By Ingrid Wickelgren It’s 7 p.m. on a Friday and Rebecca "Becky" Audette is already in bed, tucked under a polka-dotted lavender comforter. Dark purple velour curtains with butterfly ties hang over the lavender walls of her bedroom. Purple has been Becky’s favorite color since she was a toddler, before she was diagnosed with autism at age 7. Now, the young woman functions at about the level of a 4-year-old. “Am I going to bed? I want to go to bed,” she insists. Becky lives with her mother, Pamela Peirce; brother, Jason Audette; and Jason’s wife in a gray-and-white colonial-style house that was Peirce’s childhood home in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. When Peirce was a child, her extended family owned five houses along this quarter-mile stretch of road, dirt back then. Peirce and her grown children are the last of the clan to occupy the street. It’s paved now, but the house still sports features of an earlier time: two-pronged electrical outlets, a VCR, inherited furniture. It also offers a hopeful vision of the future. Becky bears the markings of an invasive, high-tech treatment under her purple plaid pajamas: two linear scars, each about 3 inches long, over her clavicle, and two circular bulges protruding ever so slightly from her chest. Beneath these marks lies the power source for an implant that stimulates key parts of her brain. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 25454 - Posted: 09.15.2018

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent Hundreds of thousands of girls and women with autism are going undiagnosed due to it being viewed as a “male condition”, according to one of the UK’s leading neuroscientists. Prof Francesca Happé, director of the Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s College London, warned that the failure to recognise autism in girls and women was taking a stark toll on their mental health. “We’ve overlooked autism in women and girls and I think there’s a real gender equality issue here,” she said. “I think we are missing large numbers and misdiagnosing them too.” Until recently, autism without intellectual impairments, sometimes called Asperger syndrome, was thought to predominantly affect boys and men, at a ratio of 10 to every one woman. However, there is growing evidence that the number of girls and women with the condition may have been vastly underestimated. Recent research, based on active screening rather than clinical or school records, found a ratio of 3:1. Happé and others believe this could fall further – potentially to as low as 2:1 – as diagnostic processes become better tailored to identifying autism in girls and women. Due to early assumptions about autism mostly affecting men, studies have often recruited male-only cohorts. Male participants in brain imaging studies on autism outnumber females by eight to one, and in earlier research the bias was even more pronounced. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Autism; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25453 - Posted: 09.15.2018

Aimee Cunningham Certain brain and personality characteristics may help predict whether a sugar pill can provide relief to someone suffering from chronic pain. In a small study, patients with persistent back pain who responded to a placebo treatment benefitted from up to a 33 percent reduction in their pain intensity. These people had distinctive features in their brains and certain personality traits, researchers report online September 12 in Nature Communications. About 20 percent of U.S. adults, or about 50 million people, had chronic pain in 2016, according to new data released September 13 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Chronic pain was defined as feeling pain on most days, if not every day, over the previous six months. Being able to identify people who respond to a placebo might mean doctors could give these individuals the option of a pain reliever that’s cheap, free of side effects and — unlike opioids, which are often prescribed to treat persistent pain — not addictive. “We need to seriously think about placebo as a treatment option, especially in chronic pain patients,” says neuroscientist and study coauthor A. Vania Apkarian of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25452 - Posted: 09.15.2018

Hannah Thomasy Transferring memories from one mind to another seems like something out of science fiction. But biologists from UCLA have recently found that memory transfer is in fact possible—at least in sea slugs. In the study, researchers in Professor David Glanzman’s lab examined memory in sea slugs using something called the siphon withdrawal reflex. The siphon is a sort of fleshy tube that sea slugs and other mollusks use to propel water in and out of their bodies. When the siphon is touched, the sea slug ordinarily withdraws it into its body as a protective reflex. The scientists “trained” the sea slugs, giving them a series of light shocks which caused them to become more sensitive to future stimuli. Then the researchers tested the slugs’ siphon withdrawal reflex 48 hours later. Sea slugs that had been shocked kept their siphons withdrawn for a significantly longer period of time than untrained sea slugs. This suggests that the conditioned sea slugs had formed a memory of their shocks. So far, nothing unusual. But then researchers removed RNA from the neurons of these trained sea slugs, and injected it into a new group—into sea slugs that hadn’t ever been shocked. Weirdly, even these otherwise naive sea slugs withdrew their siphons for much longer than normal when they were poked. In other words, they acted like they remembered being shocked, even though the shocks didn’t actually happen to them. These findings have been extremely controversial in the neuroscience community because they challenge the way that most researchers understand memory. For decades, scientists have believed that memories are stored in the brain’s synaptic connections. In other words, changing the connections between neurons (or groups of neurons) is what allows us to form and store memories. © 2017 Massive Science Inc.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25451 - Posted: 09.15.2018

