By Ceylan Yeginsu LONDON — Dim the lights. Silence the piped-in music. Turn down the checkout beeps. For an hour on Saturdays, a British supermarket chain is introducing a weekly “quieter hour” aimed at helping people with autism have a better shopping experience by easing sensory overload. The move by the supermarket, Morrisons, which begins on Saturday and runs from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m., has been welcomed by the National Autistic Society, which says that even small changes can make a big difference in the lives of people with autism and their families. “Around 700,000 people are on the autism spectrum in the U.K.,” Tom Purser, of the National Autistic Society, said in an email. “This means they see, hear and feel the world differently to other people, often in a more intense way, which can make shopping a real struggle.” Autism is a lifelong developmental disability that affects how people communicate and relate to others and how they experience the world around them. More than 60 percent of people with autism avoid shops, and 79 percent say they feel socially isolated, according to figures published by the society. Morrisons’s effort is part of the National Autistic Society’s “Too Much Information” campaign: Last year, more than 5,000 retailers across Britain participated in “Autism Hour.” The society hopes to expand the initiative. Morrisons, the fourth-largest supermarket chain in Britain, said in a statement on its website, “Listening to customers, we found that one in five had a friend or family member with autism and many liked the idea of being able to shop in more comfort at 9-10 a.m. on a Saturday.” In the statement, Angela Gray, part of a community group that builds ties with the supermarket, is quoted as saying: “I was involved in the initial trial as my son is autistic, and we found that these changes made a real difference. The trial showed there is a need for a quieter shopping experience for some customers.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 25230 - Posted: 07.20.2018

Wade Goodwyn In hospitals around the country, anesthesiologists and other doctors are facing significant shortages of injectable opioids. These drugs, like morphine, Dilaudid and fentanyl are the mainstays of intravenous pain control and are regularly used in critical care settings like surgery, intensive care units and hospital emergency departments. The distance medical science has traveled over the last hundred years in pain management is practically miraculous. Walk into a pediatric intensive care unit at any major hospital in the country and, even though the children you'll see are critically ill from disease and surgery, you won't see any of them squirming in the bed in pain or discomfort. Though a child in this ICU may be diagnosed with an incurable disease, pediatric doctors are able to use hydromorphone, fentanyl and liquid morphine to keep the patient's suffering at a distance all the way to the end. The same is true for pain management in adults. It's not just the patient who's spared — relatives, friends, not to mention doctors, nurses and the other health care providers don't have to experience a cherished human being writhing in agony. That is why doctors across the country have grown increasingly concerned that hospitals and other medical facilities have been running low on or out of the supplies they need. Dr. Red Starks, a pediatric anesthesiologist who has been practicing for 26 years, said that for him the shortage "escalated late this spring when we didn't have any morphine." "Or one week we had morphine but we didn't have Dilaudid," he continued, "and two weeks later we'd get a little trickle of Dilaudid but we wouldn't have any morphine. And you're just thinking, 'Hello, am I in the 21st century?' " © 2018 npr

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25229 - Posted: 07.20.2018

Aimee Cunningham Painkillers crafted with a part of the wrinkle-smoothing drug Botox provide long-term pain relief in mice. Researchers added the modified Botox to molecules that target pain-messaging nerve cells. Mice given a single spinal injection of the new drugs showed signs of pain relief for the full duration of the experiments, around three weeks, researchers report online July 18 in Science Translational Medicine. Such painkillers could potentially one day be developed for humans as alternatives to more addictive drugs, such as opioids. Created by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, botulinum toxin causes the food poisoning disease botulism. Botox, which is made from the toxin, is often injected into people to iron out worry lines and has been used to treat conditions that involve overactive muscles, such as repetitive neck spasms or overactive bladder (SN: 4/5/08, p. 213). The toxin has also been used to reduce the frequency of migraines. Biochemist Bazbek Davletov of the University of Sheffield in England and colleagues focused on botulinum toxin because it can stop certain nerve cells from communicating with one another for up to five months with each injection. And “you locally inject less than a millionth of a gram, which is helpful to avoid any immune response,” he says. Davletov and colleagues created their new drugs with a process he describes as a “molecular Lego system.” Taking the part of the botulinum toxin that blocks nerve cells from sending messages, the team attached the piece to one of two molecules that target neurons that relay pain information. The researchers removed the part of the toxin, found in Botox, that binds to muscle-controlling nerve cells. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25228 - Posted: 07.19.2018

