Obese mothers tend to have kids who become obese. Now provocative research suggests weight-loss surgery may help break that unhealthy cycle in an unexpected way — by affecting how their children's genes behave. In a first-of-a-kind study, Canadian researchers tested children born to obese women, plus their brothers and sisters who were conceived after the mother had obesity surgery. Youngsters born after mom lost lots of weight were slimmer than their siblings. They also had fewer risk factors for diabetes or heart disease later in life. More intriguing, the researchers discovered that numerous genes linked to obesity-related health problems worked differently in the younger siblings than in their older brothers and sisters. Clearly diet and exercise play a huge role in how fit the younger siblings will continue to be, and it's a small study. But the findings suggest the children born after mom's surgery might have an advantage. "The impact on the genes, you will see the impact for the rest of your life," predicted Marie-Claude Vohl of Laval University in Quebec City. She helped lead the work reported Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Why would there be a difference? It's not that mom passed on different genes, but how those genes operate in her child's body. The idea: Factors inside the womb seem to affect the dimmer switches that develop on a fetus' genes — chemical changes that make genes speed up or slow down or switch on and off. That in turn can greatly influence health. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Obesity; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18195 - Posted: 05.28.2013

Chris Palmer Once thought to be a low-level form of pain, itch is instead a distinct sensation with a dedicated neural circuit linking cells in the periphery of the body to the brain, a study in mice suggests. Neuroscientists Mark Hoon and Santosh Mishra of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research in Bethesda, Maryland, searched for the molecule that encodes the sensation of itch by screening genes in sensory neurons that are activated by touch, heat, pain and itch. They found that one particular protein, called natriuretic polypeptide b, or Nppb, was expressed in only a subset of these neurons. Mutant mice lacking Nppb did not respond to itch-inducing compounds, but did respond normally to heat and pain. The researchers also found that when they injected Nppb in the mice's necks, it put them into a self-scratching frenzy. This occurred both in the mutants and in control mice. “Our research reveals the primary transmitter used by itch sensory neurons and confirms that itch is detected by specialized sensory neurons,” says Hoon. Hoon and Mishra went on to find neurons bearing receptors for Nppb in the spinal cord. Injection of a toxin made from soapwort seeds that targeted these spinal-cord neurons blocked itch responses, but not other sensory responses, suggesting that information about the itch sensation is transmitted along a distinct pathway. The researchers' results are published today in Science1. The result “explains problems in the literature and provides a very testable hypothesis for how itch works”, says Glenn Giesler, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 18194 - Posted: 05.25.2013

By Susan Milius Cockroaches that don’t fall for traps’ sweet poisons have evolved taste cells that register sugar as bitter. In certain groups of the widespread German cockroach (Blattella germanica), nerve cells that normally detect bitter, potentially toxic compounds now also respond to glucose, says entomologist Coby Schal of North Carolina State University in Raleigh. The “bitter” reaction suppresses the “sweet” response from other nerve cells, and the roach stops eating, Schal and his colleagues report in the May 24 Science. Normally roaches love sugar. But with these populations, a dab of jelly with glucose in it makes them “jump back,” Schal says. “The response is: ‘Yuck! Terrible!’” This quirk of roach taste explains why glucose-baited poison traps stopped working among certain roaches, Schal says. Such bait traps combining a pesticide with something delicious became popular during the mid-1980s. But in 1993, Jules Silverman, also a coauthor on the new paper, reported roaches avoiding these once-appealing baits. “This is a fascinating piece of work because it shows how quickly, and how simply, the sense of taste can evolve,” says neurobiologist Richard Benton of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. What pest-control manufacturers put in their roach baits now, and whether some still use glucose, isn’t public, Schal says. But humankind’s arms race with cockroaches could have started long ago, “in the caves,” he says. In this back-and-forth struggle, it’s important “to understand what the cockroach is doing from a molecular basis.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Evolution
Link ID: 18193 - Posted: 05.25.2013

