25819 - Posted: 12.23.2018

By Katharine Q. Seelye Eleanor Emmons Maccoby, a distinguished psychologist and a pioneer in the field of gender studies who was the first woman to head the Stanford University psychology department, died on Dec. 11 in Palo Alto, Calif. She was 101. Her death, at a retirement community, was confirmed by her son, Mark, who said the cause was pneumonia. Dr. Maccoby, whom the American Psychological Association listed among the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century, conducted pathbreaking research in child development and gender studies. She explored a wide range of topics, including interactions between parent and child and the effect of divorce on children. But the overarching themes of her long career were the differences between the sexes and how they develop. These were the subjects of two of her most significant books: “The Psychology of Sex Differences” (1974) and “The Two Sexes: Growing Up Apart, Coming Together” (1998). “She advanced our understanding of how girls and boys develop the characteristics that we think of as boy things and girl things,” Dr. John H. Flavell, a psychology professor emeritus at Stanford, said in a telephone interview. The answer involved a complex combination of biological, cognitive and social factors, including the dynamic in which children learn from other children. Dr. Maccoby did not initially consider herself a feminist. But she was gradually awakened by slights along the way, like being not allowed to enter the Faculty Club at Harvard through its front entrance, which was reserved for men, even though she was a member. Asked in a video interview in 2013 how she became interested in gender issues, she replied, “We lived it.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25817 - Posted: 12.23.2018

By: Arthur Robin Williams, M.D., and Frances R. Levin, M.D. There's no shortage of statistics about the depth of America's opioid epidemic: 72,000 overdose deaths just last year, more than 2 million with problems, and so on. But numbers only begin to tell the whole story. Beth Macy, who has spent three decades reporting on central Appalachia—which she claims is the birthplace of the modern opioid epidemic—focuses her book on social and economic trends and how they affect ordinary people. Our reviewers, colleagues at the Columbia University Division on Substance Use Disorders, are well qualified to comment. A new volume can be added to the panoply of books detailing the tragedies of the 21st century opioid epidemic. Beth Macy’s Dopesick (Little Brown & Co., 2018) is anchored in a handful of increasingly vocal and public Appalachia families afflicted by the expansion of opioid dealing into small towns and suburbs formerly thought immune to inner-city plagues of addiction. Dopesick largely reads as a human interest story, a series of intertwined portrayals of grief and terror as young family members descend into OxyContin (one quarter of the local high school students had reported trying the drug within two years of its 1996 market launch), then heroin, then synthetic opioids, reflecting the epidemic’ s tragic course. These painful and personal stories form the heart of Macy’s book and make it perhaps the most empathic of the volumes regarding the epidemic. That she can represent a major drug dealer with as much compassion as the grieving families of teenagers and young adults who died because of his trade speaks to her Southern warmth. Her shrewd tirelessness as a journalist enables her to discern the fault lines of the stories that matter most. © 2018 The Dana Foundation

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25816 - Posted: 12.23.2018

By Kimon de Greef CAPE TOWN — A musician from South Africa had a tumor in his brain, so doctors opened a hole in his skull to remove it. But they had a crucial request: He must play his acoustic guitar during the surgery. The musician, Musa Manzini, a jazz bassist, was awake when the doctors performed the surgery last week, and video footage from the local media site News24 shows him strumming an acoustic guitar slowly as they operated. The technique, known as “awake craniotomy,” allows doctors to operate on delicate areas of the brain — like the right frontal lobe, the site of Mr. Manzini’s tumor — without causing damage. Presumably, had he hit a wrong note, it would have been an immediate signal for the surgeons to probe elsewhere. “It can be very difficult to tell the difference between the tumor and normal brain tissue,” said Dr. Basil Enicker, a specialist neurosurgeon who led the operation at Inkosi Albert Luthuli Central Hospital, in the coastal city of Durban. “Once you’re near a critical area, you can pick it up early, because he will tell you.” The surgery is not unusual. The first craniotomies date to prehistoric times, with fossil records showing that patients had holes drilled in their skulls — and survived — as early as 8,000 years ago. In the 1930s, the Canadian-American neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield pioneered modern craniotomies, which he used to treat epilepsy. The procedure has become fairly common globally since then, posing no greater technical challenge than regular brain surgery, Dr. Enicker said. But choosing patients is very important: People who cough, for example, or who cannot lie still for extended periods, are far more dangerous to operate on. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging; Epilepsy
Link ID: 25815 - Posted: 12.22.2018

