Abby L. Wilkerson The new class I was teaching — “Composing Disability: Crip Ecologies” — was one of several first-year writing seminars offered at George Washington University. Given the focus, it was likely to be a challenge for at least some of the students. And it was presenting a particular challenge to me. Even before the class began, I was anxious. I have depression, and I wondered: Should I acknowledge it in the class? Would the students benefit if I did? I wanted to be sure I knew what I was doing, for everyone’s sake, before taking the leap. But I was not at all certain. The idea of disclosing in the classroom made me feel conflicted and vulnerable. Though the World Health Organization identifies depression as “the leading cause of disability,” not everyone with depression identifies herself as disabled. One of the central meanings of disability for me is “crip” pride — resistance to medical notions of disability as a defect and related social stigmas. My depression has given me unasked-for gifts, including a sensitivity to others’ suffering. But let’s face it — on some level, depression is suffering. How could I reconcile this with the fierce crip attitude in others that I’ve so admired? In class, how would the dull weight of depression sit with the “crip” in the course title? If I were going to do this, I needed to get it right. And I wasn’t sure how. Though I have suffered severe depression in the past, these days, my episodes tend to be milder and less frequent. Some days, I feel fine. But I might soon begin feeling melancholy — yet still able to laugh, think clearly, sleep at night and enjoy my life. Then one morning, for no discernible reason, I wake up mired in mud, my body now freight to be pushed through daily routines. The rhythm of life is suddenly ground down almost to nothing. I feel somehow both numb and raw, skin thin, laid open. Everything that matters is now far-off in the distance. Other people seem remote, existing in some parallel universe. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 22985 - Posted: 12.14.2016

Laura Sanders Fewer teenagers in the United States used drugs in 2016 than in previous decades. The positive news comes from an annual survey of almost 45,500 U.S. students in grades eight, 10 and 12. “There’s a lot of good news here,” says pediatrician Sharon Levy of Boston Children’s Hospital. Public health messages from pediatricians, educators and others seem to be sinking in, she says. “I think that’s fabulous. Substance use is one of the most important — yet modifiable — behavioral health issues of adolescents.” Adolescents’ use of many of the substances, including alcohol and cigarettes, hit an all-time low since the survey, known as the Monitoring the Future study, began collecting data 42 years ago. Heroin, methamphetamines, inhalants and stimulants also hit lows this year. E-cigarettes have been particularly concerning as more adolescents gave the new devices a try, reaching a high in 2015 (SN: 5/28/16, p. 4). For the first time, the number of students who vape is declining, the survey found. In 2015, 16.3 percent of 12th-graders reported vaping in the last 30 days. In 2016, that fell to 12.5. Similar declines were evident among eighth- and 10th-graders. In a happy surprise, misuse of prescription opioid use decreased in the last five years among 12th-graders. The drop was “a big surprise,” particularly against a backdrop of a much wider opioid epidemic in the general population (SN: 9/3/16, p. 14), Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Md., said December 13 at a news briefing. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 22984 - Posted: 12.14.2016

By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS As the opioid epidemic sweeps through rural America, an ever-greater number of drug-dependent newborns are straining hospital neonatal units and draining precious medical resources. The problem has grown more quickly than realized and shows no signs of abating, researchers reported on Monday. Their study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, concludes for the first time that the increase in drug-dependent newborns has been disproportionately larger in rural areas. The rising rates are due largely to widening use of opioids among pregnant women, the researchers found. From 2004 to 2013, the proportion of newborns born dependent on drugs increased nearly sevenfold in hospitals in rural counties, to 7.5 per 1,000 from 1.2 per 1,000. By contrast, the uptick among urban infants was nearly fourfold, to 4.8 per 1,000 from 1.4 per 1,000. “The problem is accelerating in rural areas to a greater degree than in urban areas,” said Dr. Veeral Tolia, a neonatologist who works at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas and was not involved in the new report. Other recent studies have underscored the breadth of the problem. The hospital costs associated with treating addicted newborns rose to $1.5 billion in 2013, from $732 million in 2009, according to a study in the Journal of Perinatology. Some neonatal intensive care units, called NICUs, now devote 10 percent of their hours to caring for infants who have withdrawal symptoms. Hospitals in the eye of this storm are commonly underresourced, experts said. “Typically, rural hospitals that deliver babies have traditionally focused on the lower-risk population in areas they serve,” said Dr. Alison V. Holmes, an associate professor of pediatrics at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22983 - Posted: 12.13.2016

