By Nick Triggle Health correspondent, BBC News Obesity surgery is often seen as a quick fix, without proper consideration of the risks, a review says. The National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death looked at the care given to more than 300 patients at NHS and private hospitals in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It found that many were given insufficient time or information to properly consent to the operations. Post-surgery care was also found to be lacking, the watchdog said. In particular, it highlighted the fact patients were not always given access to dieticians and psychologists. The report also suggested the failings could be contributing to the high number of readmissions - nearly a fifth of the patients had to return within six months. Weight loss operations, such as the fitting of gastric bands, have been growing in popularity. There were more than 8,000 of these operations, sometimes called bariatric surgery, carried out by the NHS last year - and the number is rising by about 10% a year. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17387 - Posted: 10.18.2012

By Cari Nierenberg The strange folds and furrows covering a Brazilian man's entire scalp was neither a funky new look nor a hipster trend. Rather the 21-year-old's bizarre looking scalp with its deep skin folds in a pattern said to resemble the surface of the brain is a sign of a rare medical condition known as cutis verticis gyrata. In this week's New England Journal of Medicine, two Brazilian doctors describe this young man's case and share a picture of its odd appearance. When he was 19, the skin on his scalp started to change. It grew thicker, forming many soft, spongy ridges and narrow ruts. Even his hair had an unusual configuration. It was normal in the furrows but sparser over the folds as is common for this strange scalp condition. No doubt, visits to the barber shop as well as washing his squishy scalp and combing his hair were peculiar experiences. Despite the extent of his scalp affected, "the patient did not have the habit of covering his head," with a hat, for instance, says Dr. Karen Schons a dermatologist at the Hospital Universitario de Santa Maria, who examined the patient and co-authored the case study. In fact, the case study reports that "the condition did not bother him cosmetically." © 2012 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 17386 - Posted: 10.18.2012

by Helen Thomson, New Orleans HUMANS are constantly searching for an elixir of youth - could it be that an infusion of young blood holds the key? This seems to be true for mice, at least. According to research presented this week at the Society for Neuroscience conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, giving young blood to old mice can reverse some of the effects of age-related cognitive decline. Last year, Saul Villeda, then at Stanford University in California, and colleagues showed they could boost the growth of new cells in the brains of old mice by giving them a blood infusion from young mice (Nature, doi.org/c9jwvm). "We know that blood has this huge effect on brain cells, but we didn't know if its effects extended beyond cell regeneration," he says. Now the team has tested for changes in cognition by linking the circulatory systems of young and old mice. Once the blood of each conjoined mouse had fully mixed with the other, the researchers analysed their brains. Tissue from the hippocampus of old mice given young blood showed changes in the expression of 200 to 300 genes, particularly in those involved in synaptic plasticity, which underpins learning and memory. They also found changes in some proteins involved in nerve growth. The infusion of young blood also boosted the number and strength of neuronal connections in an area of the brain where new cells do not grow. This didn't happen when old mice received old blood. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17385 - Posted: 10.18.2012

Nearly a quarter of seniors said they'd like to participate in more social activities, according to a new report by Statistics Canada. The agency released the first nationally representative study on barriers to social participation by seniors on Wednesday. "Social engagement — involvement in meaningful activities and maintaining close relationships — is a component of successful aging," wrote Heather Gilmour of Statistics Canada's health analysis division. "The results of this analysis highlight the importance of frequent social participation to maintaining quality of life." Overall, an estimated 80 per cent said they were frequent participants in at least one social activity, such as seeing relatives or friends outside the household, attending church or religious activities like a choir or sports at least weekly or attending concerts or volunteering at least monthly. "The greater the number of frequent social activities, the higher the odds of positive self-perceived health, and the lower the odds of loneliness and life dissatisfaction," Gilmour said. "This is consistent with research that has found seniors with a wider range of social ties have better well-being." © CBC 2012

