By April Neale An innovative two-part series, "Brains on Trial with Alan Alda," airing Wednesday, September 11 and 18, 2013, 10-11 p.m. on PBS (check local listings), explores how the growing ability to separate truth from lies, even decode people’s thoughts and memories, may radically affect how criminal trials are conducted in the future. As brain scanning techniques advance, their influence in criminal cases is becoming critically important. Brains on Trial centers around the trial of a fictional crime: a robbery staged in a convenience store that has been filmed by the store’s security cameras. A teenager stands accused of the attempted murder of the store clerk’s wife who was shot during the crime. While the crime is fictional, the trial is conducted before a real federal judge and argued by real practicing attorneys. The program is divided into two-parts: the first hour examines the guilt phase of the trial concluding with the jury’s verdict; the second hour looks at the sentencing phase, when arguments for and against a severe sentence are heard. As the trial unfolds, Alda visits with neuroscientists whose research has already influenced some Supreme Court decisions, as well as Duke University law professor Nita Farahany, a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. On these visits, neuroscientists show how functional MRIs and other brain scanning techniques are exploring lie detection, facial recognition, memory decoding, racial bias, brain maturity, intention, and even emotions. The research Alda discovers is at the center of a controversy as to how this rapidly expanding ability to peer into people’s minds and decode their thoughts and feelings could – or should – affect trials like the one presented in the program. As DNA evidence has played a major role in exonerating innocent prisoners, Brains on Trial asks if neuroscience can make the criminal justice system more just.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 18527 - Posted: 08.20.2013

By Brady Dennis, Insomniacs of the world: If you think taking a long run today will make you sleep better tonight, think again. While exercise has long been a prescription for insomnia, new research suggests that exercise doesn’t immediately translate into a better night’s sleep — unless you stick with it for months. A study published Thursday in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine found that aerobic exercise can lead to more rest at night for people who suffer from existing sleep problems, but only if they maintain an exercise regimen for roughly four months. “Exercise isn’t a quick fix. . . . It takes some time and effort,” the study’s lead author, Kelly Glazer Baron, a clinical psychologist and director of the behavioral sleep program at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said in an interview. “It’s a long-term relationship.” Studies have long suggested that aerobic exercise can contribute to better sleeping habits. But much of the research on the daily effects of exercise on sleep was conducted with healthy sleepers. Tuesday’s study, by contrast, looked at the long-term effects of exercise in people already suffering from sleep disorders. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 18526 - Posted: 08.19.2013

The EnChroma Color Blindness Test measures the type and extent of color vision deficiency. The test takes between 2-5 minutes to complete. Your test results may be anonymously recorded on our server for quality assurance purposes. This test is not a medical diagnosis. Please consult an eye care professional for more information regarding color vision deficiency. Copyright 2013 EnChroma, Inc.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 18525 - Posted: 08.19.2013

A few weeks back, I wrote about special lenses that were developed to give doctors “a clearer view of veins and vasculature, bruising, cyanosis, pallor, rashes, erythema, and other variations in blood O2 level, and concentration,” especially in bright light. But these lenses turned out to have an unintended side effect: they “may cure red-green colorblindness.” I’m severely red-green colorblind, so I was eager to try these $300 lenses. Turns out they didn’t help me; the company said that my colorblindness is too severe. They have helped many others, though (their Amazon reviews makes that clear). After my column appeared, I heard from another company that makes color-enhancing glasses — this time, specifically for red-green colorblind folks. The company’s called EnChroma, and the EnChroma Cx sunglasses are a heartbeat-skipping $600 a pair. “Our lenses are specifically designed to address color blindness,” the company wrote to me, “and utilize a 100+ layer dielectric coating we engineered for this precise purpose by keeping the physiology of the eyes of colorblind people in mind.” I asked to try out a pair. (You can, too: there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee.) To begin, you figure out which kind of colorblindness you have — Protan or Deutan — by taking the test at enchroma.com. Turns out I have something called Strong Protan. (“Protanomaly is a type of red-green color vision deficiency related to a genetic anomaly of the L-cone (i.e. the red cone).”) I’d never heard of it, but whatever. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 18524 - Posted: 08.19.2013

