Alison Abbott Activists occupied an animal facility at the University of Milan, Italy, at the weekend, releasing mice and rabbits and mixing up cage labels to confuse experimental protocols. Researchers at the university say that it will take years to recover their work. Many of the animals at the facility are genetic models for psychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. No arrests have been made following the 12-hour drama, which took place on Saturday, although the university says that it will press charges against the protesters. The activists took some of the animals and were told during negotiations that they would be permitted to come back later and take more. The attack was staged by the animal-rights group that calls itself Fermare Green Hill (or Stop Green Hill), in reference to the Green Hill dog-breeding facility near Brescia, Italy, which it targets for closure. Five activists entered laboratories in the university’s pharmacology department on Saturday morning. The lack of signs of a break-in suggests that the activists may have used an illegally acquired electronic card, says pharmacologist Francesca Guidobono-Cavalchini, who works there. They prised open the reinforced doors of the facility on the fourth floor, and two of them chained themselves by the neck to the main double doors such that any attempt to open the doors could have endangered their lives. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 18059 - Posted: 04.23.2013

By Breanna Draxler When you lose something important—a child, your wallet, the keys—your brain kicks into overdrive to find the missing object. But that’s not just a matter of extra concentration. Researchers have found that in these intense search situations your brain actually rallies extra visual processing troops (and even some other non-visual parts of the brain) to get the job done. It has to do with the way your brain processes images in the first place. When you see objects, your brain sorts them into broad categories—about 1,000 of them. The various elements we perceive trigger a pattern of different categorical areas in our brains. For example, if you see a woman carrying an umbrella while walking her dog in the park, your brain might catalog it as “people,” “tools” and “animals.” But when you lose something, your brain reacts a little differently. It expands the category of the object you’re looking for to include related categories and turns down the perception of other, non-related categories, to allow you to focus more intently on the object of interest. To see what this altered categorization looked like during a search, researchers at UC Berkeley used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record changes in five people’s brain activity as they looked for objects in movies. The objects they sought were categorized broadly, paralleling how our brains separate items into generalized groups like “vehicles” and “people.” During hour-long search sessions, the researchers found that regardless of whether the participants found the objects they were looking for, their brains cast a wider visual net than they would if they were watching passively.

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 18058 - Posted: 04.23.2013

By Kate Wong Odds are you carry DNA from a Neandertal, Denisovan or some other archaic human. Just a few years ago such a statement would have been virtually unthinkable. For decades evidence from genetics seemed to support the theory that anatomically modern humans arose as a new species in a single locale in Africa and subsequently spread out from there, replacing archaic humans throughout the Old World without mating with them. But in recent years geneticists have determined that, contrary to that conventional view, anatomically modern Homo sapiens did in fact interbreed with archaic humans, and that their DNA persists in people today. In the May issue of Scientific American, Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona in Tucson examines the latest genetic findings and explores the possibility that DNA from these extinct relatives helped H. sapiens become the wildly successful species it is today. As Scientific American’s anthropology editor, I have an enduring interest in the rise of H. sapiens; and as longtime readers of this blog may know, I’m fascinated (you might even say obsessed) with Neandertals. So naturally I’ve been keen to find out how much, if any, Neandertal DNA I have in my own genome. Several consumer genetic testing companies now test for Neandertal genetic markers as part of their broader ancestry analysis, and after 23andMe lowered the price of their kit to $99 in December, I decided to take the plunge. As it happens, National Geographic’s Genographic Project had recently updated their own genetic test to look for Neandertal DNA, and they sent me a kit (retail price: $299) for editorial review, much as publishers do with new books. And so it was on a chilly Saturday in late January that I found myself spitting into a test tube for 23andMe and swabbing my cheek for the Genographic Project. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Evolution; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18057 - Posted: 04.23.2013

By Shaunacy Ferro When David Nichols earned a Ph.D in medicinal chemistry from the University of Iowa in 1973 by studying psychedelics, he thought he would continue studying hallucinogens indefinitely. "I thought I would work on it for the rest of my life," he says. His timing was less than fortuitous. In 1970, the year after Nichols started grad school, Richard Nixon signed into law the Controlled Substances Act, designed to clamp down on the manufacture and distribution of drugs in the U.S. The act classified hallucinogenic substances like LSD, DMT, psilocybin (the psychedelic alkaloid in mushrooms) and mescaline as Schedule I substances--the most restrictive use category, reserved for drugs with high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. Marijuana was also placed in this category, and 15 years later when ecstasy came onto the scene, MDMA was emergency-classified as a Schedule I substance as well. By contrast, cocaine, opium and morphine are Schedule II substances, meaning they can be prescribed by a doctor. Despite some promising results from trials of psychedelics in treating alcoholism, psychiatric conditions and modeling mental illness, by the early '70s, the government had tightened control of Schedule I substances, even for research. It's only now that we're starting to return to the notion that these drugs could be medicine. © 2012 Popular Science