Tom Goldman CTE has been part of the national lexicon in the U.S. since the 2015 movie Concussion dramatized the discovery of this degenerative brain disease among football players. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is found among people who've had head injuries. Though not everyone with head trauma develops CTE, the group that's come to be most associated with it is football players, whose brains can be routinely jarred by hard hits. The disease has been linked to depression, dementia and even suicide among those who play the game. But the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease published a study Tuesday that helps broaden the understanding of who is potentially affected by CTE to include military personnel. And, perhaps more significantly, the study represents a step forward in developing a test for the disease in the living. Right now, accurately diagnosing CTE requires the close study of brain tissue during autopsy, to identify the telltale abnormal proteins that kill brain cells. And this is a key reason why knowledge about CTE — who gets it, how widespread it is and the development of treatments — has lagged. "You've really got to have a living diagnosis scan in order to make much headway on understanding the disease," says Dr. Julian Bailes, a neurosurgeon at the Chicago area's NorthShore University HealthSystem, and one of the study's authors. That diagnostic scan is what researchers have gotten close to in this case. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Brain imaging
Link ID: 25227 - Posted: 07.19.2018

Layal Liverpool A treatment given to thousands of people who suffer cardiac arrest in Britain every year nearly doubles the risk of permanent brain damage and only marginally improves the chances of survival, a landmark study has found. More than 30,000 people have cardiac arrests – where the heart stops beating – annually in the UK. More than half receive shots of adrenaline alongside other interventions that are designed to restart the heart. In most cases the attacks are still fatal, with fewer than 10% of patients surviving to be discharged from hospital. In a study of more than 8,000 people across Britain, doctors found that adrenaline shots increased the survival rate of patients by less than 1%, but nearly doubled the risk of serious brain damage. Nearly a third of survivors who received adrenaline ended up in a vegetative state or were unable to walk and look after themselves, compared with 18% of survivors who had a placebo instead. “What we’ve shown is that adrenaline can restart the heart but it is no good for the brain,” said study leader Gavin Perkins, a professor of critical care medicine at the University of Warwick and a consultant physician at Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust. The practice of giving adrenaline to people who suffer cardiac arrest has been the standard of care in the UK for more than half a century. Under guidelines set by the Resuscitation Council UK, adrenaline is given to people who fail to respond to cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) or defibrillation immediately following cardiac arrest. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 25226 - Posted: 07.19.2018

By Sara Chodosh Think back to your earliest memory. What age were you in it? If its under two, you're not alone. In a recent survey, 40 percent of people say they remember events earlier than age two. But here's the problem: Most memory researchers argue that its essentially impossible to remember anything before those terrible twos. So what gives? Understanding how and why our brains form memories in the first place might convince you that if you're in that 40 percent, perhaps your memory is a fictional one after all. That number comes courtesy of a recent study out this week in the journal Psychological Science, which sought to understand when most people have their first memories and what they’re about. . The researchers asked 6,641 U.K. residents to describe in writing their first recollection and the age they were in that memory. They then used that data to figure out how many of these first impressions were real. Aside from interviewing friends and family (who might also have false memories), it’s difficult to determine whether a memory is real or not. Instead, the psychologists operated on the assumption—albeit an assumption backed by a lot of research—that people can’t remember anything before about age two. Based on that cutoff, 38.6 percent of the first memories in this dataset were fictional. Most of those were dated to somewhere between ages one and two, but 893 people claimed they could remember being less than one year old. Why are researchers so quick to dismiss those first couple years of life thoughts? There’s a lot of research that suggests it’s all made up. It might seem dismissive to assume that these memories are false, but memory researchers have good reason to conclude that people aren’t truly remembering being a baby. Research on infantile amnesia, the official term for the phenomenon in which we forget things that happened to us as babies and young children, has shown that it’s close to impossible to retain declarative memories at that young age. Babies can obviously remember other, nondeclarative things because they learn how to walk and talk—both of those are reliant on retaining some kind of information—but a declarative memory happens in a separate part of the brain. Copyright © 2018 Popular Science.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25225 - Posted: 07.19.2018

