By Hannah Osborne Scientists studying the brain have discovered that the organ operates on up to 11 different dimensions, creating multiverse-like structures that are “a world we had never imagined.” By using an advanced mathematical system, researchers were able to uncover architectural structures that appears when the brain has to process information, before they disintegrate into nothing. Their findings, published in the journal Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, reveals the hugely complicated processes involved in the creation of neural structures, potentially helping explain why the brain is so difficult to understand and tying together its structure with its function. The team, led by scientists at the EPFL, Switzerland, were carrying out research as part of the Blue Brain Project—an initiative to create a biologically detailed reconstruction of the human brain. Working initially on rodent brains, the team used supercomputer simulations to study the complex interactions within different regions. In the latest study, researchers honed in on the neural network structures within the brain using algebraic topology—a system used to describe networks with constantly changing spaces and structures. This is the first time this branch of math has been applied to neuroscience. "Algebraic topology is like a telescope and microscope at the same time. It can zoom into networks to find hidden structures—the trees in the forest—and see the empty spaces—the clearings—all at the same time," study author Kathryn Hess said in a statement.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 23739 - Posted: 06.14.2017

Jon Hamilton Researchers are working to revive a radical treatment for Parkinson's disease. The treatment involves transplanting healthy brain cells to replace cells killed off by the disease. It's an approach that was tried decades ago and then set aside after disappointing results. Now, groups in Europe, the U.S. and Asia are preparing to try again, using cells they believe are safer and more effective. "There have been massive advances," says Claire Henchcliffe, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. "I'm optimistic." "We are very optimistic about ability of [the new] cells to improve patients' symptoms," says Viviane Tabar, a neurosurgeon and stem cell biologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Henchcliffe and Tabar joined several other prominent scientists to describe plans to revive brain cell transplants during a session Tuesday at the International Society for Stem Cell Research meeting in Boston. Their upbeat message marks a dramatic turnaround for the approach. During the 1980s and 1990s, researchers used cells taken directly from the brains of aborted fetuses to treat hundreds of Parkinson's patients. The goal was to halt the disease. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Parkinsons; Stem Cells
Link ID: 23738 - Posted: 06.14.2017

By Lenny Bernstein A mother’s fever during pregnancy, especially in the second trimester, is associated with a higher risk that her child will be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, researchers reported Tuesday. Three or more fevers after 12 weeks of gestation may be linked to an even greater risk of the condition. The study by researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health adds support for the theory that infectious agents that trigger a pregnant woman’s immune response may disrupt a fetus’s brain development and lead to disorders such as autism. “Fever seems to be the driving force here,” not the infection itself, said Mady Hornig, director of translational research at the school’s Center for Infection and Immunity. Fever can be part of the body’s immune response to an infection, and molecules produced by a mother’s immune system may be crossing into the baby’s neurological system at a critical time, she said. The research, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, comes at a time when the scientifically discredited theory that some childhood vaccines cause autism has gained new attention. President Trump has promoted this myth, energizing some anti-vaccine groups. Some families say that their children developed autism after vaccinations. The timing is a coincidence, however; symptoms of autism typically become clear at around two years of age, which happens to be the age when children get certain vaccines. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 23737 - Posted: 06.13.2017

