By Matthew Hutson Every year, tens of millions of Americans toss and turn with chronic sleep disorders. But diagnosis isn’t easy: It usually means sleeping in a lab entangled in gadgets that track breathing, heart rate, movement, and brain activity, followed by expert analysis of the data. Now, a new technique that uses machine learning and radio signals can get rid of the sleep lab—and the expert. First, an in-home device bounces radio waves—similar to those in cellphones and Wi-Fi routers—off the sleeper, measuring the returning signal. Then, the system builds on previous radio-frequency sleep monitoring by using three machine-learning algorithms to analyze breathing and pulse and identify the stage of sleep: light, deep, REM, or wakefulness. One algorithm uses a type of neural network common in image recognition to parse the spectrograms, or snapshots, of the data; another uses a type of neural net typically employed in tracking temporal patterns to look at the dynamics of sleep stages; a third refines the analysis to make it more generalizable across people and environments. Researchers trained the tool on about 70,000 30-second sleep intervals and tested it on about 20,000. Measured against an electroencephalogram system that was about as proficient as humans, the system identified sleep stages with 80% accuracy, versus 64% for the previous best radio frequency method, the researchers will report tomorrow at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Sydney, Australia. If the system makes it to market, doctors might soon be able to diagnose you in their sleep. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 23932 - Posted: 08.09.2017

By Kerry Grens The popular chemogenetic technique for controlling cells does not operate in vivo in the way scientists had assumed. Reporting in Science yesterday (August 3), researchers show that CNO, a drug used in the DREADDs method (designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs), is not actually responsible for the effects scientists observe. Rather, it’s clozapine, a metabolite of CNO with numerous cellular targets, that binds the receptors. These results make it imperative for researchers to do proper controls with clozapine, and indicate that they should change their protocols altogether. “I’m glad I don’t own stock in CNO,” says Scott Sternson, a neuroscientist at the Janelia Research Campus. “There’s no reason to use CNO anymore.” Although it may be the end of CNO in these studies, coauthor Mike Michaelides of the National Institute on Drug Abuse tells The Scientist the results don’t necessarily mean the end of DREADDs. In fact, his findings might simplify things. Rather than using CNO, researchers can just administer clozapine instead because it’s the real actuator of the technique. “If they use proper controls, then hopefully it should be fine,” he says. The idea behind DREADDs is that a receptor is introduced into cells that will only respond to a particular drug, in this case CNO. Likewise, the drug will only target that receptor. The technique allows researchers to control neural activity. Michaelides says that although it’s a commonly used method, no one had done the critical experiments to observe CNO interacting directly with DREADDs in vivo. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 23931 - Posted: 08.08.2017

By TAFFY BRODESSER-AKNER James Chambers was watching membership sign-ups on Jan. 4, 2015, like a stock ticker — it was that first Sunday of the year, the day we all decide that this is it, we’re not going to stay fat for one more day. At the time, he was Weight Watchers’ chief executive, and he sat watching, waiting for the line on the graph to begin its skyward trajectory. Chambers knew consumer sentiment had been changing — the company was in its fourth year of member-recruitment decline. But they also had a new marketing campaign to help reverse the generally dismal trend. But the weekend came and went, and the people never showed up. More than two-thirds of Americans were what public-health officials called overweight or obese, and this was the oldest and most trusted diet company in the world. Where were the people? Weight Watchers was at a loss. Chambers called Deb Benovitz, the company’s senior vice president and global head of consumer insights. ‘‘We’re having one of the worst Januaries that anyone could have imagined,’’ she remembers him telling her. In the dieting business, January will tell you everything you need to know about the rest of the year. ‘‘Nothing like we had anticipated.’’ Chambers and Benovitz knew that people had developed a kind of diet fatigue. Weight Watchers had recently tried the new marketing campaign, called ‘‘Help With the Hard Part,’’ an attempt at radical honesty. No one wanted radical honesty. Chambers told Benovitz that they needed to figure out what was going on and how to fix it before the February board meeting. Benovitz got to work. She traveled the country, interviewing members, former members and people they thought should be members about their attitudes toward dieting. She heard that they no longer wanted to talk about ‘‘dieting’’ and ‘‘weight loss.’’ They wanted to become ‘‘healthy’’ so they could be ‘‘fit.’’ They wanted to ‘‘eat clean’’ so they could be ‘‘strong.’’ © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 23930 - Posted: 08.08.2017

