By Diana Kwon By blocking specific enzymes, researchers were able to selectively remove memories stored in the neurons of Aplysia, a sea slug. These findings, published last week (June 22) in Current Biology, demonstrate that distinct memories stored in connections to a single nerve cell can be manipulated separately. “We were able to reverse long-term changes in synaptic strength at synapses known to contribute to different forms of memories,” study coauthor Samuel Schacher, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, told Motherboard. By stimulating multiple Aplysia sensory neurons that make connections with to the same motor neuron, Schacher and colleagues induced associative memory, which involves learning the relationship between two previously unrelated items (a new acquaintance’s name, for example), and non-associative memory, where recollections are unrelated to a specific event. The team measured the strength of the synaptic connections between the sensory and motor neurons and discovered that distinct forms of an enzyme, protein kinase M (PKM), played a role in developing the changes linked to the two types of memory. Selectively blocking these molecules, the researchers found, allowed them to remove the memories of their choice. Molecules associated with memory have been discovered in the past. For example, in a 2006 Science study, another team of researchers was able to erase memories in mice by blocking a related molecule, PKM-zeta. Subsequent papers, however, found that mice lacking this enzyme had no problem forming memories. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23791 - Posted: 06.30.2017

By STEPH YIN Whales and songbirds produce sounds resembling human music, and chimpanzees and crows use tools. But only one nonhuman animal is known to marry these two skills. Palm cockatoos from northern Australia modify sticks and pods and use them to drum regular rhythms, according to new research published in Science Advances on Wednesday. In most cases, males drop beats in the presence of females, suggesting they perform the skill to show off to mates. The birds even have their own signature cadences, not unlike human musicians. This example is “the closest we have so far to musical instrument use and rhythm in humans,” said Robert Heinsohn, a professor of evolutionary and conservation biology at the Australian National University and an author of the paper. A palm cockatoo drumming performance starts with instrument fashioning — an opportunity to show off beak strength and cleverness (the birds are incredibly intelligent). Often, as a female is watching, a male will ostentatiously break a hefty stick off a tree and trim it to about the length of a pencil. Holding the stick, or occasionally a hard seedpod, with his left foot (parrots are typically left-footed), the male taps a beat on his tree perch. Occasionally he mixes in a whistle or other sounds from an impressive repertoire of around 20 syllables. As he grows more aroused, the crest feathers on his head become erect. Spreading his wings, he pirouettes and bobs his head deeply, like an expressive pianist. He uncovers his red cheek patches — the only swaths of color on his otherwise black body — and they fill with blood, brightening like a blush. Over seven years, Dr. Heinsohn and his collaborators collected audio and video recordings of 18 male palm cockatoos exhibiting such behaviors in Australia’s Cape York Peninsula, where the birds are considered vulnerable because of aluminum ore mining. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Communication; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 23790 - Posted: 06.29.2017

Nicola Davis If you want your smile to appear pleasant, you might want to avoid a dazzling beam, research suggests. A study by scientists in the US has found that wide smiles with a high angle and showing a lot of teeth are not the best at creating a positive impression. “A lot of people don’t understand how important their smiles are and how important this aspect of communication we do with each other every day is,” said Stephen Guy, a co-author of the research from the University of Minnesota. The authors say the findings could prove valuable for clinicians working to restore facial movement and expression to those who have experienced facial paralysis. “When you have different surgical options, how do you choose which one is better?” Guy said, pointing out that some options might offer more extent of smile – referring to breadth – but others might improve the angle. “In order to do that, you need to say, ‘Oh, this smile is better or worse than that smile.’” To find the perfect smile, the team showed a 3D, computer-animated virtual face smiling in a range of different ways to 802 members of the public, ranging in age from 18 to 82. All had consumed fewer than six alcoholic drinks – the study was carried out at the Minnesota state fair. Each animation ran for 250 milliseconds and the faces showed differences in the angle of the smile, how broad it was, and the amount that teeth on show. In addition, the team took one smile – featuring a high angle, low extent and medium amount of dental show – and tinkered with the symmetry of the smile, changing the length of time it took the left side of the face to smile compared with the right. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 23789 - Posted: 06.29.2017

