by Angie Seech When I first started doing research into the changes that occur in a woman’s brain during pregnancy and the postpartum, I continued to come across the name of Jodi Pawluski, Ph.D., a researcher in the field of perinatal mental health. After reading this amazing review paper, I reached out to Jodi and her colleagues to thank her for her important work. Since that one email, I’ve had the opportunity to thank her in person and spend some time talking with her about perinatal mental health. Besides being a wonderful person, she is truly passionate about what she does and about helping women. Just read some of her answers to my questions about her research and views on the present and future status of maternal mental health and I’m sure you’ll agree! What is your ultimate goal as a researcher in this field? This is such a great, but broad, question! My ultimate goal is to have policies change to incorporate the importance of maternal mental and physical health for the mother. I also want these policies to value, promote, and support research on the neurobiology of motherhood and maternal mental illness. There is so much more that we need to know, but without support and interest we, as scientists, clinicians, parents, can’t find answers to our many questions. What is your most important question? Or the question that you really want to find the answer to in your career? At the moment I am doing some really interesting work on how maternal antidepressant medication use, such as SSRIs, can affect the neurobiology of the mother and developing offspring, using rodent models. One of my goals is to find out why some women respond well to SSRIs, such as Prozac, during the perinatal period and why others don’t. This is an important question and ultimately will allow for more precise and effective treatments. During my career I hope that my research significantly contributes to understanding how maternal mental illness affects the maternal brain and contributes to find ways in which we can safely and effectively treat these diseases. 2018 © MOMMY BRAIN EDU |

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Depression
Link ID: 25483 - Posted: 09.24.2018

By — Linda Searing More than 1 of every 3 college freshmen across the globe — 35 percent — show symptoms of one of the common mental-health disorders, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association. The research was based on World Health Organization data on 13,984 full-time freshman students from 19 colleges in eight countries — Australia, Belgium, Germany, Mexico, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Spain and the United States. The two most common disorders found were major depression (affecting 21 percent of the students) and generalized anxiety disorder (19 percent). The students were also screened for panic disorder, mania, drug abuse and alcohol abuse or dependence. Although the study, published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, found that symptoms started years before college — generally at about age 14 — in most cases, the life changes and stresses that may occur as students enter their college years could exacerbate symptoms. The study’s authors, and other experts, say that to help manage their mental-health condition, students should check whether their campus counseling centers, or local psychologists, offer group or individual cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. But the lead author said that because the number of students needing mental-health treatment “far exceeds the resources of most [campus] counseling centers,” students and colleges should consider supplementing services with “Internet-based interventions” that studies have shown to be effective, including online CBT. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25482 - Posted: 09.24.2018

By Bret Stetka More often than not a trip to Las Vegas is not a financially sound decision. And yet every year over 40 million people hand over their cash to the city’s many towering casinos, hoping the roulette ball rattles to a stop on black. Gambling and other forms of risk-taking appear to be hardwired into our psyche. Humans at least as far back as Mesopotamia have rolled the dice, laying their barley, bronze and silver on the line, often against miserable odds. According to gambling industry consulting company H2 Gambling Capital, Americans alone lose nearly $120 billion a year to games of chance. Now a set of neuroscience findings is closer than ever to figuring out why. Ongoing research is helping illuminate the biology of risky behaviors—studies that may one day lead to interventions for vices like compulsive gambling. The recent results show an explanation is more complex than looking at dysfunctional reward circuitry, the network of brain regions that fire in response to pleasing stimuli like sex and drugs. Risking loss on a slim chance of thrill or reward involves a complex dance of decision-making and emotion. A new study by a team from Johns Hopkins University appears to have identified a region of the brain that plays a critical role in risky decisions. Published September 20 in Current Biology, the authors analyzed the behavior of rhesus monkeys, who share similar brain structure and function to our own. And like us, they are risk-takers, too. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Attention
Link ID: 25481 - Posted: 09.22.2018