By GINA KOLATA For middle-aged women struggling with their weight, a recent spate of scientific findings sounds too good to be true. And they may be, researchers caution. Studies in mice indicate that a single hormone whose levels rise at menopause could be responsible for a characteristic redistribution of weight in middle age to the abdomen, turning many women from “pears” to “apples.” At the same time, the hormone may spur the loss of bone. In mouse studies, blocking the hormone solves those problems, increasing the calories burned, reducing abdominal fat, slowing bone loss and even encouraging physical activity. The notion that such a simple intervention could solve two big problems of menopause has received the attention of researchers and has prompted commentaries in prestigious journals like The New England Journal of Medicine and Cell Metabolism. “It’s a super interesting idea,” said Dr. Daniel Bessesen, an obesity expert and professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. With obesity rising, “we definitely need some new ideas.” The work began when Dr. Mone Zaidi, a professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, became curious about whether a reproductive hormone — F.S.H., or follicle-stimulating hormone — affects bone density. It had long been assumed that the hormone’s role was limited to reproduction. F.S.H. stimulates the production of eggs in women and sperm in men. Researchers knew that blood levels of F.S.H. soar as women’s ovaries start to fail before menopause. At the same time, women rapidly lose bone — even when blood levels of estrogen, which can preserve bone, remain steady. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 23929 - Posted: 08.08.2017

/ By Robin Lloyd While broadly welcomed by public health advocates as an important step to further curb tobacco use, many of the commitments in a new plan to tackle the problem, announced last Friday by Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, actually involve gathering more input for future policies, rather than taking action now. “We expect to take meaningful steps in 2017 to advance important regulatory components that address the key aspects of this new policy,” FDA spokesman Michael Felberbaum said in an email message to Undark. “We do not have any additional details to share at this time.” That strikes some public health advocates as a bit of foot-dragging. “A lot of these issues they’re raising that they say they have to consider have been considered, have been researched, have been studied,” says Eric Lindblom, director for tobacco control and food and drug law at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. Lindblom has a long resume for developing tobacco control policies to improve public health, including a 2011-2014 stint at the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products. “FDA saying that ‘We’re going to look into nicotine reduction,’ without also saying, ‘We’re going to issue a proposed rule before the end of this year, or before June of next year,’ just opens the door to continued discussion and talking and all the rest, without actually ever getting anything done,” Lindblom said. Copyright 2017 Undark

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23928 - Posted: 08.08.2017

By Helen Thomson People with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) may get relief simply from watching someone else perform their compulsive actions. If the finding holds up, we may be able to develop apps that help people with OCD stop needing to repeatedly wash their hands or pull their hair. When we watch someone else perform an action, the same parts of our brains become active as when we do the action ourselves. This is called the mirror neuron system, and it is thought to help us understand the actions and feelings of others. Baland Jalal at the University of Cambridge wondered whether this system could be used to help people with OCD. Working with his colleague Vilayanur Ramachandran, at the University of California, San Diego, he studied 10 people with OCD symptoms, who experience disgust when touching things they consider even mildly contaminated. The anxiety this causes forces them to wash their hands compulsively. First, Jalal and Ramachandran showed each participant something to make them feel disgusted – either an open bag of vomit, a bowl containing blood-soaked bandages or a bedpan of faeces and toilet paper. The participants were unaware that each stimulus was in fact fake. In a variety of conditions, either the participant or a researcher touched the bag, bowl or bedpan for 15 seconds while wearing latex gloves. The participants were then asked to rate how disgusted they felt, before being allowed to wash their hands, or watch the researcher do the same. They then rated how relieved they now felt. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 23927 - Posted: 08.08.2017

