By Michael Erard , Catherine Matacic If you want a no-fuss, no-muss pet, consider the Bengalese finch. Dubbed the society finch for its friendliness, breeders often use it to foster unrelated chicks. But put the piebald songbird next to its wild ancestor, the white-rumped munia, and you can both see and hear the differences: The aggressive munia tends to be darker and whistles a scratchy, off-kilter tune, whereas the pet finch warbles a melody so complex that even nonmusicians may wonder how this caged bird learned to sing. All this makes the domesticated and wild birds a perfect natural experiment to help explore an upstart proposal about human evolution: that the building blocks of language are a byproduct of brain alterations that arose when natural selection favored cooperation among early humans. According to this hypothesis, skills such as learning complex calls, combining vocalizations, and simply knowing when another creature wants to communicate all came about as a consequence of pro-social traits like kindness. If so, domesticated animals, which are bred to be good-natured, might exhibit such communication skills too. The idea is rooted in a much older one: that humans tamed themselves. This self-domestication hypothesis, which got its start with Charles Darwin, says that when early humans started to prefer cooperative friends and mates to aggressive ones, they essentially domesticated themselves. Along with tameness came evolutionary changes seen in other domesticated mammals—smoother brows, shorter faces, and more feminized features—thanks in part to lower levels of circulating androgens (such as testosterone) that tend to promote aggression. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 25289 - Posted: 08.03.2018

By Carl Zimmer In 2003, researchers digging in a mountain cave on the Indonesian island of Flores discovered astonishing fossils of a tiny, humanlike individual with a small, chimp-sized brain. They called the species Homo floresiensis. These relatives of modern humans stood just over three feet tall. Several villages in the area, scientists noted, are inhabited by people whose average height is 4 feet 9 inches. Was this the result of interbreeding long ago between taller modern humans and shorter Homo floresiensis? Fifteen years after the bones’ discovery, a study of the DNA of living people on Flores has delivered a verdict. “It’s rare in science that you set about to answer a question and you get something of a definitive answer and it’s the end,” said Richard E. Green, a geneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a co-author of the study, published on Thursday in Science. “The answer is a clear enough ‘no’ that I’m done with it.” But as often happens in science, the answer to one question raises new ones. The study shows that at least twice in ancient history, humans and their relatives (known as hominins) arrived on Flores and then grew shorter. And not just humans: Other research has shown that elephants also arrived on Flores twice, and both times the species evolved into dwarves. So what mysterious power does this island have to shrink the body? When the fossils of Homo floresiensis first came to light, many researchers hoped they might still hold fragments of DNA. They were encouraged by the initial dating of the fossils — an estimated age of perhaps just 13,000 years. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 25288 - Posted: 08.03.2018

by Lindsey Bever It was a solution no parent wants to hear: To get rid of a brain tumor and stop their young son's seizures, surgeons would need to cut out one-sixth of his brain. But for Tanner Collins, it was the best option. A slow-growing tumor was causing sometimes-daily seizures, and medications commonly used to treat them did not seem to be working, his father said. But removing a portion of his brain was no doubt risky. That region — the right occipital and posterior temporal lobes — is important for facial recognition, and, without it, Tanner's parents wondered if he would recognize them. Tanner, who was 6 at the time, underwent surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Children's Hospital. Although his brain has had to work to adapt since then, he's had no major problems. Other than some visual impairment, Tanner, now 12, said he's “perfectly fine.” “As far as I’m concerned, I’m a perfectly normal 12-year-old boy,” Tanner said. Tanner's case was published Tuesday in the scientific journal Cell Reports, explaining how the 12-year-old's brain learned to adapt after a part largely responsible for visual processing was taken out. Marlene Behrmann, a cognitive neuroscientist and lead author of the paper, said Tanner was one of the first pediatric patients studied over the past several years in her laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University to determine the extent to which a child's brain can reorganize itself after certain sections are surgically removed. In Tanner's case, she said, surgeons took out his right occipital and posterior temporal lobes, which made up about one-third of the right hemisphere of his brain. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Epilepsy
Link ID: 25287 - Posted: 08.03.2018

