By Nicholas Bakalar Sleep apnea may be even more dangerous for women than for men, a new study suggests. Epidemiological studies have linked sleep apnea to heart disease in men, but the differences in risk between men and women have been largely unexplored. For the current study, researchers measured sleep quality electronically in 737 men and 879 women, average age 63, who were free of cardiovascular disease at the start of the study. They also tested all of them for troponin T, a protein that can be released into the bloodstream if the heart is damaged, and whose presence in otherwise healthy people indicates an increased risk for heart disease. They tracked the participants for 14 years, recording incidents of coronary artery disease, heart failure and death from cardiovascular disease or other causes. The study was published in Circulation. Obstructive sleep apnea was independently associated with increased troponin T, heart failure and death in women, but not in men. And in women, but not men, sleep apnea was associated with an enlarged heart, another risk factor for cardiovascular disease. “Most people who have sleep apnea have a lot of other risks for heart disease,” said the lead author, Dr. Amil M. Shah, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard. “But in women, the relationship between sleep apnea and heart disease persisted even after accounting for the other risks.” “Even among women with sleep apnea who don’t get heart failure,” he continued, “it’s associated with changes in the heart that lead to worse outcomes.” © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 21547 - Posted: 10.22.2015

By Roni Jacobson After many lawsuits and a 2012 U.S. Department of Justice settlement, last month an independent review found that antidepressant drug Paxil (paroxetine) is not safe for teenagers. The finding contradicts the conclusions of the initial 2001 drug trial, which the manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline had funded, then used its results to market Paxil as safe for adolescents. The original trial, known as Study 329, is but one high-profile example of pharmaceutical industry influence known to pervade scientific research, including clinical trials the U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires pharma companies to fund in order to assess their products. For that reason, people who read scientific papers as part of their jobs have come to rely on meta-analyses, supposedly thorough reviews summarizing the evidence from multiple trials, rather than trust individual studies. But a new analysis casts doubt on that practice as well, finding that the vast majority of meta-analyses of antidepressants have some industry link, with a corresponding suppression of negative results. The latest study, published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, which evaluated 185 meta-analyses, found that one third of them were written by pharma industry employees. “We knew that the industry would fund studies to promote its products, but it’s very different to fund meta-analyses,” which “have traditionally been a bulwark of evidence-based medicine,” says John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University School of Medicine and co-author of the study. “It’s really amazing that there is such a massive influx of influence in this field.” © 2015 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 21546 - Posted: 10.22.2015

In a study of mice, scientists discovered that a brain region called the thalamus may be critical for filtering out distractions. The study, published in Nature and partially funded by the National Institutes of Health, paves the way to understanding how defects in the thalamus might underlie symptoms seen in patients with autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and schizophrenia. “We are constantly bombarded by information from our surroundings,” said James Gnadt, Ph.D., program director at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). “This study shows how the circuits of the brain might decide which sensations to pay attention to.” Thirty years ago Dr. Francis Crick proposed that the thalamus “shines a light” on regions of the cortex, which readies them for the task at hand, leaving the rest of the brain’s circuits to idle in darkness. “We typically use a very small percentage of incoming sensory stimuli to guide our behavior, but in many neurological disorders the brain is overloaded,” said Michael Halassa, M.D., Ph.D., the study’s senior author and an assistant professor at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. “It gets a lot of sensory input that is not well-controlled because this filtering function might be broken.” Neuroscientists have long believed that an area at the very front of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (PFC) selects what information to focus on, but how this happens remains unknown. One common theory is that neurons in the PFC do this by sending signals to cells in the sensory cortices located on the outer part of the brain. However, Dr. Halassa’s team discovered that PFC neurons may instead tune the sensitivity of a mouse brain to sights and sounds by sending signals to inhibitory thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN) cells located deep inside the brain.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 21545 - Posted: 10.22.2015

