By Judith S. Beck After a week of devastating news about suicide, there has been much discussion of the need for people who may be thinking of ending their lives to reach out for help. But some people who are suffering may be skeptical that therapy could make a difference. Research has demonstrated the effectiveness of cognitive behavior therapy, or C.B.T., in treating suicidal individuals and decreasing subsequent attempts. A 2016 review of 15 randomized controlled trials found that C.B.T. “is a useful strategy in the prevention of suicidal cognitions and suicidal behaviors.” Throughout my career I have used this method to treat patients with many different types of problems and diagnoses, including suicidal behavior — which may occur along with problems like depression, addictions, schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder. Medications can be very effective in treating certain diagnoses, but those medications may take some time to take effect. Therefore the suicidality must be addressed before the medications will be helpful. Sometimes individuals will need to be hospitalized in order to keep them safe until C.B.T. or medications can help. But inpatient treatment is not necessary for everyone who has suicidal thoughts. C.B.T. starts with the proposition that people’s behavior, including suicide attempts, make sense once we understand what they’re thinking. A highly suicidal individual might think, for example, that his or her emotional pain will never go away and will only get worse. If the individual believes there is nothing that can alleviate his or her suffering, suicide may seem as if it is the only solution. But in C.B.T. treatment, individuals learn a number of skills. While individual patients’ needs can vary greatly, following is a basic approach. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25083 - Posted: 06.13.2018

By Matt Warren Not getting eaten is at the top of the to-do list for most members of the animal kingdom. Now, a new study suggests several species of dolphins can tell when they’re in danger of becoming a killer whale’s dinner—simply by eavesdropping on their calls. Risso’s dolphins and short-finned pilot whales are frequently devoured when they live alongside mammal-eating orcas. To find out whether the dolphins can work out when they are in danger, researchers played recordings of killer whale calls underwater to 10 pilot whales off the coast of North Carolina and four Risso’s dolphins swimming near Southern California. The animals didn’t respond to many of the killer whale sounds, but a subset of the calls provoked a strong reaction in both species: Risso’s dolphins rapidly fled, ending up more than 10 kilometers away from where the sounds were played. Pilot whales, on the other hand, called to each other and formed a tight group before diving directly toward the sound, the researchers report today in the Journal of Experimental Biology. The calls that provoked the responses all contained multiple irregular features, such as harsh and noisy sounds or two distinct frequencies at once. The researchers hypothesize that these kinds of calls could be used by groups of killer whales to communicate during hunting—a clear sign for any potential prey in the area to take action. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Animal Communication; Hearing
Link ID: 25082 - Posted: 06.13.2018

by Cleve R. Wootson Jr. Kailyn Griffin, 5, experienced temporary paralysis following a tick bite in Grenada, Miss., discovered on June 6. (WLBT) As soon as Kailyn Griffin's feet hit the floor Wednesday morning, she collapsed in a heap. The 5-year-old kept trying to stand but fell every time. She was also struggling to speak, said her mother, Jessica Griffin. Her daughter had been fine when the family went out to a T-ball game the night before, NBC-affiliate WLBT in Jackson, Miss., reported. Maybe Kailyn was having a hard time waking up Wednesday morning, or perhaps her legs were asleep. Then Griffin saw the tick. She had gathered Kailyn's hair to put it in a ponytail when she spotted the arachnid, embedded in the girl's scalp, swelled with the girl's blood. She pulled the tick out and placed it in a plastic bag, then rushed to the hospital with Kailyn, WTXL reported. Doctors told Griffin it was an uncommon condition called tick paralysis. “After tons of bloodwork and a CT of the head UMMC has ruled it as tick paralysis! PLEASE for the love of god check your kids for ticks! It’s more common in children than it is adults!” Griffin, of Grenada, Miss., wrote in a Facebook post Wednesday that seemed a mixture of worry and relief. “Scary is a UNDERSTATEMENT!” Griffin could not be immediately reached for comment. It was unclear where or when she thought her daughter had acquired the tick, or how long it had been on her body. Ticks are most active from April through September, The Washington Post has reported. Tick paralysis is caused by female ticks on the verge of laying eggs. After the tick eats a blood meal and is engorged, it secretes a neurotoxin into the host, according to the American Lyme disease Foundation. The symptoms can occur five to seven days after the tick starts feeding. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 25081 - Posted: 06.12.2018

