Dina Fine Maron Nestled inside a generic-looking office building here in suburban Maryland, down the hall from cable-provider Comcast, sits the largest blood serum repository in the world. Seven freezers, each roughly the size of a high school basketball court, are stacked high with row upon row of small cardboard boxes containing tubes of yellow or pinkish blood serum, a liquid rich in antibodies and proteins, but devoid of cells. The freezers hover at –30 degrees Celsius—cold enough to make my pen dry up and to require that workers wear protective jumpsuits, hats, gloves and face masks. Four more empty freezers, which are now kept at room temperature, await future samples. The bank of massive freezers—and its contents—is maintained by the Department of Defense (DoD). The cache of government-owned serum may provide unique insights into the workings of various maladies when linked with detailed information on service members’ demographics, deployment locations and health survey data. New research projects tapping the precious serum could lead to breakthroughs in some of the hottest topics in military research—including the hunt for biomarkers for post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide risk. But DoD’s policy of keeping its samples in perpetuity—even after troops leave the force—could raise a few eyebrows. The military started collecting serum samples 28 years ago as a by-product of its HIV surveillance. Since then serum has been routinely collected from leftover blood from HIV tests or standard post-deployment health check-ups and then frozen for future reference. Now the Department of Defense Serum Repository (DoDSR) has swelled to include 55.5 million samples of serum from 10 million individuals—mostly service members, veterans or military applicants. The armed forces use DoDSR for general health surveillance to track infectious diseases and to shape health policies. But the repository is also ripe for targeted research programs. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Stress; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18500 - Posted: 08.13.2013

By RONI CARYN RABIN Over the past two decades, the use of antidepressants has skyrocketed. One in 10 Americans now takes an antidepressant medication; among women in their 40s and 50s, the figure is one in four. Experts have offered numerous reasons. Depression is common, and economic struggles have added to our stress and anxiety. Television ads promote antidepressants, and insurance plans usually cover them, even while limiting talk therapy. But a recent study suggests another explanation: that the condition is being overdiagnosed on a remarkable scale. The study, published in April in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, found that nearly two-thirds of a sample of more than 5,000 patients who had been given a diagnosis of depression within the previous 12 months did not meet the criteria for major depressive episode as described by the psychiatrists’ bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or D.S.M.). The study is not the first to find that patients frequently get “false positive” diagnoses for depression. Several earlier review studies have reported that diagnostic accuracy is low in general practice offices, in large part because serious depression is so rare in that setting. Elderly patients were most likely to be misdiagnosed, the latest study found. Six out of seven patients age 65 and older who had been given a diagnosis of depression did not fit the criteria. More educated patients and those in poor health were less likely to receive an inaccurate diagnosis. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 18499 - Posted: 08.13.2013

For most people, seeing a picture of a famous face — Oprah Winfrey, the Queen or Einstein, for instance — sparks immediate recognition and brings the name readily to the lips. But for people with a rare form of early-onset dementia called primary progressive aphasia, or PPA, the ability to identify a face or the person's name can be impaired. PPA strikes people aged about 40 to 65, much earlier than is typical for other forms of dementia like Alzheimer's disease. The condition is characterized by a deterioration in language and eventually the ability to communicate, although at least initially cognitive function in other areas remains intact, said Tamar Gefen, a PhD candidate in clinical neuropsychology at Northwestern University in Chicago. "Memory is fine, attention is fine and their planning, their judgment, their personality, their emotions — they're intact," explained Gefen, adding that early symptoms can include being unable to recall the names of familiar people or in some cases everyday objects. "Someone will come in and say: 'I can't remember my co-worker's name. I see her every day and I cannot remember it,"' she said. As the disease progresses, the person has difficulty speaking coherently and eventually stops talking altogether. Since the inability to put a name to a face can be an early sign of Alzheimer's disease, Gefen said it's important to properly diagnose the cause using specific tests that can identify PPA. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18498 - Posted: 08.13.2013