Paula Span A few years hence, when you’ve finally tired of turning up the TV volume and making dinner reservations at 5:30 p.m. because any later and the place gets too loud, you may go shopping. Perhaps you’ll head to a local boutique called The Hear Better Store, or maybe Didja Ear That? (Reader nominees for kitschy names invited.) Maybe you’ll opt for a big-box retailer or a kiosk at your local pharmacy. If legislation now making its way through Congress succeeds, these places will all offer hearing aids. You’ll try out various models — they’ll all meet newly established federal requirements — to see what seems to work and feel best. Your choices might include products from big consumer electronics specialists like Apple, Samsung and Bose. If you want assistance, you might pay an audiologist to provide customized services, like adjusting frequencies or amplification levels. But you won’t need to go through an audiologist-gatekeeper, as you do now, to buy hearing aids. The best part of this over-the-counter scenario: Instead of spending an average of $1,500 to $2,000 per device (and nearly everyone needs two), you’ll find that the price has plummeted. You might pay $300 per ear, maybe even less. So many people will be using these new over-the-counter hearing aids — along with the hordes wearing earbuds for other reasons — that you won’t feel self-conscious. You’ll blend right in. That, at least, represents the future envisioned by supporters of the Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act of 2017, which would give the Food and Drug Administration three years to create a regulatory category for such devices and to establish standards for safety, effectiveness and labeling.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 23736 - Posted: 06.13.2017

By Kerry Grens Memory theories The theory goes that as memories form, they set up temporary shop in the hippocampus, a subcortical region buried deep in the brain, but over time find permanent storage in the cortex. The details of this process are sketchy, so Takashi Kitamura, a researcher in Susumu Tonegawa’s MIT lab, and colleagues wanted to pinpoint the time memories spend in each of these regions. Total recall As mice were subjected to a fearful experience, the team labeled so-called memory engram cells—neurons that are stimulated during the initial exposure and whose later activity drives recollection of the original stimulus (in this case, indicated by a freezing response). Using optogenetics, Kitamura turned off these cells in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) when the memory first formed as mice were exposed to a foot shock. Short-term memory was unaffected, but a couple of weeks later, the animals could not recall the event, indicating that PFC engrams formed contemporaneously with those in the hippocampus, not later, as some had suspected, and that this early memory trace in the cortex was critical for long-term retrieval. Going dark Over time, as untreated mice recalled the fearful event, engrams in the hippocampus became silent as PFC engrams became more active. “It’s a see-saw situation,” says Kitamura, “this maturation of prefrontal engrams and dematuration of hippocampal engrams.” Circuit dynamics Stephen Maren, who researches memory at Texas A&M University and was not part of the study, says the results reveal that the network circuitry involved in memory consolidation (of which Kitamura’s team dissected just one component) is much more dynamic than previously appreciated. “It’s the most sophisticated circuit-level analysis we have to date of these processes.” © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23735 - Posted: 06.13.2017

By MATT RICHTEL More than 10 percent of the world’s population is now obese, a marked rise over the last 30 years that is leading to widespread health problems and millions of premature deaths, according to a new study, the most comprehensive research done on the subject. Published Monday in The New England Journal of Medicine, the study showed that the problem had swept the globe, including regions that have historically had food shortages, like Africa. The study, compiled by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington and funded by the Gates Foundation, looked at 195 countries, essentially the world’s population, finding that rates of obesity at least doubled in 73 countries — including Turkey, Venezuela and Bhutan — from 1980 to 2015, and “continuously increased in most other countries.” Analyzing some 1,800 data sets from around the world, researchers found that excess weight played a role in four million deaths in 2015, from heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease and other factors. The per capita death rate was up 28 percent since 1990 and, notably, 40 percent of the deaths were among people who were overweight but not heavy enough to be classified as obese. The study defined obese as a body mass index of 30 or higher and overweight as a B.M.I. from 25 to 29. By those measures, nearly 604 million adults worldwide are obese and 108 million children, the authors reported. Obesity rates among children are rising faster in many countries than among adults. In the United States, 12.5 percent of children were obese, up from 5 percent in 1980. Combining children and adults, the United States had the dubious distinction of having the largest increase in percentile points of any country, a jump of 16 percentage points to 26.5 percent of the overall population. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 23734 - Posted: 06.13.2017

