One in five U.S. adults shows signs of chronic sleep deprivation, and a shortage of sleep has been linked to health problems as different as diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. Recent studies have found some interesting connections between illness and what is happening in our brains as we snooze. One in five U.S. adults shows signs of chronic sleep deprivation © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 17575 - Posted: 12.04.2012

By BENEDICT CAREY Subtle breathing problems during sleep may play a larger role in causing insomnia than the usual suspects, like stress and the need for a bathroom, a small study of poor sleepers suggests. The report, published in the current issue of the journal Sleep, found that chronic insomniacs woke an average of about 30 times a night, and that a brief respiratory problem — a drop in the volume of oxygen inhaled, due to a narrowed airway, for instance — preceded about 90 percent of those interruptions. None of the people had any idea they had breathing problems during sleep. The study is hardly conclusive, experts said, because it included only 20 people and had no control group of normal sleepers for comparison. But these experts said that it was worth following up, because it challenged the predominant theory of insomnia as a problem of “hyper-arousal,” in which the body idles on high psychologically and physiologically. Earlier studies have linked measures of hyper-arousal to delays in falling asleep and problems nodding off after interruptions. But the theory does not satisfactorily explain what prompts awakenings in the first place. The new study compared chronic insomniacs’ opinions about why they awoke at night with data from a sleep test monitoring breathing and brain waves — and does provide a possible explanation. “It is a striking finding that by no means can be discounted,” said Dr. Michael J. Sateia, a professor of psychiatry and sleep medicine at Dartmouth College’s school of medicine, who was not involved in the research. Still, he added, “we know arousal can in and of itself promote instability of the upper airway,” and it is not always clear which comes first. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 17574 - Posted: 12.04.2012

By David Brown, We all know that when it comes to enjoying food, taste and smell go hand in hand. But how and where they hold hands in the neural circuits of the brain has been something of a mystery. Neuroscientists have known for a while that odor receptors in the nose send signals to the the brain’s taste center, also known as the gustatory cortex. But does the converse happen? Do taste receptors in the tongue talk to the smell center, the olfactory cortex? New research suggests the answer is yes. The smell center gets and uses information from the tongue even if an animal is not consciously sniffing — or even inhaling. “We know there is a sense of smell in the taste system. What’s new is that we now know that smell, like taste, can’t really work on its own, either,” said Donald B. Katz, a neuroscientist at Brandeis University who co-authored the study. “What this means is that the different senses are really interacting with each other at a much earlier level than previously thought,” said Joost X. Maier, the postdoctoral researcher at Brandeis who did the experiments reported in the current issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. One can construct reasons why this might be the best way to design the brain. But the brain arose by chance, interacting with the world and sculpted by natural selection. For virtually all forms of life, taste and smell were experienced together in the act of finding and consuming food. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 17573 - Posted: 12.04.2012

A fondness for the burn of spicy food has less to do with tolerance and far more to do with personality, according to a new study. Researchers from Pennsylvania State University have found a love of chili is associated with sensation seeking and reward, but found no evidence that chili lovers get desensitized to chili burn over time. "Rather than merely showing reduced response to the irritating qualities of capsaicin (the compound that gives chili its burn) as might be expected—these findings support the hypothesis that personality differences may drive differences in spicy food liking and intake," the authors wrote in the journal Food Quality and Preference. "We always assumed that liking drives intake—we eat what we like and we like what we eat. But no one had actually directly bothered to connect these personality traits of sensation seeking with intake of chilli peppers," says lead author and self-confessed chili lover Professor John Hayes. The discovery of a relationship between fondness for chilli and sensitivity to reward was also new, says Hayes who is an assistant professor of food science at Pennsylvania State University. Nearly one hundred volunteers were given liquid samples of capsaicin and asked to swill it in their mouth for three seconds before spitting out. They were then asked to rate the burning sensation and, in a separate questionnaire, rate their liking of various foods. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 17572 - Posted: 12.04.2012