Sara Reardon A consumer-advocacy group is filing a complaint with the US government about two clinical trials in Minnesota that allegedly gave agitated patients ketamine and other sedatives without their consent, despite evidence that doing so could harm their health. The trials were conducted by researchers at Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC) in Minneapolis, Minnesota, between 2014 and June 2018. In its complaint, the advocacy group Public Citizen in Washington DC alleges that the studies’ organizers and the HCMC’s ethics-review board allowed the trials to proceed without obtaining consent from patients. In both studies, paramedics responding to medical emergencies injected agitated people with either ketamine or another sedative to determine which drug worked fastest. Patients were only notified afterwards that they had received a sedative. Sixty-four doctors, bioethicists and academic researchers have co-signed Public Citizen’s complaint, which the group plans to submit to the US Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on 25 July. “This isn’t even a close call,” says Michael Carome, director of Public Citizen’s health-research group. “This is clearly a prospective, high-risk experiment. This is really just a colossal failure of their programme to protect human subjects.” A spokesperson for Hennepin Healthcare, which operates Hennepin County Medical Center, told Nature that the hospital will not comment on the studies until after ongoing internal and external investigations are complete. © 2018 Springer Nature Limited.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25286 - Posted: 08.03.2018

/ By Rod McCullom Eight years ago, New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey published a paper whose conclusions shook the worlds of criminology and adolescent psychology. Researchers had long known that children exposed to violence and crime had poorer measures of memory, attention, planning, and focus — the cognitive processes collectively known as executive function — than peers whose lives were violence-free. But what Sharkey found, using data on 6,000 Chicago homicides from 1994 to 2002, was that a killing in a child’s neighborhood could significantly lower his or her scores on standardized tests — even if the child did not witness the killing or know the victim. He proposed that post-traumatic stress caused by exposure to violence could explain about half of the “achievement gap” between black and white students — a disparity that leads to persistent inequalities in education, income, careers, housing, and more. Similar findings have been documented in more recent studies, but one question has continued to vex researchers: Why? How does even indirect violence get under a child’s skin and into the brain? Now some intriguing interdisciplinary research — by psychologists, economists, and sociologists — suggests that a large part of the answer may lie in two biological pathways: sleep and the stress hormone cortisol. Researchers at Northwestern University, DePaul University, and NYU (including Sharkey) looked at 82 adolescents aged 11 to 18 who attended public schools in a “large Midwestern city.” (The school system asked for anonymity to participate in the study.) At least half the students had at least one violent crime in their neighborhood during the participation period, according to geocoded police report data collected by the researchers. The students wore activity-tracking watches that measured sleep-wake patterns, and most of them delivered three saliva samples daily for measuring cortisol levels. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Aggression; Stress
Link ID: 25285 - Posted: 08.02.2018

Ashley Yeager Neuroscientist Gavin Clowry didn’t intend to grow a miniature human brain in a rat pup. But a few months ago, that’s essentially what happened. “We were astonished when we saw it,” recalls the faculty member at Newcastle University in the UK. Clowry and his colleagues had derived human neural stem cells from induced pluripotent stem cells, diffused them into a 3-D gel, and transplanted the gel into the young rats’ brains to test the cells’ ability to survive. A month later, much to the team’s surprise, the human cells had formed columns of tightly packed progenitor cells surrounded by immature neurons. “They looked like organoids,” says Clowry, who published the results in May. Organoids are tiny collections of tissue made from cells that self-organize into 3-D structures that mimic the anatomy of fully formed organs. Clowry attributes the unexpected development of the human brain organoids to the complex environment of the rat’s brain, where diverse cell types interact to keep neurons operating. That’s not to say cerebral organoids can’t also be grown in a dish. Scientists published the first description of lab-grown, human brain organoids in 2013. But even cultured mini-brains appear to benefit from an in vivo environment. Clowry’s study appeared in the literature just three weeks after a paper from Fred “Rusty” Gage and his colleagues at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, described how they had transplanted lab-grown human brain organoids into the brains of mice and watched as the animals’ native blood vessels and immune cells infiltrated the organoids. Gage’s team also noted that the cells in the implanted organoids were sending and receiving signals to and from the mice’s native nerve cells. As Clowry and his colleagues would later observe in rat brains, the organoids were being integrated into the animals’ brains. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Stem Cells
Link ID: 25284 - Posted: 08.02.2018

