Chand and several other athletes throughout sports history have failed to qualify to compete in a women's event as a result of their biology. Starting in the 1960s, sex verification tests were done to ensure that only athletes determined to be biologically female could compete as women. That's because in most sports, the top male athletes outcompete the top female athletes by about 10%. More recently the motivation behind testing has shifted to determining whether an athlete has an "unfair" advantage. Since men typically have more testosterone than women and testosterone is linked to athletic performance, current tests measure female athletes' testosterone levels to ensure they are within a certain range. Can a test determine an individual's biological sex? And can testosterone produced by an athlete's own body provide an unfair advantage? pictogram of sprinters Click on "Human Development" to learn about the development of sex organs and characteristics, including hormone levels. Click on "Case Studies" to explore the sex verification tests that have been used throughout sports history by applying them to two fictitious athletes.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25674 - Posted: 11.13.2018

by Robin McKie Robert Shafran’s first inkling that his life would soon be turned on its head occurred on his first day at college in upstate New York in 1980. His fellow students greeted him like a long-lost friend. “Guys slapped me on the back, girls hugged and kissed me,” he recalls. Yet Robert had never set foot inside Sullivan County Community College until that day. Another student, Eddy Galland, who had studied at the college the previous year, was the cause of the confusion, it transpired. Eddy was his spitting image, said classmates. Robert was intrigued and went to Eddy’s home to confront him. Sign up for Lab Notes - the Guardian's weekly science update Read more “As I reached out to knock on the door, it opened – and there I am,” says Robert, recalling his first meeting with Eddy in the forthcoming documentary Three Identical Strangers. The two young men had the same facial features, the same heavy build, the same dark complexions, the same mops of black curly hair – and the same birthday: 12 July 1961. They were identical twins, a fact swiftly confirmed from hospital records. Each knew he had been adopted but neither was aware he had a twin. Their story made headlines across the US. One reader – David Kellman, a student at a different college – was particularly interested. Robert and Eddy also looked astonishingly like him. So he contacted Eddy’s adoptive mother, who was stunned to come across, in only a few weeks, two young men who were identical in appearance to her son. “My God, they are coming out of the woodwork,” she complained. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25673 - Posted: 11.12.2018

By Alice Robb One muggy Saturday last summer, I went on a date with a man who seemed entirely fine. We drank two beers and went for a walk, and he explained why he liked certain buildings that we passed. We kissed, and his breath tasted like cigarettes. We parted ways, and I couldn’t muster the energy to answer his emoji-laden follow-up texts about my weekend activities. The date was mediocre at best — but in the days that followed, I second-guessed my decision not to see him again. Maybe I had written him off too soon; maybe I should have given things a chance to develop. After all, he had some good qualities. He was handsome, tall, employed — and not, refreshingly, as a writer. It was only after a painfully on-the-nose dream a few weeks later that I stopped doubting my intuition. In the dream, I had agreed to a second date, and I had brought along two friends to observe our interactions and help me assess him. At the end of the group outing, my friends pulled me away and offered a unanimous decision: He wasn’t for me. I had made the right call. By the time we reach adulthood, most of us have accepted the conventional wisdom: We shouldn’t dwell on our dreams. Even though research suggests that REM sleep — when most dreaming takes place — is crucial for mental and physical health, we think of dreams as silly little stories, the dandruff of the brain. We’re taught that talking about our dreams is juvenile, self-indulgent, and that we should shake off their traces and get on with our day. It doesn’t have to be that way. For the past two years, a group of my friends has been gathering every month to talk about dreams; we do it for fun. Even if we resist, dreams have a way of sneaking into conscious territory and influencing our daytime mood. In three years of reporting on the science behind dreams, I’ve heard strangers describe flying, tooth loss, reunions with the dead — all the classics. I’ve seen that a dream can be a fascinating window into another person’s private life, and I’ve learned that paying attention to dreams can help us understand ourselves. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Attention
Link ID: 25672 - Posted: 11.12.2018