Scientists believe some people have a gene that hard-wires them for binge drinking by boosting levels of a happy brain chemical triggered by alcohol. The gene - RASGRF-2 - is one of many already suggested to be linked with problem drinking, PNAS journal reports. The King's College London team found animals lacking the gene had far less desire for alcohol than those with it. Brain scans of 663 teenage boys showed those with a version of the gene had heightened dopamine responses in tests. During a task designed to make them anticipate a reward, these 14-year-old boys had more activity in a part of the brain called the ventral striatum which is known to be involved in dopamine release. When the researchers later contacted the same boys at the age of 16 and asked them about their drinking habits, they found the boys with the 'culprit' variation on the RASGRF-2 gene drank more frequently. The NHS definition of binge drinking is drinking heavily in a short space of time to get drunk or feel the effects of alcohol. Lead researcher Prof Gunter Schumann explained that while this is not proof that the gene causes binge drinking, and it is likely that many environment factors and other genes are also involved, the findings help shed light on why some people appear to be vulnerable to the allure of alcohol. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 17571 - Posted: 12.04.2012

By Kyle Hill You careen headlong into a blinding light. Around you, phantasms of people and pets lost. Clouds billow and sway, giving way to a gilded and golden entrance. You feel the air, thrusted downward by delicate wings. Everything is soothing, comforting, familiar. Heaven. It’s a paradise that some experience during an apparent demise. The surprising consistency of heavenly visions during a “near death experience” (or NDE) indicates for many that an afterlife awaits us. Religious believers interpret these similar yet varying accounts like blind men exploring an elephant—they each feel something different (the tail is a snake and the legs are tree trunks, for example); yet all touch the same underlying reality. Skeptics point to the curious tendency for Heaven to conform to human desires, or for Heaven’s fleeting visage to be so dependent on culture or time period. Heaven, in a theological view, has some kind of entrance. When you die, this entrance is supposed to appear—a Platform 9 ¾ for those running towards the grave. Of course, the purported way to see Heaven without having to take the final run at the platform wall is the NDE. Thrust back into popular consciousness by a surgeon claiming that “Heaven is Real,” the NDE has come under both theological and scientific scrutiny for its supposed ability to preview the great gig in the sky. But getting to see Heaven is hell—you have to die. Or do you? © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 17570 - Posted: 12.04.2012

by Greg Miller On Saturday, the board of trustees of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) voted to approve the final text of the DSM-5, the next revision to the leading manual for diagnosing mental illness. The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which originated in 1952, will be released next May at the APA's annual meeting in San Francisco. The revision process leading to DSM-5 began in 1999, and APA says it consulted more than 1500 experts in 39 countries in updating the criteria for diagnosing hundreds of psychiatric conditions. It has been a bumpy ride. Controversy has dogged the revision process for years. Even before the first draft of proposed changes was released in 2010, critics alleged that too much of the deliberation was conducted in secret and that too many of those involved had ties to drug companies that stood to benefit from changes to diagnostic criteria—APA has repeatedly rejected these charges. And many of the diagnostic proposals have elicited a strong reaction. A proposal to combine several autism-related disorders into a single diagnosis raised concerns among some critics that it would radically alter who gets diagnosed with those disorders and angered advocates for Asperger syndrome, a milder form of autism that would be eliminated in the new scheme. A new childhood condition called disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, characterized by irritability and violent outbursts, was intended to stem the perceived overdiagnosis of childhood bipolar disorder, but critics have argued that the diagnosis lacks scientific validity. Yet another controversial proposal, to remove language that excludes people who've recently experienced the loss of a loved one from being diagnosed with major depression, elicited complaints that it would lead to the medicalization of normal grief. These changes will stand, APA said in a press release. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Autism; Depression
Link ID: 17569 - Posted: 12.04.2012

By Scicurious This past weekend, I read an interesting piece in the New Yorker. It’s another one of the current rash of pieces that are warning us (rightly!) to beware of neuro-hype. It references another recent piece in the New York Times, which referenced those fighting back against things like “How Creativity Works” (correct answer: it’s very complicated and we don’t know), and the ever-present fMRI studies hyped in the news (I’ve been guilty of a few of those, though I try very hard to be skeptical). Both pieces referenced the excellent Neuroskeptic and Neurocritic (though sadly, the NYT didn’t give them the links they definitely deserve). And both pieces warned that neuroscience is more, and better than, the gee-whiz of “This is your brain on poker“. I particularly liked the New Yorker piece, for making clear the incredible complexity of the human brain. The brain, though, rarely works that way. Most of the interesting things that the brain does involve many different pieces of tissue working together. Saying that emotion is in the amygdala, or that decision-making is the prefrontal cortex, is at best a shorthand, and a misleading one at that. Different emotions, for example, rely on different combinations of neural substrates. The act of comprehending a sentence likely involves Broca’s area (the language-related spot on the left side of the brain that they may have told you about in college), but it also draws on the parts of the brain in the temporal lobe that analyze acoustic signals, and part of sensorimotor cortex and the basal ganglia become active as well. (In congenitally blind people, some of the visual cortex also plays a role.) It’s not one spot, it’s many, some of which may be less active but still vital, and what really matters is how vast networks of neural tissue work together. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 17568 - Posted: 12.04.2012