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Alzheimers
Link ID: 17384 - Posted: 10.18.2012

by Sara Reardon, New Orleans, Louisiana Does beer make you shlur your wordsh? You're not alone: drunk zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) sing songs that are blurrier and more disordered than those of their sober counterparts. What's more, binge drinking may permanently impair juvenile finches' ability to learn new songs – which could have implications for our understanding of the effect of heavy drinking on adolescents. Having a unique and interesting song is important for zebra finches to mate, and each male develops his own signature tune as he matures, says Christopher Olson of Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. Because zebra finch song is so well studied, Olson and colleagues decided to find out how alcohol would affect it. First, they had to find out whether finches are even interested in alcohol. When they gave a group of adult finches 6 per cent ethanol in their water bottles, the birds drank enough of it that their blood alcohol content sometimes reached 0.8 per cent: the legal limit for drivers in many places. The birds were also happy to sing while drunk. Using audio analysis software, the researchers determined the degree of "white noise", or disorganised sounds, in their songs. The drunk birds' songs were significantly more broken and disorganised. "It's their husky bar voice," says Olson. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Language
Link ID: 17383 - Posted: 10.18.2012

by Moheb Costandi NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA—Books and educational toys can make a child smarter, but they also influence how the brain grows, according to new research presented here on Sunday at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. The findings point to a "sensitive period" early in life during which the developing brain is strongly influenced by environmental factors. Studies comparing identical and nonidentical twins show that genes play an important role in the development of the cerebral cortex, the thin, folded structure that supports higher mental functions. But less is known about how early life experiences influence how the cortex grows. To investigate, neuroscientist Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania and her colleagues recruited 64 children from a low income background and followed them from birth through to late adolescence. They visited the children's homes at 4 and 8 years of age to evaluate their environment, noting factors such as the number of books and educational toys in their houses, and how much warmth and support they received from their parents. More than 10 years after the second home visit, the researchers used MRI to obtain detailed images of the participants' brains. They found that the level of mental stimulation a child receives in the home at age 4 predicted the thickness of two regions of the cortex in late adolescence, such that more stimulation was associated with a thinner cortex. One region, the lateral inferior temporal gyrus, is involved in complex visual skills such as word recognition. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Language
Link ID: 17382 - Posted: 10.18.2012

By Ferris Jabr With the exception of the cast of Disney’s The Little Mermaid—and Big Mouth Billy Bass—fish do not spring to mind as the animal kingdom’s most vocally gifted members. But one unusual singing fish has been teaching biologists and neuroscientists a lot about speech and hearing. Its bulging eyes and blubbery lips have graced several research posters at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting, which is in New Orleans, Louisiana this year. The finned crooner in question is the plainfin midshipman fish (Porichthys notatus), which belongs to a family of fish known as toadfish because of their squat, slimy appearance. Midshipman fish live along the Pacific coast from Alaska to Baja California at depths of up to 300 meters, burying themselves in the mud during the day and surfacing at night to feed. Their name is attributable to the hundreds of luminous spots called photophores that decorate their underbellies, which are somewhat reminiscent of the buttons on a naval officer’s uniform. The fish likely use these bioluminescent dots to attract small prey such as krill and to hide from predators by masking their own shadows with a camouflage technique known as counter-illumination. Midshipman fish come in three varieties: females, Type I males and the smaller Type II males. All three types are vocal, emitting short grunts to communicate with one another, but Type 1 males are the most voluble by far. In the spring and summer, Type 1 males head to shallow waters, excavate nests beneath rocks along the shoreline, hunker down and start to sing, using sonic muscles surrounding their inflatable swim bladders to hum for up to an hour at a time. This humming, which people have described a droning motorboat or an orchestra of mournful oboes, is so loud that it has been known to wake houseboat owners in San Francisco and Sausalito © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hearing
Link ID: 17381 - Posted: 10.17.2012

By Janet Raloff Carbon dioxide has been vilified for decades as a driver of global warming. A new study finds signs that CO2, exhaled in every breath, can exert an equally worrisome threat — impaired cognition — in nearly every energy-efficient classroom, meeting hall or office space. The work assessed decision-making in 22 healthy young adults. Their performance on six of nine tests dropped notably when researchers raised indoor carbon dioxide levels to 1,000 parts per million from a baseline of 600 ppm. On seven tests, performance fell substantially more when the room’s CO2 was boosted to 2,500 ppm, scientists report in a paper to be published in Environmental Health Perspectives. These data are surprising, says Roger Hedrick of Architectural Energy Corp. in Boulder, Colo., because “1,000 ppm of CO2 used to be considered a benchmark of good ventilation.” Hedrick, an environmental engineer, chairs the committee that drafts commercial ventilation standards through the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, & Air-Conditioning Engineers. Carbon dioxide levels are often substantially higher in buildings than the 350 to 400 ppm typically found outdoors. Indoor values of 600 ppm are considered very good. But depending on how many people inhabit a room and how many times per hour its air is exchanged with outdoor air through ventilation, “there are plenty of buildings where you could easily see 2,500 ppm of CO2 — or close to it — even with ventilation designs that are fully compliant with current standards,” Hedrick says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17380 - Posted: 10.17.2012