By Roni Caryn Rabin Ever since he had Lasik surgery two years ago, Geobanni Ramirez sees everything in triplicate. The surgery he hoped would improve his vision left the 33-year-old graphic artist struggling with extreme light sensitivity, double vision and visual distortions that create halos around bright objects and turn headlights into blinding starbursts. His eyes are so dry and sore that he puts drops in every half-hour; sometimes they burn “like when you’re chopping onions.” His night vision is so poor that going out after dark is treacherous. But Mr. Ramirez says that as far as his surgeon is concerned, he is a success story. “My vision is considered 20/20, because I see the A’s, B’s and C’s all the way down the chart,” said Mr. Ramirez. “But I see three A’s, three B’s, three C’s.” None of the surgeons he consulted ever warned him he could sustain permanent damage following Lasik, he added. The Food and Drug Administration approved the first lasers to correct vision in the 1990s. Roughly 9.5 million Americans have had laser eye surgery, lured by the promise of a quick fix ridding them of nettlesome glasses and contact lenses. There is also a wide perception among patients, fostered by many eye doctors who do the surgery, that the procedure is virtually foolproof. As far back as 2008, however, patients who had received Lasik and their families testified at an F.D.A. meeting about impaired vision and chronic pain that led to job loss and disability, social isolation, depression — and even suicides. Even now, serious questions remain about both the short- and long-term risks and the complications of this increasingly common procedure. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 25080 - Posted: 06.12.2018

The Home Office has rejected a County Tyrone mother's plea to legalise cannabis oil for her epileptic son. Charlotte Caldwell accused Home Office minister Nick Hurd of having "likely signed my son's death warrant". Ms Caldwell brought cannabis oil from Canada for her son Billy, but it was confiscated at Heathrow on Monday. In 2017, the 12-year-old became the first person in the UK to be prescribed cannabis oil, but last month his GP was told he could no longer do so. Ms Caldwell, from Castlederg, said she was "absolutely devastated" to have the supply confiscated after she declared it to border officials. Ms Caldwell later met Mr Hurd at the Home Office to plead with him "parent to parent" to get the oil back. "It's Billy's anti-epileptic medication that Nick Hurd has taken away, it's not some sort of joint full of recreational cannabis," she said. "We had an honest and genuine conversation. I have asked him to give Billy back his medicines, but he said no." She also warned of the dangers of Billy missing his first dose of cannabis oil in 19 months. "The reason they don't do it is that it can cause really bad side-effects - they wean them down slowly," she said. "So what Nick Hurd has just done is most likely signed my son's death warrant." A Home Office spokeswoman said it was "sympathetic to the rare situation that Billy and his family are faced with". © 2018 BBC.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Epilepsy
Link ID: 25079 - Posted: 06.12.2018

By Hannah Furfaro, Spectrum Boys with autism have smaller heads, are shorter and weigh less at birth than their typical peers do—but all that changes by age 3, a new study suggests. The new work is among the first to link autism to rapid skeletal growth. “Mapping physical growth as well as growth in head circumference is really important because it implicates a lot of other mechanisms that might be involved, not just the brain,” says Cheryl Dissanayake, professor of developmental psychology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, who co-led the work. Advertisement The findings hint that children with autism are smaller in utero, but their growth then accelerates: They catch up and surpass typical children in height and head size between birth and age 3. The results from the new study contrast with those from a 2014 report that found no difference in the rate of head or body growth between infants at risk for autism and controls. But many other studies have found differences in head size in children and adolescents with autism. “It’s now quite clear that growth dysregulation is a key and important phenomenon in autism,” says Eric Courchesne, co-director of the Autism Center of Excellence at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the research. Growth spurt: The researchers reviewed growth charts for 135 boys with autism and 74 typical boys who live in Victoria, Australia. (They excluded children taking medications that affect growth and those born prematurely.) © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25078 - Posted: 06.11.2018

