Rhik Samadder The results of a comprehensive, six-year study confirmed last week what I’ve known a long time: antidepressants work. I know this because half the people I know are on them – and that’s only the half I know about. Antidepressants saved my life, they tell me, and I believe them. I don’t say: “The only thing you’ve swallowed is propaganda, mate, straight from Big Pharma’s chalky teat.” I would have to be a maniac to do that. And I’m not a maniac. At least, not in that way. I’ve been on antidepressants at various points in my life. And I’ve always been one of the 80% who come off them within a month, looking for another way. I quickly tire of the tweaking of drugs and dosages required to find the appropriate prescription. I freak out at the initial side-effects – the flaccidness in my brain, the lack of ideas in my underpants. More than that, I’ve always had been uncomfortable accepting there is something medically wrong with me. To some extent, I stand by that. Our social structures perpetuate inequality, our media feeds feelings of inferiority, while our politics is an accelerated zoetrope of horror. I feel unnerved when I meet someone who isn’t depressed. What’s wrong with you, I want to ask. Still, while it’s not wrong to feel viscerally offended by many aspects of the modern world, when the strength of those feelings stops you living your life, it’s not a solution, either. What struck me from that study, below the headline, was another of its findings: that talking therapies are equally as effective at treating moderate to severe depression.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 24695 - Posted: 02.26.2018

By JAMES GORMAN Recently someone (my boss, actually) mentioned to me that I wrote more articles about dogs than I did about cats and asked why. My first thought, naturally, was that it had nothing to do with the fact that I have owned numerous dogs and no cats, but rather reflected the amount of research done by scientists on the animals. After all, I’ll write about any interesting findings, and I like cats just fine, even if I am a dog person. Two of my adult children have cats, and I would hate for them to think I was paying them insufficient attention. (Hello Bailey! Hello Tawny! — Those are the cats, not the children.) But I figured I should do some reporting, so I emailed Elinor Karlsson at the Broad Institute and the University of Massachusetts. She is a geneticist who owns three cats, but does much of her research on dogs — the perfect unbiased observer. Her research, by the way, is about dog genomes. She gets dog DNA from owners who send in their pets’ saliva samples. The research I have been interested in and writing about involves evolution, domestication, current genetics and behavior. And the questions are of the What-is-a-dog-really? variety. Dogs and cats have also been used as laboratory animals in invasive experiments, but I wasn’t asking about which animal is more popular for those. I had gotten to know Dr. Karlsson a bit while reporting on research she was doing on wolves. I asked her whether there was indeed more research on dogs than cats, and if so, why? “Ooo, that is an interesting question!” she wrote back. “Way more interesting than the various grant-related emails that are filling up my inbox. “The research has lagged behind in cats. I think they’re taken less seriously than dogs, probably to do with societal biases. I have a vet in my group who thinks that many of the cancers in cats may actually be better models for human cancer, but there has been almost no research into them.” Better models than cancers in dogs, that is. Dogs do get many of the same cancers as humans, but in dogs the risk for these cancers often varies by breed, which narrows the target down when looking for the cause of a disease. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 24694 - Posted: 02.26.2018

Emma Marris Neanderthals painted caves in what is now Spain before their cousins, Homo sapiens, even arrived in Europe, according to research published today in Science1. The finding suggests that the extinct hominids, once assumed to be intellectually inferior to humans, may have been artists with complex beliefs. Ladder-like shapes, dots and handprints were painted and stenciled deep in caves at three sites in Spain. Their precise meaning may forever be unknowable, says Alistair Pike, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, UK, who co-authored the study, but they were almost certainly meaningful to our lost kin. “It wasn’t simply decorating your living space,” Pike says. “People were making journeys into the darkness.” Humans are thought to have arrived in Europe from Africa around 40,000–45,000 years ago. The three caves in different parts of Spain yielded artworks that are at least 65,000 years old, according to uranium-thorium dating of calcium carbonate that had formed on top of the art. These mineral deposits develop slowly, as water containing calcium comes into contact with cave surfaces. The water also contains trace levels of uranium from the rock. After the calcium carbonate has precipitated out of the water, a clock of sorts begins to tick, as uranium decays into thorium at a steady, known rate. Uranium-thorium dating has been used in geology for decades, but has seldom been employed to estimate the age of cave art. Some archaeologists are sceptical of the approach. They suggest that the calcium carbonate could have dissolved and re-crystallized after it was first formed — a process that could have also washed away some uranium, making a sample of the mineral appear older than it is. 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 24693 - Posted: 02.23.2018