by Kate Furby Deaths from liver disease have increased sharply in recent years in the United States, according to a study published in the British Medical Journal. Cirrhosis-related deaths increased by 65 percent from 1999 to 2016, and deaths from liver cancer doubled, the study said. The rise in death rates was driven predominantly by alcohol-induced disease, the report said. Over the past decade, people ages 25 to 34 had the highest increase in cirrhosis deaths — an average of 10.5 percent per year — of the demographic groups examined, researchers reported. The study suggests that a new generation of Americans is being afflicted "by alcohol misuse and its complications,” said lead author Elliot Tapper, a liver specialist at the University of Michigan. Tapper said people are at risk of life-threatening cirrhosis if they drink several drinks a night or have multiple nights of binge drinking — more than four or five drinks per sitting — per week. Women tend to be less tolerant of alcohol and their livers more sensitive to damage. The liver cleans blood as it exits the gut. The more toxins, sugars and fats consumed, the harder it has to work. If the liver gets overloaded, its plumbing can get blocked up, causing scarring that can reduce liver function. "Dying from cirrhosis, you never wish this on anybody," Tapper said. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25224 - Posted: 07.19.2018

By Matthew Hutson Bird populations are plummeting, thanks to logging, agriculture, and climate change. Scientists keep track of species by recording their calls, but even the best computer programs can’t reliably distinguish bird calls from other sounds. Now, thanks to a bit of crowdsourcing and a lot of artificial intelligence (AI), researchers say they have something to crow about. AI algorithms can be as finicky as finches, often requiring manual calibration and retraining for each new location or species. So an interdisciplinary group of researchers launched the Bird Audio Detection challenge, which released hours of audio from environmental monitoring stations around Chernobyl, Ukraine, which they happened to have access to, as well as crowdsourced recordings, some of which came from an app called Warblr. Humans labeled each 10-second clip as containing a bird call or not. Using so-called machine learning, in which computers learn from data, 30 teams trained their AIs on a set of the recordings for which labels were provided and then tested them on recordings for which they were not. Most relied on neural networks, a type of AI inspired by the brain that connects many small computing elements akin to neurons. At the end of the monthlong contest, the best algorithm scored 89 out of 100 on a statistical measure of performance called AUC. A higher number, in this case, indicates the algorithm managed to avoid labeling nonbird sounds as bird sounds (humans, insects, or rain often threw them off) and avoid missing real bird sounds (usually because of faint recordings), the organizers report in a paper uploaded to the preprint server arXiv. The best previous algorithm they tested had an AUC score of 79. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Scienc

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Animal Communication
Link ID: 25223 - Posted: 07.19.2018

By Donald G. McNeil Jr. GETA, Nepal — Fifteen years ago, Shiva Lal Rana walked 20 miles to Geta Eye Hospital to ask doctors to pluck out all his eyelashes. Trachoma, a bacterial infection, had swollen and inverted his eyelids. With every blink, his lashes raked his corneas. “The scratching hurt my eyes so much I could barely go out in the sun to plow,” he said. “I was always rubbing them.” Worse, he feared the fate that others with the infection had suffered. The tiny scratches could accumulate and ultimately blind him. Instead, doctors performed what was then a new operation: They sliced open his eyelids, rolled them back and sutured them with the lashes facing outward again. And they gave him antibiotics to clear up the infection. “My vision is much better now,” said Mr. Rana, a tiny, lively man who guessed he was about 65. “I can recognize people. I can work.” His personal triumph parallels his nation’s. In May, the World Health Organization declared that Nepal had eliminated trachoma as a public health problem, making it the sixth country to do so. In June, Ghana became the seventh. Quietly, in the shadow of fights against better-known diseases like Ebola, AIDS and malaria, the 20-year battle against trachoma is chalking up impressive victories. Those successes, experts say, show the wisdom of advocating and enforcing basic public health practices, rather than waiting for a miracle cure or a new vaccine. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 25222 - Posted: 07.18.2018

By Rick Strassman The resumption of clinical research with psychedelics is producing preliminary evidence of benefit for a variety of conditions. These include depression, substance abuse and palliative care. Some research also indicates efficacy in attaining quasi-clinical goals such as “mystical-type experiences.” With proper safeguards in place, the frequency and severity of adverse effects are acceptable. These safeguards include careful screening and preparation of subjects, close supervision of drug sessions with specially trained therapists, and careful follow-up. We are now hearing calls to increase psychedelics’ clinical availability; i.e., “legalizing psychedelics.” Michael Pollan’s popular book How to Change Your Mind encapsulates many of the arguments for loosening current regulatory burdens that restrict the drugs’ use to the research setting. But there are some risks as well, and as John Horgan reminds us in his recent blog post in Scientific American, we need to exercise due caution. Psychedelics currently live in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, which is reserved for drugs with high abuse potential; no accepted medical use; and lack of safety even under medical supervision. The lower schedules, II–V, are for drugs with greater safety and for which medical uses exist, but they’re still highly abusable; they include oxycodone and amphetamine, for example. Schedule III drugs, including low-dose opiates/painkillers such as Vicodin or Tylenol with codeine, and certain cough syrups, are less so. Advocates of rescheduling psychedelics usually recommend placement into Schedule III. © 2018 Scientific American,