By SABRINA TAVERNISE BALTIMORE — At Everest Greenish Grocery, a brightly lit store on a faded corner of this city, nothing is more popular than a chocolate-flavored little cigar. They are displayed just above the Hershey bars along with their colorful cigarillo cousins — white grape, strawberry, pineapple and Da Bomb Blueberry. And they were completely sold out by 9 one recent evening, snapped up by young people dropping by for a snack or stopping in during a night of bar hopping. “Sorry, no more chocolate,” the night clerk, Qudrad Bari, apologetically told a young woman holding a fruit drink. In 2009, Congress passed a landmark law intended to eliminate an important gateway to smoking for young people by banning virtually all the flavors in cigarettes that advocates said tempted them. Health experts predicted that the change would lead to deep reductions in youth smoking. But the law was silent on flavors in cigars and a number of other tobacco products, instead giving the Food and Drug Administration broad discretion to decide whether to regulate them. Four years later, the agency has yet to assert that authority. And a rainbow of cheap flavored cigars and cigarillos, including some that look like cigarettes, line the shelves of convenience stores and gas stations, often right next to the candy. F.D.A. officials say they intend to regulate cigars and other tobacco products, but they do not say how or when. Smoking opponents contend that the agency’s delay is threatening recent progress in reducing smoking among young people. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 18523 - Posted: 08.19.2013

By Cristy Gelling Repairing a faulty communication line between the gut and the brain can quell the urge to overeat, an experiment that cured chubby mice of their junk food addiction indicates. A similar strategy might be used to treat compulsive eating in people. Some scientists have proposed that, in both mice and humans, overeating can resemble drug addiction; the more food a person consumes, the less responsive the brain becomes to the pleasure of eating. By restoring normal communication between the gut and brain, researchers were able to resensitize overfed rodents to the pleasures of both fatty and healthy foods. "The therapeutic implications are huge,” says neuroscientist Paul Kenny of the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla., who was not involved in the study. In the brain, a chemical called dopamine surges in response to pleasurable experiences like eating, sex and taking drugs. But brain-scanning studies suggest that obese individuals have muted dopamine reponses to food. These changes could lead overeaters to seek more and more food to satisfy their cravings, suggests study leader Ivan de Araujo of Yale University. De Araujo and his colleagues looked for ways to restore the dopamine response of overfed mice by studying the signals sent by their guts. In previous work, the researchers found that mice get a dopamine rush when fat is introduced directly into the small intestine via catheters. This shows that the gut communicates with the brain’s reward center even when the mouse can’t taste food. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Obesity; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 18522 - Posted: 08.17.2013

Drinking several servings of soda a day is associated with behaviour problems such as aggression, a new study of preschoolers suggests. When researchers looked at 2,929 children in the U.S., they found 43 per cent of parents said their child had at least one serving of soda a day and four per cent had four or more servings daily. Four per cent of parents in the study reported their children had four or more servings of pop a day. Sugar and caffeine are potential triggers for behaviour, but parenting practices and home environment are also an influence.Four per cent of parents in the study reported their children had four or more servings of pop a day. Sugar and caffeine are potential triggers for behaviour, but parenting practices and home environment are also an influence. (Reuters) "In this large sample of five-year-old urban U.S. children, we found strong and consistent relationships between soda consumption and a range of problem behaviours, consistent with the findings of previous studies in adolescents," Shakira Suglia of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health in New York and her coauthors concluded in Friday's issue of the Journal of Pediatrics. Children who consumed four or more servings of soda per day were more than twice as likely to destroy things belonging to others, to get into fights and to physically attack people compared with children who drank no soda. Drinking four servings of soft drinks was associated with increased aggressive behaviour, even after accounting for factors such as TV viewing, candy consumption, maternal depression and intimate partner violence. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Aggression; Obesity
Link ID: 18521 - Posted: 08.17.2013