By Veronique Greenwood Baffling grammar, strange vowels, quirky idioms and so many new words—all of this makes learning a new language hard work. Luckily, researchers have discovered a number of helpful tricks, ranging from exposing your ears to a variety of native speakers to going to sleep soon after a practice session. A pair of recent papers suggests that even when you are not actively studying, what you hear can affect your learning and that sometimes listening without speaking works best. In one study, published in 2015 in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, linguists found that people who took breaks from learning new sounds performed just as well as those who took no breaks, as long as the sounds continued to play in the background. The researchers trained two groups of people to distinguish among trios of similar sounds—for instance, Hindi has “p,” “b” and a third sound English speakers mistake for “b.” One group practiced telling these apart one hour a day for two days. Another group alternated between 10 minutes of the task and 10 minutes of a “distractor” task that involved matching symbols on a worksheet while the sounds continued to play in the background. Remarkably, the group that switched between tasks improved just as much as the one that focused on the distinguishing task the entire time. “There's something about our brains that makes it possible to take advantage of the things you've already paid attention to and to keep paying attention to them,” even when you are focused on something else, suggests Melissa Baese-Berk, a linguist at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the study. In a 2016 study published in the Journal of Memory and Language, Baese-Berk and another colleague found that it is better to listen to new sounds silently rather than practice saying them yourself at the same time. Spanish speakers learning to distinguish among sounds in the Basque language performed more poorly when they were asked to repeat one of the sounds during training. The findings square with what many teachers have intuited—that a combination of focused practice and passive exposure to a language is the best approach. “You need to come to class and pay attention,” Baese-Berk says, “but when you go home, turn on the TV or turn on the radio in that language while you're cooking dinner, and even if you're not paying total attention to it, it's going to help you.” © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Language; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 22982 - Posted: 12.13.2016

By BENEDICT CAREY About one in six American adults reported taking at least one psychiatric drug, usually an antidepressant or an anti-anxiety medication, and most had been doing so for a year or more, according to a new analysis. The report is based on 2013 government survey data on some 242 million adults and provides the most fine-grained snapshot of prescription drug use for psychological and sleep problems to date. “I follow this area, so I knew the numbers would be high,” said Thomas J. Moore, a researcher at the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a nonprofit in Alexandria, Va., and the lead author of the analysis, which was published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. “But in some populations, the rates are extraordinary.” Mr. Moore and his co-author, Donald R. Mattison of Risk Sciences International in Ottawa, combed household survey and insurance data compiled by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. They found that one in five women had reported filling at least one prescription that year — about two times the number of men who had — and that whites were about twice as likely to have done so than blacks or Hispanics. Nearly 85 percent of those who had gotten at least one drug had filled multiple prescriptions for that drug over the course of the year studied, which the authors considered long-term use. “To discover that eight in 10 adults who have taken psychiatric drugs are using them long term raises safety concerns, given that there’s reason to believe some of this continued use is due to dependence and withdrawal symptoms,” Mr. Moore said. Dr. Mark Olfson, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, who was not involved in the study, said the new analysis provided a clear, detailed picture of current usage: “It reflects a growing acceptance of and reliance on prescription medications” to manage common emotional problems, he said. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 22981 - Posted: 12.13.2016

