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

Allison Aubrey Was it hard to concentrate during that long meeting? Or, does the crossword seem a little tougher? You could be mildly dehydrated. A growing body of evidence finds that being just a little dehydrated is tied to a range of subtle effects — from mood changes to muddled thinking. "We find that when people are mildly dehydrated they really don't do as well on tasks that require complex processing or on tasks that require a lot of their attention," says Mindy Millard-Stafford, director of the Exercise Physiology Laboratory at Georgia Institute of Technology. She published an analysis of the evidence this month, based on 33 studies. Heat Making You Lethargic? Research Shows It Can Slow Your Brain, Too Shots - Health News Heat Making You Lethargic? Research Shows It Can Slow Your Brain, Too How long does it take to become mildly dehydrated in the summer heat? Not long at all, studies show, especially when you exercise outdoors. "If I were hiking at moderate intensity for one hour, I could reach about 1.5 percent to 2 percent dehydration," says Doug Casa, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Connecticut, and CEO of the Korey Stringer Institute. For an average-size person, 2 percent dehydration equates to sweating out about a liter of water. "Most people don't realize how high their sweat rate is in the heat," Casa says. If you're going hard during a run, you can reach that level of dehydration in about 30 minutes. And, at this level of dehydration the feeling of thirst, for many of us, is only just beginning to kick in. "Most people can't perceive that they're 1.5 percent dehydrated," Casa says. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Attention
Link ID: 25269 - Posted: 07.30.2018

By Katherine J. Wu Eat poorly, and your body will remember—and possibly pass the consequences onto your kids. In the past several years, mounting evidence has shown that sperm can take note of a father’s lifestyle decisions, and transfer this baggage to offspring. Today, in two complementary studies, scientists tell us how. As sperm traverse the male reproductive system, they jettison and acquire non-genetic cargo that fundamentally alters sperm before ejaculation. These modifications not only communicate the father’s current state of wellbeing, but can also have drastic consequences on the viability of future offspring. Each year, over 76,000 children are born as a result of assisted reproduction techniques, the majority of which involve some type of in vitro fertilization (IVF). These procedures unite egg and sperm outside the human body, then transfer the resulting fertilized egg—the embryo—into a woman’s uterus. Multiple variations on IVF exist, but in some cases that involve male infertility—for instance, sperm that struggle to swim—sperm must be surgically extracted from the testes or epididymis, a lengthy, convoluted duct that cradles each testis. After sperm are produced in the testes, they embark on a harrowing journey through the winding epididymis—which, in a human male, is about six meters long when unfurled—on their way to storage. Sperm wander the epididymis for about two weeks; only at the end of this path are they fully motile. Thus, while “mature” sperm can essentially be dumped on a waiting egg and be reasonably expected to achieve fertilization, sperm plucked from the testes and epididymis must be injected directly into the egg with a very fine needle. No matter the source of the sperm, these techniques have birthed healthy infants in four decades of successful procedures.

Keyword: Epigenetics
Link ID: 25268 - Posted: 07.30.2018

By Perri Klass, M.D. Whenever I write about children getting medications for anxiety, for depression, or especially for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, a certain number of readers respond with anger and suspicion, accusing me of being part of a conspiracy to medicate children for behaviors that are either part of the normal range of childhood or else the direct result of bad schools, bad environments or bad parenting. Others suggest that doctors who prescribe such medications are in the corrupt grip of the drug companies. And there are parents with stories of unexpected side effects and doctors who didn’t listen. (Of course, there are also parents who write to say that the right medication at the right moment really helped, or adults regretting that no one offered them something that might have helped back when they were struggling.) Putting children, especially young children, on psychotropic medications is scary for parents, sometimes scary for children and also, often, scary for the doctors who do the prescribing. As a pediatrician, I have often had occasion to be grateful to colleagues with more experience and training who could help a family figure out the right medication, dosing and follow-up. It is a big deal, and there are side effects to worry about and doctors should listen to families’ concerns. But when a child is suffering and struggling, families need help, and medications are often part of the discussion. And so, without presuming to judge what should be done for any specific child, I want to talk about the discussion that needs to take place around medicating a child in distress, and how the doctor and the family should monitor medications when they are prescribed. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25267 - Posted: 07.30.2018

