By Laura Sanders In the fraught, emotional world of speed dating, scientific calculations don’t usually hold much sway. But the brain runs a complex series of computations to tally the allure of a prospective partner in just seconds, a new study finds. And the strength of these brain signals predicted which speed daters would go on to score a match. The results help explain how people evaluate others — a process that happens at lightning speed, says neuroscientist Daniela Schiller of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. “It’s a gut feeling, but here, the paper dissects it for us and tells us, ‘This is what we calculate.’” Scientists led by Jeffrey Cooper, who conducted the work at Trinity College Dublin and Caltech, scanned the brains of single volunteers as they looked at pictures of potential dating partners. Although it’s hard to put a number on people by a photo alone, researchers made volunteers rate on a scale of 1 to 4 how much they’d like to go on a date with the person in the photograph. In contrast to many other lab-based experiments on decision making, this exercise wasn’t just academic: Later, the participants attended three real speed-dating events loaded with many of the potential partners seen in the photos. Like a normal speed-dating scenario, volunteers’ contact information was exchanged if both of the people wanted to follow up. (Also like a typical scenario, there weren’t many love connections, says Cooper. When the scientists checked in six weeks later, only a few couples had gone on real dates.) © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Brain imaging
Link ID: 17467 - Posted: 11.07.2012

By Ben Thomas In the early 1990s, a team of neuroscientists at the University of Parma made a surprising discovery: Certain groups of neurons in the brains of macaque monkeys fired not only when a monkey performed an action – grabbing an apple out of a box, for instance – but also when the monkey watched someone else performing that action; and even when the monkey heard someone performing the action in another room. In short, even though these “mirror neurons” were part of the brain’s motor system, they seemed to be correlated not with specific movements, but with specific goals. Over the next few decades, this “action understanding” theory of mirror neurons blossomed into a wide range of promising speculations. Since most of us think of goals as more abstract than movements, mirror neurons confront us with the distinct possibility that those everyday categories may be missing crucial pieces of the puzzle – thus, some scientists propose that mirror neurons might be involved in feelings of empathy, while others think these cells may play central roles in human abilities like speech. Some doctors even say they’ve discovered new treatments for mental disorders by reexamining diseases through the mirror neuron lens. For instance, UCLA’s Marco Iacoboni and others have put forth what Iacoboni called the “broken mirror hypothesis” of autism – the idea that malfunctioning mirror neurons are likely responsible for the lack of empathy and theory of mind found in severely autistic people. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Vision; Autism
Link ID: 17466 - Posted: 11.07.2012

Seniors who take common medications to treat insomnia, anxiety, itching or allergies may have symptoms of forgetfulness or trouble concentrating, a new review concludes. About 90 per cent of people aged 65 and older take at least one prescription medication and almost half take five or more, studies suggest. About 90 per cent of people aged 65 and older take at least one prescription medication, U.S. research suggests.About 90 per cent of people aged 65 and older take at least one prescription medication, U.S. research suggests. (iStock) As people increasingly report memory and attention problems and seek testing for early dementia, researchers in Montreal wanted to see how medications can induce such symptoms. Dr. Cara Tannenbaum, research chair at the Montreal Geriatric University Institute and her co-authors in Montreal, Calgary, Australia and the U.S. reviewed 162 studies on medications most likely to affect memory, creating what's called an amnesia effect, or affect brain functions like attention and concentration that are called non-amnestic. "There is a consistent body of evidence suggesting that drug-induced mild cognitive impairment can occur with episodic use of medications for insomnia, anxiety, [itching] or allergy symptoms," the study's authors concluded in the journal Drugs & Aging. "Combined amnestic and non-amnestic deficits occur with the use of benzodiazepine agents and may partially underlie older adults' frequent complaints of forgetfulness or difficulty concentrating." © CBC 2012