By Daniel Barron Conrad was 17 months old when Dave, his grandfather, was babysitting him at their home in Temple, Texas. The two had been playing in the pool and went inside for a break. Dave set to unloading dishes in the dishwasher, unaware that Conrad had snuck back outside. As he finished the dishes, Dave looked out the window and noticed something odd. There was what looked like a floating bundle of clothes in the swimming pool. It was his grandson. Fortunately, Conrad responded to cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), but it’s unclear how long his lungs—and his brain—went without oxygen. Drowning is the second most common cause of accidental death in children to age four. As in Conrad’s case, CPR is fortunately very successful, with 66 percent of nearly drowned children surviving. But even when resuscitated, the seconds and minutes that the brain is deprived of oxygen come at a great cost. This type of damage is known as anoxic brain injury. Anoxic brain injury is a clinical term that indicates damage to the brain that occurs due to lack of oxygen. There is a spectrum of injury ranging from complete recovery to minor to widespread brain damage. Within this spectrum lies what is known as the disorders of consciousness, with the extent of damage being proportional to the loss of consciousness. In the case of nearly drowned children, the injury is frequently thought to be widespread. Nearly drowned children are labeled “minimally conscious” or even in a “persistent vegetative state” (with no consciousness) and the prevailing medical prognosis is grim: treatment and recovery is difficult if not impossible. © 2017 Scientific American,

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 23926 - Posted: 08.08.2017

Jean M. Twenge One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.” Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.” Copyright (c) 2017 by The Atlantic Monthly Group.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 23925 - Posted: 08.08.2017

By Erin Blakemore Do you talk to yourself? Don’t sweat it: Scientists say you’re not alone. And the ways in which you chatter to yourself, both in your head and out loud, are changing what neuroscientists know about the human brain. Writing in Scientific American, psychologist Charles Fernyhough reveals why we’re our best conversational partners. Scientists have only recently learned how to study self-talk — and it’s opening up exciting new avenues of research. It turns out there are two ways of chatting yourself up. In “inner speech,” you speak to yourself without making sound. With “private speech,” you do the same thing, just out loud. This chatter serves varied purposes: It can help people control themselves and relate to others. But it’s notoriously hard to study. So Fernyhough and colleagues figured out some inventive ways to prompt people to talk to themselves as they lay inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, scanner. When they studied the brains of people who talked to themselves internally, the team noticed that spontaneous inner speech activates a different part of the brain than words that the participants were asked to say aloud. And people whose self-talk takes the form of a monologue seem to activate different brain areas than those who carry on a dialogue in their heads. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Consciousness; Language
Link ID: 23924 - Posted: 08.07.2017

Michael Viney I first saw them by night, or rather by flashlight aimed beside the dinghy as we fished a mile beyond Brighton’s pier. A whole shoal of them appeared beneath the boat, waving their arms, their button eyes glistening. We were not fishing for squid – too foreign a taste for England in those days. But this early glimpse left me fascinated with their kind, not least their giant, still greatly mysterious relative with eyes the size of hubcaps. The Brighton squids were the regular, long-fin Doryteuthis of inshore waters, not the huge, deep-water Architeuthis dux, snared this summer as trawler by-catch on the Porcupine Bank. The Cú na Mara (a nice echo) landed two separate specimens at Dingle a few weeks apart. Expiring on they way up, each was around 6m long, counting in the tentacles. They brought to seven the number landed in 350 years, including a remarkable three in 1995 alone. Two of those were trawled from the Porcupine Bank by a Marine Institute survey vessel. Dr Kevin Flannery, the Dingle marine biologist, would now like the institute to send its remote cameras for a proper look around. Meanwhile, the second squid, as dead as the first but in better shape, will soon be on display in the Dingle Oceanworld aquarium. What could seem strangest is that giant squid are soft-bodied molluscs, like limpets or winkles. Abandoning external shells to work on jet propulsion, they have developed genes and nerves of special interest to science. © 2017 THE IRISH TIMES

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 23923 - Posted: 08.07.2017

By Amanda Onion, While driving and accelerating in his car, a patient in France suddenly had a bizarre sensation. He felt like he was outside his car, looking in at his physical self, which was still at the wheel. The patient was part of a new study that links problems of the inner ear with eerie "out-of-body" experiences. These experiences arecurious, usually brief sensations in which a person's consciousness seems to exitthe body and then view the body from the outside. The study analyzed 210 patients who had visited their doctors with so-called vestibular disorders. The vestibular system, which is made up of several structures in the inner ear, provides the body with a sense of balance and spatial orientation. Problems with this system can cause dizziness or a floating sensation, among other symptoms. [7 Weird Facts About Balance] Maya Elzière, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Hôpital Européen in Marseille, France, and co-author of the study, enlisted patients who had experienced a range of issues, from recurrent vertigo and tinnitus to infections in the ear. Among these patients, 14 percent reported out-of-body experiences, compared with only 5 percent of healthy people without vestibular disorders who said the same. "Out-of-body experiences were about three times more frequent" in patients with vestibular disorders, versus those without these disorders, said Christophe Lopez, lead author of the study and a neuroscientist at Aix-Marseille Université in France. © 2017 Scientific American,

