By Jim Hopper On Monday October 1, Republican senators released “Analysis of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s Allegations,” a memo written by Rachel Mitchell, the prosecutor they hired to question Christine Blasey Ford and review other evidence. Ms. Mitchell’s “analysis” includes descriptions of Ford’s memories as not “consistent,” lacking “key details,” and uncorroborated by people she said were at the “party.” In the final two weeks of September, many Americans learned from the media (e.g., USA Today, Rolling Stone, Vox, NBC News, NPR) the distinction that memory researchers make between “central” and “peripheral” details, terms that reflect the commonsense understanding that we remember things that had significance to us and got our attention. Many people have also learned that stress and trauma greatly enhance the differential storage of central over peripheral details, and that the central details of traumatic experiences can get burned into our brains for the rest of our lives. But most people already knew that too, even if they hadn’t stopped to think about it. Advertisement These past few weeks, I’ve tried to help with that learning, by talking with reporters and sharing the expert testimony on trauma and memory that I could have provided to senators and the country, which was published by Scientific American and on my blog with Psychology Today, Sexual Assault and the Brain. There I explain central versus peripheral details, that stress amplifies their differential encoding and storage, and how sexual assault survivors—like traumatized soldiers and police—may protect themselves by clinging for years to superficial descriptions of events, which keep the most disturbing details out of their minds. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Stress
Link ID: 25534 - Posted: 10.06.2018

By Carl Zimmer People of Asian and European descent — almost anyone with origins outside of Africa — have inherited a sliver of DNA from some unusual ancestors: the Neanderthals. These genes are the result of repeated interbreeding long ago between Neanderthals and modern humans. But why are those genes still there 40,000 years after Neanderthals became extinct? As it turns out, some of them may protect humans against infections. In a study published on Thursday, scientists reported new evidence that modern humans encountered new viruses — including some related to influenza, herpes and H.I.V. — as they expanded out of Africa roughly 70,000 years ago. Some of those infections may have been picked up directly from Neanderthals. Without immunity to pathogens they had never encountered, modern humans were particularly vulnerable. “We were actually able to not only say, ‘Yes, modern humans and Neanderthals exchanged viruses,’” said David Enard, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and co-author of the new paper, published in the journal Cell. “We are able to start saying something about which types of viruses were involved.” But if Neanderthals made us sick, they also helped keep us well. Some of the genes inherited from them through interbreeding also protected our ancestors from these infections, just as they protected the Neanderthals. Lluis Quintana-Murci, a geneticist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who was not involved in the new research, said that until now, scientists had not dreamed of getting such a glimpse at the distant medical history of our species. “Five years ago, we would never have imagined that,” he said. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25533 - Posted: 10.05.2018

Doris Tsao is a neuroscientist who uses brain imaging technology, electrical recording techniques, and mathematical modeling. Though Tsao has explored several aspects of visual processing, such as the perception of depth and color, her most notable line of research has focused on uncovering the fundamental neural principles that underlie one of the brain’s most highly specialized and socially important tasks: recognizing a face. Prior neuroscientific research has identified regions in the inferior temporal cortex of monkeys that are particularly responsive to faces. These earlier studies, however, shed little light on how face-responsive cells within these regions might be organized and integrated into a system. Early in her career, Tsao confirmed with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that the visual cortex of the macaque monkey shows face-selective activation in six small “patches” in each hemisphere of the brain. She then used data from fMRI brain scans as a map to guide the placement of single-neuron, electrical recording probes, which demonstrated that certain neurons display highly attuned sensitivity to faces, but not to other categories of objects, and that different patches across the brain’s cortex are integrated in a network dedicated to the visual processing of faces. Through other elegantly designed experiments, Tsao showed that the sensitivity of specific neurons can be further analyzed by measuring their responses to cartoon representations of faces with subtle variations in features and that certain features, such as facial shape and inter-eye distance, elicit particularly frequent and robust responses. © 2018 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 25532 - Posted: 10.05.2018