By Tara Parker-Pope Children who regularly use antibiotics gain weight faster than those who have never taken the drugs, according to new research that suggests childhood antibiotics may have a lasting effect on body weight well into adulthood. The study, published in the International Journal of Obesity, examined the electronic medical records of 163,820 children ages 3 to 18, counting antibiotic prescriptions, body weight and height. The records, which covered pediatric exams from 2001 through 2012, showed that one in five — over 30,000 children — had been prescribed antibiotics seven or more times. By the time those children reached age 15, they weighed, on average, about 3 pounds more than children who had received no antibiotics. While earlier studies have suggested a link between antibiotics and childhood weight gain, they typically have relied on a mother’s memories of her child’s antibiotic use. The new research is significant because it’s based on documented use of antibiotics in a child’s medical record. “Not only did antibiotics contribute to weight gain at all ages, but the contribution of antibiotics to weight gain gets stronger as you get older,” said Dr. Brian S. Schwartz, the first author and a professor in the department of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Scientists have known for years that antibiotic use promotes weight gain in livestock, which is why large food producers include low doses of antibiotics in the diets of their animals. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 21544 - Posted: 10.22.2015

By Kerry Grens Eric Altschuler has been staring at mirrors. Specifically, those of van Eyck, Caravaggio, Parmigianino, Escher, and other painters. The Temple University professor and his colleague V.S. Ramachandran of the University of California, San Diego, are on the hunt for novel ways that artists have presented reflections, as a means of seeking out potentially new modes of therapy. Ramachandran and Altschuler have pioneered methods of using a mirror to alleviate phantom limb pain and other conditions. A patient sits at the side of the mirror with, say, his right arm reflected in front of the glass. The patient peeks around the corner to view the reflection as if he were looking at his left arm—a setup Ramachandran and Altschuler call the parasagittal reflection. In their cataloging of mirrors in art, presented as a poster at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting held in Chicago this week, Altschuler and Ramachandran found that for 500 or more years, painters presented frontal plane reflections (a straight-on view in the mirror). It wasn’t until 1946 that something different—the parasagittal view, in particular—appeared in fine art: in M.C. Escher’s lithograph, “Magic Mirror,” Altschuler and Ramachandran reported at SfN. The viewer has an angled view at a ball reflected in a mirror, with an identical ball positioned symmetrically behind the mirror—very similar to the concept of mirror therapy. “Magic Mirror” was produced 50 years before Ramachandran first published on mirror therapy, and even then Ramachandran was unaware of the artwork. “Escher was very clever,” Altschuler told The Scientist, noting that perhaps there are other novel approaches just waiting to be discovered in paintings. © 1986-2015 The Scientist

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 21543 - Posted: 10.22.2015

Keikantse Matlhagela Susumu Tonegawa unlocked the genetic secrets behind antibodies' diverse structures, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1987. Having since moved fields, he tells Keikantse Matlhagela about his latest work on the neuroscience of happy and sad memories. You started as a chemist, then you moved into molecular biology and now you are a neuroscientist. Why change fields? Strangely, the only people to ask me about this are journalists — my students never ask. I see myself as a scientist who is interested in what's going on inside of us. It doesn't matter whether it is chemistry or immunology or neuroscience, I just do research on what I find interesting. The switch from chemistry to immunology did not seem like a big shift when I was young, but immunology to neuroscience was. After about 15 years spent researching immunology I wanted to explore an area of science where there are still big, unresolved questions. The brain is probably the most mysterious subject there is. Do you keep up to date with the field in which you won your Nobel prize? I am sorry to say that I haven't been paying a lot of attention to immunology in recent years because I am preoccupied with my work on memory. I have friends, of course, from that time — very close friends. But my friends are not young. Even though they are experts, they are also retired. We tend not to talk about immunology a whole lot. © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 21542 - Posted: 10.22.2015

Sara Reardon Naked mole rats are among the ugliest creatures in the animal kingdom, and they engage in acts that seem repulsive — such as eating one another’s, and their own, faeces. Now researchers have found one biological motivation for this behaviour. When a queen mole rat’s subordinates feed on her hormone-filled faeces, the resulting oestrogen boost causes the beta rats to take care of the queen’s pups, according to results presented on 18 October at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, Illinois. Like bees, naked mole rats live in eusocial colonies, with only one queen rat and a few males that can reproduce. The rest of the colony consists of dozens of infertile subordinates that help with tasks such as foraging and defending the nest. The subordinate rats also take care of the queen’s pups as though the babies were their own: they build the nests, lick the pups and keep them warm with their body heat. Because they have no mature sex organs, subordinate rats cannot produce the hormones that would usually drive parenting behaviour. To look at what generates the rats’ caring ways, animal biologist Akiyuki Watarai and behavioural scientist Takefumi Kikusui at Azabu University in Japan played recordings of crying mole-rat pups to subordinate rats. Animals whose queens had just given birth paid more attention to the crying than those from other groups, suggesting that the pregnancy itself triggered subordinates’ maternal instincts. © 2015 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 21541 - Posted: 10.21.2015