By Gary Stix First off, this study on a molecule tied to social interaction was conducted in animals. So I’m supposed to turn on the siren and the flashing red light here to let you know that the headline you just read might not apply in humans. Still, the animals in question, prairie voles, are a special case, models of faithfulness that put humans to shame when it comes to the delicate topic of monogamy. Once hitched, the rodents stick with their mates for life—an example of moral pulchritude in the animal kingdom that many of us human sinners can never hope to emulate. It could easily become the state animal for whole regions of the U.S. For just that alone, the implications of the experiment in question are particularly intriguing. The new research shows that oxytocin, the bonding hormone, is sometimes capable of turning the upstanding rodent into an anti-social lout, making the study results more compelling in many ways than if they were reported in errant humans. So the man-bites-dog headline stays. This all came up when Karen Bales, a professor at University of California, Davis, wanted to know what would happen if oxytocin gets administered for lengthy intervals, not the short-term dosing that has occurred in the multitude of previous vole studies that linked the hormone to monogamous behavior. In their experiment, Bales and team gave either a low, medium or high dose through the nose to 29 voles, and a saline solution to 14 controls At first, the animals became all cuddly as in previous studies But after three weeks, an entire vole childhood (from weaning to sexual maturity), they started breaking bad. Males did not engage in the normal behavior of “pair bonding,” that drives them to look for the girl of their dreams. And female voles’ natural mothering instinct seemed to disappear: when placed nearby young pups that were not their own, they didn’t dote, as they are wont to do. The cuddle hormone had turned the rodents into meanies. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17379 - Posted: 10.17.2012

(Relaxnews)—In a study of more than 90 men, scientists from the University of Bonn, Germany, found that subjects treated with a dose of testosterone before the study told fewer lies than those who received a placebo. "Testosterone has always been said to promote aggressive and risky behavior and posturing," says researcher and neuroscientist Bernard Weber. However, more recent studies indicate that it also fosters social behavior. Prior research has suggested that the hormone may actually cause people to be more "prosocial" in that they voluntarily act in the interest of others, writes the Atlantic magazine, but exactly how the hormone influences behaviors isn't understood. For this latest study, 46 subjects were treated with testosterone by applying it to the skin in gel form, while 45 subjects received a placebo. The next day, the subjects played a dice game in which it was easy for the men to lie to earn more money, with no possibility of being caught. The study was designed so that it was impossible even for the researchers to detect whether a subject was lying or not. Rather, they used statistics to analyze reported earnings that were higher than probability would allow, inferring from these how honest the subjects were being. While many people in the study lied about the game, there was a noticeable difference between the men boosted with testosterone and those who weren't—the testosterone group avoided the temptation to cheat more often. Blood tests confirmed the results that high testosterone levels were linked with more honest game playing. "Test subjects with the higher testosterone levels had clearly lied less frequently than untreated test subjects," says co-author Armin Falk. "This result clearly contradicts the one-dimensional approach that testosterone results in anti-social behavior." The study was published last week in the journal PLoS One . http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0046774 © 2012 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 17378 - Posted: 10.17.2012