By Clyde Haberman For nine frustrating years, Lesley and John Brown tried to conceive a child but failed because of her blocked fallopian tubes. Then in late 1977, this English couple put their hopes in the hands of two men of science. Thus began their leap into the unknown, and into history. On July 25, 1978, the Browns got what they had long wished for with the arrival of a daughter, Louise, a baby like no other the world had seen. She came into being through a process of in vitro fertilization developed by Robert G. Edwards and Patrick Steptoe. Her father’s sperm was mixed with her mother’s egg in a petri dish, and the resulting embryo was then implanted into the womb for normal development. Louise was widely, glibly and incorrectly called a “test-tube baby.” The label was enough to throw millions of people into a moral panic, for it filled them with visions of Dr. Frankenstein playing God and throwing the natural order of the universe out of kilter. The reality proved far more benign, maybe best captured by Grace MacDonald, a Scottish woman who in January 1979 gave birth to the second in vitro baby, a boy named Alastair. Nothing unethical was at work, she told the BBC in 2003. “It’s just nature being given a helping hand.” In this installment of its video documentaries, Retro Report explores how major news stories of the past shape current events by harking back to Louise Brown’s birth. If anything, more modern developments in genetics have raised the moral, ethical and political stakes. But the fundamental questions are essentially what they were in the 1970s with the advent of in vitro fertilization: Are these welcome advances that can only benefit civilization? Or are they incursions into an unholy realm, one of “designer babies,” with potentially frightening consequences? In vitro fertilization, or I.V.F., is by now broadly accepted, though it still has objectors, including the Roman Catholic Church. Worldwide, the procedure has produced an estimated six million babies, and is believed to account for 3 percent of all live births in some developed countries. Designer-baby fears have proved in the main to be “overblown,” said Dr. Paula Amato, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. “We have not seen it with I.V.F. in general,” she told Retro Report. “We have not seen it with P.G.D.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25077 - Posted: 06.11.2018

Angus Chen Hunger can trigger cruel words from kind people. A starved dog lover might fantasize about punting the neighbor's Chihuahua that just will not shut up. A puckish but otherwise nice person might snap at a friend, "Bring me the freaking cheesesteak before I flip this TABLE!" They are, in a word, "hangry" or irrationally irritable, upset or angry because of hunger. But how hunger turns into hangriness is a mystery, says Jennifer MacCormack, a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in psychology and neuroscience, who wanted to understand the phenomenon. "The mechanism isn't clear on how [hunger] affects your emotions or the exact emotional processes," she says. To find out, she designed some provocative experiments to rile up hungry people. In one of them, MacCormack had 118 undergraduates fast for five hours or more and 118 others eat a meal before coming to her lab. "Psych 101 students, bless their heart," she says. "They didn't know this was a study about feeling hangry." Unfortunately for them, MacCormack concocted an experiment to annoy them and to see how they responded. First, she had half the people in both groups write an essay about emotions to direct their attention to how they're feeling. The other half wrote an essay about a neutral, unemotional day. "We wanted to see if [self-awareness] halts creating this hangry emotions and behaviors," MacCormack says. Next, she had all of them go through a long, arduous computer exercise. "I designed this fake task with colored circles. The colors are really glaring and bright and hard to look at, and it's a hard task with a hundred trials," she says. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 25076 - Posted: 06.11.2018

