By Gina Kolata You’d think that scientists at an international conference on obesity would know by now which diet is best, and why. As it turns out, even the experts still have widely divergent opinions. At a recent meeting of the Obesity Society, organizers held a symposium during which two leading scientists presented the somewhat contradictory findings of two high-profile diet studies. A moderator tried to sort things out. In one study, by Christopher Gardner, a professor of medicine at Stanford, patients were given low-fat or low-carb diets with the same amount of calories. After a year, weight loss was the same in each group, Dr. Gardner reported. Another study, by Dr. David Ludwig of Boston Children’s Hospital, reported that a low-carbohydrate diet was better than a high-carbohydrate diet in helping subjects keep weight off after they had dieted and lost. The low-carbohydrate diet, he found, enabled participants to burn about 200 extra calories a day. So does a low-carbohydrate diet help people burn more calories? Or is the composition of the diet irrelevant if the calories are the same? Does it matter if the question is how to lose weight or how to keep it off? There was no consensus at the end of the session. But here are a few certainties about dieting amid the sea of unknowns. What we know People vary — a lot — in how they respond to dieting. Some people thrive on low-fat diets, others do best on low-carb diets. Still others succeed with gluten-free diets or Paleo diets or periodic fasts or ketogenic diets or other options on the seemingly endless menu of weight-loss plans. Most studies comparing diets have produced results like Dr. Gardner’s: no difference © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 25775 - Posted: 12.11.2018

By Kelly Servick If you’ve ever unwittingly grabbed a hot pan, you know our bodies have exquisite reflexes for avoiding or minimizing injuries. But once the damage is done, we also have a spontaneous urge to sooth the pain—to blow on a burned hand, cradle a broken toe, or suck on a cut finger. A new study reveals a neural circuit behind this soothing response in mice. Many common animal tests of pain don’t involve this circuit, the authors contend, which could explain why some painkillers that seem to work in mice prove ineffective in people. “We know there is not just one ‘pain pathway’ or a single brain site involved in processing pain,” says Kathleen Sluka, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, who was not involved in the new work. “Understanding the different pathways that underlie unique behaviors could one day help us to individualize treatments” for patients based on how they respond to pain. Harvard University neurobiologist Qiufu Ma and his team wanted to tease apart different aspects of pain, not just in the brain but in the neurons throughout our bodies that relay signals up the spinal cord. Ma and his collaborators previously proposed two general groups of sensory neurons: ones that project to the outermost layer of skin and ones that branch to deeper tissue throughout the body—the underlying skin layers, bones, joints, and muscles. Ma suggests the first group is a first-line defense that monitors our surroundings for danger and prompts us to pull away from a hot pan or a sharp prick. The deeper nerves, he suggests, are attuned to the lasting pain of an injury or illness—and may drive the experience of unpleasantness and distress that comes with pain. Our reflexes avoid potential harm, Ma explains; “the suffering of pain is very different.” © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25774 - Posted: 12.11.2018

Alison Abbott Doris Tsao launched her career deciphering faces — but for a few weeks in September, she struggled to control the expression on her own. Tsao had just won a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ award, an honour that comes with more than half a million dollars to use however the recipient wants. But she was sworn to secrecy — even when the foundation sent a film crew to her laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. Thrilled and embarrassed at the same time, she had to invent an explanation, all while keeping her face in check. It was her work on faces that won Tsao awards and acclaim. Last year, she cracked the code that the brain uses to recognize faces from a multitude of minuscule differences in shapes, distances between features, tones and textures. The simplicity of the coding surprised and impressed the neuroscience community. “Her work has been transformative,” says Tom Mrsic-Flogel, director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at University College London. But Tsao doesn’t want to be remembered just as the scientist who discovered the face code. It is a means to an end, she says, a good tool for approaching the question that really interests her: how does the brain build up a complete, coherent model of the world by filling in gaps in perception? “This idea has an elegant mathematical formulation,” she says, but it has been notoriously hard to put to the test. Tsao now has an idea of how to begin. © 2018 Springer Nature Publishing AG