By JoAnna Klein Plants have no eyes, no ears, no mouth and no hands. They do not have a brain or a nervous system. Muscles? Forget them. They’re stuck where they started, soaking up the sun and sucking up nutrients from the soil. And yet, when something comes around to eat them, they sense it. And they fight back. How is this possible? “You’ve got to think like a vegetable now,” says Simon Gilroy, a botanist who studies how plants sense and respond to their environments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Plants are not green animals,” Dr. Gilroy says. “Plants are different, but sometimes they’re remarkably similar to how animals operate.” To reveal the secret workings of a plant’s threat communication system for a study published Thursday in Science, Masatsugu Toyota (now a professor at Saitama University in Japan) and other researchers in Dr. Gilroy’s lab sent in munching caterpillars like in the video above. They also slashed leaves with scissors. They applied glutamate, an important neurotransmitter that helps neurons communicate in animals. In these and about a dozen other videos, they used a glowing, green protein to trace calcium and accompanying chemical and electrical messages in the plant. And they watched beneath a microscope as warnings transited through the leafy green appendages, revealing that plants aren’t as passive as they seem. The messages start at the point of attack, where glutamate initiates a wave of calcium that propagates through the plant’s veins, or plumbing system. The deluge turns on stress hormones and genetic switches that open plant arsenals and prepare the plant to ward off attackers — with no thought or movement. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 25450 - Posted: 09.14.2018

By Emily Underwood On a moonless night, the light that reaches Earth is a trillion–fold less than on a sunny day. Yet most mammals still see well enough to get around just fine—even without the special light-boosting membranes in the eyes of cats and other nocturnal animals. A new study in mice hints at how this natural night vision works: Motion-sensing nerve cells in the retina temporarily change how they wire to each other in dark conditions. The findings might one day help visually impaired humans, researchers say. Scientists already knew a bit about how night vision works in rabbits, mice, humans, and other mammals. Mammalian retinas can respond to “ridiculously small” numbers of photons, says Joshua Singer, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland in College Park who was not involved in the new study. A single photon can activate a light-sensitive cell known as a rod cell in the retina, which sends a minute electrical signal to the brain through a ganglion cell. One kind of ganglion cell specializes in motion detection—a vital function if you’re a mouse being hunted by an owl, or a person darting to avoid oncoming traffic. Some of these direction-selective ganglion cells (DSGCs) get excited only when an object is moving upward. Others fire only when objects are moving down, or to the left or right. Together, the cells decide where an object is headed and relay that information to the brain, which decides how to act. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 25449 - Posted: 09.14.2018

By Knvul Sheikh Humans and other mammals react to stressful situations through a series of well-orchestrated evolutionary adaptations. When faced with a predator looking for its next meal, or with worry of losing a job, our bodies release a cascade of stress hormones. Our heart rate spikes, breath quickens, muscles tense up and beads of sweat appear. This so-called “fight-or-flight” response served our ancestors well, but its continual activation in our modern-day lives comes with a cost. Scientists are starting to realize stress often exacerbates several diseases, including depression, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, HIV/AIDS and asthma. One theory is hoping to explain the link between stress and such widespread havoc by laying the blame on an unexpected source—the microscopic powerhouses inside each cell. Each of our cells contains hundreds of small bean-shaped mitochondria — subcellular structures, or organelles, that provide the energy needed for normal functioning. Mitochondria have their own circular genome with 37 genes. We inherit this mitochondrial DNA only from our mothers, so the makeup of the DNA’s code stays relatively consistent from one generation to the next. But our fight-or-flight response places extreme demands on the mitochondria. All of a sudden, they need to produce much more energy to fuel a faster heartbeat, expanding lungs and tensing muscles, which leaves them vulnerable to damage. Unlike DNA in the cell’s nucleus, though, mitochondria have limited repair mechanisms. And recent animal studies have shown chronic stress not only leads to mitochondrial damage in brain regions such as the hippocampus, hypothalamus and cortex, it also results in mitochondria releasing their DNA into the cell cytoplasm, and eventually into the blood. © 2018 Scientific American,