By Edd Gent There’s been a lot of hype coming out of Silicon Valley about technology that can meld the human brain with machines. But how will this help society, and which companies are leading the charge? Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, made waves in March when he announced his latest venture, Neuralink, which would design what are called brain-computer interfaces. Initially, BCIs would be used for medical research, but the ultimate goal would be to prevent humans from becoming obsolete by enabling people to merge with artificial intelligence. Musk is not the only one who’s trying to bring humans closer to machines. Here are five organizations working hard on hacking the brain. According to Musk, the main barrier to human-machine co­operation is communication bandwidth. Because using a touch screen or a keyboard is a slow way to communicate with a computer, Musk’s new venture aims to create a “high-bandwidth” link between the brain and machines. What that system would look like is not entirely clear. Words such as “neural lace” and “neural dust” have been bandied about, but all that has really been revealed is a business model. Neuralink has been registered as a medical research company, and Musk said the firm will produce a product to help people with severe brain injuries within four years. This will lay the groundwork for developing BCIs for healthy people, enabling them to communicate by “consensual telepathy,” possibly within five years, Musk said. Some scientists, particularly those in neuroscience, are skeptical of Musk’s ambitious plans. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 23733 - Posted: 06.12.2017

By ALEX WILLIAMS This past winter, Sarah Fader, a 37-year-old social media consultant in Brooklyn who has generalized anxiety disorder, texted a friend in Oregon about an impending visit, and when a quick response failed to materialize, she posted on Twitter to her 16,000-plus followers. “I don’t hear from my friend for a day — my thought, they don’t want to be my friend anymore,” she wrote, appending the hashtag #ThisIsWhatAnxietyFeelsLike. Thousands of people were soon offering up their own examples under the hashtag; some were retweeted more than 1,000 times. You might say Ms. Fader struck a nerve. “If you’re a human being living in 2017 and you’re not anxious,” she said on the telephone, “there’s something wrong with you.” It was 70 years ago that the poet W.H. Auden published “The Age of Anxiety,” a six-part verse framing modern humankind’s condition over the course of more than 100 pages, and now it seems we are too rattled to even sit down and read something that long (or as the internet would say, tl;dr). Anxiety has become our everyday argot, our thrumming lifeblood: not just on Twitter (the ur-anxious medium, with its constant updates), but also in blogger diaries, celebrity confessionals (Et tu, Beyoncé?), a hit Broadway show (“Dear Evan Hansen”), a magazine start-up (Anxy, a mental-health publication based in Berkeley, Calif.), buzzed-about television series (like “Maniac,” a coming Netflix series by Cary Fukunaga, the lauded “True Detective” director) and, defying our abbreviated attention spans, on bookshelves. With two new volumes analyzing the condition (“On Edge: A Journey Through Anxiety,” by Andrea Petersen, and “Hi, Anxiety,” by Kat Kinsman) following recent best-sellers by Scott Stossel (“My Age of Anxiety”) and Daniel Smith (“Monkey Mind”), the anxiety memoir has become a literary subgenre to rival the depression memoir, firmly established since William Styron’s “Darkness Visible” and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s “Prozac Nation” in the 1990s and continuing today with Daphne Merkin’s “This Close to Happy.” © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Stress
Link ID: 23732 - Posted: 06.12.2017

By Clare Wilson Would you have pig cells implanted in your brain? Some people with Parkinson’s disease have, in the hope it will stop their disease progressing. The approach is still in the early stages of testing, but initial results from four people look promising, with all showing some improvement 18 months after surgery. People with Parkinson’s disease, which causes tremors and difficulty moving, usually get worse over time. The disease is caused by the gradual loss of brain cells that make dopamine, a compound that helps control our movements. Current medicines replace the missing dopamine, but their effectiveness wears off over the years. So Living Cell Technologies, based in Auckland, New Zealand, has been developing a treatment that uses cells from the choroid plexus in pigs. This brain structure makes a cocktail of growth factors and signalling molecules known to help keep nerve cells healthy. Last month, surgery was completed on a further 18 people in a placebo-controlled trial, using the choroid plexus cell implants. The hope is that compounds made by these cells will nourish the remaining dopamine-producing cells in the patients’ brains, slowing further loss. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Stem Cells
Link ID: 23731 - Posted: 06.12.2017