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 25773 - Posted: 12.11.2018

By Benedict Carey A generation ago, parents worried about the effects of TV; before that, it was radio. Now, the concern is “screen time,” a catchall term for the amount of time that children, especially preteens and teenagers, spend interacting with TVs, computers, smartphones, digital pads, and video games. This age group draws particular attention because screen immersion rises sharply during adolescence, and because brain development accelerates then, too, as neural networks are pruned and consolidated in the transition to adulthood. On Sunday evening, CBS’s “60 Minutes” reported on early results from the A.B.C.D. Study (for Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development), a $300 million project financed by the National Institutes of Health. The study aims to reveal how brain development is affected by a range of experiences, including substance use, concussions, and screen time. As part of an exposé on screen time, “60 Minutes” reported that heavy screen use was associated with lower scores on some aptitude tests, and to accelerated “cortical thinning" — a natural process — in some children. But the data is preliminary, and it’s unclear whether the effects are lasting or even meaningful. Does screen addiction change the brain? Yes, but so does every other activity that children engage in: sleep, homework, playing soccer, arguing, growing up in poverty, reading, vaping behind the school. The adolescent brain continually changes, or “rewires” itself, in response to daily experience, and that adaptation continues into the early to mid 20s. What scientists want to learn is whether screen time, at some threshold, causes any measurable differences in adolescent brain structure or function, and whether those differences are meaningful. Do they cause attention deficits, mood problems, or delays in reading or problem-solving ability? © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25772 - Posted: 12.11.2018

Doing crossword puzzles and Sudoku does not appear to protect against mental decline, according to a new study. The idea of "use it or lose it" when it comes to our brains in later life has previously been widely accepted. The new Scottish study showed that people who regularly do intellectual activities throughout life have higher mental abilities. This provides a "higher cognitive point" from which to decline, say the researchers. But the study did not show that they decline any slower. The work, published in the BMJ, was undertaken by Dr Roger Staff at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary and the University of Aberdeen. It looked at 498 people born in 1936 who had taken part in a group intelligence test at the age of 11. This current study started when they were about 64 years old and they were recalled for memory and mental-processing-speed testing up to five times over a 15-year period. It found engagement in problem solving did not protect an individual from decline. However, engaging in intellectually stimulating activities on a regular basis was linked to level of mental ability in old age. The study uses modelling to look at associations and cannot prove any causal link. Also, many of the participants were unable to complete the whole study - some dropped out, others died. Image copyright Getty Images Previously, some studies have found that cognitive training can improve some aspects of memory and thinking, particularly for people who are middle-aged or older. They found so-called brain training may help older people to manage their daily tasks better. No studies have shown that brain training prevents dementia. And last year a report from the Global Council on Brain Health recommended that people should take part in stimulating activities such as learning a musical instrument, designing a quilt or gardening rather than brain training to help their brain function in later life. © 2018 BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25771 - Posted: 12.11.2018

By Judi Ketteler A friend of mine who works for a jewelry company that makes necklaces inscribed with empowering sayings recently offered me one. “How about the ‘I am fearless’ one?” she asked. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m not fearless.” She laughed. I did too. Except I meant it. And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. I suspect fearlessness is a concept invented by motivational speakers to sell books and command large audiences at events that feature fear-conquering exercises. I wonder, is being fearless even a real thing? “Talking about being fearless covers up where people really are with fear,” says Dr. Kerry Ressler, director of the Neurobiology of Fear Laboratory at McLean Hospital. “After all, fear is the most evolutionarily conserved behavioral reflex for survival.” Fear, he says, produces the same responses in people now as it did at the beginning of human history. We’ve needed fear to survive as a species, to run from the lion crouching in the brush, and we still need it. “The question,” he says, “is how do you not let the emotional response of the fear reflex run wild?” Dr. Ressler says the great majority of people — about 90 percent — are resilient after something frightening or tragic happens, like a car accident or the death of a loved one. They are left with a bad memory or with grief, but they have perspective. Yet about 10 percent of people generalize the fearful memory or the grief. Their brains continually get cues that the bad thing is still happening, and their bodies respond accordingly. “It becomes a black hole of emotion,” Dr. Ressler says. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 25770 - Posted: 12.11.2018