By Annette Choi “I was facing my clothes rack where I have a bunch of stuff hanging off of it,” Brandon Tan says. “And since it was dark, my bags and jackets were kind of morphed into black figures.” Tan, a New York City-based writer, says that that night—with eyes wide-open and lips sealed—he struggled to move his own body. Quickly, nightmarish hallucinations began taking over his auditory and sensory perceptions, blurring the line between dream and reality. “I just kept hearing really mischievous giggling and really creepy screaming,” he says. “And it felt like there were really strong gusts of wind in my room, but the window was completely shut.” Jackie Monoson can sympathize. But unlike Tan, who is new to the experience of sleep paralysis, Monoson, a video editor living in New York City, says she has experienced it on and off for several years now, especially during times of high stress. She recalls one episode in particular, which occurred during finals week of her senior year at New York University: “I felt like as I was falling asleep, I was also waking up,” she says. “I was in my dorm, and I knew that my roommate was in the room, but I couldn’t yell out.” Not long after her first few encounters, Monoson turned to the internet for help. Per the advice of an online sleep paralysis forum, during episodes, Monoson learned to focus on moving smaller muscles—like wiggling her toes—to break from the feeling of paralysis. Sleep paralysis affects millions every year, and studies estimate that more than half of the global population will experience at least one episode in their lifetimes. Despite the prevalence, however, the disorder is poorly understood. © 1996–2018 WGBH Educational Foundation

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 25671 - Posted: 11.12.2018

By Alex Therrien Health reporter, BBC News A five-minute scan could be used to spot people at risk of dementia before symptoms appear, researchers claim. Scientists used ultrasound scanners to look at blood vessels in the necks of more than 3,000 people and monitored them over the next 15 years. They found those with the most intense pulses went on to experience greater cognitive decline over the next decade than the other study participants. Researchers hope it may offer a new way to predict cognitive decline. An international team of experts, led by University College London (UCL), measured the intensity of the pulse travelling towards the brain in 3,191 people in 2002. A more intense pulse can cause damage to the small vessels of the brain, structural changes in the brain's blood vessel network and minor bleeds known as mini-strokes. Over the next 15 years, researchers monitored participants' memory and problem-solving ability. Those with the highest intensity pulse (the top quarter of participants) at the beginning of the study were about 50% more likely to show accelerated cognitive decline over the next decade compared with the rest of the participants, the study found. Researchers said this was the equivalent of about an extra one to one-and-half years of decline. Cognitive decline is often one of the first signs of dementia, but not everyone who experiences it will go on to develop the condition. Researchers said the test could provide a new way to identify people who are at risk of developing dementia, leading to earlier treatments and lifestyle interventions. Controlling blood pressure and cholesterol, having a healthy diet, doing regular exercise and not smoking can all help to stave off dementia, evidence suggests. © 2018 BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25670 - Posted: 11.12.2018

By Isabella Rolz Anais Garcia, 21, anxiously stares at the menu of a Bob Evans restaurant in Baltimore. Her dark brown eyes gravitate toward the Fit and Healthy section, which lists calories per meal. She takes a long time figuring out what to order and decides to go with her “safe meal,” a small stack of pancakes, with no butter, reduced-calorie syrup, a small bowl of fruit on the side and a cup of black coffee. “Restaurants are like battle zones for me, literal war zones,” she says. A ballerina who contended with anorexia nervosa for years, Garcia, who is 5-foot-1½ tall, has reached 105 pounds, a safer weight than the 79 pounds of a year ago. In her gray turtleneck sweater and casual black leggings, her extreme thinness remains apparent. “For the past five years, I’ve done nothing but hate and try to disown my body,” she says. Ballet celebrates the body — and thinness. Despite demands for change from dancers who have experienced problems and from psychologists specializing in eating disorders, the stereotype that a dancer must be elegant and lean persists. Ballerinas become vulnerable to self-consciousness about their bodies, and they face increased risk of anorexia, bulimia nervosa and other eating disorders. Generally, someone who develops an eating disorder has a predisposition, with several factors at play. For ballerinas, “it is of course the ballet culture,” which is competitive and demanding, says Linda Hamilton, a New York psychologist who has worked with ballerinas with eating disorders. But “you might also have a personality predisposition,” she says. “A perfectionist personality can make the dancer intolerant of any physical changes.” Sometimes, “the disorders start early, as young as 12,” she says, because the curves that come with puberty don’t fit the ballet look. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 25669 - Posted: 11.12.2018