By Benedict Carey Dr. Bernard J. Carroll, whose studies of severe depression gave psychiatry the closest thing it has to a “blood test” for a mental disorder, and who later became one of the field’s most relentless critics, helping to expose pervasive corruption in academic research, died on Sept. 10 at his home in Carmel, Calif. He was 77. His wife, Sylvia Carroll, said the cause was lung cancer. Dr. Carroll was all of 28 when he published a paper that seemed to herald a new age of psychiatry, one rooted in biology rather than Freudian theory. Trained both in endocrinology and psychiatry, he applied a test from that first specialty — the dexamethasone suppression test, or DST — to people with mood problems. The test measures the body’s ability to suppress its own surges of cortisol, a stress hormone. In a 1968 article in The British Medical Journal, Dr. Carroll announced that when the test was administered to people with the severest species of depression — a paralyzing gloom then called melancholia, or endogenous depression — their bodies were shown to have trouble suppressing the hormone. People with other kinds of mood disorders had normal scores. The test did not mean that failure to suppress cortisol caused depression, just that it was associated with it. “I thought of it as a confirmatory test, to support a diagnosis, not to make one,” Dr. Carroll, known as Barney, said, in a recent interview in his home, “and possibly as a way to monitor progress in treatment.” It didn’t happen. In 1980, experts revising psychiatry’s influential diagnostic manual eliminated distinctions in kinds of depression. Melancholia was lumped with many other mild and moderate conditions under the classification “major depressive disorder.” Soon after, modern antidepressants hit the market, and pharmaceutical companies paid top academics around the world to help interpret studies, massage data and promote their products. The field chased the drugs, and the money, and learned nothing about the biology of mental disorders. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25531 - Posted: 10.05.2018

By Laura M. Holson Researchers from Johns Hopkins University have recommended that psilocybin, the active compound in hallucinogenic mushrooms, be reclassified for medical use, potentially paving the way for the psychedelic drug to one day treat depression and anxiety and help people stop smoking. The suggestion to reclassify psilocybin from a Schedule I drug, with no known medical benefit, to a Schedule IV drug, which is akin to prescription sleeping pills, was part of a review to assess the safety and abuse of medically administered psilocybin. Before the Food and Drug Administration can be petitioned to reclassify the drug, though, it has to clear extensive study and trials, which can take more than five years, the researchers wrote. The analysis was published in the October print issue of Neuropharmacology, a medical journal focused on neuroscience. The study comes as many Americans shift their attitudes toward the use of some illegal drugs. The widespread legalization of marijuana has helped demystify drug use, with many people now recognizing the medicinal benefits for those with anxiety, arthritis and other physical ailments. Psychedelics, like LSD and psilocybin, are illegal and not approved for medical or recreational use. But in recent years scientists and consumers have begun rethinking their use to combat depression and anxiety. “We are seeing a demographic shift, particularly among women,” said Matthew Johnson, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins and one of the study’s authors. Among the research he has conducted, he said, “we’ve had more females in our studies.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25530 - Posted: 10.04.2018

By Michael Shermer Anthony Bourdain (age 61). Kate Spade (55). Robin Williams (63). Aaron Swartz (26). Junior Seau (43). Alexander McQueen (40). Hunter S. Thompson (67). Kurt Cobain (27). Sylvia Plath (30). Ernest Hemingway (61). Alan Turing (41). Virginia Woolf (59). Vincent van Gogh (37). By the time you finish reading this list of notable people who died by suicide, somewhere in the world another person will have done the same, about one every 40 seconds (around 800,000 a year), making suicide the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S. Why? According to the prominent psychologist Jesse Bering of the University of Otago in New Zealand, in his authoritative book Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves (University of Chicago Press, 2018), “the specific issues leading any given person to become suicidal are as different, of course, as their DNA—involving chains of events that one expert calls ‘dizzying in their variety.’” Indeed, my short list above includes people with a diversity of ages, professions, personality and gender. Depression is commonly fingered in many suicide cases, yet most people suffering from depression do not kill themselves (only about 5 percent Bering says), and not all suicide victims were depressed. “Around 43 percent of the variability in suicidal behavior among the general population can be explained by genetics,” Bering reports, “while the remaining 57 percent is attributable to environmental factors.” Having a genetic predisposition for suicidality, coupled with a particular sequence of environmental assaults on one's will to live, leads some people to try to make the pain stop. In Bering's case, it first came as a closeted gay teenager “in an intolerant small Midwestern town” and later with unemployment at a status apex in his academic career (success can lead to unreasonably high standards for happiness, later crushed by the vicissitudes of life). Yet most oppressed gays and fallen academics don't want to kill themselves. “In the vast majority of cases, people kill themselves because of other people,” Bering adduces. “Social problems—especially a hypervigilant concern with what others think or will think of us if only they knew what we perceive to be some unpalatable truth—stoke a deadly fire.” © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25529 - Posted: 10.04.2018