by Clare Wilson Why does making direct eye contact with someone give you that feeling of a special connection? Perhaps because it excites newly discovered "eye cells" in the amygdala, the part of the brain that processes emotions and social interactions. This new type of neuron was discovered in a Rhesus macaque. If humans have these neurons too, it may be that they are impaired in disorders such as autism and schizophrenia, which affect eye contact and social interactions. Katalin Gothard, a neurophysiologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and her team placed seven electrodes in the amygdala of a Rhesus macaque. The electrodes, each one-tenth the thickness of a human hair, allowed them to record activity in individual neurons as the macaque watched a video featuring another macaque. All the while, the team also tracked the macaque's gaze. Out of the 151 neurons the researchers could distinguish, 23 fired only when the macaque was looking at the eyes of the monkey in the video. Of these neurons, which the team call "eye cells", four fired more when the monkey in the video appeared to be gazing back at the laboratory macaque, as if the two animals were making eye contact. "These are cells that have been tuned by evolution to look at the eye, and they extract information about who you are, and most importantly, are you making eye contact with me," says Gothard. Other eye cells fired depending on whether the monkey in the video was behaving in a friendly, aggressive or neutral manner, but not in response to eye contact. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 17377 - Posted: 10.17.2012

The Crack Team That Removes & Preserves People's Brains Just Hours After They Die by Jeff Wheelwright On average, the residents of Sun City, Arizona, occupy their domiciles for a dozen years. When they depart—almost always by dying—they often leave their brains behind. The stages of physical and mental decline take them from their dream house to a hospital off Del Webb Boulevard, then to a nursing home, and finally back to the medical complex, where researchers harvest their most important organ. Hoping to do good for science, they have enrolled in the Brain and Body Donation Program of the Banner Sun Health Research Institute—widely considered the world’s preeminent brain bank. A large base of well-
documented donors in close proximity sets the Sun City program apart from other repositories, which often have scant information about patients who may be scattered and diverse. Here, healthy, active seniors who eventually die of, say, heart disease, can be compared with others who develop neurodegenerative disorders. Because the two sets of subjects have similar backgrounds, lifestyles, and ethnic traits, changes relating to a brain disease should be easier to detect. The institute is also famed for its crack autopsy team, which responds so quickly that no more than three hours elapse from the time a donor expires to the time that the brain is removed and preserved. “We’re not the biggest brain bank in the world, but we have the highest-quality tissue,” says pathologist Thomas Beach, the program director, who notes that donors must live within a 50-mile radius of the morgue. © 2012, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 17376 - Posted: 10.17.2012

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR A new study suggests that prenatal exposure to mercury is associated with symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but the greater a mother’s consumption of fish — a source of mercury — the less likely her child is to suffer these symptoms. The apparently paradoxical findings, published online last week in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, come from an analysis of 607 children born between 1993 and 1998. The researchers reviewed data on the amounts of mercury in the mothers’ hair, comparing them against dietary records. At ages 7 to 10, the children underwent neuropsychological examinations. After controlling for fish consumption and many other factors, the scientists found an association between several A.D.H.D.-related behaviors and levels of mercury above one microgram per gram in the maternal hair samples. At the same time, they found that after adjusting for mercury levels, mothers who ate more than two servings of fish per week — more than the 12 ounces that government guidelines suggest — were less likely to have children with A.D.H.D.-related behaviors. “All fish has some mercury in it, but there are very different levels,” said the lead author, Sharon K. Sagiv, an assistant professor at Boston University. The findings may seem contradictory, she added, but “they highlight an important public health issue: Eating fish is good for you, but eating fish that is high in mercury is not.” Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 17375 - Posted: 10.16.2012

By Kate Kelland and Reuters, Children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder who take stimulants such as Ritalin tend to feel that the drugs help them control their behavior and do not turn them into “robots,” as many skeptics assume, a study reported on Monday. The research, which for the first time asked children taking ADHD drugs what they felt about their treatment and its effects, found that many said medication helped them manage their impulsivity and make better decisions. “With medication, it’s not that you’re a different person. You’re still the same person, but you just act a little better,” said Angie, an 11-year-old American who took part in the study and was quoted in a report about its findings. The results are likely to further fuel the debate about whether children with ADHD, some as young as 4 years old, should be given stimulants. ADHD is one of the most common childhood disorders in the United States, where parents report that 9.5 percent of children ages 4 and older have received such a diagnosis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Britain, where the authors of the study are based, experts estimate that between 5 and 10 percent of children and adolescents have ADHD. Symptoms of the disorder include difficulty staying focused, hyperactivity and problems with controlling disruptive or aggressive behavior. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 17374 - Posted: 10.16.2012

