by Clare Wilson IMAGINE you are a doctor before the advent of modern medical tests and your patient is gasping for breath. Is it asthma, a chest injury, or are they having a heart-attack? You don't know and have no idea how best to help them. Some would argue that's what it's like for doctors trying to diagnose mental health problems today. There are no blood tests or brain scans for mental illnesses so diagnoses are subjective and unreliable. The issue came to a head one year ago this month, with the latest edition of psychiatry's "bible", the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The US National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) said the DSM-5 had so many problems we effectively need to tear it up and start again. The way forward, it said, is a new research programme to discover the brain problems that underlie mental illnesses. That research is now taking off. The first milestone came earlier this year, when the NIMH published a list of 23 core brain functions and their associated neural circuitry, neurotransmitters and genes – and the behaviours and emotions that go with them (see "The mind's 23 building blocks"). Within weeks, the first drug trials conceived and funded through this new programme will begin. While just a first draft, the list arguably represents the future of neuroscience-based mental healthcare. "This is the Rosetta stone for characterising human mental function," says Andrew Krystal at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Criticism of psychiatry has been growing for years – existing treatments are often inadequate, and myriad advances in neuroscience and genetics have not translated into anything better. Vocal opponents are not confined to the US. Last week, the new UK Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry launched a campaign claiming that drugs such as antidepressants and antipsychotics often do more harm than good. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 19588 - Posted: 05.08.2014

By Maggie Fox Treating psychiatric illnesses with antipsychotic drugs can greatly reduce the risk that a patient will commit a violent crime, researchers reported on Thursday. Their study, published in the Lancet medical journal, adds weight to the argument that severely mentally ill people need to get diagnosed and treated. Mental health experts agree that people with psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia are far more likely to become victims of violence than they are to hurt someone else. But Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute on Mental Health, also notes that people with severe mental illness are up to three times more likely than the general population to be violent. The question has been whether treatment lowers these risks. One high-profile case is that of Jared Loughner, a schizophrenia patient who shot and killed six people in Arizona and wounded several more, including then-congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Dr. Seena Fazel of Britain’s Oxford University used a Swedish national database to find out. Sweden keeps careful medical records, and has similar rates of both mental illness and violence to the United States. The only exception is homicide, where the U.S. has much higher rates than just about every other country. Fazel’s team looked at the medical records of everyone born in Sweden between 1961 and 1990. “We identified 40,937 men and 41,710 women who were prescribed any antipsychotic or mood stabilizer between Jan 1, 2006, and Dec 31, 2009,” they wrote. It worked out to about 2 percent of the population.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 19587 - Posted: 05.08.2014

By Scott Barry Kaufman The latest neuroscience of aesthetics suggests that the experience of visual, musical, and moral beauty all recruit the same part of the “emotional brain”: field A1 of the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC). But what about mathematics? Plato believed that mathematical beauty was the highest form of beauty since it is derived from the intellect alone and is concerned with universal truths. Similarly, the art critic Clive Bell noted: “Art transports us from the world of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. For a moment we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life. The pure mathematician rapt in his studies knows a state of mind which I take to be similar, if not identical. He feels an emotion for his speculations which arises from no perceived relation between them and the lives of men, but springs, inhuman or super-human, from the heart of an abstract science. I wonder, sometimes, whether the appreciators of art and of mathematical solutions are not even more closely allied.” A new study suggests that Bell might be right. Semir Zeki and colleagues recruited 16 mathematicians at the postgraduate or postdoctoral level as well as 12 non-mathematicians. All participants viewed a series of mathematical equations in the fMRI scanner and were asked to rate the beauty of the equations as well as their understanding of each equation. After they were out of the scanner, they filled out a questionnaire in which they reported their level of understanding of each equation as well as their emotional experience viewing the equations. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 19586 - Posted: 05.08.2014