Susan Milius It’s a lovely notion, but tricky to prove. Still, lemurs sniffing around wild fruits in Madagascar are bolstering the idea that animal noses contributed to the evolution of aromas of fruity ripeness. The idea sounds simple, says evolutionary ecologist Omer Nevo of the University of Ulm in Germany. Plants can use mouth-watering scents to lure animals to eat fruits, and thus spread around the seeds. But are those odors really advertising, or are they just the way fruits happen to smell as they ripen? For some wild figs and a range of other fruits in eastern Madagascar, a strong scent of ripeness does seem to have evolved in aid of allure, Nevo and his colleagues argue October 3 in Science Advances. A lot of fruit collecting and odor chemistry suggest that fruits dispersed by lemurs, with their sensitive noses, change more in scent than fruits that rely more on birds with acute color vision. Earlier studies had sniffed around several species, such as figs. But for a broader look, Nevo and his colleagues analyzed scents from 25 other kinds of fruits as well as five kinds of figs. All grew wild in a “really magnificent” mountainous rainforest preserved as a park in eastern Madagascar, Nevo says. The researchers classified 19 of the plants as depending largely on red-bellied and other local lemurs to spread seeds. Most of these lemurs are red-green color-blind, not great for spotting the ripe fruits among foliage. But the researchers following some lemurs foraging in daylight noticed that sniffing at fruits was a big deal for the primates. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Evolution
Link ID: 25528 - Posted: 10.04.2018

By Simon Makin Neuroscientists know a lot about how individual neurons operate but remarkably little about how large numbers of them work together to produce thoughts, feelings and behavior. They need a wiring diagram for the brain—known as a connectome—to identify the circuits that underlie the organ’s functions. Now researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and their colleagues have developed an innovative brain-mapping technique and used it to trace the connections emanating from nearly 600 neurons in a mouse brain’s main visual area in just three weeks. This technology could someday be used to help understand disorders thought to involve atypical brain wiring, such as autism or schizophrenia. The technique works by tagging cells with genetic “bar codes.” Researchers inject viruses into mice brains, where the viruses direct cells to produce random 30-letter RNA sequences (consisting of the nucleotide “letters” G, A, U and C). The cells also create a protein that binds to these RNA bar codes and drags them the length of each neuron’s output wire, or axon. The researchers later dissect the mice brains into target regions and sequence the cells in each area, enabling them to determine which tagged neurons are connected to which regions. The team found that neurons in a mouse’s primary visual cortex typically send outputs to multiple other visual areas. It also discovered that most cells fall into six distinct groups based on which regions—and how many of them—they connect to. This finding suggests there are subtypes of neurons in a mouse’s primary visual cortex that perform different functions. “Because we have so many neurons, we can do statistics and start understanding the patterns we see,” says Cold Spring Harbor’s Justus Kebschull, co-lead author of the study, which was published in April in Nature. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging; Autism
Link ID: 25527 - Posted: 10.04.2018

By Gretchen Reynolds Are we born to be physically lazy? A sophisticated if disconcerting new neurological study suggests that we probably are. It finds that even when people know that exercise is desirable and plan to work out, certain electrical signals within their brains may be nudging them toward being sedentary. The study’s authors hope, though, that learning how our minds may undermine our exercise intentions could give us renewed motivation to move. Exercise physiologists, psychologists and practitioners have long been flummoxed by the difference between people’s plans and desires to be physically active and their actual behavior, which usually involves doing the opposite. Few of us exercise regularly, even though we know that it is important for health and well being. Typically, we blame lack of time, facilities or ability. But recently an international group of researchers began to wonder whether part of the cause might lie deeper, in how we think. For an earlier review, these scientists had examined past research about exercise attitudes and behavior and found that much of it showed that people sincerely wished to be active. In computer-based studies, for example, they would direct their attention to images of physical activity and away from images related to sitting and similar languor. But, as the scientists knew, few people followed through on their aims to be active. So maybe, the scientists thought, something was going on inside their skulls that dampened their enthusiasm for exercise. To find out, they recruited 29 healthy young men and women. All of the volunteers told the scientists that they wanted to be physically active, although only a few of them regularly were. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 25526 - Posted: 10.04.2018

