Injuries to the head can leave victims susceptible to early death even years later through impaired judgement, a major analysis of survivors shows. Those with a history of psychiatric disorders before the injury are most at risk of dying prematurely. The study, in JAMA Psychiatry, of 40 years of data on more than two million people, showed that overall a brain injury trebled the risk. Suicide and fatal injuries were among the commonest causes of early death. More than one million people in Europe are taken to hospital with a traumatic brain injury each year. The study, by researchers at the University of Oxford and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, looked at Swedish medical records between 1969 and 2009. They followed patients who survived the initial six-month danger period after injury. The data showed that without injury 0.2% of people were dying prematurely - before the age of 56. However, the premature-death rate was three-fold higher in patients who had previously suffered traumatic brain injury. In those who also had a psychiatric disorder the rate soared to 4%. Dr Seena Fazel, one of the researchers in Oxford, said: "There are these subgroups with really high rates, and these are potentially treatable illnesses, so this is something we can do something about." BBC © 2014

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 19139 - Posted: 01.16.2014

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR Scientists call it the obesity paradox, the notion that being overweight or moderately obese lowers the risk of an early death. They have documented the phenomenon in large population studies and in groups of patients with chronic diseases like hypertension and Type 2 diabetes. But now a new report, published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, is calling the obesity paradox into question, at least for patients with Type 2 diabetes. The study, of nearly 12,000 people with the disease, found that there was no survival advantage for those who had a body mass index that put them in the overweight or obese categories. Instead, the researchers found that the diabetics with the lowest mortality rate were those who were considered normal weight. The study is among the largest to examine the obesity paradox among people with Type 2 diabetes, an illness that afflicts more than 25 million Americans. The authors argue that previous studies showing a protective effect of a high B.M.I. among diabetics were flawed because they were too small or failed to account for factors like smoking or undiagnosed illnesses that can contribute to low body weight but a shorter life span as well. The new study found that when smoking and other factors that can contribute to weight loss were accounted for, people in the highest B.M.I. groups had higher mortality rates. “I think the case is not necessarily closed,” said Deirdre K. Tobias, the lead author of the paper and a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. “But at this point, there is no reason to believe that being overweight or obese would be protective for people with diabetes.” © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 19138 - Posted: 01.16.2014

A new website that helps determine whether someone might have Alzheimer's disease or dementia is so popular that the site crashed temporarily. Ohio State University's website says its Self-Administered Gerocognitive Exam (SAGE) is a test that can be done in your own home with a paper and pencil. When researchers visited 45 community events where they asked people to take the simple test, they found that of the 1, 047 who did it, 28 per cent were identified with cognitive impairment, test developer Dr. Douglas Scharre of Ohio State and his team reported Monday in The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences. Alzheimer's test Researchers in Ohio say the SAGE test has been shown to be effective in spotting the early signs of cognitive decline. (Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center) Participants were told the test represented their baseline level, which doctors could use for future comparisons during re-screening. "What we found was that this SAGE self-administered test correlated very well with detailed cognitive testing," Scharre said in a release. "If we catch this cognitive change really early, then we can start potential treatments much earlier than without having this test." The Alzheimer Society of Canada says early diagnosis can help with planning, care and support. © CBC 2014

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 19137 - Posted: 01.16.2014

By ANDREW POLLACK Launch media viewer Kristin Tremblay helps make dinner at home in Gainesville, Fla. She has a disorder that makes her uncontrollably hungry. Rob C. Witzel for The New York Times Lisa Tremblay still recalls in horror the time her daughter Kristin pulled a hot dog crawling with ants from the garbage at a cookout and prepared to swallow it. Kristin has a rare genetic abnormality that gives her an incessant, uncontrollable hunger. Some people with the condition, called Prader-Willi syndrome, will eat until their stomach ruptures and they die. And, not surprisingly, many are obese. “She’s eaten dog food. She’s eaten cat food,” said Ms. Tremblay, who lives in Nokomis, Fla. When Kristin, now 28, was a child, neighbors once called social welfare authorities, thinking Kristin was not being fed because she complained of being hungry so much. Once an obscure and neglected disease, Prader-Willi is starting to attract more attention from scientists and pharmaceutical companies for a simple reason: It may shed some light on the much broader public health problems of overeating and obesity. “These are remarkable human models of severe obesity,” said Dr. Steven B. Heymsfield, a professor and former executive director of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La. “When we discover the underlying mechanism of these very rare disorders, they will shed light on garden-variety obesity.” One drug being developed to help obese people lose weight has shown some preliminary signs of success in patients with Prader-Willi. The drug, beloranib, is believed to work by reducing fat synthesis and increasing fat use. In a small trial, it reduced weight and body fat and lowered the food-seeking urge, according to the drug’s developer, Zafgen. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 19136 - Posted: 01.15.2014