By Katie Hafner NEW HAVEN, Conn. — By now, Sally and Bennett Shaywitz might have retired to a life of grandchild-doting and Mediterranean-cruising. Instead, the Shaywitzes — experts in dyslexia at Yale who have been married to each other for 55 years — remain as focused as ever on a research endeavor they began 35 years ago. Sally, 76, and Bennett, 79, both academic physicians, run the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity. Their goal is not just to widen understanding of the scientific underpinnings of dyslexia, the most common learning disorder in the United States, but to push for public policies aligned with that knowledge. For years, dyslexia was largely misunderstood as a reading problem that caused children to reverse letters, and often was seen as a sign of laziness, stupidity or bad vision. The Shaywitzes’ work has shown there is no link between dyslexia and intelligence, and that dyslexia is not something one outgrows. Their research has found that it affects one in five people, yet even now many never receive a formal diagnosis. “There is an epidemic of reading failure that we have the scientific evidence to treat effectively and yet we are not acknowledging,” Sally said. Working from unprepossessing offices on the Yale School of Medicine campus, the Shaywitzes are now updating one of their signal achievements, a study they started in 1983 following 445 five-year-olds in Connecticut. It was the first study to examine reading continually from childhood through adulthood. The Connecticut Longitudinal Study, or C.L.S., has not only established the prevalence of dyslexia but also has demonstrated that it affects boys and girls in roughly equal numbers. The couple recently began a new phase of the study, administering reading tests to 375 of the participants, who are now in their 40s. They have no planned completion date. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Dyslexia; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25480 - Posted: 09.22.2018

Nicola Davis Alcohol is responsible for more than 5% of all deaths worldwide, or around 3 million a year, new figures have revealed. The data, part of a report from the World Health Organization, shows that about 2.3 million of those deaths in 2016 were of men, and that almost 29% of all alcohol-caused deaths were down to injuries – including traffic accidents and suicide. The report, which comes out every four years, reveals the continued impact of alcohol on public health around the world, and highlights that the young bear the brunt: 13.5% of deaths among people in their 20s are linked to booze, with alcohol responsible for 7.2% of premature deaths overall. It also stresses that harm from drinking is greater among poorer consumers than wealthier ones. While the proportion of deaths worldwide that have been linked to alcohol has fallen to 5.3% since 2012, when the figure was at 5.9%, experts say the findings make for sobering reading. A WHO alcohol-control expert, Dr Vladimir Poznyak, who was involved in the report, said the health burden of alcohol was “unacceptably large”. “Unfortunately, the implementation of the most effective policy options is lagging behind the magnitude of the problems,” he said, adding that projections suggested both worldwide alcohol consumption and the related harms were set to rise in the coming years. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25479 - Posted: 09.22.2018

Giorgia Guglielmi Biophysicist Adam Cohen was strolling around San Francisco, California, in 2010, when a telephone call caught him by surprise. “We have a signal,” said the caller. Nearly 5,000 kilometres away, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his collaborators had struck gold. After months of failed experiments, the researchers had found a fluorescent protein that allowed them to watch signals as they passed between neurons. But there was something weird going on. When Cohen got back to his lab at Harvard University, he learned that all the recordings of the experiment showed a strange progression. At first, neurons decorated with the protein flashed nicely as electric impulses whizzed through them. But then the cells turned into bright blobs. “Halfway through each recording, the signal would go all wild,” Cohen says. So he decided to join his team during an experiment. “When they started the recording, they would sit there holding their breath,” Cohen says. But as soon as they realized it was working, they would celebrate, “dancing and running around the room”. In their exuberance, they were letting the light from a desk lamp shine right onto the microscope. “We were actually recording our excitement,” says Daniel Hochbaum, then a graduate student in Cohen’s group. They toned down their celebrations, and a year later, the team published its study1 — one of the first to show that a fluorescent protein engineered into specific mammalian neurons could be used to track individual electric impulses in real time. © 2018 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 25478 - Posted: 09.21.2018

Jon Hamilton Experiments with two gambling monkeys have revealed a small area in the brain that plays a big role in risky decisions. When researchers inactivated this region in the prefrontal cortex, the rhesus monkeys became less inclined to choose a long shot over a sure thing, the team reported Thursday in the journal Current Biology. "They did not like the gambles anymore," says Veit Stuphorn, an author of the study and an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University. The finding in our fellow primates adds to the evidence that human brains are capable of constantly adjusting our willingness to take risks, depending on factors such as what's at stake. "For a long time, people thought that this is like a personality trait, that some people are risk-takers and others are not," Stuphorn says. But recent research has shown that the same person who is very cautious about personal investments may be an avid bungee jumper. This study involved two monkeys that learned to play a computer game that gave them drops of juice when they won. The monkeys played voluntarily because they liked to gamble, Stuphorn says. The game offered two options. The first was a juice reward that was guaranteed, but usually small. The second was a gamble: It might bring a lot of juice, or none. The monkeys moved their eyes to indicate their choice in each round. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25477 - Posted: 09.21.2018