By Michael Mosley Horizon Could taking a placebo, a pill which contains nothing but ground rice, really help cure back pain? The placebo effect is well studied but at the same time something of a mystery. The word placebo comes from the Latin "I shall please" and is associated with images of quack doctors selling dodgy cures. Yet it is also an important part of modern clinical trials, where patients are given either a placebo (sometimes called a dummy pill) or an active drug (without knowing which is which) and researchers then look to see if the drug outperforms the placebo, or vice versa. But what if you decided to do a placebo-controlled trial on back pain, with a twist? The twist being that everyone, unknowingly, was getting placebo? Would people taking the pills get better anyway? That's what we set out to test for BBC2's Horizon programme, Can my brain cure my body? With the help of Dr Jeremy Howick. an expert on the placebo effect from University of Oxford, we set out to see if we could cure real back pain with fake pills. It would be the largest experiment of its kind ever carried out in the UK, with 100 people from Blackpool taking part. Some were asked to act as a "control" group. The rest were told that they were taking part in a study - where they might receive the placebo or a powerful new painkiller. What they weren't told was that they would all get placebos, capsules containing nothing but ground rice. The pills were authentic looking and based on years of research. They were blue-and-white-striped, because that has been shown to have a greatest painkilling effect. They came in bottles, carefully labelled, warning of potential side effects and sternly reminding patients to keep out of the hands of children. All very convincing. © 2018 BBC

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25525 - Posted: 10.04.2018

Sarah Boseley Health editor Half of all those taking antidepressants experience withdrawal problems when they try to give them up and for millions of people in England, these are severe, according to a new review of the evidence commissioned by MPs. Guidance from the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (Nice), which says withdrawal symptoms “are usually mild and self-limiting over about one week” urgently needs to be changed, say the review authors. Dr James Davies from the University of Roehampton and Prof John Read from the University of East London say the high rate of withdrawal symptoms may be part of the reason people are staying on the pills for longer. They cannot cope, so carry on taking the drugs, or their doctors assume they have relapsed and write another prescription. The review was commissioned by the all-party parliamentary group for prescribed drug dependence and follows a long debate about the Nice guidance, which critics say is out of date. Modern antidepressants of the SSRI class, such as Prozac (fluoxetine) and Seroxat (paroxetine), were marketed in part on their safety. People were unable to harm themselves by overdosing as they could on benzodiazepines like valium and stopping the drugs was said to be easier. There have been plenty of anecdotal accounts of withdrawal symptoms, which include dizziness, vertigo, nausea, insomnia, headaches, tiredness and difficulties concentrating. But the Nice guidance said in 2004 that the withdrawal symptoms were slight and short-lived and was re-adopted without further evidence in 2009. It is similar to the US guidance, which says symptoms usually resolve within one to two weeks. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25524 - Posted: 10.03.2018

By Diana Kwon How do we decide what we like to eat? Although tasty foods typically top the list, a number of studies suggest preferences about consumption go beyond palatability. Scientists have found both humans and animals can form choices about what to consume based on the caloric content of food, independent of taste. Research spanning many decades has shown nutrients in the gastrointestinal tract can shape animals’ flavor preferences. One of the earliest findings of this effect dates back to the 1960s, when Garvin Holman of the University of Washington reported hungry rats preferred consuming a liquid paired with food injected into the stomach rather than a solution coupled with a gastric infusion of water. More recently Ivan de Araujo, a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and his colleagues have shown calories can trump palatability: Their work has demonstrated mice prefer consuming bitter solutions paired with a sugar infusion injected in the gut rather than a calorie-free sweet solution. Advertisement For years De Araujo and his group have been working to tease apart how the contents of the gut produce pleasure in the brain. In mice they have found sugar in the digestive tract can activate the brain’s reward centers. In animals bred without the ability to taste sweetness, sugary snacks still triggered activity in the ventral striatum, a brain region involved in reward processing. But according to De Araujo, the specific pathway that relayed signals between the gut and the brain remained a mystery. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Obesity; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25523 - Posted: 10.03.2018

Sukanya Charuchandra More and more children around the world are being born to obese mothers than ever before. In the United States, 23.4 percent of women are obese before they become pregnant—a number that represents a growing phenomenon. From 1994 to 2014, the rate of women who were obese prior to pregnancy in the country shot up 86 percent, according to a nationwide nutrition program registry. The increasingly common condition has been associated with children being born obese as well as showing a greater risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, cognitive and behavioral difficulties, and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Incidentally, a growing numbers of children are being diagnosed with mental disorders, with up to one in five children in the US experiencing conditions that challenge their mental health in any single year. This summer alone, multiple studies have found that different facets of moms’ metabolic health and weight are linked with a greater risk for children being diagnosed with autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and mild neurodevelopmental problems. In June, Thomas Buchanan of the University of Southern Carolina and his colleagues reported how expectant mothers’ diabetes—experienced by one in 16 pregnant women in the US—is tied to a baby’s chances developing autism. The researchers found a clear divide: Mothers with a diabetes diagnosis by their 26th week of pregnancy gave birth to children with a higher likelihood of being on the autism spectrum compared to mothers with no diabetes or who received a diagnosis after their 26th week. “There appeared to be not a technical dose-response relationship, but a relationship in severity, according to the severity and timing of the diabetes: the more severe and earlier, the more the risk of autism,” Buchanan tells The Scientist. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Autism; Obesity
Link ID: 25522 - Posted: 10.03.2018

