By Sandra G. Boodman A Braced by her partner, Suzanne Tobin shuffled back to her car parked in the cavernous garage at Johns Hopkins Hospital late on the evening of Oct. 22, 2013, distraught about what might happen next. Tobin, then 60, had been driven by her partner, James Rapp, from their Germantown home to the Hopkins ER in hopes that doctors there could determine what was causing her relentless deterioration. Three months earlier, Tobin had held a full-time job as a copy editor at AARP in the District. She spent an hour before work striding around the Mall for exercise. Now she could no longer walk unassisted, her speech was nearly unintelligible and her left hand was so weak she could no longer hold a book. Doctors in suburban Maryland had diagnosed a stroke — or possibly a series of strokes — but were unable to explain why Tobin kept getting worse by the week. Her neurologist counseled patience and offered to prescribe antidepressants, drugs that Tobin had told him she had taken for years. An occupational therapist she’d been seeing had expressed alarm; stroke patients tended to plateau or even improve over time, not to experience a steady downward spiral. “You need to get a new neurologist,” she advised Tobin. Tobin and Rapp decided their best bet was to head to Hopkins in Baltimore. But after 12 hours and a battery of tests, including a CT, MRI and other scans, emergency physicians sent Tobin home. They found no new stroke — an earlier MRI that Rapp had brought along appeared to show an old one — nor any other problem that would require immediate hospitalization. They advised her to follow up with her regular doctors.

Keyword: Stroke; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 20823 - Posted: 04.21.2015

By David Grimm In a decision that effectively recognizes chimpanzees as legal persons for the first time, a New York judge today granted a pair of Stony Brook University lab animals the right to have their day in court. The ruling marks the first time in U.S. history that an animal has been covered by a writ of habeus corpus, which typically allows human prisoners to challenge their detention. The judicial action could force the university, which is believed to be holding the chimps, to release the primates, and could sway additional judges to do the same with other research animals. “This is a big step forward to getting what we are ultimately seeking: the right to bodily liberty for chimpanzees and other cognitively complex animals,” says Natalie Prosin, the Executive Director of the animal rights organization, the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP), which filed the case. “We got our foot in the door. And no matter what happens, that door can never be completely shut again.” Richard Cupp, a law professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, and a noted opponent of personhood for animals, cautions against reading too much into the ruling, however. “The judge may merely want more information to make a decision on the legal personhood claim, and may have ordered a hearing simply as a vehicle for hearing out both parties in more depth,” he writes in an email to Science. “It would be quite surprising if the judge intended to make a momentous substantive finding that chimpanzees are legal persons if the judge has not yet heard the other side’s arguments.” © 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 20822 - Posted: 04.21.2015

By ALAN SCHWARZ Fading fast at 11 p.m., Elizabeth texted her dealer and waited just 30 minutes for him to reach her third-floor New York apartment. She handed him a wad of twenties and fifties, received a tattered envelope of pills, and returned to her computer. Her PowerPoint needed another four hours. Investors in her health-technology start-up wanted re-crunched numbers, a presentation begged for bullet points and emails from global developers would keep arriving well past midnight. She gulped down one pill — pale orange, like baby aspirin — and then, reconsidering, took one of the pinks, too. “O.K., now I can work,” Elizabeth exhaled. Several minutes later, she felt her brain snap to attention. She pushed her glasses up her nose and churned until 7 a.m. Only then did she sleep for 90 minutes, before arriving at her office at 9. The pills were versions of the drug Adderall, an amphetamine-based stimulant prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that many college students have long used illicitly while studying. Now, experts say, stimulant abuse is graduating into the work force. But in interviews, dozens of people in a wide spectrum of professions said they and co-workers misused stimulants like Adderall, Vyvanse and Concerta to improve work performance. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs or access to the medication. Doctors and medical ethicists expressed concern for misusers’ health, as stimulants can cause anxiety, addiction and hallucinations when taken in high doses. But they also worried about added pressure in the workplace — where the use by some pressures more to join the trend. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; ADHD
Link ID: 20821 - Posted: 04.20.2015