Answer by Paul King, Director of Data Science, on Quora: There are hundreds of surprising, perspective-shifting insights about the nature of reality that come from neuroscience. Every bizarre neurological syndrome, every visual illusion, and every clever psychological experiment reveals something entirely unexpected about our experience of the world that we take for granted. Here are a few to give a flavor: 1. Perceptual reality is entirely generated by our brain. We hear voices and meaning from air pressure waves. We see colors and objects, yet our brain only receives signals about reflected photons. The objects we perceive are a construct of the brain, which is why optical illusions can fool the brain. Recommended by Forbes 2. We see the world in narrow disjoint fragments. We think we see the whole world, but we are looking through a narrow visual portal onto a small region of space. You have to move your eyes when you read because most of the page is blurry. We don't see this, because as soon as we become curious about part of the world, our eyes move there to fill in the detail before we see it was missing. While our eyes are in motion, we should see a blank blur, but our brain edits this out. 3. Body image is dynamic and flexible. Our brain can be fooled into thinking a rubber arm or a virtual reality hand is actually a part of our body. In one syndrome, people believe one of their limbs does not belong to them. One man thought a cadaver limb had been sewn onto his body as a practical joke by doctors. 4. Our behavior is mostly automatic, even though we think we are controlling it.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 22980 - Posted: 12.13.2016

By DANIEL A. YUDKIN and JAY VAN BAVEL During the first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton argued that “implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police.” Her comment moved to the forefront of public conversation an issue that scientists have been studying for decades: namely, that even well-meaning people frequently harbor hidden prejudices against members of other racial groups. Studies have shown that these subtle biases are widespread and associated with discrimination in legal, economic and organizational settings. Critics of this notion, however, protest what they see as a character smear — a suggestion that everybody, deep down, is racist. Vice President-elect Mike Pence has said that an “accusation of implicit bias” in cases where a white police officer shoots a black civilian serves to “demean law enforcement.” Writing in National Review, David French claimed that the concept of implicit bias lets people “indict entire communities as bigoted.” But implicit bias is not about bigotry per se. As new research from our laboratory suggests, implicit bias is grounded in a basic human tendency to divide the social world into groups. In other words, what may appear as an example of tacit racism may actually be a manifestation of a broader propensity to think in terms of “us versus them” — a prejudice that can apply, say, to fans of a different sports team. This doesn’t make the effects of implicit bias any less worrisome, but it does mean people should be less defensive about it. Furthermore, our research gives cause for optimism: Implicit bias can be overcome with rational deliberation. In a series of experiments whose results were published in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, we set out to determine how severely people would punish someone for stealing. Our interest was in whether a perpetrator’s membership in a particular group would influence the severity of the punishment he or she received. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 22979 - Posted: 12.12.2016

By Chloé Hecketsweiler Can brain science predict when someone will commit a crime, or tell whether a defendant knew right from wrong? In recent decades, scientists and criminal justice experts have been trying to answer tantalizing questions like these — with mixed success. The science of predicting crime using algorithms is still shaky, and while sophisticated tools such as neuroimaging are increasingly being used in courtrooms, they raise a host of tricky questions: What kind of brain defect or brain injury should count when assessing a defendant’s responsibility for a crime? Can brain imaging distinguish truth from falsehood? Can neuroscience predict human behavior? Judith Edersheim, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and also a lawyer who specializes in forensic evaluations, focuses her research on these gray areas. In 2009, she co-founded the Center for Law, Brain, and Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital, with the goal of “translating neuroscience into the legal arena.” And on December 15, at an event at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Edersheim will talk about the vulnerability of the aging brain, highlighting the case of a man affected by an undetected brain disease. For this installment of the Undark Five, we asked her what brain imaging can reveal about the “criminal brain,” how relationships between brain functioning and behavior can inform the courtroom, and what controversies this iconoclastic science may raise. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity, and Undark has supplied some additional links. UNDARK — Using brain imaging, scientists have identified correlations between certain brain abnormalities and criminal behaviors. Is there a signature for the “criminal brain”? JUDITH EDERSHEIM — There may be no criminal minds; there may be criminal moments. Copyright 2016 Undark