The reason we struggle to recall memories from our early childhood is down to high levels of neuron production during the first years of life, say Canadian researchers. The formation of new brain cells increases the capacity for learning but also clears the mind of old memories. The findings were presented to the Canadian Association of Neuroscience. An expert at City University in London said the mouse study called into question some psychological theories. Neurogenesis, or the formation of new neurons in the hippocampus - a region of the brain known to be important for learning and remembering, reaches its peak before and after birth. It then declines steadily during childhood and adulthood. Dr Paul Frankland and Dr Sheena Josselyn, from the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and the University of Toronto, wanted to find out how the process of new neuron generation impacted on memory storage. They carried out their research on younger and older mice in the lab. Early amnesia In adult mice, they found that increasing neurogenesis after memory formation was enough to bring about forgetting. In infant mice, they discovered that decreasing neurogenesis after memory formation meant that the normal forgetting observed at this age did not occur. Their research suggests a direct link between a reduction in neuron growth and increased memory recall. They found the opposite to be true also - a decreased ability to remember when neurogenesis is increased (as happens during infancy). BBC © 2013

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 18192 - Posted: 05.25.2013

By DANIEL BERGNER Linneah sat at a desk at the Center for Sexual Medicine at Sheppard Pratt in the suburbs of Baltimore and filled out a questionnaire. She read briskly, making swift checks beside her selected answers, and when she was finished, she handed the pages across the desk to Martina Miller, who gave her a round of pills. The pills were either a placebo or a new drug called Lybrido, created to stoke sexual desire in women. Checking her computer, Miller pointed out gently that Linneah hadn’t been doing her duty as a study participant. Over the past eight weeks, she took the tablets before she planned to have sex, and for every time she put a pill on her tongue, she was supposed to make an entry in her online diary about her level of lust. “I know, I know,” Linneah said. She is a 44-year-old part-time elementary-school teacher, and that day she wore red pants and a canary yellow scarf. (She asked that only a nickname be used to protect her privacy.) “It’s a mess. I keep forgetting.” Miller, a study coordinator, began a short interview, typing Linneah’s replies into a database that the medication’s Dutch inventor, Adriaan Tuiten, will present to the Food and Drug Administration this summer or fall as part of his campaign to win the agency’s approval and begin marketing what might become the first female-desire drug in America. “Thinking about your desire now,” Miller said, “would you say it is absent, very low, low, reasonable or present?” “Low.” This was no different from Linneah’s reply at the trial’s outset two months before. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 18191 - Posted: 05.25.2013

Helen Shen Bexarotene, a cancer drug touted as a potential treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, may not be the blockbuster remedy scientists were hoping for, according to several analyses published in Science on 24 May1–4. Four independent research groups report that they failed to fully replicate striking results published in the journal last year5 by Gary Landreth, a neuroscientist at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio, and his colleagues. Landreth's team reported that the drug bexarotene could lower brain concentrations of the β-amyloid protein that has long been suspected as a key contributor to Alzheimer’s disease, and could even reverse cognitive impairments in diseased mice. But the study garnered particular attention for its claim that the drug could clear 50% of amyloid plaques — sticky clumps of the protein thought to interfere with brain function — in as little as 72 hours. “That attracted a lot of folks to try to replicate these studies,” says Philip Wong, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “No drug at the present moment can do things like that.” None of the follow-up studies published this week replicated the effects of bexarotene on plaques. Two groups did, however, confirm Landreth’s finding that the drug reduced levels of a soluble, free-floating form of β-amyloid, which can aggregate in plaques4. Not all of the papers examined memory in mice, but one group led by Radosveta Koldamova, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, found that bexarotene treatment led to cognitive improvements1. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 18190 - Posted: 05.25.2013

People with higher IQs are slow to detect large background movements because their brains filter out non-essential information, say US researchers. Instead, they are good at detecting small moving objects. The findings come in a study of 53 people given a simple, visual test in Current Biology. The results could help scientists understand what makes a brain more efficient and more intelligent. In the study, individuals watched short video clips of black and white bars moving across a computer screen. Some clips were small and filled only the centre of the screen, while others filled the whole screen. The participants' sole task was to identify in which direction the bars were drifting - to the right or to the left. Participants also took a standardised intelligence test. The results showed that people with higher IQ scores were faster at noticing the movement of the bars when observing the smallest image - but they were slower at detecting movement in the larger images. Michael Melnick of the University of Rochester, who was part of the research team said the results were very clear. "From previous research, we expected that all participants would be worse at detecting the movement of large images, but high IQ individuals were much, much worse. The authors explain that in most scenarios, background movement is less important than small moving objects in the foreground, for example driving a car, walking down a hall or moving your eyes across the room. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Intelligence; Attention
Link ID: 18189 - Posted: 05.25.2013