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25221 - Posted: 07.18.2018

Rhitu Chatterjee Most teens today own a smartphone and go online every day, and about a quarter of them use the internet "almost constantly," according to a 2015 report by the Pew Research Center. Now a study published Tuesday in JAMA suggests that such frequent use of digital media by adolescents might increase their odds of developing symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. "It's one of the first studies to look at modern digital media and ADHD risk," says psychologist Adam Leventhal, an associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California and an author of the study. When considered with previous research showing that greater social media use is associated with depression in teens, the new study suggests that "excessive digital media use doesn't seem to be great for [their] mental health," he adds. Previous research has shown that watching television or playing video games on a console put teenagers at a slightly higher risk of developing ADHD behaviors. But less is known about the impact of computers, tablets and smartphones. Because these tools have evolved very rapidly, there's been little research into the impact of these new technologies on us, says Jenny Radesky, a pediatrician at the University of Michigan, who wrote an editorial about the new study for JAMA. Each new platform reaches millions of people worldwide in a matter of days or weeks, she says. "Angry Birds reached 50 million users within 35 days. Pokémon Go reached the same number in 19 days." © 2018 npr

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 25220 - Posted: 07.18.2018

By Nicholas Bakalar A good night’s sleep may be critical for the metabolic health of teenagers. Researchers studied 829 boys and girls, average age 13, who wore electronic measuring devices that tracked sleep time, sleep quality and physical activity over seven to 10 days. They also recorded five factors associated with cardiovascular risk: waist circumference, blood pressure, HDL or “good” cholesterol, triglycerides and insulin resistance. Inadequate sleep was common — 31 percent of the children slept less than seven hours a night, and 58 percent had poor sleep efficiency as measured by percentage of time awake after initial sleep onset. Shorter sleep duration and poorer sleep efficiency were associated with higher systolic blood pressure, lower HDL cholesterol, higher triglycerides and higher glucose levels, all indicators of poorer metabolic health. Other studies have found that shorter sleep is associated with obesity, but in this study, published in Pediatrics, the associations were independent of body mass index. The researchers controlled for age and sex, race and ethnicity, TV viewing, fast food consumption and other factors. “It was surprising that we found that the relationship was not fully explained by body mass index,” said the lead author, Elizabeth M. Cespedes Feliciano, a staff scientist at Kaiser Permanente Northern California. “The main takeaway is that using objective measurements, we showed that both quantity and quality of sleep matter for metabolic health.” © 2018 The New York Times Compan

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25219 - Posted: 07.18.2018

Catherine Offord Researchers at Caltech have designed a noninvasive method to control specific neural circuits in the mouse brain. The technique, published earlier this week (July 9) in Nature Biomedical Engineering, combines ultrasound waves with genetic engineering and the administration of designer compounds to selectively activate or inhibit neurons. Although currently only tested in mice, the approach could offer a novel way to administer therapy to regions of the human brain that are difficult to access using surgery. “By using sound waves and known genetic techniques, we can, for the first time, noninvasively control specific brain regions and cell types as well as the timing of when neurons are switched on or off,” study coauthor Mikhail Shapiro says in a statement. While several emerging methods in neuroscience allow researchers to manipulate brain circuits, most “require invasive techniques such as stereotaxic surgery, which can damage tissue and initiate a long-lasting immune response,” note neuroscientists Caroline Menard and Scott Russo of Quebec City’s Université Laval and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, respectively, in an accompanying News and Views article. “Also, conventional pharmacological approaches lack the spatial, temporal and cell-type specificity required to treat the brain, and can lead to deleterious side effects.” © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 25218 - Posted: 07.17.2018