Keyword: Depression; Stress
Link ID: 18056 - Posted: 04.22.2013

By ELIZABETH WEIL According to Sonja Lyubomirsky, you have a happiness set point. It’s partly encoded in your genes. If something good happens, your sense of happiness rises; if something bad happens, it falls. But either way, before too long, your mood will creep back to its set point because of a really powerful and perverse phenomenon referred to in science as “hedonic adaptation.” You know, people get used to things. With her 2007 book, “The How of Happiness,” and this year’s follow-up, “The Myths of Happiness,” Dr. Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, caused ripples in her field but also drew a wider audience, cementing her place in a long chain of happiness-industry stalwarts, from M. Scott Peck with “The Road Less Traveled” to Martin E. P. Seligman and “Learned Optimism” to Daniel Gilbert and his best-selling “Stumbling on Happiness.” Dr. Lyubomirsky’s findings can be provocative and, at times, counterintuitive. Renters are happier than homeowners, she says. Interrupting positive experiences makes them more enjoyable. Acts of kindness make people feel happier, but not if you are compelled to perform the same act too frequently. (Bring your lover breakfast in bed one day, and it feels great. Bring it every day, and it feels like a chore.) Dr. Lyubomirsky — 46, Russian and expecting to give birth to her fourth child this weekend — is an unlikely mood guru. “I really hate all the smiley faces and rainbows and kittens,” she said in her office. She doesn’t often count her blessings or write gratitude letters, both of which she thinks sound hokey even though her research suggests they make people happier. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 18055 - Posted: 04.22.2013

By PAULA SPAN It was supposed to be a short stay. In 2006, Roger Anderson was to undergo surgery to relieve a painfully compressed spinal disk. His wife, Karen, figured the staff at the hospital, in Portland, Ore., would understand how to care for someone with Parkinson’s disease. It can be difficult. Parkinson’s patients like Mr. Anderson, for example, must take medications at precise intervals to replace the brain chemical dopamine, which is diminished by the disease. “You don’t have much of a window,” Mrs. Anderson said. “If you have to wait an hour, you have tremendous problems.” Without these medications, people may “freeze” and be unable to move, or develop uncontrolled movements called dyskinesia, and are prone to falls. But the nurses at the Portland hospital didn’t seem to grasp those imperatives. “You’d have to wait half an hour or an hour, and that’s not how it works for Parkinson’s patients,” Mrs. Anderson said. Nor did hospital rules, at the time, permit her to simply give her husband the Sinemet pills on her own. Surgery and anesthesia, the disrupted medications, an incision that subsequently became infected — all contributed to a tailspin that lasted nearly three months. Mr. Anderson developed delirium, rotated between rehab centers and hospitals, took a fall, lost 60 pounds. “People were telling me, ‘He’s never going to come home,’” Mrs. Anderson said. He did recover, and at 69 is doing well, his wife said, though his disease has progressed. But his wasn’t an unusual story, neurologists say. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 18054 - Posted: 04.22.2013

by Scicurious Mmmmm beer! Just a sip is enough to prime the brain's dopamine addiction circuits, if reports of a new study are to be believed. Photograph: Johnny Green/PA It's been a long day at work, followed by a long workout. I'm tired, and all I really want is to relax with a beer. I grab one out of the fridge and take a sip. I feel better already. A new study tells us that this is due to dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays an important role in things like motivation and reward. Drugs of abuse, such as cocaine, increase dopamine levels in areas of the brain associated with the expectation of reward, such as the ventral striatum, and this increase is part of what makes them feel so good, and do so bad. But dopamine can also signal the expectation of something that might be rewarding. This means that as we learn that some things are rewarding, like, say, beer, we begin to respond, not only to the alcohol, but to the cues that alcohol is coming: to the beer bottles, the glass, or the taste. And taste is what this study looked at. The authors took 49 male beer drinkers and divided them up into three groups: those with a family history of alcoholism, those without, and those who didn't know. They used positron emission tomography (PET) to examine how the dopamine in their brains responded to a taste of beer. The big effect? The mere taste of your favourite beer (15 millilitres – not enough to get any effects of the alcohol) produces an increase in dopamine in the ventral striatum, as well as an increased desire to … drink more beer. This suggests that a cue (the taste) produces a sign of reward expectation long before the alcohol hits your system. And the effect of the taste of beer on dopamine in the ventral striatum was larger in people who had a family history of alcohol abuse. What's not to love! It's beer! It's dopamine! It's brain scans! Of course the media got excited. © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Brain imaging
Link ID: 18053 - Posted: 04.20.2013

