Alzheimer's disease can be detected decades before onset, using a virtual reality test, a study suggests. People aged 18 to 30 were asked to navigate through a virtual maze to test the function of certain brain cells. Those with a high genetic risk of Alzheimer's could be identified by their performance, according to German neuroscientists. The findings could help future research, diagnosis and treatment, they report in the journal Science. The scientists, led by Lukas Kunz of the German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Bonn, say the high risk group navigated the maze differently and had reduced functioning of a type of brain cell involved in spatial navigation. The findings could give an insight into why people with dementia can find navigating the world around them challenging, they say. "Our results could provide a new basic framework for preclinical research on Alzheimer's disease and may provide a neurocognitive explanation of spatial disorientation in Alzheimer's disease," they report in Science. Although genes play a role in dementia, their effects are complex with many unknowns. Dr Laura Phipps of Alzheimer's Research, said the latest study focused on healthy younger people at higher genetic risk of Alzheimer's, suggesting they may already show alterations in spatial navigation several decades before the disease could start. © 2015 BBC.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 21555 - Posted: 10.23.2015

By JAMES GORMAN No offense to tenors, but outside of opera, a high male voice is seldom, if ever, considered seductive. Scientific research has shown that women find deep male voices attractive, and the same is true in other species, like howler monkeys. Stories from Our Advertisers But evolution is often stingy in its gifts, and researchers investigating male competition to reproduce have discovered an intriguing trade-off in some species of howler monkeys: the deeper the call, the smaller the testicles. Jacob Dunn of Cambridge University, one of the leaders of the research, said that species evolved either to make lower-frequency sounds, or have larger testicles, but none had both a very low sound and very large testicles. “It’s a great study,” said Stuart Semple, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Roehampton in London who was not involved in the research. “It shows this really clear trade-off.” Dr. Dunn and other researchers, including W. Tecumseh Fitch, of the University of Vienna, and Leslie A. Knapp, of the University of Utah, studied the size of a bone in the vocal apparatus, which is directly related to how deep the calls are, and the size of testicles, to come up for averages in nine species of howlers. They had been intrigued by great variations in both the size of the howlers’ hyoid bones in museum collections and in the size of the monkeys’ testicles as seen in the field. Dr. Knapp said that some of them are large enough that they are quite obvious “when you look up into the trees.” They used the museum samples of the bone and living monkeys in zoos for testicle measurements, and reported their findings Thursday in the journal Current Biology. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hearing
Link ID: 21554 - Posted: 10.23.2015

Jon Hamilton For a few days this week, a convention center in Chicago became the global epicenter of brain science. Nearly 30,000 scientists swarmed through the vast hallways of the McCormick Place convention center as part of the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting. Among them were Nobel Prize winners, the director of the National Institutes of Health, and scores of researchers regarded as the international rock stars of neuroscience. "It's amazing. I'm a bit overwhelmed," said Kara Furman, a graduate student from Yale who was attending her first Society for Neuroscience meeting. Furman was just one of several hundred neuroscientists I found standing in lines outside the center one afternoon, waiting for shuttle buses. She was pondering a presentation from a few hours earlier that she found "pretty mind-blowing." What was it about? "Using MRI techniques to access dopamine release at the molecular level," she told me, deadpan. Welcome to the five-day annual event that's become known simply as "The Neuro Meeting." It's where brain scientists from around the world come to present their own work and discover the "mind-blowing" research others are doing. And there are thousands of presentations to choose from. "I prepared an itinerary based on my interests and that ran into 20 pages," said Srinivas Bharath from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore, India. © 2015 npr

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 21553 - Posted: 10.23.2015

By Melissa Dahl Next time you feel you are in danger of losing an argument, make some obscure reference to the brain. Any nod to neuroscience will do, even if it doesn’t actually illuminate the problem at hand or prove anything that halfway resembles a point. People tend to find explanations that include references to the brain very convincing, even if those references are mostly nonsense, according to the latest episode of "Psych Crunch," a podcast hosted by psychologist (and Science of Us contributor) Christian Jarrett. Jarrett interviews Sara Hodges, a research psychologist at the University of Oregon and the co-author of a study published this May on the appeal of “superfluous neuroscience information.” In it, Hodges and her colleagues presented students with a variety of explanations for various psychological phenomena. Some of these explanations were not really explanations at all, but rather just a restatement of the facts already presented. The students considered explanations for various quirks of human behavior from the fields of social science, biological science, and neuroscience, and rated how convincing they found each explanation. “The social sciences would refer to something about how people were raised, and the hard-science explanation referred to changes in DNA, the structure of DNA,” Hodges explained to Jarrett. The neuroscience explanation, on the other hand, would pretty much just name an area of the brain thought to be associated with the behavior at hand and leave matters at that, without really explaining anything. Even still, Hodges said, the “neuroscience explanations always came out on top — better than no explanation, better than social science, better than the hard science.” © 2015, New York Media LLC

