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

By Julianne Chiaet Kate wanted to die. She remembers the moment the psychiatrist said “the antidepressant isn’t going to work right away. Can you promise to be here next week and not kill yourself?” “I told her no,” Kate says. “I couldn’t promise my doctor I’d make it a week. That’s how bad my life had to be before I got help. When you’re struggling to stay alive every single day, and then your doctor tells you it’s going to take two to six weeks before the medications they give you are going to work, it’s devastating.” To make matters worse, after those weeks, the drug didn’t work. Kate went through five different anti-depressants over the course of six months before confirming that none of them worked. The debilitating disorder kept her out of school for extended periods of time. The National Center for Health Statistics estimates more than 1 in 10 Americans over the age of 12 took antidepressants between 2005 and 2008, the last time period for which the data are available. The rate of antidepressant use increased 400 percent from 1998 to 2008. Traditional antidepressants go after serotonin neurotransmitters, which sit in the membrane of the brain. Some antidepressants also target norepinephrine and dopamine. The drug keeps the transmitters from performing their normal function of transporting serotonin from the outside to the inside of the brain cells. People with depression have a normal amount of serotonin inside of their brain cells, however they have an insufficient amount on the outside of their cells. Thus by inhibiting the transmitter, the drug blocks the transportation of serotonin being taken into the cell, thus building up the serotonin outside of the cell. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 18919 - Posted: 11.13.2013

by Jennifer Viegas Music skills evolved at least 30 million years ago in the common ancestor of humans and monkeys, according to a new study that could help explain why chimpanzees drum on tree roots and monkey calls sound like singing. The study, published in the latest issue of Biology Letters, also suggests an answer to this chicken-and-egg question: Which came first, language or music? The answer appears to be music. "Musical behaviors would constitute a first step towards phonological patterning, and therefore language," lead author Andrea Ravignani told Discovery News. For the study, Ravignani, a doctoral candidate at the University of Vienna's Department of Cognitive Biology, and his colleagues focused on an ability known as "dependency detection." This has to do with recognizing relationships between syllables, words and musical notes. For example, once we hear a certain pattern like Do-Re-Mi, we listen for it again. Hearing something like Do-Re-Fa sounds wrong because it violates the expected pattern. Normally monkeys don't respond the same way, but this research grabbed their attention since it used sounds within their frequency ranges. In the study, squirrel monkeys sat in a sound booth and listened to a set of three novel patterns. (The researchers fed the monkeys insects between playbacks, so the monkeys quickly got to like this activity.) Whenever a pattern changed, similar to our hearing Do-Re-Fa, the monkeys stared longer, as if to say, "Huh?" © 2013 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Hearing; Language
Link ID: 18918 - Posted: 11.13.2013

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA—Why do teens—especially adolescent males—commit crimes more frequently than adults? One explanation may be that as a group, teenagers react more impulsively to threatening situations than do children or adults, likely because their brains have to work harder to reign in their behavior, a research team reported here yesterday at the Society for Neuroscience meeting. Whether it's driving too fast on a slick road or experimenting with drugs, teenagers have a reputation for courting danger that is often attributed to immaturity or poor decision-making. If immaturity or lack of judgment were the only problem, however, one would expect that children, whose brains are at an even earlier stage of development, would have an equal or greater penchant for risk-taking, says Kristina Caudle, a neuroscientist at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City who led the study. But younger children tend to be more cautious than teenagers, suggesting that there is something unique about adolescent brain development that lures them to danger, she says. It's hard to generalize about teenage impulsivity, because some adolescents clearly have more self-control than many adults, says principal investigator B. J. Casey, a neuroscientist. Still, a growing body of evidence suggests that, in general, teens specifically struggle to keep their cool in social situations, she says. Because many crimes committed during adolescence involve emotionally fraught social situations, such as conflict, Caudle and colleagues decided to test whether teens perform badly on a common impulsivity task when faced with social cues of threat. They recruited 83 people, ranging in age from 6 to 29, to perform a simple "Go/No-Go" task, in which they watched a series of faces making neutral or threatening facial expressions flicker past on a computer screen. Each time the participants saw a neutral face, they were instructed to hit a button. They were also told to hold back from pressing the button when they saw a threatening face. As the participants performed the task, the researchers monitored their brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging. © 2013 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Attention
Link ID: 18917 - Posted: 11.12.2013

Babies born to women who exercised during pregnancy have enhanced brain development compared with babies born to moms who didn’t exercise while they were pregnant, a new Canadian study suggests. The babies of 10 women who did as little as 20 minutes of moderate exercise three times a week during pregnancy showed more advanced brain activity when they were tested at eight to 12 days old than the babies of eight women who did not exercise during pregnancy, reported University of Montreal researcher David Ellemberg and his colleagues at the Neuroscience 2013 conference in San Diego on Sunday. “We are optimistic that this will encourage women to change their health habits, given that the simple act of exercising during pregnancy could make a difference for their child's future,” Ellemberg said in a statement. The women in the study were randomly assigned to an exercise group or a sedentary group at the beginning of their second trimester. Those in the exercise group had to spend at least 20 minutes three times a week doing exercise intense enough to lead to at least a slight shortness of breath. After their babies were born, the researchers tested them by placing a cap of electrodes on the babies' heads and then playing novel sounds while they slept. They measured the electrical response of the babies' brains to see how well they could distinguish between different sounds. The researchers found that the babies in the exercise group produced signals associated with more mature brains. The researchers said they plan to test the children’s cognitive, motor and language development at age one to see if there are lasting effects. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18916 - Posted: 11.12.2013