By Bahar Gholipour Girls with anorexia may tend to have traits that are usually found in people with autism, a new study suggests. Researchers compared 66 teen girls who had anorexia with about 1,600 girls who did not have the eating disorder, using questionnaires they had previously developed to assess thinking and personality types in children with autism. Girls with the eating disorder anorexia may tend to have traits usually found in people with autism. The girls with anorexia were found to have more interest in systems and order, and lower scores in empathy — a profile more similar to people with autism than to typical adolescents, the researchers said. The finding suggests the two conditions may share certain features, such as rigid attitudes and behaviors, a tendency to be very self-focused and a fascination with detail, the researchers said. “Traditionally, anorexia has been viewed purely as an eating disorder. This is quite reasonable, since the girls’ dangerously low weight and their risk of malnutrition or even death has to be the highest priority” for treatment, said Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge in England. But his study suggests that “underlying the surface behavior, the mind of a person with anorexia may share a lot with the mind of a person with autism,” Baron-Cohen said. People with both conditions have a strong interest in organizational systems; girls with anorexia are intensely interested in the system that governs body weight, shape and food intake, he said. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia; Autism
Link ID: 18497 - Posted: 08.13.2013

By Scicurious There are lots of challenges when it comes to studying the brain, but one of the biggest is that it’s very hard to see. Aside from being, you know, inside your skull, the many electrical and chemical signals which the brain uses are impossible to see with the naked eye. We have ways to look at neurons and how they convey information. For example, to record the electrical signals from a single neuron, you can piece it with a tiny electrode, to get access inside the membrane (electrophysiology). You can then stimulate the neuron to fire, or record as it fires spontaneously. For techniques like optogenetics, you can insert a gene into the neuron that makes it fire (or not) in response to light. When you shine the light, you can make the neuron fire. So you can make a neuron fire, or see a neuron fire. With things like voltammetry, we can see neurotransmitters, chemicals as they are released from a neuron and sent as signals on to other neurons. Techniques like these have made huge strides in what we understand about neurons and how they work. But…you can only do this for a few neurons at a time. This becomes a problem, because the brain does not work as one neuron at a time. Instead, neurons organize into networks, A neuron fires, which impinges upon many more neurons, all of which will react in different ways, depending on what input they receive and when. Often many neurons have to fire to get a result, often it’s a single specific pattern of neurons. An ideal technique would be one where we could see neurons fire spontaneously, in real time, and then see where those signals GO, to actually see a network in action. And where we could see it…without taking the brain out first. It looks like that technique might be here. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18496 - Posted: 08.13.2013

By C. CLAIBORNE RAY A. A widely discussed 2006 study of transit noise in New York City, measuring noise on buses as well as in subway cars and on platforms, was described at the time as the first such formal study published since the 1930s. Done by scientists at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and published in The Journal of Urban Health, the study concluded that noise levels at subway and bus stops could easily exceed recognized public health recommendations and had the potential to damage hearing, given sufficient exposure. For example, guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization set a limit of 45 minutes’ exposure to 85 decibels, the mean noise level measured on subway platforms. And nearly 60 percent of the platform measurements exceeded that level. The maximum noise levels inside subway cars were even higher than those on the platforms, with one-fifth exceeding 100 decibels and more than two-thirds exceeding 90 decibels. The study recommended properly fitted earplugs and earmuff-type protectors in loud transit environments, saying they could cut noise levels significantly at the eardrum. And it warned that personal listening devices only increased the total noise and risk. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 18495 - Posted: 08.13.2013

By Melinda Wenner Moyer Our world is determined by the limits of our five senses. We can't hear pitches that are too high or low, nor can we see ultraviolet or infrared light—even though these phenomena are not fundamentally different from the sounds and sights that our ears and eyes can detect. But what if it were possible to widen our sensory boundaries beyond the physical limitations of our anatomy? In a study published recently in Nature Communications, scientists used brain implants to teach rats to “see” infrared light, which they usually find invisible. The implications are tremendous: if the brain is so flexible it can learn to process novel sensory signals, people could one day feel touch through prosthetic limbs, see heat via infrared light or even develop a sixth sense for magnetic north. Miguel Nicolelis, a neurobiologist at Duke University, and his colleagues trained six rats to poke their nose inside a port when the LED light above it lit up. Then the researchers surgically attached infrared cameras to the rats' head and wired the cameras to electrodes they implanted into the rats' primary somatosensory cortex, a brain region responsible for sensory processing. When the camera detected infrared light, it stimulated the animals' whisker neurons. The stimulation became stronger the closer the rats got to the infrared light or the more they turned their head toward it, just as brain activation responds to light seen by the eyes. Then the scientists let the animals loose in their chambers, this time using infrared light instead of LEDs to signal the ports the rats should visit. At first, none of the rats used the infrared signals. But after about 26 days of practice, all six had learned how to use the once invisible light to find the right ports. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 18494 - Posted: 08.13.2013