By Lina Zeldovich, It was 1924 when the 12-year-old boy was brought to the Moscow clinic for an evaluation. By all accounts, he was different from his peers. Other people did not interest him much, and he preferred the company of adults to that of children his own age. He never played with toys: He had taught himself to read by age 5 and spent his days reading everything he could instead. Thin and slouching, the boy moved slowly and awkwardly. He also suffered from anxiety and frequent stomachaches. At the clinic, a gifted young doctor, Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva, saw the boy. Caring and attentive, she observed him with a keen eye, noting that he was “highly intelligent” and liked to engage in philosophical discussions. By way of a diagnosis, she described him as “an introverted type, with an autistic proclivity into himself.” ‘Autistic’ was a relatively new adjective in psychiatry at the time. About a decade earlier, Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler had coined the term to describe the social withdrawal and detachment from reality often seen in children with schizophrenia. Sukhareva’s characterization came nearly two decades before Austrian doctors Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger published what have long been considered to be the first clinical accounts of autism. At first, Sukhareva used ‘autistic’ in the same way Bleuler did—but as she started to see other children with this trait, she decided to try to characterize it more fully. Over the course of the following year, she identified five more boys with what she described as “autistic tendencies.” All five also showed a preference for their own inner world, yet each had his own peculiarities or talents. One was an extraordinarily gifted violinist but struggled socially; another had an exceptional memory for numbers but could not recognize faces; yet another had imaginary friends who lived in the fireplace. None were popular with other children, she noted, and some saw peer interaction as useless: “They are too loud,” one boy said. “They hinder my thinking.” © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 25668 - Posted: 11.12.2018

David Sington Aubrey Manning’s hugely popular 1998 BBC series Earth Story, about the evolution and shaping of the planet Earth, inspired a generation and led to a noticeable increase in students applying to read earth sciences. Yet, Aubrey, who has died aged 88, was not a geologist, but an ethologist, whose work made an important contribution to the understanding of how animal behaviour plays a role in the evolution of new species. In a series of experiments at Oxford and Edinburgh universities – he was professor of natural history (1973-97) at the latter – Aubrey showed how mutations in genes that affect the behaviour of fruit flies could lead to reproductive isolation, a key mechanism in the creation of new species. This work laid the foundation for the modern study of the evolutionary genetics of behaviour. His 1967 publication An Introduction to Animal Behaviour, now in its sixth edition, is still the standard textbook in its field, and his lectures were so popular – packed with students from many other courses – that the university took to scheduling them for 9am on Mondays as the most effective way to get undergraduates out of bed. It was this reputation as a superb communicator of science that led the BBC to his door. When as its producer I approached him in 1997 to present Earth Story, Aubrey, with typical modesty, protested that I had the wrong man and insisted on introducing me to his geological colleagues. However, it was the very fact that the subject was new to him that was the secret of the ventures success. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 25667 - Posted: 11.12.2018