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 17465 - Posted: 11.07.2012

Neuroscientists at the University of Ingberg have found a brain region that does absolutely nothing. Their research, presented at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting, showed that a small region of the cortex located near the posterior section of the cingulate gyrus responded to ‘not one of our 46 experimental manipulations’. Dr. Ahlquist was rather surprised at the finding. “During a pilot study we noticed that this small section of the cortex did not show differential activity in any of our manipulations. Out of curiosity, we wanted to see whether it actually did anything at all. Over the months that followed we tried every we knew, with over 20 different participants. IQ tests, memory tasks, flashing lights, talking, listening, imagining juggling, but there was no response. Nothing. We got more desperate, so we tried pictures of faces, TMS, pictures of cats, pictures of sex, pictures of violence and even sexy violence, but nothing happened! Not even a decrease. No connectivity to anywhere else, not even a voodoo correlation. 46 voxels of wasted space. I know dead salmons that are more responsive. It’s an evolutionary disgrace, that’s what it is.” Some neuroscientists are disappointed by the regions’ lack of response: ‘This is exactly the type of cortical behavior that leads to this popular science nonsense about using only 10% of our brain. Frankly, I am outraged by this lazy piece of brain. It’s the cortical equivalent of a spare tyre. If anyone wants to have it lobotomized, I am happy to break out the orbitoclast and help them out. That’ll teach it.”

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 17464 - Posted: 11.07.2012

Danish researchers Krogh and colleagues randomly 115 assigned depressed people to one of two exercise programs. One was a strenuous aerobic workout - cycling for 30 minutes, 3 times per week, for 3 months. The other was various stretching exercises. The idea was that stretching was a kind of placebo control group on the grounds that, while it is an intervention, it's not the kind of exercise that gets you fit. It doesn't burn many calories, it doesn't improve your cardiovascular system, etc. Aerobic exercise is the kind that's most commonly been proposed as having an antidepressant effect. So what happened? Not much. Both groups got less depressed but there was zero difference between the two conditions. The cyclists did get physically fitter than the stretchers, losing more weight and improving on other measures. But they didn't feel any better. If this is true, it might mean that the antidepressant effects of aerobic exercise are psychological rather than physical - it's about the idea of 'exercising', not the process of becoming fitter. While many trials have found modest beneficial effects of exercise vs a "control condition", the control condition was often just doing nothing much - such as being put on a waiting-list. So the placebo effect or the motivational benefits of 'doing something', rather than the effects of exercise per se, could be behind it. In the current study though the stretching avoided that problem.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 17463 - Posted: 11.07.2012

By Stephanie Pappas, An over-excited immune system may explain why some people are susceptible to depression, according to new research on mice. Mice whose immune systems responded to stress by overproducing an inflammatory compound called Interleukin-6 were more likely to become the mousy versions of depressed than mice with non-overactive immune systems, the research found. This same compound is elevated in depressed humans, said study researcher Georgia Hodes, suggesting hope for new depression treatments. "There's probably a subset of people with depression who have this over-sensitive inflammatory response to stress and that this is leading to the symptoms of depression," Hodes, a postdoctoral researcher at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, told LiveScience. Hodes added that stress could be thought of as an allergen, like pet dander, with the over-reactive immune system making you depressed rather than giving you runny nose. "In some ways, it is an analogy to an allergy," Hodes said. "You have something that is not really dangerous, but your body thinks it is, so you have this massive immune response. In this case, the stressor is what they're having this massive immune response to." Some of the symptoms of depression — lack of energy, loss of appetite — mirror the body's response to physical illness, Hodes noted. © 2012 Yahoo! Inc.

Keyword: Depression; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 17462 - Posted: 11.07.2012

By Scicurious Stress is generally not a good thing. Most of us who live stressful lives (which, I suppose, would be all of us), are well aware of this. We try to reduce our stress, or even stress about how stressed we are. Traumatic stress increases the risk for all sorts of psychiatric disorders, including major depressive disorder, anxiety, and post traumatic stress disorder. But not all stresses are created equal, even the traumatic ones. And it turns out that it’s not the stress itself that is important…it’s whether or not you have any control over it. A stress that you can control is a very different one from a stress that you can’t. I usually think of a stress you cannot control as something like the illness of a family member, as compared to a stress you can control, say, the stress involved in training for and running a marathon (which is definitely a physical stressor). These are both stresses, but they aren’t alike. While the stress that you cannot control is often a very traumatic experience, and can predispose people to psychiatric disorders, a controllable stress is actually a good event. Not only does it blunt the impact of the stressor itself, it can be protective against the detriments of future uncontrolled stresses. Scientists call this “behavioral immunization” against future stress. Behavioral immunization involves the recruitment of very specific brain regions, especially the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain. After exposure to a controllable stress, there is increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, and it is thought that the increase in activity is important for the development of behavioral immunization. If you stop this increased activity from taking place during controllable stress, you can prevent behavioral immunization. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 17461 - Posted: 11.07.2012