By Elizabeth Pennisi Anyone who has tried to whisper sweet nothings into their lover’s ear while standing on a noisy street corner can understand the plight of the túngara frog. A tiny amphibian about the size of a U.S. quarter, the male Physalaemus pustulosus has had to make its call more complex to woo mates when they move from the forest to the city. Now, researchers have found that female túngara frogs from both the country and the city prefer these mouthy city slickers. Biologists have long studied túngara frog courtship, demonstrating that visual signals and calls by themselves are unattractive to females but together are a winning combination, and that a female’s decision to mate depends on the context. Now, researchers have recorded the calls of male frogs living in cities, small towns, and forests across Panama. As they played the calls back, they counted the females, frog-eating bats, and frog-biting insects lured in by each call. Then they transplanted forest-dwelling frogs to the city and city dwellers to the forest to see how females there reacted to their calls. Finally, in the lab, they tested female preference for each call. Males living in cities and towns called more frequently and had more complex calls—with louder “chucks” interspersed in the whine—than forest frogs, the team reports today in Nature Ecology & Evolution. When they were moved into the country, they simplified their calls; but when their country cousins were brought to the big city, they couldn’t make the switch, and kept singing simply. When the researchers played back the calls to females, the females preferred more complex calls, even if the female herself was from the country, they reported. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Animal Communication; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25769 - Posted: 12.11.2018

By Benedict Carey In mid-October, researchers in California published a study of Civil War prisoners that came to a remarkable conclusion. Male children of abused war prisoners were about 10 percent more likely to die than their peers were in any given year after middle age, the study reported. The findings, the authors concluded, supported an “epigenetic explanation.” The idea is that trauma can leave a chemical mark on a person’s genes, which then is passed down to subsequent generations. The mark doesn’t directly damage the gene; there’s no mutation. Instead it alters the mechanism by which the gene is converted into functioning proteins, or expressed. The alteration isn’t genetic. It’s epigenetic. The field of epigenetics gained momentum about a decade ago, when scientists reported that children who were exposed in the womb to the Dutch Hunger Winter, a period of famine toward the end of World War II, carried a particular chemical mark, or epigenetic signature, on one of their genes. The researchers later linked that finding to differences in the children’s health later in life, including higher-than-average body mass. The excitement since then has only intensified, generating more studies — of the descendants of Holocaust survivors, of victims of poverty — that hint at the heritability of trauma. If these studies hold up, they would suggest that we genetically inherit some trace of our parents’ and even grandparents’ experience, particularly their suffering, which in turn modifies our own day-to-day health — and perhaps our children’s, too. But behind the scenes, the work has touched off a bitter dispute among researchers that could stunt the enterprise in its infancy. Critics contend that the biology implied by such studies simply is not plausible. Epigenetics researchers counter that their evidence is solid, even if the biology is not worked out. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epigenetics; Stress
Link ID: 25768 - Posted: 12.10.2018

By Ramin Skibba Even when you’re fluent in two languages, it can be a challenge to switch back and forth smoothly between them. It’s common to mangle a split verb in Spanish, use the wrong preposition in English or lose sight of the connection between the beginning and end of a long German sentence. So, does mastering a second language hone our multitasking skills or merely muddle us up? This debate has been pitting linguists and psychologists against one another since the 1920s, when many experts thought that bilingual children were fated to suffer cognitive impairments later in life. But the science has marched on. Psycholinguist Mark Antoniou of Western Sydney University in Australia argues that bilingualism — as he defines it, using at least two languages in your daily life — may benefit our brains, especially as we age. In a recent article, he addressed how best to teach languages to children and laid out evidence that multiple-language use on a regular basis may help delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Q: What are the benefits of bilingualism? A: The first main advantage involves what’s loosely referred to as executive function. This describes skills that allow you to control, direct and manage your attention, as well as your ability to plan. It also helps you ignore irrelevant information and focus on what’s important. Because a bilingual person has mastery of two languages, and the languages are activated automatically and subconsciously, the person is constantly managing the interference of the languages so that she or he doesn’t say the wrong word in the wrong language at the wrong time. The brain areas responsible for that are also used when you’re trying to complete a task while there are distractions. The task could have nothing to do with language; it could be trying to listen to something in a noisy environment or doing some visual task. The muscle memory developed from using two languages also can apply to different skills. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Language; Alzheimers
Link ID: 25767 - Posted: 12.10.2018

Julia Wright Shot-sized bottle. Fancy label. Clearish-yellow liquid. It looks like the single-serving bottles of rum or vodka near the checkout of your local liquor store. But don't let the packaging fool you. Pace isn't your typical tipple. Health Canada says it's a controlled substance and its sale is illegal. "Pace is an illegal and unauthorized product in Canada," the federal department said in a statement to CBC News. "Health Canada is taking appropriate follow-up actions to prevent the sale of this product in Canada." But the manufacturer, Diet Alcohol Corporation of the Americas, describes Pace as legal on its website. It describes the drink as a brand-new "alcohol alternative" that packs a similar buzz to booze — with zero alcohol, calories or hangover. The company describes the active ingredient in Pace, MEAI, as a "new synthetic" that delivers "a mild inebriation along with a feeling of contentedness that curbs overconsumption and excessive drinking." It also says on its website that the product is "absolutely" legal. MEAI — the active ingredient in Pace — reduces the desire to binge drink, according to the manufacturers. But the drug's long-term health impacts haven't been studied and aren't well understood. According to Ezekiel Golan, lead scientist with Pace, "tens of thousands" of bottles have already been sold online and shipped to Canadians. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25766 - Posted: 12.10.2018