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25448 - Posted: 09.14.2018

By Abraham Loeb Scientific discoveries substantiate our awe when faced with the richness and universality of the laws of nature. But science falls short of explaining this natural order and why it exists in the first place. This is where philosophy comes to the rescue. Science seeks to understand how the universe works, just as we might try to figure out the mechanics of a sophisticated engine. Philosophy, by contrast, addresses questions that transcend the functionality of nature, as we might pursue the complementary task of figuring out why the engine is constructed in a particular way. As a scientist, I am surprised at the degree of organization the universe exhibits; the same laws that govern its earliest moments—something we know from observations of the most distant galaxies and most ancient radiation—also preside over what we find today in laboratories on Earth. This should not be taken for granted. We could have witnessed a fragmented reality, one in which different regions of spacetime obey different sets of laws or even behave chaotically with no rational explanation. By studying the physical constituents of an engine, one acquires a better understanding of how it works but not necessarily the purpose for its existence. Metaphysical thinking can supplement science in territories not accessible to empirical inquiry. Within these domains, philosophy can build on scientific knowledge rather than yield to it. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 25447 - Posted: 09.13.2018

By Sheila Kaplan and Jan Hoffman WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday declared that teenage use of electronic cigarettes has reached “an epidemic proportion,” and it put makers of the most popular devices on notice that they have just 60 days to prove they can keep their devices away from minors. The order was part of a sweeping government action that targeted both makers and sellers of e-cigarettes. If Juul Labs and four other major manufacturers fail to halt sales to minors, the agency said, it could remove their flavored products from the market. It also raised the possibility of civil or criminal charges if companies are allowing bulk sales through their websites. The agency said it was sending warning letters to 1,100 retailers — including 7-Eleven stores, Walgreens, Circle K convenience shops and Shell gas stations — and issued another 131 fines, ranging from $279 to $11,182, for selling e-cigarettes to minors. Federal law prohibits selling e-cigarettes to anyone under 18. In a briefing with reporters, the F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, said that more than two million middle and high school students were regular users of e-cigarettes last year. The government’s tactics underscore a dilemma in the public health community: In addressing one public health problem — cigarette smoking, which kills 480,000 people in the United States each year — e-cigarettes are creating another — hooking teenagers who have never smoked on nicotine. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25446 - Posted: 09.13.2018

By: Albert La Spada, M.D., Ph.D. Altering the DNA sequence of a single gene can be enough to cause a fatal illness, and a medical specialty is devoted to the diagnosis and care of patients who have what doctors have labeled “genetic diseases.” While most of these conditions are very rare (except in certain small human populations that exist in reproductive isolation1), there are thousands of genetic diseases, and at least half of pediatric patients admitted to major children’s medical centers at any given time are afflicted with one of them.2 Single gene mutations can also cause breast, ovarian, and colon cancer in adult patients. Over the last century, our understanding of genetic disease has greatly advanced through the tireless work of clinicians and researchers, as the concept of one gene giving rise to one particular disorder evolved, and the modes of inheritance for different genetic diseases were defined. In the course of this work, certain such diseases (e.g. sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, neurofibromatosis) became well known, almost always because they were the most common and the most tragic. Included in this group is a disorder that has been the focus of intense research efforts to define its cause and now to develop an effective treatment: Huntington’s disease (HD). In this primarily neuropsychiatric disorder, most affected individuals first suffer from an inability to control their movements, and develop signs of disease in their 30s or 40s. Because these uncontrolled movements can appear rhythmic, the disease was also named Huntington’s chorea, from the Greek word for dance. The initial phase typically advances for a number of years before HD patients develop cognitive decline, which progresses until they can no longer perform the activities of daily living. At this point, patients are typically admitted to a skilled nursing facility, where they linger in decline for more years before passing away. © 2018 The Dana Foundation

