by Erika Engelhaupt When I was in graduate school, I once gassed out my lab with the smell of death. I was studying the products of plant decomposition, and I had placed copious quantities of duckweed into large tubs and let the mix decompose for a few weeks. Duckweed is a small floating aquatic plant; it looks harmless enough. But when I dragged my tubs into the lab and set up a pump and filtration system, all hell broke loose. The filter clogged, the back pressure threw the hose off the pump, and a spray of decomposed mess flew all over a poor professor who had come in to help. For the rest of the day, he smelled like a pile of dead raccoons. That day, I learned about cadaverine and putrescine. These two molecules are produced during the decomposition of proteins, when the amino acids lysine and ornithine break down, and they are largely responsible for the smell of rotting flesh. My mistake in the lab was to think that rotting plants are more innocuous than rotting animals. Duckweed, it turns out, has such high protein levels that it’s used as animal feed, and those proteins, like any proteins, can create a deathly stench. The smells of cadaverine and putrescine tend to provoke a strong reaction (as I learned once the duckweed stench subsided and my labmates were able to return to the lab). But not every animal finds the odors disgusting. Carrion flies, rats and other animals that eat or lay eggs in dead things are attracted to the molecules. So researchers have started to look for exactly how animals tune in to these smells. Pinning down animals' odor detectors gives researchers a way to study aversion or attraction to certain objects. And understanding how these behavioral responses work will, I believe, help researchers clarify why humans feel the distinct emotion known as disgust. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Emotions
Link ID: 18939 - Posted: 11.16.2013

By Tanya Lewis and LiveScience SAN DIEGO — Being a social butterfly just might change your brain: In people with a large network of friends and excellent social skills, certain brain regions are bigger and better connected than in people with fewer friends, a new study finds. The research, presented here Tuesday (Nov. 12) at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, suggests a connection between social interactions and brain structure. "We're interested in how your brain is able to allow you to navigate in complex social environments," study researcher MaryAnn Noonan, a neuroscientist at Oxford University, in England, said at a news conference. Basically, "how many friends can your brain handle?" Noonan said. Scientists still don't understand how the brain manages human behavior in increasingly complex social situations, or what parts of the brain are linked to deviant social behavior associated with conditions like autism and schizophrenia. Studies in macaque monkeys have shown that brain areas involved in face processing and in predicting the intentions of others are larger in animals living in large social groups than in ones living in smaller groups. To investigate these brain differences in humans, Noonan and her colleagues at McGill University, in Canada, recruited 18 participants for a structural brain-imaging study. They asked people how many social interactions they had experienced in the past month, in order to determine the size of their social networks. As was the case in monkeys, some brain areas were enlarged and better connected in people with larger social networks. In humans, these areas were the temporal parietal junction, the anterior cingulate cortex and the rostral prefrontal cortex, which are part of a network involved in "mentalization" — the ability to attribute mental states, thoughts and beliefs to another. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 18938 - Posted: 11.16.2013

by Bob Holmes When it comes to evolution, there is no such thing as perfection. Even in the simple, unchanging environment of a laboratory flask, bacteria never stop making small tweaks to improve their fitness. That's the conclusion of the longest-running evolutionary experiment carried out in a lab. In 1988, Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing began growing 12 cultures of the same strain of Escherichia coli bacteria. The bacteria have been growing ever since, in isolation, on a simple nutrient medium – a total of more than 50,000 E. coli generations to date. Every 500 generations, Lenski freezes a sample of each culture, creating an artificial "fossil record". This allows him to resurrect the past and measure evolutionary progress by comparing how well bacteria compete against each other at different points in the evolutionary process. No upper limit After 10,000 generations, Lenski thought that the bacteria might approach an upper limit in fitness beyond which no further improvement was possible. But the full 50,000 generations of data show that isn't the case. When pitted against each other in an equal race, new generations always grew faster than older ones. In other words, fitness never stopped increasing. Their results fit a mathematical pattern known as a power law, in which something can increase forever, but at a steadily diminishing rate. "Even if we extrapolate it to 2.5 billion generations, there's no obvious reason to think there's an upper limit," says Lenski. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 18937 - Posted: 11.16.2013

