Regina Nuzzo People with dyslexia are often taught to work through reading by ‘slowing down and sounding it out’. Results from a computerized training program, however, suggest that ‘hurrying up and getting on with it’ might be a better practice. Accelerated training could improve both reading fluency and comprehension, with lasting benefits. The training protocol speeds up reading by displaying a sentence and then systematically erasing it, letter by letter, in the direction of reading. It then asks questions to test the reader's comprehension. If the questions are answered correctly, the software moves on to the next sentence but gives the reader 2 milliseconds — the duration of an eyeblink — less reading time per letter. “We essentially tell the brain, ‘Hey, you can do better,’” says Zvia Breznitz, a psychologist at the University of Haifa in Israel and lead author of the study. “We slowly break the cycle of bad reading.” After training with the programme for three 20-minute sessions per week for two months, students with dyslexia read about 25% faster than before and comprehended more, even when allowed to read at their own pace. Their test scores ended up statistically indistinguishable from those of typical readers who had not gone through training, and the gains were still apparent six months after training ended. Typical readers also benefited from the training, but their gains were neither as significant nor as long-lasting as the dyslexics'. The findings are published today in Nature Communications1. “The results are exciting,” says Guinevere Eden, a neuroscientist at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Dyslexia is thought to affect between 5 and 10% of the world’s population2, but there is no gold-standard method for treating it. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Dyslexia
Link ID: 17799 - Posted: 02.13.2013

By RAPHAEL SATTER, Associated Press LONDON (AP) — When it comes to mating, guppies treasure their ugly friends — because they look so good by comparison. An article published Wednesday by Britain's Royal Society says that male guppies prefer to associate with their drab-colored counterparts when females were around. "Males actively choose the social context that maximizes their relative attractiveness," the article said. Or, as lead author Clelia Gasparini put it, "If you are surrounded by ugly friends, you look better." Gasparini and her colleagues at Italy's University of Padua built their theory on a kind of guppy dating game. An aquarium was set up with one female in partition on either end. Guppy bachelorette No. 1 had two attractive, brightly-colored males placed on either side of her. Guppy bachelorette No. 2 was stuck with uglier, drab-colored fish. When a male guppy was put in the middle of the tank, and given the choice of which female to sidle up to, Bachelorette No. 2 was the more popular pick, with male guppies spending about 62 percent of their time hanging around her side of the aquarium. What's more, the researchers found that the time guppies spent with bachelorette No. 2 correlated with their unattractiveness. The uglier the guppy, the less likely it was that he would hang around the brightly colored fish placed next to bachelorette No. 1. © 2013 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17798 - Posted: 02.13.2013

Matt Kaplan The astounding warning colours of the nudibranchs, a diverse group of sea slugs, are certainly enough to attract attention — but even they pale in comparison to the gripping news that one species of the soft-bodied molluscs has a habit of discarding its penis. Nudibranchs are hermaphrodites, meaning that they carry both male and female reproductive organs. Moreover, when they mate, they can perform the male role of donating sperm and the female role of receiving sperm at the same time. This process involves two penises and two vagina-like organs, and sperm transmission effectively happens simultaneously during the encounter. This is a relatively standard arrangement among nudibranchs, so the creatures' sexual organs might all be expected to look roughly the same. But the animals show incredible sex-organ diversity, and it was during an exploration of this diversity in the species Chromodoris reticulata that researchers made their jaw-dropping discovery. A Japanese team led by Ayami Sekizawa at Osaka City University and Yasuhiro Nakashima at Nihon University in Tokyo went scuba diving off the coast of Okinawa to collect the sea slugs. They then placed the creatures in aquaria in pairs. In some cases both members of a pair had been isolated from others for 24 hours; in other cases a recently-mated animal was placed with one that had been in isolation. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17797 - Posted: 02.13.2013