Maria Temming Google Glass may have failed as a high-tech fashion trend, but it’s showing promise as a tool to help children with autism better navigate social situations. A new smartphone app that pairs with a Google Glass headset uses facial recognition software to give the wearer real-time updates on which emotions people are expressing. In a pilot trial, described online August 2 in npj Digital Medicine, 14 children with autism spectrum disorder used this program at home for an average of just over 10 weeks. After treatment, the kids showed improved social skills, including increased eye contact and ability to decode facial expressions. After her 9-year-old son, Alex, participated in the study, Donji Cullenbine described the Google Glass therapy as “remarkable.” She noticed within a few weeks that Alex was meeting her eyes more often — a behavior change that’s stuck since treatment ended, she says. And Alex enjoyed using the Google Glass app. Cullenbine recalls her son telling her excitedly, “Mommy, I can read minds.” Unlike most children, who naturally learn to read facial expressions by interacting with family and friends, children with autism often have to hone these skills through behavioral therapy. That typically involves a therapist leading the child through structured activities, like exercises with flash cards that depict faces wearing different expressions. But therapists are so few and far between that a child diagnosed with autism can spend 18 months on a waiting list before starting treatment. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Autism; Emotions
Link ID: 25283 - Posted: 08.02.2018

Ashley Yeager European health officials have approved the sale of the migraine-prevention drug Aimovig (erenumab), The Guardian reports today (July 31). In May, the US Food and Drug Administration gave the green light for the same drug, considered a first of its kind because it blocks a receptor that plays a role in transmitting signals of migraine pain. “Migraine is incredibly painful, and has symptoms that include vomiting and visual disturbance, so getting it frequently can literally ruin lives,” Wendy Thomas, chief executive of the Migraine Trust, tells The Guardian. “That is why it is important that [the drug] becomes available to patients as soon as possible.” Aimovig targets the calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) receptor, and in clinical trials the compound was shown to reduce the number of days individuals suffered migraines each month. One in four patients with chronic migraines—those experiencing symptoms 15 days or more a month—were migraine-free for more than 15 months. “A treatment specifically designed for migraine prevention is a much welcomed innovation and could transform lives of patients for whom current therapies do not work or are not well tolerated,” Patrick Little, president of the European Migraine and Headache Alliance, said in a June 30 statement from Novartis, the company that manufactures Aimovig. In the trials, the drug was tested on migraine sufferers who did not get relief from two to four other commonly used migraine treatments. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientis

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25282 - Posted: 08.02.2018

Laura Sanders Among amateur players who headed a similar number of balls, women had more signs of microscopic damage in their brains’ white matter than men, scientists report July 31 in Radiology. Female athletes are known to have worse symptoms after brain injuries than male athletes, but a clear head-to-head comparison of post-heading brains hadn’t been done until now. From 2013 to 2016, study coauthor Michael Lipton of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, N.Y., and colleagues recruited 98 soccer players from amateur teams, including from colleges. The researchers then compared male and female players who headed the ball a similar number of times over the past year. For men, that median estimate was 487 headers. Women had an estimated median of 469 headers. Despite those similar numbers of head knocks, women’s brains had more spots that showed signs of microscopic damage. A type of magnetic resonance imaging scan called diffusion tensor imaging identified brain regions with changes in white matter, bundles of message-sending fibers. In some cases, those altered spots indicated possible damage to nerve cell axons and myelin, a protective coating that speeds neural signals along. In men, only three brain regions showed potential damage associated with heading frequency. In women, eight regions showed signs of damage with frequent heading. These brain changes weren’t enough to cause symptoms in the amateur soccer players. But repeated blows to the brain can contribute to memory loss and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a disorder found in professional football players, soldiers and others whose brains suffer repetitive trauma (SN: 7/13/13, p. 18). |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25281 - Posted: 08.01.2018

