By Abby Olena Diagnosing neurobiological disorders, such as the autism spectrum disorders, focuses on complex clinical evaluations. But a study published last week (March 6) in eLife shows that an objective measure—how the pupil varies in size while viewing an optical illusion—reveals differences in perceptual styles and correlates with a self-reported score of autistic traits. The findings suggest that tracking fluctuations in pupil size, which is called pupillometry, could be used alongside clinical assessments to help researchers and clinicians understand autism. “We used to think that the pupil was a simple light reflex or that it just indexed arousal,” says Stefan Van der Stigchel, an attention and perception researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands who did not participate in the work. This study shows “how the pupil can be informative of, in this situation, perceptual styles.” Previous research has shown that people with autism spectrum disorders allocate their attention differently—and therefore may perceive things differently—than people in the general population. For instance, rather than perceiving an image as a forest, they might focus on the individual trees, says coauthor David Burr of the University of Florence. It’s possible to measure what people pay attention to by having them look at images with both bright and dark areas. Their pupils are slightly larger when they attend to the dark parts and slightly smaller when they attend to the light parts. Burr, Paola Binda of the University of Pisa in Italy, and Marco Turi, a postdoc at the University of Pisa, decided to take advantage of this phenomenon and study how attention, via pupil size, tracks with autistic traits. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Autism; Attention
Link ID: 24755 - Posted: 03.15.2018

Researchers at the University of Calgary say they have developed a portable brain-imaging system that would literally shed light on concussions. Symptoms of a concussion can vary greatly between individuals and include headaches, nausea, loss of memory and lack of co-ordination, which make it difficult to find treatment options. U of C scientist Jeff Dunn says there has been no accepted way to get an image of a concussion, but he and his team have developed a device, called a Near-Infrared Spectroscopy, that measures communication in the brain by measuring oxygen levels in blood. Results show these patterns change after concussion. The device — a cap that contains small lights with sensors connected to a computer — is placed on the top of the head to monitor and measure brain activity while the patient looks at a picture or does a simple activity. "When the brain activates, blood flow goes up but oxygen levels also go up, so the blood actually becomes redder as the brain activates," Dunn said. "And we measure that so we shine a light in and we can see that change in oxygen level and measure the change in absorption." Dunn hopes the images will show a connection between symptoms and abnormalities in the brain that could help doctors identify treatment protocols and recovery timelines. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Brain imaging
Link ID: 24754 - Posted: 03.15.2018

Sue Blackmore Are you longing for your brain and all its memories to be preserved for ever? That once fanciful idea seems creepily closer now that a complete pig’s brain has been successfully treated, frozen, rewarmed and found to have its neural connections still intact. This achievement, by the cryobiology research company 21st Century Medicine (21CM), has just won the final phase of the Brain Preservation Foundation’s prize – a prize that demanded all of a brain’s synaptic connections be preserved in a way that allowed for centuries-long storage of the entire information content of a whole large mammal’s brain. They used a pig’s brain, which was perfused with lethal glutaraldehyde before being frozen at –135C, a method called aldehyde-stabilised cryopreservation (ASC). This process kills any chance of the brain being brought to life again, but they won because when the treated brain was warmed up again its connectome – the brain’s wiring diagram – was amazingly well preserved. In fact it was so well preserved that even the fine ultrastructural details of dendritic spine synapses could still be seen with a 3D electron microscope. This means potentially 150 trillion connections, all of which may be implicated in storing memory. A human brain treated this way could never be brought back to life. Yet all its preserved information could potentially be uploaded into an artificial or virtual body indistinguishable from the previously living one – like “uploading a person’s mind” after a long wait. Would this then be “you”? © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 24753 - Posted: 03.15.2018