By Neuroskeptic Newly discovered papers have shed light on a fascinating episode in the history of neuroscience: Weighing brain activity with the balance The story of the early Italian neuroscientist Dr Angelo Mosso and his ‘human circulation balance’ is an old one – I remember reading about it as a student, in the introductory bit of a textbook on fMRI – but until now, the exact details were murky. In the new paper, Italian neuroscientists Sandrone and colleagues report that they’ve unearthed Mosso’s original manuscripts from an archive in Milan. Mosso worked in the late 19th century, an era that was – in retrospect – right at the dawn of modern neuroscience. A major question at that time was the relationship between brain function and blood flow. His early work included studies of the blood pressure in the brains of individuals with skull defects. His most ambitious project, however, was his balance – or as he sometimes called it, according to his daughter, his ‘metal cradle’ or ‘machine to weigh the soul’. It was in essence just a large balance. A volunteer lay on a table, their head on one side of the scale’s pivot and their feet on the other. It was carefully adjusted so that the two sides were perfectly balanced. The theory was that if mental activity caused increased brain blood flow, it ought to increase the weight of the head relative to the rest of the body, so that side of the balance would fall.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18188 - Posted: 05.23.2013

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD Modern mothers love to debate how long to breast-feed, a topic that stirs both guilt and pride. Now — in a very preliminary finding — the Neanderthals are weighing in. By looking at barium levels in the fossilized molar of a Neanderthal child, researchers concluded that the child had been breast-fed exclusively for the first seven months, followed by seven months of mother’s milk supplemented by other food. Then the barium pattern in the tooth enamel “returned to baseline prenatal levels, indicating an abrupt cessation of breast-feeding at 1.2 years of age,” the scientists reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature. While that timetable conforms with the current recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics — which suggests that mothers exclusively breast-feed babies for six months and continue for 12 months if possible — it represents a much shorter span of breast-feeding than practiced by apes or a vast majority of modern humans. The average age of weaning in nonindustrial populations is about 2.5 years; in chimpanzees in the wild, it is about 5.3 years. Of course, living conditions were much different for our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, extinct for the last 30,000 years. The findings, which drew strong skepticism from some scientists, were meant to highlight a method of linking barium levels in teeth to dietary changes. In the Nature report, researchers from the United States and Australia described tests among human infants and captive macaques showing that traces of the element barium in tooth enamel appeared to accurately reflect transitions from mother’s milk through weaning. The barium levels rose during breast-feeding and fell off sharply on weaning. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Evolution
Link ID: 18187 - Posted: 05.23.2013

Scientists have reversed behavioral and brain abnormalities in adult mice that resemble some features of schizophrenia by restoring normal expression to a suspect gene that is over-expressed in humans with the illness. Targeting expression of the gene Neuregulin1, which makes a protein important for brain development, may hold promise for treating at least some patients with the brain disorder, say researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health. Like patients with schizophrenia, adult mice biogenetically-engineered to have higher Neuregulin 1 levels showed reduced activity of the brain messenger chemicals glutamate and GABA. The mice also showed behaviors related to aspects of the human illness. For example, they interacted less with other animals and faltered on thinking tasks. “The deficits reversed when we normalized Neuregulin 1 expression in animals that had been symptomatic, suggesting that damage which occurred during development is recoverable in adulthood,” explained Lin Mei, M.D., Ph.D.External Web Site Policy , of the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University, a grantee of NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). “While mouse models can’t really do full justice to a complex brain disorder that impairs our most uniquely human characteristics, this study demonstrates the potential of dissecting the workings of intermediate components of disorders in animals to discover underlying mechanisms and new treatment targets,” said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D. “Hopeful news about how an illness process that originates early in development might be reversible in adulthood illustrates the promise of such translational research.” Schizophrenia is thought to stem from early damage to the developing fetal brain, traceable to a complex mix of genetic and environmental causes. Although genes identified to date account for only a small fraction of cases, evidence has implicated variation in the Neuregulin 1 gene. For example, postmortem studies have found that it is overexpressed in the brain's thinking hub, or prefrontal cortex, of some people who had schizophrenia. It codes for a chemical messenger that plays a pivotal role in communication between brain cells, as well as in brain development.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18186 - Posted: 05.23.2013