Keyword: Aggression; Brain imaging
Link ID: 22978 - Posted: 12.12.2016

Ian Boldsworth If you deal with mental health issues of any sort, talking about them is often a struggle, especially with all the stigma around them. It turns out, putting them out there for the world to hear is even more tricky. Nonetheless, after years of producing podcasts that stretched idiocy to previously unchartered territories, I recently did precisely this and released my first semi-serious project, all about discussing and sharing personal experiences of dealing with mental health problems. Three days after it was released, I’d still not listened to the completed series myself. Despite being the presenter and producer, I’d slightly bottled it. Those closest to me will tell you that I was battling a real anxiety in the lead-up to releasing the full series of The Mental Podcast, and that I’d already made my excuses to them. Every time somebody said they were looking forward to it I told them not to, and my initial promotional tweets had a cautionary, apologetic feel of “you may like this, you may not”. For the record, I’ve never had any issues talking about mental health stuff, always more than happy to casually drop it into an interview or real-life conversation, but with this new series, as the release date loomed closer, I started to get worried about it. On a purely business level, I was concerned that it wouldn’t make its money back. Over the last 12 months or so I’ve financed my independent stuff up front and then, with a reward incentivised (not a word) donations drive at the end of the series, attempted to recoup the cost. It’s a very high risk/utterly idiotic business model as podcast listeners have “getting stuff free” in their DNA, but so far I’ve fluked a decent, if modest, return. The last two series of podcasts were called The ParaPod and consisted of me lambasting a ghost-believing-buffoon with the simple tools of logic and facts, a pretty easy concept to get on board with and you don’t need to be worrying that it will potentially take you to the darkest depths of depression (although the commitment of an adult to such a ludicrous supernatural premise should at least waver your faith in human intelligence). © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 22977 - Posted: 12.12.2016

By GINA KOLATA Dr. Frank Sacks, a professor of nutrition at Harvard, likes to challenge his audience when he gives lectures on obesity. “If you want to make a great discovery,” he tells them, figure out this: Why do some people lose 50 pounds on a diet while others on the same diet gain a few pounds? Then he shows them data from a study he did that found exactly that effect. Dr. Sack’s challenge is a question at the center of obesity research today. Two people can have the same amount of excess weight, they can be the same age, the same socioeconomic class, the same race, the same gender. And yet a treatment that works for one will do nothing for the other. The problem, researchers say, is that obesity and its precursor — being overweight — are not one disease but instead, like cancer, they are many. “You can look at two people with the same amount of excess body weight and they put on the weight for very different reasons,” said Dr. Arya Sharma, medical director of the obesity program at the University of Alberta. Not only can that explain why treatment is so difficult and results so wildly variable, but it can explain why prevention efforts often fail. After trial and error, here are six stories from people who finally found diets, drugs and other methods that helped them keep the weight off. If obesity is many diseases, said Dr. Lee Kaplan, director of the obesity, metabolism and nutrition institute at Massachusetts General Hospital, there can be many paths to the same outcome. It makes as much sense to insist there is one way to prevent all types of obesity — get rid of sugary sodas, clear the stores of junk foods, shun carbohydrates, eat breakfast, get more sleep — as it does to say you can avoid lung cancer by staying out of the sun, a strategy specific to skin cancer. One focus of research is to figure out how many types of obesity there are — Dr. Kaplan counts 59 so far — and how many genes can contribute. So far, investigators have found more than 25 genes with such powerful effects that if one is mutated, a person is pretty much guaranteed to become obese, said Dr. Stephen O’Rahilly, head of the department of clinical biochemistry and medicine at Cambridge University. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 22976 - Posted: 12.12.2016