By Emilie Reas “Come on. Get out of the express checkout lane! That’s way more than twelve items, lady.” Without having to count, you can make a good guess at how many purchases the shopper in front of you is making. She may think she’s pulling a fast one, but thanks to the brain’s refined sense for quantity, she’s not fooling anyone. This ability to perceive numerosity – or number of items – does more than help prevent express lane fraud; it also builds the foundation for our arithmetic skills, the economic system and our concept of value. Until recently, it’s remained a puzzle how the brain allows us to so quickly and accurately judge quantity. Neuroscientists believe that neural representations of most high-level cognitive concepts – for example, those involved in memory, language or decision-making – are distributed, in a relatively disorganized manner, throughout the brain. In contrast, highly organized, specialized brain regions have been identified that represent most lower-level sensory information, such as sights, sounds, or physical touch. Such areas resemble maps, in that sensory information is arranged in a logical, systematic spatial layout. Notably, this type of neural topography has only previously been observed for the basic senses, but never for a high-level cognitive function. Researchers from the Netherlands may have discovered an exception to this rule, as reported in their recently published Science paper: a small brain area which represents numerosity along a continuous “map.” Just as we organize numbers along a mental “number line,” with one at the left, increasing in magnitude to the right, so is quantity mapped onto space in the brain. One side of this brain region responds to small numbers, the adjacent region to larger numbers, and so on, with numeric representations increasing to the far end. © 2014 Scientific American,

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 19135 - Posted: 01.15.2014

By Arthur Allen, Cognitive psychologist Mary Czerwinski and her boyfriend were having a vigorous argument as they drove to Vancouver, B.C., from Seattle, where she works at Microsoft Research. She can’t remember the subject, but she does recall that suddenly, his phone went off, and he read out the text message: “Your friend Mary isn’t feeling well. You might want to give her a call.” At the time, Czerwinski was wearing on her wrist a wireless device intended to monitor her emotional ups and downs. Similar to the technology used in lie detector tests, it interprets signals such as heart rate and electrical changes in the skin. The argument may have been trivial, but Czerwinski’s internal response was not. That prompted the device to send a distress message to her cellphone, which broadcast it to a network of her friends. Including the one with whom she was arguing, right beside her. Czerwinski is working in affective computing, which emerged in 2000 from the laboratory of Rosalind Picard at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Picard and her colleagues dreamed of creating caring robots. As a first step, they decided to make machines that could detect and help us cope with our sometimes hidden emotions. One of Picard’s early projects involved helping autistic children. Because her devices were often better than the children themselves at communicating their feelings, she designed ways of feeding information from a wrist sensor to the cellphones of parents and other caretakers so they could know about the stress their children were under and respond accordingly. © 1996-2014 The Washington Post

Keyword: Emotions; Robotics
Link ID: 19134 - Posted: 01.15.2014

By Ashutosh Jogalekar Popular wisdom holds that caffeine enhances learning, alertness and retention, leading millions to consume coffee or caffeinated drinks before a challenging learning task such as attending a business strategy meeting or a demanding scientific presentation. However a new study in the journal Nature Neuroscience conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins hints that when it comes to long-term memory and caffeine, timing may be everything; caffeine may enhance consolidation of memories only if it is consumed after a learning or memory challenge. In the study the authors conducted a randomized, double-blind controlled experiment in which 160 healthy female subjects between the ages of 18 and 30 were asked to perform a series of learning tasks. The subjects were handed cards with pictures of various random indoor and outdoor objects (for instance leaves, ducks and handbags) on them and asked to classify the objects as indoor or outdoor. Immediately after the task the volunteers were handed pills, either containing 200 mg of caffeine or placebo. Saliva samples to test for caffeine and its metabolites were collected after 1, 3 and 24 hours. After 24 hours the researchers tested the participants’ recollection of the past day’s test. Along with the items in the test (‘old’) they were presented with new items (‘foils’) and similar looking items (‘lures’), neither of which were part of the task. They were then asked to again classify the items as old, new and similar. There was a statistically significant percentage of volunteers in the caffeinated group that was more likely to mark the ‘similar’ items as ‘similar’ rather than ‘old’. That is, caffeinated participants were clearly able to distinguish much better between the old and the other items, indicating that they were retaining the memory of the old items much better than the people in the placebo group. © 2014 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 19133 - Posted: 01.15.2014