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 23922 - Posted: 08.07.2017

/ By Florence Williams The 17th century ushered in an astonishing age of scientific discovery, from Galileo’s positioning of the sun in the heavens to Newton’s Laws of Motion to Francis Bacon’s empiricism. Armed with new swagger and understanding, the scientific rationalists of the day figured the pivot from astronomy and physics to biology would be a piece of cake. The workings of the universe had been proved to adhere to laws and formulas. All would be properly unveiled in due time. “The bold men of science,” Edward Dolnick writes, “raced off to take on the mystery of life and promptly face-planted.” How mistaken they were. As Edward Dolnick writes in his amusing and informative “The Seeds of Life,” “The bold men of science raced off to take on the mystery of life and promptly face-planted.” In fact, they were fairly undone, partly by their own pigheaded biases and partly by the truly mystifying matters of genes and heredity, for which they were woefully ill prepared. It was not until 1875 that a German scientist finally put the sperm and the egg together conceptually. The journey to that insight was sometimes comical, sometimes misguided, and usually revealing of cultural mores, gender politics, and societal blind spots. Consider, for example, the common scientific belief that a woman’s contribution to baby-making must surely be minimal. Copyright 2017 Undark

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23921 - Posted: 08.07.2017

By Mo Costandi The controversy began about 10 years ago, when it emerged that the National Football League had first tried to cover up evidence linking repetitive head injuries in players to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive neurodegenerative disorder, and then to discredit the scientists doing the work. Since then evidence supporting this link has grown as an increasing number of players have come forward to report that they are suffering from depression, and some have committed suicide. And yet, exactly how repetitive head injuries are linked to CTE development and the psychiatric symptoms associated with it is still a matter of debate. The largest-ever study of its kind has now given the most compelling evidence yet linking repetitive head impacts in football players to CTE. The study, published recently in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association, has notable limitations, however. It has also sparked calls for more research to measure the impact of head blows on players over the course of a lifetime. The new work builds on findings from 2013: neuropathologist Ann McKee of Boston University and her colleagues published a postmortem report of 68 male athletes and military veterans with CTE, in which they described a spectrum of pathological signatures associated with the condition. McKee and colleagues observed two distinct sets of clinical symptoms: one involving disturbances in mood and behavior, which was seen in the younger subjects, and the other including cognitive impairments, which developed at an older age. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 23920 - Posted: 08.05.2017

Daniel Trotta NEW YORK (Reuters) - While President Donald Trump has thrust transgender people back into the conflict between conservative and liberal values in the United States, geneticists are quietly working on a major research effort to unlock the secrets of gender identity. A consortium of five research institutions in Europe and the United States, including Vanderbilt University Medical Center, George Washington University and Boston Children's Hospital, is looking to the genome, a person's complete set of DNA, for clues about whether transgender people are born that way. Two decades of brain research have provided hints of a biological origin to being transgender, but no irrefutable conclusions. Now scientists in the consortium have embarked on what they call the largest-ever study of its kind, searching for a genetic component to explain why people assigned one gender at birth so persistently identify as the other, often from very early childhood. (reut.rs/2w3Ozg9) Researchers have extracted DNA from the blood samples of 10,000 people, 3,000 of them transgender and the rest non-transgender, or cisgender. The project is awaiting grant funding to begin the next phase: testing about 3 million markers, or variations, across the genome for all of the samples.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 23919 - Posted: 08.05.2017