Barbara J. King When humans talk to each other or walk alongside each other, we tend to match each other's subtle movements. Called interpersonal movement synchrony in the science literature and mirroring in the popular media, it's an often-unconscious process during which we match our gestures and pace to that of our social partner of the moment. Writing in the March issue of the journal Animal Cognition, Charlotte Duranton, Thierry Bedossa, and Florence Gaunet note that this process is "evolutionarily adaptive" for us: "It contributes to communication between individuals by signaling the convergence of their inner states and fostering social cohesion." Then, these three researchers present evidence to show that dogs synchronize their walking pace with their humans in a way that may also reflect an evolutionary adaptation. In an experiment, 36 pet dogs were brought to an open area in Maisons-Laffitte, France, with their owners. After a 15-minute free period, the owner-dog pairs experienced three testing conditions presented in random order. These were: stay-still (owner didn't move for 10 seconds), normal-walk (owners walked at normal speed for 10 seconds), and fast-walk (owner walked fast for 10 seconds). Importantly, the dogs were off-leash and, thus, not tethered in any way to the speed of the owners. The owners were told not to look at, or talk to, their dogs — or to show any evident emotion. The experimenters filmed the trials as they occurred. The dogs synchronized their pace closely with their owners, speeding up when the owners walked at an unnaturally fast pace. (The dogs in their regular routines were used to walking at a normal pace, with the owners often pausing to chat with other people). © 2018 npr

Keyword: Animal Communication; Emotions
Link ID: 24692 - Posted: 02.23.2018

By BENEDICT CAREY President Trump called again on Thursday for the opening of more mental hospitals to help prevent mass murders like the one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Yet ramping up institutional care, experts say, likely would not have prevented most of the spree killings regularly making headlines in this country. “We’re going to be talking about mental institutions. And when you have some person like this, you can bring them into a mental institution, and they can see what they can do. But we’ve got to get them out of our communities,” the president said during a meeting at the White House with state and local officials. In the 1960s, states across the country began to close or shrink mental hospitals after a series of court decisions that limited the powers of state and local officials to commit people. The decline continued for decades, in part because of cuts in both state and federal budgets for mental health care. Those institutions housed people with severe mental disorders, like schizophrenia, who were deemed unable to care for themselves. And while spree killers may be angry and emotionally disordered, few have had the sorts of illnesses that would have landed them in hospital custody. The latest school shooter, Nikolas Cruz, 19, was clearly troubled and making threats, and he was stockpiling weapons. But he had no mental diagnosis. He has been described as angry, possibly depressed, perhaps isolated — not so different from millions of other teenagers. A full psychiatric evaluation, if he’d had one, might have resulted in a temporary commitment at best, but not full-time institutionalization, experts said. The idea that more such institutions would prevent this kind of violence “is ridiculous, because you can’t put half the people in the country with a mental disturbance in mental hospitals,” said Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist at Columbia University who has studied mass killers. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 24691 - Posted: 02.23.2018

It was disappointing to read such an uncritical description of the latest analysis of antidepressant trials that does not address doubts about the widespread use of these drugs (The drugs do work, says study of antidepressants, 22 February). The analysis consists of comparing “response” rates between people on antidepressants and those on placebo. But “response” is an artificial category that has been arbitrarily constructed out of the data actually collected, which consists of scores on depression rating scales. Analysing categories inflates differences. When scores are compared, differences are trivial, and unlikely to be clinically relevant. Moreover, even these small differences are easily accounted for by the fact that antidepressants produce more or less subtle mental and physical alterations (eg nausea, dry mouth, drowsiness and emotional blunting) irrespective of whether or not they treat depression. These enable participants to guess whether they have been allocated to antidepressant or placebo, thus enhancing the placebo effect of the active drugs. This may explain why antidepressants that cause the most noticeable alterations, such as amitriptyline, appeared to be the most effective. “Real world” studies show that people treated with antidepressants have poor outcomes and fare worse than depressed people who do not receive antidepressants. Increased prescribing will do more harm than good. Adverse effects include sexual dysfunction, which may occasionally persist after the drugs are stopped, agitation, suicidal and aggressive behaviour among younger users, prolonged and severe withdrawal effects and foetal abnormalities. The costs of encouraging more people to consider themselves as flawed and diseased are hard to quantify. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 24690 - Posted: 02.23.2018