By Dina Fine Maron Not all of Mitchell Elkind’s stroke patients are on social security. In recent years he has treated devastating attacks in people as young as 18. And he is not alone. A growing body of research indicates strokes among U.S. millennials—ages 18 to 34—have soared in recent years. But an analysis by Scientific American has revealed significant differences in where these strokes are occurring, depending both on region and whether people live in rural or urban settings. The investigation, which used data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), was reviewed by five stroke experts and found that the West and Midwest have seen especially worrisome increases among younger adults. Moreover, large cities appear to have seen bigger increases than rural areas. The analysis employed hospital discharge data from 2003 to 2012 from the AHRQ’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) database. The findings align with earlier studies that pointed to nationwide increases in strokes in this age group: In a study published earlier this year in JAMA Neurology, researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that in a nine-year span from 2003 to 2012 there was a 32 percent spike in strokes among 18- to 34-year-old women and a 15 percent increase for men in the same range. Scientific American’s analysis sought to dig deeper into the data by exploring whether the stroke trend differed by location. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 23788 - Posted: 06.29.2017

By Kerry Grens Until a little more than a decade ago, doctors had few options to treat newborns whose brains were deprived of oxygen or blood at birth, a condition known as perinatal hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, or HIE. If babies could be stabilized and kept breathing, physicians and nurses could offer only supportive care and had to watch and wait to see how much brain damage their patients would suffer. “This was a disease where we had no treatment that worked, and [around] 60 percent of these babies were either dying or had a disability,” says Rosemary Higgins, a program scientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. In 2005, research findings reshaped the field. Higgins and other neonatologists reported the results of a couple of large clinical trials testing the effects of so-called cooling therapy on brain damage. Hundreds of babies suffering from HIE—the effects on the brain of oxygen deprivation during delivery, due to umbilical cord problems, the placenta coming away from the uterus too soon, or other complications—had their temperatures chilled from roughly 37 °C to about 33 °C for 72 hours, then slowly rewarmed (in one study it was whole-body cooling, in the other it was just the head). Although many babies still died of the brain damage or ended up with a severe disability, more fared better in the treatment groups than in the control groups (New Engl J Med, 353:1574-84; The Lancet, 365:663-70). “Cooling was a landmark discovery for this disease,” Higgins says. Finally, doctors (and their patients) weren’t completely helpless. The intervention used in these studies reduced the number of newborns dying or enduring a severe disability to below 50 percent. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23787 - Posted: 06.29.2017

People with higher IQs are less likely to die before the age of 79. That’s according to a study of over 65,000 people born in Scotland in 1936. Each of the people in the study took an intelligence test at the age of 11, and their health was then followed for 68 years, until the end of 2015. When Ian Deary, of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and his team analysed data from the study, they found that a higher test score in childhood was linked to a 28 per cent lower risk of death from respiratory disease, a 25 per cent reduced risk of coronary heart disease, and a 24 per cent lower risk of death from stroke. These people were also less likely to die from injuries, digestive diseases, and dementia – even when factors like socio-economic status were taken into account. Deary’s team say there are several theories for why more intelligent people live longer, such as people with higher IQs being more likely to look after their health and less likely to smoke. They also tend to do more exercise and seek medical attention when ill. “I’m hoping it means that if we can find out what smart people do and copy them, then we have a chance of a slightly longer and healthier life,” says Dreary. But there’s evidence genetics is involved too. A recent study suggests that very rare genetic variants can play an important role in lowering intelligence, and that these may also be likely to impair a person’s health. Journal reference: British Medical Journal, DOI: 10.1136/bmj.j2708 © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Intelligence
Link ID: 23786 - Posted: 06.29.2017

By Anil Ananthaswamy To understand human consciousness, we need to know why it exists in the first place. New experimental evidence suggests it may have evolved to help us learn and adapt to changing circumstances far more rapidly and effectively. We used to think consciousness was a uniquely human trait, but neuroscientists now believe we share it with many other animals, including mammals, birds and octopuses. While plants and arguably some animals like jellyfish seem able to respond to the world around them without any conscious awareness, many other animals consciously experience and perceive their environment. Read more: Why be conscious – The improbable origins of our unique mind In the 19th century, Thomas Henry Huxley and others argued that such consciousness is an “epiphenomenon” – a side effect of the workings of the brain that has no causal influence, the way a steam whistle has no effect on the way a steam engine works. More recently, neuroscientists have suggested that consciousness enables us to integrate information from different senses or keep such information active for long enough in the brain that we can experience the sight and sound of car passing by, for example, as one unified perception, even though sound and light travel at different speeds. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Consciousness; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23785 - Posted: 06.28.2017