By JANE E. BRODY Hurray for the HotBlack Coffee cafe in Toronto for declining to offer Wi-Fi to its customers. There are other such cafes, to be sure, including seven of the eight New York City locations of Café Grumpy. But it’s HotBlack’s reason for the electronic blackout that is cause for hosannas. As its president, Jimson Bienenstock, explained, his aim is to get customers to talk with one another instead of being buried in their portable devices. “It’s about creating a social vibe,” he told a New York Times reporter. “We’re a vehicle for human interaction, otherwise it’s just a commodity.” What a novel idea! Perhaps Mr. Bienenstock instinctively knows what medical science has been increasingly demonstrating for decades: Social interaction is a critically important contributor to good health and longevity. Personally, I don’t need research-based evidence to appreciate the value of making and maintaining social connections. I experience it daily during my morning walk with up to three women, then before and after my swim in the locker room of the YMCA where the use of electronic devices is not allowed. The locker room experience has been surprisingly rewarding. I’ve made many new friends with whom I can share both joys and sorrows. The women help me solve problems big and small, providing a sounding board, advice and counsel and often a hearty laugh that brightens my day. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 23730 - Posted: 06.12.2017

By David Noonan Sight and hearing get all the glory, but the often overlooked and underappreciated sense of smell—or problems with it—is a subject of rapidly growing interest among scientists and clinicians who battle Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Impaired smell is one of the earliest and most common symptoms of both, and researchers hope a better understanding will improve diagnosis and help unlock some of the secrets of these incurable conditions. The latest offering from the burgeoning field is a paper published this month in Lancet Neurology. It proposes neurotransmitter dysfunction as a possible cause of smell loss in a number of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. More than 90 percent of Parkinson’s patients report some level of olfactory dysfunction. And because problems with smell progress in Alzheimer’s, nearly all of those diagnosed with moderate to severe forms of the illness have odor identification issues. “It’s important, not just because it’s novel and interesting and simple but because the evidence is strong,” says Davangere Devanand, a professor of psychiatry and neurology at Columbia University. His most recent paper on the subject, a review, was published in The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry in December. Studies have shown impaired smell to be even stronger than memory problems as a predictor of cognitive decline in currently healthy adults. It is especially useful for forecasting the progression from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to full-blown Alzheimer’s. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, approximately 15 to 20 percent of people over 65 have MCI. About half of them go on to develop Alzheimer’s, Devanand says—and the sooner they are identified, the earlier doctors can begin interventions, including treatment with the few existing Alzheimer’s drugs. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 23729 - Posted: 06.12.2017

By STEPH YIN European eels are born and die in the North Atlantic Ocean, but spend most of their lives in rivers or estuaries across Europe and North Africa. In between, they traverse thousands of miles of ocean, where it’s often unclear which way is up or down. Scientists have therefore long suspected that these critically endangered fish use magnetism to help guide them. A study published Friday in Science Advances shows, for the first time, that European eels might link magnetic cues with the tides to navigate. Studying juveniles during the crucial stage when they move toward land from open ocean, the authors found that eels faced different directions based on whether the tide was flowing in (flood tide) or out (ebb tide). Changing orientation might help eels take advantage of tides to travel from the ocean to the coast, and into fresh water, more efficiently, said Alessandro Cresci, a graduate student at the University of Miami and lead author of the study. Previous studies have shown that eels can detect magnetic fields, but how they use this sixth sense “has remained a matter of speculation” until now, said Michael J. Miller, an eel biologist at Nihon University in Japan who was not involved in the study. When transitioning from sea to coast, European eels are in a stage of their lives where they are about the size of a finger and transparent along their bodies, thus the name “glass eels.” Mr. Cresci’s group studied glass eels from the coast of Norway, observing the animals in the field by putting 54 slippery, see-through eels, one by one, in a drifting chamber equipped with cameras and compasses. When the tide ebbed, these animals generally faced south, but when it flowed in, they showed no consistent orientation. The researchers then studied 49 of the same eels in laboratory tanks. They subjected some of the eels to reoriented magnetic fields, rotating magnetic north to the east, south or west. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Migration
Link ID: 23728 - Posted: 06.12.2017