Kerri Smith Cole Skinner was hanging from a wall above an abandoned quarry when he heard a car pull up. He and his friends bolted, racing along a narrow path on the quarry’s edge and hopping over a barbed-wire fence to exit the grounds. The chase is part of the fun for Skinner and his friend Alex McCallum-Toppin, both 15 and pupils at a school in Faringdon, UK. The two say that they seek out places such as construction sites and disused buildings — not to get into trouble, but to explore. There are also bragging rights to be earned. “It’s just something you can say: ‘Yeah, I’ve been in an abandoned quarry’,” says McCallum-Toppin. “You can talk about it with your friends.” Science has often looked at risk-taking among adolescents as a monolithic problem for parents and the public to manage or endure. When Eva Telzer, a neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, asks family, friends, undergraduates or researchers in related fields about their perception of teenagers, “there’s almost never anything positive”, she says. “It’s a pervasive stereotype.” But how Alex and Cole dabble with risk — considering its social value alongside other pros and cons — is in keeping with a more complex picture emerging from neuroscience. Adolescent behaviour goes beyond impetuous rebellion or uncontrollable hormones, says Adriana Galván, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “How we define risk-taking is going through a shift.” Adolescents do take more risks than adults, and the consequences can include injury, death, run-ins with the law and even long-term health problems. But lab studies in the past decade have revealed layers of nuance in how young people assess risks. In some situations, teenagers can be more risk-averse than their older peers. And they navigate a broader range of risks than has typically been considered in the lab, including social risks and positive risks — such as trying out for a sports team. These types of behaviour seem to have different effects on the brain. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Emotions
Link ID: 24689 - Posted: 02.22.2018

Jason Beaubien The blind have descended in droves on the Bisidimo Hospital in Eastern Ethiopia. The Himalayan Cataract Project is hosting a mass cataract surgery campaign at the medical compound that used to be a leper colony. For one week a team from the nonprofit has set up seven operating tables in four operating rooms and they're offering free cataract surgery to anyone who needs it. On the first day of the campaign it's clear that the need is great. "We have like 700 or 800 patients already in the compound and many more appointed for tomorrow and the day after and the day after that," says Teketel Mathiwos, the Ethiopian program coordinator for the Himalayan Cataract Project. People hoping to get their sight restored are jammed into the compound's main courtyard. Others spill out of an office where optometrists are prepping patients for surgery. The line to get into the actual operating theater extends all the way out of the building, up along a covered walkway and then loops around the corner of another medical building. More still are standing outside the hospital gates. Mathiwos says some patients may have to wait a day or two for the procedure. "They have tents here," Mathiwos says. "We give them the food to eat and we try to take care of them as best as we can." Some of the patients at the Bisidimo Hospital have only one milky eye. Others are blind in both eyes. These patients underwent surgery as part of a campaign run by Himalayan Cataract Project at the Bisidimo Hospital in Ethiopia. The bandages are removed the day after the procedure. Surgeons performed more than 1,600 cataract surgeries during a six-day event in December. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 24688 - Posted: 02.22.2018

Sarah Boseley Health editor Antidepressants work – some more effectively than others – in treating depression, according to authors of a groundbreaking study which doctors hope will finally put to rest doubts about the controversial medicine. Millions more people around the world should be prescribed pills or offered talking therapies, which work equally well for moderate to severe depression, say the doctors, noting that just one in six people receive proper treatment in the rich world – and one in 27 in the developing world. If cancer or heart patients suffered this level of under-treatment, there would be a public outcry, they say. “Depression is the single largest contributor to global disability that we have – a massive challenge for humankind,” said John Geddes, professor of epidemiological psychiatry at Oxford University. It affects around 350 million people worldwide and instances rose almost 20% from 2005-2015. “Antidepressants are an effective tool for depression. Untreated depression is a huge problem because of the burden to society,” said Andrea Cipriani of the NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre, who led the study. In the UK, Geddes said “it is likely that at least one million more people per year should have access to effective treatment for depression, either drugs or psychotherapy. The choice will need to be made by doctor and patient.” © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 24687 - Posted: 02.22.2018