By Meredith Wadman The hallmark brain damage in Parkinson’s disease is thought to be the work of a misfolded, rogue protein that spreads from brain cell to brain cell like an infection. Now, researchers have found that the normal form of the protein—α-synuclein (αS)—may actually defend the intestines against invaders by marshaling key immune cells. But chronic intestinal infections could ultimately cause Parkinson’s, the scientists suggest, if αS migrates from overloaded nerves in the gut wall to the brain. “The gut-brain immune axis seems to be on a cusp of an explosion of new insights, and this work offers an exceptionally exciting new hypothesis,” says Charles Bevins, an expert in intestinal immunity at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved with the study. The normal function of αS has long been a mystery. Though the protein is known to accumulate in toxic clumps in the brain and the nerves of the gut wall in patients with Parkinson’s disease, no one was sure what it did in healthy people. Noting that a region of the αS molecule behaves similarly to small, microbe-targeting proteins that are part of the body’s immune defenses, Michael Zasloff, an immunologist at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., set out to find whether αS, too, might help fend off microbial invaders. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 23784 - Posted: 06.28.2017

By Debra W. Soh If there was a way of telling who in our society is sexually attracted to children, are we entitled to know? A recent study from Georg-August-University Göttingen in Germany suggests that we may need to grapple with this question. Phallometric testing, also known as penile plethysmography, is considered the gold standard in measuring male sexual arousal, and particularly, deviant sexual interests such as pedophilia, which is the sexual interest in prepubescent children, roughly aged 3 to 10. The test involves measuring the volume of blood in the test-taker’s penis using an airtight glass tube (or conversely, measuring penile circumference with a mercury strain gauge) while he is presented with a series of images of children and adults, and audio stories describing a corresponding sexual encounter. Phallometry is commonly used in forensic settings to assess the sexual interests of sex offenders, in order to determine their risk of re-offending. As one can imagine, sex offenders tend not to be forthright about their sexual preferences, which makes phallometry all the more important. It has, however, been criticized because the test can become easier for individuals to fool with each successive assessment. Brain scanning using fMRI holds much promise as a diagnostic tool in evaluating sexual interests, as research has documented a reliable network of brain regions involved in sexual arousal. The current study took this another step by testing whether brain functional activation could be used to infer what someone finds sexually interesting without them knowing. © 2017 Scientific American,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Brain imaging
Link ID: 23783 - Posted: 06.28.2017

By Michael Price Contrary to popular lore that portrays chimpanzees as having “super strength,” studies have only found modest differences with humans. But our closest relatives are slightly stronger by several measures, and now a study comparing the muscle fibers of different primates reveals a potential explanation: Humans may have traded strength for endurance, allowing us to travel farther for food. To determine why chimpanzees are stronger than humans—at least on a pound-for-pound basis—Matthew O’Neill, an anatomy and evolution researcher at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Phoenix, and colleagues biopsied the thigh and calf muscles of three chimps housed at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. They dissected the samples into individual fibers and stimulated them to figure out how much force they could generate. Comparing their measurements to known data from humans, the team found that, at the individual fiber level, muscle output was about the same. Given that different fibers throughout the muscle might make a difference, the researchers conducted a more thorough analysis of tissue samples from pelvic and hind limb muscles of three chimpanzee cadavers from various zoos and research institutes around the United States. Previous studies in mammals have found that muscle composition between trunk, forelimb, and hind limb muscles is largely the same, O’Neill says, so he’s confident the samples are representative across most of the chimp’s musculature. The team used a technique called gel electrophoresis to break down the muscles into individual muscle fibers, and compared this breakdown to human muscle fiber data. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Muscles; Evolution
Link ID: 23782 - Posted: 06.27.2017