By Emily Underwood The human gut is lined with more than 100 million nerve cells—it’s practically a brain unto itself. And indeed, the gut actually talks to the brain, releasing hormones into the bloodstream that, over the course of about 10 minutes, tell us how hungry it is, or that we shouldn’t have eaten an entire pizza. But a new study reveals the gut has a much more direct connection to the brain through a neural circuit that allows it to transmit signals in mere seconds. The findings could lead to new treatments for obesity, eating disorders, and even depression and autism—all of which have been linked to a malfunctioning gut. The study reveals “a new set of pathways that use gut cells to rapidly communicate with … the brain stem,” says Daniel Drucker, a clinician-scientist who studies gut disorders at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute in Toronto, Canada, who was not involved with the work. Although many questions remain before the clinical implications become clear, he says, “This is a cool new piece of the puzzle.” In 2010, neuroscientist Diego Bohórquez of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, made a startling discovery while looking through his electron microscope. Enteroendocrine cells, which stud the lining of the gut and produce hormones that spur digestion and suppress hunger, had footlike protrusions that resemble the synapses neurons use to communicate with each other. Bohórquez knew the enteroendocrine cells could send hormonal messages to the central nervous system, but he also wondered whether they could “talk” to the brain using electrical signals, the way that neurons do. If so, they would have to send the signals through the vagus nerve, which travels from the gut to the brain stem. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Obesity; Brain imaging
Link ID: 25476 - Posted: 09.21.2018

By Douglas Quenqua For solitary animals, giant pandas have an awful lot to say to one another. Their vocal repertoire comprises more than a dozen distinct grunts, barks and squeaks, most of which amount to some version of “leave me alone.” But when mating season rolls around, both male and female giant pandas turn to their preferred come-hither call: a husky, rapid vibrato that’s commonly known as the bleat. The bleat not only alerts other pandas to the presence of an available mate, it contains important information about the vocalist’s size and identity. Given the dense bamboo thicket that limits visual contact in most panda habitats and the brevity of panda mating season — females ovulate just once a year and can conceive for only a few days — the pandas’ ability to perceive the bleat is critical to reproduction among this once-endangered species. Now, researchers have determined that the bleat works best as a local call. A panda can discern aspects of a caller’s identity. like its size, from a bleat within about 65 feet, but the caller’s gender is only perceptible within about 33 feet, according to a study published Thursday in Scientific Reports. Megan Owen, a conservation ecologist at the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research and an author of the study, offered a human analogy for how this ability works. “If you’re walking into a crowded room and someone calls out your name, there’s a certain point where you can identify who that is, or maybe you can identify that it’s a male or female that is calling your name,” she said. “There’s information that’s encoded in that call, but that information degrades over distance.” To conduct the study, Dr. Owen and her colleagues — including Ben Charlton, another San Diego institute researcher who has studied panda bleats — obtained recordings of giant pandas from Chengdu, China, during breeding season. They then played those recordings through a speaker in a section of the San Diego Zoo Safari Park that contains bamboo similar in type and density to a typical panda habitat. By placing recording devices throughout the bamboo, the researchers were able to capture and analyze the bleats from various distances. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 25475 - Posted: 09.21.2018

Aimee Cunningham Even as the country’s attention is focused on the ongoing opioid epidemic, a new study shows that the United States has had a wide-ranging drug overdose problem for decades, and it’s growing ever worse. Analyzing nearly 600,000 accidental drug poisoning deaths from 1979 to 2016 shows that the country has seen an exponential rise in these cases, with the number of deaths doubling approximately every nine years, researchers report in the Sept. 21 Science. More than 63,600 Americans died from all drug overdoses in 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Numbers of accidental overdose deaths due to individual drugs, such as heroin or methamphetamine, have varied during the 38-year time period. But combining the data, from the National Vital Statistics System, produces a clear — and troubling — pattern, one that portends that the overall overdose epidemic will continue in the future, the researchers conclude. “We need to focus on the entire epidemic,” not just a particular drug, to understand what’s driving the continued growth in drug overdose deaths, says coauthor Hawre Jalal, a health policy researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. Looking at mortality rates from all drugs together, a clear pattern emerges. This exponential growth curve (dotted line) suggests the overall drug overdose epidemic will continue to grow. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25474 - Posted: 09.21.2018