By Dana G. Smith SAN DIEGO—Robert King spent 29 years living alone in a six by nine-foot prison cell. He was part of the “Angola Three”—a trio of men kept in solitary confinement for decades and named for the Louisiana state penitentiary where they were held. King was released in 2001 after a judge overturned his 1973 conviction for killing a fellow inmate. Since his exoneration he has dedicated his life to raising awareness about the psychological harms of solitary confinement. “People want to know whether or not I have psychological problems, whether or not I’m crazy—‘How did you not go insane?’” King told a packed session at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting here this week. “I look at them and I tell them, ‘I did not tell you I was not insane.’ I don’t mean I was psychotic or anything like that, but being placed in a six by nine by 12–foot cell for 23 hours a day, no matter how you appear on the outside, you are not sane.” There are an estimated 80,000 people, mostly men, in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons. They are confined to windowless cells roughly the size of a king bed for 23 hours a day, with virtually no human contact except for brief interactions with prison guards. According to scientists speaking at the conference session, this type of social isolation and sensory deprivation can have traumatic effects on the brain, many of which may be irreversible. Neuroscientists, lawyers and activists such as King have teamed up with the goal of abolishing solitary confinement as cruel and unusual punishment. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 25666 - Posted: 11.10.2018

Tam Hunt Why is my awareness here, while yours is over there? Why is the universe split in two for each of us, into a subject and an infinity of objects? How is each of us our own center of experience, receiving information about the rest of the world out there? Why are some things conscious and others apparently not? Is a rat conscious? A gnat? A bacterium? These questions are all aspects of the ancient “mind-body problem,” which asks, essentially: What is the relationship between mind and matter? It’s resisted a generally satisfying conclusion for thousands of years. The mind-body problem enjoyed a major rebranding over the last two decades. Now it’s generally known as the “hard problem” of consciousness, after philosopher David Chalmers coined this term in a now classic paper and further explored it in his 1996 book, “The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.” Chalmers thought the mind-body problem should be called “hard” in comparison to what, with tongue in cheek, he called the “easy” problems of neuroscience: How do neurons and the brain work at the physical level? Of course they’re not actually easy at all. But his point was that they’re relatively easy compared to the truly difficult problem of explaining how consciousness relates to matter. Over the last decade, my colleague, University of California, Santa Barbara psychology professor Jonathan Schooler and I have developed what we call a “resonance theory of consciousness.” We suggest that resonance – another word for synchronized vibrations – is at the heart of not only human consciousness but also animal consciousness and of physical reality more generally. It sounds like something the hippies might have dreamed up – it’s all vibrations, man! – but stick with me. How do things in nature – like flashing fireflies – spontaneously synchronize? © 2010–2018, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 25665 - Posted: 11.10.2018

By Kelly Servick SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA—We know the menagerie of microbes in the gut has powerful effects on our health. Could some of these same bacteria be making a home in our brains? A poster presented here this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience drew attention with high-resolution microscope images of bacteria apparently penetrating and inhabiting the cells of healthy human brains. The work is preliminary, and its authors are careful to note that their tissue samples, collected from cadavers, could have been contaminated. But to many passersby in the exhibit hall, the possibility that bacteria could directly influence processes in the brain—including, perhaps, the course of neurological disease—was exhilarating. “This is the hit of the week,” said neuroscientist Ronald McGregor of the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the work. “It’s like a whole new molecular factory [in the brain] with its own needs. … This is mind-blowing.” The brain is a protected environment, partially walled off from the contents of the bloodstream by a network of cells that surround its blood vessels. Bacteria and viruses that manage to penetrate this blood-brain barrier can cause life-threatening inflammation. Some research has suggested distant microbes—those living in our gut—might affect mood and behavior and even the risk of neurological disease, but by indirect means. For example, a disruption in the balance of gut microbiomes could increase the production of a rogue protein that may cause Parkinson’s disease if it travels up the nerve connecting the gut to the brain. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Obesity; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 25664 - Posted: 11.10.2018