Helen Shen To researchers who study how living things move, the octopus is an eight-legged marvel, managing its array of undulating appendages by means of a relatively simple nervous system. Some studies have suggested that each of the octopus’s tentacles has a 'mind' of its own, without rigid central coordination by the animal’s brain1. Now neuroscientist Guy Levy and his colleagues at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem report that the animals can rotate their bodies independently of their direction of movement, reorienting them while continuing to crawl in a straight line. And, unlike species that use their limbs to move forward or sideways relative to their body's orientation, octopuses tend to slither around in all directions. The team presented its findings on 10 November at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego, California. The new description of octopus movement is “not how one would imagine that would happen, but it seems to give a lot of control to the animal", says Gal Haspel, a neuroscientist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark. Haspel studies worm locomotion, and he was also surprised by the researchers’ report that the octopus pushes itself with worm-like contractions of its tentacles. Different combinations flex together to produce movement in different directions. Levy, who began the research as part of a project to design and control flexible, octopus-like robots, says that the work could also help to uncover basic biological principles of locomotion. Levy’s team deconstructed octopus movement using a transparent tank rigged with a system of mirrors and video cameras, in which they tested nine adult common octopuses (Octopus vulgaris). © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Evolution
Link ID: 18936 - Posted: 11.16.2013

When President Obama announced his plan to explore the mysteries of the human brain seven months ago, it was long on ambition and short on details. Now some of the details are being sketched in. They will include efforts to restore lost memories in war veterans, create tools that let scientists study individual brain circuits and map the nervous system of the fruit fly. The Defense Advanced Projects Agency, or DARPA, which has committed more than $50 million to the effort, offered the clearest plan. The agency wants to focus on treatments for the sort of brain disorders affecting soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to , deputy director of . "That is our constituency," Ling said at a news conference at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego. A colored 3-D MRI scan of the brain's white matter pathways traces connections between cells in the cerebrum and the brainstem. So DARPA will be working on problems including PTSD and traumatic brain injuries, Ling says. In particular, the agency wants to help the soldier who has "a terribly damaged brain and has lost a significant amount of declarative memory," Ling said. "We would like to restore that memory." DARPA hopes to do that with an implanted device that will take over some functions of the brain's hippocampus, an area that's important to memory. The agency has already used a device that does this in rodents, Ling said, and the goal is to move on to people quickly. The agency plans to use the same approach that created a better in record time, Ling said. "We went from idea to prototype in 18 months," he says. This undated X-ray image from the Cleveland Clinic shows electrodes implanted in a patient's brain. The method, known as deep brain stimulation, has traditionally been used to treat diseases such as Parkinson's, but new research indicates it could be helpful for patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. ©2013 NPR

Keyword: Stress; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18935 - Posted: 11.16.2013

by Jessica Griggs, San Diego Pregnant women may pass on the effects of stress to their fetus by way of bacterial changes in their vagina, suggests a study in mice. It may affect how well their baby's brain is equipped to deal with stress in adulthood. The bacteria in our body outnumber our own cells by about 10 to 1, with most of them found in our gut. Over the last few years, it has become clear that the bacterial ecosystem in our body – our microbiome – is essential for developing and maintaining a healthy immune system. Our gut bugs also help to prevent germs from invading our bodies, and help to absorb nutrients from food. A baby gets its first major dose of bacteria in life as it passes through its mother's birth canal. En route, the baby ingests the mother's vaginal microbes, which begin to colonise the newborn's gut. Chris Howerton, then at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and his colleagues wanted to know if this initial population of bacteria is important in shaping a baby's neurological development, and whether that population is influenced by stress during pregnancy. The first step was to figure out what features of the mother's vaginal microbiome might be altered by stress, and then see if any of those changes were transmitted to the offspring's gut. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Stress
Link ID: 18934 - Posted: 11.16.2013

by Laura Sanders SAN DIEGO — Teenagers’ brains are wired to confront a threat instead of retreating, research presented November 10 at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting suggests. The results may help explain why criminal activity peaks during adolescence. Kristina Caudle of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City and colleagues tested the impulse control of 83 people between ages 6 and 29. In the experiment, participants were asked to press a button when a photo of a happy face quickly flashed before them. They were told not to press the button when a face had a threatening expression. When confronted with the threatening faces, people between the ages of 13 and 17 were more likely to impulsively push the button than children and adults were, the team found. Brain scans revealed that activity in an area called the orbital frontal cortex peaked in teens when they successfully avoided pushing the button, suggesting that this region curbs the impulse to react, Caudle said. It’s not clear why children don’t have the same impulsive reaction to threatening faces. More studies could determine how the relevant brain systems grow and change, Caudle said. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Attention
Link ID: 18933 - Posted: 11.16.2013