Carl Zimmer Primates are unquestionably clever: Monkeys can learn how to use money, and chimpanzees have a knack for game theory. But no one has ever taught a nonhuman primate to say “hello.” Scientists have long been intrigued by the failure of primates to talk like us. Understanding the reasons may offer clues to how our own ancestors evolved full-blown speech, one of our most powerful adaptations. On Friday, a team of researchers reported that monkeys have a vocal tract capable of human speech. They argue that other primates can’t talk because they lack the right wiring in their brains. “A monkey’s vocal tract would be perfectly adequate to produce hundreds, thousands of words,” said W. Tecumseh Fitch, a cognitive scientist at the University of Vienna and a co-author of the new study. Human speech results from a complicated choreography of flowing air and contracting muscles. To make a particular sound, we have to give the vocal tract a particular shape. The vocal tracts of other primates contain the same elements as ours — from vocal cords to tongues to lips — but their geometry is different. That difference long ago set scientists to debating whether primates could make speechlike sounds. In the 1960s, Philip H. Lieberman, now a professor emeritus of Brown University, and his colleagues went so far as to pack a dead monkey’s vocal tract with plaster to get a three-dimensional rendering. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 22975 - Posted: 12.10.2016

By Michael Price The famed parrot Alex had a vocabulary of more than 100 words. Kosik the elephant learned to “speak” a bit of Korean by using the tip of his trunk the way people whistle with their fingers. So it’s puzzling that our closest primate cousins are limited to hoots, coos, and grunts. For decades, monkeys’ and apes’ vocal anatomy has been blamed for their inability to reproduce human speech sounds, but a new study suggests macaque monkeys—and by extension, other primates—could indeed talk if they only possessed the brain wiring to do so. The findings might provide new clues to anthropologists and language researchers looking to pin down when humans learned to speak. “This certainly shows that the macaque vocal tract is capable of a lot more than has previously been assumed,” says John Esling, a linguist and phonetics expert at the University of Victoria in Canada, who was not involved with the work. The study’s lead author, William Tecumseh Sherman Fitch III, an evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Vienna, says the question of why monkeys and apes can’t speak goes back to Darwin. (Yes, Fitch is the great-great-great-grandson of U.S. Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman.) Darwin thought nonhuman primates couldn’t talk because they didn’t have the brains, he says. But over time, anthropologists instead embraced the idea that the primates’ vocal tracts were holding them back: They simply lacked the flexibility to produce the wide range of vowels present in human speech. That remains the “textbook answer” today, Fitch says. © 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 22974 - Posted: 12.10.2016

By Sam Wong Size matters. Bigger genitals mean more mating success for male mosquito fish, a relative of the guppy. But the development of longer male organs prompts females to evolve bigger brains to help them escape overeager mates. Mating among mosquito fish is far from romantic. The male makes no effort to court partners, instead sneaking up and attempting to copulate by force up to a thousand times a day. It uses a modified anal fin, the gonopodium, to deliver sperm into the female. In this sort of mating system, the relationship between males and females can resemble that between predators and prey, which commonly involve an evolutionary arms race where adaptations on one side are closely matched by changes on the other. For example, big-brained predators tend to prey on big-brained prey, as the two try to outsmart each other. Séverine Buechel and colleagues at Stockholm University in Sweden wondered if a similar arms race was going on between male and female mosquito fish. Do females evolve bigger brains to defend against sneaky males, and do males evolve bigger brains in response? To test this, the team looked at what happened to brain size when males were bred to have longer gonopodia. Male mosquito fish have long gonopodia compared with related species in which coercion is not the dominant mating strategy, and males with longer gonopodia tend to be more successful at mating. The researchers found that breeding more well-endowed males led to bigger-brained females. But there was no arms race: male brains didn’t get bigger at the same time. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 22973 - Posted: 12.10.2016

by Tom Siegfried SAN DIEGO — Society’s record for protecting public health has been pretty good in the developed world, not so much in developing countries. That disparity has long been recognized. But there’s another disparity in society’s approach to public health — the divide between attention to traditional diseases and the resources devoted to mental disorders. “When it comes to mental health, all countries are developing countries,” says Shekhar Saxena, director of the World Health Organization’s department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse. Despite a breadth of scope and depth of impact exceeding that of many more highly publicized diseases, mental illness has long been regarded as a second-class medical concern. And modern medicine’s success at diagnosing, treating and curing many other diseases has not been duplicated for major mental disorders. Saxena thinks that neuroscience research can help. He sees an opportunity for progress through increased interdisciplinary collaboration between neuroscience and mental health researchers. “The collaboration seems to be improving, but much more is needed and not only in a few countries, but all countries,” he said November 12 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016.