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 25445 - Posted: 09.13.2018

By Michael Schulson Last spring, Paul Strode gave an unusual survey to his advanced biology students at Fairview High School in Boulder, Colorado. The first five questions were: 1. Define as best you can: What is a racial group? 2. Define as best you can: What is an ethnic group? 3. Define as best you can: What is meant by the term genetic ancestry? 4. True or False: There is too much overlap between racial groups to use a single biological trait (like skin color) to distinguish one racial group from another. 5. True or False: When several traits are combined they can be used to distinguish one racial group from another. “In terms of wading into the idea of gender identification, differences between racial groups and so forth, we regard those as potential firestorms, if we were to go there.” The next day, Strode showed his students — all seniors — their aggregated results. On some questions, the students were mostly in agreement. More than 80 percent of them, for example, correctly marked Question 4 as “True.” But other topics were muddier, and on several questions — including #5 — the students split nearly 50-50. “They’re guessing,” Strode says. (For the record, the answer he says he was looking for on #5 was “False.”) Strode’s exercise is an anomaly. Most American biology textbooks and curricula don’t discuss race at all — nor do they grapple with the biology of sexual orientation or gender, for that matter. To some, these omissions seem appropriate. Early 20th-century biology textbooks, after all, were replete with ignorant racial and gender stereotyping and classifications purporting to be scientific — and some even extolled the virtues of racial purity. It would be hard to find such discussions in today’s biology classrooms and supporting materials. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25444 - Posted: 09.13.2018

Diana Kwon Obesity is on the rise across the globe. The worldwide prevalence of the condition has nearly tripled over the last four decades, and approximately 13 percent of adults were obese in 2016. This staggering rise poses a public health concern: not only is obesity tied to bodily ailments such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, epidemiological investigations have revealed that it is also linked to cognitive decline—and higher chances of developing dementia and other brain-related disorders later in life. Researchers have recently started to shed light on how weight gain affects the brain, and over the last few years, microglia, the brain’s resident immune cells, have emerged as the key culprit. Several rodent studies paint a picture of activated microglia gobbling up dendritic spines that form synapses in obese animals’ brains as the cause of cognitive decline. A study published today (September 10) in the Journal of Neuroscience provides strong new support for this theory. While prior studies have drawn robust associations between microglia and obesity-related cognitive decline, Elise Cope, a postdoc at Princeton University, says none had yet addressed whether those cells were actually causing the behavioral changes. “The novelty of our study was where we decided to see if blocking microglia using three different methods could actually prevent the dendritic spine loss and improve cognitive function,” Cope says. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist.

Keyword: Obesity; Glia
Link ID: 25443 - Posted: 09.13.2018

By Carl Zimmer How generous is an ape? It’s a hard question for scientists to tackle, but the answer could tell us a lot about ourselves. People in every culture can be generous, whether they’re loaning a cellphone to an office mate or sharing an antelope haunch with a hungry family. While it’s easy to dwell on our capacity for war and violence, scientists see our generosity as a remarkable feature of our species. “One of the things that stands out about humans is how helpful we are,” said Christopher Krupenye, a primate behavior researcher at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. This generosity may have been crucial to the survival of our early ancestors who lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers. “When our own attempts to find food are unsuccessful, we rely on others to share food with us — otherwise we starve,” said Jan Engelmann, a researcher at Göttingen University. To understand the origin of this impulse — known as prosociality — a number of researchers have turned to our closest living relatives. For example, a new study involving bonobo apes suggests that the roots of human generosity run deep, but only came into full flower over the course of the evolution of our species. Roughly seven million years ago, our lineage split from the ancestors of chimpanzees and their cousin species, bonobos. Chimpanzees and bonobos share a common ancestor that lived about two million years ago. These two closely related species of apes look almost identical to the untrained eye. But they have evolved some intriguing differences in their behavior, including which objects — food or tools — prompt them to behave with generosity. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 25442 - Posted: 09.12.2018