Jo Marchant People with genes that make it tough for them to engage socially with others seem to be better than average at hypnotizing themselves. A study published today in Psychoneuroendocrinology1 concludes that such individuals are particularly good at becoming absorbed in their own internal world, and might also be more susceptible to other distortions of reality. Psychologist Richard Bryant of the University of New South Wales in Sydney and his colleagues tested the hypnotizability of volunteers with different forms of the receptor for oxytocin, a hormone that increases trust and social bonding. (Oxytocin's association with emotional attachment also earned it the nickname of 'love hormone'.) Those with gene variants linked to social detachment and autism were found to be most susceptible to hypnosis. Hypnosis has intrigued scientists since the nineteenth-century physician James Braid used it to alleviate pain in a variety of medical conditions, but it has never been fully understood. Hypnotized people can undergo a range of unusual experiences, including amnesia, anaesthesia and the loss of the ability to move their limbs. But some individuals are more affected by hypnosis than others — and no one knows why. Hormones and hypnotism How susceptible someone is to persuasion is an important factor in how easily they can be hypnotized by someone else. Bryant and his colleagues have previously shown that spraying a shot of oxytocin up people’s noses makes them more hypnotizable, and more likely to engage in potentially embarrassing activities such as swearing or dancing at a hypnotist’s suggestion. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Attention
Link ID: 18052 - Posted: 04.20.2013

By Susan Milius Zola the crow is about to face a test that has baffled animals from canaries to dogs. She’s a wild New Caledonian crow, and for the first time, she’s seeing a tidbit of meat dangling on a long string tied to a stick. She perches on the stick, bends down, grabs the string with her beak and pulls. But the string is too long. The meat still hangs out of reach. In similar tests, dogs, pigeons and many other species routinely falter. Some nibble at the string or keep tugging and dropping the same segment. Some pull at a string that’s not connected to food just as readily as a string that is. Eventually many get the hang of reeling in the tidbit, but they seem to learn by trial and error. Zola, however, does not fumble. On her first attempt, she anchors the first length of string by stepping on it and immediately bends down again for the next segment. With several more pulls and steps, Zola reels in the treat. Watching the crow, says Russell Gray, one of the researchers behind the string-pulling experiment, “people say, ‘Wow, it had a flash of insight.’ ” At first glance it seems Zola mentally worked through the problem as a human might, devising a solution in an aha moment. But Gray, of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has had enough of such supposed animal geniuses. Asking whether the crow solves problems in the same way a human would isn’t a useful question, he says. He warns of a roller coaster that scientists and animal lovers alike can get stuck on: first getting excited and romanticizing a clever animal’s accomplishments, then crashing into disappointment when some killjoy comes up with a mundane explanation that’s not humanlike at all. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 18051 - Posted: 04.20.2013

By STEPHEN CASTLE LONDON — British antitrust authorities on Friday accused the pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline of paying three rivals to delay the introduction of a generic version of an antidepressant drug. It is the latest so-called pay-for-delay case drawing scrutiny from regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. The Office of Fair Trading in Britain contended that Glaxo had abused its dominant position in the market, kept prices artificially high and denied “significant cost savings” to Britain’s state-run health provider, the National Health Service. The British case centers on efforts by three companies, Alpharma, Generics (U.K.) and Norton Healthcare, to market an alternative to Seroxat, GlaxoSmithKline’s brand of paroxetine. The company sells it in the United States under the brand name Paxil. In recent years, regulators in Europe and the United States have paid greater attention to pay-for-delay deals, suspecting that they may allow pharmaceutical companies to make big profits by exploiting a brief but lucrative period of monopoly over the supply of a product. “These are blockbuster drugs,” said Farasat Bokhari, a senior lecturer in economics at the University of East Anglia, “so if they are on the market without generics challenging them then companies can maintain high, monopoly profits. “As soon as generic entry takes place,” Mr. Bokhari added, “prices drop significantly, sometimes by up to 70 to 80 percent.” GlaxoSmithKline, according to British authorities, warned the three companies that their generic equivalents would infringe a patent. To resolve the dispute, each of the rivals concluded one or more agreements with GlaxoSmithKline, the Office of Fair Trading said. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 18050 - Posted: 04.20.2013