By Luciana Gravotta If cupid had studied neuroscience, he’d know to aim his arrows at the brain rather than the heart. Recent research suggests that for love to last, it’s best he dip those arrows in oxytocin. Although scientists have long known that this hormone is essential for monogamous rodents to stay true to their mates, and that it makes humans more trusting toward one another, they are now finding that it is also crucial to how we form and maintain romantic relationships. A handful of new studies show that oxytocin makes us more sympathetic, supportive and open with our feelings—all necessary for couples to celebrate not just one Valentine’s Day, but many. These findings have led some researchers to investigate whether oxytocin can be used in couple therapy. The first bit of evidence that points to oxytocin as nature’s love glue comes from researchers who measured the hormone in couples. Psychology professor Ruth Feldman at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, spent years studying oxytocin’s role in the mother–child bond and recently decided to dive into the uncharted waters of romantic bonds by comparing oxytocin levels in new lovers and singles. “The increase in oxytocin during the period of falling in love was the highest that we ever found,” she says of a study she and her colleagues published in Psychoneuroendocrinology. New lovers had double the amount Feldman usually sees in pregnant women. Oxytocin was also correlated with the longevity of a relationship. Couples with the highest levels were the ones still together six months later. They were also more attuned to each other than the low-oxytocin couples when Feldman asked them to talk about a shared positive experience. © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 17796 - Posted: 02.13.2013

By BENEDICT CAREY The young men who opened fire at Columbine High School, at the movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and in other massacres had this in common: they were video gamers who seemed to be acting out some dark digital fantasy. It was as if all that exposure to computerized violence gave them the idea to go on a rampage — or at least fueled their urges. Social scientists have been studying and debating the effects of media violence on behavior since the 1950s, and video games in particular since the 1980s. The issue is especially relevant today, because the games are more realistic and bloodier than ever, and because most American boys play them at some point. Girls play at lower rates and are significantly less likely to play violent games. A burst of new research has begun to clarify what can and cannot be said about the effects of violent gaming. Playing the games can and does stir hostile urges and mildly aggressive behavior in the short term. Moreover, youngsters who develop a gaming habit can become slightly more aggressive — as measured by clashes with peers, for instance — at least over a period of a year or two. Yet it is not at all clear whether, over longer periods, such a habit increases the likelihood that a person will commit a violent crime, like murder, rape, or assault, much less a Newtown-like massacre. (Such calculated rampages are too rare to study in any rigorous way, researchers agree.) “I don’t know that a psychological study can ever answer that question definitively,” said Michael R. Ward, an economist at the University of Texas, Arlington. “We are left to glean what we can from the data and research on video game use that we have.” © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 17795 - Posted: 02.13.2013

Nearly 400 years after William Shakespeare asked, "What is love?," brain imaging studies are allowing scientists to give at least a partial answer. As our calendars get closer to Feb. 14, a day when passion is deeply associated with the heart, love will in fact be in the mind. A recent study shows love is a complex emotion triggered by 12 specific areas of the brain — the network of love. Love is in the mind, not in the heart © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 17794 - Posted: 02.13.2013

By Laura Sanders Immune cells that help heal injuries in the adult brain may have a second job early in life, a study in mice reveals. The brain crusaders unexpectedly moonlight as sculptors, shaping a region of the brain into a male-specific form. The cells, called microglia, are mobile garbage disposals that travel around the brain and gobble up damaged cells and infectious agents. But the new study, published in the Feb. 13 Journal of Neuroscience, emphasizes that these cells have diverse functions, says neuroscientist Jean Harry of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, N.C., who was not involved in the work. Earlier results hinted that parts of the immune system have a role in building sex differences into the brain, so Kathryn Lenz and her colleagues at the University of Maryland, Baltimore decided to test whether microglia are pulling double duty. The team focused on the preoptic area of the mouse brain—“a place where you see a ton of sex differences,” Lenz says. Early in life, this brain area gets shaped by sex hormones including molecules called estradiol and prostaglandin E2, which work on the male mouse brain. In males, the preoptic area is larger, and the cells there have more elaborate shapes than in females. Scientists think those brain differences drive mating behaviors. Lenz and her colleagues found another difference in the preoptic area between males and females: Young males had about twice as many active microglia as females did. What’s more, a dose of estradiol or prostaglandin E2 in the first few days of life caused female animals to produce the male number of active microglia. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 17793 - Posted: 02.13.2013