By Jason G. Goldman Television has a bad side. According to a report from the University of Michigan, the average American child has seen sixteen thousand murders on TV by age 18. Indeed, programs explicitly designed for kids often contain more violence than adult programming, and that violence is often paired with humor. Every single animated feature film produced by US production houses between 1937 and 1999 contained violence, and the amount of violence increased throughout that time period. Researchers from the University of Michigan found that just being awake and in the room with a TV on more than two hours a day – even if the kids aren’t explicitly paying attention to the TV – was a risk factor for being overweight at ages three and four-and-a-half. This may be related to the fact that two thirds of the twenty thousand television commercials the average child sees each year are for food. The American Academy of Pediatrics, in their wisdom, recommend that children under age two have zero hours of screen time. (Meanwhile, a bevy of DVDs are marketed to parents of children age zero to 2, promising to “teach your child about language and logic, patterns and sequencing, analyzing details and more.”) Despite the warning, however, many parents of infants age 0 to 2 do allow their children some screen time. In 2007, Frederick J. Zimmerman of the University of Washington (now at UCLA) wondered what the effects of TV watching were on those infants. He collected data from 1008 parents about the infants’ TV habits, as well as the amount of time they spent doing things like reading (with parents), playing, and so on. He also administered, for each child, a survey called the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI). The CDI is a standard tool used by developmental psychologists to assess language development in infants and children. He and his team then looked to see if there were statistical relationships between time spent watching TV (and the other activities) and language abilities, as measured by the CDI. Here’s the catch: they only included infants whose TV watching consisted entirely of infant-directed programming. That is, TV programs especially designed for infants age 0 to 2. If the infants were shown other sorts of TV programs, they were not included in the study. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17373 - Posted: 10.16.2012

By HENRY FOUNTAIN SAINT-LOUIS, France — Denis Spitzer wants to beat dogs at their own game. At a binational armaments and security research center here in eastern France, Dr. Spitzer and his colleagues are working on a sensor to detect vapors of TNT and other explosives in very faint amounts, as might emanate from a bomb being smuggled through airport security. Using microscopic slivers of silicon covered with forests of even smaller tubes of titanium oxide, they aim to create a device that could supplement, perhaps even supplant, the best mobile bomb detector in the business: the sniffer dog. But emulating the nose and brain of a trained dog is a formidable task. A bomb-sniffing device must be extremely sensitive, able to develop a signal from a relative handful of molecules. And it must be highly selective, able to distinguish an explosive from the “noise” of other compounds. While researchers like Dr. Spitzer are making progress — and there are some vapor detectors on the market — when it comes to sensitivity and selectivity, dogs still reign supreme. “Dogs are awesome,” said Aimee Rose, a product sales director at the sensor manufacturer Flir Systems, which markets a line of explosives detectors called Fido. “They have by far the most developed ability to detect concealed threats,” she said. But dogs get distracted, cannot work around the clock and require expensive training and handling, Dr. Rose said, so there is a need for instruments. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Robotics
Link ID: 17372 - Posted: 10.16.2012

by Michael Marshall There's a downside to everything. When humans evolved bigger brains, we became the smartest animal alive and were able to colonise the entire planet. But for our minds to expand, a new theory goes, our cells had to become less willing to commit suicide – and that may have made us more prone to cancer. When cells become damaged or just aren't needed, they self-destruct in a process called apoptosis. In developing organisms, apoptosis is just as important as cell growth for generating organs and appendages – it helps "prune" structures to their final form. By getting rid of malfunctioning cells, apoptosis also prevents cells from growing into tumours. "Reduced apoptotic function is well known to be associated with cancer onset," says John McDonald of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. McDonald compared skin cells from humans, chimpanzees and macaques and found that, compared to cells from other primates, our cells are reluctant to undergo apoptosis. When exposed to apoptosis-triggering chemicals, human cells responded significantly less than the chimp and macaque cells. Fewer human cells died, and they did not change shape in the ways cells do when preparing to die. In 2009, McDonald found that genes promoting apoptosis are down-regulated – essentially suppressed – in humans, and those turning it off are up-regulated (Medical Hypotheses, doi.org/bgkshp). Genes involved in apoptosis are also known to have changed rapidly during human evolution. The new study adds to the evidence that apoptosis is down-regulated in human cells. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Apoptosis; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17371 - Posted: 10.16.2012