By Jan Hoffman The Food and Drug Administration conducted a surprise inspection of the headquarters of the e-cigarette maker Juul Labs last Friday, carting away more than a thousand documents it said were related to the company’s sales and marketing practices. The move, announced on Tuesday, was seen as an attempt to ratchet up pressure on the company, which controls 72 percent of the e-cigarette market in the United States and whose products have become popular in high schools. The F.D.A. said it was particularly interested in whether Juul deliberately targeted minors as consumers. “The new and highly disturbing data we have on youth use demonstrates plainly that e-cigarettes are creating an epidemic of regular nicotine use among teens,” the F.D.A. said in a statement. “It is vital that we take action to understand and address the particular appeal of, and ease of access to, these products among kids.” F.D.A. officials described the surprise inspection as a follow-up to a request the agency made for Juul’s research and marketing data in April. Kevin Burns, Juul’s chief executive officer, said the company had already handed over more than 50,000 pages of internal documents to the F.D.A. in response to that request. “We want to be part of the solution in preventing underage use, and we believe it will take industry and regulators working together to restrict youth access,” he said. In recent months, the F.D.A. has increasingly expressed alarm over the prevalence of vaping among youths in high school and even middle school, which its commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, said had reached “epidemic proportions.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25521 - Posted: 10.03.2018

By Michael Price Alien limb syndrome isn’t as extraterrestrial as it sounds—but it’s still pretty freaky. Patients complain that one of their hands has gone “rogue,” reaching for things without their knowledge. “They sit on their hand trying to get it not to move,” says Ryan Darby, a neurologist and neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. “They’re not crazy. They know there’s not something controlling their arm, that it’s not possessed. But they really feel like they don’t have control.” Now, a study analyzing the locations of brain lesions in these patients—and those who have akinetic mutism, in which people can scratch an itch and chew food placed into their mouths without being aware they’ve initiated these movements—are shedding light on how our brains know what’s going on with our bodies. The work shows how neuroscience is beginning to approach elements of the biological nature of free will. “I think it's really nice work, carefully done and thoughtfully presented,” says Kevin Mitchell, a neurogeneticist at Trinity College in Dublin who studies perception and who wasn’t involved in the study. Philosophers have wrestled with questions of free will—that is, whether we are active drivers or passive observers of our decisions—for millennia. Neuroscientists tap-dance around it, asking instead why most of us feel like we have free will. They do this by looking at rare cases in which people seem to have lost it. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 25520 - Posted: 10.02.2018

By Sarah Mervosh A simple rule change in Ivy League football games has led to a significant drop in concussions, a study released this week found. After the Ivy League changed its kickoff rules in 2016, adjusting the kickoff and touchback lines by just five yards, the rate of concussions per 1,000 kickoff plays fell to two from 11, according to the study, which was published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Kickoffs, during which players sprint down the field and can knock into each other at full speed, had previously represented an outsize number of concussions. The study comes amid a broader push to adjust kickoff rules at all levels of football and offers a strong indication that touchbacks can help reduce the risk of head injury in a sport grappling with the competing priorities of entertaining its audience and keeping its players safe. “We see really compelling evidence that, indeed, introducing the experimental kickoff rule seems to be associated with a large reduction in concussions,” said Douglas Wiebe, the lead author of the study and the director of the Penn Injury Science Center at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2015, kickoffs during Ivy League games accounted for 6 percent of all plays, but 21 percent of concussions, the study said. So Ivy League football coaches decided to change the rules to encourage kicks into the end zone. Under the new system, teams kicked off from the 40-yard line, instead of the 35, and touchbacks started from the 20-yard line, rather than the 25. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 25519 - Posted: 10.02.2018