By RICHARD SANDOMIR Isabelle Rapin, a Swiss-born child neurologist who helped establish autism’s biological underpinnings and advanced the idea that autism was part of a broad spectrum of disorders, died on May 24 in Rhinebeck, N.Y. She was 89. The cause was pneumonia, said her daughter Anne Louise Oaklander, who is also a neurologist. “Calling her one of the founding mothers of autism is very appropriate,” said Dr. Thomas Frazier II, a clinical psychologist and chief science officer of Autism Speaks, an advocacy group for people with autism and their families. “With the gravity she carried, she moved us into a modern understanding of autism.” Dr. Rapin (pronounced RAP-in) taught at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and over a half-century there built a reputation for rigorous scholarship. She retired in 2012 but continued working at her office and writing journal papers. The neurologist Oliver Sacks, a close friend and colleague, called her his “scientific conscience.” In his autobiography, “On the Move: A Life” (2015), Dr. Sacks wrote: “Isabelle would never permit me, any more than she permitted herself, any loose, exaggerated, uncorroborated statements. ‘Give me the evidence,’ she always says.” Dr. Rapin’s focus on autism evolved from her studies of communications and metabolic disorders that cause mental disabilities and diminish children’s ability to navigate the world. For decades she treated deaf children, whose difficulties in communicating limited their path to excelling in school and forced some into institutions. “Communications disorders were the overarching theme of my mother’s career,” Dr. Oaklander said in an interview. In a short biography written for the Journal of Child Neurology in 2001, Dr. Rapin recalled a critical moment in her work on autism. “After evaluating hundreds of autistic children,” she wrote, “I became convinced that the report by one-third of parents of autistic preschoolers, of a very early language and behavioral regression, is real and deserving of biologic investigation.” © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 23727 - Posted: 06.12.2017

Maria Temming Fascination with faces is nature, not nurture, suggests a new study of third-trimester fetuses. Scientists have long known that babies like looking at faces more than other objects. But research published online June 8 in Current Biology offers evidence that this preference develops before birth. In the first-ever study of prenatal visual perception, fetuses were more likely to move their heads to track facelike configurations of light projected into the womb than nonfacelike shapes. Past research has shown that newborns pay special attention to faces, even if a “face” is stripped down to its bare essentials — for instance, a triangle of three dots: two up top for eyes, one below for a mouth or nose. This preoccupation with faces is considered crucial to social development. “The basic tendency to pick out a face as being different from other things in your environment, and then to actually look at it, is the first step to learning who the important people are in your world,” says Scott Johnson, a developmental psychologist at UCLA who was not involved in the study. Using a 4-D ultrasound, the researchers watched how 34-week-old fetuses reacted to seeing facelike triangles compared with seeing triangles with one dot above and two below. They projected triangles of red light in both configurations through a mother’s abdomen into the fetus’s peripheral vision. Then, they slid the light across the mom’s belly, away from the fetus’s line of sight, to see if it would turn its head to continue looking at the image. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Attention
Link ID: 23726 - Posted: 06.09.2017