By Matthew Hutson For millions who can’t hear, lip reading offers a window into conversations that would be lost without it. But the practice is hard—and the results are often inaccurate (as you can see in these Bad Lip Reading videos). Now, researchers are reporting a new artificial intelligence (AI) program that outperformed professional lip readers and the best AI to date, with just half the error rate of the previous best algorithm. If perfected and integrated into smart devices, the approach could put lip reading in the palm of everyone’s hands. “It’s a fantastic piece of work,” says Helen Bear, a computer scientist at Queen Mary University of London who was not involved with the project. Writing computer code that can read lips is maddeningly difficult. So in the new study scientists turned to a form of AI called machine learning, in which computers learn from data. They fed their system thousands of hours of videos along with transcripts, and had the computer solve the task for itself. The researchers started with 140,000 hours of YouTube videos of people talking in diverse situations. Then, they designed a program that created clips a few seconds long with the mouth movement for each phoneme, or word sound, annotated. The program filtered out non-English speech, nonspeaking faces, low-quality video, and video that wasn’t shot straight ahead. Then, they cropped the videos around the mouth. That yielded nearly 4000 hours of footage, including more than 127,000 English words. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Hearing; Robotics
Link ID: 25280 - Posted: 08.01.2018

By Anna Clemens In 2003 a 65-year-old man brought a strange problem to neurologist Adam Zeman, now at the University of Exeter in England. The patient, later dubbed “MX,” claimed he could not conjure images of friends, family members or recently visited places. All his life, MX, a retired surveyor, had loved reading novels and had routinely drifted off to sleep visualizing buildings, loved ones and recent events. But after undergoing a procedure to open arteries in his heart, during which he probably suffered a minor stroke, his mind’s eye went blind. He could see normally, but he could not form pictures in his mind. Zeman had never encountered anything like it and set out to learn more. He has since given the condition a name—aphantasia (phantasia means “imagination” in Greek). And he and others are exploring its neurological underpinnings. Zeman and his colleagues began their analysis by testing MX’s visual imagination in several ways. Compared with control subjects, MX scored poorly on questionnaires assessing the ability to produce visual imagery. Surprisingly, though, he was able to accomplish tasks that typically involve visualization. Advertisement For example, when asked to say which is a lighter color of green—grass or pine trees—most people would decide by imagining both grass and tree and comparing them. MX correctly said that pine trees are darker than grass, but he insisted he had used no visual imagery to make the decision. “I just know the answer,” he said. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 25279 - Posted: 08.01.2018

By Stephen T. Casper The case report is dead. At least, it seems all but so in the realm of evidence-based medicine. It is thus thoroughly refreshing to read Helen Thomson’s Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World’s Strangest Brains and Eric R. Kandel’s The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves, two ambitious books that draw on clinical profiles to tell stories about our brains and minds. Thomson’s memoir aims to help us understand our brains through stories about exceptional others, who, she argues, may serve as proxies for ourselves. Kandel’s book argues from neuroscience research and individual illness experiences for a biologically informed account of mind and brain. Both authors are unapologetic in their focus on what might be dismissed as merely anecdotal. Each foregrounds neurological and psychiatric patient narratives and experiences and from these draws out larger philosophical and scientific lessons. By profiling and seeking meaning in individuals with curious neurological conditions, Thomson’s Unthinkable follows a well-worn literary path but revitalizes the genre with an original and subtle shift to the personal. Perfected by neurologist Oliver Sacks, Thomson’s technique was invented before the 19th century but most famously pioneered in the 20th century by such eminent neurologists as Morton Prince, Sigmund Freud, and Alexander Luria. Where those authors represented patients as medical mysteries or as object lessons in physiology and philosophy, Thomson finds a timelier focus that corresponds with the growing advocacy for, and social attention to, individual patients’ rights. Unlike her predecessors in the genre, Thomson enters her subject’s lives—their restaurants, homes, families, communities, and online selves. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 25278 - Posted: 08.01.2018