By Alix Spiegel In 1979, when Jim Stigler was still a graduate student at the University of Michigan, he went to Japan to research teaching methods and found himself sitting in the back row of a crowded fourth-grade math class. “The teacher was trying to teach the class how to draw three-dimensional cubes on paper,” Stigler explains, “and one kid was just totally having trouble with it. His cube looked all cockeyed, so the teacher said to him, ‘Why don’t you go put yours on the board?’ So right there I thought, ‘That’s interesting! He took the one who can’t do it and told him to go and put it on the board.’ ” Stigler knew that in American classrooms, it was usually the best kid in the class who was invited to the board. And so he watched with interest as the Japanese student dutifully came to the board and started drawing, but still couldn’t complete the cube. Every few minutes, the teacher would ask the rest of the class whether the kid had gotten it right, and the class would look up from their work, and shake their heads no. And as the period progressed, Stigler noticed that he — Stigler — was getting more and more anxious. In Japanese classrooms, teachers consciously design tasks that are slightly beyond the capabilities of the students they teach, so the students can actually experience struggling with something just outside their reach. “I realized that I was sitting there starting to perspire,” he says, “because I was really empathizing with this kid. I thought, ‘This kid is going to break into tears!’ ” © 2015 KQED Inc.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 20820 - Posted: 04.20.2015

By LISA FELDMAN BARRETT and JOLIE WORMWOOD THE Justice Department recently analyzed eight years of shootings by Philadelphia police officers. Its report contained two sobering statistics: Fifteen percent of those shot were unarmed; and in half of these cases, an officer reportedly misidentified a “nonthreatening object (e.g., a cellphone) or movement (e.g., tugging at the waistband)” as a weapon. Many factors presumably contribute to such shootings, ranging from carelessness to unconscious bias to explicit racism, all of which have received considerable attention of late, and deservedly so. But there is a lesser-known psychological phenomenon that might also explain some of these shootings. It’s called “affective realism”: the tendency of your feelings to influence what you see — not what you think you see, but the actual content of your perceptual experience. Affective realism illustrates a common misconception about the working of the human brain. In everyday life, your brain seems to be a reactive organ. You stroll past a round red object in the produce section of a supermarket and react by reaching for an apple. A police officer sees a weapon and reacts by raising his gun. Stimulus is followed by response. But the brain doesn’t really work this way. The brain is a predictive organ. A majority of your brain activity consists of predictions about the world — thousands of them at a time — based on your past experience. These predictions are not deliberate prognostications like “the Red Sox will win the World Series,” but unconscious anticipations of every sight, sound and other sensation you might encounter in every instant. These neural “guesses” largely shape what you see, hear and otherwise perceive. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision; Emotions
Link ID: 20819 - Posted: 04.20.2015

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN Most newly stylish coinages carry with them some evidence of grammatical trauma. Consider “affluencer,” “selfie,” “impactful.” Notes of cynicism and cutesiness come through. But every now and then a bright exception to this dispiriting routine appears. A rookie word makes its big-league debut, a stadium of pedants prepares to peg it with tomatoes and — nothing. A halfhearted heckle. The new word looks only passably pathetic. Maddeningly, it has heft. “Mindfulness” may be that hefty word now, one that can’t readily be dismissed as trivia or propaganda. Yes, it’s current among jaw-grinding Fortune 500 executives who take sleeping pills and have “leadership coaches,” as well as with the moneyed earnest, who shop at Whole Foods, where Mindful magazine is on the newsstand alongside glossies about woodworking and the environment. It looks like nothing more than the noun form of “mindful” — the proper attitude toward the London subway’s gaps — but “mindfulness” has more exotic origins. In the late 19th century, the heyday of both the British Empire and Victorian Orientalism, a British magistrate in Galle, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), with the formidable name of Thomas William Rhys Davids, found himself charged with adjudicating Buddhist ecclesiastical disputes. He set out to learn Pali, a Middle Indo-Aryan tongue and the liturgical language of Theravada, an early branch of Buddhism. In 1881, he thus pulled out “mindfulness” — a synonym for “attention” from 1530 — as an approximate translation of the Buddhist concept of sati. The translation was indeed rough. Sati, which Buddhists consider the first of seven factors of enlightenment, means, more nearly, “memory of the present,” which didn’t track in tense-preoccupied English. “Mindfulness” stuck — but may have saddled the subtle sati with false-note connotations of Victorian caution, or even obedience. (“Mind your manners!”) © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 20818 - Posted: 04.20.2015