According to a new National Institutes of Health-funded study, it is not destiny that brings two fruit flies together, but an evolutionary matchmaker of sorts that made tiny adjustments to their brains’ mating circuits, so they would be attracted to one another while rejecting advances from other, even closely-related, species. The results, published in Nature, may help explain how a specific female scent triggers completely different responses in different male flies. “This study reveals how a very small tweak in brain wiring can result in large changes in very complex social behaviors, which can ultimately determine the fate of a species,” said Jim Gnadt, Ph.D., program director at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), which supported the study. “Understanding how variation in brain circuits leads to changes in behavior is one of the primary goals of the NIH’s BRAIN Initiative and this study provides a piece of the puzzle.” Vanessa Ruta, Ph.D., professor at Rockefeller University in New York City, and her colleagues used cutting-edge genetic tools to compare the brain circuits behind courtship behavior in two closely related species of fruit fly, D. melanogaster and D. simulans. Previous studies showed that although males from both species could detect a specific pheromone, or scent, called 7,11-heptacosadiene (7,11-HD), their reactions to it were very different. Male D. melanogaster flies found it attractive while D. simulans males avoided females that carried it. In this study, Dr. Ruta and her team discovered that slight differences in the way the fly’s brains are wired may control these opposite reactions.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25217 - Posted: 07.17.2018

By Niraj Chokshi Six months after a White House physician told reporters that President Trump had aced a well-regarded test of cognitive impairment, a group of doctors is warning that the exam may have been compromised by the resulting news coverage, which revealed some of its questions. Until it’s clear what effect the exposure has had on the effectiveness of the test, known as the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or MoCA, doctors should consider using alternatives, said Dr. Hourmazd Haghbayan, an internist at the University of Toronto. “When I saw that this test was being disseminated to the mass population, and in some cases individuals were being invited to take it online, I wondered whether there would be an effect,” Dr. Haghbayan and colleagues wrote in a letter published Monday in the medical journal JAMA Neurology. The group collected data to show how widely the test’s questions were publicized after Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, a rear admiral in the Navy and then the White House physician, mentioned it at a news conference in January. Dr. Jackson, who later withdrew as nominee for veterans affairs secretary under a cloud of scandal, told reporters at the time that Mr. Trump was in “excellent” overall health and that he had landed a perfect MoCA score. “The fact that the president got 30 out of 30 on that exam, I think that there’s no indication whatsoever that he has any cognitive issues,” Dr. Jackson said. Mr. Trump has long faced questions about his mental stability and his fitness for office. He has occasionally responded to them directly, as he did in early January when he described himself on Twitter as “a very stable genius.” Using a Google News search, the researchers found 190 articles published in the days after the announcement that mentioned MoCA in reference to the president. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 25216 - Posted: 07.17.2018

Ashley Yeager Exosomes in the blood that originated from brain cells carry biomarkers that indicate the severity of traumatic brain injuries, researchers reported in Brain Injury in June. The authors say certain proteins in these vesicles could help predict the progression and long-term effects of the brain damage. “Developing a peripheral blood test to track TBIs [traumatic brain injuries] is a holy grail,” says John Lukens, a neuroscientist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine who was not involved in the study. Showing that blood-derived biomarkers can be predictive of the issues individuals with TBIs might experience, he says, is a big advance toward achieving that goal. Past studies have shown that elevated levels of tau and amyloid-β in blood plasma are associated with post-concussive symptoms after a TBI, and postmortem studies of the brains of athletes that have had repeated head injuries also have shown increased levels of tau. The detection of amyloid-β in postmortem brain tissue has been tied to repeated hits to the head that didn’t cause concussions but hinted at brain injury. Other research has also suggested links between brain inflammation, TBIs, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but such connections have been hard to identify using blood biomarkers. In the new study, Jessica Gill, who studies the neurobiology of trauma at the National Institute of Nursing Research, and colleagues collected blood from 60 men and 4 women who served in the military. Some of the individuals had suffered mild TBIs, while others had not. The team then used recently developed nanoparticle sorting technology to isolate individual exosomes—extracellular vesicles that carry contents from their cells of origin—from the soldiers’ blood. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 25215 - Posted: 07.17.2018

By Mark Fischetti The Same Genes May Underlie Different Psychiatric Disorders Schizophrenia brain. 3-D magnetic resonance image (MRI) of the brain of a schizophrenic patient showing structural changes. Credit: Nancy C. Andreasen Getty Images People who have autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder may have different challenges, but the ailments might arise from a common set of genes. Researchers compared genetic analyses of 700 human brains from deceased individuals who had one of those three disorders, major depression or alcoholism (columns) with brains of individuals who had none of the conditions. They examined 13 groups of genes thought to function together (rows). The scientists found that five groups had a pattern of overactivity or underactivity across at least three of the five conditions (blue and gray panels). Bipolar disorder, for example, was more similar to schizophrenia than to major depression even though clinicians may link bipolar disorder and depression, based on their symptoms. These insights could possibly reveal new treatments, says neurogeneticist Daniel Geschwind of the University of California, Los Angeles, one of the investigators. He adds that one path to that result, which has not yet been tested, could be to “put the different groups of genes in lab dishes and see which drugs reverse any overexpression or underexpression of the genes.” © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 25214 - Posted: 07.17.2018