By Emily Underwood CHICAGO—In 1898, Italian biologist Camillo Golgi found something odd as he examined slices of brain tissue under his microscope. Weblike lattices, now known as "perineuronal nets," surrounded many neurons, but he could not discern their purpose. Many dismissed the nets as an artifact of Golgi's staining technique; for the next century, they remained largely obscure. Today, here at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, researchers offered tantalizing new evidence that holes in these nets could be where long-term memories are stored. Scientists now know that perineuronal nets (PNNS) are scaffolds of linked proteins and sugars that resemble cartilage, says neuroscientist Sakina Palida, a graduate student in Roger Tsien's lab at the University of California,San Diego, and co-investigator on the study. Although it's still unclear precisely what the nets do, a growing body of research suggests that PNNs may control the formation and function of synapses, the microscopic junctions between neurons that allow cells to communicate, and that may play a role in learning and memory, Palida says. One of the most pressing questions in neuroscience is how memories—particularly long-term ones—are stored in the brain, given that most of the proteins inside neurons are constantly being replaced, refreshing themselves anywhere from every few days to every few hours. To last a lifetime, Palida says, some scientists believe that memories must somehow be encoded in a persistent, stable molecular structure. Inspired in part by evidence that destroying the nets in some brain regions can reverse deeply ingrained behaviors, Palida’s adviser Tsien, a Nobel-prize-winning chemist, recently began to explore whether PNNs could be that structure. Adding to the evidence were a number of recent studies linking abnormal PNNs to brain disorders including schizophrenia and Costello syndrome, a form of intellectual disability. © 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Brain imaging
Link ID: 21540 - Posted: 10.21.2015

Jon Hamilton Babies born prematurely are much more likely than other children to develop autism, ADHD and emotional disorders. Now researchers think they may have an idea about how that could happen. There's evidence that preemies are born with weak connections in some critical brain networks, including those involved in focus, social interactions, and emotional processing, researchers reported at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago. A study comparing MRI scans of the brains of 58 full-term babies with those of 76 babies born at least 10 weeks early found that "preterm infants indeed have abnormal structural brain connections," says Cynthia Rogers, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "We were really interested that the tracts that we know connect areas that are involved in attention and emotional networks were heavily affected," Rogers says. That would make it harder for these brain areas to work together to focus on a goal or read social cues or regulate emotions, she says. The team used two different types of MRI to study the nerve fibers that carry signals from one part of the brain to another and measure how well different areas of the brain are communicating. Full-term infants were scanned shortly after they were born, while premature infants were scanned near their expected due date. The researchers are continuing to monitor the brains of the children in their study to see which ones actually develop disorders. © 2015 NPR

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Brain imaging
Link ID: 21539 - Posted: 10.21.2015

By Hanae Armitage CHICAGO, ILLINOIS—Huntingtons disease, a neurological condition caused by brain-destroying mutant proteins, starts with mood swings and twitching and ends in dementia and death. The condition, which afflicts about 30,000 Americans, has no cure. But now, a new gene-editing method that many believe will lead to a Nobel Prize has been shown to effectively halt production of the defective proteins in mice, leading to hope that a potent therapy for Huntingtons is on the distant horizon. That new method is CRISPR, which uses RNA-guided enzymes to snip out or add segments of DNA to a cell. In the first time it has been applied to Huntingtons disease, CRISPR’s results are “remarkably encouraging,” says neuroscientist Nicole Déglon of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, who led the mouse study, results of which she and her co-researcher Nicolas Merienne shared yesterday at the Society for Neuroscience Conference in Chicago, Illinois. As neurological diseases go, Huntingtons is an ideal candidate for CRISPR therapy, because the disease is determined by a single gene, Déglon notes. A mutation in the gene, which codes for a normally helpful brain protein called huntingtin, consists of different numbers of “tandem repeats,” repeating segments of DNA that cause the protein to fold into a shape that is toxic to the brain. Déglon and her team wondered whether CRISPR could halt production of this dangerous molecule. Using a virus as a delivery vehicle, the researchers infected two separate groups of healthy adult mice with a mutant huntingtin gene, but only one group received the therapy: a CRISPR “cassette,” which includes DNA for the gene-editing enzyme Cas9 and the RNA to target the huntingtin gene. © 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 21538 - Posted: 10.21.2015