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, America’s most celebrated baby doctor since Benjamin Spock and the pediatrician who revolutionized our understanding of how children develop psychologically, died on Tuesday at his home in Barnstable, Mass., on Cape Cod. He was 99. His daughter Christina Brazelton confirmed the death. Before Dr. Brazelton began practicing medicine in the early 1950s, the conventional wisdom about babies and child rearing was unsparingly authoritarian. It was believed that infants could not feel pain. Parents were instructed to set strict schedules, demand obedience and refrain from kissing or cuddling. Babies were to be fed every four hours, by the clock, preferably from a bottle. When children were hospitalized, parents were allowed few if any visiting hours. Dr. Brazelton, echoing Dr. Spock, whose book “The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care” became a best seller in 1946, rejected such beliefs and practices as being senseless, if not barbaric. “He put the baby at the center of the universe,” Dr. Barry Lester, a pediatrician and director of the Center for the Study of Children at Risk at Brown University, said in an interview for this obituary in 2009. “We take for granted all the changes he helped bring about. He more than anyone is responsible for the return to natural childbirth, breast feeding and the ability of parents to stay with a hospitalized child.” Nevertheless, Dr. Brazelton’s work never entered mainstream pediatrics and is not taught in most medical curriculums. But the public loved the charismatic Dr. Brazelton. He wrote nearly 40 books and a column in Family Circle magazine, and he was the host of an Emmy Award-winning show, “What Every Baby Knows,” which ran for 12 years on the Lifetime cable channel. He also worked with Congress to pass parental leave legislation and other parent-friendly measures. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24752 - Posted: 03.15.2018

By Frankie Schembri When you go to catch a Frisbee, you don’t need to stare at your hand until it makes contact. You have an intuitive sense of where your arm is—and where it’s going—based on how your muscles and joints feel. This sense of body position, known as kinesthesia, has proved tricky to build into prosthetic arms. Now, researchers have recreated the feeling of kinesthesia in six arm amputees by sending finely tuned vibrations into the skin of their upper arms and shoulders. The approach improved their ability to feel and control their prosthetic arms when performing actions such as gripping and pinching, the team reports today in Science Translational Medicine. The amputees in the study had previously undergone surgery to rewire the nerves in their upper bodies to act as messengers for the specific electric signals associated with arm and hand movement. Three also completed tests where they were asked to close their hand as if gripping a cylinder, while not being able to see their prosthetic arm. When the subjects performed the task again while receiving kinesthesia vibrations simulating the feeling of the motion, they more instinctively moved their prosthetics into the grip and were faster in correcting their mistakes, such as when some of their fingers had not closed into the grip. The subjects also indicated in surveys that they felt greater control over their prosthetic arms when receiving the kinesthesia vibrations. The authors of the study say that more experiments need to be run in order to determine the effectiveness of the vibrations in helping with everyday activities such as picking up objects, and on a test group larger than six people. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Robotics
Link ID: 24751 - Posted: 03.15.2018

Laura Sanders We can’t see it, but brains hum with electrical activity. Brain waves created by the coordinated firing of huge collections of nerve cells pinball around the brain. The waves can ricochet from the front of the brain to the back, or from deep structures all the way to the scalp and then back again. Called neuronal oscillations, these signals are known to accompany certain mental states. Quiet alpha waves ripple soothingly across the brains of meditating monks. Beta waves rise and fall during intense conversational turns. Fast gamma waves accompany sharp insights. Sluggish delta rhythms lull deep sleepers, while dreamers shift into slightly quicker theta rhythms. Researchers have long argued over whether these waves have purpose, and what those purposes might be. Some scientists see waves as inevitable but useless by-products of the signals that really matter — messages sent by individual nerve cells. Waves are simply a consequence of collective neural behavior, and nothing more, that view holds. But a growing body of evidence suggests just the opposite: Instead of by-products of important signals, brain waves are key to how the brain operates, routing information among far-flung brain regions that need to work together. MIT’s Earl Miller is among the neuro­scientists amassing evidence that waves are an essential part of how the brain operates. Brain oscillations deftly route information in a way that allows the brain to choose which signals in the world to pay attention to and which to ignore, his recent studies suggest. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 24750 - Posted: 03.14.2018

By Rachel R. Albert Parents are often their own worst critics when it comes to imparting knowledge to their children. Although helping with science fairs or homework assignments may come later on, the pressure comes early, as their infant starts to babble in increasingly word-like vocalizations. It’s easy to assume that children who can’t yet form a word are unable to understand what their parents are saying to them. But spend just a few minutes with an infant, and you quickly realize how rapidly the gears are turning. And new research by me and my colleagues Michael Goldstein and Jennifer Schwade at Cornell University, suggests these interactions are more sophisticated than we once thought. Parents’ responses to their baby’s babbling take on new significance at the age of about six months, when babies’ vocalizations start to mature. Around this age, babies become incredibly receptive to what they hear immediately after they babble. In fact, previous work from the B.A.B.Y. Lab at Cornell University suggests that if infants receive a response to their initial vocalization, they’re far more likely to vocalize again. Observations of mother-infant conversations have found that within 10 minutes of this type of exchange, children can be taught new vocalizations. For example, they can be taught to shift their consonant-vowel construction of “dada” into vowel-consonant “ada.” But what’s truly incredible about these exchanges is the level of influence babies have as actual conversation partners. © 2018 Scientific American,