Sukanya Charuchandra Older individuals with high blood pressure are more likely to have brain lesions than those without high blood pressure and may also have protein tangles, a sign of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study published in Neurology on July 11. Coauthor Zoe Arvanitakis, a neurologist at Rush University Medical Center, says these “preliminary data” need further exploration, according to the Associated Press. “We can’t be alarmist,” she says. According to a statement, the researchers were keen to learn if blood pressure had links to signs of brain aging. They tracked 1,288 people who were over the age of 65 until their deaths, an average of eight years. The scientists measured the blood pressure of the subjects once every year and examined their brains postmortem. Of the total number of subjects, two-thirds of the subjects had high blood pressure, while about half had one or more brain infarcts, necrotic regions caused by a loss of blood flow. With higher blood pressure, the risk of brain lesions went up: people with an upper blood pressure of 147 (normal being 120) had a 46 percent higher chance of having one or more lesions. Additionally, those with high pressure were more likely to have protein tangles in their brains. While the paper has “good information,” it also raises many questions, Ajay Misra, a neurologist at New York University Winthrop Hospital who was not involved in this research, tells Health Day. For instance, is higher blood pressure better in some situations? The researchers found that elderly subjects with lower blood pressure had a greater risk of stroke. Misra suggests the higher pressure may be required to keep blood vessels of older adults clear. He adds that a one-size-fits-all blood-pressure guideline may not be appropriate. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25213 - Posted: 07.17.2018

Laura Beil Neuroscientist Barbara Bendlin studies the brain as Alzheimer’s disease develops. When she goes home, she tries to leave her work in the lab. But one recent research project has crossed into her personal life: She now takes sleep much more seriously. Bendlin works at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, home to the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention, a study of more than 1,500 people who were ages 40 to 65 when they signed up. Members of the registry did not have symptoms of dementia when they volunteered, but more than 70 percent had a family history of Alzheimer’s disease. Since 2001, participants have been tested regularly for memory loss and other signs of the disease, such as the presence of amyloid-beta, a protein fragment that can clump into sticky plaques in the brain. Those plaques are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia. Each person also fills out lengthy questionnaires about their lives in the hopes that one day the information will offer clues to the disease. Among the inquiries: How tired are you? Some answers to the sleep questions have been eye-opening. Bendlin and her colleagues identified 98 people from the registry who recorded their sleep quality and had brain scans. Those who slept badly — measured by such things as being tired during the day — tended to have more A-beta plaques visible on brain imaging, the researchers reported in 2015 in Neurobiology of Aging. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Sleep; Alzheimers
Link ID: 25212 - Posted: 07.16.2018

Allison Aubrey Can't cool off this summer? Heat waves can slow us down in ways we may not realize. New research suggests heat stress can muddle our thinking, making simple math a little harder to do. "There's evidence that our brains are susceptible to temperature abnormalities," says Joe Allen, co-director of the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at Harvard University. And as the climate changes, temperatures spike and heat waves are more frequent. To learn more about how the heat influences young, healthy adults, Allen and his colleagues studied college students living in dorms during a summer heat wave in Boston. Half of the students lived in buildings with central AC, where the indoor air temperature averaged 71 degrees. The other half lived in dorms with no AC, where air temperatures averaged almost 80 degrees. "In the morning, when they woke up, we pushed tests out to their cellphones," explains Allen. The students took two tests a day for 12 consecutive days. One test, which included basic addition and subtraction, measured cognitive speed and memory. A second test assessed attention and processing speed. "We found that the students who were in the non-air-conditioned buildings actually had slower reaction times: 13 percent lower performance on basic arithmetic tests, and nearly a 10 percent reduction in the number of correct responses per minute," Allen explains. The results, published in PLOS Medicine, may come as a surprise. "I think it's a little bit akin to the frog in the boiling water," Allen says. There's a "slow, steady — largely imperceptible — rise in temperature, and you don't realize it's having an impact on you." © 2018 npr

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 25211 - Posted: 07.16.2018