Carl Zimmer Mark D. Zabel wants to set some fires. Dr. Zabel and his colleagues are developing plans to burn plots of National Park Service land in Arkansas and Colorado. If the experiments turn out as the researchers hope, they will spare some elk and deer a gruesome death. Across a growing swath of North America, these animals are dying from a mysterious disorder called chronic wasting disease. It’s caused not by a virus or bacterium, but a deformed protein called a prion. When ingested, prions force normal proteins in the animal’s body to become deformed as well. Over the course of months, prions can gradually wreck the animal’s nervous system, ultimately killing it. This year is the 50th anniversary of the discovery of chronic wasting disease. In the September issue of Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, Dr. Zabel, an immunologist at Colorado State University, and his former graduate student Aimee Ortega survey what scientists have learned about the slow-spreading plague. It makes for ominous reading. “There’s a lot that we still don’t know and don’t understand about the disease,” Dr. Zabel said in an interview. Once chronic wasting disease gets a foothold, it can spread relentlessly. It’s now documented in 24 states, and continues to expand into new ranges. In some herds, as many as half of the animals carry prions. It’s only been in recent years that scientists have gained crucial clues to how the disease spreads. Direct contact, it turns out, isn’t the only way that the prions get from one animal to another. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 23781 - Posted: 06.27.2017

By Alice Klein Women are missing out on optimum medical treatment because most pre-clinical drug research is done in male animals, a new study suggests. New drugs must be evaluated in animals before being considered for human trials. Over three-quarters of these studies use only male animals because of concerns that female hormone cycles will affect experiments. It is also widely assumed that what works for males will work for females. However, research by Natasha Karp at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge and her colleagues casts doubt on this assumption. They compared 234 physical traits in 14,000 male and female lab mice. Sex differences were identified for 57 per cent of quantifiable traits – like cholesterol level and bone mass – and for 10 per cent of qualitative traits, like head shape. In another 40,000 mice, they found that when they switched off specific genes, the effects varied according to sex. This suggests that genetic diseases may manifest themselves differently in males and females and require different treatments, says Karp. These sex nuances mean that drugs optimised for male animals may be less effective in females, or even cause harm, says Karp. Between 1997 and 2001, 8 of the 10 drugs that were pulled from the market in the US posed greater health risks for women – possibly as a result of male-biased animal research, she says. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 23780 - Posted: 06.27.2017

By Catherine Caruso, More than half of all opioid prescriptions in the United States are written for people with anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders, according to a new study that questions how pain is treated in this vulnerable population. People with mood disorders are at increased risk of abusing opioids, and yet they received many more prescriptions than the general population, according to an analysis of data from 2011 and 2013. “We’re handing this stuff out like candy,” said Dr. Brian Sites, of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, the senior author of the study. Opioid prescribing in the U.S. quadrupled between 1999 and 2015, and during that time over 183,000 people died from overdoses related to prescription opioids, according to the CDC. Sites said more research is needed to understand whether opioids are being overprescribed to adults with mood disorders. “If you want to come up with social policy to address the need to decrease our out-of-control opioid prescribing, this would be the population you want to study, because they’re getting the bulk of the opioids, and then they are known to be at higher risk for the bad stuff,” he said. The study, published Monday in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, tapped a U.S. health survey that gathered data from providers and facilities on prescription medications, health status, and basic demographics for about 51,000 adults. It found that 19 percent of the 38.6 million Americans with mood disorders use prescription opioids, compared to 5 percent of the general population — a difference that remained even when the researchers controlled for factors such as physical health, level of pain, age, sex and race. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23779 - Posted: 06.27.2017

/ By Rod McCullom Facebook has problem — a very significant problem — with the violent and gruesome content which has quickly found its way, in numerous instances, onto the social network and its Facebook Live feature, which was introduced to American users in January 2016. The disturbing litany of murders, suicides and assaults have already become macabre technological milestones. These include Robert Godwin Sr., the 74-year-old father of nine and grandfather of 14 who was selected by a gunman at random and then murdered in a video posted to Facebook in mid-April. One week later, a man in Thailand streamed the murder of his 11-month old daughter on Facebook Live before taking his own life. The beating and torture of an 18-year-old man with intellectual and development disabilities was live-streamed on the service in January, and the tragic shooting death of two-year-old Lavontay White Jr. followed a month later on Valentine’s Day. “At least 45 instances of violence — shootings, rapes, murders, child abuse, torture, suicides, and attempted suicides — have been broadcast via Live [since] December 2015,” Buzzfeed’s Alex Kantrowitz reported this month. “That’s an average rate of about two instances per month.” Copyright 2017 Undark