/ By Susan D’Agostino I’d had intestinal distress before, but never like this. I was excreting not just waste, but blood and bits of my colon’s lining — up to 30 times per day. My abdominal pain hit deeper and felt less productive than the pain of giving birth, epidural-free, to my second child. Even shingles, which stung like a dental drill against my face, paled in comparison. Such was the agony of Clostridium difficile. Commonly known as C. diff., Clostridium difficile is an antibiotic-resistant superbug carried by approximately 5 percent of the adult population. The harmful gut bacterium is normally kept in check by other, good bacteria in the gut’s microbiome. But when the microbial balance is upset — for example, by a dose of antibiotics — C. diff. can gain a foothold. Left to multiply unchecked, it may kill its human host. In 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 14,000 Americans die each year from C. diff. Thanks to an ill-considered decision by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the willful ignorance of a string of doctors charged with my care, I was nearly one of them. Things started innocently enough. In early 2013, my doctor diagnosed me with a bacterial infection and prescribed an antibiotic. I had lived antibiotic-free for nearly four decades — a streak I was not inclined to break. But my doctor insisted on antibiotics, and I reluctantly complied. Soon after, my stomach turned against me. I went to an emergency room and was sent home with a prescription for vancomycin, an antibiotic reserved for serious bacterial infections. But the drug proved little match for the microbes that had bum-rushed my colon. My weight and fluid loss accelerated. My colon risked perforation. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 25663 - Posted: 11.10.2018

By Paula Span The spouses arriving for the Wednesday afternoon caregivers’ class at the Penn Memory Center in Philadelphia had something on their minds even before Alison Lynn, the social worker leading the session, could start the conversation. A few days before, retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor had released a letter announcing that she’d been diagnosed with dementia, probably Alzheimer’s disease. “As this condition has progressed, I am no longer able to participate in public life,” she wrote. “I want to be open about these changes, and while I am still able, share some personal thoughts.” It meant something to Ms. Lynn’s participants that the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court would acknowledge, at 88, that she had the same relentless disease that was claiming their husbands and wives (and that killed Justice O’Connor’s husband, too, in 2009). “There’s so much stigma,” Ms. Lynn said. “Caregivers feel so isolated and lonely. They were happy that she would bring light and public attention to this disease.” Justice O’Connor had joined a growing but still tiny group: public figures who choose to share a dementia diagnosis. The breakthrough came in 1994, when Ronald and Nancy Reagan released a handwritten letter disclosing his Alzheimer’s disease. “In opening our hearts, we hope this might promote greater awareness of this condition,” the former president wrote. “Perhaps it will encourage a clearer understanding of the individuals and families who are affected by it.” Musician Glen Campbell and his family reached a similar decision in 2011, announcing his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and several farewell concerts, in a magazine interview. The concerts became a 15-month tour and an intimate, unflinching documentary. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25662 - Posted: 11.10.2018

By Meredith Wadman A treatment for Niemann-Pick type C (NPC), an extremely rare and ultimately fatal neurodegenerative disease, performed no differently than placebo in a pivotal trial in 56 children and youths, its corporate sponsor announced on Tuesday. Perplexingly, though, the disease did not progress in either the treatment or placebo groups during the 1-year study, the company said. Normally, the condition, a result of impaired cholesterol metabolism, inexorably worsens, causing loss of balance, difficulty swallowing, seizures, and cognitive disabilities. The drug, VTS-270, a doughnut-shaped sugar molecule called a cyclodextrin, “did not show a statistically significant separation from placebo,” Steven Romano, Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals’s executive vice present and chief scientific officer told investors on a conference call on Tuesday. “But importantly, neither did [patients in the active or placebo arms of the trial] show disease progression as would have been anticipated in the neurodegenerative condition over 52 weeks of observation.” The drug was given by spinal injection into the cerebrospinal fluid, which circulates to the brain. The news—and the way Mallinckrodt, which has its U.S. headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri, delivered it—came as a shock to families in the NPC community, who learned of it when investors began to tweet about it. (The company did email a letter to NPC disease groups on Tuesday. Mallinckrodt, whose stock is publicly traded, added in a statement emailed to Science that securities laws prevented the company from notifying patients sooner.) © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25661 - Posted: 11.10.2018