By GINA KOLATA Researchers studying two seemingly unrelated conditions — autism and cancer — have unexpectedly converged on a surprising discovery. Some people with autism have mutated cancer or tumor genes that apparently caused their brain disorder. Ten percent of children with mutations in a gene called PTEN, which causes cancers of the breast, colon, thyroid and other organs, have autism. So do about half of children with gene mutations that can lead to some kinds of brain and kidney cancer and large tumors in several organs, including the brain. That is many times the rate of autism in the general population. “It’s eerie,” Evan Eichler, a professor of genome science at the University of Washington, said about the convergence. He and others caution that the findings apply to only a small proportion of people with autism; in most cases, the cause remains a mystery. And as with nearly all genetic disorders, not everyone with the mutations develops autism or cancer, or other disorders associated with the genes, like epilepsy, enlarged brains and benign brain tumors. But researchers say the findings are intriguing, given that there are no animals that naturally get autism, no way of analyzing what might cause autism in developing brains and no cure. The newly discovered link has enabled scientists to genetically engineer mice with many symptoms of the human disorder. And it has led to the first clinical trial of a treatment for children with autism, using the drug that treats tumors that share the same genetic basis. Richard Ewing of Nashville, a 10-year-old who has a form of autism caused by a tumor-causing gene, is among those in the new study. His parents, Alexandra and Rick Ewing, know he is at risk for tumors in the brain, heart, kidney, skin and eyes. But that bad news was tempered by his eligibility for the clinical trial, which has only just started. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18493 - Posted: 08.12.2013

By Neuroskeptic Thanks to newly-developed “super-resolution” microscopy techniques, a group of French neuroscientists have discovered a remarkable world of complexity on a tiny scale. Writing in the Journal of Neuroscience, Deepak Nair colleagues report that: Super-Resolution Imaging Reveals That AMPA Receptors Inside Synapses Are Dynamically Organized in Nanodomains Regulated by PSD95 Neurons communicate with each other via chemical synapses. Here, two cells almost touch each other, and one of them can release a messenger molecule (neurotransmitter) which activates proteins (receptors) on the receiving (postsynaptic) neuron, thus conveying information. Here’s part of a single cell: the synapses are where the little ‘spines’ or ‘bulbs’ meet those present on another cell (not pictured).Until now, it’s been believed that within a synapse, receptors are just randomly distributed over the postsynaptic cell membrane. However, Nair et al’s work reveals an unsuspected level of organization. It turns out that receptors – or at least AMPA receptors, the only kind they looked at – are in fact clustered together into structures the authors dub nanodomains. Each nanodomain contains about 20 receptors, and is about 70 nanometers across. This is small. It’s roughly the size of a virus, and about 1/1000th the width of a human hair. When I saw this picture, it didn’t call to mind anything else I’d ever seen in neuroscience. Rather, it reminded me of the Hubble Deep Field images of distant galaxies… and funnily enough, one of the proteins that plays a secondary role in this paper is called stargazin.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18492 - Posted: 08.12.2013

By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS Children with chronic stomach pains are at high risk for anxiety disorders in adolescence and young adulthood, a new study has found, suggesting that parents may wish to have their children evaluated at some point for anxiety. Researchers at Vanderbilt University tracked 332 children with recurring stomachaches that could not be traced to a physical cause — so-called functional abdominal pain — comparing them as they reached young adulthood with 147 children who had never had such stomachaches. About half the teenagers and young adults who had had functional abdominal pain as children developed an anxiety disorder at some point, compared with 20 percent of the control group, the researchers found. The vulnerability to anxiety persisted into adulthood even if the pain had disappeared, although the risk was highest if the pain continued. Forty percent of the children with functional abdominal pain went on to experience depression, compared with 16 percent of those who had never had these stomachaches. The study was published on Monday in the journal Pediatrics. “What this study shows is a strong connection between functional abdominal pain and anxiety persists into adulthood, and it drives home the point that this isn’t by chance,” said Dr. John V. Campo, chairman of the department of psychiatry at Ohio State University, who was not involved in the new study. In 2001, Dr. Campo published a smaller study that found that 28 young adults who had suffered functional abdominal pain as children were far more likely to have an anxiety disorder than 28 similar adults who had experienced another childhood illness. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18491 - Posted: 08.12.2013