Alan Hoffman says nilotinib has changed his life. Just weeks after he started taking the drug in a clinical trial, he began to feel himself recovering from his Parkinson’s disease. The retired professor of social science first started to show the signs of Parkinson’s in 1997. Over the years, his symptoms worsened. “I couldn’t get out of bed without my wife,” Hoffman says. Once a prolific reader, devouring four or five books a week, Hoffman found himself unable to keep his attention on even a short magazine article. His body became increasingly rigid, and he started to lose his sense of balance. “I fell a lot,” he says. And it affected his social life. The disorder was such a struggle, Hoffman says he considered taking his own life. He tried a range of medications, which eased his symptoms to varying degrees. In 2008, he had surgery to implant an electrode into his brain. The deep brain stimulation that followed helped with the rigidity, he says. But deep brain stimulation doesn’t offer a cure – the brain cells continue to die. So Hoffman agreed to join a six-month clinical trial of nilotinib – a drug typically used to treat leukaemia. Nilotinib blocks a protein that interferes with lysosomes – cell structures that destroy harmful proteins. Researchers behind the trial think that nilotinib can free up lysosomes to do a better job of clearing out proteins associated with Parkinson’s disease. (For a full report on the effect of the drug see “People with Parkinson’s walk again after promising drug trial”.) © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 21537 - Posted: 10.21.2015

By WILLIAM GRIMES The first show at the Museum of Food and Drink’s new space in Brooklyn is “Flavor: Making It and Faking It,” and it wastes no time in getting to the point. “What makes your favorite food so delicious?” the text on a large free-standing panel near the entrance asks. The one-word answer: “Chemicals.” The word is deflating. It’s a little like being told that the human soul has a specific atomic weight. Chemicals? Yuck. But maybe not. Flavors come in two varieties, natural and artificial, but what do the words really mean? This is the looming question in an exhibition about food and culture that opens next Wednesday, in a museum that until now has been a free-floating idea rather than a building with an address. The show follows the history of lab-created flavors from the middle of the 19th century, when German scientists created artificial vanilla, to the present day, when the culinary spin doctors known as flavorists tweak and blend the myriad tastes found in virtually every food product on supermarket shelves. Flavor is a complex, beguiling subject. At one of several “smell machines” throughout the exhibition, where specific aromas are emitted through silver hoses at the push of a button, visitors learn that coffee gets a little lift — the je ne sais quoi that makes it irresistible in the morning — from a sulfur compound also found in skunk spray. Tiny edible pellets distributed from gumball machines send the message in tactile form. This is an exhibition that is not just hands-on, but tongue-on and nostrils-on. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 21536 - Posted: 10.21.2015

Mark Easton Home editor An attempt by UN officials to get countries to decriminalise the possession and use of all drugs has been foiled, the BBC can reveal. A paper from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has been withdrawn after pressure from at least one country. The document, which was leaked, recommends that UN members consider "decriminalising drug and possession for personal consumption". It argued "arrest and incarceration are disproportionate measures". The document was drawn up by Dr Monica Beg, chief of the HIV/AIDs section of the UNODC in Vienna. It was prepared for an international harm reduction conference currently being held in Kuala Lumpur. The UNODC oversees international drugs conventions and offers guidance on compliance. Sources within the UNODC have told the BBC the document was never sanctioned by the organisation as policy. One senior figure within the agency described Dr Beg as "a middle-ranking official" who was offering a professional viewpoint. The document, on headed agency notepaper, claims it "clarifies the position of UNODC to inform country responses to promote a health and human-rights approach to drug policy". "Treating drug use for non-medical purposes and possession for personal consumption as criminal offences has contributed to public health problems and induced negative consequences for safety, security, and human rights," the document states. © 2015 BBC.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 21535 - Posted: 10.21.2015