Ingfei Chen In a white lab coat and blue latex gloves, Neda Vishlaghi peers through a light microscope at six milky-white blobs. Each is about the size of a couscous grain, bathed in the pale orange broth of a petri dish. With tweezers in one hand and surgical scissors in the other, she deftly snips one tiny clump in half. When growing human brains, sometimes you need to do some pruning. The blobs are 8-week-old bits of brainlike tissue. While they wouldn’t be mistaken for Lilliputian-sized brains, some of their fine-grained features bear a remarkable resemblance to the human cerebral cortex, home to our memories, decision making and other high-level cognitive powers. Vishlaghi created these “minibrains” at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA, where she’s a research assistant. First she immersed batches of human pluripotent stem cells — which can morph into any cell type in the body — in a special mix of chemicals. The free-floating cells multiplied and coalesced into itty-bitty balls of neural tissue. Nurtured with meticulously timed doses of growth-supporting ingredients, the cell clumps were eventually transferred to petri dishes of broth laced with Matrigel, a gelatin-like matrix of proteins. On day 56, the blobs display shadowy clusters of neural “rosettes.” Under a laser scanning microscope, razor-thin slices of those rosettes reveal loose-knit layers of a variety of dividing neural stem cells and the nerve cells, or neurons, they give rise to. The layered structures look similar to the architecture of a human fetal brain at 14 weeks of gestation. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24686 - Posted: 02.21.2018

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR Anyone who has ever been on a diet knows that the standard prescription for weight loss is to reduce the amount of calories you consume. But a new study, published Tuesday in JAMA, may turn that advice on its head. It found that people who cut back on added sugar, refined grains and highly processed foods while concentrating on eating plenty of vegetables and whole foods — without worrying about counting calories or limiting portion sizes — lost significant amounts of weight over the course of a year. The strategy worked for people whether they followed diets that were mostly low in fat or mostly low in carbohydrates. And their success did not appear to be influenced by their genetics, a finding that casts doubt on the increasingly popular idea that different diets should be recommended to people based on their DNA makeup. The research lends strong support to the notion that diet quality, not quantity, is what helps people lose and manage their weight most easily in the long run. It also suggests that health authorities should shift away from telling the public to obsess over calories and instead encourage Americans to avoid processed foods that are made with refined starches and added sugar, like bagels, white bread, refined flour and sugary snacks and beverages, said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. “This is the road map to reducing the obesity epidemic in the United States,” said Dr. Mozaffarian, who was not involved in the new study. “It’s time for U.S. and other national policies to stop focusing on calories and calorie counting.” The new research was published in JAMA and led by Christopher D. Gardner, the director of nutrition studies at the Stanford Prevention Research Center. It was a large and expensive trial, carried out on more than 600 people with $8 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Nutrition Science Initiative and other groups. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 24685 - Posted: 02.21.2018

Sarah Webb Four years ago, scientists from Google showed up on neuroscientist Steve Finkbeiner’s doorstep. The researchers were based at Google Accelerated Science, a research division in Mountain View, California, that aims to use Google technologies to speed scientific discovery. They were interested in applying ‘deep-learning’ approaches to the mountains of imaging data generated by Finkbeiner’s team at the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease in San Francisco, also in California. Deep-learning algorithms take raw features from an extremely large, annotated data set, such as a collection of images or genomes, and use them to create a predictive tool based on patterns buried inside. Once trained, the algorithms can apply that training to analyse other data, sometimes from wildly different sources. The technique can be used to “tackle really hard, tough, complicated problems, and be able to see structure in data — amounts of data that are just too big and too complex for the human brain to comprehend”, Finkbeiner says. He and his team produce reams of data using a high-throughput imaging strategy known as robotic microscopy, which they had developed for studying brain cells. But the team couldn’t analyse its data at the speed it acquired them, so Finkbeiner welcomed the opportunity to collaborate. “I can’t honestly say at the time that I had a clear grasp of what questions might be addressed with deep learning, but I knew that we were generating data at about twice to three times the rate we could analyse it,” he says. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Robotics
Link ID: 24684 - Posted: 02.21.2018

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Exercise may help the brain to build durable memories, through good times and bad. Stress and adversity weaken the brain’s ability to learn and retain information, earlier research has found. But according to a remarkable new neurological study in mice, regular exercise can counteract those effects by bolstering communication between brain cells. Memory has long been considered a biological enigma, a medley of mental ephemera that has some basis in material existence. Memories are coded into brain cells in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center. If our memories were not written into those cells, they would not be available for later, long-term recall, and every brain would be like that of Dory, the memory-challenged fish in “Finding Nemo.” But representations of experience are extremely complex, and aspects of most memories must be spread across multiple brain cells, neuroscientists have determined. These cells must be able to connect with one another, so that the memory, as a whole, stays intact. The connections between neurons, known as synapses, are composed of electrical and chemical signals that move from cell to cell, like notes passed in class. The signals can be relatively weak and sporadic or flow with vigor and frequency. In general, the stronger the messages between neurons, the sturdier and more permanent the memories they hold. Neuroscientists have known for some time that the potency of our synapses depends to some degree on how we live our lives. Lack of sleep, alcohol, diet and other aspects of our lifestyles, especially stress, may dampen the flow of messages between brain cells, while practice fortifies it. Repeat an action and the signals between the cells maintaining the memory of that action can strengthen. That is learning. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 24683 - Posted: 02.21.2018