BERLIN—A national ad campaign targeting the work and person of neuroscientist Andreas Kreiter has caused an uproar in the German scientific community. Today, the Alliance of Scientific Organizations in Germany published a sharply worded statement against the full-page ads, which appeared in regional and national newspapers in April. The ad “crudely hurts the personal rights” of the scientist, the organizations write, and “defames biomedical research as a whole.” “The ad aims for personal annihilation,” Kreiter says, “and it is not acceptable for a state founded on the rule of law.” A professor of animal physiology at the University of Bremen (UB), Kreiter studies the neurophysiology of the macaque brain. His work has met with fierce resistance since the 1990s, but Kreiter says hostility peaked after he won a series of protracted legal battles over his work. The most recent trial finished in February, when the Federal Administrative Court of Germany confirmed earlier decisions that the animal distress caused by Kreiter’s research is justified given its scientific significance. A group called Tierversuchsgegner Bundesrepublik Deutschland (the German Association for Opponents of Animal Research), whose proclaimed goal is to end animal experimentation in Germany, has used advertising as a weapon for several years. But the most recent one (click here for a larger version in PDF) is the most personal and aggressive yet, Kreiter says; headlined “Kreiter continues in cold blood,” it features a photo of the researcher as well as a picture of a macaque, sitting immobilized in an experimental laboratory setup. It ran in many outlets on 16 and 17 April, including in leading newspapers such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Die Zeit. © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 19585 - Posted: 05.08.2014

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS The more physically active you are at age 25, the better your thinking tends to be when you reach middle age, according to a large-scale new study. Encouragingly, the findings also suggest that if you negligently neglected to exercise when young, you can start now and still improve the health of your brain. Those of us past age 40 are generally familiar with those first glimmerings of forgetfulness and muddled thinking. We can’t easily recall people’s names, certain words, or where we left the car keys. “It’s what we scientists call having a C.R.S. problem,” said David R. Jacobs, a professor of public health at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and a co-author of the new study. “You can’t remember stuff.” But these slight, midlife declines in thinking skills strike some people later or less severely than others, and scientists have not known why. Genetics almost certainly play a role, most researchers agree. Yet the contribution of lifestyle, and in particular of exercise habits, has been unclear. So recently, Dr. Jacobs and colleagues from universities in the United States and overseas turned to a large trove of data collected over several decades for the Cardia study. The study, whose name is short for Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults, began in the mid-1980s with the recruitment of thousands of men and women then ages 18 to 30 who underwent health testing to determine their cholesterol levels, blood pressure and other measures. Many of the volunteers also completed a treadmill run to exhaustion, during which they strode at an increasingly brisk pace until they could go no farther. The average time to exhaustion among these young adults was 10 minutes, meaning that most were moderately but not tremendously fit. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 19584 - Posted: 05.07.2014

Erin Allday The game seems pretty simple. An alien-looking creature stands on a block of ice that's flowing down a river. The goal is to maneuver the ice around whales and other hurdles and periodically cause the alien to "jump" to grab green fish as they leap out of the water. The game is played on a tablet, and it looks a lot like any of hundreds of apps that can be downloaded for some mindless entertainment during an afternoon commute on BART. Here's what sets the game apart: It was designed by scientists at UCSF looking for a new way to treat serious symptoms of depression. "We're trying to see whether we can get the same effects with the game as with therapy," said Patricia Arean, a clinical psychologist at UCSF who is studying the potential mental health benefits of video game play in older adults. Arean is joining the burgeoning field of research into the use of video games as tools for promoting brain health. Video games undoubtedly have some kind of effect on our brains, but harnessing the technology and forcing a lasting - and positive - change is the challenge. So far, what little evidence does exist that video games can have a measurable impact on brain activity has been gathered almost entirely on healthy subjects. But in small clinical trials - like Arean's study of depression in older adults - the effects of games on both healthy and unhealthy people are being studied to find out whether they're useful in treating mental illness, such as autism, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Some neuroscientists say video games may also strengthen neural networks, potentially preventing or slowing down the brain deterioration associated with old age or diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. "We're in the infancy of this idea that entertaining and gaming stuff can be useful for you," said Joaquin Anguera, a UCSF neuroscientist who designs cognitive training games, including the one Arean is testing with patients. © 2014 Hearst Communications, Inc.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 19583 - Posted: 05.07.2014