Laura Beil Martha Carlin married the love of her life in 1995. She and John Carlin had dated briefly in college in Kentucky, then lost touch until a chance meeting years later at a Dallas pub. They wed soon after and had two children. John worked as an entrepreneur and stay-at-home dad. In his free time, he ran marathons. Almost eight years into their marriage, the pinky finger on John’s right hand began to quiver. So did his tongue. Most disturbing for Martha was how he looked at her. For as long as she’d known him, he’d had a joy in his eyes. But then, she says, he had a stony stare, “like he was looking through me.” In November 2002, a doctor diagnosed John with Parkinson’s disease. He was 44 years old. Carlin made it her mission to understand how her seemingly fit husband had developed such a debilitating disease. “The minute we got home from the neurologist, I was on the internet looking for answers,” she recalls. She began consuming all of the medical literature she could find. With her training in accounting and corporate consulting, Carlin was used to thinking about how the many parts of large companies came together as a whole. That kind of wide-angle perspective made her skeptical that Parkinson’s, which affects half a million people in the United States, was just a malfunction in the brain. “I had an initial hunch that food and food quality was part of the issue,” she says. If something in the environment triggered Parkinson’s, as some theories suggest, it made sense to her that the disease would involve the digestive system. Every time we eat and drink, our insides encounter the outside world. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 25765 - Posted: 12.08.2018

By JoAnna Klein A macaw named Poncho starred in movies like “102 Dalmatians,” “Dr. Doolittle” and “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” before retiring in England. She recently celebrated her 90th birthday. Alex, an African grey parrot who lived to 31, knew colors, shapes and numbers, and communicated using basic expressions. He could do what toddlers only do after a certain stage of development — know when something is hidden from view. And they’re just two of the many parrots in the world who have surprised us with their intelligence, skills and longevity. “Nature does these experiments for us, and then we have to go and ask, how did this happen?” said Dr. Claudio Mello, a neuroscientist at Oregon Health and Science University. So he and a team of nearly two dozen scientists looked for clues in the genome of the blue-fronted Amazon parrot in Brazil, his home country. After comparing its genome with those of dozens of other birds, the researchers’ findings suggest that evolution may have made parrots something like the humans of the avian world. In some ways, the long-lived feathered friends are as genetically different from other birds as humans are from other primates. Their analysis, published Thursday in Current Biology, also highlights how two very different animals — parrots and humans — can wind up finding similar solutions to problems through evolution. A general rule of life span in birds and other animals is the bigger or heavier you are, the longer you live. A small bird like a finch may live five to eight years, while bigger ones like eagles or cranes can live decades. The blue-fronted Amazon and some other parrots are even more exceptional, in that they can live up to 66 years — in some cases outliving their human companions. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 25764 - Posted: 12.08.2018

One of the animals that's thought to give creatures like apes, dolphins and crows a run for their money when it comes to intelligence is the octopus. For those other animals, there's a pattern to how they evolved to be so smart — they live long, socially complex lives. But that's not the case for octopuses that live solitary lives for the year or two they usually survive. Now scientists think they've figured out how the octopus became so so smart, and it has to do with the loss of their shell through evolution. "Octopuses, unlike many other molluscs, they do not have a protective shell," said Piero Amodio, the lead author on the new study published in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution about how cephalopods (octopuses and their relatives) gained their intelligence. "So [octopuses] are very, very vulnerable to many kinds of predators — from fishes to marine mammals to birds — and the idea is that by becoming quite smart, this is a kind of weapon they can use to avoid being eaten." Amodio, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, told Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald that this evolutionary process differs from those that led to intelligence in other groups of vertebrates. Intelligence in other vertebrates is thought to have arisen because they live long and socially complex lives. Building a brain is a metabolically labour intensive process, so it's a big investment for an animal to develop a big brain like in apes, dolphins, and crows — an investment they get a return on when they live a long time. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Evolution; Intelligence
Link ID: 25763 - Posted: 12.08.2018