By Sam Kean In 1559, the two surgeons Ambroise Paré and Andreas Vesalius discussed trepanning the skull of King Henri II of France to remove any excess fluids and “corrupted” blood inside, but the risks outweighed the benefits and they gave the idea up. In the meantime, they examined the heads of the decapitated criminals. History doesn’t record the exact methodology here—whether someone fixed each head inside a vice to provide a stable target, or perhaps strung the noggins up like piñatas to swing at—but the Count de Montgomery’s stump got quite a workout battering their mugs. It was a macabre mix of medieval brutality and modern experimental savvy, and Paré and Vesalius eagerly examined them for clues. Alas, they offered little inspiration for treatment. Instead, the two men could have learned a lot more by simply observing the king, whose suffering foreshadowed many great discoveries over the next four centuries of neuroscience. Henri continued to drift in and out of coherence, limning the borders of the unconscious. He suffered from seizures and temporary paralysis, two then-mysterious afflictions. Strangely, the paralysis or seizures would derange only half of his body at any one time, a clear hint (in retrospect) that the brain controls the body’s halves independently. Henri’s vision also went in and out, a clue that the back of the brain (where Paré expected to find the contrecoup damage) controls our sense of sight. Worst of all, Henri’s headache kept widening, which told Paré that his brain was swelling and that blood vessels had ruptured inside the skull. As we know today, inflammation and fluid pressure can crush brain cells, destroying the switches and circuits that run the body and mind. This explains why brain injuries can be lethal even if the skull suffers no fracture. Skull fractures can in fact save people’s lives, by giving the swollen brain or pools of blood room to expand into. The history of neuroscience has proved the brain amazingly resilient, but one thing it cannot stand is pressure, and the secondary effects of trauma, like swelling, often prove more deadly than the initial blow. © 2014 Time Inc.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 19132 - Posted: 01.15.2014

Imagine a couple of million years ago, a curious young alien from the planet Zantar — let's call him a grad student — lands on Earth, looks around and asks, "Who's the brainiest critter on this planet? Relative to body size, who's got the biggest brain?" The answer, back then, would not have been us. (Two million years ago, apes — even walking ones — had much smaller brains.) The brainiest weren't ancestral crows or parrots or magpies or ravens or elephants or colonies of ants or bees or termites. The Earthlings with the biggest brains back then were dolphins (and certain whales). The Zantarian grad student would have wanted to meet them. A visitor from Zantar and a dolphin check each other out. But had the grad student arrived earlier, dolphins wouldn't have been the champs, because evolution is always changing life. , at Emory University in Atlanta, has been studying fossilized brains. And looking back, she sees sudden spurts of brain growth in different animals. "[T]he most dramatic increase in brain-to-body ratio in dolphins and toothed whales occurred 35 million years ago," she tells Chris Impey, the astronomer and writer, in Talking About Life. Something happened to make their medium-sized brains bigger, Lori says, then bigger still. For 20 million years certain dolphin species kept their brains growing until — just as mysteriously as it started — about 15 million years ago, they stopped. Why? Had the dolphins answered some secret dolphin question? Figured out a puzzle? Adapted to an environmental change? Gotten tired? Hit a limit? What? Dolphin says, "Enough." ©2014 NPR

Keyword: Evolution; Intelligence
Link ID: 19131 - Posted: 01.15.2014

By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent, BBC News Taking substances to enhance the brain is more popular among amateur athletes than taking drugs to boost the body. Researchers in Germany found that 15% of recreational triathletes admitted to brain doping, using prescription medicines that increase attention. Some 13% of competitors reported using physical enhancers like steroids or human growth hormone. Brain doping is more popular say the scientists, because many of the substances aren't banned. The research has been published in the journal Plos One. Previous studies have shown that, among amateur competitors, the use of performance-enhancing substances is widespread. This new work used the responses of almost 3,000 triathletes taking part in events in Germany, to analyse the broader picture of physical and cognitive doping. Researchers believe that many so-called "smart drugs" are being widely used to enhance mental functions outside the patients groups they have been designed to help. They are also concerned that competitors in a variety of sports may be using these substances to gain an edge. In the study, participants were asked whether they had used physical or brain-enhancing substances in the past 12 months. Overall, 13% said they had taken drugs like EPO, steroids, or growth hormones. BBC © 2014