The gene that most likely determines the sex of the platypus and echidna has been identified by Australian and Swiss researchers. The study also shows that the Y chromosome, contrary to previous assumptions, carries genes that are important to the basic viability of male mammals, says geneticist Dr Paul Waters from the University of New South Wales. Although the Y chromosome is known to be important in sex determination, little is known about the function and evolution of its genes, says Waters. He says this is because it has so many repetitive and palindromic sequences, which make it hard to reconstruct the true sequences of its genes from fragments of sequenced DNA. Monotremes (the platypus and the echidna), whose males have 5 X chromosomes and 5 Y chromosomes, are especially challenging. "No one had really characterised any Y chromosomes in platypus before because they've got quite a complex sex chromosome system," says Waters. Waters and colleagues from the University of Adelaide and the University of Lausanne now report on their new analysis of male and female DNA from 15 representative mammals, including human, elephants, marsupials and monotremes. The study, reported recently in the journal Nature, is the largest of its kind, and relied on a rapid new sequencing technique. © 2014 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 19582 - Posted: 05.07.2014

By Felicity Muth Imagine that you walk into a room, where three people are sitting, facing you. Their faces are oriented towards you, but all three of them have their eyes directed towards the left side of the room. You would probably follow their gaze to the point where they were looking (if you weren’t too unnerved to take your eyes off these odd people). As a social species, we are particularly cued in to social cues like following others’ gazes. However, we’re not the only animals that follow the gazes of members of our species: great apes, monkeys, lemurs, dogs, goats, birds and even tortoises follow each other’s gazes too. However, we don’t all follow gazes to the same extent. One species of macaque monkey (the stumptailed macaque) follows gazes a lot more than other macaque species, bonobos do it more than chimpanzees and human children follow gazes a lot more than other great ape species do. Species also differ in their understanding of what the other animal is looking at. For example, if we saw a person gazing at a point, and between them and this point was a barrier, whether the barrier was solid or transparent would affect how far we followed their gaze. This is because we imagine ourselves in their physical position and what they might be able to see. Bonobos and chimpanzees can also do this, but not the orang-utan. Like us, great apes and old world monkeys also will follow a gaze, but then look back at the individual gazing if they don’t see what the individual is gazing at (‘are you going crazy or am I just not seeing what you’re seeing?’). Capuchin and spider monkeys don’t seem to do this. So, even though a lot of animals are capable of following the gazes of others, there is a lot of variation in the extent and flexibility of this behaviour. A recent study looked to see whether chimpanzees, bonobos, orang-utans and humans would be more likely to follow their own species’ gazes than another species. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 19581 - Posted: 05.06.2014

By Eric Niiler, Scientists studying head injuries have found something surprising: Genes may make some people more susceptible to concussion and trauma than others. A person’s genetic makeup, in fact, may play a more important role in the extent of injury than the number of blows a person sustains. While this research is still in its infancy, these scientists are working toward developing a blood test that may one day help a person decide — based on his her or her genetic predisposition — whether to try out for the football team, or perhaps take up swimming or chess instead. “Until now, all the attention has been paid to how hard and how often you get hit,” said Thomas McAllister, a professor of clinical psychiatry at the Indiana University School of Medicine. “No doubt that’s important. But it’s also becoming clear that’s it’s probably an interaction between the injury and the genetics of the person being injured.” This research is being spurred by fears that some athletes and many returning soldiers may face a lifetime of problems from head injuries. The National Football League agreed to settle a class-action concussion lawsuit by retired players last August for $765 million, although a judge rejected the agreement. In addition, the Pentagon estimates that 294,000 troops, many of whom served in Iraq and Afghanistan, suffered some kind of brain injury since 2000. “More and more we are noticing our servicemen are coming home with significant problems with brain function,” said Daniel Perl, a neuropathologist at the Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine at the Pentagon’s Uniformed Services University for Health Sciences in Bethesda. “We don’t know much about the biology of this. We need to get down to cellular level of resolution, how the brain starts to repair itself.” © 1996-2014 The Washington Post