By Dan Falk When the ghost of King Hamlet commands his son to “remember me,” the prince takes the message to heart, vowing to “wipe away” all that is trivial in his accumulated memory, so that “thy commandment alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain.” Of course, it’s not quite that simple, and we often find ourselves doing battle with our memories — struggling to recall something that we’ve forgotten, or wishing to forget something that nonetheless intrudes into consciousness. Humans are masters at leaping through time, vividly imagining the past while making richly detailed plans for the future. A long-forgotten memory can surface at any time. In Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” the narrator bites into a French pastry known as a madeleine and is instantly transported back in time. Suddenly a childhood memory “revealed itself” — it was the recollection of the snack his aunt used to share with him in her bedroom on Sunday mornings before mass. Poets and novelists got a head start, but for some 140 years now scientists, too, have been wrestling with memory. It’s this struggle that two Norwegian sisters, the novelist Hilde Østby and the neuropsychologist Ylva Østby, tackle in their engrossing book, “Adventures in Memory: The Science and Secrets of Remembering and Forgetting.” Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25762 - Posted: 12.08.2018

By Paula Span Shari Horne broke her toes a decade ago, and after surgery, “I have plates and pins and screws in my feet, and they get achy at times,” she said. So Ms. Horne, 66, applies a salve containing cannabidiol, derived from the cannabis, or marijuana, plant. It eases the pain. The salve didn’t help when she developed bursitis in her shoulder, but a tincture of cannabidiol mixed with T.H.C., the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, provided relief. Using a pipe, she also smokes “a few hits” of a cannabis brand called Blue Dream after dinner, because “I think relaxing is healthy for you.” Many of her neighbors in Laguna Woods, Calif., a community of mostly older adults in Orange County, where she serves on the City Council, have developed similar routines. “People in their 80s and 90s, even retired Air Force colonels, are finding such relief” with cannabis, said Ms. Horne. “Almost everybody I know is using it in one form or another” — including her husband Hal, 68, a retired insurance broker, who says it helps him sleep. In fact, so many Laguna Woods seniors use medical cannabis — for ailments ranging from arthritis and diabetes nerve pain to back injuries and insomnia — that the local dispensary, Bud and Bloom, charters a free bus to bring residents to its Santa Ana location to stock up on supplies. Along with a catered lunch, the bus riders get a seniors discount. Physicians who treat older adults expect their cannabis use to increase as the number of states legalizing medical marijuana keeps growing. After the midterm elections, when Utah and Missouri voters approved medical use, 33 states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana, along with ten states that also have legalized recreational use. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25761 - Posted: 12.08.2018

By C. Claiborne Ray Q. Do lizards dream like people do? A. Some species of lizards do have two sleep phases, one resembling the dreaming phase of human beings, other mammals and birds. In 2016, a study of the central bearded dragon, Pogona vitticeps, found slow-wave and rapid-eye-movement states that cycled back and forth in 80-second increments over sleep periods of six to 10 hours. In other animals, slow-wave sleep is usually described as deep, dreamless sleep, while rapid eye movements are linked to shallower sleep and dreaming. Recently scientists in France collected data on brain activity, heart rates and behavioral patterns, including eye movement, in the sleeping Argentine black-and-white tegu (Salvator merianae). The scientists also documented two sleep states, suggesting that the animals do experience something like R.E.M. sleep. In both studies, the researchers suggested that dreaming may have originated with a common ancestor of mammals, birds and lizards, rather than developing independently in various species. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Evolution
Link ID: 25760 - Posted: 12.08.2018

By Jennifer Couzin-Frankel For the millions of people treated for cancer, “chemo brain” can be an unnerving and disabling side effect. It causes memory lapses, trouble concentrating, and an all-around mental fog, which appear linked to the treatment and not the disease. Although the cognitive effects often fade after chemotherapy ends, for some people the fog persists for years, even decades. And doctors and researchers have long wondered why. Now, a new study suggests an answer in the case of one chemotherapy drug: Brain cells called microglia may orchestrate chemo brain by disrupting other cells that help maintain the brain’s communication system. “I can’t tell you how many patients I see who look at me when I explain [chemo brain] and say, ‘I’ve been living with this for 10 years and thought I was crazy,’” says Michelle Monje, a pediatric neuro-oncologist and neuroscientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. It’s still mostly a mystery how common long-term cognitive impairment is after chemo. In one recent study by clinical neuropsychologist Sanne Schagen at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, it affected 16% of breast cancer survivors 6 months after treatment. Monje began to probe the cognitive effects of cancer treatment in the early 2000s, starting with radiation, a therapy that can be far more debilitating than chemotherapy. A Science paper she and her colleagues published in 2003 suggested radiation affected a type of brain cell called microglia, which protect the brain against inflammation. Just like immune cells in the blood, microglia—which make up at least 10% of all brain cells—become activated during injury or infection. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Glia
Link ID: 25759 - Posted: 12.07.2018