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Attention
Link ID: 19130 - Posted: 01.15.2014

Ask a group of people to describe the color of a sheet of paper, a cloud, or a glass of milk, and chances are they’ll all say “white.” But ask the same group to describe the smell of cinnamon, and you’ll likely get a potpourri of answers, ranging from “spicy” to “smoky” to “sweet,” and sometimes all three. When it comes to naming smells, humans struggle to find concise, universal terms. Indeed, scientists have long thought the ability was out of our reach. But a new study indicates that the inhabitants of a remote peninsula in Southeast Asia can depict smells as easily as the rest of us pick colors. The study concerns the Jahai, nomadic hunter-gatherers who live in the mountain rainforests along the border between Malaysia and Thailand. Smell is very important to this society. Odors are often evoked in illness, or medicine, for example, and it is one of the few cultures to have words devoted exclusively to smells. “For example, the term pʔus (pronounced ‘pa-oos’) describes the smell of old huts, day-old food, and cabbage,” says Asifa Majid, a psychologist at the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. This suggests, she says, that the Jahai can isolate basic smell properties, much like we can isolate the color white from milk. To find out if the Jahai are better at naming smells than the rest of us, Majid and colleagues asked native Jahai speakers and native English speakers to describe 12 different odors: cinnamon, turpentine, lemon, smoke, chocolate, rose, paint thinner, banana, pineapple, gasoline, soap, and onion. The Jahai easily and consistently named the odors, whereas English speakers struggled, the team reports in the February issue of Cognition. © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 19129 - Posted: 01.14.2014

By Scott O. Lilienfeld and Hal Arkowitz “Just say no.” In 1982 First Lady Nancy Reagan uttered those three words in response to a schoolgirl who wanted to know what she should say if someone offered her drugs. The first lady's suggestion soon became the clarion call for the adolescent drug prevention movement in the 1980s and beyond. Since then, schools around the country have instituted programs designed to discourage alcohol and drug use among youth—most of them targeting older elementary schoolchildren and a few addressing adolescents. There is good reason for concern about youth substance abuse. A large U.S. survey conducted in 2012 by psychologist Lloyd D. Johnston and his colleagues at the University of Michigan revealed that fully 24 percent of 12th graders had engaged in binge drinking (defined as five or more drinks on one occasion) in the past two weeks. Moreover, 42 percent had consumed at least some alcohol in the past month, as had 11 percent of eighth graders and 28 percent of high school sophomores. In addition, 1 percent of 12th graders had tried methamphetamine, and almost 3 percent had used cocaine in the past year. In an attempt to reduce these figures, substance abuse prevention programs often educate pupils regarding the perils of drug use, teach students social skills to resist peer pressure to experiment, and help young people feel that saying no is socially acceptable. All the approaches seem sensible on the surface, so policy makers, teachers and parents typically assume they work. Yet it turns out that approaches involving social interaction work better than the ones emphasizing education. That finding may explain why the most popular prevention program has been found to be ineffective—and may even heighten the use of some substances among teens. © 2014 Scientific American,

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 19128 - Posted: 01.14.2014

By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D. “How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System”: That subtitle is the opening shot across the bow in this jeremiad of a book by the psychiatrist Dr. E. Fuller Torrey. It could just as well have read: “How a group of well-intentioned, starry-eyed idealists made a hash of mental health care.” You could hardly blame them for trying, though. The care of people with serious mental illness was long a national disgrace. By the 1950s, slightly more than half a million psychiatric patients resided in overcrowded and underfunded state mental hospitals, often under appalling conditions. Related Coverage Enter a group of high-minded psychiatrists with a vision to “create a brave new world, a mentally healthy America,” in Dr. Torrey’s words. Armed with little more than optimism, they helped start the National Institute of Mental Health and set in motion an ambitious agenda for the next half-century: closing the state mental hospitals, initiating a federal takeover of the mental health system, and creating a nationwide network of community mental health centers. Reform was well underway when President John F. Kennedy endorsed this new era in mental health in a 1963 speech, calling for a “bold new approach” in which “reliance on the cold mercy of custodial isolation will be supplanted by the open warmth of community concern and capability.” Those were heady days in American psychiatry, when psychoanalysis and the mental hygiene movement held sway and promised to cure all manner of ills by early intervention and improving the social environment. In hindsight, the therapeutic zeal of these professionals was impressively naïve: They were certain that severely mentally ill patients in state hospitals — many living there for decades — would magically adjust to the community and do well with outpatient treatment. How wrong they proved to be. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 19127 - Posted: 01.14.2014