By Karin Brulliard Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie defended the agency’s ongoing experiments on dogs Friday and said he would continue to “reauthorize” them, eight months after Congress passed legislation limiting tests that are opposed by a bipartisan cast of lawmakers and several veterans’ groups. Speaking at the National Press Club, Wilkie rejected calls to end research that he said led to the invention in the 1960s of the cardiac pacemaker and the discovery in the late 1990s of a treatment for deadly cardiac arrhythmias. These days, he said, some of the testing is focused on spinal cord injuries. “I love canines,” Wilkie said. “But we have an opportunity to change the lives of men and women who have been terribly hurt. And until somebody tells me that that research does not help in that outcome, then I’ll continue.” Wilkie’s comments drew swift backlash from lawmakers who have criticized the experiments, which occur at three VA locations and are invasive and sometimes fatal to the dogs, as cruel and unnecessary. President Trump in March signed a spending bill that included language restricting such tests, and legislation has been proposed that would end all canine research at VA. “Having sustained catastrophic injuries on the battlefield, which included the loss of both my legs, I am acutely aware of the vital role dogs play in helping troops recover from war’s physical and psychological tolls,” said Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), an Army veteran and co-sponsor of the legislation. “The VA has not executed what we wanted as intent, which is to bring this to an end in its entirety, so we will keep up the pressure." © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Animal Rights; Regeneration
Link ID: 25660 - Posted: 11.10.2018

Jon Hamilton Scientists may have caught a glimpse of what sadness looks like in the brain. A study of 21 people found that for most, feeling down was associated with greater communication between brain areas involved in emotion and memory, a team from the University of California, San Francisco reported Thursday in the journal Cell. "There was one network that over and over would tell us whether they were feeling happy or sad," says Vikaas Sohal, an associate professor of psychiatry at UCSF. The finding could lead to a better understanding of mood disorders, and perhaps new ways of treating them. Previous research had established that sadness and other emotions involve the amygdala, an almond-shaped mass found in each side of the brain. And there was also evidence that the hippocampus, which is associated with memory, can play a role in emotion. But Sohal and the other researchers were curious about precisely what these and other brain areas are doing when someone's mood shifts. "We really wanted to get at, you know, when you're feeling down or feeling happy, what exactly is happening in the brain at those moments," Sohal says. You can't get that information from brain scans, which don't capture changes that happen in fractions of a second. So the team studied 21 people who were in the hospital awaiting brain surgery for severe epilepsy. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Emotions; Brain imaging
Link ID: 25659 - Posted: 11.09.2018

Tina Hesman Saey Timing is everything. Even how many calories a person burns while at rest depends on the hour. People burn about 129 more calories when resting in the afternoon and evening than in the early morning. But morning is better for burning carbohydrates, while fats are more likely to be burned in the evening, researchers report November 8 in Current Biology. The findings add to evidence that when people eat and sleep may be as important as what they eat for maintaining proper health (SN: 10/31/15, p. 10). Calories burned at rest fuel breathing, circulation and brain activity, while also helping to maintain body temperature. Researchers previously had conflicting evidence about whether a resting body burns calories at a fairly constant rate, or one that rises and falls in a daily — or circadian — rhythm. The study shows that a body’s resting metabolism is governed by circadian clocks, neuroscientist Jeanne Duffy of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and colleagues report. The study followed seven people kept in windowless rooms for three weeks, without any clues to the time of day. Each night, the seven went to bed four hours later than the previous night. That’s the equivalent of traveling around the world and crossing all time zones within a week. The schedule change allowed the researchers to study the natural body rhythms of each subject without outside influences. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Obesity
Link ID: 25658 - Posted: 11.09.2018