By Ben Guarino If you give an octopus MDMA, it will get touchy and want to mingle. What sounds like the premise of a children’s book set at Burning Man is, in fact, the conclusion of a study published Thursday in the journal Current Biology. Neuroscientist Gül Dölen, who studies social behavior at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and octopus expert Eric Edsinger, a research fellow at Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., bathed octopuses in the psychedelic drug and observed the result. Most humans enjoy hanging with their buds. We share this trait with animals like dogs, but not with the California two-spot octopus. Octopus bimaculoides is an asocial creature, which means it avoids other octopuses whenever possible. Put it in a tank with another octopus, and it might become aggressive or squish itself shyly against a wall. There’s one exception — during mating, this asocial behavior stops. Dölen figured that a neuromechanism was at play and wondered whether MDMA (3-4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, better known as ecstasy) could trigger that mechanism to switch the cephalopod into a more social animal. This wasn’t wonder for its own sake. “There’s been a renaissance for looking at psychedelic drugs as possible therapeutics,” she said. Robert C. Malenka, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Stanford University, who was not involved with this study, called for increased study of MDMA in an influential Cell paper in 2016. MDMA has taboo associations with psychedelia and rave culture — it’s classified as Schedule 1, reserved for illegal drugs with high abuse potential. Nevertheless, it is being explored as a therapy for military veterans with PTSD. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25473 - Posted: 09.21.2018

Smokers have a higher risk of developing dementia, but giving up smoking can lower that risk, according to a new study in South Korea. Long-term quitters and those who had never smoked had 14 per cent and 19 per cent lower risks for dementia, respectively, compared to smokers who kept up with the habit, the study authors reported in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology. "Smoking is well known for its thousands of negative health consequences, including cancers and cardiovascular diseases. However, its impact on our brain is relatively less emphasized," said lead study author Dr. Daein Choi of the Seoul National University College of Medicine. The article cites several case-control studies from the 1980s and 1990s that found smoking reduced the risk of Alzheimer's disease, but these studies were typically funded by tobacco companies. "There has been a misconception that the stimulant effect of nicotine might act as a protective factor for dementia," Choi told Reuters by email. Smoking and Alzheimer's risk Choi and colleagues studied health claims from a national database in Korea, focusing on 46,000 men over age 60. Based on questionnaire responses, the researchers classified the men as continual smokers, short-term quitters of less than four years, long-term quitters of four years or more, and never smokers. From the start of the study in 2002 until the end in 2013, 1,644 men were diagnosed with dementia. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada

Keyword: Alzheimers; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25472 - Posted: 09.21.2018

By Nicholas Bakalar A new study links daytime sleepiness with the accumulation of the plaques in the brain that are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. The study, published in Sleep, included 124 mentally healthy men and women, average age 60, who reported on their own daytime sleepiness and napping habits. An average of 15 years later, researchers administered PET and M.R.I. scans to detect the presence of beta-amyloid, the protein that clumps together to form plaques. After controlling for other variables, they found that compared with people who reported no daytime sleepiness, those who did had almost three times the risk of having plaques. Frequent napping, on the other hand, was not associated with plaque accumulation. “If you’re falling asleep when you’d rather be awake, that’s something that needs to be investigated,” said the lead author, Adam P. Spira, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It could be just insufficient sleep, or sleep disordered breathing, or other conditions or medications that are leading to it.” This is an observational study that does not prove cause and effect, Dr. Spira said, “but it provides more evidence for the link between disturbed sleep and the development of Alzheimer’s disease pathology.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Sleep
Link ID: 25471 - Posted: 09.21.2018