Mo Costandi General anaesthetics induce a coma-like state within seconds, allowing patients to be operated on without feeling pain or discomfort. Yet very little is known about how these drugs work. Now research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1 shows that they change the activity of specific regions of the brain and make it difficult for the different parts to talk to each other. Neuroscientist Laura Lewis of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and her colleagues used microelectrodes to measure the activity of single cells and networks of neurons in the brains of three people who were about to undergo neurosurgery for epilepsy. Each patient was given a single dose of the general anaesthetic propofol, and their ability to respond to auditory stimuli was used to determine when they slipped into unconsciousness. The researchers found that loss of consciousness coincided with the rapid onset of brain waves known as slow oscillations. “We were surprised to find that slow oscillations began so abruptly,” says Lewis. “Their onset was sudden, and precisely timed to when patients lost consciousness.” The oscillations started at different times in different regions of the cerebral cortex, and individual neurons became markedly less active overall, with their activity spiking at the same time as the slow oscillations in that region. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 17460 - Posted: 11.06.2012

by Virginia Morell Figaro may not be as talented an inventor as Leonardo da Vinci, but among Goffin's cockatoos, he's a prodigy. In their natural habitat—the forests of Indonesia these cockatoos have never been seen making or using tools. But researchers report today—that Figaro, a member of a captive colony of the birds in Austria, invents and uses stick tools of his own design. Although toolmaking and use is not uncommon in animals, this type of spontaneous innovation and individual creativity is "exceedingly rare" among nonhuman animals, the scientists note, and opens up many questions about the cognitive skills required. Understanding these processes, they say, may help unlock many of the questions about the evolution of intelligence. Many species of birds, such as woodpecker finches of the Galapagos Islands, ravens, crows, and herons, are natural toolmakers and users. New Caledonian crows are especially talented, shaping bits of wood and stiff palm leaves into spears and hooks to forage for grubs. One captive New Caledonian crow displayed an inventiveness similar to Figaro's by fashioning hooks (a shape she had not previously seen) out of wire. And captive Northern blue jays, which are not tool-users in the wild, have shredded newspaper to use as rakes for retrieving food pellets. Such talents haven't been seen before in cockatoos—and although tool use is seen in many species, innovative tool manufacture is rare. But even if Figaro is a standalone talent among his species, says Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University in Atlanta, the discovery of such skills in even one individual shows that "general intelligence can lead to innovative behavior." Inventiveness is thus not tied to some type of mental specialization, such as being a natural tool-user, as has been argued previously, he explains. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 17459 - Posted: 11.06.2012

by Virginia Morell Alex, an African grey parrot who died 5 years ago and was known for his ability to use English words, also understood a great deal about numbers. In a new study in this month's Cognition, scientists show that Alex correctly inferred the relationship between cardinal and ordinal numbers, an ability that has not previously been found in any species other than humans. After learning the cardinal numbers—or exact values—of one to six, Alex was taught the ordinal values (the position of a number in a list) of seven and eight—that is, he learned that six is less than seven, and seven is less than eight. He was never taught the cardinal values of seven and eight—but when tested on this, he passed with flying colors, apparently inferring, for instance, that the sound "seven" meant six plus one. In the video above of one of these experiments, comparative psychologist Irene Pepperberg of Harvard University asks Alex to pick out the set of colored blocks that equal the number seven. Play the video to hear his answer. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 17458 - Posted: 11.06.2012

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News Researchers have found some of the earliest signs of Alzheimer's disease, more than two decades before the first symptoms usually appear. Treating the disease early is thought to be vital to prevent damage to memory and thinking. A study, published in the Lancet Neurology, found differences in the brains of an extended Colombian family predisposed to develop an early form of Alzheimer's. Experts said the US study may give doctors more time to treat people. Alzheimer's disease starts long before anyone would notice; previous studies have shown an effect on the brain 10-15 years before symptoms. It is only after enough brain cells have died that the signs of dementia begin to appear - some regions of the brain will have lost up to 20% of their brain cells before the disease becomes noticeable. However, doctors fear so much of the brain will have degenerated by this time that it will be too late to treat patients. The failure of recent trials to prevent further cognitive decline in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease has been partly put down to timing. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 17457 - Posted: 11.06.2012