Virginia Hughes Late in the morning on 20 February, more than 200 people packed an auditorium at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. The purpose of the event, according to its organizers, was to explain why a new study about weight and death was absolutely wrong. The report, a meta-analysis of 97 studies including 2.88 million people, had been released on 2 January in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)1. A team led by Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Maryland, reported that people deemed 'overweight' by international standards were 6% less likely to die than were those of 'normal' weight over the same time period. The result seemed to counter decades of advice to avoid even modest weight gain, provoking coverage in most major news outlets — and a hostile backlash from some public-health experts. “This study is really a pile of rubbish, and no one should waste their time reading it,” said Walter Willett, a leading nutrition and epidemiology researcher at the Harvard school, in a radio interview. Willett later organized the Harvard symposium — where speakers lined up to critique Flegal's study — to counteract that coverage and highlight what he and his colleagues saw as problems with the paper. “The Flegal paper was so flawed, so misleading and so confusing to so many people, we thought it really would be important to dig down more deeply,” Willett says. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 18185 - Posted: 05.23.2013

By Bruce Bower Chaser isn’t just a 9-year-old border collie with her breed’s boundless energy, intense focus and love of herding virtually anything. She’s a grammar hound. In experiments directed by her owner, psychologist John Pilley of Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C., Chaser demonstrated her grasp of the basic elements of grammar by responding correctly to commands such as “to ball take Frisbee” and its reverse, “to Frisbee take ball.” The dog had previous, extensive training to recognize classes of words including nouns, verbs and prepositions. “Chaser intuitively discovered how to comprehend sentences based on lots of background learning about different types of words,” Pilley says. He reports the results May 13 in Learning and Motivation. Throughout the first three years of Chaser’s life, Pilley and a colleague trained the dog to recognize and fetch more than 1,000 objects by name. Using praise and play as reinforcements, the researchers also taught Chaser the meaning of different types of words, such as verbs and prepositions. As a result, Chaser learned that phrases such as “to Frisbee” meant that she should take whatever was in her mouth to the named object. Exactly how the dog gained her command of grammar is unclear, however. Pilley suspects that Chaser first mentally linked each of two nouns she heard in a sentence to objects in her memory. Then the canine held that information in mind while deciding which of two objects to bring to which of two other objects. Pilley’s work follows controversial studies of grammar understanding in dolphins and a pygmy chimp. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 18184 - Posted: 05.22.2013

Jeremy Laurance Iodine deficiency is widespread amongst pregnant women in the UK and may be harming the cognitive development of their children, scientists have found. The first large study of the problem in the UK has revealed that two-thirds of expectant mothers had a mild to moderate deficiency in the mineral, which was associated with significantly lower IQ and reading ability in their children at the ages of eight and nine. Iodine is essential for growth and development of the brain, and pregnant women need 50 per cent more. Researchers said women should ensure they are getting enough from their diet – milk, yogurt and fish are the best sources – and that any pregnancy supplement they take contains iodine. But they warned that kelp and seaweed supplements should be avoided as they contain variable levels of iodine and could lead to overdose. Severe iodine deficiency is known to cause brain damage and is the biggest cause of mental deficiency in the developing world. But mild to moderate iodine deficiency has been little studied – until now. Researchers from the Universities of Surrey and Bristol examined records of 1,000 mothers who were part of the Children of the 90s study which has followed the development of children born to 14,000 mothers in Avon since 1990-91. They found that 67 per cent of the mothers had levels of iodine below that recommended by the World Health Organisation. Their children were divided into groups according to how well they performed on IQ and reading tests at eight and nine. The results showed those whose mothers had low iodine levels were 60 per cent more likely to be in the bottom group. © independent.co.uk

Keyword: Intelligence; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18183 - Posted: 05.22.2013