by Douglas Heaven It's a cognitive leap forward. IBM can now program an experimental chip they unveiled two years ago. The chips, designed to mimic how our brains work, are set to power computers that handle many streams of input data at once – much like the sensory input we deal with all the time. IBM's TrueNorth computer chips contain memory, processors and communication channels wired up like the synapses, neurons and axons of a brain. A key idea is that the chips can be hooked up into vast grids with many thousands working together in parallel. For certain types of task, such as quickly responding to large amounts of input data from sensors, they are much faster and less power-hungry than standard chips. They could one day replace human reflexes in self-driving cars or power the sensory systems of a robot, for example. But because the chips rewrite the rulebook for how computers are normally put together, they are not easy to program. Dharmendra Modha and his colleagues at IBM Research in San Jose, California, learned this the hard way. The team's first attempts were full of errors: "The programs were very unintuitive and extremely difficult to debug," says Modha. "Things looked hopeless." So they designed a new way of programming. This involves telling the computer how to yoke together the many individual chips in play at once. The IBM team came up with a way to package the functionality of each chip inside blocks of code they call "corelets". © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 18490 - Posted: 08.12.2013

By D. D. GUTTENPLAN LONDON — With its battered desks, fluorescent lights and interactive whiteboard showing an odd creature that, depending on how you look at it, could be either a duck or a rabbit, this could be a class in any university philosophy department. But this is a class with a difference. It is the Maudsley Philosophy Group, a seminar that meets regularly on the grounds of the Maudsley Hospital, Britain’s largest mental health teaching hospital, which is affiliated with the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London. Participants at the last session included psychiatrists, psychologists, philosophers and an actor who had just finished working as a chaplain in a locked men’s ward at the hospital and who was about to organize a storytelling group there. “We started out as a reading group for trainee psychiatrists,” said Gareth S. Owen, a researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry who co-founded the group in 2002. “Then, gradually, we developed and started inviting philosophers — at first it was quite low key. We would talk about our clinical experiences and then they would relate those experiences to their way of thinking.” Robert Harland, another co-founder of the group, said he had known Dr. Owen since they “cut up a corpse together at medical school.” “The analytic philosophers brought a real clarity to our discussions,” Dr. Harland said. “We were looking at various models to help us understand what we were doing as psychiatrists. “There is lots of applied science now in psychiatry: neuroimaging, genetics, epidemiology. But they don’t have much to say about sitting with a patient and trying to understand that person’s experiences.” © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 18489 - Posted: 08.12.2013

Roger Dobson Older male nightingales have perfected an art that would be the envy of men having a mid-life crisis: a trick that makes them more attractive to females than their younger male competitors. Their mastery of successful courtship is achieved with a dazzling array of up to 100 trills a second, far more than their younger competitors can manage, and more than any other investigated bird, according to new research. That ability, backed up by a sophisticated playlist of about 200 songs, means that they are probably seen as better mates by young trill-seeking females. Singing so many trills at peak frequency requires a lot of physical effort and, as a result, it has evolved as a sign on fitness, say the researchers. "Females could assess the age of the male singer by the trill rate, and mate preferably with older ones," says the zoologist Dr Valentin Amrhein, who led the study at the University of Basel, Switzerland. "This makes sense for the females because older males have more experience with defending their territory or with raising young, and therefore have a better reproductive performance." The research, being published in the Journal of Avian Biology, shows that older birds can come up with 100 trills a second, making them the fastest singers. They also performed about 200 different song types, but the researchers think it is the immediate impact of the trills that is attracting the females. It would take more than an hour for the male to go through his whole song list. "Since the performance of these sounds is very demanding, the rate at which they can be repeated is limited. Trying to sing rapidly increasing sounds in fast repetition is very hard for us humans as well," says Dr Amrhein. "Singing rapid broadband trills comes at a certain price for the male nightingale, so trilling is a good indicator for mate quality." © independent.co.uk

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Language
Link ID: 18488 - Posted: 08.12.2013