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24749 - Posted: 03.14.2018

To understand the link between aging and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, scientists from the National Institutes of Health compared the genetic clocks that tick during the lives of normal and mutant flies. They found that altering the activity of a gene called Cdk5 appeared to make the clocks run faster than normal, and the flies older than their chronological age. This caused the flies to have problems walking or flying later in life, to show signs of neurodegeneration, and to die earlier. “We tried to untangle the large role aging appears to play in some of the most devastating neurological disorders,” said Edward Giniger, Ph.D., senior investigator at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the senior author of the study published in Disease Models & Mechanisms. “Our results suggest that neurodegenerative disorders may accelerate the aging process.” On average, the normal flies in this study lived for 47 days. To create a genetic clock, Dr. Giniger’s team measured the levels of every gene encoded in messenger RNA molecules from cells from the heads and bodies of flies at 3, 10, 30, and 45 days after birth. This allowed the researchers to use advanced analysis techniques to search for the genes that seemed to be sensitive to aging, and create a standard curve, or timeline, that described the way they changed. When they performed the same experiments on 10-day-old mutant flies and compared the results with the standard curve, they found that the flies were “older” than their chronological age. Altering Cdk5 activity made the brains of the flies appear genetically to be about 15 days old and their bodies to be about 20 days old.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 24748 - Posted: 03.14.2018

Geoff Brumfiel Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found slumped on a bench in the city of Salisbury on March 4. Experts quickly assessed that Skripal — a former Russian intelligence official accused of spying for the British — had been poisoned with a nerve agent. On Monday, British Prime Minister Theresa May named the agent in a speech before Parliament. "It is now clear that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia," she said. "This is part of a group of nerve agents known as Novichok." Novichok agents are extremely rare. "As far as I know, I don't know anybody who knows how to make it except these guys in Russia," says Dan Kaszeta, a chemical weapons expert with Strongpoint Security in London. "They've been a deep, dark secret." Novichok means "newcomer" in Russian. Kaszeta says that Novichok agents were developed in the 1980s as a new weapon in the waning days of the Cold War. Novichok chemicals were designed to evade equipment carried by NATO troops. "They wanted to develop nerve agents that the West couldn't detect," he says. According to a defector's report published by the Stimson Center in 1995, they were developed at the State Scientific Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology in Moscow. As the U.S. and Russia were laying the groundwork to dismantle their chemical weapons stockpiles, researchers at the institute were working in secret to develop the new Novichok chemicals. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 24747 - Posted: 03.13.2018

By Nicola Davis Your book is all about reproductive hormones, and their impact on our behaviour. It only focuses on female hormones. Why not look at men’s too? Two reasons. One is that the focus of research in my lab is to look at women’s hormones. The other is that I think there are problems with how people have viewed hormones and women, and I really want to debunk those myths, then pursue some of the implications for further exploring links between women’s hormones and their behaviour. I think they are really important for women’s wellbeing. You say that some people, including women, have pushed back against discussing the influence of hormones. Why is that? I get a strong sense that if you ascribe a woman’s behaviour to biology, people will automatically think that women are automatons, driven by their hormones and unable to regulate their own behaviour. That is false. There is a female stereotype, whereby any time a woman does something a little bit difficult to understand, then it is hormones that make women “irrational”. But nobody says that about men. For that reason, those who are concerned about women achieving equality with men worry that if we talk about women and hormones, then people will say such things as women shouldn’t hold higher office and so on. That’s silly, because men have hormones, too. Are you surprised by how recently we have begun investigating the impact of hormones on women? One reason is that scientists were content for many decades with studying the male as the default sex, and that was in part because women had cycles that made them messy. If you are doing a scientific experiment, you don’t want noise, you don’t want variation, you want everything to be strictly controlled. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24746 - Posted: 03.13.2018