The brain holds in mind what has just been seen by synchronizing brain waves in a working memory circuit, an animal study supported by the National Institutes of Health suggests. The more in-sync such electrical signals of neurons were in two key hubs of the circuit, the more those cells held the short-term memory of a just-seen object. Charles Gray, Ph.D., of Montana State University, Bozeman, and colleagues, report their findings Nov. 1, 2012, online, in the journal Science Express. "This work demonstrates, for the first time, that there is information about short term memories reflected in in-sync brainwaves," explained Gray. "The Holy Grail of neuroscience has been to understand how and where information is encoded in the brain. This study provides more evidence that large scale electrical oscillations across distant brain regions may carry information for visual memories," said NIMH director Thomas R. Insel, M.D. Prior to the study, scientists had observed synchronous patterns of electrical activity between the two circuit hubs after a monkey saw an object, but weren’t sure if the signals actually represent such short-term visual memories in the brain. Rather, it was thought that such neural oscillations might play the role of a traffic cop, directing information along brain highways. To find out more, Gray, Rodrigo Salazar Ph.D., and Nick Dotson of Montana State and Steven Bressler, Ph.D., at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, recorded electrical signals from groups of neurons in both hubs of two monkeys performing a visual working memory task. To earn a reward, the monkeys had to remember an object — or its location — that they saw momentarily on a computer screen and correctly match it. The researchers expected to see the telltale boost in synchrony during a delay period immediately after an object disappeared from the screen, when the monkey had to hold information briefly in mind.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17456 - Posted: 11.06.2012

By Meghan Rosen Michael McAlpine’s shiny circuit doesn’t look like something you would stick in your mouth. It’s dashed with gold, has a coiled antenna and is glued to a stiff rectangle. But the antenna flexes, and the rectangle is actually silk, its stiffness melting away under water. And if you paste the device on your tooth, it could keep you healthy. The electronic gizmo is designed to detect dangerous bacteria and send out warning signals, alerting its bearer to microbes slipping past the lips. Recently, McAlpine, of Princeton University, and his colleagues spotted a single E. coli bacterium skittering across the surface of the gadget’s sensor. The sensor also picked out ulcer-causing H. pylori amid the molecular medley of human saliva, the team reported earlier this year in Nature Communications. At about the size of a standard postage stamp, the dental device is still too big to fit comfortably in a human mouth. “We had to use a cow tooth,” McAlpine says, describing test experiments. But his team plans to shrink the gadget so it can nestle against human enamel. McAlpine is convinced that one day, perhaps five to 10 years from now, everyone will wear some sort of electronic device. “It’s not just teeth,” he says. “People are going to be bionic.” McAlpine belongs to a growing pack of tech-savvy scientists figuring out how to merge the rigid, brittle materials of conventional electronics with the soft, curving surfaces of human tissues. Their goal: To create products that have the high performance of silicon wafers — the crystalline material used in computer chips — while still moving with the body. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 17455 - Posted: 11.05.2012

By ANDREW SOLOMON Drew Petersen didn’t speak until he was 3½, but his mother, Sue, never believed he was slow. When he was 18 months old, in 1994, she was reading to him and skipped a word, whereupon Drew reached over and pointed to the missing word on the page. Drew didn’t produce much sound at that stage, but he already cared about it deeply. “Church bells would elicit a big response,” Sue told me. “Birdsong would stop him in his tracks.” Sue, who learned piano as a child, taught Drew the basics on an old upright, and he became fascinated by sheet music. “He needed to decode it,” Sue said. “So I had to recall what little I remembered, which was the treble clef.” As Drew told me, “It was like learning 13 letters of the alphabet and then trying to read books.” He figured out the bass clef on his own, and when he began formal lessons at 5, his teacher said he could skip the first six months’ worth of material. Within the year, Drew was performing Beethoven sonatas at the recital hall at Carnegie Hall. “I thought it was delightful,” Sue said, “but I also thought we shouldn’t take it too seriously. He was just a little boy.” On his way to kindergarten one day, Drew asked his mother, “Can I just stay home so I can learn something?” Sue was at a loss. “He was reading textbooks this big, and they’re in class holding up a blowup M,” she said. Drew, who is now 18, said: “At first, it felt lonely. Then you accept that, yes, you’re different from everyone else, but people will be your friends anyway.” Drew’s parents moved him to a private school. They bought him a new piano, because he announced at 7 that their upright lacked dynamic contrast. “It cost more money than we’d ever paid for anything except a down payment on a house,” Sue said. When Drew was 14, he discovered a home-school program created by Harvard; when I met him two years ago, he was 16, studying at the Manhattan School of Music and halfway to a Harvard bachelor’s degree. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 17454 - Posted: 11.05.2012