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 19580 - Posted: 05.06.2014

Heidi Ledford Dutch celebrity daredevil Wim Hof has endured lengthy ice-water baths, hiked to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in shorts and made his mark in Guinness World Records with his ability to withstand cold. Now he has made a mark on science as well. Researchers have used Hof’s methods of mental and physical conditioning to train 12 volunteers to fend off inflammation. The results, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1, suggest that people can learn to modulate their immune responses — a finding that has raised hopes for patients who have chronic inflammatory disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease. The results are only preliminary, warns study first author Matthijs Kox, who investigates immune responses at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Kox says that people with inflammatory disorders sometimes hear about his experiments and call to ask whether the training would enable them to reduce their medication. “We simply do not yet know that,” he says. Still, the work stands out as an illustration of the interactions between the nervous system and the immune system, says Guiseppe Matarese, an immunologist at the University of Salerno in Italy, who was not involved with the study. “This study is a nice way to show that link,” he says. “Orthodox neurobiologists and orthodox immunologists have been sceptical.” They think the study of the interactions between the nervous and immune systems is a “field in the shadows,” he says. © 2014 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Stress; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 19579 - Posted: 05.06.2014

By Christian Jarrett I must have been about seven years old, a junior in my prep school. I was standing in the dining hall surrounded by over a hundred senior boys and schoolmasters, all looking at me, some with pity, others with disdain. It was unheard of for a junior boy to be present in the dining room by the time the seniors had filed in. “What on earth do you think you’re doing Jarrett?” asked the headmaster with mock outrage. I was there because, by refusing to finish my rhubarb crumble, I’d broken a cardinal school rule. All pupils were to eat all they were given. But after vomiting up some of my rhubarb – a flesh-like fruit that still disgusts me to this day – I simply refused to eat on. Keeping me behind in the dining room as the seniors arrived was my punishment. I wanted to explain this to the assembled crowd. Yet speech completely failed me and I began to sob openly and uncontrollably, my humiliation sealed. This was an intense emotional experience for me, and as you can probably tell, the memory remains sore to this day. But is humiliation any more intense than the other negative emotions, such as anger or shame? If it were, how would psychologists and neuroscientists demonstrate that this was the case? You might imagine that the most effective method would be to ask people to rate and describe different emotional experiences – after all, to say that an emotion is intense is really to say something about how it feels, and how it affects you. Yet in a paper published earlier this year, a pair of psychologists – Marte Otten and Kai Jonas – have taken a different approach. Inspired by claims that humiliation is an unusually intense emotion, responsible even for war and strife in the world, the researchers have turned to brain-based evidence. They claim to have provided the “first empirical, neurocognitive evidence for long-standing claims in the humiliation literature that humiliation is a particularly intense emotion.” WIRED.com © 2014 Condé Nast.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 19578 - Posted: 05.06.2014