By Susana Martinez-Conde Want to know an effective way to reduce pain from burns? Cover the affected red area, so you are unable to look at it. Ideally, use a blue bandage. Painfully hot stimuli applied to red skin feel more painful than applied to blue skin, a new research article published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience shows. The scientists, Matteo Martini, Daniel Perez-Marcos and Maria Victoria Sanchez-Vives from the University of Barcelona, used immersive virtual reality in combination with the application of real heat stimuli to the wrists of experimental subjects. Participants saw their virtual arms get increasingly red, blue, or green as the heat rose, and indicated, by pressing a button, when the sensation became painful. In an additional experimental condition, a gray dot close to the virtual arm became red as the temperature increased, but the color of the arm itself remained unaltered. The results showed that subjects experienced pain earlier (that is, at lower physical temperatures) when the arm was red than when it was blue. Also, the experience of increased pain was not associated to seeing red per se, but it mattered whether the color was on the body or not. A patch of red near –but not on– the virtual arm resulted in significantly less pain than that recorded with the arm itself becoming red. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Emotions
Link ID: 18520 - Posted: 08.17.2013

by Linda Geddes "IT WAS like red-hot pokers needling one side of my face," says Catherine, recalling the cluster headaches she experienced for six years. "I just wanted it to stop." But it wouldn't – none of the drugs she tried had any effect. Thinking she had nothing to lose, last year she enrolled in a pilot study to test a handheld device that applies a bolt of electricity to the neck, stimulating the vagus nerve – the superhighway that connects the brain to many of the body's organs, including the heart. The results of the trial were presented last month at the International Headache Congress in Boston, and while the trial is small, the findings are positive. Of the 21 volunteers, 18 reported a reduction in the severity and frequency of their headaches, rating them, on average, 50 per cent less painful after using the device daily and whenever they felt a headache coming on. This isn't the first time vagal nerve stimulation has been used as a treatment – but it is one of the first that hasn't required surgery. Some people with epilepsy have had a small generator that sends regular electrical signals to the vagus nerve implanted into their chest. Implanted devices have also been approved to treat depression. What's more, there is increasing evidence that such stimulation could treat many more disorders from headaches to stroke and possibly Alzheimer's disease (see "The many uses of the wonder nerve"). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 18519 - Posted: 08.17.2013

by Laura Poppick, LiveScience Researchers have widely examined homosexual behavior in mammals and birds, but have addressed it less frequently in insects and spiders. To assess the range of evolutionary explanations for same-sex intercourse in the invertebrate world, a team of biologists from Tel Aviv University in Israel and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland examined roughly 100 existing studies on the topic and compiled the first comprehensive review of homosexuality in invertebrates. The review was published earlier this month in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. The team focused on male-male interactions to simplify the analysis, and found that most of these encounters occurred as accidents. Whereas larger animals have developed more complicated homosexual motivations — like maintaining alliances, which has been found in certain primate and seagull species — insects seem to mistakenly partake in it in a hasty attempt to secure mates. [Gay Animals: Alternate Lifestyles in the Wild] "They have evolved to mate quick and dirty," said study co-author Inon Scharf, an evolutionary ecologist at Tel Aviv University. "They grab every opportunity to mate that they have because, if they become slow, they may give up an opportunity to mate." In some cases, males carry around the scent of females they have just mated with, sending confusing signals to other perusing males. In other cases, males and females look so similar to one another that males cannot tell if a potential mate is a female until he mounts "her" and prepares for the act, Scharf said. © 2013 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 18518 - Posted: 08.17.2013

by Sara Reardon It can be nearly impossible to know what is happening in the mind of someone who has experienced a severe brain injury, but two new methods could offer some clues. Together, they provide not only a better indication of consciousness but also a more effective way to communicate with some vegetative people. The way that a seemingly unconscious person behaves does not always reflect their mental state. Someone in a completely vegetative state may still be able to smile simply through reflex, while a perfectly alert person may be left unable to do so if a brain injury has affected their ability to move. So a different way to assess mental state is needed. Marcello Massimini at the University of Milan in Italy and his colleagues have developed a possible solution by stimulating brains with an electromagnetic pulse and then measuring the response. The pulse acts like striking a bell, they say, and neurons across the entire brain continue to "ring" in a specific wave pattern, depending on how active the connections between individual brain cells are. The team used this method to assess 20 people with brain injuries who were either in a vegetative state, in a minimally conscious state, or in the process of emerging from a coma. The team compared the patterns from these people with the patterns recorded from 32 healthy people who were awake, asleep or under anaesthesia. In each of the distinct states of consciousness, the researchers found, the neurons "shook" in a distinctive pattern in response to the electromagnetic pulse. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 18517 - Posted: 08.17.2013