by Nic Halverson By studying a magic trick that has been around for thousands of years, neuroscientists have shed light on human attention and visual systems -- as well as on the trick, itself. "Magicians, in particular, are very intellectual performance artists. They are very interested in the mind and how behavior happens," Dr. Stephen Macknik, director of the Laboratory of Behavioral Neurophysiology at the Barrow Neurological Institute(BNI), told Discovery News. "What scientists are doing when we study perception is pretty much the same thing, except we're using the scientific method." The hope is that magicians' intuitive insight could help instruct the field of neuroscience and perhaps, even be applied in medicine to help people with attention deficit issues. In their study, recently published in the inaugural issue of PeerJ, the researchers focused upon a famous trick by a pair of very famous magicians. Penn & Teller's 10-year run at The Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino has made them one of the longest-running and most beloved acts in Las Vegas history. Their trick, "Cups and Balls," is a classic illusion performed by Roman magicians as far back as 2,000 years ago when gladiators still battled in the Colosseum. While the trick has many derivatives, the most common uses three brightly colored balls and three opaque cups. Using sleight-of-hand, the magician seemingly makes the balls pass through the bottoms of cups, jump from cup to cup, disappear and reappear elsewhere or turn into entirely different objects. In Penn & Teller's case, that different object is often a potato. © 2013 Discovery Communications, LLC. T

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 17792 - Posted: 02.13.2013

By Scicurious When it comes down to it, most humans are pretty optimistic. Yeah, we know the Titanic sank, but our boat is better. We know that driving a car is really pretty dangerous, but we’re more careful, it won’t happen to us. This is not just a cultural thing, we generally tend to place more importance on positive information about something than on negative. We’re more optimistic than we should be on everything, from the future of our current relationship to the stock market. But what is it that makes us so optimistic? And what happens when it goes wrong? Because not everyone is optimistic. People with major depressive disorder, for example, are more pessimistic (sometimes they are just pessimistic enough to be realistic, but they can also be unrealistically pessimistic). What is it that determines how optimistic we are? It’s time to take another look at dopamine. I often talk about the neurotransmitter dopamine in the context of addiction. But dopamine is a much more subtle signal than just the “reward” or “pleasure” you see thrown around in the media. Dopamine is extremely important in detecting prediction errors: when you’ve made the wrong choice. Basically, dopamine can spike in the presence of reward, and can spike when a reward is expected. Conversely, you often see decreases in dopamine when something unexpected happens and you fail to get your reward, like with a Rickroll. That’s a prediction error, you predicted a reward and it didn’t happen. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Emotions
Link ID: 17791 - Posted: 02.12.2013

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Being physically fit in midlife is associated with a lower risk of dementia in old age, a new study reports. Between 1971 and 2009, 19,458 healthy adults younger than age 65 took a treadmill fitness test as part of a broader health examination. Researchers followed the subjects through their Medicare records for an average of 24 years. After adjusting for age, smoking, diabetes, cholesterol and other health factors, the researchers found that compared with those in the lowest 20 percent for fitness in midlife, those in the highest 20 percent had a 36 percent reduced risk of dementia. The reason for the association is unclear, but it was independent of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular risk factors for dementia, suggesting that both vascular and nonvascular mechanisms may be involved. “Dementia is a disease with no cure and no good therapies,” said the lead author, Dr. Laura F. DeFina, the interim chief scientific officer at the Cooper Institute in Dallas. Physical activity may be “a preventive way to address dementia instead of addressing the costs of a disabled elder.” The study population was largely white and highly educated, and the researchers acknowledge that their findings, published last week in The Annals of Internal Medicine, cannot be generalized to other populations. They emphasize that the study is observational and does not prove causation. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 17790 - Posted: 02.12.2013