Carl Zimmer In 1998, Dr. Philip A. Starr started putting electrodes in people’s brains. A neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Starr was treating people with Parkinson’s disease, which slowly destroys essential bits of brain tissue, robbing people of control of their bodies. At first, drugs had given his patients some relief, but now they needed more help. After the surgery, Dr. Starr closed up his patients’ skulls and switched on the electrodes, releasing a steady buzz of electric pulses in their brains. For many patients, the effect was immediate. “We have people who, when they’re not taking their meds, can be frozen,” said Dr. Starr. “When we turn on the stimulator, they start walking.” First developed in the early 1990s, deep brain stimulation, or D.B.S., was approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treating Parkinson’s disease in 2002. Since its invention, about 100,000 people have received implants. While D.B.S. doesn’t halt Parkinson’s, it can turn back the clock a few years for many patients. Yet despite its clear effectiveness, scientists like Dr. Starr have struggled to understand what D.B.S. actually does to the brain. “We do D.B.S. because it works,” said Dr. Starr, “but we don’t really know how.” In a recent experiment, Dr. Starr and his colleagues believe they found a clue. D.B.S. may counter Parkinson’s disease by liberating the brain from a devastating electrical lock-step. The new research, published on Monday in Nature Neuroscience, may help scientists develop better treatments for Parkinson’s disease. It may also help researchers adapt D.B.S. for treatment of such brain disorders as depression and obsessive compulsive disorder. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 20817 - Posted: 04.18.2015

|By Julie Hecht Unlike porcupines, dogs are a relatively hands-on (actually, paws-on) species, both with one another and with us. YouTube has numerous videos of dogs essentially saying, “Just keep petting me, please. Yes, that’s it…more.” But this relationship is not one-sided. Many studies find that positive interactions between people and dogs can be beneficial for both species. Increases in β-endorphin (beta-endorphin), oxytocin and dopamine—neurochemicals associated with positive feelings and bonding—have been observed in both dogs and people after enjoyable interactions like petting, play and talking. Essentially, interacting with a dog, particularly a known dog, can have some of the same psychophysiological markers as when two emotionally attached people spend time together. But do certain types of interactions have an outsized impact? Dogs are incredibly attentive to human faces and, in some cases, even specific facial expressions. This seemingly routine, benign behavior—your dog turning to gaze on your beautiful face as you do his or hers—could actually hold a very important piece of the puzzle in our relationship with dogs, suggests a study published this week in Science. The new study, by Miho Nagasawa of Azabu University in Japan and colleagues, builds on Nagasawa’s previous work, published in Hormones and Behavior in 2009, that found owners and dogs sharing a long mutual gaze had higher levels of oxytocin in their urine than owners of dogs giving a shorter gaze. (Oxytocin, a humble peptide of nine amino acids that is sometimes called the “cuddle hormone,” has been implicated in social bonding and is instrumental to the cascade of hormonal changes leading up to and following birth.) Nagasawa and her colleagues concluded that their finding was “a manifestation of attachment behavior.” © 2015 Scientific American

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 20816 - Posted: 04.18.2015

By Chris Cesare The beautiful color of a sunset might be more than just a pretty picture. It could be a signal to our bodies that it’s time to reset our internal clock, the biological ticktock that governs everything from sleep patterns to digestion. That’s the implication of a new study in mice that shows these small rodents use light’s changing color to set their own clocks, a finding that researchers expect will hold for humans, too. “I think this work opens up how we're just starting to scratch the surface and look at the environmental adaptations of clocks,” says Carrie Partch, a biochemist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the new study. Scientists have long known about the role light plays in governing circadian rhythms, which synchronize life’s ebb and flow with the 24-hour day. But they weren’t sure how different properties of light, such as color and brightness, contributed to winding up that clock. “As a sort of common sense notion people have assumed that the clock somehow measures the amount of light in the outside world,” says Tim Brown, a neuroscientist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom and an author of the new study. “Our idea was that it might be doing something more sophisticated than that.” To find out, Brown and his colleagues targeted an area in the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN, a region common to all vertebrates. It’s where the body keeps time using chemical and electrical rhythms that last, on average, 24 hours. The team wanted to know if color signals sent from the eyes reached the SCN and whether that information affected the timing of the clock. © 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Vision
Link ID: 20815 - Posted: 04.18.2015