Nicola Davis A drug commonly used to treat diabetes could help those living with Parkinson’s disease, research has revealed. By 2020 it is predicted that 162,000 individuals in the UK will be living with the condition. While existing drugs help to control its symptoms, there are currently none available which slow or halt its progression. But now scientists say they have found that a drug commonly used to treat type 2 diabetes appears to improve movement-related issues. The benefit persisted even when the drug had not been taken for 12 weeks, suggesting it might be helping to slow the progression of the disease. “It is not ready for us to say ‘well, everyone needs to start this drug’,” said Thomas Foltynie, professor of neurology at University College London and co-author of the study. “[But] if we can replicate these findings in a multicentre trial, especially with longer follow-up, then this can change the face of our approach to treating Parkinson’s.” Writing in the Lancet, Foltynie and colleagues in the UK and US describe how they tested the impact of the drug, known as exenatide. With recent studies suggesting problems with insulin signalling in the brain could be linked to neurodegenerative disorders, hopes have been raised that diabetes drugs could also be used to tackle Parkinson’s, with previous research – including in cell cultures and animals, as well as a recent pilot study on humans by Foltynie and colleagues – backing up the notion.. But the latest study is the first robust clinical trial of the drug, randomly allocating 60 people with Parkinson’s to one of two treatments – either receiving injections of exenatide or a placebo once a week. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 23918 - Posted: 08.05.2017

By JOHN SCHWARTZ The studio for what is arguably the world’s most successful online course is tucked into a corner of Barb and Phil Oakley’s basement, a converted TV room that smells faintly of cat urine. (At the end of every video session, the Oakleys pin up the green fabric that serves as the backdrop so Fluffy doesn’t ruin it.) This is where they put together “Learning How to Learn,” taken by more than 1.8 million students from 200 countries, the most ever on Coursera. The course provides practical advice on tackling daunting subjects and on beating procrastination, and the lessons engagingly blend neuroscience and common sense. Dr. Oakley, an engineering professor at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., created the class with Terrence Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and with the University of California, San Diego. Prestigious universities have spent millions and employ hundreds of professionally trained videographers, editors and producers to create their massive open online courses, known as MOOCs. The Oakleys put together their studio with equipment that cost $5,000. They figured out what to buy by Googling “how to set up a green screen studio” and “how to set up studio lighting.” Mr. Oakley runs the camera and teleprompter. She does most of the editing. The course is free ($49 for a certificate of completion — Coursera won’t divulge how many finish). “It’s actually not rocket science,” said Dr. Oakley — but she’s careful where she says that these days. When she spoke at Harvard in 2015, she said, “the hackles went up”; she crossed her arms sternly by way of grim illustration. This is home-brew, not Harvard. And it has worked. Spectacularly. The Oakleys never could have predicted their success. Many of the early sessions had to be trashed. “I looked like a deer in the headlights,” Dr. Oakley said. She would flub her lines and moan, “I just can’t do this.” Her husband would say, “Come on. We’re going to have lunch, and we’re going to come right back to this.” But he confessed to having had doubts, too. “We were in the basement, worrying, ‘Is anybody even going to look at this?’” © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23917 - Posted: 08.05.2017

By Francine Russo Survivors of sexual assault who come forward often confront doubt on the part of others. Did you fight back? they are asked. Did you scream? Just as painful for them, if not more so, can be a sense of guilt and shame. Why did I not resist? they may ask themselves. Is it my fault? And to make matters worse, although the laws are in flux in various jurisdictions, active resistance can be seen as necessary for a legal or even “common sense” definition of rape. Unless it is clearly too dangerous, as when the rapist is armed, resisting is generally thought to be the “normal” reaction to sexual assault. But new research adds to the evidence debunking this common belief. According to a recent study, a majority of female rape survivors who visited the Emergency Clinic for Rape Victims in Stockholm reported they did not fight back. Many also did not yell for help. During the assault they experienced a kind of temporary paralysis called tonic immobility. And those who experienced extreme tonic immobility were twice as likely to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and three times more likely to suffer severe depression in the months after the attack than women who did not have this response. Tonic immobility (TI) describes a state of involuntary paralysis in which individuals cannot move or, in many cases, even speak. In animals this reaction is considered an evolutionary adaptive defense to an attack by a predator when other forms of defense are not possible. Much less is known about this phenomenon in humans, although it has been observed in soldiers in battle as well as in survivors of sexual assault. A study from 2005, for example, found 52 percent of female undergraduates who reported childhood sexual abuse said they experienced this paralysis. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 23916 - Posted: 08.05.2017