By Emily Chung, CBC News Having a stressed-out mom may give baby squirrels a competitive edge, a new study suggests. Red squirrels who were stressed out during pregnancy had babies that out-competed their peers by growing significantly faster without any extra food, reported the study, published online in Science Express. "What that suggests is that they're first able to predict what sort of environment their offspring will encounter… and they're preparing them for what their offspring are going to face," said Ben Dantzer, lead author of the study he worked on while he was a Ph.D. student at Michigan State University under the supervision of Guelph University biologist Andrew McAdam. Further investigation uncovered a link between faster growth among the baby squirrels and higher levels of stress hormones in their mothers during the pregnancies. That link may explain how environmental conditions cue the animals to respond and adapt. Canadian researchers, including Stan Boutin at the University of Alberta, Murray Humphreys at McGill University in Montreal and McAdam at the University of Guelph, had been studying red squirrels near Kluane Lake, Yukon, for 22 years to find out how they are affected by changes in resources such as food over time. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18049 - Posted: 04.20.2013

by Dennis Normile A human mother rocking a baby in her arms and a cat carrying her kitten by the scruff of its neck have the same physiological effect on both young animals and probably stem from the same maternal instinct to protect their young. That's the conclusion of a new study, which for the first time has compared the physiological impact of maternal carrying behaviors across species. The findings may lead to better parenting techniques for people and possibly to new ways to detect developmental disorders early in life. It's "really fascinating" work, says Oliver Bosch, a neurobiologist at the University of Regensburg in Germany, who was not involved in the research. "No one has looked at [this aspect] of maternal behavior in such detail." Japanese neuroscientist Kumi Kuroda began the study in her own home. She noticed that carrying her newborn baby boy while walking had a rapid calming effect on him. Back in her lab at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, near Tokyo, she found that picking up mouse pups by the scruff of the neck makes them passive and easy to handle. Kuroda wondered if the same physiological processes were driving both behaviors. She and colleagues recorded pulse rates and observed the crying and squirming behavior of 12 infants, 1 to 6 months old, as each was left alone in a crib, held by its mother sitting in a chair, and carried as the mother walked around. In various durations and combinations of the three conditions, they found that the carried babies cried and squirmed the least and had the lowest pulse rates. Those left in the crib were the fussiest; holding the baby while sitting produced in-between results. What was particularly surprising, Kuroda says, was that when a mother started walking, the infant's pulse dropped, and the crying and squirming stopped within 2 to 3 seconds, not over several minutes. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 18048 - Posted: 04.20.2013

by Douglas Heaven A glimpse of consciousness emerging in the brains of babies has been recorded for the first time. Insights gleaned from the work may aid the monitoring of babies under anaesthesia, and give a better understanding of awareness in people in vegetative states – and possibly even in animals. The human brain develops dramatically in a baby's first year, transforming the baby from being unaware to being fully engaged with its surroundings. To capture this change, Sid Kouider at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, and colleagues used electroencephalography (EEG) to record electrical activity in the brains of 80 infants while they were briefly shown pictures of faces. In adults, awareness of a stimulus is known to be linked to a two-stage pattern of brain activity. Immediately after a visual stimulus is presented, areas of the visual cortex fire. About 300 milliseconds later other areas light up, including the prefrontal cortex, which deals with higher-level cognition. Conscious awareness kicks in only after the second stage of neural activity reaches a specific threshold. "It's an all-or-nothing response," says Kouider. Adults can verbally describe being aware of a stimulus, but a baby is a closed book. "We have learned a lot about consciousness in people who can talk about it, but very little in those who cannot," says Tristan Bekinschtein at the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the work. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Consciousness
Link ID: 18047 - Posted: 04.20.2013