Brian Owens The hordes of microbes that inhabit every nook and cranny of every animal are not just passive hitchhikers: they actively shape their hosts’ well-being and even behaviour. Now, researchers have found evidence that bacteria living in the scent glands of hyenas help to produce the smells that the animals use to identify group members and tell when females are ready to mate. Kevin Theis, a microbial ecologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, had been studying hyena scent communication for several years when, after he gave a talk on the subject, someone asked him what part the bacteria might play. “I just said, ‘I don’t know’,” he says. He started investigating. He found that for 40 years, scientists had wondered whether smelly bacteria were involved in animals' chemical communication. But experiments to determine which bacteria were present had been inconclusive, because the microbes had to be grown in culture, which is not possible with all bacteria. However, next-generation genetic sequencing would enable Theis to identify the microbes in a sample without having to grow them in a dish. Using this technique, Theis and his colleagues last year published a study1 that identified more types of bacterium living in the hyenas’ scent glands than the 15 previous studies of mammal scent glands combined. In both spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) and striped hyenas (Hyaena hyaena), most of the bacteria were of a kind that ferments nutrients exuded by the skin and produces odours. “The diversity of the bacteria is enough to potentially explain the origin of these signals,” says Theis. Now, they have found that the structure of the bacterial communities varied depending on the scent profiles of the sour, musky-smelling 'pastes' that the animals left on grass stalks to communicate with members of their clan. In addition, in the spotted hyenas, both the bacterial and scent profiles varied between males and females, and with the reproductive state of females — all attributes that hyenas are known to be able to infer from scent pastes. The work is published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 18915 - Posted: 11.12.2013

By PAM BELLUCK It is probably no accident that the pivotal object in Martin Cruz Smith’s newest detective thriller, “Tatiana,” is a notebook nobody can read. Early on, Mr. Smith worried that his novel, being published Tuesday by Simon & Schuster, would be unreadable too — or wouldn’t be written at all. Author of the 1981 blockbuster “Gorky Park” and many acclaimed books since, Mr. Smith writes about people who uncover and keep secrets. But for 18 years, he has had a secret of his own. In 1995, he received a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. But he kept it hidden, not only from the public, but from his publisher and editors. He concealed it, although for years, tremors and stiffness have kept him from taking detailed notes and sketching people, places and objects for his research — and even as he became unable to type the words he needed to finish his 2010 best seller “Three Stations.” “I didn’t want to be judged by that,” Mr. Smith, 71, explained recently in his light-filled Victorian home north of San Francisco. “Either I’m a good writer or I’m not. ‘He’s our pre-eminent Parkinson’s writer.’ Who needs that?” In talking about his Parkinson’s odyssey, including a relatively new but promising treatment, Mr. Smith is opening a window on the still incurable disorder affecting four million people worldwide, a disease that is becoming increasingly prevalent as baby boomers age. His experience reflects a common desire to conceal often-stigmatizing symptoms, like shaking, slowness, and rigidity. (He mostly didn’t mind his Parkinsonian hallucinations: a black cat in his lap, whirlwinds spiraling from computer keys, a butler, a British military officer in full regalia. “Having hallucinations for a fiction writer is redundant,” he said.) Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 18914 - Posted: 11.12.2013

By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online Depression can make us physically older by speeding up the ageing process in our cells, according to a study. Lab tests showed cells looked biologically older in people who were severely depressed or who had been in the past. These visible differences in a measure of cell ageing called telomere length couldn't be explained by other factors, such as whether a person smoked. The findings, in more than 2,000 people, appear in Molecular Psychiatry. Experts already know that people with major depression are at increased risk of age-related diseases such as cancer, diabetes, obesity and heart disease. This might be partly down to unhealthy lifestyle behaviours such as alcohol use and physical inactivity. But scientists suspect depression takes its own toll on our cells. To investigate, Josine Verhoeven from the VU University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, along with colleagues from the US, recruited 2,407 people to take part in the study. More than one third of the volunteers were currently depressed, a third had experienced major depression in the past and the rest had never been depressed. The volunteers were asked to give a blood sample for the researchers to analyse in the lab for signs of cellular ageing. The researchers were looking for changes in structures deep inside cells called telomeres. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 18913 - Posted: 11.12.2013

By PAULA SPAN Jim Cooke blames his hearing loss on the constant roar of C-119 aircraft engines he experienced in the Air Force. He didn’t wear protective gear because, like most 20-year-olds, “you think you’re indestructible,” he said. By the time he was 45, he needed hearing aids for both ears. Still, he had a long career as a telephone company executive while he and his wife, Jean, raised two children in Broadview Heights, Ohio. Only after retirement, he told me in an interview, did he start having trouble communicating. Jean and Jim Cooke Jean and Jim Cooke Mr. Cooke had to relinquish a couple of part-time jobs he enjoyed because “I felt insecure about dealing with people on the phone,” he said. He withdrew from a church organization he led because he couldn’t grasp what members were saying at meetings. “He didn’t want to be in social situations,” Mrs. Cooke said. “It gave him a feeling of inadequacy, and anger at times.” Two years ago, when their grandchildren began saying that Granddad needed to replace his hearing aid batteries — although the batteries were fine — the Cookes went to the Cleveland Clinic, where an audiologist there, Dr. Sarah Sydlowski, told Jim that at 76, he might consider a cochlear implant. Perhaps the heart-tugging YouTube videos of deaf toddlers suddenly hearing sounds have led us to think of cochlear implants as primarily for children. Or perhaps, said Dr. Frank R. Lin, a Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist, we consider late-life hearing loss normal (which it is), “an unfortunate but inconsequential aspect of aging,” and don’t explore treatment beyond hearing aids. In any case, the idea of older adults having a complex electronic device surgically implanted has been slow to catch on, even though by far the greatest number of people with severe hearing loss are seniors. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Robotics
Link ID: 18912 - Posted: 11.12.2013