By LISA SANDERS, M.D. The middle-aged couple knocked at the door of the townhouse. When no one answered, the woman took her key and let them in. She called her daughter’s name as she hurried through the rooms. They had been trying to reach their 27-year-old daughter by phone all day, and she hadn’t answered. They found her upstairs, lying in bed and mumbling incoherently. The mother rushed over, but her daughter showed no signs of recognition. She and her husband quickly carried her to the car. Four months before, the mother told the emergency-room doctor at SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital in St. Louis, her daughter had a procedure called gastric-sleeve surgery to help her lose weight. She came home after just a couple of days and felt great. She looked bright and eager. Once she started to eat, though, nausea and vomiting set in. After almost every meal, she would throw up. It’s an unusual but well-known complication of this kind of surgery. The cause is not clearly understood, but the phenomenon is sometimes linked to reflux. The surgeon tried different medications to stop the nausea and vomiting and to reduce the acid in her stomach, but they didn’t help. She had the surgery in order to lose weight, but now she was losing weight too quickly. After a month of vomiting, her doctors thought maybe she had developed gallstones — a common problem after rapid weight loss. But even after her gallbladder was removed, the young woman continued to vomit after eating. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Obesity
Link ID: 21534 - Posted: 10.21.2015

Susan Gaidos CHICAGO — Eating a high-fat diet as a youngster can affect learning and memory during adulthood, studies have shown. But new findings suggest such diets may not have long-lasting effects. Rats fed a high-fat diet for nearly a year recovered their ability to navigate their surroundings. University of Texas at Dallas neuroscientist Erica Underwood tested spatial memory for rats fed a high-fat diet for either 12 weeks or 52 weeks, immediately after weaning. After rats placed in a chamber-filled box containing Lego-like toys became familiar with the box, the researchers moved the toys to new chambers. Later, when placed in the box, rats who ate high-fat foods for 12 weeks appeared confused and had difficulty finding the toys. But rats that ate high-fat foods for nearly a year performed as well as those fed a normal diet. Underwood repeated the experiment, posing additional spatial memory tests to new groups of rats. The findings were the same: Over the long-term, rats on high-fat diets recovered their ability to learn and remember. Studies of brain cells revealed that rats on the long-term high-fat diet showed reduced excitability in nerve cells from the hippocampus, the same detrimental effects seen in rats on the short-term high-fat diet. “The physiology that should create a dumber animal is there, but not the behavior,” said Lucien Thompson of UT Dallas, who oversaw the study. Underwood and Thompson speculate that some other part of the brain may be compensating for this reduction in neural response. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2015.

Keyword: Obesity; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 21533 - Posted: 10.21.2015

By BENEDICT CAREY More than two million people in the United States have a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and the treatment for most of them mainly involves strong doses of antipsychotic drugs that blunt hallucinations and delusions but can come with unbearable side effects, like severe weight gain or debilitating tremors. Stories from Our Advertisers Now, results of a landmark government-funded study call that approach into question. The findings, from by far the most rigorous trial to date conducted in the United States, concluded that schizophrenia patients who received smaller doses of antipsychotic medication and a bigger emphasis on one-on-one talk therapy and family support made greater strides in recovery over the first two years of treatment than patients who got the usual drug-focused care. The report, to be published on Tuesday in The American Journal of Psychiatry and funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, comes as Congress debates mental health reform and as interest in the effectiveness of treatments grows amid a debate over the possible role of mental illness in mass shootings. Its findings have already trickled out to government agencies: On Friday, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services published in its influential guidelines a strong endorsement of the combined-therapy approach. Mental health reform bills now being circulated in Congress “mention the study by name,” said Dr. Robert K. Heinssen, the director of services and intervention research at the centers, who oversaw the research. In 2014, Congress awarded $25 million in block grants to the states to be set aside for early-intervention mental health programs. So far, 32 states have begun using those grants to fund combined-treatment services, Dr. Heinssen said. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 21532 - Posted: 10.20.2015

By Brook Borel and Spectrum In a lab in Sacramento, California, a wall of plastic boxes lined with corncob bedding holds around 800 mice. Even in this clean and bright room, the smell of so many mice concentrated in one place is overpowering — pungent, and familiar to anyone who has spent time with a pet hamster or gerbil. Most of the boxes hold four adult mice, which flit about, noses twitching as they stare out at the humans staring in. But in one of the boxes, a sleek white mouse is tucked in a corner suckling her litter of half a dozen or so squirmy, dark-furred pups. In most research labs, the fate of these pups would be determined by their sex. The males would spend their lives as test subjects. The females would either be kept for breeding or simply euthanized because they’re not ideal for experiments: They’re supposedly more difficult to work with and generate less consistent data than males do, and it costs too much to maintain both males and females, which must be housed separately. Or so the rationale has gone. But these little female pups are different. The lab where they live is run by Jill Silverman and Mu Yang, researchers at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) MIND Institute. The two scientists study the behavior of about 15 autism mouse models, and they have always included both males and females in their work. When the pups get older, they will learn to paddle through water mazes or bury black marbles in their bedding, giving researchers insight into how their memory and behavior compare with that of typical mice. Finding the best animal behavioral models of autism is essential because behavior is at the heart of the disorder. In people, autism is diagnosed based on behavioral criteria: abnormal social interactions, difficulties with communication and repetitive actions. © 2015 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 21531 - Posted: 10.20.2015