Patricia Janak Drugs of abuse have complex pharmacological effects that trigger many changes in brain function. One of these effects, the direct or indirect activation of neurons that release the neurotransmitter dopamine, is common to all drugs of abuse and has long been assumed to contribute to the development of addiction. Writing in Nature, Pascoli et al.1 report on the neurobiological mechanisms induced by the repeated activation of dopamine neurons that might explain why some drug users seek reward despite facing negative consequences — a type of compulsive behaviour that is a defining feature of human addiction2. The authors took an optogenetics approach to mimic the activation of the brain’s dopamine systems by drugs of abuse: they used laser light delivered through an optical fibre to activate dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the brains of genetically engineered mice. The mice could directly stimulate these neurons themselves by pressing a lever, and performed this action avidly during a test period of 40 minutes a day for almost 2 weeks. On subsequent days, the mice received a brief electric shock to their feet on one-third of the lever-pressing occasions, at random. Their behaviour under this condition revealed an intriguing variability: 40% of the mice (termed renouncers) greatly reduced the frequency of lever-pressing when given foot shocks (Fig. 1a), whereas the remaining 60% (perseverers) were willing to receive painful punishment for the opportunity to self-stimulate their dopamine neurons (Fig. 1b). As some of these authors have previously shown3, the persevering mice provide a model for persistent drug use despite negative consequences, and parallel the subset of human drug users whose drug use becomes compulsive. © 2018 Springer Nature Publishing AG

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25814 - Posted: 12.22.2018

Micaela Martinez, Kevin M. Bakker Does it ever seem like you’re invited to an awful lot of summer birthday gatherings? For good reason. In the United States, most births occur between June and early November. Count back nine months, and you’ll see that places most conceptions in the fall and winter. What’s going on? Is the crisp autumn air, or the joy (or anxiety) of the holiday season, triggering more unprotected sexual intercourse? Or is it something else entirely? It turns out reproduction is seasonal across all living organisms, from plants, to insects, to reptiles, to birds and mammals – including human beings. The ultimate explanation for this phenomenon is an evolutionary one. Earth’s environment is seasonal. Above or below the equator, the year is structured by the winter, spring, summer and fall. In equatorial regions, the wet and dry seasons punctuate the year. Organisms have evolved strategies to reproduce at the time of year that will maximize their lifetime reproductive success. Humans are no exception and maintain this evolutionary outcome: birth seasonality. Researchers, including us, have recently been working to understand more about why births are seasonal because these patterns can have a big impact on childhood disease outbreaks. The first studies demonstrating human birth seasonality date back to the early 1800s. © 2010–2018, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25813 - Posted: 12.22.2018

Rodrigo Pérez Ortega Nearly one-third of American adults sleep less than six hours each night, a broad new survey shows. Among nearly 400,000 respondents to the annual National Health Interview Survey, 32.9 percent reported this short sleep in 2017 — up from 28.6 percent in 2004 when researchers began noticing a slight drop in sleep time. That’s a 15 percent increase representing “more than 9 million people, which is about the population of New York City,” says coauthor Connor Sheehan, a sociologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. Analysis of the annual survey results — accounting for the U.S. population’s age distribution as well as respondents' marital status, income, employment and lifestyle — suggests people have been sleeping significantly less from 2013 onward, especially black adults, the researchers report online November 17 in Sleep. In 2017, 40.9 percent of black Americans were likely to report short sleep, as were 30.9 percent of whites and 32.9 percent of Hispanics, the researchers calculate. Zzz force Americans were more likely in 2017 to report sleeping less than six hours a night than in 2004, but the trend increased most among black and Hispanic people than among white respondents. This is the first study showing self-reported sleep declining among minorities over time, says Mercedes Carnethon, an epidemiologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago who was not involved in the study. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 25812 - Posted: 12.22.2018