Abby Olena To convince female Drosophila melanogaster flies to mate, males sing—that is, they vibrate their wings to serenade females. In more than 50 years of studying these songs, scientists thought there were only two song modes, known as pulse and sine. But in a study published today (July 26) in Current Biology, researchers found that there are actually two different types of pulse songs, lengthening the set list to three and paving the way for a greater understanding of how the brain generates behavior. “The beauty of the paper is that it demonstrates the hidden complexity in these fruit fly songs,” says David Stern, a biologist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus who did not participate in the work. “Even what we thought was one song type hides really interesting variation, and this is a beautiful quantitative description of that underlying complexity that most of us missed in the past.” In a 2014 Nature study, Princeton biologist Mala Murthy and colleagues used computational models to predict which song male flies would produce based on sensory cues they received during courtship. The researchers’ models accounted for much of the variability in the males’ choice of song modes, but not all of it. Murthy says that one reason the models didn’t account for all the variability could be that they were missing information about the song itself. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 25266 - Posted: 07.28.2018

Sara Kiley Watson Read these sentences aloud: I never said she stole my money. I never said she stole my money. I never said she stole my money. Emphasizing any one of the words over the others makes the string of words mean something completely different. "Pitch change" — the vocal quality we use to emphasize words — is a crucial part of human communication, whether spoken or sung. Recent research from Dr. Edward Chang's lab at the University of California, San Francisco's epilepsy center has narrowed down which part of the brain controls our ability to regulate the pitch of our voices when we speak or sing— the part that enables us to differentiate between the utterances "Let's eat, Grandma" and "Let's eat Grandma." Scientists already knew, more or less, what parts of the brain are engaged in speech, says Chang, a professor of neurological surgery. What the new research has allowed, he says, is a better understanding of the neural code of pitch and its variations — how information about pitch is represented in the brain. Chang's team was able to study these neural codes with the help of a particular group of study volunteers: epilepsy patients. Chang treats people whose seizures can't be medically controlled; these patients need surgery to stop the misfiring neurons. He puts electrodes in each patient's brain to help guide the scalpel during their surgery. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 25265 - Posted: 07.28.2018

by Lenny Bernstein A quarter of the adults who went to hospital emergency departments with sprained ankles were prescribed opioid painkillers, a new study shows, in another sign of how commonly physicians turn to narcotics even for minor injuries. The state-by-state review revealed wide variation in the use of opioids for the sprains, from 40 percent in Arkansas to 2.8 percent in North Dakota. All but one of the nine states that recorded above-average opioid prescribing are in the South or Southwest. None are in the parts of Appalachia or New England that have been hit hardest by the opioid epidemic. The analysis of 30,832 private insurance claims from 2011 to 2015 revealed that emergency department prescriptions can influence long-term opioid use. The median prescription was 15 tablets, or three days’ worth of hydrocodone, oxycodone, tramadol or other narcotics. Patients who received the largest amounts were five times as likely to continue with prolonged opioid use than those given 10 tablets or fewer, though their overall numbers were relatively small. The recipients were not known to have previously used opioids. Opioid prescriptions written by emergency room doctors are responsible for a small portion of the vast amount of narcotic painkillers consumed by patients each year. Most prescriptions come from primary-care physicians. There were about 215 million prescriptions for the drugs in 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25264 - Posted: 07.28.2018

By Rhiannon Picton-James I was seeing a guy from London, and he told me Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were his favorite couple. He was charming, exciting and “got” me. His choice sounded so romantic, so like him. Obviously I knew who they were, but I wasn’t familiar with the details of their relationship. I lay in bed and Googled eagerly. Was this the kind of great love he envisioned for us? Zelda Fitzgerald was intensely glamorous and hauntingly beautiful. Scott called her the original flapper. Oh, and they had a turbulent relationship wracked with infidelity and excessive drinking: a love affair that ended with her dying after a fire broke out in the mental institution where she was a patient. She was schizophrenic and spent the last of her years hospitalized. Is this how he saw me? I had clinical depression, not schizophrenia. In my head (and, clearly, mine alone) we shared a blind devotion. When the reality of our relationship sank in, he got busy at work fast before disappearing entirely. He told me, over text, that he was “gut-wrenchingly sorry.” Although the devastation passed, his words lingered. I pulled up more articles on the Fitzgeralds. The Guardian wrote that Scott Fitzgerald’s “troubled wife” was a “beautiful and damned” socialite, per the title of his second novel, who would be played by Scarlett Johansson in an upcoming drama. The romanticism was bothersome to me. Elsewhere, on Facebook, an ad for a sale at Skinnydip, a London brand, popped up. It included a cute miniature backpack, emblazoned with the words “I’ve got issues” and embroidered pink roses. The catchy Julia Michaels hit played in my head, her soft voice gently singing, “When I’m down, I get real down,” before breaking into the chorus: “’Cause baby I’ve got issues.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 25263 - Posted: 07.28.2018