|By Ariel Van Brummelen The presence of light may do more for us than merely allow for sight. A study by Gilles Vandewalle and his colleagues at the University of Montreal suggests that light affects important brain functions—even in the absence of vision. Previous studies have found that certain photoreceptor cells located in the retina can detect light even in people who do not have the ability to see. Yet most studies suggested that at least 30 minutes of light exposure is needed to significantly affect cognition via these nonvisual pathways. Vandewalle's study, which involved three completely blind participants, found that just a few seconds of light altered brain activity, as long as the brain was engaged in active processing rather than at rest. First the experimenters asked their blind subjects whether a blue light was on or off, and the subjects answered correctly at a rate significantly higher than random chance—even though they confirmed they had no conscious perception of the light. Using functional MRI, the researchers then determined that less than a minute of blue light exposure triggered changes in activity in regions of their brain associated with alertness and executive function. Finally, the scientists found that if the subjects received simultaneous auditory stimulation, a mere two seconds of blue light was enough to modify brain activity. The researchers think the noise engaged active sensory processing, which allowed the brain to respond to the light much more quickly than in previous studies when subjects rested while being exposed to light. The results confirm that the brain can detect light in the absence of working vision. They also suggest that light can quickly alter brain activity through pathways unrelated to sight. The researchers posit that this nonvisual light sensing may aid in regulating many aspects of human brain function, including sleep/wake cycles and threat detection. © 2014 Scientific American,

Keyword: Vision; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 19577 - Posted: 05.06.2014

Mo Costandi A vast project to map neural connections in the mouse retina may have answered the long-standing question of how the eyes detect motion. With the help of volunteers who played an online brain-mapping game, researchers showed that pairs of neurons positioned along a given direction together cause a third neuron to fire in response to images moving in the same direction. It is sometimes said that we see with the brain rather than the eyes, but this is not entirely true. People can only make sense of visual information once it has been interpreted by the brain, but some of this information is processed partly by neurons in the retina. In particular, 50 years ago researchers discovered that the mammalian retina is sensitive to the direction and speed of moving images1. This showed that motion perception begins in the retina, but researchers struggled to explain how. When light enters the eye, it is captured by photoreceptor cells, which convert the information into electrical impulses and transmit them to deeper layers of the retina. Individual photoreceptors are not sensitive to the direction in which an object may be moving, so neuroscientist Jinseop Kim, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, and his colleagues wanted to test whether the answer to the puzzle could lie in the way various types of cells in the retina are connected. Photoreceptors relay their signals via ‘bipolar neurons’, named this way because they have two stems that jut out of the cell's body in opposite directions. The signal then transits through ‘starburst amacrine cells’ — which have filaments, or dendrites, that extend in all directions similarly to light rays out of a star — before reaching the cells that form the optic nerve, which relays them into the brain. © 2014 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 19576 - Posted: 05.05.2014

Lida Katsimpardi Could the elixir of youth be as simple as a protein found in young blood? In recent years, researchers studying mice found that giving old animals blood from young ones can reverse some signs of aging, and last year one team identified a growth factor in the blood that they think is partly responsible for the anti-aging effect on a specific tissue--the heart. Now that group has shown this same factor can also rejuvenate muscle and the brain. "This is the first demonstration of a rejuvenation factor" that is naturally produced, declines with age, and reverses aging in multiple tissues, says Harvard stem cell researcher Amy Wagers, who led efforts to isolate and study the protein. Independently, another team has found that simply injecting plasma from young mice into old mice can boost learning. The results build on a wave of studies in the last decade in which investigators sewed together the skins of two mice, joining their circulation systems, and studied the effects on various tissues. “It’s still a bit creepy for many people. At meetings, people talk about vampires,” says Stanford University neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray, who led the study of learning. But he, Wagers, and others think unease will give way to excitement. The new work, he says, “opens the possibility that we can try to isolate additional factors” from blood, “and they have effects on the whole body.” Hope and hype are high in the anti-aging research arena, and other researchers caution that the work is preliminary. “These are exciting papers,” but “it’s a starting point,” says neuroscientist Sally Temple of the Neural Stem Cell Institute in Rensselaer, NY. Adds Matthew Kaeberlein, a biologist who studies aging at the University of Washington, Seattle, “The therapeutic implications are profound if this mechanism holds true in people.” But that “is the million dollar question here, and that may take some time to figure out.” © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 19575 - Posted: 05.05.2014