by Jessica Griggs, San Diego Glugging lots of sugary drinks won't just make you fat, it might also lead to changes in the brain that have been linked to cancer and Alzheimer's – at least in rats. This finding comes from the first analysis of how sugary drinks affect proteins in the brain. It showed that 20 per cent of the proteins produced in a brain region related to decision-making were altered in rats that drank sugary drinks compared with those given water. It is well established that drinking sugar-sweetened drinks is linked to obesity and diabetes, as well as increasing the risk of cardiovascular problems. A recent estimate put the number of deaths associated with soft drinks at 184,000 a year globally. But the effects of sugar-rich drinks on the brain have received much less attention. "For many people around the world, soft drinks are their sole source of liquid, or at least they provide a very high proportion of their daily calories", says Jane Franklin at the behavioural neuropharmacology lab at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, who carried out the study. "We know that soft drinks are bad for the body, so it's reasonable to assume that they aren't doing anything good for your brain either". To find out, Franklin and her colleague Jennifer Cornish gave 24 adult rats either water or a solution of water containing 10 per cent sugar – about the proportion you would find in an average can of soft drink – for 26 days. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 18932 - Posted: 11.16.2013

By BARRY MEIER Addiction experts protested loudly when the Food and Drug Administration approved a powerful new opioid painkiller last month, saying that it would set off a wave of abuse much as OxyContin did when it first appeared. An F.D.A. panel had earlier voted, 11 to 2, against approval of the drug, Zohydro, in part because unlike current versions of OxyContin, it is not made in a formulation designed to deter abuse. Now a new issue is being raised about Zohydro. The drug will be manufactured by the same company, Alkermes, that makes a popular medication called Vivitrol, used to treat patients addicted to painkillers or alcohol. In addition, the company provides financial support to a leading professional group that represents substance abuse experts, the American Society of Addiction Medicine. For some critics, the company’s multiple roles in the world of painkillers is troubling. Dr. Gregory L. Jones, an addiction specialist in Louisville, Ky., said he had long been concerned about financial links between the group and the drug industry, adding that the Zohydro situation amplified those potential conflicts. Dr. Stuart Gitlow, the current president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, said he had been unaware until now of Alkermes’s involvement with Zohydro. Dr. Gitlow, who is affiliated with Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, said that the group would seek more information from Alkermes about the situation and then decide what, if anything, to do next. Officials of Alkermes appear to recognize the issue they face. In recent years, the company has been trying to increase sales of Vivitrol, a form of a drug called naltrexone, that is used to treat both alcoholism and opioid addiction. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 18931 - Posted: 11.16.2013

Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman Which illness frightens you most? Cancer? Stroke? Dementia? To judge from tabloid coverage, the condition we should really fear isn't physical at all. "Scared of mum's schizophrenic attacks", "Knife-wielding schizophrenic woman in court", "Schizo stranger killed dad", "Rachel murder: schizo accused", and "My schizophrenic son says he'll kill… but he's escaped from secure hospitals 7 times" are just a few of dozens of similar headlines we found in a cursory internet search. Mental illness, these stories imply, is dangerous. And schizophrenia is the most dangerous of all. Such reporting is unhelpful, misleading and manipulative. But it may be even more inaccurate than it first appears. This is because scientists are increasingly doubtful whether schizophrenia – a term invented more than a century ago by the psychiatric pioneer Eugen Bleuler – is a distinct illness at all. This isn't to say that individuals diagnosed with the condition don't have genuine and serious mental health problems. But how well the label "schizophrenia" fits those problems is now a very real question. What's wrong with the concept of schizophrenia? For one thing, research indicates the term may simply be functioning as a catch-all for a variety of separate problems. Six main conditions are typically caught under the umbrella of schizophrenia: paranoia; grandiosity (delusional beliefs that one has special powers or is famous); hallucinations (hearing voices, for example); thought disorder (being unable to think straight); anhedonia or the inability to experience pleasure; and diminished emotional expression (essentially an emotional "numbness"). But how many of these problems a person experiences, and how severely, varies enormously. Having one doesn't mean you'll necessarily develop any of the others. © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 18930 - Posted: 11.16.2013