NICHOLAS SPITZER is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California. His research concentrates on the ways in which neurons take on specialised functions to enable signalling in the brain. He is editor-in-chief of BrainFacts.org, a public information service about the brain and nervous system, and is instrumental in the BRAIN Initiative, a research project backed by the White House to advance new technologies to help map the brain. What do you know about the brain that the rest of us don’t? The structure and function of the brain are determined by genes and environment. We think we know this—it’s nature and nurture—but what many don’t realise is that this remains true throughout life. People think the brain is malleable only when we’re young. But that’s just not true. The forms of plasticity we see in the young brain are sustained in the mature brain. By plasticity I mean the ability of the brain to change its structure and function in response to changes in the environment. In addition to the classical ways the brain changes (the strength of the connections, synapses and neurons) we now understand a third kind of brain plasticity in which the neurotransmitter molecules—the signals from one neuron to another—can actually switch. What does this mean for human development? Our experiments have mainly been done on adult rats. A finding that is directly related to the human condition is that putting the animals on different photoperiods [day and night cycles] changes the neurotransmitter identity in the hypothalamus [a part of the brain] and this changes the animal’s behaviour. When animals are on a short day (rats are nocturnal so a short day is good) they make dopamine, the reward chemical. On the long day the neurons switch from dopamine to somatostatin, which retards growth. © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2013.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 18516 - Posted: 08.17.2013

Kelly Servick Consciousness isn’t easy to define, but we know it when we experience it. It’s not so simple to decide when someone else is conscious, however, as doctors must sometimes do with patients who have suffered traumatic brain injury. Now, researchers have come up with an approach that uses the brain’s response to magnetic stimulation to judge a person’s awareness, reducing it to a numerical score they call an index of consciousness. “You’re kind of banging on the brain and listening to the echo,” says Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom who was not involved in the work. Faced with an unresponsive patient, clinicians do their best to determine whether the person is conscious. Through sound, touch, and other stimuli, they try to provoke verbal responses, slight finger movements, or just a shifting gaze. Yet some conscious patients simply can’t move or speak; an estimated 40% of those initially judged to be completely unaware are later found to have some level of consciousness. Recently, physicians seeking to resolve a patient’s conscious state have gone right to the source, searching for signs of awareness using brain imaging or recording electrical activity of neurons. Most of these approaches define a conscious brain as an integrated brain, where groups of cells in many different regions activate to form a cohesive pattern, explains Marcello Massimini, a neurophysiologist at the University of Milan in Italy. “But that’s not enough,” he says. Sometimes even an unconscious brain looks highly integrated. For example, stimulating the brain of a sleeping person can create a huge wave of activity that “propagates like a ripple in water.” It’s a highly synchronized, widespread pattern, but it’s not consciousness, he says, and so this measure is often unreliable for diagnosis. © 2012 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 18515 - Posted: 08.15.2013

Moheb Costandi In the early hours of 9 September, 1984, a stranger entered Mrs M's California home through an open living-room window. Finding Mrs M asleep, he tried to rape her, but fled when other people in the house awoke. Mrs M described her assailant to the police: he was black, weighing about 170 pounds and 5'7” to 5'9” tall, with small braids and a blue baseball cap. Officers cruising her neighbourhood spotted someone roughly matching that description standing beside his car a block away from the house. The man, Joseph Pacely, said that his car had broken down and he was looking for someone to jump-start it. But Mrs M identified him as her attacker and he was charged. At Pacely's trial a few months later, memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus testified on his behalf. She told the jury how memory is fallible; how stress and fear may have impaired Mrs M's ability to identify her assailant, and how people can find it difficult to identify someone of a race other than their own. Pacely was acquitted. “It's cases like this that mean the most to me,” says Loftus, “the ones in which I play a role in bringing justice to an innocent person.” In a career spanning four decades, Loftus, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, has done more than any other researcher to document the unreliability of memory in experimental settings. And she has used what she has learned to testify as an expert witness in hundreds of criminal cases — Pacely's was her 101st — informing juries that memories are pliable and that eyewitness accounts are far from perfect recordings of actual events. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18514 - Posted: 08.15.2013