By PAM BELLUCK A type of brain stimulation caused by a mild electric current that appears to have minimal negative side effects is showing promise as a potential treatment for major depression, according to several studies. The experimental therapy, known as transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS, involves a low-level charge about one-400th of that used in electroshock treatment. Unlike electroshock (also called electroconvulsive therapy or ECT), which is administered for a few seconds to patients under anesthesia, tDCS is given for 20 to 30 minutes continuously while patients are conscious. While doctors do not see it replacing electroshock, considered the most effective approach for major depression that has been treatment-resistant and requires urgent attention, tDCS does not appear to cause memory loss as electroshock can. Because it is inexpensive and easily administered, scientists say it might become an alternative or additional treatment for people whose depression is not completely helped by medication. “I think tDCS could be tried before ECT,” said Dr. Andre R. Brunoni, a psychiatrist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil and an author of a study published last week in The Journal of the American Medical Association-Psychiatry. Or, he said, it could be used “for avoiding drug treatment in patients that cannot use drugs.” Researchers said Dr. Brunoni’s study is the largest to date of about half a dozen studies in recent years. It is the first comparing tDCS with another treatment — in this case, sertraline, or Zoloft. The study, involving 120 patients, found that tDCS appeared to work about as well as a low dose of Zoloft, and that combined with Zoloft, it worked better than the drug or the stimulation alone. Zoloft and tDCS were equally safe. A few patients became manic, and some developed redness where electrodes were applied. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 17789 - Posted: 02.12.2013

If optimists see the world through rose-colored lenses, some birds see it through ultraviolet ones. Avians have evolved ultraviolet vision quite a few times in history, a new study finds. Birds depend on their color vision for selecting mates, hunting or foraging for food, and spotting predators. Until recently, ultraviolet vision was thought to have arisen as a one-time development in birds. But a new DNA analysis of 40 bird species, reported Feb. 11 in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology, shows the shift between violet (shorter wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum) and ultraviolet vision has occurred at least 14 times. "Birds see color in a different way from humans," study co-author Anders Ödeen, an animal ecologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, told LiveScience. Human eyes have three different color receptors, or cones, that are sensitive to light of different wavelengths and mix together to reveal all the colors we see. Birds, by contrast, have four cones, so "they see potentially more colors than humans do," Ödeen said. Birds themselves are split into two groups based on the color of light (wavelength) that their cones detect most acutely. Scientists define them as violet-sensitive or ultraviolet-sensitive, and the two groups don't overlap, according to Ödeen. Birds of each group would see the same objects as different hues. The specialization of color vision has its advantages. For instance, a bird with ultraviolet-sensitive vision might have spectacularly bright plumage in order to impress a female, but that same plumage might appear dull to predator birds that see only in the violet range. © 2013 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Vision; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 17788 - Posted: 02.12.2013

By KATHERINE BOUTON At a party the other night, a fund-raiser for a literary magazine, I found myself in conversation with a well-known author whose work I greatly admire. I use the term “conversation” loosely. I couldn’t hear a word he said. But worse, the effort I was making to hear was using up so much brain power that I completely forgot the titles of his books. A senior moment? Maybe. (I’m 65.) But for me, it’s complicated by the fact that I have severe hearing loss, only somewhat eased by a hearing aid and cochlear implant. Dr. Frank Lin, an otolaryngologist and epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, describes this phenomenon as “cognitive load.” Cognitive overload is the way it feels. Essentially, the brain is so preoccupied with translating the sounds into words that it seems to have no processing power left to search through the storerooms of memory for a response. Over the past few years, Dr. Lin has delivered unwelcome news to those of us with hearing loss. His work looks “at the interface of hearing loss, gerontology and public health,” as he writes on his Web site. The most significant issue is the relation between hearing loss and dementia. In a 2011 paper in The Archives of Neurology, Dr. Lin and colleagues found a strong association between the two. The researchers looked at 639 subjects, ranging in age at the beginning of the study from 36 to 90 (with the majority between 60 and 80). The subjects were part of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. None had cognitive impairment at the beginning of the study, which followed subjects for 18 years; some had hearing loss. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Alzheimers
Link ID: 17787 - Posted: 02.12.2013