NIH-funded researchers at Stanford University used the gene editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 to rapidly identify genes in the human genome that might modify the severity of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) caused by mutations in a gene called C9orf72. The results of the search, published in Nature Genetics, uncovered a new set of genes that may hasten neuron death during the disease. Accounting for nearly 40 percent of inherited cases of ALS and 25 percent of inherited FTD cases, disease-causing mutations in C9orf72 insert extra sequences of DNA, called hexanucleotide repeats, into the gene. These repeats produce potentially toxic RNA and protein molecules that kill neurons resulting in problems with movement and eventually paralysis for ALS patients and language and decision-making problems for FTD patients. Led by Aaron D. Gitler, Ph.D., and Michael C. Bassik, Ph.D., the researchers used CRISPR to disable each gene, one-by-one, in a line of human leukemia cells and then tested whether the cells would survive exposure to toxic proteins derived from the hexanucleotide repeats, called DPRs. Any disabled genes that caused cells to live longer or die faster than normal were considered suspects in DPR toxicity. They confirmed that genes that control the movement of molecules in and out of a cell’s nucleus may be partners. They also identified several new players, including genes that modify chromosomes and that help cells assemble proteins passing through a maze-like structure called the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). A second CRISPR search conducted on mouse brain cells confirmed the initial results. Disabling the top 200 genes identified in the leukemia cells helped neurons survive DPR exposure.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease ; Alzheimers
Link ID: 24745 - Posted: 03.13.2018

Shankar Vedantam Economic theory rests on a simple notion about humans: people are rational. They seek out the best information. They measure costs and benefits, and maximize pleasure and profit. This idea of the rational economic actor has been around for centuries. But about 50 years ago, two psychologists shattered these assumptions. They showed that people routinely walk away from good money. And they explained why, once we get in a hole, we often keep digging. Think Fast with Daniel Kahneman The methods of these psychologists were as unusual as their insights. Instead of writing complex theorems, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky spent hours together...talking. They came up with playful thought experiments. They laughed a lot. "We found our mistakes very funny," recalls Kahneman. "What was fun was finding yourself about to say something really stupid." The insights that Kahneman developed with Tversky, who passed away in 1996, transformed the way we understand the mind. That transformation also had philosophical implications. "The stories about the past are so good that they create an illusion that life is understandable, and they create an illusion that you can predict the future," Kahneman says. Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel prize in 2002, and over the past 99 episodes of Hidden Brain, we've drawn extensively on research inspired by his work. This week, we celebrate our 100th episode by interviewing Kahneman about judgment, memory, and the mind itself. He spoke with us before a live audience at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Emotions
Link ID: 24744 - Posted: 03.13.2018

By Katarina Zimmer Many of life’s trickier decisions share a common denominator: the options all have both pros and cons. This is what psychologists call a “cost-benefit conflict,” and it’s something that rats and mice in Ann Graybiel’s neuroscience laboratory at MIT face on a regular basis. Graybiel aims to understand how brains evaluate costs and benefits, and why the capacity to do so is sometimes impaired in neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders such as Huntington’s disease, anxiety, and depression. Graybiel and her colleagues have pinpointed the specific brain circuit—consisting of prefrontal cortical neurons, neurons in structures known as striosomes, and inhibitory interneurons that suppress the activity of striosomes—that appears to control this type of decision making. In a study published last November, the researchers reported that chronic stress caused rats and mice to make riskier decisions than they normally would, and that the rodents’ motivations returned to normal with manipulation of this circuit. Graybiel has long been fascinated by the striatum, located in the basal ganglia in the deep forebrain. It was assumed to be primitive, “and not mixed up in any kind of terribly interesting behavior,” she explains. But that view has since changed. The brain region has many projections into the prefrontal cortex, is innervated by midbrain dopaminergic circuits, and is thought to act as a “relay station” between cognitive tasks and motor-related tasks. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Stress; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 24743 - Posted: 03.13.2018