By Maia Szalavitz There are many roads to greatness, but logging 10,000 hours of practice to help you perfect a skill may not be sufficient. Based on research suggesting that practice is the essence of genius, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that 10,000 hours of appropriately guided practice was “the magic number of greatness,” regardless of a person’s natural aptitude. With enough practice, he claimed in his book Outliers, anyone could achieve a level of proficiency that would rival that of a professional. It was just a matter of putting in the time. But in the years since Gladwell first pushed the “10,000-hours rule,” researchers have engaged in a spirited debate over what that rule entails. It’s clear that not just any practice, but only dedicated and intensive honing of skills that counts. And is there magic in that 10,000th hour? In an attempt to answer some of these questions, and to delve further into how practice leads to mastery, Zach Hambrick, associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University, and his colleagues decided to study musicians and chess players. It helps that both skills are amenable to such analysis because players can be ranked almost objectively. So in their research, which was published in the journal Intelligence, they reanalyzed data from 14 studies of top chess players and musicians. They found that for musicians, only 30% of the variance in their rankings as performers could be accounted for by how much time they spent practicing. For chess players, practice only accounted for 34% of what determined the rank of a master player. © 2013 Time Inc. All rights reserved

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Intelligence
Link ID: 18182 - Posted: 05.22.2013

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS MONTREAL — In many ways, the Obama administration’s new plan to map the human brain has its origins in the work of Brenda Milner, the neuropsychologist whose detailed observations of an amnesia patient in the 1950s showed how memory is rooted in specific regions of the brain. “Prior to Brenda Milner’s discoveries, many behaviorists and some cognitive psychologists followed the lead of Freud and Skinner in abandoning biology as a useful guide to the study of memory,” the Nobel laureate Dr. Eric Kandel wrote in his memoir, “In Search of Memory.” “Milner’s work changed all that.” The amnesia patient, Henry Molaison (known during his lifetime only as H.M., to protect his privacy), died at 82 in 2008; his brain is now being dissected and digitally mapped in exquisite detail. But Dr. Milner is still very much alive. Two months short of her 95th birthday, she puts in full days at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, where she is studying left/right brain differences. We spoke in her offices here at “the Neuro” and at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston. Here is a condensed and edited version of the conversations. How did you come to work with H.M., perhaps the most famous patient in the history of neuroscience? In 1950, while working on a doctorate at McGill, I went to work here at the Montreal Neurological Institute to study the patients of Dr. Wilder Penfield. He’d created the Neuro as a place to pioneer the neurosurgical treatment of epilepsy. He’d developed a procedure for patients who were having epileptic seizures because of brain injuries where he’d excise the injured part of the brain. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18181 - Posted: 05.21.2013

by Andy Coghlan An experimental stem-cell treatment has restored the sight of a man blinded by the degeneration of his retinal cells. The man, who is taking part in a trial examining the safety of using human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) to reverse two common causes of blindness, can now see well enough to be allowed to drive. People undergoing treatment had reported modest improvements in vision earlier in the trial, which began in 2011, but this individual has made especially dramatic progress. The vision in his affected eye went from 20/400 – essentially blind – to 20/40, which is considered sighted. "There's a guy walking around who was blind, but now can see," says Gary Rabin, chief executive officer of Advanced Cell Technology, the company in Marlborough, Massachusetts that devised the treatment. "With that sort of vision, you can have a driver's licence." In all, the company has so far treated 22 patients who either have dry age-related macular degeneration, a common condition that leaves people with a black hole in the centre of their vision, or Stargardt's macular dystrophy, an inherited disease that leads to premature blindness. The company wouldn't tell New Scientist which of the two diseases the participant with the dramatic improvement has. In both diseases, people gradually lose retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells. These are essential for vision as they recycle protein and lipid debris that accumulates on the retina, and supply nutrients and energy to photoreceptors – the cells that capture light and transmit signals to the brain. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Stem Cells
Link ID: 18180 - Posted: 05.21.2013