By Puneet Kollipara Brain research has been on a lot of minds lately in the nation’s capital. After offering a brief shout-out to Alzheimer’s research in his February State of the Union address, President Barack Obama went a step further in April by announcing a decade-long effort to develop advanced tools for tracking human brain activity. The administration dubbed it the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies initiative, and proposed spending $100 million on the program in the 2014 fiscal year. Scientists have discussed such an endeavor for years, and pushed hard for it in the past few months. Writing March 15 in Science, researchers say the project would develop technologies to probe brain activity on a far greater scale and with higher resolution than is now possible. Current tools can monitor only small numbers of individual neurons at a time or capture blurry, bird’s-eye views of brain activity. The new tools would enable real-time mapping of how the thousands or millions of neurons in coordinated groups, known as circuits, work together. Brain functions — and, in many cases, dysfunctions — are thought to emerge from this still poorly described circuit level. “There’s no way to build a map until you develop the tools,” says Rafael Yuste, a neuroscientist at Columbia University’s Kavli Institute for Brain Science and one of the project’s proponents. Researchers call for developing three sets of tools to better understand brain circuits. One focus is on the creation of tools to measure the activities of all the individual neurons in a circuit. Another is on technologies to experimentally manipulate these neurons. The third tool set would store, analyze and make the data accessible to all researchers. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18046 - Posted: 04.20.2013

By Neuroskeptic A new paper could prompt a rethink of a technique that’s become very hot in neuroscience lately: Confounds in multivariate pattern analysis The authors are Princetonians Michael T. Todd and colleagues, and the method in question is multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA). I’ve written about this before and there’s a blog dedicated to it. MVPA searches for relatively subtle patterns of brain activity, most commonly in fMRI data. For example, a conventional fMRI study might compare activity when someone’s looking at a picture, compared to a blank screen, and would find increases of activity in the visual cortex. But MVPA might take two different pictures, and see if there’s a pattern of activity that’s unique to one picture over the other – even if overall activity in the visual cortex is the same. Neuroscientists have fallen in love with MVPA (and related methods) over the past 5 years, mainly I think because it’s promised to let us ‘read’ the brain: to not just see where in the brain things happen, but to glimpse what information is being represented. In the new paper, Todd et al make a very simple point: all MVPA really shows is that there are places where, in most people’s brain, activity differs when they’re doing one thing as opposed to another. But there infinite reasons why that might be the case, many of them rather trivial. The authors give the example of two very similar tasks, A and B. We’ll say these are imagining apples and imagining bananas. You scan some people doing A and B. You run a standard fMRI analysis, and find that nowhere in the brain shows a difference in activity, on average, between the two (as expected – they are similar.)

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18045 - Posted: 04.20.2013

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS If you give a rat a running wheel and it decides not to use it, are genes to blame? And if so, what does that tell us about why many people skip exercise? To examine those questions, scientists at the University of Missouri in Columbia recently interbred rats to create two very distinct groups of animals, one of which loves to run. Those in the other group turn up their collective little noses at exercise, slouching idly in their cages instead. Then the scientists closely scrutinized and compared the animals’ bodies, brains and DNA. For some time, exercise scientists have suspected that the motivation to exercise — or not — must have a genetic component. When researchers have compared physical activity patterns among family members, and particularly among twins, they have found that close relations tend to work out similarly, exercising about as much or as little as their parents or siblings do, even if they grew up in different environments. These findings suggest that the desire to be active or indolent is, to some extent, inherited. But to what extent someone’s motivation to exercise is affected by genes — and what specific genes may be involved — has been hard to determine. There are only so many human twins around for study purposes, after all. And even more daunting, it’s difficult to separate the role of upbringing from that of genetics in determining whether and why some people want to exercise and others don’t. So the University of Missouri researchers decided to create their own innately avid runners or couch potatoes, provide them with similar upbringings, and see what happened next. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18044 - Posted: 04.18.2013

By David Brown, As a bioterrorism agent, ricin has the advantage of being easily made and highly potent. But there have been few fatal cases in the past 50 years, and there is little precise information about the substance’s effects on human beings. Ricin is not a microbe. It does not grow inside the body and can’t be passed from person to person. It is a toxin produced by the castor bean plant. When the beans are crushed for oil, the compound is left behind in the mashed material, of which more than a million tons is produced around the world each year. “It is a plant that grows wild throughout much of North America. You can buy the seeds online,” said Jennifer A. Oakes, a physician and expert in ricin poisoning at Albany Medical College. “It doesn’t take much to get a fatal dose. Somebody could do this in their house if they are motivated to.” Ricin’s best-known victim is Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian journalist who was stabbed by an umbrella on a London street in 1978. The umbrella’s tip injected a tiny metal capsule containing ricin into Markov’s leg. He died three days later. Apart from him, the only other ricin fatalities in the past 50 years have been a few suicides and accidental poisonings, usually after castor beans were eaten but at least once by injecting a crude extract. A person needs to take about 1,000 times as much ricin by mouth as by other routes to get a fatal dose. Unlike nerve agents and botulinum toxin, which disrupt nerve transmission and can cause death in minutes, ricin acts slowly. It stops the synthesis of proteins in cells, killing them over hours or days. A person dies of multi-organ failure as cells break down and fluid and essential electrolytes are lost. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 18043 - Posted: 04.18.2013