Helen Shen The false mouse memories made the ethicists uneasy. By stimulating certain neurons in the hippocampus, Susumu Tonegawa and his colleagues caused mice to recall receiving foot shocks in a setting in which none had occurred1. Tonegawa, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, says that he has no plans to ever implant false memories into humans — the study, published last month, was designed just to offer insight into memory formation. But the experiment has nonetheless alarmed some neuroethicists. “That was a bell-ringer, the idea that you can manipulate the brain to control the mind,” says James Giordano, chief of neuroethics studies at Georgetown University in Washington DC. He says that the study is one of many raising ethical concerns, and more are sure to come as an ambitious, multi-year US effort to parse the human brain gets under way. The BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative will develop technologies to understand how the brain’s billions of neurons work together to produce thought, emotion, movement and memory. But, along with the discoveries, it could force scientists and society to grapple with a laundry list of ethical issues: the responsible use of cognitive-enhancement devices, the protection of personal neural data, the prediction of untreatable neurodegenerative diseases and the assessment of criminal responsibility through brain scanning. On 20 August, US President Barack Obama’s commission on bioethics will hold a meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to begin to craft a set of ethics standards to guide the BRAIN project. There is already one major mechanism for ethical oversight in US research: institutional review boards, which must approve any studies involving human subjects. But many ethicists say that as neuroscience discoveries creep beyond laboratory walls into the marketplace and the courtroom, more comprehensive oversight is needed. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18513 - Posted: 08.15.2013

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS The start this month of high school and college football seasons across the country renews concerns about the issue of repeated head impacts and how to manage or, preferably, avoid concussions. Unfortunately, the resources to deal with the problem remain limited. Newly released, state-of-the-art football helmets, for instance, may measure how much force each player’s head is absorbing and relay that data via telemetry to trainers on the sidelines, but at $1,500 or so per helmet, they are unattainable for most teams. Which is why a study published recently in The British Journal of Sports Medicine is so appealing. Eminently practical, it offers a means by which any team, no matter how small or cash-strapped, can assess the likelihood of one of its players having sustained an on-field concussion. It also celebrates a nifty, D.I.Y., MacGyver-ish sensibility rarely seen in our technology-obsessed times. The study’s authors began with the simple idea that, to manage sports-related concussions, “you need to be able to quickly and easily assess” whether a given player has actually sustained one, said Steven P. Broglio, director of the University of Michigan’s NeuroSport Research Laboratory and co-author of the study. Not every head impact results in a concussion. One means of assessing concussion status, Dr. Broglio continued, is to look at a player’s reaction time, since it is known to increase immediately after a concussion. A variety of scientifically validated tools exist to measure players’ reaction times, but most require a computer and sophisticated software, and are not practicable on the sidelines or in the budgets of many teams. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18512 - Posted: 08.15.2013

By Bruce Bower NEW YORK CITY — Psychiatrists regularly get criticized for turning typical life problems into medical disorders. But in an odd reversal, many mental health clinicians are trying to transform one certified mental illness, borderline personality disorder, into a label for needy, manipulative people who don’t need treatment, a sociologist reported at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting on August 11. Patients with borderline personality disorder, unlike people with schizophrenia or other serious mental conditions, are often viewed by mental health providers as having cynically planned out rash acts and even suicide attempts, sociologist Sandra Sulzer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found in extensive interviews with 22 psychiatrists and psychologists in the United States. The condition includes difficulty controlling emotions, intense but unstable relationships, recklessness, cutting and other acts of self-harm, along with attempted and completed suicides. Before Sulzer’s study, little was known about how mental health professionals discuss and deal with this troubling set of symptoms. “Clinicians frequently view borderline personality disorder symptoms as signs of badness, not sickness, and as a code to route patients out of mental health care,” Sulzer said. That finding goes a long way toward explaining why many borderline personality disorder patients receive no treatment despite the availability of effective forms of psychotherapy (SN: 6/16/07, p. 374), she suggested. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 18511 - Posted: 08.15.2013