Researchers at Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) have mapped the neuroanatomical regions of the brain of a female mosquito (Aedes aegypti). The researchers constructed the map of groups of neurons by immunostaining the mosquito’s brain for Brp, a synaptic protein, and imaged the brain with confocal microscopy. The atlas was made freely available online on January 31st. “We are trying to build the field of mosquito neurobiology,” says HHMI neurobiologist Leslie Vosshall, who led the work, in a press release. She says she hopes that the new atlas will let mosquito researchers from around the world share data and better understand which parts of the mosquito brain direct different behaviors. “Somewhere in that female brain is the drive to sense humans, fly toward humans, land on humans, and bite and drink the blood of humans,” she says. “Somewhere in that brain is where decision making, motivation, and hunger reside.” © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 25811 - Posted: 12.22.2018

By Emily Willingham For centuries, some indigenous groups in South America have relied on a brew made from the parts of a local vine and a shrub. The effects of this drink, called ayahuasca, would begin with severe vomiting and diarrhea, but the real reason for drinking the tea was the hallucinating that followed. These visions were thought to uncover the secrets of the drinker’s poor health and point the way to a cure. Modern techniques have revealed that one of the compounds underlying these mystic experiences is the psychoactive drug harmine. What these first users of ayahuasca couldn’t have known was that, one day, this ingredient in their enlightening brew would be positioned as a key to treating diabetes. Such a cure is a long way off, but researchers took another step toward it when they combined naturally occurring harmine with a compound synthesized from scratch in a lab. Together, the pair can coax the insulin-producing pancreatic cells, called beta cells, into replicating at the fastest rates ever reported, according to findings published December 20 in Molecular Cell. Type 1 diabetes arises when the body turns on these cells and destroys them. Type 2 diabetes develops when these same cells wear out and can no longer make insulin. Either effect is a point of no return because the beta cells we make in early life are the only ones we’ll ever have. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Obesity
Link ID: 25810 - Posted: 12.21.2018

Jon Hamilton Just in time for the winter solstice, scientists may have figured out how short days can lead to dark moods. Two recent studies suggest the culprit is a brain circuit that connects special light-sensing cells in the retina with brain areas that affect whether you are happy or sad. When these cells detect shorter days, they appear to use this pathway to send signals to the brain that can make a person feel glum or even depressed. "It's very likely that things like seasonal affective disorder involve this pathway," says Jerome Sanes, a professor of neuroscience at Brown University. Sanes was part of a team that found evidence of the brain circuit in people. The scientists presented their research in November at the Society for Neuroscience meeting. The work hasn't been published in a peer-reviewed journal yet, but the researchers plan to submit it. A few weeks earlier, a different team published a study suggesting a very similar circuit in mice. Together, the studies offer a strong argument that seasonal mood changes, which affect about 1 in 5 people, have a biological cause. The research also adds to the evidence that support light therapy as an appropriate treatment.. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Depression; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 25809 - Posted: 12.21.2018

Laura Sanders Just a generation ago, common wisdom held that once a person reaches adulthood, the brain stops producing new nerve cells. Scientists countered that depressing prospect 20 years ago with signs that a grown-up brain can in fact replenish itself. The implications were huge: Maybe that process would offer a way to fight disorders such as depression and Alzheimer’s disease. This year, though, several pieces of contradictory evidence surfaced and a heated debate once again flared up. Today, we still don’t know whether the fully grown brain churns out new nerve cells. This year’s opening shot came March 7 in a controversial report in Nature. Contradicting several landmark findings that had convinced the scientific community that adults can make new nerve cells, researchers described an utter lack of dividing nerve cells, or neurons, in adult postmortem brain tissue (SN Online: 3/8/18). A return volley came a month later, when a different research group described loads of newborn neurons in postmortem brains, in an April 5 paper in Cell Stem Cell (SN: 5/12/18, p. 10). Scientific whiplash ensued when a third group found no new neurons in postmortem brains, describing the results in the July Cerebral Cortex. Still more neuroscientists jumped into the fray with commentaries and perspective articles. This ping-ponging over the rejuvenating powers of the brain is the most recent iteration of a question that still hasn’t been answered. The first encouraging news about brain cells came in 1998 when scientists looked at the brains of people who had been treated with a compound that marks DNA in newly born neurons. The compound turned up in cells in the adult hippocampus, a brain structure important for learning and memory. Those results, along with a 2013 study that used a different tagging method, suggested that the brain can pump out neurons throughout life. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Neurogenesis
Link ID: 25808 - Posted: 12.21.2018