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 21552 - Posted: 10.23.2015

By Karen Weintraub The short answer is: not yet, but treatments are getting better. Getting older is the leading risk factor for age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss in the United States. Macular degeneration comes in two forms: dry and wet. The dry form is milder and usually has no symptoms, but it can degenerate into the wet form, which is characterized by the growth of abnormal blood vessels in the back of the eye, potentially causing blurriness or vision loss in the center of the field of vision. The best treatment for wet macular degeneration is prevention, said Dr. Rahul N. Khurana, a clinical spokesman for the American Academy of Ophthalmology and a retina specialist practicing in Mountain View, Calif. Not smoking, along with eating dark green vegetables and at least two servings of fish a week, may help reduce the risk of macular degeneration, he said. An annual eye exam can catch macular degeneration while it is still in the dry form, Dr. Khurana said, and vitamins can help prevent it from progressing into the wet form, the main cause of vision loss. Dr. Joan W. Miller, chief of ophthalmology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear, said anyone with a family history of the disease should get a retina check at age 50. People should also get an eye exam if they notice problems like trouble adjusting to the dark or needing more light to read. The federally funded Age-Related Eye Disease Study, published in 2001 and updated in 2013, found that people at high risk for advanced age-related macular degeneration could cut that risk by about 25 percent by taking a supplement that included 500 milligrams of vitamin C, 400 I.U.s of vitamin E, 10 milligrams of lutein, 2 milligrams of zeaxanthin, 80 milligrams of zinc, and 2 milligrams of copper. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 21551 - Posted: 10.23.2015

By Hanae Armitage CHICAGO, ILLINOIS—When prairie voles choose a mate, there’s no turning back—the “love chemical” oxytocin increases in their brains and they devote themselves to only each other. Although scientists have observed the behavioral and chemical side of prairie vole love, the neural networks behind commitment are still a mystery. Now, a group of scientists are working toward clearing up the neuronal backdrop of long-term love, and yesterday, presented their findings here at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Studies have long suggested the nucleus accumbens, a part of the brain involved in reward processing, plays a crucial role in this type of devotion. To get a better look at the neuronal activity of this region, the scientists mounted a small-scale microscope that monitors calcium flux on top of a male prairie vole’s head (the more calcium into the neuron, the more neuronal activity). They saw that when male prairie voles interacted with their special lady vole, neuronal activity in the nucleus accumbens jumped 20% compared with when they interacted with a random female. Upon closer inspection, scientists saw that specific neurons that fired when the voles interacted with their mates stayed silent when they interacting with a different female. The result, though preliminary, indicates that mates stimulate the brain’s reward center in ways that nonmates cannot. © 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 21550 - Posted: 10.23.2015

By Hanae Armitage CHICAGO, ILLINOIS—Aside from a few animals—like pythons and vampire bats—that can sense infrared light, the world of this particular electromagnetic radiation has been off-limits to most creatures. But now, researchers have engineered rodents to see infrared light by implanting sensors in their visual cortex—a first-ever feat announced here yesterday at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Before they wired rats to see infrared light, Duke University neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis and his postdoc Eric Thomson engineered them to feel it. In 2013, they surgically implanted a single infrared-detecting electrode into an area of the rat’s brain that processes touch called the somatosensory cortex. The other end of the sensor, outside the rat’s head, surveyed the environment for infrared light. When it picked up infrared, the sensor sent electrical messages to the rats’ brains that seemed to give them a physical sensation. At first, the rats would groom and rub their whiskers repeatedly whenever the light went on. But after a short while, they stopped fidgeting. They even learned to associate infrared with a reward-based task in which they followed the light to a bowl of water. In the new experiment, the team inserted three additional electrodes, spaced out equally so that the rats could have 360 degrees of infrared perception. When they were primed to perform the same water-reward task, they learned it in just 4 days, compared to 40 days with the single implant. “Frankly, this was a surprise,” Thomson says. “I thought it would be really confusing for [the rats] to have so much stimulation all over their brain, rather than [at] one location.” © 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 21549 - Posted: 10.22.2015

By Jonathan Webb Science reporter, BBC News Crocodiles can sleep with one eye open, according to a study from Australia. In doing so they join a list of animals with this ability, which includes some birds, dolphins and other reptiles. Writing in the Journal of Experimental Biology, the researchers say the crocs are probably sleeping with one brain hemisphere at a time, leaving one half of the brain active and on the lookout. Consistent with this idea, the crocs in the study were more likely to leave one eye open in the presence of a human. They also kept that single eye trained directly on the interloper, said senior author John Lesku. "They definitely monitored the human when they were in the room. But even after the human left the room, the animal still kept its open eye… directed towards the location where the human had been - suggesting that they were keeping an eye out for potential threats." The experiments were done in an aquarium lined with infrared cameras, to monitor juvenile crocodiles day and night. "These animals are not particularly amenable to handling; they are a little snippy. So we had to limit all of our work to juvenile crocodiles, about 40-50cm long," said Dr Lesku, from La Trobe University in Melbourne. As well as placing a human in the room for certain periods, the team tested the effect of having other young crocs around. Sure enough, these also tended to attract the gaze of any reptiles dozing with only one eye. This matches what is known of "unihemispheric sleep" in aquatic mammals, such as walruses and dolphins, which seem to use one eye to make sure they stick together in a group. © 2015 BBC.

Keyword: Sleep; Laterality
Link ID: 21548 - Posted: 10.22.2015

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