Rob Stein The Food and Drug Administration requested Thursday that the drugmaker Endo Pharmaceuticals stop selling Opana ER — its extended-release version of Opana. The FDA says the move marks the first time the agency has taken steps to remove an opioid from the market because of "public health consequences of abuse." An increasing number of people, the FDA says, are abusing the powerful prescription pills by crushing, dissolving and injecting them. The sharing of needles by these drug users has fueled an outbreak of associated infectious diseases — HIV, hepatitis C and another serious blood disorder. "We are facing an opioid epidemic — a public health crisis, and we must take all necessary steps to reduce the scope of opioid misuse and abuse," says Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the FDA's commissioner, in announcing the move. "We will continue to take regulatory steps when we see situations where an opioid product's risks outweigh its benefits, not only for its intended patient population but also in regard to its potential for misuse and abuse," Gottlieb says. Dangers Of Opana Opioid Painkiller Outweigh Benefits, FDA Panel Says In a written statement, Endo says the company is "reviewing the request and is evaluating the full range of potential options as we determine the appropriate path forward." The company defended its drug, a version of the medicine oxymorphone hydrochloride, citing the opioid's effectiveness in alleviating pain and Endo's efforts to prevent abuse. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 23725 - Posted: 06.09.2017

By PHILIP S. GUTIS My husband, Tim, and a duo of Jack Russell terriers arrived in my life 13 years ago. They were a package deal that included Osceola Jack, a champion Frisbee player who once was the Mighty Dog actor in the famous commercials, and his pup, the equally mighty Samantha. Later our family grew with Beatrice, a sweet cattle dog mix from Florida who belonged to Tim’s brother but needed a new home. As an introvert, I have not always had the best people skills, but my ability to connect with animals has never flagged. Many of my best memories involve animals. But now things are changing. Last summer, at age 54, I learned I had early onset Alzheimer’s. Amid the many worries that accompany this diagnosis, I am afraid that I will lose my cherished ability to bond with — or even remember — my animal companions much longer. Since my 20s and 30s, I’ve had some weird memory gaps. I once forgot that a childhood best friend worked for me at the school newspaper at Penn State. I wrote off these memory holes to a busy life and career. I worked long days, spent hours on airplanes and trains, managed dozens of people and grappled with complicated issues. I told myself that all of that work, stress and the sheer volume of information that I was expected to retain had to take a toll on my ability to remember everything. But a few years ago, I started to notice that I just wasn’t performing as well as I used to. Keeping track of big projects became increasingly difficult. Skills that were sometimes challenging (simple math, remembering names, understanding maps and directions) became all but impossible. Some days my memory was so bad that I wanted to wear a shirt that said, “Sorry, I just cannot remember your name.” My sister found an online advertisement for people concerned about memory loss. I called the phone number and scheduled an in-person screening. Bring someone familiar with you, the woman on the phone said. I brought Tim, who stayed close as a neurologist poked and prodded me, and vials and vials of blood were drawn. And then came the memory tests. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 23724 - Posted: 06.09.2017

Ian Sample Science editor Fossils recovered from an old mine on a desolate mountain in Morocco have rocked one of the most enduring foundations of the human story: that Homo sapiens arose in a cradle of humankind in East Africa 200,000 years ago. Archaeologists unearthed the bones of at least five people at Jebel Irhoud, a former barite mine 100km west of Marrakesh, in excavations that lasted years. They knew the remains were old, but were stunned when dating tests revealed that a tooth and stone tools found with the bones were about 300,000 years old. Why we're closer than ever to a timeline for human evolution Read more “My reaction was a big ‘wow’,” said Jean-Jacques Hublin, a senior scientist on the team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. “I was expecting them to be old, but not that old.” Hublin said the extreme age of the bones makes them the oldest known specimens of modern humans and poses a major challenge to the idea that the earliest members of our species evolved in a “Garden of Eden” in East Africa one hundred thousand years later. “This gives us a completely different picture of the evolution of our species. It goes much further back in time, but also the very process of evolution is different to what we thought,” Hublin told the Guardian. “It looks like our species was already present probably all over Africa by 300,000 years ago. If there was a Garden of Eden, it might have been the size of the continent.” © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 23723 - Posted: 06.08.2017