Eojin Choi It seems simple enough: Your task is to trace lines with your computer mouse while listening to soothing music, drawing the branches of a neuron. You can rotate the block where the spidery neuron is embedded, and zoom in to see the details. It’s fascinating stuff, if you think about how you’re piecing together the parts and wires of your brain. But as you follow faint signals consisting of blurry white dots, you realize that this game is less connect-the-dots, more hide-and-seek -- it’s often about guessing where the branches lead and erasing mistakes in the process, wondering if your work is even remotely correct. Even if you feel like you’re failing, though, you keep trying for one heartening reason: you’re helping advance brain science. And you're at the forefront of a 21st century trend: "citizen science" initiatives that use data from game players to further ongoing research, including brain research. This neuron-tracing game is called "Mozak," the Serbo-Croatian word for brain, and is among the latest entries in this category. Created by the Allen Institute for Brain Science and the Center for Game Science, the free online game has attracted around 2,500 players since its release last November. They're helping to fill a major scientific gap: We still don't really understand how neuron circuits in our brain are structured or how they work. From images of 3-D neurons inside living brain tissue, players can trace and reconstruct shapes of human and mouse neurons, which can then be classified and studied. This information may eventually help scientists understand and develop cures for brain diseases like Alzheimer’s. © Copyright WBUR 2017

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 23915 - Posted: 08.05.2017

Shirley S. Wang Efforts to develop a treatment that stalls the memory-robbing devastation of Alzheimer's disease have so far been unsuccessful, but scientists are making strides in another important area: the development of better tests to tell who has the condition. Their aim is to develop more accurate, cheaper and less invasive tests to detect the biological markers of Alzheimer's-induced changes in the brain. At the recent Alzheimer's Association International Conference in London, scientists presented early but promising data on a new blood test and a novel brain imaging technique. They also unveiled preliminary data on a study to investigate the potential clinical usefulness of a test that's already on the market but isn't widely reimbursed by insurance. Alzheimer's is characterized by changes to the brain involving clumping of a protein called amyloid and another called tau — pathologies that until the last decade or so could only be seen upon autopsy. The biomarker tests available to date focus primarily on detecting amyloid. These tests are generally used only for research purposes because they can be expensive or require special technology. They are meant to be used for ruling out Alzheimer's in patients who already have memory problems. Less invasive, easier to use and cheaper technologies may mean that more people could have access to testing. For public health, this could mean being able to more broadly screen the population to identify people who are at high-risk for getting the illness and then focusing more expensive, involved efforts for testing, prevention and treatment on them. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 23914 - Posted: 08.05.2017

By Knvul Sheikh The brain has evolved to recognize and remember many different faces. We can instantly identify a friend's countenance among dozens in a crowded restaurant or on a busy street. And a brief glance tells us whether that person is excited or angry, happy or sad. Brain-imaging studies have revealed that several blueberry-size regions in the temporal lobe—the area under the temple—specialize in responding to faces. Neuroscientists call these areas “face patches.” But neither brain scans nor clinical studies of patients with implanted electrodes explained exactly how the cells in these patches work. Now, using a combination of brain imaging and single-neuron recording in macaques, biologist Doris Tsao and her colleagues at the California Institute of Technology appear to have finally cracked the neural code for primate face recognition. The researchers found the firing rate of each face patch cell corresponds to a separate facial feature. Like a set of dials, the cells can be fine-tuned to respond to bits of information, which they can then combine in various ways to create an image of every face the animal encounters. “This was mind-blowing,” Tsao says. “The values of each dial are so predictable that we can re-create the face that a monkey sees by simply tracking the electrical activity of its face cells.” Previous studies had hinted at the specificity of these brain areas for encoding faces. In the early 2000s, when Tsao was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School, she and electrophysiologist Winrich Freiwald showed that neurons in a monkey's face patches would fire electrical signals every time the animal saw pictures of a face. But the same brain cells showed little or no response to other objects, such as images of vegetables, radios or nonfacial body parts. Other experiments indicated that neurons in these regions could also distinguish among individual faces, even if they were cartoons. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 23913 - Posted: 08.03.2017