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA—Compulsive gamblers aren’t necessarily greedier than the rest of us—their brains may just be wired to favor money over sex. That’s the conclusion of a study presented here today at the Society for Neuroscience conference. This tendency to prioritize money over more basic desires resembles other addictions like alcoholism, researchers say, and could point toward new therapies. Of the millions of people who gamble for fun or profit, about 1% to 2% qualify as pathological gamblers. They can't quit despite encountering serious negative consequences—going into debt, damaging relationships, and even smashing up slot machines and getting arrested when the habit gets out of control. This inability to stop even after sustained loss is one reason gambling recently became the first behavioral addiction to be recognized by psychiatry's most frequently used diagnostic manual, the DSM-5, says Guillaume Sescousse, a neuroscientist at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands who led the new study. After all, he says, professional poker players can play for 10 hours a day and not be considered addicts—so long as they can stop when their luck runs out. Researchers have long hypothesized that the basis for gambling addiction might be hypersensitivity to the highs of winning money, caused by dysfunctional wiring in neural circuits that process reward. Studies have produced conflicting results, however, so Sescousse decided to investigate an alternative hypothesis. He wondered if instead of being overly sensitive to monetary reward, compulsive gamblers were less sensitive to other rewarding things, like alcohol and sex. © 2013 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 18929 - Posted: 11.14.2013

by Jessica Griggs, San Diego No practice required. Wouldn't it be great if you could get better at playing sport or hone your piano skills simply by thinking about it? A small pilot study suggests that it might be possible. In the last few years, brain training using computer games that provide neurofeedback – a real-time representation of your brain activity – has become a popular, if controversial, method of enhancing cognitive abilities such as spatial memory, planning and multitasking. It has even been used to help actors get into character. Most of the games aim to enhance activation in a single part of the brain. But motor skills are known to involve two main areas – the premotor cortex and the supplementary motor cortex. Both are involved when people make movements or imagine moving. Brain activity between these regions is known to be less synchronised in people who are poor at motor tasks than in those who excel at them. So to see if brain training could target both areas and improve motor performance, Sook-Lei Liew and her colleagues from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland, recruited eight young adults. The researchers and asked the participants to watch a white circle on a screen while an fMRI machine scanned their brain. When the circle turned into a red triangle, the volunteers were told to move their fingers. This movement caused activation in their premotor cortex and supplementary motor cortex, which in turn moved a bar on the screen. The higher the synchronisation of activity between the two brain areas, the higher the bar went. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 18928 - Posted: 11.14.2013

by Laura Sanders SAN DIEGO — When stress during pregnancy disrupts a growing baby’s brain, blame bacteria. Microbes take part in an elaborate chain reaction, a new study finds: First, stress changes the populations of bacteria dwelling in a pregnant mouse’s vagina; those changes then affect which bacteria colonize a newborn pup’s gut; and the altered gut bacteria change the newborn’s brain. The research, presented at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting, may help explain how a stressful environment early in life can make a person more susceptible to disorders such as autism or schizophrenia. The finding also highlights the important and still mysterious ways that the bacteria living in bodies can influence the brain. “This is really fascinating and promising work,” said neuroscientist Cory Burghy of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “I am excited to take a look at how these systems interact in humans,” she said. Stress during pregnancy dramatically shifts the mix of bacteria that dwell in the vagina, Christopher Howerton of the University of Pennsylvania reported November 11. The alarming odor of foxes, loud noise, physical restraints and other stressful situations during a mouse’s pregnancy changed the composition of its vaginal bacteria, he and his colleagues found. The population of helpful Lactobacillus bacteria, for instance, decreased after stress. And because newborn mouse pups populate their guts with bacteria dwelling in their mother’s birth canal, microbes from mom colonize the baby’s gut. Mice born to moms with lower levels of Lactobacillus in the vagina had lower levels of Lactobacillus in their guts soon after they were born, the team reported. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18927 - Posted: 11.14.2013