By Evan Charney and William English Dozens of studies in the past few years have linked single genes to whether a person is liberal or conservative, has a strong party affiliation or is likely to vote reguarly. The discipline of “genopolitics” has grabbed headlines as a result, but is the claim that a few genes influence political views and actions legitimate? We don't think so. The kinds of studies that have produced many of the findings we question involve searching for connections between behavior and gene variants that occur frequently in the population. Most of the 20,000 to 25,000 human genes come in hundreds or thousands of common variations, which often consist of slight differences in a gene's sequence of DNA code letters or in repeats of a particular segment. For the most part, scientists do not know what effect, if any, these common variants, known as polymorphisms, have on the functioning of the proteins they encode. Genes predict certain well-defined physiological diseases—such as hereditary breast cancer and the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease—but when it comes to complex human behaviors such as voting, the link is tenuous at best. One of the most prominent papers showing a link between a few polymorphisms and political behavior was published by James Fowler and Christopher Dawes in 2008 in the Journal of Politics. They concluded that people who possess certain variants of a gene called MAOA are more likely to vote than those who do not and that people with a particular variant of a gene known as 5-HTT who regularly attend religious services are also more likely to vote. We do not believe that these conclusions are right. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 17453 - Posted: 11.05.2012

By OLIVER SACKS HALLUCINATIONS are very startling and frightening: you suddenly see, or hear or smell something — something that is not there. Your immediate, bewildered feeling is, what is going on? Where is this coming from? The hallucination is convincingly real, produced by the same neural pathways as actual perception, and yet no one else seems to see it. And then you are forced to the conclusion that something — something unprecedented — is happening in your own brain or mind. Are you going insane, getting dementia, having a stroke? In other cultures, hallucinations have been regarded as gifts from the gods or the Muses, but in modern times they seem to carry an ominous significance in the public (and also the medical) mind, as portents of severe mental or neurological disorders. Having hallucinations is a fearful secret for many people — millions of people — never to be mentioned, hardly to be acknowledged to oneself, and yet far from uncommon. The vast majority are benign — and, indeed, in many circumstances, perfectly normal. Most of us have experienced them from time to time, during a fever or with the sensory monotony of a desert or empty road, or sometimes, seemingly, out of the blue. Many of us, as we lie in bed with closed eyes, awaiting sleep, have so-called hypnagogic hallucinations — geometric patterns, or faces, sometimes landscapes. Such patterns or scenes may be almost too faint to notice, or they may be very elaborate, brilliantly colored and rapidly changing — people used to compare them to slide shows. At the other end of sleep are hypnopompic hallucinations, seen with open eyes, upon first waking. These may be ordinary (an intensification of color perhaps, or someone calling your name) or terrifying (especially if combined with sleep paralysis) — a vast spider, a pterodactyl above the bed, poised to strike. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 17452 - Posted: 11.05.2012