By Natalie Angier In advance of Father’s Day, let’s take a moment to sort out the differences and similarities between “Dad jeans” and “Dad genes.” Dad jeans are articles of sex-specific leisure clothing, long mocked for being comfy, dumpy and elastic-waisted but lately reinvented as a fashion trend, suitable for male bodies of all shapes and ages. Dad genes are particles on the sex-specific Y chromosome, long mocked for being a stunted clump of mostly useless nucleic waste but lately revealed as man’s fastest friend, essential to the health of male bodies and brains no matter the age. Yes, dear fathers and others born with the appurtenances generally designated male. We live in exciting times, and that includes novel insights into the sole chromosomal distinction between you and the women now prowling the aisles at the hardware store. (“Didn’t he say he could use a new bow saw? Or some halogen light bulbs?”) Researchers have discovered that, contrary to longstanding assumptions, the Y chromosome is not limited to a handful of masculine tasks, like specifying male body parts in a developing embryo or replenishing the sperm supply in an adult man. New evidence indicates that the Y chromosome participates in an array of essential, general-interest tasks in men, like stanching cancerous growth, keeping arteries clear and blocking the buildup of amyloid plaque in the brain. As a sizable percentage of men age, their blood and other body cells begin to spontaneously jettison copies of the Y chromosome, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. That unfortunate act of chromosomal decluttering appears to put the men at a heightened risk of Alzheimer’s disease, leukemia and other disorders. “I’m quite certain,” said Lars Forsberg, an associate professor of medical genetics at Uppsala University in Sweden, “that the loss of the Y chromosome with age explains a very large proportion of the increased mortality in men, compared to women.” Other researchers are tracing the evolution of the Y chromosome and comparing the version found in modern men with those of our close relatives, both living and extinct. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25075 - Posted: 06.11.2018

by Anthea Rowan When Mike Shooter was in medical school, he suffered the first of what he calls “thunderous depressions.” More followed. Shooter’s efforts to come to grips with these experiences has made him acutely aware of what young people with mental-health problems endure and forged his career as a preeminent child psychiatrist in England. He was the first such specialist to be elected president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a position he held from 2002 to 2005. Recently he published “Growing Pains,” which is based on 40 years of working with young people. The book explains why it’s imperative to differentiate between depression and the ordinary but often intense difficulties some children face. He recently spoke with The Washington Post on these issues. This transcript was edited for clarity and length. Q: Do you think young people are more vulnerable to mental illness now? A: Research suggests that the United Kingdom is the least happy place for a child to be brought up in the Western world; America cannot be far behind. Some of this could be attributed to the grinding effect of poverty. But not all: The frenetic competition, in school, in the scramble for jobs, in peer-group relationships, means many children fall off the bottom of the ladder of competition and feel as if they’ve failed. Or are so unsure of their own worth that they sit up all night searching for “likes” on social media in lieu of proper friendships. But it’s not all bad news. There is currently much research into resilience: what enables some children to cope while others do not. I know from experience that there is one thing that can make all the difference: a relationship with an adult close enough to them, that supports them, listens to their distress and treats them as worthwhile. That person could be a relative, a family friend, a teacher or, dare I say it, a child psychiatrist. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25074 - Posted: 06.11.2018

Alex Fox Northern fur seals (Callorhinus ursinus) can forgo rapid eye movement sleep for up to two weeks while at sea with no visible hardship, according to new research. This flies in the face of previous studies on land mammals such as rats, in which depriving the animals of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep for a week or more led to problems including weight loss, hypothermia and eventually, death. Nearly all land mammals and birds experience REM sleep. This is the brain's most active sleep phase and has been associated with learning and processing memories. But now, results1 published on 7 June in Current Biology point to another function: regulating brain temperature. Like whales and dolphins, northern fur seals switch off half of their brain to catch some Zs at sea in order to maintain a low level of alertness. The researchers wanted to see whether the seals skipped REM sleep in the water, as whales and dolphins do2. They also thought that the fur seals could offer a good way of investigating the functions of REM sleep without causing the stress of interrupted sleep that can muddy the results of similar studies in other mammals. The study authors used four captive northern fur seals, fitting them with electrodes that recorded electrical activity in the animals’ brains, eyes, muscles and hearts. The scientists allowed or prevented the seals from sleeping on land by raising or lowering the water level in their pool — thereby exposing or submerging a platform they could use to rest. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 25073 - Posted: 06.09.2018