By Melinda Wenner Moyer Intuitively, it makes sense Splatterhouse and Postal 2 would serve as virtual training sessions for teens, encouraging them to act out in ways that mimic game-related violence. But many studies have failed to find a clear connection between violent game play and belligerent behavior, and the controversy over whether the shoot-‘em-up world transfers to real life has persisted for years. A new study published on October 1 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tries to resolve the controversy by weighing the findings of two dozen studies on the topic. The meta-analysis does tie violent video games to a small increase in physical aggression among adolescents and preteens. Yet debate is by no means over. Whereas the analysis was undertaken to help settle the science on the issue, researchers still disagree on the real-world significance of the findings. This new analysis attempted to navigate through the minefield of conflicting research. Many studies find gaming associated with increases in aggression, but others identify no such link. A small but vocal cadre of researchers have argued much of the work implicating video games has serious flaws in that, among other things, it measures the frequency of aggressive thoughts or language rather than physically aggressive behaviors like hitting or pushing, which have more real-world relevance. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 25518 - Posted: 10.02.2018

Sarah Boseley and agencies One in two women will develop dementia or Parkinson’s disease, or have a stroke, in their lifetime, new research suggests. About a third of men aged 45 and half of women of the same age are likely to go on to be diagnosed with one of the conditions, according to a study of more than 12,000 people. The researchers, from the University Medical Center Rotterdam in the Netherlands, said preventive measures could “substantially” reduce the burden of the illnesses. The findings have been published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry. The health of 12,102 people was monitored between 1990 and 2016, with all participants initially under the age of 45. During this period 1,489 were diagnosed with dementia and 263 with parkinsonism – the generic term for a range of symptoms that can be seen in someone with Parkinson’s disease – while 1,285 had a stroke. The overall risk of a 45-year-old later developing one of the three conditions was 48% for women and 36% for men, the researchers said. Dementia was of greatest concern for women, who at 45 years old had a 25.9% risk of going on to develop the condition, compared with 13.7% for men. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Alzheimers; Parkinsons
Link ID: 25517 - Posted: 10.02.2018

Linda Holmes On Sunday's CBS Sunday Morning, Ted Koppel reminisced about the many profiles of media giant Ted Turner that have aired on the network, beginning all the way back in the 1970s, when he hadn't started CNN but had bought Atlanta's baseball and basketball teams. Now, about to turn 80, Turner told Koppel about his diagnosis of Lewy body dementia. He acknowledged that in addition to memory difficulties, it causes exhaustion. In fact, as he noted with a tinge of humor, he wasn't able to bring the name of the disease to mind even as he was talking about how it affected him. Turner is still active, however: He was seen not only practicing yoga but continuing to wander his immense Montana ranch on horseback. According to the National Institutes of Health, Lewy body dementia is caused by protein deposits in the brain — named "Lewy bodies" after the neurologist who discovered them. The deposits cause changes in brain chemistry that disrupt thinking and behavior as well as movement. The disease also reportedly affected actor Robin Williams prior to his death in 2014. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25516 - Posted: 10.02.2018

By Christine Hauser A New Jersey man died after being infected with Naegleria fowleri, also known as the “brain-eating amoeba,” a rare infection that is contracted through the nose in fresh water. The man, Fabrizio Stabile, 29, of Ventnor, N.J., was mowing his lawn on Sept. 16 when he felt ill from a headache, according to his obituary and GoFundMe page. His symptoms worsened and he was taken to the hospital after he became unable to speak coherently. A spinal tap revealed he was infected with the amoeba, and he died on Sept. 21. It is the first confirmed case of the infection in the United States since 2016, an epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Jennifer Cope, said on Monday. Mr. Stabile fell ill after visiting the BSR Cable Park and Surf Resort, a surf and water park in Waco, Tex., said Kelly Craine, a spokeswoman for the Waco-McLennan County Public Health District. She said in a telephone interview on Monday that the C.D.C. sent epidemiologists to take samples from the park to test for the presence of the amoeba, and those results could come this week. There are no reports of other illnesses at the Waco park, the C.D.C. said. The amoeba is a single-celled organism that can cause a rare infection of the brain called primary amoebic meningoencephalitis, also known as PAM, which is usually fatal. It thrives in warm temperatures and is commonly found in warm bodies of fresh water, such as lakes, rivers and hot springs, the C.D.C. said, though it can also be present in soil. It enters the body through the nose, and it moves on to the brain. Infection typically occurs when people go swimming in lakes and rivers, according to the C.D.C. The amoeba got its nickname because it starts to destroy brain tissue once it reaches the brain, after it is forced up there in a rush of water. Before it enters the body, it happily feasts on the bacteria found in the water. “It turns to using the brain as a food source,” Dr. Cope said. “It is a scary name. It is not completely inaccurate.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 25515 - Posted: 10.02.2018