By Daniela Lamas Incompletely understood at best, after more than a century of false starts and research gains. So we learn in “Aroused,” an eye-opening new book that traces the history of endocrinology through a sequence of crisp, meticulously researched, and often surprisingly funny tales from the turn of the 20th century to today. Though hormones have entered common parlance — we have growth hormone and sex hormones and hormone replacement therapy — it was not always this way. Randi Hutter Epstein, an accomplished author who has a medical degree and a master’s of public health, illuminates more than a century of false starts and research gains as she explains the ways these chemical messengers control the daily work of our bodies. At the same time, she leaves us wondering how much of our current understanding of hormones is in fact “true” and how much may ultimately be disproved. This is a novel contribution. While most of the literature on hormones has been confined to medical text or limited to a single hormone (estrogen, for example), Epstein’s approach is wide-ranging. Consider this story. The year was 1924, and two teenagers in Chicago bludgeoned a younger boy to death. The new field of endocrinology was exploding at the time, and their lawyers proposed a provocative theory to avoid the death penalty: Hormones were at fault. After extensive X-rays, interviews, and measures of metabolism, doctors testified that the teenagers had severely impaired hormonal glands and had committed the grisly murder under the influence of hormones gone awry. They were sentenced to life in prison. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 25262 - Posted: 07.28.2018

NIH-funded researchers delayed signs of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in rodents by injecting them with a second-generation drug designed to silence the gene, superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1). The results, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, suggest the newer version of the drug may be effective at treating an inherited form of the disease caused by mutations in SOD1. Currently, the drug is being tested in an ALS clinical trial (NCT02623699). ALS destroys motor neurons responsible for activating muscles, causing patients to rapidly lose muscle strength and their ability to speak, swallow, move, and breathe. Most die within three to five years of symptom onset. Previous studies suggested that a gene therapy drug, called an antisense oligonucleotide, could be used to treat a form of ALS caused by mutations in the gene SOD1. These drugs turned off SOD1 by latching onto versions the gene encoded in messenger RNA (mRNA), tagging them for disposal and preventing SOD1 protein production. Using rats and mice genetically modified to carry normal or disease-mutant versions of human SOD1, a team of researchers led by Timothy M. Miller, M.D., Ph.D., Washington University, St. Louis, MO, discovered that newer versions of the drug may be more effective at treating ALS than the earlier one that had been tested in a phase 1 clinical trial. For instance, injections of the newer versions were more efficient at reducing normal, human SOD1 mRNA levels in rats and mice and they helped rats, genetically modified to carry a disease-causing mutation in SOD1, live much longer than previous versions of the drug. Injections of the new drugs also delayed the age at which mice carrying a disease-mutant SOD1 gene had trouble balancing on a rotating rod and appeared to prevent muscle weakness and loss of connections between nerves and muscles, suggesting it could treat the muscle activation problems caused by ALS. These and other results were the basis for a current phase 1 clinical trial testing the next generation drug in ALS patients (NCT02623699).

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 25261 - Posted: 07.27.2018

by Maggie Fox A mind-controlling parasite found in cat feces may give people the courage they need to become entrepreneurs, researchers reported Tuesday. They found that people who have been infected with the Toxoplasma gondii parasite are more likely to major in business and to have started their own businesses than non-infected people. The parasite, which makes rodents unafraid of cats, may be reducing the fear of failure in people, Stefanie Johnson of the University of Colorado and colleagues said. They haven’t actually shown that. But toxoplasma does get into the brain, and it’s been linked to a variety of mental effects in mice and people alike. And fear of failure could be a good thing, Johnson said. Toxoplasmosis has been linked to a greater risk of "car accidents, mental illness, neuroticism, drug abuse and suicide,” Johnson and her colleagues wrote in their paper, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. It might be affecting message-carrying chemicals in the brain called neurotransmitters, or hormones such as testosterone, they wrote. In particular, scientists have studied whether the parasite might increase risk-taking behavior. © 2018 NBC UNIVERSAL

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 25260 - Posted: 07.27.2018