by Amy B Wang The 84-year-old man arrived in the emergency room with complaints that weren't uncommon for a patient his age. He had reported feeling unsteady over the past several months, culminating in repeated falls in recent weeks. In the three days leading up to his hospital visit, his left arm and leg had noticeably weakened. Still, there were no red flags in the man's medical history. He didn't smoke. He rarely drank. A blood test detected nothing abnormal. “There was no confusion, facial weakness, visual or speech disturbance,” doctors stated in a summary of the man's case published Feb. 27 in the medical journal BMJ Case Reports. “He was otherwise fit and well, independent with physical activities of daily living ... and lived at home with his wife and two sons.” In other words, doctors thought, there was nothing apparent that would have suggested a clear reason for his symptoms. In a way, they wouldn't be wrong. It was only after CT and MRI scans that the patient's medical team made an alarming discovery: Where much of the man's right frontal lobe of his brain should have been, there was simply a large blank space. Finlay Brown, a physician who was working in the emergency department at Causeway Hospital in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, at the time, remembers reviewing the brain-imaging scans with the rest of the staff. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24742 - Posted: 03.13.2018

Laura Beil On the hormonal roller coaster of life, the ups and downs of childbirth are the Tower of Power. For nine long months, a woman’s body and brain absorb a slow upwelling of hormones, notably progesterone and estrogen. The ovaries and placenta produce these two chemicals in a gradual but relentless rise to support the developing fetus. With the birth of a baby, and the immediate expulsion of the placenta, hormone levels plummet. No other physiological change comes close to this kind of free fall in both speed and intensity. For most women, the brain and body make a smooth landing, but more than 1 in 10 women in the United States may have trouble coping with the sudden crash. Those new mothers are left feeling depressed, isolated or anxious at a time society expects them to be deliriously happy. This has always been so. Mental struggles following childbirth have been recognized for as long as doctors have documented the experience of pregnancy. Hippocrates described a woman’s restlessness and insomnia after giving birth. In the 19th century, some doctors declared that mothers were suffering from “insanity of pregnancy” or “insanity of lactation.” Women were sent to mental hospitals. Modern medicine recognizes psychiatric suffering in new mothers as an illness like any other, but the condition, known as postpartum depression, still bears stigma. Both depression and anxiety are thought to be woefully underdiagnosed in new mothers, given that many women are afraid to admit that a new baby is anything less than a bundle of joy. It’s not the feeling they expected when they were expecting. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24741 - Posted: 03.12.2018

by Anthea Rowan My mother suffered from severe recurring depression for 30 years, episodes that floored her to the point of near-catatonic inertia. She was lost to us in a mire of desolation. This happened often — once a year, sometimes more. The worst episodes hung around for months and months. She endured hospital stays, electroconvulsive therapy, countless appointments with shrinks, dozens of varying prescriptions, some akin to snake oil, none a silver bullet. Then, 2½ years ago, she had a stroke. It stole her ability to read, her ability to remember names, her right-sided vision. It also stole her depression. Until the moment she had her stroke — a massive brain trauma to her left occipital lobe — Mum had been in a major depressive episode that had endured for two years, the longest stretch ever. Yet in the post-stroke rehab ward, I find her engaging with other patients in a way she has not done for years. She is animated — her speech, unlike her reading, quite unaffected by her brain injury — the antithesis of the lethargy that hamstrung her for so long. Will it last, I ask her neuro as he makes his perfunctory rounds, striding through the ward, long-legged, angular, unsmiling. Nope, he says, adamantly and assuredly, with a finality I dare not argue with. He’s the expert, after all. But I am disappointed. And afraid. Must Mum now learn to cope with her depressions without her books — her refuge when sick — since she seems unable to process written words? © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Depression; Stroke
Link ID: 24740 - Posted: 03.12.2018

By Aaron E. Carroll More people in the United States are on antidepressants, as a percentage of the population, than any other country in the world. And yet the drugs’ efficacy has been hotly debated. Some believe that the short-term benefits are much more modest than widely thought, and that harms may outweigh benefits in the long run. Others believe that they work, and that they can be life-changing. Settling this debate has been much harder than you might think. It’s not that we lack research. Many, many studies of antidepressants can be found in the peer-reviewed literature. The problem is that this has been a prime example of publication bias: Positive studies are likely to be released, with negative ones more likely to be buried in a drawer. In 2008, a group of researchers made this point by doing a meta-analysis of antidepressant trials that were registered with the Food and Drug Administration as evidence in support of approvals for marketing or changes in labeling. Companies had to submit the results of registered trials to the F.D.A. regardless of the result. These trials also tend to have less data massaging — such as the cherry-picking of outcomes — than might be possible in journals. The researchers found 74 studies, with more than 12,500 patients, for drugs approved between 1987 and 2004. About half of these trials had “positive” results, in that the antidepressant performed better than a placebo; the other half were “negative.” But if you looked only in the published literature, you’d get a much different picture. Nearly all of the positive studies are there. Only three of the negative studies appear in the literature as negative. Twenty-two were never published, and 11 were published but repackaged so that they appeared positive. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 24739 - Posted: 03.12.2018