Heavy drinkers are putting themselves at risk of dementia, according to the largest study of its kind ever conducted. Research published in the Lancet Public Health journal provides powerful evidence that people who drink enough to end up in hospital are putting themselves at serious risk of vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. It will also raise questions for moderate drinkers about the possible long-term consequences of their social habit. The study, which used the French National Hospital Discharge database, looked at more than a million people diagnosed with dementia between 2008 and 2013. More than a third – 38% of the 57,000 cases of early-onset dementia – were directly alcohol-related and 18% had an additional diagnosis of alcohol use disorders. Overall, alcohol use disorders were associated with a three times greater risk of all types of dementia. Dr Sara Imarisio, head of research at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said: “As this study only looked at the people who had been admitted to hospital due to chronic heavy drinking, it doesn’t reveal the full extent of the link between alcohol use and dementia risk. Previous research has indicated that even moderate drinking may have a negative impact on brain health and people shouldn’t be under the impression that only drinking to the point of hospitalisation carries a risk.” Experts said the new research should change attitudes. “What is most surprising about this paper is that it has taken us so long to recognise that alcohol misuse and dependence are such potent risk factors for the development of dementia,” said Robert Howard, professor of old age psychiatry at University College London.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Alzheimers
Link ID: 24682 - Posted: 02.21.2018

By CHRISTOPHER MELE A persistent noise of unknown origin, sometimes compared to a truck idling or distant thunder, has bedeviled a Canadian city for years, damaging people’s health and quality of life, numerous residents say. Those who hear it have compared it to a fleet of diesel engines idling next to your home or the pulsation of a subwoofer at a concert. Others report it rattling their windows and spooking their pets. Known as the Windsor Hum, this sound in Windsor, Ontario, near Detroit, is unpredictable in its duration, timing and intensity, making it all the more maddening for those affected. “You know how you hear of people who have gone out to secluded places to get away from certain sounds or noises and the like?” Sabrina Wiese posted in a private Facebook group dedicated to finding the source of the noise. “I’ve wanted to do that many times in the past year or so because it has gotten so bad,” she wrote. “Imagine having to flee all you know and love just to have a chance to hear nothing humming in your head for hours on end.” Since reports of it surfaced in 2011, the hum has been studied by the Canadian government, the University of Western Ontario and the University of Windsor. Activists have done their own sleuthing. Over six years, Mike Provost of Windsor, who helps run the Facebook page, has amassed more than 4,000 pages of daily observations about the duration, intensity and characteristics of the sound and the weather conditions at the time. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 24681 - Posted: 02.19.2018

Jon Hamilton Beer has fueled a lot of bad ideas. But on a Friday afternoon in 2007, it helped two Alzheimer's researchers come up with a really a good one. Neuroscientists Robert Moir and Rudolph Tanzi were sipping Coronas in separate offices during "attitude adjustment hour" at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard's largest teaching hospital. And, by chance, each scientist found himself wondering about an apparent link between Alzheimer's disease and the immune system. Moir had been surfing through random scientific papers online — something he does for an hour or so on most Fridays. "I cruise wherever my fancy takes me," he says. And on this day, he cruised to research on molecules known as antimicrobial peptides. They're part of the ancient immune system that's found in all forms of life and plays an important role in protecting the human brain. One way antimicrobial peptides protect us is by engulfing and neutralizing a germ or some other foreign invader. That gives newer parts of the immune system time to get mobilized. These peptides are "extremely important," Moir says. "They're not like legacies from an immune system we don't use anymore. If you don't have them, you're going to die in a couple of hours." As Moir surfed through paper after paper, he realized that one of these ancient molecules, known as LL-37, looked a lot like a molecule closely associated with Alzheimer's. That molecule is called amyloid-beta and it forms the sticky plaques that tend to build up in the brains of people with dementia. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 24680 - Posted: 02.19.2018