Mr Tickle can’t bamboozle a baby. Unlike grown-ups, young infants don’t let the positioning of their bodies confuse their sense of touch. If adults who can see are touched on each hand in quick succession while their hands are crossed, they can find it hard to name which hand was touched first. Adults who have been blind from birth don’t have this difficulty, but people who become blind later in life have the same trouble as those who can still see. “That suggests that early on in life, something to do with visual experience is crucial in setting up a typical way of perceiving touch,” says Andrew Bremner at Goldsmiths, University of London. To investigate how this develops in infancy, Bremner and his colleagues compared how babies reacted to having one foot tickled. With their legs crossed over, babies aged 6 months moved the foot being tickled half of the time. But 4-month-olds did better, moving the tickled foot 70 per cent of the time – as often as they did with their legs uncrossed. The team concludes that at 4 months, babies haven’t yet learned to relate what they touch to the physical space that their body occupies. For many adults, the concept might be difficult to envision. “It’s like imagining that you feel a touch on your body, but not really knowing how that’s related to what you’re looking at,” says Bremner. “It’s almost like you have multiple sensory worlds: a visual world, an auditory world and a tactile world, which are separate and not combined in space.” © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 21530 - Posted: 10.20.2015

Susan Gaidos CHICAGO — Teens like high-tech gadgets so much that they often use them all at once. While doing homework or playing video games, teens may listen to music or watch TV, all the while texting their friends. Some of these multitaskers think they are boosting their ability to attend to multiple activities, but in fact are more likely impairing their ability to focus, psychologist Mona Moisala of the University of Helsinki, reported October 18 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Moisala and colleagues tested 149 adolescents and young adults, ages 13 to 24, who regularly juggle multiple forms of media or play video games daily. Each participant had to focus attention on sentences (some logical, some illogical) under three conditions: without any distractions, while listening to distracting sounds, and while both listening to a sentence and reading another sentence. Using functional MRI to track brain activity, the researchers found that daily gaming had no effect on participants’ ability to focus. Those who juggle multiple forms of electronic media, however, had more trouble paying attention. Multitaskers performed lower overall, even when they weren’t being distracted. Brain images showed that the multitaskers also showed a higher level of activity in the right prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain implicated in problem solving and in processing complex thoughts and emotions. “Participants with the highest reported frequency of multimedia use showed the highest levels of brain activation in this area,” Moisala said. “In addition, these adolescents did worse on the task.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2015

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 21529 - Posted: 10.20.2015

An expensive cancer drug may reverse late-stage Parkinson’s disease, enabling participants in a small clinical trial to speak and walk again for the first time in years. While there are several treatments for the symptoms of Parkinson’s, if confirmed this would be the first time a drug has worked on the causes of the disease. “We’ve seen patients at end stages of the disease coming back to life,” says Charbel Moussa of Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington DC, who led the trial. The drug, called nilotinib, works by boosting the brain’s own “garbage disposal system” to clear proteins that accumulate in the brains of people with Parkinson’s disease, says Moussa. These proteins are thought to trigger the death of brain cells that make molecules like dopamine that are needed for movement and other functions. Nilotinib is already approved to treat cancer – it blocks a protein that drives chronic myeloid leukaemia. It also blocks another protein that interferes with lysosomes – cell structures that destroy harmful proteins. Moussa thinks that nilotinib can free up lysosomes to do a better job of clearing out proteins associated with Parkinson’s disease. Tests in animals showed promise, so Moussa, his colleague Fernando Pagan and their team set up a small trial of 12 volunteers with Parkinson’s disease or a similar condition called dementia with Lewy bodies. The trial was designed to test only the safety of the oral drug, which was given as a daily dose for six months. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 21528 - Posted: 10.20.2015