Philip Ball In Fiji, a star is a kalokalo. For the Pazeh people of Taiwan, it is mintol, and for the Melanau people of Borneo, bitén. All these words are thought to come from the same root. But what was it? An algorithm devised by researchers in Canada and California now offers an answer — in this case, bituqen. The program can reconstruct extinct ‘root’ languages from modern ones, a process that has previously been done painstakingly ‘by hand’ using rules of how linguistic sounds tend to change over time. Statistician Alexandre Bouchard-Côté of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and his co-workers say that by making the reconstruction of ancestral languages much simpler, their method should facilitate the testing of hypotheses about how languages evolve. They report their technique in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Automated language reconstruction has been attempted before, but the authors say that earlier algorithms tended to be rather intractable and prescriptive. Bouchard-Côté and colleagues' method can factor in a large number of languages to improve the quality of reconstruction, and it uses rules that handle possible sound changes in flexible, probabilistic ways. The program requires researchers to input a list of words in each language, together with their meanings, and a phylogenetic ‘language tree’ showing how each language is related to the others. Linguists routinely construct such trees using techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 17786 - Posted: 02.12.2013

By Tina Hesman Saey Mice are poor stand-ins for people in experiments on some types of inflammation, a new study concludes. But some scientists say that critique discounts the value of mouse studies, many of which simply couldn’t be done without the animals. More attention — and money — should go toward studying disease in people than on mouse research, a consortium of scientists contends online February 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Too often, researchers make a discovery in mice and assume that humans will react in the same way, says study coauthor Ronald Tompkins, chief of the Massachusetts General Hospital burn service. “The presumption is not justifiable,” he says. As a result, drug trials — often based heavily on data gleaned from studies with mice — can fail. But other scientists say that critique isn’t new and is overstated. Clinical trials are unsuccessful for many reasons, says Derry Roopenian, an immunologist and mouse geneticist at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. “There’s frailty all along the process. That’s not a failure of the mouse.” He and other critics worry that the study, conducted with a generic strain of laboratory mouse called Black6, unfairly tarnishes the reputation of all mice, even ones engineered to be as much like humans as possible. The group’s conclusions, were they accepted by policy makers, could set back biomedical research by jeopardizing funding for mouse studies, critics warn. “Without the mouse, progress is going to be slowed to a standstill,” Roopenian says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 17785 - Posted: 02.12.2013

By JANE E. BRODY “Treatment is not a prerequisite to surviving addiction.” This bold statement opens the treatment chapter in a helpful new book, “Now What? An Insider’s Guide to Addiction and Recovery,” by William Cope Moyers, a man who nonetheless needed “four intense treatment experiences over five years” before he broke free of alcohol and drugs. As the son of Judith and Bill Moyers, successful parents who watched helplessly during a 15-year pursuit of oblivion through alcohol and drugs, William Moyers said his near-fatal battle with addiction demonstrates that this “illness of the mind, body and spirit” has no respect for status or opportunity. “My parents raised me to become anything I wanted, but when it came to this chronic incurable illness, I couldn’t get on top of it by myself,” he said in an interview. He finally emerged from his drug-induced nadir when he gave up “trying to do it my way” and instead listened to professional therapists and assumed responsibility for his behavior. For the last “18 years and four months, one day at a time,” he said, he has lived drug-free. “Treatment is not the end, it’s the beginning,” he said. “My problem was not drinking or drugs. My problem was learning how to live life without drinking or drugs.” Mr. Moyers acknowledges that treatment is not a magic bullet. Even after a monthlong stay at a highly reputable treatment center like Hazelden in Center City, Minn., where Mr. Moyers is a vice president of public affairs and community relations, the probability of remaining sober and clean a year later is only about 55 percent. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 17784 - Posted: 02.11.2013

Steve Connor Scientists believe they may be able to discover why children who spend much of their time indoors rather than playing outside are more likely to develop short-sightedness following a breakthrough study into the genetics of myopia. More than two dozen genes have been linked to an increased risk of developing myopia, a finding that may finally allow researchers to understand why children today are more likely to become short-sighted than children in the past. Myopia now affects about one in three people in the West and up to 80 per cent of people in Asia. In some countries in the Far East as many as 90 per cent of children are short-sighted, compared to less than 20 per cent a couple of decades ago. Although short-sightedness tends to run in families and has a strong inherited component, the explosive increase in the condition over recent years has been linked with an increase in the time that children spend indoors either studying or playing computer games and watching TV, scientists believe. A study of more than 45,000 people from Europe and Asia has identified 24 new genes that appear to be involved in triggering the onset of myopia. It has also confirmed the role of two further genes that were already suspected of being involved with short-sightedness, the scientists said. © independent.co.uk