Nicola Davis Adults who have experienced a stroke may one day be able to take a drug to help their brain “rewire” itself, so that tasks once carried out by now-damaged areas can be taken over by other regions, researchers have claimed. The ability for the brain to rewire, so-called “brain plasticity”, is thought to occur throughout life; however, while children have a high degree of brain plasticity, adult brains are generally thought to be less plastic. Research looking at children and young adults who had a stroke as a baby – a situation thought to affect at least one in 4,000 around the time of their birth – has highlighted the incredible ability of the young brain to rewire. Elissa Newport, a professor of neurology at Georgetown University school of medicine in Washington DC, detailed a new study involving 12 such individuals, aged between 12 and 25. “What you see is the right hemisphere, which is never in control of language in anyone who is healthy, is apparently capable of taking over language if you lose left hemisphere,” said Newport, who presented the findings at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin, Texas. “This does not happen in adults,” she added. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 24679 - Posted: 02.19.2018

Laurel Hamers AUSTIN, Texas — Babies’ stroke-damaged brains can pull a mirror trick to recover. A stroke on the left side of the brain often damages important language-processing areas. But people who have this stroke just before or after birth recover their language abilities in the mirror image spot on the right side, a study of teens and young adults shows. Those patients all had normal language skills, even though as much as half of their brain had withered away, researchers reported February 17 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Researchers so far have recruited 12 people ages 12 to 25 who had each experienced a stroke to the same region of their brain’s left hemisphere just before or after birth. People who have this type of stroke as adults often lose their ability to use and understand language, said study coauthor Elissa Newport, a neurology researcher at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C. MRI scans of healthy siblings of the stroke patients showed activity in language centers in the left hemisphere of the brain when the participants heard speech. The stroke patients showed activity in the exact same areas — just on the opposite side of the brain. It’s well established that if an area of the brain gets damaged, other brain areas will sometimes compensate. But the new finding suggests that while young brains have an extraordinary capacity to recover, there might be limits on which areas can pinch-hit. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Laterality; Stroke
Link ID: 24678 - Posted: 02.19.2018

by Sandra G. Boodman “What are you doing ?” Laura Hsiung’s friends asked as she slowly loped across a Maryland handball court, her ankle off-kilter so that she was walking on the outside of her left foot. Hsiung recalls wondering the same thing. One minute she was walking normally, and then all of a sudden, she wasn’t. “I couldn’t figure it out,” Hsiung said. “I hadn’t rolled my ankle. But my left foot just would not function normally.” For the next two years, Hsiung consulted specialist after specialist — orthopedists, a podiatrist and a neurologist — each of whom was unable to explain what was causing her weird walk. She underwent surgery which didn’t help and felt increasingly desperate about the problem, which did not affect her right foot. “Doctors would literally say, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you,’ ” said Hsiung, who lives in Montgomery County. Nor, she said, did most of them seem interested in unearthing a probable cause. After nearly two years of frustration and anxiety, a consultation with a physical therapist ultimately led to a diagnosis, followed by treatment that has helped alleviate Hsiung’s unusual disorder. Although they met only twice, the impact of her encounters with that physical therapist had a galvanizing effect on another aspect of Hsiung’s life, pushing her to make a midlife career change she had been contemplating. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 24677 - Posted: 02.19.2018

By Linda Qiu and Justin Bank A heavily armed young man is accused of killing 17 people after opening fire on terrified students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., on Wednesday. It was the third mass shooting in the past four months in the United States. Nikolas Cruz, who has been linked to a history of mental illness, is believed to have used a legally obtained AR-15 in the shooting. The attack has led to widespread conversations about links between gun violence and mental illness, and how lawmakers and interest groups are debating potential policy responses. Below is a look at some facts and falsehoods uttered by Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin; Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont; and others in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting. “Mental health is often a big problem underlying these tragedies.” — House Speaker Paul Ryan There’s a link, but it’s more limited than widely thought. Mr. Ryan’s claim reflects a common misconception. According to various polls, roughly half of Americans either believe that failing to identify people with mental health problems is the primary cause of gun violence or that addressing mental health issues would be a major deterrent. That conclusion is not shared by experts or widely accepted research. In an analysis of 235 mass killings, many of which were carried out with firearms, 22 percent of the perpetrators could be considered mentally ill. Overall, mass shootings by people with serious mental illness represent 1 percent of all gun homicides each year, according to the book “Gun Violence and Mental Illness” published by the American Psychiatric Association in 2016. To be sure, gun violence experts contacted by New York Times reporters have said that barring sales to people who are deemed dangerous by mental health providers could help prevent mass shootings. But the experts said several more measures — including banning assault weapons and barring sales to convicted violent criminals — more effective. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 24676 - Posted: 02.17.2018