Keyword: Aggression; Robotics
Link ID: 23778 - Posted: 06.27.2017

Frances Perraudin A 90-tonne machine that will allow cancer patients to receive state-of-the-art high-energy proton beam therapy on the NHS for the first time is to be installed at a hospital in Manchester. The cyclotron delivers a special type of radiotherapy currently only available overseas. The NHS has been paying for patients to travel abroad for the treatment since 2008. A 90-metre (300ft) crane will be used to lower the machine into position at the Christie hospital on Thursday. It will sit in a bunker reinforced with 270 timber, steel and concrete posts. Proton beam therapy targets certain cancers very precisely, increasing success rates and reducing side-effects. It causes less damage to healthy tissue surrounding the tumour and is particularly appropriate for certain cancers in children, who are more at risk of lasting damage because their organs are still growing. The treatment came to national attention in 2014 when a police search was mounted after the parents of five-year-old Ashya King took him out of hospital against doctors’ wishes and travelled to the continent. The couple hoped to secure proton beam therapy to treat their son’s brain tumour, but doctors argued that the treatment would not increase the boy’s chances of recovery. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 23777 - Posted: 06.27.2017

By THERESE HUSTON “Does being over 40 make you feel like half the man you used to be?” Ads like that have led to a surge in the number of men seeking to boost their testosterone. The Food and Drug Administration reports that prescriptions for testosterone supplements have risen to 2.3 million from 1.3 million in just four years. There is such a condition as “low-T,” or hypogonadism, which can cause fatigue and diminished sex drive, and it becomes more common as men age. But according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, half of the men taking prescription testosterone don’t have a deficiency. Many are just tired and want a lift. But they may not be doing themselves any favors. It turns out that the supplement isn’t entirely harmless: Neuroscientists are uncovering evidence suggesting that when men take testosterone, they make more impulsive — and often faulty — decisions. Researchers have shown for years that men tend to be more confident about their intelligence and judgments than women, believing that solutions they’ve generated are better than they actually are. This hubris could be tied to testosterone levels, and new research by Gideon Nave, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, along with Amos Nadler at Western University in Ontario, reveals that high testosterone can make it harder to see the flaws in one’s reasoning. How might heightened testosterone lead to overconfidence? One possible explanation lies in the orbitofrontal cortex, a region just behind the eyes that’s essential for self-evaluation, decision making and impulse control. The neuroscientists Pranjal Mehta at the University of Oregon and Jennifer Beer at the University of Texas, Austin, have found that people with higher levels of testosterone have less activity in their orbitofrontal cortex. Studies show that when that part of the brain is less active, people tend to be overconfident in their reasoning abilities. It’s as though the orbitofrontal cortex is your internal editor, speaking up when there’s a potential problem with your work. Boost your testosterone and your editor goes reassuringly (but misleadingly) silent. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Attention
Link ID: 23776 - Posted: 06.26.2017

By Diana Kwon Across the animal kingdom, nearly all creatures sleep or display sleep-like states. The roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans, does not sleep in a typical day-night cycle like humans and many other animals. Instead, these worms catch most of their z’s while transitioning from one larval stage to another, during a period called lethargus. When these creatures fall asleep, most of their neurons become inactive spontaneously, suggesting that sleep—at least in worms—is a passive state of the brain, according to a study published today (June 22) in Science. “The condition between sleep to wakefulness is probably one of the most drastic changes that our brains undergo,” says Manuel Zimmer, a neuroscientist at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology at the Vienna Biocenter in Austria. “How a brain can switch between such drastically different states is not really understood.” To investigate this process, Zimmer and colleagues examined the brains of C. elegans. These worms do indeed have primitive brains, yet their nervous system comprises only 302 neurons, making it much easier to tackle than, say, the human brain, with billions of neurons, or even the fly brain, which has around 100,000 nerve cells. Using transgenic worms engineered with a fluorescent indicator that becomes active in response to high calcium levels in neurons (a proxy for neural activity), the researchers imaged the C. elegans brain during the transitions between sleep and wake states by adjusting oxygen levels. Because these soil-dwelling creatures live among low levels of oxygen (10 percent), atmospheric oxygen concentrations (21 percent) induce hyperactivity and wakefulness. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 23775 - Posted: 06.26.2017