Keyword: Vision; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 17783 - Posted: 02.11.2013

By Laura Sanders Psychiatry seemed poised on the edge of a breakthrough. In early 2011, after decades of no radically new drugs, a fundamentally different schizophrenia treatment promised relief from the psychotic hallucinations and delusions plaguing people with the disease. The new compound, devised by chemists at Eli Lilly and Co., hit a target in the brain that older medicines had ignored. All signs pointed to success. In mice, a similar molecule could block the schizophrenia-like effects of PCP. In people the new drug, LY2140023, appeared to curb psychotic behavior with few side effects, small pilot studies showed. In March 2011, Lilly began enrolling 1,100 people in a definitive Phase III clinical trial, the final test designed to show conclusively that the new compound worked. A year and a half later, the drug was dead. After years of work and millions of dollars of investment, the failure was crushing. People with schizophrenia were no better on the new drug than similar people taking a placebo, early results indicated. “I’m disappointed in what these results mean for patients with schizophrenia who still are searching for options to treat this terrible illness,” Jan Lundberg, president of Lilly Research Laboratories, said in a press release. Although the results were devastating, many in the field weren’t surprised. For new drugs designed to treat complex brain disorders such as schizophrenia, depression and anxiety, the odds of success are exceedingly slim. Given the current state of affairs in the drug discovery world, some would argue those odds are close to zero. Not a single drug designed to treat a psychiatric illness in a novel way has reached patients in more than 30 years, argues psychiatrist Christian Fibiger of the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, who described the problem in a 2012 Schizophrenia Bulletin editorial. “For me, the data are in,” says Fibiger, who has developed drugs at several major pharmaceutical companies. “We’ve got to change. This isn’t working.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 17782 - Posted: 02.11.2013

by Michael Marshall Humans aren't built for giving birth. Babies' heads are big to accommodate their big brains, but the mother's hips are small because they walk upright. As a result, birth takes hours and is extremely painful – and midwives almost always help out. Other animals may find birth difficult, particularly if the babies have been gestating for a long time and have grown large. Nevertheless, most mammals have it easier than humans. Monkeys give birth in less than ten minutes. So it is a surprise that female black snub-nosed monkeys may be assisted by "midwives" when they give birth. This behaviour has only been seen once in this species, but it suggests that it's not just human mothers that need help giving birth. Black snub-nosed monkeys live in societies called bands, which can be over 400 strong. Each is divided into smaller groups of around 10 monkeys. Most groups contain one male and several females plus offspring, but there are also all-male groups. Wen Xiao of Dali University in Yunnan, China, and colleagues have been observing black snub-nosed monkeys in the province for years, but had never seen one give birth: the monkeys normally deliver at night. Then on 18 March last year, they got lucky. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 17781 - Posted: 02.11.2013

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News It may be possible to use a patient's own skin to repair the damage caused by multiple sclerosis (MS), which is currently incurable, say researchers. Nerves struggle to communicate in MS as their insulating covering is attacked by the immune system - causing fatigue and damaging movement. Animal tests, described in the journal Cell Stem Cell, have now used modified skin cells to repair the insulation. Experts said there was an "urgent need" for such therapies. Just like electrical wires, nerves have insulation - but instead of plastic, the body uses a protein called myelin. However, diseases that result in damage to the myelin, including MS, leave the nerves exposed and electrical signals struggle to travel round the body. A team of scientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center, in the US, used advances in stem-cell research to attempt to repair the myelin. They took a sample of human skin cells and converted it into stem cells, which are capable of becoming any other type of cell in the body. The next step was to transform the stem cells into immature versions of cells in the brain that produce myelin. When these cells had been injected into mice born without any myelin it had had a significant effect, said researchers. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Stem Cells
Link ID: 17780 - Posted: 02.09.2013