Aimee Cunningham American kids with food allergies are more than twice as likely to have autism spectrum disorder as kids without, a study of national health data finds. The population-based finding adds to experimental evidence that there may be a connection between false steps or overreactions by the immune system and the neurodevelopmental disorder. Researchers looked only for an association between allergies and autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, among a total of 199,520 children ages 3 to 17 surveyed from 1997 to 2016 as part of the U.S. National Health Interview Survey. The study was not designed to discover what may be behind the link. The team found that, out of 1,868 children with autism, 216 had a food allergy — or about 11 percent. By comparison, only about 4 percent of children without autism had a food allergy, the researchers report online June 8 in JAMA Network Open. Kids with autism were also more likely to have respiratory or skin allergies like eczema than kids without autism. The number of children with autism has more than doubled since 2000, to a prevalence of 16.8 per 1,000 kids. Meanwhile, the number of kids with food allergies rose from 3.4 percent in 1997–1999 to 5.1 percent in 2009–2011. It is unknown whether developing food allergies may contribute to the development of autism, or vice versa, or if something else is causing both, says study coauthor and epidemiologist Wei Bao of the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health in Iowa City. “The causes of ASD remain unclear,” he says. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Autism; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 25072 - Posted: 06.09.2018

By Benedict Carey The deaths of the designer Kate Spade and the chef Anthony Bourdain, both of whom committed suicide this week, were not simply pop culture tragedies. They were the latest markers of an intractable public health crisis that has been unfolding in slow motion for a generation. Treatment for chronic depression and anxiety — often the precursors to suicide — has never been more available and more widespread. Yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week reported a steady, stubborn rise in the national suicide rate, up 25 percent since 1999. The rates have been climbing each year across most age and ethnic groups. Suicide is now the 10th leading cause of death in the United States. Nearly 45,000 Americans killed themselves in 2016, twice the number who died by homicide. After decades of research, effective prevention strategies are lacking. It remains difficult, perhaps impossible, to predict who will commit suicide, and the phenomenon is extremely difficult for researchers to study. One of the few proven interventions is unpalatable to wide swaths of the American public: reduced access to guns. The C.D.C. report found that the states where rates rose most sharply were those, like Montana and Oklahoma, where gun ownership is more common. It is predominantly men who use guns to commit suicide, and men are much less likely to seek help than women. The escalating suicide rate is a profound indictment of the country’s mental health system. Most people who kill themselves have identifiable psychiatric symptoms, even if they never get an official diagnosis. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25071 - Posted: 06.09.2018

By Carl Zimmer On a December evening in 1951, Eugene Aserinsky, a physiologist at the University of Chicago, placed electrodes on the scalp of his 8-year-old son, Armond, before putting him to bed. Then the scientist retired to another room to watch a row of pens quiver across a rolling sheet of paper, recording the electrical activity in the boy’s facial muscles. Hours later, the pens started to swing wildly. To judge from the chart, it seemed as if Armond were awake, his eyes darting about the room. But when Aserinsky looked in on him, his son was fast asleep. Aserinsky had discovered R.E.M. sleep. Eventually he and other researchers learned that during this state, the brain shifts from low-frequency to high-frequency electrical waves, like those produced in waking hours. When Aserinsky woke his subjects from R.E.M. sleep, they often reported vivid dreams. Almost all mammals experience R.E.M. sleep, but even today researchers debate why it exists. On Thursday, a team of American and Russian researchers reported that fur seals may provide an important clue. While they swim, fur seals switch off R.E.M. sleep entirely. It returns when they come back to land — a pattern never seen before. Jerome M. Siegel, a sleep expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a co-author of the new study published Thursday in Current Biology, said that the seals provide evidence that our brains switch to R.E.M. sleep from time to time to generate heat in our skulls. “R.E.M. sleep is like shivering for the brain,” he said. Many scientists have argued that our brains require R.E.M. sleep each night to function properly. One clue comes from experiments in which researchers deprive rats of R.E.M. sleep for a few days. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 25070 - Posted: 06.08.2018