By Alex Marshall Alan Alda has been living with Parkinson’s disease for over three years, the actor revealed Tuesday in an appearance on CBS’s “This Morning.” “The reason I want to talk about it in public is that I was diagnosed three-and-a-half years ago, and I’ve had a full life since,” he said. “I thought it’s probably only a matter of time before somebody does a story about this from a sad point of view,” he added, pointing out that one of his thumbs had been twitching in recent TV appearances. “But that’s not where I am.” Parkinson’s is a movement disorder with symptoms that include muscle tremors and stiffness, poor balance and coordination. It affects over a million Americans, according to the American Parkinson Disease Association, including Michael J. Fox and the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, the longtime civil rights leader. Mr. Alda, who made his name in the TV series “M*A*S*H,” said he went to the doctors after reading an article in The New York Times, by Jane E. Brody, which said that acting out one’s dreams could be an early warning sign of the disorder. “By acting out your dreams, I mean I was having a dream that somebody was attacking me and I threw a sack of potatoes at them,” Mr. Alda, 82, said in the interview. “But what I was really doing is throwing a pillow at my wife.” He said he had no other symptoms, but a few months later noticed a thumb twitch. Mr. Alda said he was also speaking out to reassure people that they do not have to be fearful after a diagnosis. “You still have things you can do,” he said. Mr. Alda goes boxing three times a week, plays tennis and marches to John Philip Sousa music. “Marching to march music is good for Parkinson’s,” he explained. Mr. Alda was not trying to belittle people who have severe symptoms, he added. “That’s difficult,” he said. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Parkinsons; Sleep
Link ID: 25277 - Posted: 08.01.2018

Diana Kwon Bruce Baker, a geneticist who studied gene-behavior interactions in Drosophila melanogaster, died on July 1. He was 72 years old. “Bruce had enormous respect for the details of science, not only the science in his own lab but also that of his peers,” Deborah Andrew, a biologist at Johns Hopkins and one of Baker’s former graduate students, writes in an obituary posted by the Genetics Society of America. Baker was born in Swannanoa, North Carolina in 1945. After completing his undergraduate studies at Reed College in 1966 and receiving a PhD from the University of Washington in 1971, Baker joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego. In 1986, he became a professor at Stanford University, where he remained for more than two decades before moving to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in 2008. Over the course of his career, Baker published more than 150 papers, primarily focused on the cellular and genetic mechanisms that determine the development of sex-specific characteristics in fruit flies. He also investigated dosage compensation, the strategies used by fruit flies to deal with having one X chromosome instead of two. Among Baker’s scientific contributions is the discovery that the gene encoding the transcription factor Fruitless plays a key role in male-specific courtship behaviors. Studies led by Baker and his colleague, neurobiologist Barry Dickson, revealed that Fruitless (fru) influenced male flies’ attraction to females and, when expressed in females, led them to court other female flies. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25276 - Posted: 08.01.2018