Ed Yong Humanity's success depends on the ability of humans to copy, and build on, the works of their predecessors. Over time, human society has accumulated technologies, skills and knowledge beyond the scope of any single individual. Now, two teams of scientists have independently shown that the strength of this cumulative culture depends on the size and interconnectedness of social groups. Through laboratory experiments, they showed that complex cultural traditions — from making fishing nets to tying knots — last longer and improve faster at the hands of larger, more sociable groups. This helps to explain why some groups, such as Tasmanian aboriginals, lost many valuable skills and technologies as their populations shrank. “For producing fancy tools and complexity, it’s better to be social than smart,” says psychologist Joe Henrich of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, the lead author of one of the two studies, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B1. “And things that make us social are going to make us seem smarter.” “There were some theoretical models to explain these phenomena but no one had done experiments,” says evolutionary biologist Maxime Derex of the University of Montpellier, France, who led the other study, published online today in Nature2. Derex’s team asked 366 male students to play a virtual game in which they gained points — and eventually money — by building either an arrowhead or a fishing net. The nets offered greater rewards, but were also harder to make. The students watched video demonstrations of the two tasks in groups of 2, 4, 8 or 16, before attempting the tasks individually. Their arrows and nets were tested in simulations and scored. After each trial, they could see how other group members fared, and watch a step-by-step procedure for any one of the designs. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution; Intelligence
Link ID: 18926 - Posted: 11.14.2013

By Melissa Hogenboom Science reporter, BBC News Changes to specific cells in the retina could help diagnose and track the progression of Alzheimer's disease, scientists say. A team found genetically engineered mice with Alzheimer's lost thickness in this layer of eye cells. As the retina is a direct extension of the brain, they say the loss of retinal neurons could be related to the loss of brain cells in Alzheimer's. The findings were revealed at the US Society for Neuroscience conference. The team believes this work could one day lead to opticians being able to detect Alzheimer's in a regular eye check, if they had the right tools. Alterations in the same retinal cells could also help detect glaucoma - which causes blindness - and is now also viewed as a neurodegenerative disease similar to Alzheimer's, the researchers report. Scott Turner, director of the memory disorders programme at Georgetown University Medical Center, said: "The retina is an extension of the brain so it makes sense to see if the same pathologic processes found in an Alzheimer's brain are also found in the eye." Dr Turner and colleagues looked at the thickness of the retina in an area that had not previously been investigated. This included the inner nuclear layer and the retinal ganglion cell layer. They found that a loss of thickness occurred only in mice with Alzheimer's. The retinal ganglion cell layer had almost halved in size and the inner nuclear layer had decreased by more than a third. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Alzheimers; Vision
Link ID: 18925 - Posted: 11.14.2013

by Colin Barras IT'S musical mind-reading. Your patterns of brain activity can show what song you are listening to. In the area of the brain that processes sound – the auditory cortex – different neurons become active in response to different sound frequencies. So it should be possible to work out which musical note someone is listening to just by looking at this activity, says Geoff Boynton at the University of Washington in Seattle. To find out, Boynton and his colleague Jessica Thomas had four volunteers listen to various notes, while they used fMRI to record the resulting neural activity. "Then the game is to play a song and use the neural activity to guess what was played," he says. They were able to identify melodies like Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star from neural activity alone, Boynton told the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego, California, this week. The results could help probe the neural roots of people who are tone deaf. This can be a problem for people with cochlear implants, says Rebecca Schaefer, who researches neuroscience and music at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Another study into the music of the mind, also presented this week in San Diego, suggests that the brain is highly attuned to rhythm and this might explain why we talk at certain speeds. David Poeppel at New York University and his colleagues monitored brain activity in 12 volunteers while they listened to three piano sonatas. One sonata had a quick tempo, with around eight notes per second, one had five per second, and the slowest had one note every 2 seconds. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hearing; Brain imaging
Link ID: 18924 - Posted: 11.14.2013

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA—The nine-banded armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus) has many hidden skills—it can sniff out insects buried 20 cm underground, for example, and jump more than a meter into the air when startled. Seeing, however, is not one of its natural talents. Because its eyes lack light-detecting cells called cones, it has fuzzy, colorless vision. The light-receptive cells that an armadillo does have, called rods, are so sensitive that daylight renders the nocturnal animals practically blind. But the deficit may have a silver lining for humans. To study diseases that cause blindness in people, scientists typically genetically “knock out” cone-related genes in animals like mice. Such studies are limited, because they examine only one gene at a time, when a number of different genes contribute to cone dysfunction, researchers say. By comparing the armadillo gene to other closely related mammals, a team of scientists has now identified several cone-related genes in the armadillo genome that became nonfunctional millions of years ago, they report today at the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego, California. This makes the animals "excellent candidates" for gene therapy experiments that could restore color vision and point the way to potential human treatments, they say. © 2013 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Vision; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18923 - Posted: 11.14.2013