By KATIE THOMAS Last fall, an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry caught the attention of specialists who treat borderline personality disorder, an intractable condition for which no approved drug treatment exists. The article seemed to offer a glimmer of hope: The antipsychotic drug Seroquel XR reduced some of the disorder’s worst symptoms in a significant number of patients. “It was an exciting development,” recalled Mark F. Lenzenweger, a professor at Binghamton University and Weill Cornell Medical College and an expert in borderline personality disorder. In the realm of clinical trials, however, reality is sometimes far messier than the tidy summaries in medical journals. A closer look at the Seroquel XR study shows just how complicated things can get when a clinical trial involves psychiatric disorders and has its roots in intersecting and sometimes competing interests: a drug company looking to hold onto sales of a best-selling drug, a prominent academic with strong ties to the pharmaceutical industry and a university under fire for failing to protect human study subjects. The trial was paid for by AstraZeneca, the maker of Seroquel XR, and was conducted by Dr. S. Charles Schulz, the head of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota. Two of the study participants were living in a residential treatment facility for sex offenders and may have lied about their diagnosis to qualify for the trial. One of those men slipped the drugs to unwitting treatment center residents and staff, an alarming development that nevertheless did not seem to ruffle the university oversight board that is charged with looking into such episodes. The University of Minnesota’s clinical trial practices are now under intense scrutiny. In February, a panel of outside experts excoriated the university for failing to properly oversee clinical trials and for paying inadequate attention to the protection of vulnerable subjects. The review, commissioned by the university after years of criticism of its research practices, singled out Dr. Schulz and his department of psychiatry, describing “a culture of fear” that pervaded the department. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 20814 - Posted: 04.18.2015

Mothers may influence the mood and behaviour of their babies through their breast milk, researchers say. There's growing evidence that mother's milk doesn't just affect the growth of a baby's body "but also areas of their brain that shape their motivations, their emotions, and therefore their behavioural activity," says Katie Hinde, an assistant professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. In a paper published in the journal Evolution, Medicine and Public Health, Hinde and two other researchers propose a way in which the composition of breast milk could influence a baby's brain and behaviour. If food is scarce or there are a lot of predators around, it may be better for a mother to have a baby that is calmer and focuses on growing rather than one that is very active and playful, Hinde told CBC Radio's Quirks & Quarks in an interview that airs Saturday. It may be possible to influence a baby's activity level by changing the composition of the milk to affect the bacteria in the infant's gut, she added. Breast milk contains a lot of sugars that infants can't digest, but that feed bacteria that live in human intestines. Those bacteria don't just help digest food, said Hinde. "They can release chemical signals that travel to the infant's brain and shape neurodevelopment." ©2015 CBC/Radio-Canada

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 20813 - Posted: 04.18.2015

Michaeleen Doucleff It began with anxiety and depression. A few months later, hallucinations appeared. Then the Texas man, in his 40s, couldn't feel the left side of his face. He thought the symptoms were because of a recent car accident. But the psychiatric problems got worse. And some doctors thought the man might have bipolar disorder. Cattle feeding practices have been changed in an effort to halt the spread of mad cow disease. Eventually, he couldn't walk or speak. He was hospitalized. And about 18 months after symptoms began, the man died. An autopsy confirmed what doctors had finally suspected: the human version of mad cow disease, called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.* The case, published Wednesday in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, is only the fourth one diagnosed in the U.S. In those previous cases, people caught the disease in another country. Right away the man's diagnosis raised a new question: How did a rare disease linked to contaminated beef in the U.K. more than a decade ago get to a Texas man? Back in the early '80s, British ranchers noticed some of their cows were dying of a strange neurological disease. The cows became aggressive. They couldn't walk. Eventually, scientists figured out the culprit. A rogue protein formed large clumps in the brain and spinal cord. Over time, the clumps spread throughout the brain and damaged tissue. © 2015 NPR

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 20812 - Posted: 04.18.2015

By SABRINA TAVERNISE E-cigarettes have arrived in the life of the American teenager. Use of the devices among middle- and high school students tripled from 2013 to 2014, according to federal data released on Thursday, bringing the share of high school students who use them to 13 percent — more than smoke traditional cigarettes. About a quarter of all high school students and 8 percent of middle school students — 4.6 million young people altogether — used tobacco in some form last year. The sharp rise of e-cigarettes, together with a substantial increase in the use of hookah pipes, led to 400,000 additional young people using a tobacco product in 2014, the first increase in years, though researchers pointed out the percentage of the rise fell within the report’s margin of error. But the report also told another story. From 2011 to 2014, the share of high school students who smoked traditional cigarettes declined substantially, to 9 percent from 16 percent, and use of cigars and pipes ebbed too. The shift suggested that some teenage smokers may be using e-cigarettes to quit. Smoking is still the single-biggest cause of preventable death in the United States, killing more than 480,000 Americans a year, and most scientists agree that e-cigarettes, which deliver the nicotine but not the dangerous tar and other chemicals, are likely to be far less harmful than traditional cigarettes. The numbers came as a surprise and seemed to put policy makers into uncharted territory. The Food and Drug Administration took its first tentative step toward regulating e-cigarettes last year, but the process is slow, and many experts worry that habits are forming far faster than rules are being written. Because e-cigarettes are so new, scientists are still gathering evidence on their long-term health effects, leaving regulators scrambling to gather data. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 20811 - Posted: 04.18.2015