By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS Laura Ward, 41, had always attributed her excess pounds to the drugs she takes for major depression. So Ms. Ward, who is 5-foot-6 and once weighed 220 pounds, didn’t try to slim down or avoid dietary pitfalls like fried chicken. But in a clinical trial, Ms. Ward managed to lose more than 30 pounds doing low-impact aerobics three times a week. During the 18-month experiment, she was introduced to cauliflower and post-workout soreness for the first time. She and the other participants attended counseling sessions where they practiced refusing junk food and choosing smaller portions. She drank two liters of Diet Dr Pepper daily instead of eight. Eventually, Ms. Ward, who lives in Baltimore, realized her waistline wasn’t simply a drug side effect. “If it was only the medications, I would have never lost all that weight,” she said. People with serious mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or major depression, are at least 50 percent more likely to be overweight or obese than the general population. They die earlier, too, with the primary cause heart disease. Yet diet and exercise usually take a back seat to the treatment of their illnesses. The drugs used, like antidepressants and antipsychotics, can increase appetite and weight. It has been a difficult issue for mental health experts. A 2012 review of health promotion programs for those with serious mental illness by Dartmouth researchers concluded that of 24 well-designed studies, most achieved statistically significant weight loss, but very few achieved “clinically significant weight loss.” Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 18042 - Posted: 04.16.2013

A study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health gives insight into changes in the reward circuitry of the brain that may provide resistance against cocaine addiction. Scientists found that strengthening signaling along a neural pathway that runs through the nucleus accumbens — a region of the brain involved in motivation, pleasure, and addiction — can reduce cocaine-seeking behavior in mice. Research suggests that about 1 in 5 people who use cocaine will become addicted, but it remains unclear why certain people are more vulnerable to drug addiction than others. “A key step in understanding addiction and advancing treatment is to identify the differences in brain connectivity between subjects that compulsively take cocaine and those who do not,” said Ken Warren, Ph.D., acting director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). Researchers at NIAAA, part of NIH, conducted the study. “Until now, most efforts have focused on finding traits associated with vulnerability to develop compulsive cocaine use. However, identifying mechanisms that promote resilience may prove to have more therapeutic value,” said the paper’s senior author, Veronica Alvarez, Ph.D., acting chief of the Section on Neuronal Structure in the NIAAA Laboratory for Integrative Neuroscience. The study is available on the Nature Neuroscience website ahead of print. In the study, mice were conditioned to receive an intravenous dose of cocaine each time they poked their nose into a hole in their enclosure. Cocaine was then made unavailable for periods of time during the day. Some of the mice would stop seeking the drug once it was removed while others would obsessively continue to poke the hole in an effort to obtain the drug.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Brain imaging
Link ID: 18041 - Posted: 04.16.2013

By Sandra G. Boodman, For someone who had been such a healthy child, Nancy Kennedy couldn’t figure out how she had become the kind of sickly adult whose life revolved around visits to a seemingly endless series of doctors. Beginning in 2005, shortly after a job transfer took her from Northern Virginia to St. Louis, Kennedy, then 47, developed a string of vexing medical problems. Her white blood cell count was inexplicably elevated. Her sinuses were chronically infected, although her respiratory tract seemed unusually dry. She often felt fatigued, and her joints hurt. “It felt as though an alien had invaded my body,” said Kennedy, formerly a manager at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. “I felt like I was in doctors’ offices all the time.” Tests for possible ailments — including blood disorders, cancer, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis — were negative. For seven years. Kennedy and her primary-care physician, who said she felt as though she sent Kennedy to “every specialist that walked,” had no clear idea what might be wrong. But during a physical in January 2012, her doctor, Melissa Johnson, struck by Kennedy’s trouble walking and her accelerating deterioration, decided to check for a condition not previously considered. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 18040 - Posted: 04.16.2013