Helen Shen Long used to treat movement disorders, deep-brain stimulation (DBS) is rapidly emerging as an experimental therapy for neuropsychiatric conditions including depression, Tourette’s syndrome, obsessive–compulsive disorder and even Alzheimer’s disease. But despite some encouraging results in patients, it remains largely unknown how the electrical pulses delivered by implants deep within the brain affect neural circuits and change behaviour. Now there is a prototype DBS device that could provide some answers, researchers reported on 10 November at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in San Diego, California. Called Harmoni, the device is the first DBS implant to monitor electrical and chemical responses in the brain while delivering electrical stimulation. “That’s new data that we haven’t really had access to in humans before,” says Cameron McIntyre, a biomedical engineer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who is not involved in the work. Researchers hope that the device will identify the electrical and chemical signals in the brain that correlate in real time with the presence and severity of symptoms, including the tremors experienced by people with Parkinson’s disease. This information could help to uncover where and how DBS exerts its therapeutic effects on the brain, and why it sometimes fails, says Kendall Lee, a neurosurgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who is leading the project. The results come at a time of great excitement in the DBS field. Last month, the US government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a 5-year, US$70-million initiative to support development of the next generation of therapeutic brain-stimulating technologies. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 18922 - Posted: 11.13.2013

Heavy smokers who regularly puffed more than a packet of cigarettes a day cut down or quit for six months after their brains were stimulated with magnets, researchers say. The apparent success of the simple procedure has led the scientists to organise a large-scale trial which will launch early next year at 15 medical centres worldwide. Smokers in the pilot study had already tried anti-smoking drugs, nicotine gum and patches or psychotherapy to no avail, raising hopes that magnetic stimulation might offer an effective alternative for those who want to give up but have so far failed. Nearly half of the smokers in one group, who received high-frequency magnetic pulses, quit after a three-week course of stimulation, with more than a third still abstaining six months on. "This is a new approach to the problem," said neuroscientist Abraham Zangen of Ben-Gurion University in Israel. "These are heavy smokers who could not stop smoking before." More trials will be needed to prove the value of the procedure, which scientists say should only be offered within a psychotherapy-based programme designed specifically for smokers. For the pilot study, Zangen recruited 115 people aged 21-70 who smoked at least 20 a day. Only those who had tried to give up before using at least two methods were allowed to take part in the programme. The smokers were divided into three groups. The first had 15 minutes of high-frequency magnetic stimulation every weekday for two weeks, followed by three sessions in the third week. © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 18921 - Posted: 11.13.2013

Sedentary adults may improve their memory as soon as six weeks after taking up aerobic exercise, a small brain imaging study suggests. Cardiovascular fitness and cognitive performance such as attention seem to improve after six months or more of aerobic exercise in previous aging studies. Now researchers in Texas have found signs of increased regional blood flow in the brain of 37 sedentary adults with an average age of 64 who were randomized to physical training or a control group who had the training after a waiting period. They found a higher resting cerebral blood flow in the brain's anterior cingulate region in the physical training group compared with controls. The anterior cingulate region is associated with better memory functions. The size of this brain region was also larger in another study of "successful cognitive agers" over the age of 80 compared to middle-aged or elderly controls. "A relatively rapid health benefit across brain, memory and fitness in sedentary adults soon after starting to exercise, some gains starting as early as six weeks, could motivate adults to start exercising regularly," the study's lead author, Sandra Bond Champman of the Center for BrainHealth in Dallas and her co-authors concluded in Monday's issue of the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience. "The current findings shed new light on ways exercise promotes cognitive/brain health in aging." The participants all had a physical exam and screening for dementia, early cognitive impairment, depression and IQ before the study began. A noninvasive type of MRI was used to measure brain blood flow before, half way through the 6-week training sessions and at 12 weeks. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18920 - Posted: 11.13.2013