By Natalie Grover (Reuters) - A handful of drugmakers are taking their first steps toward developing marijuana-based painkillers, alternatives to opioids that have led to widespread abuse and caused the U.S. health regulator to ask for a withdrawal of a popular drug this month. The cannabis plant has been used for decades to manage pain and there are increasingly sophisticated marijuana products available across 29 U.S. states, as well as in the District of Columbia, where medical marijuana is legal. There are no U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved painkillers derived from marijuana, but companies such as Axim Biotechnologies Inc, Nemus Bioscience Inc and Intec Pharma Ltd have drugs in various stages of development. The companies are targeting the more than 100 million Americans who suffer from chronic pain, and are dependent on opioid painkillers such as Vicodin, or addicted to street opiates including heroin. Opioid overdose, which claimed celebrities including Prince and Heath Ledger as victims, contributed to more than 33,000 deaths in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Earlier this month, the FDA asked Endo International Plc to withdraw its Opana ER painkiller from the market, the first time the agency has called for the removal of an opioid painkiller for public health reasons. The FDA concluded that the drug's benefits no longer outweighed its risks. Multiple studies have shown that pro-medical marijuana states have reported fewer opiate deaths and there are no deaths related to marijuana overdose on record.(http://reut.rs/2r74Sbe) © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23774 - Posted: 06.26.2017

By JANE E. BRODY It’s perfectly normal for someone to feel anxious or depressed after receiving a diagnosis of a serious illness. But what if the reverse occurs and symptoms of anxiety or depression masquerade as an as-yet undiagnosed physical disorder? Or what if someone’s physical symptoms stem from a psychological problem? How long might it take before the true cause of the symptoms is uncovered and proper treatment begun? Psychiatric Times, a medical publication seen by some 50,000 psychiatrists each month, recently published a “partial listing” of 47 medical illnesses, ranging from cardiac arrhythmias to pancreatic cancer, that may first present as anxiety. Added to that was another “partial listing” of 30 categories of medications that may cause anxiety, including, ironically, popular antidepressants like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I.s. These lists were included in an article called “Managing Anxiety in the Medically Ill” meant to alert mental health practitioners to the possibility that some patients seeking treatment for anxiety or depression may have an underlying medical condition that must be addressed before any emotional symptoms are likely to resolve. Doctors who treat ailments like cardiac, endocrine or intestinal disorders would do well to read this article as well lest they do patients a serious disservice by not recognizing an emotional cause of physical symptoms or addressing the emotional components of a physical disease. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Stress
Link ID: 23773 - Posted: 06.26.2017

Rebecca Hersher The first problem with the airplane bathroom was its location. It was March. Greg O'Brien and his wife, Mary Catherine, were flying back to Boston from Los Angeles, sitting in economy seats in the middle of the plane. "We're halfway, probably over Chicago," Greg remembers, "and Mary Catherine said, 'Go to the bathroom.' " "It just sounded like my mother," Greg says. So I said 'no.' " Mary Catherine persisted, urging her husband of 40 years to use the restroom. People started looking at them. "It was kind of funny," says Greg. Mary Catherine was more alarmed than amused. Greg has early-onset Alzheimer's, which makes it increasingly hard for him to keep track of thoughts and feelings over the course of minutes or even seconds. It's easy to get into a situation where you feel like you need to use the bathroom, but then forget. And they had already been on the plane for hours. Finally, Greg started toward the restroom at the back of the plane, only to find the aisle was blocked by an attendant serving drinks. Mary Catherine gestured to him. "Use the one in first class!" At that point, on top of the mild anxiety most people feel when they slip into first class to use the restroom, Greg was feeling overwhelmed by the geography of the plane. He pulled back the curtain dividing the seating sections. "This flight attendant looks at me like she has no use for me. I just said 'Look, I really have to go the bathroom,' and she says 'OK, just go.' " © 2017 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23772 - Posted: 06.26.2017