Sara Reardon Infectious-disease researchers hunting for the cause of a mysterious illness that is paralysing children are combining machine learning with a new gene-sequencing technique to pin down the culprit. The disease, called acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), causes limb weakness and paralysis that resembles the symptoms of polio. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, has confirmed 134 cases of AFM in the United States so far this year. Many of those who develop the illness never recover. Most of the evidence suggests that an enterovirus called EV-D681 is causing the illness, but researchers haven’t been able to find the pathogen in the spinal fluid of sick children. Scientists are trying to identify the culprit by using a combination of host-response diagnostics — which look at how the immune system responds to pathogens — and machine-learning analysis. The approach could lead to better diagnostics and provide hints about new treatments. Host-response diagnostic tests haven’t been used in the clinic yet. But researchers are developing similar tests to help pinpoint other conditions that can be tricky to diagnose, including tuberculosis and bacterial meningitis. This year’s AFM outbreak started in October, and is the third in a series of outbreaks in the United States that began in 2014. They have occurred every other year since, though researchers have yet to find a definitive explanation for the pattern. It is also taking scientists an unusually long time to determine the cause of the illness, says William Weldon, a microbiologist at the CDC. © 2018 Springer Nature Publishing AG

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 25758 - Posted: 12.07.2018

Laura Sanders The uterus is best known for its baby-growing job. But the female organ may also have an unexpected role in memory, a study in rats suggests. The results, published online December 6 in Endocrinology, counter the idea that the nonpregnant uterus is an extraneous organ. That may have implications for the estimated 20 million women in the United States who have had hysterectomies. In the study, female rats either underwent removal of the uterus, ovaries, both organs or neither. Six weeks after surgery, researchers led by behavioral neuroscientist Heather Bimonte-Nelson of Arizona State University in Tempe began testing the rats on water mazes with platforms that were hidden just below the surface. Compared with the other groups, rats that lacked only a uterus were worse at remembering where to find the platforms as the tests turned progressively harder. The results suggest that signals that go from the uterus to the brain are somehow involved in remembering multiple bits of information at the same time. Rats lacking just a uterus had differences in their hormone levels, too, even though these rats kept their hormone-producing ovaries. Researchers have known for decades that hormones released by the ovaries can influence the brain. But finding that the uterus on its own can influence memory is a surprise, says neuroendocrinologist Victoria Luine of Hunter College of the City University of New York. Because many women have their uteruses removed but keep their ovaries, “this revelation brings up some interesting questions to explore.” |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 25757 - Posted: 12.07.2018

Rhitu Chatterjee Researchers have traced a connection between some infections and mental illnesses like schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorder. New research from Denmark bolsters that connection. The study, published Thursday in JAMA Psychiatry, shows that a wide variety of infections, even common ones like bronchitis, are linked to a higher risk of many mental illnesses in children and adolescents. The findings support the idea that infections affect mental health, possibly by influencing the immune system. "This idea that activation of the body's immune inflammatory system as a causative factor in ... select mental illnesses is one that has really caught on," says Dr. Roger McIntyre, a professor of psychology and pharmacology at the University of Toronto, who wasn't involved in the study. "This study adds to that generally, but builds the case further in a compelling way." In the new study, the researchers gathered data on hospitalizations and prescription medications for the 1.1 million children born in Denmark between Jan. 1, 1995, and June 30, 2012. "We could follow individuals from birth, so there was no missing information during the study period," says Dr. Ole Köhler-Forsberg of Aarhus University Hospital, a neuroscientist and one of the authors of the study. Köhler-Forsberg and his colleagues used two national registries — one to get data on hospitalizations because of severe infections like pneumonia and another for data on antimicrobial or antiparasitic medications prescribed to children for less severe infections. "Most of them are those infections that you and I and all others have experienced," says Köhler-Forsberg. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 25756 - Posted: 12.06.2018