By Lenny Bernstein The dangers associated with night-time breathing disturbances, such as obstructive sleep apnea, are well known: increased risk of high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke and diabetes, not to mention sometimes dangerous daytime drowsiness, according to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Now a study suggests that such sleep conditions can hasten the onset of both Alzheimer's disease and "moderate cognitive impairment," such as memory loss, by quite a few years. But in a bit of good news, it concludes that using a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine, the treatment of choice for sleep apnea, can prevent or delay cognitive problems. A team of researchers led by Ricardo Osorio, an assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center determined that the sleep disturbances brought on mild cognitive impairment at least 11 years earlier in groups of people enrolled in a long-term Alzheimer's disease study, even when they controlled for other factors. In the largest group, that meant self-reported or family-reported cognitive problems, such as memory loss, at about 72 instead of 83. The same was true for Alzheimer's disease itself, which started in one group at a little older than 83, instead of about 88, when other factors were ruled out. The study was published online in the journal Neurology. It could be that the intermittent cutoff of oxygen to the brain is responsible for the problems, or the sleep disruption itself may be affecting cognition, Osorio said. Studies are underway to determine the cause.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 20810 - Posted: 04.18.2015

by Beth Mole Small doses of lead may have big impacts on reading and math scores, scientists report April 7 in Environmental Health. Researchers looked at third grade test scores and levels of lead in blood samples from 58,650 students in Chicago public schools. As little as 2 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood was associated with lower reading and math scores. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that anything above 5 micrograms per deciliter is of concern. The researchers estimate that childhood lead levels at or above 5 micrograms per deciliter of blood accounted for as many as 25 percent of the children in the study failing reading and math standardized tests. The findings confirm that lead exposure, even at low doses, is associated with poor school performance. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2015

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 20809 - Posted: 04.18.2015

By Virginia Morell Like many newborn mammals, baby mice cry to get their mother’s attention. But the mother doesn’t instinctively recognize these calls; she must learn the sounds of her offspring—just as human parents must learn the cries of their infants. Now, a team of researchers has discovered that the hormone oxytocin, which has been tied to trust and maternal bonding, holds the key to how this learning occurs. Only after oxytocin tweaks the brain of a female mouse does she respond with a mother’s concern and attentiveness to crying pups. “It’s an exciting study with implications that … could be helpful to certain disorders, such as autism,” says Larry Young, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta who was not involved in the work. To understand the role oxytocin plays in a mother mouse’s brain, scientists at New York University School of Medicine first investigated how female mice in general respond to the distress calls of baby mice. Pups emit ultrasonic cries when they are separated from the nest, which sometimes happens when a mother carries her babies to a new location. (Moms change nest locations regularly to elude predators.) When a mother hears these cries, she runs to the lost pup, picks it up, and carries it back to her nest. Other scientists have shown that moms respond even to the distress cries of pups that aren’t their own, readily approaching loudspeakers that broadcast the calls. Most virgin female mice, though, couldn’t care less; they seem completely indifferent to the pups’ cries for help. And yet, some virgin females that have either been housed with a mother and her litter or have been injected with oxytocin will retrieve crying infants. © 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 20808 - Posted: 04.16.2015

Angus Chen A common pain medication might make you go from "so cute!" to "so what?" when you look at a photo of an adorable kitten. And it might make you less sensitive to horrifying things too. It's acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. Researchers say the drug might be taking the edge off emotions – not just pain. "It seems to take off the highs of your daily highs and the lows off your daily lows," says Baldwin Way, a psychologist at Ohio State University and the principal investigator on the study, "It kind of flattens out the vicissitudes of your life." The idea that over-the-counter pain pills might affect emotions has been circulating since 2010, when two psychologists, Naomi Eisenberger and Nathan DeWall, led a study showing that acetaminophen seemed to be having both a psychological and a neurological effect on people. They asked volunteers to play a rigged game that simulated social rejection. Not only did the acetaminophen appear to be deflecting social anxieties, it also seemed to be dimming activity in the insula, a region of the brain involved in processing emotional pain. A brain that can let other thoughts bubble up despite being in pain might help its owner benefit from meditation or other cognitive therapies. "But [the insula] is a portion of the brain that seems to be involved in a lot of things," Way says. In older studies, scientists saw that people with damage in their insula didn't react as strongly to either negative or positive images. So Way and one of his students, Geoffrey Durso, figured that if acetaminophen is doing something to the insula, then it might be having a wider effect, too. © 2015 NPR