By Melissa Hogenboom Science reporter, BBC Radio Science Neuroscience is a fast growing and popular field, but despite advances, when an area of the brain 'lights up" it does not tell us as much as we'd like about the inner workings of the mind. Many of us have seen the pictures and read the stories. A beautiful picture of the brain where an area is highlighted and found to be fundamental for processes like fear, disgust or impaired social ability. There are so many stories it can be easy to be swayed into thinking that much more of the brain's mystery has been solved than is the case. The technology is impressive but one of the most popular scanning methods - functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) actually measures regional regional changes of blood flow to areas of the brain, not our neurons directly. Researchers use it when they want to understand what part of the brain is involved in a particular task. They can place a person in a brain scanner and see which areas become active. The areas that light up are then inferred to be important for that task, but the resulting images and phrase "lighting up the brain" can lead to over interpretation. Neuroscientist Molly Crocket from University College London explains that while fMRI is extremely useful, we are still very far from being able to read an individual's mind from a scan. "There's a misconception that's still rather common that you can look at someone's brain imaging data and be able to read off what they're thinking and feeling. This is certainly not the case," Dr Crocket told the BBC's Inside Science programme. 19th Century brain "A study will have been done which tells us something about the brain, but what [the public] really want to do is make the leap and understand the mind." She cites an article with the headline, "You love your iPhone, literally". In this case a team saw an area previously associated with love - the insula - was active when participants watched videos of a ringing iPhone. BBC © 2014

Keyword: Brain imaging; Consciousness
Link ID: 19574 - Posted: 05.05.2014

Autism was formally described for the first time 71 years ago. The medical notes for "Case one", a 10-year-old from Mississippi, US, referred to as Donald T, describe a perplexing condition that was different from "anything reported so far". In 1943, when Donald Triplett was diagnosed, autism was considered extremely rare and treatment consisted of institutionalisation and – all too often – isolation. Today we know "autism disorder" as one of a number of autism spectrum disorders alongside Asperger's syndrome, pervasive developmental disorder and single gene disorders such as Rett syndrome. But of all neuropsychiatric conditions, autism remains one of the least understood. We now know that genetics almost certainly plays a key role, with researchers finding that if a family has one child with autism, then the likelihood of a future child having the condition is as high as 25%. But to what extent autism is defined by genes remains a mystery. "Everyone recognises that genes are part of the story but autism isn't 100% genetic," says Professor Simon Baron-Cohen of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. "Even if you have identical twins who share all their genes, you can find that one has autism and one doesn't. That means that there must be some non-genetic factors." One of the most controversial theories about how autism develops is neuroinflammation. MRI scans of autistic patients have revealed abnormalities in the white matter – the wiring tissue responsible for connecting brains areas. Some scientists have drawn comparisons with multiple sclerosis, in which inflammatory processes attack the myelin sheath around the axons of brain cells, slowing down signalling and making it less efficient. © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 19573 - Posted: 05.05.2014

Daniel Cressey Organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have been campaigning for the disclosure of more information on animal research in the United Kingdom. The government of the United Kingdom wants to jettison rules that prevent it releasing any confidential information it holds about animal research, as part of a continuing push towards openness about such work. Animal-rights groups have long complained about what they characterise as a “secrecy clause” that prevents details of animal research in the UK being made public. The Home Office collects huge amounts of information such as the type of work done, the people and institutions doing it, and the results of inspections at laboratories. However it is currently prevented from revealing anything potentially considered confidential under ‘section 24’ of the rules governing animal research. Today the government said that it would like repeal this blanket ban on information disclosure, as it has previously promised, and requested comment on its proposal. In place of section 24, it would like to introduce a new rule prohibiting disclosure only of information relating to “people, places and intellectual property”. Home Office minister Norman Baker said in the consultation document released today, “To maintain public trust we must be as open and transparent as possible about activities under the regulatory framework.” If implemented, the new rule would still keep names and locations of animal research out of the public domain — a key concern of many researchers who fear protests or even violent attacks from extremist animal rights protestors. © 2014 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 19572 - Posted: 05.05.2014