Jon Hamilton A substance that gives pot its kick appears to reduce the brain changes associated with Alzheimer's disease – at least in mice. In mice that had been genetically tweaked to develop symptoms like those of Alzheimer's, animals that received a synthetic form of tetrahydrocannabinol for six weeks performed as well as healthy mice on a memory test, scientists reported Tuesday at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego. Meanwhile, mice given a placebo instead of THC lost the ability to remember where to find the shallow spot in a pool of water. The treated mice also lost fewer brain cells and their brains contained 20 percent less of the sticky plaques associated with Alzheimer's, said researcher Yvonne Bouter of the University Medical Center Goettingen in Goettingen, Germany. Bouter presented the results, which haven't been published in a peer-reviewed journal, at a press conference. The findings suggest that "cannabis could be beneficial for Alzheimer's disease," Bouter said. But even if that's true, she said, it doesn't mean the growing number of healthy older people who smoke pot should celebrate by lighting up. "We did this same experiment in healthy mice," she said, "and they had problems learning." "Should you give Grandpa THC? You should probably be cautious," said Michael Taffe of the Scripps Research Institute, who moderated the press conference. "You could have something that is detrimental, if this does not translate to humans, or the person did not have the disorder." © 2018 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25657 - Posted: 11.09.2018

Laura Sanders SAN DIEGO — Marijuana use during teenage years may change the brain in key decision-making areas, a study in rats suggests. “Adolescence is a dangerous time to be insulting the brain, particularly with drugs of abuse,” study coauthor Eliza Jacobs-Brichford said November 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Jacobs-Brichford and colleagues gave adolescent male and female rats a marijuana-like compound. Afterward, the researchers found changes in parts of the brain involved in making decisions. Normally, many of the nerve cells there are surrounded by rigid structures called perineuronal nets, sturdy webs that help stabilize connections between nerve cells. But in male rats that had been exposed to the marijuana-like compound in adolescence, fewer of these nerve cells, which help put the brakes on other cells’ activity, were covered by nets. Drug exposure didn’t seem to affect the nets in female rats. “Males look more susceptible to these drugs,” said Jacobs-Brichford, a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Citations E. Jacobs-Brichford et al. Effects of adolescent WIN exposure on perineuronal net emergence in PFC. Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting, San Diego, November 7, 2018. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25656 - Posted: 11.09.2018

By Gary Greenberg The Chain of Office of the Dutch city of Leiden is a broad and colorful ceremonial necklace that, draped around the shoulders of Mayor Henri Lenferink, lends a magisterial air to official proceedings in this ancient university town. But whatever gravitas it provided Lenferink as he welcomed a group of researchers to his city, he was quick to undercut it. “I am just a humble historian,” he told the 300 members of the Society for Interdisciplinary Placebo Studies who had gathered in Leiden’s ornate municipal concert hall, “so I don’t know anything about your topic.” He was being a little disingenuous. He knew enough about the topic that these psychologists and neuroscientists and physicians and anthropologists and philosophers had come to his city to talk about — the placebo effect, the phenomenon whereby suffering people get better from treatments that have no discernible reason to work — to call it “fake medicine,” and to add that it probably works because “people like to be cheated.” He took a beat. “But in the end, I believe that honesty will prevail.” Lenferink might not have been so glib had he attended the previous day’s meeting on the other side of town, at which two dozen of the leading lights of placebo science spent a preconference day agonizing over their reputation — as purveyors of sham medicine who prey on the desperate and, if they are lucky, fool people into feeling better — and strategizing about how to improve it. It’s an urgent subject for them, and only in part because, like all apostate professionals, they crave mainstream acceptance. More important, they are motivated by a conviction that the placebo is a powerful medical treatment that is ignored by doctors only at their patients’ expense. And after a quarter-century of hard work, they have abundant evidence to prove it. Give people a sugar pill, they have shown, and those patients — especially if they have one of the chronic, stress-related conditions that register the strongest placebo effects and if the treatment is delivered by someone in whom they have confidence — will improve. Tell someone a normal milkshake is a diet beverage, and his gut will respond as if the drink were low fat. Take athletes to the top of the Alps, put them on exercise machines and hook them to an oxygen tank, and they will perform better than when they are breathing room air — even if room air is all that’s in the tank. Wake a patient from surgery and tell him you’ve done an arthroscopic repair, and his knee gets better even if all you did was knock him out and put a couple of incisions in his skin. Give a drug a fancy name, and it works better than if you don’t. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25655 - Posted: 11.07.2018