Susan Milius A little brain can be surprisingly good at nothing. Honeybees are the first invertebrates to pass a test of recognizing where zero goes in numerical order, a new study finds. Even small children struggle with recognizing “nothing” as being less than one, says cognitive behavioral scientist Scarlett Howard of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. But honeybees trained to fly to images of greater or fewer dots or whazzits tended to rank a blank image as less than one, Howard and colleagues report in the June 8 Science. Despite decades of discoveries, nonhuman animals still don’t get due credit outside specialist circles for intelligence, laments Lars Chittka of Queen Mary University of London, who has explored various mental capacities of bees. For the world at large, he emphasizes that the abilities described in the new paper are “remarkable.” Researchers recognize several levels of complexity in grasping zero. Most animals, or maybe all, can understand the simplest level — just recognizing that the absence of something differs from its presence, Howard says. Grasping the notion that absence could fit into a sequence of quantities, though, seems harder. Previously, only some primates such as chimps and vervet monkeys, plus an African gray parrot named Alex, have demonstrated this level of understanding of the concept of zero (SN: 12/10/16, p. 22). |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 25069 - Posted: 06.08.2018

by Amy Ellis Nutt Suicide rates rose in all but one state between 1999 and 2016, with increases seen across age, gender, race and ethnicity, according to a report released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In more than half of all deaths in 27 states, the people had no known mental health condition when they ended their lives. In North Dakota, the rate jumped more than 57 percent. In the most recent period studied (2014 to 2016), the rate was highest in Montana, at 29.2 per 100,000 residents, compared with the national average of 13.4 per 100,000. Only Nevada recorded a decline — of 1 percent — for the overall period, although its rate remained higher than the national average. Increasingly, suicide is being viewed not only as a mental health problem but a public health one. Nearly 45,000 suicides occurred in the United States in 2016 — more than twice the number of homicides — making it the 10th-leading cause of death. Among people ages 15 to 34, suicide is the second-leading cause of death. The most common method used across all groups was firearms. “The data are disturbing,” said Anne Schuchat, the CDC's principal deputy director. “The widespread nature of the increase, in every state but one, really suggests that this is a national problem hitting most communities.” It is hitting many places especially hard. In half of the states, suicide among people age 10 and older increased more than 30 percent. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25068 - Posted: 06.08.2018

By Heather Murphy Reports of Kate Spade’s suicide and struggle with depression have transformed her from symbol of polished prep to a blunt reminder that suffering affects all types. Her death has inspired hundreds to tweet some version of the same message: Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of. But deep in the comment threads, some also debated a more uncomfortable question: What do you do when a friend is depressed for such a long time that you’ve started to feel that that nothing you can do will make a difference, and your empathy reserves are tapped out? There are no easy answers. But here are some tips from experts: Don’t underestimate the power of showing up You may not feel that your presence is wanted. But just being by the side of someone who is depressed, and reminding her that she is special to you, is important to ensuring that she does not feel alone, said Dr. Norman Rosenthal, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine. If she acknowledges she’s depressed, that’s a good sign, said Dr. Rosenthal. He recalled the story of a patient who stopped feeling suicidal after telling people he was close to how he was feeling. “When you shine the light on the shame, it gets better,” Dr. Rosenthal said. Your brother has an enviable job and two lovely children. He’s still ridiculously handsome even though he hasn’t gone to the gym for six months. It’s tempting to want to remind him of all these good things. Not only is that unlikely to boost his mood, it could backfire by reinforcing his sense that you just don’t get it, said Megan Devine, a psychotherapist and the author of “It’s O.K. That You’re Not O.K.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25067 - Posted: 06.08.2018