Training to improve cognitive abilities in older people lasted to some degree 10 years after the training program was completed, according to results of a randomized clinical trial supported by the National Institutes of Health. The findings showed training gains for aspects of cognition involved in the ability to think and learn, but researchers said memory training did not have an effect after 10 years. The report, from the Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly (ACTIVE) study, appears in the January 2014 issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The project was funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR), components of the NIH. “Previous data from this clinical trial demonstrated that the effects of the training lasted for five years,” said NIA Director Richard J. Hodes, M.D. “Now, these longer term results indicate that particular types of cognitive training can provide a lasting benefit a decade later. They suggest that we should continue to pursue cognitive training as an intervention that might help maintain the mental abilities of older people so that they may remain independent and in the community.” “ACTIVE is an important example of intervention research aimed at enabling older people to maintain their cognitive abilities as they age,” said NINR Director Patricia Grady, Ph.D. “The average age of the individuals who have been followed over the last 10 years is now 82. Given our nation’s aging population, this type of research is an increasingly high priority.”

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 19126 - Posted: 01.14.2014

By Megan Wiegand and Slate, Tips for beating the seasonal blues are as numerous as the winter night is long. Light boxes, touted to “uplift people’s spirits” and “improve mood and energy,” offer a New-Agey-seeming solution to propel us into the cold as if it’s the first beautiful day of spring. But can sitting in front of a light for a few minutes a day actually counteract the dreariest months? Yes, in many cases. Light-box therapy has been shown to alleviate symptoms in people who suffer from seasonal affective disorder, or SAD. Symptoms of this form of depression — they can include lost interest in beloved activities, overeating, loss of energy, disrupted sleep cycles and feelings of hopelessness or guilt — typically appear in late fall or early winter and dissipate in spring. Women are twice as likely as men to seek treatment for SAD, and those farther away from the equator are more likely to be diagnosed: About 11 percent of Mainers have a clinical SAD diagnosis, but only 2 percent of Floridians report the illness, according to Kathryn Roecklein, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. One tool doctors use to treat SAD is light-box therapy. Light boxes use bright white fluorescent bulbs (or sometimes blue light) that reproduce some wavelengths of the sun’s light. They contain filters to block harmful UV rays and come in various shapes, sizes, light types and price points. © 1996-2014 The Washington Post

Keyword: Depression; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 19125 - Posted: 01.14.2014

By C. CLAIBORNE RAY Q. Why do I wake up at exactly the same time every night, without any stimulus? It has happened all my life, and it doesn’t even matter what time I went to bed. A. What you are experiencing is probably a normal period of relative alertness that happens in the middle of the night, said Dr. Carl W. Bazil, director of the division of epilepsy and sleep at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. “Most people realize that there is a natural drowsiness midday, usually around lunchtime,” Dr. Bazil said. “This is why many fortunate cultures developed the siesta.” But the reverse normally happens at night. The two interludes are both part of the body’s circadian rhythm, which he said is “controlled by an internal clock but of course influenced by lots of external things,” like caffeine, light, exercise and stress. Dr. Bazil said it might also help those who wake up midsleep to know that “before the advent of electrical lighting, it was normal for people to go to bed at sundown, sleep for about four hours and arise during that natural alertness for a few hours before returning for a ‘second sleep.’ ” © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sleep
Link ID: 19124 - Posted: 01.14.2014

By MARIA KONNIKOVA SLEEP seems like a perfectly fine waste of time. Why would our bodies evolve to spend close to one-third of our lives completely out of it, when we could instead be doing something useful or exciting? Something that would, as an added bonus, be less likely to get us killed back when we were sleeping on the savanna? “Sleep is such a dangerous thing to do, when you’re out in the wild,” Maiken Nedergaard, a Danish biologist who has been leading research into sleep function at the University of Rochester’s medical school, told me. “It has to have a basic evolutional function. Otherwise it would have been eliminated.” We’ve known for some time that sleep is essential for forming and consolidating memories and that it plays a central role in the formation of new neuronal connections and the pruning of old ones. But that hardly seems enough to risk death-by-leopard-in-the-night. “If sleep was just to remember what you did yesterday, that wouldn’t be important enough,” Dr. Nedergaard explains. In a series of new studies, published this fall in the journal Science, the Nedergaard lab may at last be shedding light on just what it is that would be important enough. Sleep, it turns out, may play a crucial role in our brain’s physiological maintenance. As your body sleeps, your brain is quite actively playing the part of mental janitor: It’s clearing out all of the junk that has accumulated as a result of your daily thinking. Recall what happens to your body during exercise. You start off full of energy, but soon enough your breathing turns uneven, your muscles tire, and your stamina runs its course. What’s happening internally is that your body isn’t able to deliver oxygen quickly enough to each muscle that needs it and instead creates needed energy anaerobically. And while that process allows you to keep on going, a side effect is the accumulation of toxic byproducts in your muscle cells. Those byproducts are cleared out by the body’s lymphatic system, allowing you to resume normal function without any permanent damage. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 19123 - Posted: 01.13.2014