By Dennis Normile Researchers in Japan today announced the launch of a clinical trial to treat Parkinson’s disease with neurological material derived from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, mature cells chemically manipulated to return to an early stage of development from which they can theoretically differentiate into any of the body’s specialized cells. The study team will inject dopaminergic progenitors, a cell type that develops into neurons that produce dopamine, directly into a region of the brain known to play a key role in the neural degeneration associated with Parkinson’s disease. The effort is being led by Jun Takahashi, a neurosurgeon at Kyoto University's Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA), in cooperation with Kyoto University Hospital. Parkinson’s disease results from the death of specialized cells in the brain that produce the neurotransmitter dopamine. A lack of dopamine leads to a decline in motor skills, resulting in difficulty walking and involuntary trembling. As the disease progresses it can lead to dementia. The trial strategy is to derive dopaminergic progenitors from iPS cells and inject them into the putamen, a round structure located at the base of the forebrain. Surgeons will drill two small holes through a patient’s skull and use a specialized device to inject roughly 5 million cells. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Stem Cells
Link ID: 25275 - Posted: 07.31.2018

Laura Sanders Anxiety can run in families. Key differences in how an anxious monkey’s brain operates can be passed along too, a large study suggests. By finding a pattern of brain activity linked to anxiety, and by tracing it through generations of monkeys, the results bring researchers closer to understanding the brain characteristics involved in severe anxiety — and how these characteristics can be inherited. “We can trace how anxiety falls through the family tree,” which parents pass it on to which children, how cousins are affected and so on, says study coauthor Ned Kalin of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison. The newly identified brain activity pattern takes the same path through the family tree as the anxious behavior, Kalin and colleagues report July 30 in the Journal of Neuroscience. Kalin and colleagues studied rhesus monkeys that, as youngsters, displayed an anxious temperament. Human children with this trait are often painfully shy, and are at much higher risk of going on to develop anxiety and depression than other children, studies have shown. Monkeys can behave similarly. Researchers measured anxious temperament by subjecting young monkeys to a stressful situation: An intruder entered their cage and showed only his or her profile to the monkey. “The monkey isn’t sure what is going to happen, because it can’t see the individual’s eyes,” Kalin says. Faced with this potential threat, monkeys freeze and fall silent. By measuring the degree of this response, as well as levels of the stress hormone cortisol, the researchers figured out which monkeys had anxious temperaments. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Emotions; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25274 - Posted: 07.31.2018

By Damian Garde, In the long-running debate over just what causes Alzheimer’s disease, one side looks to have scored a victory with new results with an in-development drug. But there’s enough variation in the data to ensure that the squabbling factions of Alzheimer’s will have plenty to fight about. At issue is the so-called amyloid hypothesis, a decades-old theory claiming that Alzheimer’s gradual degradation of the brain is caused by the accumulation of sticky plaques. And the new drug is BAN2401, designed by Biogen and Eisai to prevent those amyloid plaques from clustering and attack the clumps that already have. In data presented last week, one group of patients receiving BAN2401 saw their amyloid levels plummet, a result that was tied to a significant reduction in cognitive decline compared with placebo. To the amyloid-inclined, like Dr. Howard Fillit of the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation, that marks a clear affirmation of the linkage between plaques and mental fortitude. “I mean if you asked me five or 10 years ago if we’re going to have a drug that can remove the plaques from the brain, I would have thought this was space technology,” Fillit said. “And there was definitely a signal, in my opinion, on clinical outcomes, which is what we’ve all been looking for.” But to skeptics, the trial was laden with confounding details that make it impossible to draw conclusions. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25273 - Posted: 07.31.2018