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 22972 - Posted: 12.10.2016

By Alice Klein How can you stop old anxieties from resurfacing? An injection of new neurons may help, a study in mice suggests. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety and other fear-related disorders are difficult to treat, and many people who seem to get better later relapse. A similar phenomenon occurs in rodents. Adult mice can be conditioned to fear a sound by giving them an electric shock every time they hear it. Playing the sound repeatedly without the shock gradually wipes out the fear – a process known as extinction training. However, the fear often returns spontaneously if the mouse hears the sound later on. Baby mice, on the other hand, do not seem to relapse as much. Yong-Chun Yu at Fudan University in China and his colleagues wanted to know if they could treat fearful adult mice with brain cells from mouse embryos. The transplants did not prevent the mice developing new fears, nor help them overcome existing ones – at least not by themselves. But coupled with extinction training, the embryonic cells did help wipe out existing fears and prevent the mice relapsing. First, the researchers injected live brain cells from mouse embryos into the amygdalae of adult mice – the parts of the brain involved in fear. Other mice were implanted with dead embryonic brain cells as a comparison. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 22971 - Posted: 12.09.2016

Men and women who suffered traumatic brain injuries had more than twice the risk of winding up in a federal prison in Canada as their uninjured peers, a new study shows. That doesn't surprise Dr. Geoffrey Manley, a neurosurgeon who runs a trauma centre. He knows all too well the long-term struggles of survivors of traumatic brain injuries. "Because there's no system of care for these individuals, they fall into the cracks and get themselves in trouble. And we really as a society are not doing a good job of taking care of people with traumatic brain injuries," Manley, who was not involved in the study, said in a phone interview. For 13 years, researchers followed more than 1.4 million people who were eligible for health care in Ontario and were between the ages of 18 and 28 in 1997. As reported in CMAJ Open, the open-access journal of the Canadian Medical Association, the research team linked subjects' health records to correctional records, adjusted for a variety of factors like age and substance abuse, and found that men with traumatic brain injuries were 2.5 times more likely to serve time in a Canadian federal prison than men without head injuries. Female prisoners were even more likely to have survived traumatic brain injuries. For women with these injuries, the risk of winding up in a Canadian federal prison was 2.76 times higher than it was for uninjured women, although the authors caution that the pool of incarcerated females was small, accounting for only 210 of the more than 700,000 women studied. ©2016 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Aggression
Link ID: 22970 - Posted: 12.09.2016

By Jason G. Goldman In her widely celebrated 1978 book Illness as Metaphor Susan Sontag wrote that when medical experts attribute psychological causality to biological disease, they “assign to the luckless ill the ultimate responsibility both for falling ill and for getting well.” The latest salvo in the ongoing debate over the extent to which psychological factors can explain physiological outcomes comes from a study published today, which finds optimistic women are less likely to die of a variety of illnesses—from cancer to heart failure to infectious disease. Researchers from Harvard University's T. H. Chan School of Public Health turned to a 40-year survey-based study begun in 1976 of American female nurses, most of whom were white, called the “Nurses’ Health Study.” They extracted data on the women's personalities from the 2004 and 2008 surveys and compared it with mortality rates for the same women between 2006 and 2012. Altogether, they collected information from more than 70,000 individuals. To assess optimism, the study asked participants to rate on a five-point scale the extent to which they agreed with six statements such as, “in uncertain times, I usually expect the best.” “When comparing the top 25 percent most optimistic [women] to the bottom 25 percent, they had about a 30 percent reduced risk of mortality,” says study leader Eric Kim of Harvard. Those relationships remained, albeit less robustly, even after the researchers adjusted the predictions to account for sociodemographic factors and health-related behaviors. Kim is quick to point out that this does not necessarily mean optimism leads to healthier lifestyles, only that there is a statistical association. Still, he and his colleagues argue that because personality traits are somewhat malleable, optimism-based interventions could be a fairly simple, low-cost way to improve public health. © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Stress; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 22969 - Posted: 12.09.2016