by Jessica Hamzelou Never underestimate the value of a good night's sleep. Not only does a lack of shut-eye leave you irritable, it has been linked to diabetes and weight gain, though no one understood why. To investigate, Matthew Brady at the University of Chicago and his colleagues tested fat cells taken from the bellies of seven adults after four nights of sleeping up to 8 and a half hours, and then again after four nights on a measly 4 and a half hours. The team found that after sleep deprivation fat cells from the same person were on average 30 per cent less responsive to insulin – a hormone that makes muscle, liver and fat cells take up glucose after a meal. High blood glucose levels are linked to diabetes. Fat cells also normally release the appetite-regulating hormone leptin. Brady suggests that if sleep-deprived cells are generally malfunctioning, this mechanism may also be disrupted, affecting weight gain. "We were surprised at how robust the response was," says Brady. "Four nights of sleep curtailment represents a real-world situation, such as sitting for final exams or having a newborn in the house." Journal reference: Annals of Internal Medicine, DOI: 10.7326/0003-4819-157-8-201210160-00005 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity; Sleep
Link ID: 17370 - Posted: 10.16.2012

By Megan Gannon Something "uncanny" seems familiar yet alien at the same time, often stirring a feeling of fear or revulsion. For example, we tend to feel creeped out around lifelike robots and animatronics that fall in the "uncanny valley," the divide between the fully human and the not-exactly-human. New research suggests this type of reaction might start in infancy. Scientists in Japan studied how 57 babies reacted to pictures of faces. The infants were shown real photographs — either of the child's mother or a complete stranger — and natural-looking morphed images that combined either the mother's face and a stranger's face or two strangers' faces. In previous studies, researchers showed that infants tend to stare at pictures of both mothers and strangers for about the same amount of time, but measures of their neural responses suggest they process the two faces differently. "Infants like both familiarity and novelty in objects," Yoshi-Taka Matsuda of Tokyo's Riken Brain Science Institute said in a statement. "We wondered how their preference might change when they encountered objects that are intermediate between familiarity and novelty." Using an eye-tracking system, the researchers found the infants looked at the photos of their mothers longer than the "half-mother" hybrid faces. This effect strengthened with the infant's age, the team said. There was no significant difference in the infants' preference between the real and morphed photos of strangers. © 2012 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Emotions; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17369 - Posted: 10.15.2012

By LAURA GEGGEL For years, young people — often girls and young women — have frequented Web sites promoting anorexia and bulimia as a source of inspiration and tips on staying thin, even as online companies have worked to ban such content. Now, groups and Web sites focused on recovery from eating disorders are fighting back. “We need to be looking at these communities and see what we can learn from them, and what we can provide as a positive alternative,” said Claire Mysko, manager of Proud2Bme.org, a Web site and online community focused on healthy recovery that is financed by the nonprofit National Eating Disorders Association. “That’s what we’re trying to do here.” This Saturday, the group is taking its message to the University of South Florida in Tampa for its free annual Proud2Bme Summit. Attendees will be encouraged to engage in activities like taking a stand on Twitter against “body snarking,” a bullying tactic that draws attention to a person’s body or weight gain, and hear from speakers including Julia Bluhm, a 14-year-old who collected more than 86,000 signatures to petition Seventeen magazine to print one unaltered photo spread a month. “Our goal here is to make it a space where people can connect,” Ms. Mysko said. The site began in 2011 after the success of its Dutch counterpart, Proud2Bme.nl, whose co-founder Scarlet Hemkes struggled with anorexia and bulimia as a teenager and young adult and was horrified to find countless sites where girls competed to lose weight or shared tips on how to lie to parents about weight loss. Inspired by France’s move in 2008 to ban such sites — commonly called pro-ana (for pro-anorexia) sites — Ms. Hemkes collected 10,000 signatures with the hopes of inspiring similar Dutch legislation. When that didn’t work, she created a community on Hyves, a Facebook-like social network for girls with eating disorders, before founding Proud2Bme with a psychologist, Eric van Furth, in 2009. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 17368 - Posted: 10.13.2012