By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online Sharing a bed with a newborn increases the risk of sudden infant death syndrome fivefold, research claims. The risk applies even if parents avoid tobacco, alcohol and drugs - other factors firmly linked to cot deaths. The BMJ Open research compared nearly 1,500 cot deaths with a control group of more than 4,500 parents. Current guidance in the UK is that parents should decide where their baby sleeps, but says the safest option is in a crib or cot in the same room. No consensus Many other countries, such as the US and the Netherlands, go further and say parents should not share a bed with their baby for the first three months of his or her life. Prof Bob Carpenter, from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, carried out the analysis and says the UK should now follow suit and "take a more definitive stance against bed-sharing for babies under three months". The government said it had asked the public health watchdog NICE to urgently examine its guidance on co-sleeping in light of this new study. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 18179 - Posted: 05.21.2013

By Sandra G. Boodman, ‘Oh my God,” Leigh Partridge remembers thinking, her mind reeling as she tried to contemplate the unimaginable. “This cannot be happening again.” Doctors in the emergency room of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) had just told Partridge that a mass in the abdomen of her 16-year-old daughter might be cancer. Further testing would be required. To Partridge, who had lost her husband two years earlier when brain cancer killed him in a matter of months, the possibility that their middle daughter might have a malignancy was terrifying. “I didn’t even know who to call to come sit with me,” Partridge recalled. “The person who was supposed to be with me wasn’t there” anymore. Allison Partridge, then a high school junior, had found the fist-size tumor in her abdomen the previous evening while lying in bed at home. For months, Allie had suffered from severe and worsening pain in her lower abdomen and tailbone, which she usually tried to minimize or deny to protect herself and her mother. But now the pain and the giant lump were too obvious to downplay. “My mom was definitely freaking out a lot more than I was,” Allie recalled. Her hospitalization in April 2011 was both traumatic and a turning point, revealing the unusual cause of her problem as well as the essential clue — unknown to her mother — that was overlooked by doctors. © 1996-2013 The Washington Po

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 18178 - Posted: 05.21.2013

by Caroline Williams Those at risk of developing Alzheimer's may be able to slow its onset through daily B vitamins. We already know that a high level of the amino acid homocysteine in the blood is a risk factor for Alzheimer's, and that B vitamin supplements help reduce homocysteine levels. But it was unclear whether or not these supplements would slow the progression of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to Alzheimer's. David Smith and Gwenaëlle Douaud at the University of Oxford led a research effort to find out. They used MRI to track changes in the brains of 200 elderly volunteers with MCI over two years. During this time, half were given high doses of vitamin B12, B6 and folic acid – 300, 20 and 4 times the UK guideline daily amounts, respectively. The rest took a placebo. In 2010, Smith and his colleagues showed that high doses of B vitamins slowed whole-brain shrinkage by up to 53 per cent in patients with above average homocysteine levels. Now Smith and Douaud's team have looked deeper to work out which brain regions are best protected. They found that it was the areas of the brain most seriously affected by Alzheimer's, including the hippocampus and cerebellum, that were protected in volunteers given the vitamins. For instance, in those with high homocysteine, the atrophy rate in these brain regions was 5.2 per cent in the placebo group but just 0.6 per cent in the vitamin group. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18177 - Posted: 05.21.2013

By Maggie Fox, Senior Writer, NBC News It might seem against all logic, but adding a little olive oil or a handful of nuts to your diet each day may help keep your mind clear, researchers reported on Monday. It’s the same diet that’s also been shown to reduce deaths from heart attacks and strokes. The researchers found that people who ate these healthy fats were less likely to show the early signs of dementia than those who stuck to a more traditional diet. And this was done in Spain -- where people are already eating a so-called Mediterranean diet. “Our findings support increasing evidence on the protective effects of the Mediterranean Diet on cognitive function,” Miguel Martinez-Gonzalez of the University of Navarra in Spain and colleagues reported in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry. The findings come from a large and well-publicized trial that showed the Mediterranean diet rich in fruits, vegetables, olive oil and a little wine can cut the risk of heart attacks and strokes by 30 percent. Martinez and colleagues took a part data on 500 volunteers from their own study center, who were followed for more than six and a half years after starting the diet. A Mediterranean diet includes lots of salad, fruit, vegetables, nuts, a little fish, a little lean meat, a small amount of cheese and olive oil. Wine is also served at meals. In the main study, 7,400 volunteers got extra counseling, and either a weekly supply of extra-virgin olive oil or mixed nuts -- walnuts, almonds and hazelnuts. © 2013 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 18176 - Posted: 05.21.2013