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent Purging “zombie cells” from the brain could stave off the effects of dementia, a groundbreaking study has found. The research in mice is the first to show that so-called senescent cells, which enter a state of suspended animation as the body ages, contribute to neurodegeneration. Flushing out these cells was shown to prevent damage, potentially opening a new line of attack against Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Prof Lawrence Rajendran, deputy director of the Dementia Research Institute at King’s College London who was not involved in the study, described the findings as “exciting”. “It is not only novel in its approach but also opens up new vistas for both diagnosis and therapy for neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s,” he said. The transformation of cells into the semi-dormant, senescent state is part of the body’s natural defences against cancer: when cells have accumulated mutations that could result in uncontrolled growth, the switch to senescence puts the brakes on. Initially senescent cells were thought to be inert bystanders – useless, but harmless. However, in the past decade that picture has changed as evidence has emerged linking senescent cells to Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, arthritis, heart disease and ageing itself. The latest study adds dementia to this list. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25470 - Posted: 09.20.2018

Jenny Rood In 1999, a paper in Nature Medicine reported that mouse models of the fatal neurodegenerative disorder amyotrophic lateral sclerosis fared better with a simple treatment: a diet supplemented with creatine, a compound that helps regulate energy levels in the brain and muscles (5:347–50). That promising, albeit preliminary, result soon launched not one but three clinical trials, with a total of 386 patients in the US and Europe. Disappointingly, the trials revealed that creatine had no effect in people. It was a familiar outcome: more than 50 other clinical trials of potential amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) drugs, ranging from lithium to celecoxib (Celebrex), have failed. Also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS results from the degeneration and death of motor neurons, and affects approximately two to five of every 100,000 people worldwide. ALS’s devastating symptoms—including progressively worsening muscle weakness and spasming, and difficulties with speech, swallowing, and breathing, leading ultimately to paralysis and death—have led to an intense hunt for treatments to halt its progression. Unfortunately, the desire to give patients hope has often outstripped good scientific sense. “Many drugs that have gone into ALS clinical trials shouldn’t have, because the preclinical data package didn’t support it,” says Steve Perrin, CEO and CSO of the nonprofit ALS Therapy Development Institute (TDI) based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Only five of the 420 ALS therapy candidates that his center has retested in mouse and cellular models have shown a therapeutic effect. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 25469 - Posted: 09.20.2018

By Piercarlo Valdesolo Earlier this year, a research team led by Dr. Sven Karlsson published the largest scale study on the causes of human intelligence. They found an intriguing pattern of results: Focusing on arithmetic and linguistic tests, genetics predicted over 26% of people’s responses. Namely, individuals with a long allele of the 4-GTTLR gene got more right answers on the arithmetic, mental rotation, and semantic memory tasks than did individuals with the short version of the gene. In contrast, education explained only 4% of people’s responses. Describing the work, Karlsson wrote “We believe this is an interesting result! Our findings indicate that, contrary to certain previous assumptions, basic cognitive capabilities—mental rotation, math and language—really have a strong heritable component. Intelligence in adulthood seems to be predicted by genes early in life… things like education and effort play a small role once you take into account the role of genetics.” How did you react to the description above? Hopefully you haven’t already tweeted about it: it’s completely made up. A genetic basis for intelligence is a politically fraught scientific idea about which you had likely developed an opinion before reading about the fictitious Dr. Karlsson. You might think it obviously so that genes play an important role in shaping all traits, including intelligence. Or you might think that genes play a trivial role in comparison to socialization and learning. The ease with which you accepted the brief synopsis of research above as true likely depends on these existing beliefs. If the findings are consistent with your beliefs, you might have quickly accepted its truth value. If inconsistent, then you might have been tempted to either dismiss the finding out of hand, or perhaps dig deeper into the article to find some disqualifying error in method or analysis. These are reactions that psychologists have known about for decades. Motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, selective attention. We are equipped with a range of psychological processes that inoculate us from the threat of information that pokes up against our worldviews and beliefs, and attract us to information consistent with our beliefs. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Intelligence; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25468 - Posted: 09.20.2018

By Jason Arment She was a cat lover with cotton-candy-colored hair and obnoxious tastes in music but similar politics to mine. While texting on Tinder, she suggested I might get to play with her kitty. We agreed that we would take her cat out to the park some time but that we would start with dinner and a drink. There were no other hints to me that anything thrilling might happen beyond my riding my motorcycle from Denver to Boulder for the meeting. Sitting together at an Italian restaurant, we got past the cat conversation and progressed to politics and music, jokes and laughter. We were communicating freely and enjoying each other’s company — pretty much everything I wanted out of a first date. As the waitress picked up the check, my date invited me back to her place. I went. I still didn’t think anything was going to happen until we were going to settle in to watch a movie and she changed her clothes right in front of me. So many veterans’ stories begin with them coming back home to find it’s a place with which they no longer identify. I don’t want to overstate my problems, but as a man who went to Iraq as a proud Marine only to realize what was happening there was nothing short of catastrophic, I started to rethink where exactly my heart aligned with my nation and where it fractured and split. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Stress
Link ID: 25467 - Posted: 09.20.2018