By Steve Ayan Peter Carruthers, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, is an expert on the philosophy of mind who draws heavily on empirical psychology and cognitive neuroscience. He outlined many of his ideas on conscious thinking in his 2015 book The Centered Mind: What the Science of Working Memory Shows Us about the Nature of Human Thought. More recently, in 2017, he published a paper with the astonishing title of “The Illusion of Conscious Thought.” In the following excerpted conversation, Carruthers explains to editor Steve Ayan the reasons for his provocative proposal. What makes you think conscious thought is an illusion? I believe that the whole idea of conscious thought is an error. I came to this conclusion by following out the implications of the two of the main theories of consciousness. The first is what is called the Global Workspace Theory, which is associated with neuroscientists Stanislas Dehaene and Bernard Baars. Their theory states that to be considered conscious a mental state must be among the contents of working memory (the “user interface” of our minds) and thereby be available to other mental functions, such as decision-making and verbalization. Accordingly, conscious states are those that are “globally broadcast,” so to speak. The alternative view, proposed by Michael Graziano, David Rosenthal and others, holds that conscious mental states are simply those that you know of, that you are directly aware of in a way that doesn’t require you to interpret yourself. You do not have to read you own mind to know of them. Now, whichever view you adopt, it turns out that thoughts such as decisions and judgments should not be considered to be conscious. They are not accessible in working memory, nor are we directly aware of them. We merely have what I call “the illusion of immediacy”—the false impression that we know our thoughts directly. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 25807 - Posted: 12.21.2018

By Nicole Wetsman If a sign tells you To follow the purple skull to your destination, the answer seems simple: Veer left. But isolate the stripes that make up the skulls, and you’ll find neither skull has purple bones; in fact, all the bones are the same color. Slot them back into the banded setting, and they shift to purple and orange. The pigments morph because of the ­Munker-​White illusion, which shifts the perception of two identical color tones when they’re placed against different surrounding hues. No one knows for sure, but the illusion probably results from what David Novick, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at El Paso, calls the color-completion effect. The phenomenon causes an image to skew toward the color of the objects that surround it. In a black-and-white image, a gray element would appear lighter when it’s striped with white, and darker when banded with black. Many neuroscientists think that neural ­signals in charge of relaying information about the pigments in our visual field get averaged—creating a color somewhere in the middle. Here, one skull is covered by blue stripes in the foreground and the other with yellow ones. When the original skulls take on the characteristics of the separate surroundings, they look like different colors entirely. Don’t be fooled: Follow both skulls by going straight. Copyright © 2018 Popular Science

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 25806 - Posted: 12.21.2018

By Laura Spinney A disease mystery with no shortage of leads now has an intriguing new one. Since the 1960s, thousands of children in poor, war-torn regions of East Africa have developed epilepsy-like seizures in which their heads bob to their chest; over time, the seizures worsen, cognitive problems develop, and the victims ultimately die. Researchers have proposed causes for nodding syndrome that include malnutrition, parasites, and viruses, but have not proved a clear link to any of them. Now, the first published examination of the brains of children who died after developing the condition suggests it has a key similarity to certain brain diseases of old age, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's: It leaves victims' brains riddled with fibrous tangles containing a protein called tau. "Nodding syndrome is a tauopathy," concludes Michael Pollanen, a pathologist at the University of Toronto in Canada who is lead author of a report published last month in Acta Neuropathologica. Pollanen believes the finding "suggests a totally new line of investigation" into the syndrome. As significant as the discovery of the tangles may be what his group of Canadian and Ugandan researchers didn't find: any sign of the brain inflammation that might be triggered by a parasite or virus. "Our hypothesis is that nodding syndrome is a neurodegenerative disease, like Alzheimer's," Pollanen says. Some who study the condition are skeptical, but the possibility excites researchers working on other tauopathies including Alzheimer's. Childhood forms of those diseases are exceedingly rare, but the nodding syndrome finding "means [tau deposition] is not an age-dependent problem," says John Hardy, of the UK Dementia Research Institute at University College London. Something else must have triggered the tauopathy in these children. And because nodding syndrome struck a small region of East Africa, over a specific time period—in Uganda, the condition appears to be vanishing—its trigger might be relatively easy to identify, and could shed light on the causes of diseases like Alzheimer's, Hardy and others say. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Parkinsons
Link ID: 25805 - Posted: 12.20.2018