Between email and cell phones, many of us feel like we're at work 24/7. The concept of workplace burnout is not that old. NPR's Planet Money team has the story of the man who coined the term. ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: If you're the type of person who checks your work email right before bed and just as you wake up the next day, you might know the word burnout, but you may not know the story behind it. Noel King from NPR's Planet Money podcast tells us about the man who coined the term burnout and then found a sort of solution. NOEL KING, BYLINE: In the early '70s, Herbert Freudenberger had a successful psychology practice on New York's Upper East Side. He was a serious, driven man. He'd survived the Holocaust and moved to the U.S. as a kid. Here's his daughter Lisa Freudenberger. Her dad died in 1999. LISA FREUDENBERGER: His childhood kind of stopped at 7 or 8 because he had then had to grow up pretty quickly and survive in a new country. KING: In the States, he was taken in by an aunt who was cruel to him. She made him sleep in an attic. In his teens, he ran away and lived on the street for a while. Herbert grew up to become someone who was always pushing himself to help more people. That's why in addition to his practice on the Upper East Side, he opened a clinic on the Bowery - New York's Skid Row. He worked with drug addicts. © 2016 npr

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 22968 - Posted: 12.09.2016

By Meredith Wadman There have been few happy endings when it comes to spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), the most common genetic cause of death in childhood. The disease inexorably destroys the motor neurons of the spinal cord and brainstem that control movement, including swallowing and breathing. In its most severe form, SMA kills those afflicted at about age 2, most commonly by suffocating them. There are no Food and Drug Administration (FDA)–approved drugs for the disease. That is almost certainly about to change. An innovative drug that helps cells bypass the genetic flaw responsible for SMA may be approved as soon as this month, on the heels of strongly positive results from late-stage clinical trials. On 7 November, a trial of the drug, nusinersen, in wheelchair-bound children aged 2 to 12, was stopped on the grounds that it was unethical to deny the drug to children in the control arm, given the positive results in the treated children. In August, a similar trial in infants was stopped for the same reason, allowing the untreated infants in a control arm to begin receiving the drug. And today, a paper appearing in The Lancet provides compelling biological evidence that nusinersen is having its desired effect in the cells of the brain and spinal cord. “These [infant-onset] SMA kids are going to die. And not only are they now not dying, you are essentially on the path to a true cure of a degenerative [neurological] disease, which is unheard of,” says Jeffrey Rothstein, a neurologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, who was not affiliated with the trials of the drug and is not connected with either of the two companies involved in its development: Ionis of Carlsbad, California, and Biogen of Cambridge, Massachusetts. © 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22967 - Posted: 12.08.2016

Laura Sanders Flickering light kicks off brain waves that clean a protein related to Alzheimer’s disease out of mice’s brains, a new study shows. The results, described online December 7 in Nature, suggest a fundamentally new approach to counteracting Alzheimer’s. Many potential therapies involve drugs that target amyloid-beta, the sticky protein that accumulates in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. In contrast, the new method used on mice causes certain nerve cells to fire at a specific rhythm, generating brain waves that researchers believe may clear A-beta. “This is a very creative and innovative new approach to targeting brain amyloid load in Alzheimer’s,” says geriatric psychiatrist Paul Rosenberg of Johns Hopkins Medicine. But he cautions that the mouse results are preliminary. Neuroscientist Li-Huei Tsai of MIT and colleagues saw that mice engineered to produce lots of A-beta don’t produce as many gamma waves in the hippocampus, a brain structure important for memory. Using a method called optogenetics, the researchers genetically designed certain nerve cells in the hippocampus to fire off signals in response to light. In this way, the researchers induced gamma waves — rhythmic firings 40 times per second. After just an hour of forced gamma waves, the mice had less A-beta in the hippocampus, the researchers found. Further experiments revealed that gamma waves packed a double whammy — they lowered A-beta by both reducing production and enhancing the brain’s ability to clear it. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 22966 - Posted: 12.08.2016