By Kelly Servick PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA—While artificial intelligence (AI) has been busy trouncing humans at Go and spawning eerily personable Alexas, some neuroscientists have harbored a different hope: that the types of algorithms driving those technologies can also yield some insight into the squishy, wet computers in our skulls. At the Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience here this month, researchers presented new tools for comparing data from living brains with readouts from computational models known as deep neural networks. Such comparisons might offer up new hypotheses about how humans process sights and sounds, understand language, or navigate the world. “People have fantasized about that since the 1980s,” says Josh McDermott, a computational neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. Until recently, AI couldn’t come close to human performance on tasks such as recognizing sounds or classifying images. But deep neural networks, loosely inspired by the brain, have logged increasingly impressive performances, especially on visual tasks. That “brings the question back to mind,” says neuroscientist Chris Baker of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Deep neural networks work by passing information between computational “nodes” that are arranged in successive layers. The systems hone skills on huge sets of data; for networks that classify images, that usually means collections of labeled photos. Performance improves with feedback as the systems repeatedly adjust the strengths of the connections between nodes. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 25466 - Posted: 09.18.2018

Ryan Kellman When a relationship ends but love remains, it can be both frustrating and embarrassing. Dessa, a well-known rapper, singer and writer from Minneapolis, knows the feeling well. She'd spent years trying to get over an ex-boyfriend, but she was still stuck on him. "You're not only suffering," she says, "You're just sort of ridiculous. Discipline and dedication are my strong suits — it really bothered me that, no matter how much effort I tried to expend in trying to solve this problem, I was stuck." But things changed when Dessa turned to the frontiers of neuroscience for help. She came across a TED Talk by Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist and visiting research associate at Rutgers University. Using a type of brain scan called fMRI, Fisher had looked into the brains of lovestruck people and noticed that certain parts of their brains were unusually active. "That you could objectively measure and observe 'love' — that had never occurred to me before," Dessa says. She wondered: If science could map the sources of love in her brain, could it somehow make that love go away? The question led her to a controversial therapy technique called neurofeedback. The idea is simple: If you want to learn to lower your heart rate, it helps to be able to hear your pulse. And if you want to change patterns of brain activity, it might be helpful to be able to see what your brain is up to. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25465 - Posted: 09.18.2018

Ian Sample Science editor A radical gene therapy for drug addiction has been shown to dampen down cravings for cocaine and protect against overdoses of the substance that would normally be lethal. The therapy uses implants of stem cells which have been genetically engineered to release a powerful enzyme that removes the class A drug from the bloodstream. Tests in the lab showed that mice fitted with the implants lost their appetite for cocaine and survived massive overdoses of the drug that killed 100% of untreated animals. The work has raised hopes for a long term treatment for addiction that works by clearing drugs from the body as soon as they are injected, inhaled or ingested. The therapy would effectively make addicts immune to the substances. Lead researcher Ming Xu, a professor of anaesthesia and critical care at the University of Chicago, said the approach was “highly efficient and specific for eliminating cocaine.” “Compared to other gene therapies, our approach is minimally invasive, long term, low maintenance and affordable. It’s very promising,” he told the Guardian. Scientists have known for decades that an enzyme found in blood plasma called butyrylcholinesterase, or BChE, destroys cocaine by breaking it down into harmless byproducts. But the enzyme is not particularly fast-acting and does not linger in the bloodstream long enough to help those addicted to the drug. To create their new therapy, the Chicago researchers rewrote the DNA in mouse skin stem cells to make them churn out a modified form of BChE that is 4,400 times more potent than the natural enzyme. The scientists reasoned that clumps of these engineered cells, called organoids, could be implanted under the skin, where they would release the cocaine-busting enzyme into the blood. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited o

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25464 - Posted: 09.18.2018