Jon Hamilton Kids with ADHD are easily distracted. Barn owls are not. So a team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore is studying these highly focused predatory birds in an effort to understand the brain circuits that control attention. The team's long-term goal is to figure out what goes wrong in the brains of people with attention problems, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. "We think we have the beginnings of an answer," says Shreesh Mysore, an assistant professor who oversees the owl lab at Hopkins. The answer, he says, appears to involve an ancient brain area with special cells that tell us what to ignore. Mysore explains his hypothesis from one of the owl rooms in his basement lab. He has a distraught bird perched on his forearm. And as he talks, he tries to soothe the animal. The owl screeches, flaps and digs its talons into the elbow-length leather glove that Mysore wears for protection. He covers the bird's eyes with his free hand and hugs the animal to his chest. The owl, no longer able to focus on the movements of his human visitors, goes quiet. When it comes to paying attention, barn owls have a lot in common with people, Mysore says. "Essentially, a brain decides at any instant: What is the most important piece of information for behavior or survival?" he says. "And that is the piece of information that gets attended to, that drives behavior." © 2018 npr

Keyword: ADHD; Attention
Link ID: 25441 - Posted: 09.12.2018

By Elena Pasquinelli Ten years ago technology writer Nicholas Carr published an article in the Atlantic entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He strongly suspected the answer was “yes.” Himself less and less able to focus, remember things or absorb more than a few pages of text, he accused the Internet of radically changing people’s brains. And that is just one of the grievances leveled against the Internet and at the various devices we use to access it–including cell phones, tablets, game consoles and laptops. Often the complaints target video games that involve fighting or war, arguing that they cause players to become violent. But digital devices also have fervent defenders—in particular the promoters of brain-training games, who claim that their offerings can help improve attention, memory and reflexes. Who, if anyone, is right? The answer is less straightforward than you might think. Take Carr’s accusation. As evidence, he quoted findings of neuroscientists who showed that the brain is more plastic than previously understood. In other words, it has the ability to reprogram itself over time, which could account for the Internet’s effect on it. Yet in a 2010 opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, psychologists Christopher Chabris, then at Union College, and Daniel J. Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign rebutted Carr’s view: “There is simply no experimental evidence to show that living with new technologies fundamentally changes brain organization in a way that affects one’s ability to focus,” they wrote. And the debate goes on. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Attention
Link ID: 25440 - Posted: 09.12.2018

Laura Sanders I’m relatively new to Oregon, but one of the ways I know I’m starting to settle in is my ability to recognize marijuana shops. Some are easy. But others, with names like The Agrestic and Mr. Nice Guy, are a little trickier to identify for someone who hasn’t spent much time in a state that has legalized marijuana. A growing number of states have legalized both medical and recreational marijuana. At the same time, women who are pregnant or breastfeeding are using the drug in increasing numbers. A 2017 JAMA study described both survey results and urine tests of nearly 280,000 pregnant women in Northern California, where medical marijuana was legalized in 1996. The study showed that in 2009, about 4 percent of the women tested used marijuana. In 2016, about 7 percent of women did. Those California numbers may be even higher now, since recreational marijuana became legal there this year. Some of those numbers may be due in part to women using marijuana to treat their morning sickness, a more recent study by some of the same researchers suggests. Their report, published August 20 in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that pregnant women with severe nausea and vomiting were 3.8 times more likely to use marijuana than pregnant women without morning sickness. So some pregnant women are definitely using the drug, and exposing their fetuses to it, too. Ingredients in marijuana are known to make their way to fetuses by crossing the placenta during pregnancy (and by entering breast milk after the baby is born). But what actually happens when those marijuana compounds arrive? © Society for Science and the Public