By Neuroskeptic Back in April a paper came out in Nature Reviews Neuroscience that shocked many: Katherine Button et al’s Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience It didn’t shock me, though, skeptic that I am: I had long suspected that much of neuroscience (and science in general) is underpowered – that is, that our sample sizes are too small to give us an acceptable chance of detecting the signals that we claim to be able to isolate out of the noise. In fact, I was so unsurprised by Button et al that I didn’t even read it, let alone write about it, even though the authors list included such neuro-blog favorites as John Ionaddis, Marcus Munafo and Brian Nosek (I try to avoid obvious favouritism, you see). However this week I took a belated look at the paper, and I noticed something interesting. Button et al took 49 meta-analyses and calculated the median observed statistical power of the studies in each analysis. The headline finding was that average power is small. I was curious to know why it was small. So I correlated the study characteristics (sample size and observed effect size) with the median power of the studies. I found that median power in a given meta-analysis was not correlated with the median sample size of those studies (d on the left, RR on the right):

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 18487 - Posted: 08.12.2013

By Nathan Seppa The late rock and roll singer Jim Morrison was not a poster boy for public safety — and was no authority on safe driving. After all, later in “Roadhouse Blues,” he has beer for breakfast. But the opening line of that Doors’ song still resonates as sound guidance. If only such good advice could stand the test of time. “Roadhouse Blues” hit the airwaves in 1970, long before the unlikely marriage of driving and talking on a cell phone. Millions of people now routinely conduct remote conversations while driving, despite research showing that it’s dangerous — even with two eyes on the road and both hands upon the wheel. It turns out that hands don’t matter. It’s the conversation that can be lethal. Cell phone conversations impede what a driver sees and processes, a number of studies have shown. That, in turn, slows reactions and other faculties. This distracted state should be familiar to everyone. “That’s why you can drive home and not remember having driven home,” says Daniel Simons, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Just because you look at something doesn’t mean you see it.” Simons has shown that people assigned to observe certain activities in a lab setting can totally miss other events occurring in the very same space. The on-road versions of such blind spots show up when drivers engaged in a cell phone conversation fail to look at side streets or watch for pedestrians. This distraction may seem subtle and even fleeting, but it takes a toll: The risk of an accident quadruples when the driver is on the phone, studies have suggested. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 18486 - Posted: 08.10.2013

Keith Barry, skilled magician that he is, doesn't give away his tricks but he does give the audience a clue when he says "magic is all about directing attention." Neuroscientists have long known that attention plays a key role in perception, and yet, we still don't fully understand the details of how attention works and what neural mechanisms are involved. Only a small fraction of the information that comes in through our eyes is actually perceived by our conscious brains. Attention is the filter that directs what is most salient in our environment to our conscious awareness. Almost all magic tricks somehow take advantage of loopholes in attention. For instance, a key strategy for magicians taps into something which cognitive neuroscientists call "inattentional or perceptual blindness", our inability to notice an object or feature in a visual scene because attention is directed elsewhere. You have experienced this phenomenon yourself. Your brain is constantly bombarded with stimuli, and it is impossible to pay attention to them all. While your attention is focused on one thing -- neuroscientists call this the "attentional spotlight"-- your ability to perceive objects outside this focus area is compromised. Indeed, if we could record the activity of the neurons in your brain that track to the visual scene, the neural responses for those areas outside the attentional spotlight would be dampened. The magician takes advantage of this phenomenon. By distracting your attention with sly hand movements, lively banter, humor, or skillful shifts of gaze, he can move your "attentional spotlight," while manipulating the action elsewhere, all without your knowing it and indeed while you think you are paying close attention! So, there you have it -- the neuroscientific answer to "how did he do that?" But, the fact that there is a logical, brain-based explanation behind the magician's tricks is not so surprising. The more interesting question is, if neuroscience can explain magic, can magic teach us anything about neuroscience? © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 18485 - Posted: 08.10.2013