Keyword: Emotions; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 20807 - Posted: 04.16.2015

By Nicholas Bakalar Breathing problems during sleep may be linked to early mental decline and Alzheimer’s disease, a new study suggests. But treating apnea with a continuous positive airway pressure machine can significantly delay the onset of cognitive problems. In a group of 2,470 people, average age 73, researchers gathered information on the incidence of sleep apnea, a breathing disorder marked by interrupted breathing and snoring, and the incidence of mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease. After adjusting for a range of variables, they found that people with disordered breathing during sleep became cognitively impaired an average of about 10 years sooner than those without the disorder. But compared with those whose sleep disorder was untreated, those using C.P.A.P. machines delayed the appearance of cognitive impairment by an average of 10 years — making their age of onset almost identical to those who had no sleep disorder at all. The lead author, Dr. Ricardo S. Osorio, a research professor of psychiatry at New York University, said the analysis, published online in Neurology, is an observational study that does not prove cause and effect. “But,” he added, “we need to increase the awareness that sleep disorders can increase the risk for cognitive impairment and possibly for Alzheimer’s. Whether treating sleep disorders truly slows the decline is still not known, but there is some evidence that it might.” © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 20806 - Posted: 04.16.2015

by Jessica Hamzelou An exoskeleton that enables movement and provides tactile feedback has helped eight paralysed people regain sensation and move previously paralysed muscles "I FELT the ball!" yelled Juliano Pinto as he kicked off the Football World Cup in Brazil last year. Pinto, aged 29 at the time, lost the use of his lower body after a car accident in 2006. "It was the most moving moment," says Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University in North Carolina, head of the Walk Again Project, which developed the thought-controlled exoskeleton that enabled Pinto to make his kick. Since November 2013, Nicolelis and his team have been training Pinto and seven other people with similar injuries to use the exoskeleton – a robotic device that encases the limbs and converts brain signals into movement. The device also feeds sensory information to its wearer, which seems to have partially reawakened their nervous system. When Nicolelis reassessed his volunteers after a year of training, he found that all eight people had regained sensations and the ability to move muscles in their once-paralysed limbs. "Nobody expected it at all," says Nicolelis, who presented the results at the Brain Forum in Lausanne, Switzerland, on 31 March. "When we first saw the level of recovery, there was not a single person in the room with a dry eye." When a person's spinal cord is injured, the connection between body and brain can be damaged, leaving them unable to feel or move parts of their body. If a few spinal nerves remain, people can sometimes regain control over their limbs, although this can involve years of rehabilitation. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 20805 - Posted: 04.16.2015

|By Cari Nierenberg and LiveScience Women who develop gestational diabetes early in their pregnancy have a higher chance of having a child with autism than women who don't develop the condition, a new study suggests. Researchers found that mothers-to-be who developed gestational diabetes — high blood sugar during pregnancy in women who have never had diabetes — by their 26th week of pregnancy were 63 percent more likely to have a child diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared with women who did not have gestational diabetes at any point during their pregnancy (and who also did not have type 2 diabetes prior to pregnancy). The finding does not mean that autism is common among children born to women who had gestational diabetes. "Autism is still rare," said study co-author Anny Xiang, a research scientist at Kaiser Permanente Southern California in Pasadena. The findings show that, although the risk of having a child with autism is still low among women who have gestational diabetes early in pregnancy (before 26 weeks), the study did find a relationship between these women and an increased risk that the child would have autism, Xiang said. The study, published today (April 14) in the Journal of the American Medical Association, looked at more than 320,000 children born in Southern California between 1995 and 2009. About 8 percent of the kids were born to mothers who had pregnancy-related diabetes, and 2 percent had mothers with type 2 diabetes. © 2015 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism; Obesity
Link ID: 20804 - Posted: 04.16.2015