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25439 - Posted: 09.12.2018

By Nicholas Bakalar New research has found that obstructive sleep apnea — a disorder in which breathing stops and starts during sleep — is associated with an increased risk for gout, a common cause of painful arthritis. Scientists studied 15,879 patients with apnea and 63,296 matched controls without, following them for an average of almost six years. Over that time, 4.9 percent of people with apnea developed gout, compared with 2.6 percent of those without the disorder. Both disorders are associated with obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes and other conditions, but after controlling for these and other factors the independent association of apnea with gout was still evident. The study is in Arthritis & Rheumatology. The mechanism is unclear, but reduced oxygen supply during sleep encourages the production of uric acid, and the accumulation of uric acid crystals in the joints is what causes the inflammation and pain of gout. Apnea can be treated with continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, in which the patient wears a mask at night to allow easier breathing. There are drugs and diet restrictions used to treat gout. The lead author, Milica Blagojevic-Bucknall, a lecturer at Keele University in England, said that this observational study does not prove cause and effect. Still, she added, “It’s possible that people who use CPAP could reduce the risk or severity of gout.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 25438 - Posted: 09.12.2018

By James Gorman Chalk up another achievement for parrots, with an odd twist that raises questions about whether the experimenters or the birds know best. Anastasia Krasheninnikova and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany tested four species of parrots in an experiment that required trading tokens for food and recently reported their findings in the journal Scientific Reports. Would the birds resist an immediate reward to trade for something better? Many species have shown the ability to hold off on an immediate treat — like a dry corn kernel — for something tastier later on, like a bit of walnut. Chimpanzees, monkeys and cockatoos, among other species, can defer gratification. But using tokens for trading had not been tried before in birds, Dr. Krasheninnikova said. Here’s how it worked. First the birds, great green macaws, blue-throated macaws, blue-headed macaws and African grey parrots, learned that they could barter tokens for foods of different value — to the birds, that is. A metal hoop could be traded for a piece of dry corn, the lowest value food, a metal bracket for a medium value sunflower seed and a plastic ring for the highest value food, a piece of shelled walnut. The birds were then offered various choices, like a piece of corn or the ring. They all reliably chose to forego the corn and take the ring. Then they were able to trade the ring for a piece of walnut. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 25437 - Posted: 09.11.2018

By Frankie Schembri The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation has awarded its three annual prizes, regarded as the United States’s most prestigious biomedical research awards, to four researchers in fields including genetics and anesthetic drug development. The Laskers often precede a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: Since the awards were founded in 1945, 87 Lasker laureates have later gotten the call from Stockholm. The basic research prize is shared by Michael Grunstein of the University of California, Los Angeles, and C. David Allis of The Rockefeller University in New York City, who investigated the histone, once considered to be inert packing material for DNA. It is now recognized as an essential component in gene regulation. Joan Argetsinger Steitz of Yale University won the special prize for her discoveries in RNA biology, as well as her work in mentoring and advocating for women in science. John “Iain” Glen, a Scottish veterinary-anesthesiologist now retired from AstraZeneca, the biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Cambridge, U.K., won the clinical award for development of propofol. One of the most widely used drugs for inducing anesthesia, propofol is administered some 60 million times per year in the United States. The laureates will receive their prizes and honorariums of $250,000 for each category at a ceremony in New York City on 21 September. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 25436 - Posted: 09.11.2018

Bret Stetka Dr. Leslie Norins is willing to hand over $1 million of his own money to anyone who can clarify something: Is Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia worldwide, caused by a germ? By "germ" he means microbes like bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites. In other words, Norins, a physician turned publisher, wants to know if Alzheimer's is infectious. It's an idea that just a few years ago would've seemed to many an easy way to drain your research budget on bunk science. Money has poured into Alzheimer's research for years, but until very recently not much of it went toward investigating infection in causing dementia. But this "germ theory" of Alzheimer's, as Norins calls it, has been fermenting in the literature for decades. Even early 20th century Czech physician Oskar Fischer — who, along with his German contemporary Dr. Alois Alzheimer, was integral in first describing the condition — noted a possible connection between the newly identified dementia and tuberculosis. If the germ theory gets traction, even in some Alzheimer's patients, it could trigger a seismic shift in how doctors understand and treat the disease. For instance, would we see a day when dementia is prevented with a vaccine, or treated with antibiotics and antiviral medications? Norins thinks it's worth looking into. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 25435 - Posted: 09.11.2018