Here's what the Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvard did. In 1934, he got himself a pen and paper and drew cubes, like this. He called this final version "Impossible Triangle of Opus 1 No. 293aa." I don't know what the "293aa" is about, but he was right about "impossible." An arrangement like this cannot take place in the physical universe as we know it. You follow the bottom row along with your eyes, then add another row, but when the third row pops in, where are you? Nowhere you have ever been before. At some step in the process you've been tricked, but it's very, very hard to say where the trick is, because what's happening is your brain wants to see all these boxes as units of a single triangle and while the parts simply won't gel, your brain insists on seeing them as a whole. It's YOU who's playing the trick, and you can't un-be you. So you are your own prisoner. At first, this feels like a neurological trap, like a lie you can't not believe. But when you think about for a bit, it's the opposite, it's a release. Twenty years later, the mathematician/physicist Roger Penrose (and his dad, psychologist Lionel Penrose) did it again. They hadn't seen Reutersvard's triangle. Theirs was drawn in perspective, which makes it even more challenging. Here's my version of their Penrose Triangle. What's cool about this? I'm going to paraphrase science writer John D. Barrow, in several places: We know that these drawings can't exist in the physical world. Even as we look at them, particularly when we look at them, we know they are impossible. And yet, we can imagine them anyway. Our brains, it turns out, are not prisoners of the world we live in; we can fly free! We can, any time we like, create the impossible. ©2013 NPR

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 18484 - Posted: 08.10.2013

Some colors humans are exposed to late at night could cause symptoms of clinical depression. That is the conclusion of a study that builds on previous findings that individuals exposed to dim levels of light overnight, such as from a glowing television set, can develop signs of clinical depression. Investigators, curious as to whether the color of light contributed to depressive symptoms in humans, designed an experiment that exposed hamsters to different colors. They chose hamsters because they are nocturnal, meaning they sleep during the day and are active at night. One group of hamsters was kept in the dark during their nighttime period. Another group of rodents was exposed to blue light and a third group slept in the presence of white light. A fourth group of hamsters was exposed to glowing red light. After four weeks, researchers noted how much sugary water the hamsters drank. The more depressed rodents consumed the least amount of water. Randy Nelson, chair of Ohio State University’s Department of Neuroscience and co-author of the study, said animals that slept in blue and white light appeared to be the most depressed. “What we saw is these animals didn’t show any sleep disruptions at all but they did have mucked up circadian clock genes and they did show depressive phenotypes whereas if they were in the dim red light, they did not,” Nelson said. Nelson explained that photosensitive cells in the retina, which don’t have much to do with vision, detect light and transmit signals to the master circadian clock in the brain that controls the natural sleep-wake cycle.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Depression
Link ID: 18483 - Posted: 08.10.2013

Autism affects male and female brains differently, a study has suggested. UK experts studied brain scans of 120 men and women, with half of those studied having autism. The differences found in the research, published in journal Brain, show more work is needed to understand how autism affects girls, the scientists say. Experts said girls with the condition could be more stigmatised than boys - and it could be harder for them to be diagnosed at all. Autism affects 1% of the population and is more prevalent in boys, so most research has focused on them. In this study, scientists from the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to examine how autism affects the brain of males and females. The study looked at the difference between the brains of typical males and those with autism - and then females with and without autism. They found the brains of females with autism "look" more like - but still not the same as - healthy males, when compared with healthy females. But the same kind of difference was not seen in males with autism - so their brains did not show "extreme" male characteristics. Dr Meng-Chuan Lai, who worked on the study said: "What we have known about autism to date is mainly male-biased. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Autism; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 18482 - Posted: 08.10.2013

By Fred Guterl Myths can be more harmful than lies, Nobel laureate Harry Kroto has said, because they are more difficult to recognize and often go unexamined. For many years, a diagnosis of schizophrenia was like a prison sentence, because many people (some of them in the medical profession) held to the notion that a schizophrenic could not recover from the illness and was condemned to an inexorable decline into madness. Like any myth, this one had some truth to it. Many people with severe symptoms do not recover. But some can, as Eleanor Longden discovered for herself. Longden began hearing voices when she was an undergraduate. At first they were somewhat benign, making mostly neutral, factual comments, but they grew more troublesome as she struggled to adjust to college life. Longden was diagnosed as schizophrenic and underwent conventional treatment. By her own account, in “Listening to Voices” in the September/October 2013 issue of Scientific American MIND, the label of schizophrenic and the attitudes of those around her to that label exacerbated her own internal struggles. The voices grew more menacing. Longden began her own slide into madness. But then something odd happened: she began to recover. She did so in part, she says, by accepting the voices in her head as an aspect of her own personality. She listened to them, and tried to understand them. In this way she was able to tame them, and she got enough control over her life to attend school and pursue her graduate studies. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 18481 - Posted: 08.10.2013