Maggie Fox NBC News A 12-year-old Arkansas girl infected with a brain-eating amoeba is on the mend and may be only the third person known to have survived the baffling infection, doctors said Wednesday. She’s recovering just as a 12-year-old boy in Miami struggles for his life with the same infection. Doctors note the infection is still extremely rare – so rare that health officials don’t know how to track it or protect against it. They’re also not sure why Kali Hardig of Little Rock appears to be recovering, but federal health officials are relaying details about her treatment to the team treating Zachary Reyna in Miami. The amoeba is called Naegleria fowleri, and it’s found in warm, fresh waters all over the world. It’s been seen in hot springs and swimming holes, freshwater lakes and even in neti pots used to clean out sinuses. It infects people through the nose, traveling up the nerve cells that carry smell signals into the brain. Doctors are not sure how or why a very few people are susceptible, but it’s clear that having water forced up into the sinuses, perhaps by dunking or diving, is an important factor. Kali became ill after swimming at a water park fed by spring water in Little Rock. Doctors at Arkansas Children’s Hospital tried the standard approach – a cocktail of four antibiotics – but also used an experimental antifungal drug and an unusual approach that involved lowering her body temperature.

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18510 - Posted: 08.15.2013

Brian Owens Too much sugar is bad for you, but how much, exactly, is too much? A study in mice has found that the animals' health and ability to compete can be harmed by a diet that has sugar levels equivalent to what many people in the United States currently consume. High-sugar diets are associated not only with obesity and diabetes, but also with other human conditions such as coronary heart disease. However, the exact causal links for many of these has not been established. When studies are done in mice to evaluate health effects of sugar, the doses given are often so high, and outside the range of equivalent human consumption, that it is hard to tell conclusively whether the results are relevant to people. “Nobody has been able to show adverse effects at human-relevant levels,” says Wayne Potts, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. But in a study published today in Nature Communications1, Potts and his colleagues looked at what happens under conditions comparable to the lifestyles of a substantial number of people in the United States. The researchers bred a pair of wild mice captured by Potts in a bakery, and fed offspring a diet in which 25% of the calories came from sugar. This is the maximum 'safe' level recommended by the US National Academies and by the US Department of Agriculture, and such a diet is consumed by around 13–25% of the US population. The safe level is roughly equivalent to drinking three cans of sugary drinks a day but having an otherwise sugar-free diet. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 18509 - Posted: 08.14.2013

By KATIE THOMAS The first test for a new sleep drug is — unsurprisingly — how safely it puts people to sleep. Now comes a second test: how safely it lets people wake up. The Food and Drug Administration is taking heightened interest in the issue, as new evidence suggests what many people have long suspected: the effects of common prescription sleep aids like Ambien can persist well into the next day. Of particular concern is whether people who take the drugs before bed can drive safely the next morning. Consumer advocates have warned for years about possible links between sleep drugs and car accidents. In one prominent example, Kerry Kennedy, the former wife of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, was arrested last year after tests showed she had taken a sleep aid before swerving her car into a tractor-trailer. The F.D.A.’s actions are part of a robust national conversation about how to cope with the throngs of drivers who take to roads every day under the influence of prescription drugs. Law enforcement authorities have struggled with how to prosecute those who are impaired, especially when they have a prescription. A government survey in 2007 found that nearly 5 percent of daytime drivers tested positive for prescription or over-the-counter medications. Doctors wrote close to 60 million prescriptions for sleep aids in the United States last year, according to the research firm IMS Health, but experts say testing how these drugs affect driving is not easy. Nonetheless, the F.D.A. has been unusually active. Last month, it rejected an application by Merck to approve a new sleep drug, suvorexant, in part because tests showed that some people had trouble driving the next day. In May, the agency warned patients taking common allergy drugs like Benadryl against driving, noting that the sedating effects can sometimes last into the following day. In January, citing similar concerns, the F.D.A. took the unusual step of requiring that all manufacturers of zolpidem, the generic name of Ambien, cut in half the dosage for women. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Attention
Link ID: 18508 - Posted: 08.14.2013