By Maureen McCarthy October 30th marked the five-year anniversary of the death of my friend Washoe. Washoe was a wonderful friend. She was confident and self-assured. She was a matriarch, a mother figure not only to her adopted son but to others as well. She was kind and caring, but she didn’t suffer fools. Washoe also happened to be known around the world as the first nonhuman to acquire aspects of a human language, American Sign Language. You see, my friend Washoe was a chimpanzee. Washoe was born somewhere in West Africa around September 1965. Much like the chimpanzees I study here in Uganda, Washoe’s mother cared for her during infancy, nursing her, carrying her, and sharing her sleeping nests with her. That changed when her mother was killed so baby Washoe could be taken from her forest home, then bought by the US Air Force for use in biomedical testing. Washoe was not used in this sort of testing, however. Instead, Drs. Allen and Beatrix Gardner of the University of Nevada chose her among the young chimpanzees at Holloman Aeromedical Laboratory to be cross-fostered. Cross-fostering occurs when a youngster of one species is reared by adults of a different species. In this case, humans raised Washoe exactly as if she were a deaf human child. She learned to brush her teeth, drink from cups, and dress herself, in the same way a human child learns these behaviors. She was also exposed to humans using sign language around her. In fact, humans used only American Sign Language (ASL) to communicate in Washoe’s presence, avoiding spoken English so as to replicate as accurately as possible the learning environment of a young human exposed to sign language. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 17451 - Posted: 11.05.2012

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News A new drug is the "most effective" treatment for relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis, say UK researchers. During MS the body's immune system turns on its own nerves causing debilitating muscle problems. Researchers at the University of Cambridge say a cancer drug, which wipes out and resets the immune system, has better results than other options. However, there is concern that a drugs company is about to increase the cost of the drug as a result. Around 100,000 people in the UK have multiple sclerosis. When the condition is diagnosed most will have a form of the disease know as relapsing-remitting MS, in which the symptoms can almost disappear for a time, before suddenly returning. Built from scratch The researchers tested a leukaemia drug, alemtuzumab, which had shown benefits for MS in small studies. In leukaemia, a blood cancer, it controls the excess production of white blood cells. In MS patients, the dose eliminates the immune cells entirely, forcing a new immune system to be built from scratch which should not attack the nerves. Two trials, published in the Lancet medical journal, compared the effectiveness of alemtuzumab with a first-choice drug, interferon beta-1a. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 17450 - Posted: 11.03.2012

By DENISE GRADY Just when they might have thought they were in the clear, people recovering from meningitis in an outbreak caused by a contaminated steroid drug have been struck by a second illness. The new problem, called an epidural abscess, is an infection near the spine at the site where the drug — contaminated by a fungus — was injected to treat back or neck pain. The abscesses are a localized infection, different from meningitis, which affects the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord. But in some cases, an untreated abscess can cause meningitis. The abscesses have formed even while patients were taking powerful antifungal medicines, putting them back in the hospital for more treatment, often with surgery. The problem has just begun to emerge, so far mostly in Michigan, which has had more people sickened by the drug — 112 out of 404 nationwide — than any other state. “We’re hearing about it in Michigan and other locations as well,” said Dr. Tom M. Chiller, the deputy chief of the mycotic diseases branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We don’t have a good handle on how many people are coming back.” He added, “We are just learning about this and trying to assess how best to manage these patients. They’re very complicated.” In the last few days, about a third of the 53 patients treated for meningitis at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor, Mich., have returned with abscesses, said Dr. Lakshmi K. Halasyamani, the chief medical officer. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 17449 - Posted: 11.03.2012

By Hannah Krakauer, Last week, the Food and Drug Administration released incident reports describing several deaths that have occurred following the consumption of Monster Energy drinks. Much of the concern over energy-drink consumption centers on the high caffeine content of such beverages. How did these deaths come to light? Anais Fournier, 14, of Hagerstown, Md., died suddenly last December from a heart arrhythmia that led to cardiac arrest. She had apparently drunk two Monster Energy drinks over two days. In mid-October, Fournier’s mother, Wendy Crossland, filed a lawsuit against Monster Beverage, based in Corona, Calif., claiming that the company did not make clear the risks that come with drinking the beverage. As part of a Freedom of Information request by Crossland, the FDA released details of the other four cases, plus one nonfatal heart attack, all of which are alleged to be associated with drinking Monster Energy. The company maintains that its drinks are safe. How much caffeine is in energy drinks such as Monster Energy? Actually, not a huge amount. A 24-ounce can of Monster Energy contains 240 milligrams of caffeine. A typical eight-ounce cup of brewed coffee contains 90 to 200 milligrams of caffeine. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 17448 - Posted: 11.03.2012