Emily Hanford Dyslexia is the most common learning disability, affecting tens of millions of people in the United States. But getting help for children who have it in public school can be a nightmare. "They wouldn't acknowledge that he had a problem," says Christine Beattie about her son Neil. "They wouldn't say the word 'dyslexia.' " Other parents, she says, in the Upper Arlington, Ohio, schools were having the same problem. The district in a suburb of Columbus wasn't identifying their children's dyslexia or giving them appropriate help. So, in 2011, the parents pooled their resources and hired a lawyer. "I was not surprised there was a group of students with dyslexia who were not getting the kind of instruction that they really needed," says Kerry Agins, an Ohio special education attorney who represented the Upper Arlington parents. She says the issue of public schools failing to address the needs of students with dyslexia is widespread, in Ohio and across the country. Agins advised the parents to file a group complaint against the district. Parents typically fight special education cases alone, seeking remedies one by one. But a group complaint, Agins told them, could force the school system to make broader change. Nineteen people signed the complaint, including parents, students and graduates of the Upper Arlington public schools. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Dyslexia
Link ID: 24738 - Posted: 03.12.2018

Researchers say they may have worked out why there is a natural loss of muscle in the legs as people age - and that it is due to a loss of nerves. In tests on 168 men, they found that nerves controlling the legs decreased by around 30% by the age of 75. This made muscles waste away, but in older fitter athletes there was a better chance of them being 'rescued' by nerves re-connecting. The scientists published their research in the Journal of Physiology. As people get older, their leg muscles become smaller and weaker, leading to problems with everyday movements such as walking up stairs or getting out of a chair. It is something that affects everyone eventually, but why it happens is not fully understood. Prof Jamie McPhee, from Manchester Metropolitan University, said young adults usually had 60-70,000 nerves controlling movement in the legs from the lumbar spine. But his research showed this changed significantly in old age. "There was a dramatic loss of nerves controlling the muscles - a 30-60% loss - which means they waste away," he said. "The muscles need to receive a proper signal from the nervous system to tell them to contract, so we can move around." The research team from Manchester Metropolitan University worked with researchers from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, and the University of Manchester. They looked at muscle tissue in detail using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and they recorded the electrical activity passing through the muscle to estimate the numbers and the size of surviving nerves. The good news is that healthy muscles have a form of protection: surviving nerves can send out new branches to rescue muscles and stop them wasting away. This is more likely to happen in fit people with large, healthy muscles, Prof McPhee said. © 2018 BBC.

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24737 - Posted: 03.12.2018

By George Musser, Satsuki Ayaya remembers finding it hard to play with other children when she was young, as if a screen separated her from them. Sometimes she felt numb, sometimes too sensitive; sometimes sounds were muted, sometimes too sharp. As a teenager, desperate to understand herself, she began keeping a journal. “I started to write my ideas in my notebooks, like: What’s happened to me? Or: What’s wrong with me? Or: Who am I?” she says, “I wrote, wrote, wrote. I filled maybe 40 notebooks.” Today, at 43, Ayaya has a better sense of who she is: She was diagnosed with autism when she was in her early 30s. As a Ph.D. student in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Tokyo, she is using the narratives from her teen years and after to generate hypotheses and suggest experiments about autism — a form of self-analysis called Tojisha-Kenkyu, introduced nearly 20 years ago by the disability-rights movement in Japan. In Ayaya’s telling, her autism involves a host of perceptual disconnects. For example, she feels in exquisite detail all the sensations that typical people readily identify as hunger, but she can’t piece them together. “It’s very hard for me to conclude I’m hungry,” she says. “I feel irritated, or I feel sad, or I feel something [is] wrong. This information is separated, not connected.” It takes her so long to realize she is hungry that she often feels faint and gets something to eat only after someone suggests it to her. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 24736 - Posted: 03.10.2018