Ed Yong Imagine emerging into the sun after 17 long years spent lying underground, only for your butt to fall off. That ignominious fate regularly befalls America’s cicadas. These bugs spend their youth underground, feeding on roots. After 13 or 17 years of this, they synchronously erupt from the soil in plagues of biblical proportions for a few weeks of song and sex. But on their way out, some of them encounter the spores of a fungus called Massospora. A week after these encounters, the hard panels of the cicadas’ abdomens slough off, revealing a strange white “plug.” That’s the fungus, which has grown throughout the insect, consumed its organs, and converted the rear third of its body into a mass of spores. The de-derriered insects go about their business as if nothing unusual has happened. And as they fly around, the spores rain down from their exposed backsides, landing on other cicadas and saturating the soil. “We call them flying saltshakers of death,” says Matt Kasson, who studies fungi at West Virginia University. Massospora and its butt-eating powers were first discovered in the 19th century, but Kasson and his colleagues have only just shown that it has another secret: It doses its victims with mind-altering drugs. Perhaps that’s why “the cicadas walk around as if nothing’s wrong even though a third of their body has fallen off,” Kasson says.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25272 - Posted: 07.31.2018

Lee Daniel Kravetz In 1972, a woman checked into London’s Royal Free Hospital to be treated for anorexia. “I found her symptoms to be unique,” Gerald Russell, the British psychologist who treated her, tells me. “They didn’t match the diagnostic criteria for anorexia at all.” Unlike his emaciated patients with sallow skin and big eyes, Russell’s new patient was of average weight. Her face was full. Her cheeks were pink as the skin of an onion. She was the first of roughly thirty instances of this unusual condition that crossed the threshold of his clinic over the next seven years, each person presenting with perplexing purging behaviors secondary to binge eating. Russell wasn’t dealing with anorexia nervosa, he realized, but something as yet undefined by psychology or medicine. In fact, he had stumbled upon a condition that science had yet to see in large numbers or identify at any time in the long history of eating disorders. Psychological Medicine published Russell’s ensuing paper on these unusual cases; in it, he described the key features of this novel mental illness he was now referring to as bulimia nervosa. Many in the scientific community objected to Russell’s conclusions, pointing to the limited and problematic sample size he’d used. At the time, however, there were simply too few cases for Russell to draw from. The pool in the 1970s was just too small. As bulimia gained further diagnostic legitimacy in 1980 with its inclusion in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Russell ruefully tracked its unexpectedly swift spread across Europe and North America, where it infiltrated college campuses, affecting 15 percent of female students in sororities, all-women dormitories, and female collegiate sports teams. The disease moved through the halls of American high schools, where binging, fasting, diet pill use, and other eating disorder symptoms easily clustered. He chased its dispersion across Egypt, where the number of new cases grew to 400,000. In Canada, it swelled to 600,000. In Russia, 800,000. In India, 6 million. In China, 7 million. In the UK, one out of every one hundred women was now developing the disorder. © 2018, New York Media LLC.

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 25271 - Posted: 07.30.2018

By Jane E. Brody Eating disorders pose serious hazards to adolescents and young adults and are often hidden from family, friends and even doctors, sometimes until the disorders cause lasting health damage and have become highly resistant to treatment. According to the Family Institute at Northwestern University, nearly 3 percent of teenagers between the ages of 13 and 18 have eating disorders. Boys as well as girls may be affected. Even when the disorder does not reach the level of a clinical diagnosis, some studies suggest that as many as half of teenage girls and 30 percent of boys have seriously distorted eating habits that can adversely affect them physically, academically, psychologically and socially. Eating disorders can ultimately be fatal, said Dr. Laurie Hornberger, a specialist in adolescent medicine at Children’s Mercy Kansas City. “People with eating disorders can die of medical complications, but they may be even more likely to die of suicide. They become tired of having their lives controlled by eating and food issues.” The problem is especially common among, though not limited to, gymnasts, dancers, models, wrestlers and other athletes, who often struggle to maintain ultra-slim bodies or maintain restrictive weight limits. The transgender population is also at higher risk for eating disorders. It is not unusual for teenagers to adopt strange or extreme food-related behaviors, prompting many parents to think “this too shall pass.” But experts say an eating disorder — anorexia, bulimia or binge-eating — should not be considered “normal” adolescent behavior, and they urge the adults in the youngsters’ lives to be alert to telltale signs and take necessary action to stop the problem before it becomes entrenched. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 25270 - Posted: 07.30.2018