By Lauren Waldron, M.D. I was on a camping trip in Jackson Hole with my cousins at 4 years old when I realized there was something different about me. We were climbing a tree and I saw that, unlike me, my cousins used both hands to navigate its branches. Because I had a stroke when I was 8 months old, the right side of my body is hypertonic, meaning it does not move easily. I got stuck in the tree (as usual), and my mom had to come to get me down. As my cousins hopped out of the tree without difficulty and ran off, a question came to me. I asked my mom, for the first time, “Mommy, do all kids have a stroke when they are babies?” A pause. “No, sweetheart. They don’t.” What had moments before been a benign fact of my existence suddenly became a frustrating impediment. I was angry that my right arm and leg were always stuck when I wanted to move them. It was not fair. “Can I not have a stroke?” I asked. “I don’t want it.” My parents had never been secretive about my stroke. My earliest memories include my parents telling me that when I was a baby a blood vessel in my brain had broken and bled. The bleeding had damaged a part of the left side of my brain called the left internal capsule, which helps to control movement on the right side of my body. That was why my right fingers didn’t move, why my right arm was stiff, why I wore a leg brace, and why I went to physical therapy. But until that day in the tree, I never thought that having a blood vessel bleed in my brain made me different. Twenty-three years later, as a medical student at Temple University, I stood in a pediatric exam room listening to my attending speak to our patient’s mother. He was describing motor deficits the 2-year-old would likely experience after surgeons removed the part of her brain causing her seizures. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 25066 - Posted: 06.07.2018

/ By Michael Schulson Biswaroop Roy Chowdhury is an Indian engineer with, he says, an honorary Ph.D. in diabetes science from Alliance International University, a school in Zambia that bears many of the hallmarks of an online scam. He runs a small nutrition clinic near Delhi. Two months ago, Chowdhury posted a brief video on YouTube arguing that HIV is not real, and that anti-retroviral medication actually causes AIDS. He offered to inject himself with the blood of someone who had tested positive. Within weeks, the video had more than 380,000 views on YouTube. Tens of thousands more people watched on Facebook. Most of the viewers appear to be in India, where some 60,000 people die of HIV-related causes each year. After the March video, Chowdhury kept on posting. Follow-up videos on HIV racked up hundreds of thousands more hits. He also distributed copies of an ebook titled “HIV-AIDS: The Greatest Lie of 21st Century.” When I spoke with Chowdhury by phone last month, he claimed that 700 people had gotten in touch to say they had gone off their HIV medications. The actual number, he added, might be even higher. “We don’t know what people are doing on their own. I can only tell you about the people who report to us,” he said. Chowdhury’s figures are impossible to verify, but his skills with digital media are apparent — as are the troubling questions they raise about the role of Silicon Valley platforms in spreading misinformation. Such concerns, of course, aren’t new: Over the past two years, consumers, lawmakers, and media integrity advocates in the United States and Europe have become increasingly alarmed at the speed with which incendiary, inaccurate, and often deliberately false content spreads on sites like Facebook and YouTube — the latter a Google subsidiary. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 25065 - Posted: 06.07.2018

Leah Rosenbaum Migraines have plagued humans since time immemorial. Now a new migraine prevention treatment, recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, promises long-awaited relief from the debilitating condition. But whether the drug will turn out to be a real solution for the 1 in 7 Americans who suffer from migraines, severe headaches that often come with nausea and visual auras, isn’t yet clear. Here’s what we know, and don’t know, about the new therapy. How does the drug work in the body? The new drug, Aimovig, generically called erenumab, is a type of monoclonal antibody treatment, a class of medications that resemble the antibodies that the body naturally produces to bind to infectious pathogens. These treatments work by using specially designed antibodies to target specific proteins and their receptors that contribute to disease. Aimovig, released by pharmaceutical companies Amgen Inc. and Novartis, targets the receptor for a protein called calcitonin gene-related peptide, or CGRP, that is increased in people suffering a migraine attack. The protein is released from nerve endings throughout the body, including in the meninges, the membranes that surround the brain. When it attaches to the receptor, CGRP widens blood vessels and can contribute to inflammation and pain transmission. Aimovig, delivered once a month with an EpiPen-like injector, works by blocking the receptor for CGRP, reducing pain. Blocking the protein’s receptor is kind of like putting gum in a lock, says Elizabeth Loder, a neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and at Harvard Medical School. The CGRP protein “key” is still floating around, but it can’t become activated. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25064 - Posted: 06.07.2018