by Susan Milius Sometimes called the unicorn of the sea, the male narwhal’s tusk is actually a tooth, and it grows directly through the whale’s upper lip instead of pushing the lip aside. It’s an exuberantly large version of a canine tooth that grows in a spiral; the only tooth known to do so. Otherwise narwhals are practically toothless, with only vestigial stubs that stop growing during development and rarely emerge into the mouth. This extreme anatomy has captivated dentist Martin Nweeia, who practices in Connecticut and teaches at Harvard University. For more than a decade, he has pioneered ways to study these difficult-to-reach Arctic whales, and he and his colleagues now describe in the April Anatomical Record that narwhals can detect changes in water salinity using only their tusks. The animals “don’t have a good sense of humor,” though, about being temporarily restrained for the testing, Nweeia says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 19571 - Posted: 05.05.2014

By SAM KEAN UNTIL the past few decades, neuroscientists really had only one way to study the human brain: Wait for strokes or some other disaster to strike people, and if the victims pulled through, determine how their minds worked differently afterward. Depending on what part of the brain suffered, strange things might happen. Parents couldn’t recognize their children. Normal people became pathological liars. Some people lost the ability to speak — but could sing just fine. These incidents have become classic case studies, fodder for innumerable textbooks and bull sessions around the lab. The names of these patients — H. M., Tan, Phineas Gage — are deeply woven into the lore of neuroscience. When recounting these cases today, neuroscientists naturally focus on these patients’ deficits, emphasizing the changes that took place in their thinking and behavior. After all, there’s no better way to learn what some structure in the brain does than to see what happens when it shorts out or otherwise gets destroyed. But these case snippets overlook something crucial about people with brain damage. However glaring their deficits are, their brains still work like ours to a large extent. Most can still read and reason. They can still talk, walk and emote. And they still have the same joys and fears — facts that the psychological caricatures passed down from generation to generation generally omit. The famous amnesiac H. M., for instance, underwent radical brain surgery in 1953 and had most of the hippocampus removed on both sides of his brain; afterward, he seemed to lose the ability to form new long-term memories. Names, dates, directions to the bathroom all escaped him now. He’d eat two breakfasts if no one stopped him. Careful testing, however, revealed that H. M. could form new motor memories — memories of things like how to ride a bicycle — because they rely on different structures in the brain. This work established that memory isn’t a single, monolithic thing, but a collection of different faculties. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke; Emotions
Link ID: 19570 - Posted: 05.04.2014

by Andy Coghlan A pregnancy hormone could prove a simple way to treat multiple sclerosis, after showing promise in a trial of 158 women with MS. MS is a neurological condition that results from damage to the brain and nerves inflicted by the body's own immune system. It affects 2.3 million people worldwide. Symptoms include extreme tiredness, blurred vision, muscle weakness and problems with balance and movement. The symptoms of women with MS tend to ease when they are pregnant, but worsen again after giving birth. This could be because of a hormone called oestriol, which is only produced in significant amounts during pregnancy. The hormone is thought to help suppress the mother's immune system to prevent it attacking the fetus. Fewer relapses Rhonda Voskuhl of the University of California, Los Angeles, and her colleagues wondered whether giving oestriol to people with MS who aren't pregnant might also help with symptoms. They gave 8 milligrams of oestriol daily to 86 women with MS, along with their medication, Copaxone (glatiramer acetate). The women had the most common form of MS, called relapsing-remitting MS, which results in periodic flare-ups of symptoms followed by recovery. After one year, they had 47 per cent fewer relapses than a control group that took Copaxone and a placebo. After two years, the relapse rate was 32 per cent lower than the control group in the group given the hormone, suggesting the effects had plateaued. "We think the oestriol group had bottomed out, and there was nothing left to improve," Voskuhl said, as she presented the preliminary results at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Philadelphia last week. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 19569 - Posted: 05.04.2014