Ian Sample, science correspondent A cup or two of coffee could boost the brain's ability to store long-term memories, researchers in the US claim. People who had a shot of caffeine after looking at a series of pictures were better at distinguishing them from similar images in tests the next day, the scientists found. The task gives a measure of how precisely information is stored in the brain, which helps with a process called pattern separation which can be crucial in everyday situations. If the effect is real, and some scientists are doubtful, then it would add memory enhancement to the growing list of benefits that moderate caffeine consumption seems to provide. Michael Yassa, a neuroscientist who led the study at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said the ability to separate patterns was vital for discriminating between similar scenarios and experiences in life. "If you park in the same parking lot every day, the spot you choose can look the same as many others. But when you go and look for your car, you need to look for where you parked it today, not where you parked it yesterday," he said. Writing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Yassa described how 44 volunteers who were not heavy caffeine consumers and had abstained for at least a day were shown a rapid sequence of pictures on a computer screen. The pictures included a huge range of items, such as a hammer, a chair, an apple, a seahorse, a rubber duck and a car. © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 19122 - Posted: 01.13.2014

By Gary Stix The blood-brain barrier is the Berlin Wall of human anatomy and physiology Its closely packed cells shield neurons and the like from toxins and pathogens, while letting pass glucose and other essential chemicals for brain metabolism (caffeine?). For years, pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers have engaged in halting efforts to traverse this imposing blockade in order to deliver some of the big molecules that might potentially help slow the progression of devastating neurological diseases. Like would-be refugees from the former East Germany, many medications get snagged by border guards during the crossing—a molecular security force that either impedes or digests any invader. There have been many attempts to secure safe passage—deploying chemicals that make brain-barrier “endothelial” cells shrivel up, or wielding tiny catheters or minute bubbles that slip through minuscule breaches. Success has been mixed at best—none of these molecular cargo carriers have made their way as far as human trials. Roche, the Swiss-based drugmaker, reported in the Jan. 8 Neuron a bit of progress toward overcoming the lingering technical impediments. The study described a new technique that tricks one of the BBB’s natural checkpoints to let through an elaborately engineered drug that attacks the amyloid-beta protein fragments that may be the primary culprit inflicting the damage wrought by Alzheimer’s. The subterfuge involves the transferrin receptor, a docking site used to transport iron into the brain. Roche took a fragment of an antibody that binds the transferrin receptor and latched it onto another antibody that, once on the other side of the BBB, attaches to and then removes amyloid. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 19121 - Posted: 01.13.2014

By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS The standard treatment for people with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea is a mask worn at night that helps them breathe without interruption. The mask is unwieldy and uncomfortable, however; one study found that46 percent to 83 percent of patients with obstructive sleep apnea do not wear it diligently. Now scientists may have found an alternative, at least for some patients: a pacemaker-like device implanted in the chest that stimulates a nerve in the jaw, helping to keep part of the upper airway open. The device, called a neurostimulator, helped reduce breathing interruptions and raise blood oxygen levels in about two-thirds of sleep apnea patients participating in a trial, researchers reported on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. “This is a new paradigm of surgical treatment that seems to effectively control obstructive sleep apnea in selected patients,” said Dr. Sean M. Caples, a sleep specialist in the division of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “It’s very exciting.” Still, Dr. Caples, who was not involved in the new study, noted that “a third of patients were not improved when all was said and done,” even though they were chosen because they were seen as likely to benefit. The new trial was funded by the maker of the device, Inspire Medical Systems. At 22 sites internationally, in 126 patients, doctors surgically implanted a remote-controlled neurostimulator that, activated at night, sends regular electric impulses to a nerve inside the jaw. The impulses cause the tongue to move forward during inhalation, opening the airway. Copyright 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 19120 - Posted: 01.11.2014