By Anil Ananthaswamy A machine-learning algorithm has analysed brain scans of 6-month-old children and predicted with near-certainty whether they will show signs of autism when they reach the age of 2. The finding means we may soon be able to intervene before symptoms appear, although whether that would be desirable is a controversial issue. “We have been trying to identify autism as early as possible, most importantly before the actual behavioural symptoms of autism appear,” says team member Robert Emerson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previous work has identified that bundles of nerve fibres in the brain develop differently in infants with older siblings with autism from how they do in infants without this familial risk factor. The changes in these white matter tracts in the brain are visible at 6 months. For the new study, Emerson and his team did fMRI brain scans of 59 sleeping infants, all of whom were aged 6 months and had older siblings with autism, which means they are more likely to develop autism themselves. The scans collected data from 230 brain regions, showing the 26,335 connections between them. When the team followed-up with the children at the age of 2, 11 had been diagnosed with an autism-like condition. The team used the brain scans from when the babies were 6 months old and behavioural data from when the children were 2 years old to train a machine-learning program to identify any brain connectivity patterns that might be linked to later signs of autism, such as repetitive behaviour, difficulties with language, or problems relating socially to others. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Autism; Brain imaging
Link ID: 23722 - Posted: 06.08.2017

By LISA SANDERS, M.D. She didn’t have any urgent medical problems, the woman told Dr. Lori Bigi. She was there because she had moved to Pittsburgh and needed a primary-care doctor. Bigi, an internist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, quickly eyed her new patient. She was 31 and petite, just over five feet tall and barely 100 pounds. And she looked just as she described herself, pretty healthy. Doctors often rely on patients’ sense of their well-being, especially when their assessment matches their appearance. But as Dr. Bigi was reminded that day, patients aren’t always right. The patient did say that she had seen her old doctor for awful headaches she got occasionally. They felt like an ice pick through the top of her head, the patient explained, which, at least initially, usually came on while she was going to the bathroom. The headache didn’t last long, but it was intensely painful. Her previous doctor thought it was a type of migraine. He prescribed medication, but it didn’t help. Now her main problem was anxiety, and she saw a psychiatrist for that. Sudden Panic Anxiety is common enough, and because the patient was seeing a specialist, Bigi wasn’t planning to spend much time discussing it. But then the doctor saw that in addition to taking an antidepressant — a recommended treatment for anxiety — the patient was on a sedating medication called clonazepam. It wasn’t a first-line medication for anxiety, and this tiny woman was taking a huge dose of it. The young woman explained that for most of her life, she was not a particularly anxious person. Then, two years earlier, she started experiencing episodes of total panic for seemingly no reason. At the time she chalked it up to a new job — she worked in a research lab — and the pressures associated with a project they had recently started. But the anxiety never let up. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 23721 - Posted: 06.08.2017

Children born to women with gestational diabetes whose diet included high proportions of refined grains may have a higher risk of obesity by age 7, compared to children born to women with gestational diabetes who ate low proportions of refined grains, according to results from a National Institutes of Health study. These findings, which appear online in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, were part of the Diabetes & Women’s Health Study, a research project led by NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Gestational diabetes, or high blood sugar during pregnancy, affects about 5 percent of all pregnancies in the United States and may lead to health problems for mothers and newborns. The authors noted that previous studies have linked diets high in refined grains — such as white rice — to obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The researchers compared records from 918 mother-child pairs who took part in the Danish National Birth Cohort, a study that followed the pregnancies of more than 91,000 women in Denmark. They found that children born to women with gestational diabetes who consumed the most refined grain (more than 156 grams per day) were twice as likely to be obese at age 7, compared to children born to women with gestational diabetes who ate the least amount of refined grain (less than 37 grams per day). The link between maternal grain consumption during pregnancy and obesity by age 7 still persisted when the researchers controlled for factors that could potentially influence the children’s weight — such as physical activity level and consumption of vegetables, fruit and sweets. The authors called for additional studies to confirm their results and to follow children through later childhood, adolescence and adulthood to see if the obesity risk persists later in life.

Keyword: Obesity; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23720 - Posted: 06.08.2017