Posted by Gary Marcus In the early nineteen-nineties, David Poeppel, then a graduate student at M.I.T. (and a classmate of mine)—discovered an astonishing thing. He was studying the neurophysiological basis of speech perception, and a new technique had just come into vogue, called positron emission tomography (PET). About half a dozen PET studies of speech perception had been published, all in top journals, and David tried to synthesize them, essentially by comparing which parts of the brain were said to be active during the processing of speech in each of the studies. What he found, shockingly, was that there was virtually no agreement. Every new study had published with great fanfare, but collectively they were so inconsistent they seemed to add up to nothing. It was like six different witnesses describing a crime in six different ways. This was terrible news for neuroscience—if six studies led to six different answers, why should anybody believe anything that neuroscientists had to say? Much hand-wringing followed. Was it because PET, which involves injecting a radioactive tracer into the brain, was unreliable? Were the studies themselves somehow sloppy? Nobody seemed to know. And then, surprisingly, the field prospered. Brain imaging became more, not less, popular. The technique of PET was replaced with the more flexible technique of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which allowed scientists to study people’s brains without the use of the risky radioactive tracers, and to conduct longer studies that collected more data and yielded more reliable results. Experimental methods gradually become more careful. As fMRI machines become more widely available, and methods became more standardized and refined, researchers finally started to find a degree of consensus between labs. © 2012 Condé Nast.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 17567 - Posted: 12.04.2012

Roger Dobson Love, according to romantics, can have a dramatic effect on the senses: striking lovers blind, deaf or rendering them tongue-tied. But the simple answer to the question of whether any relationship is "the one" seems to be that your ideal man or woman gets up your nose. New research suggests a sense of smell is vital for a good long-term relationship. In the new study, reported in the journal Biological Psychology, researchers looked for the first time at the effect of being born without a sense on smell on men and women's relationships. The research involved analysing data on men and women aged 18 to 46 with no sense of smell and comparing it with information gleaned from a healthy control group. The results showed that men and women who were unable to smell had higher levels of social insecurity, although this manifested itself in different ways. In men, but not in women, it led to fewer relationships. The men with a faulty sense of smell averaged two partners compared with 10 for healthy men. One theory is that the lack of a sense of smell may make men less adventurous. They may have more problems assessing and communicating with other people. They may also be concerned about how they are perceived by others, and worry about their own body odour. © independent.co.uk

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17566 - Posted: 12.03.2012

By KEN BELSON The growing evidence of a link between head trauma and long-term, degenerative brain disease was amplified in an extensive study of athletes, military veterans and others who absorbed repeated hits to the head, according to new findings published in the scientific journal Brain. The study, which included brain samples taken posthumously from 85 people who had histories of repeated mild traumatic brain injury, added to the mounting body of research revealing the possible consequences of routine hits to the head in sports like football and hockey. The possibility that such mild head trauma could result in long-term cognitive impairment has come to vex sports officials, team doctors, athletes and parents in recent years. Of the group of 85 people, 80 percent (68 men) — nearly all of whom played sports — showed evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., a degenerative and incurable disease whose symptoms can include memory loss, depression and dementia. Among the group found to have C.T.E., 50 were football players, including 33 who played in the N.F.L. Among them were stars like Dave Duerson, Cookie Gilchrist and John Mackey. Many of the players were linemen and running backs, positions that tend to have more contact with opponents. Six high school football players, nine college football players, seven pro boxers and four N.H.L. players, including Derek Boogaard, the former hockey enforcer who died from an accidental overdose of alcohol and painkillers, also showed signs of C.T.E. The study also included 21 veterans, most of whom were also athletes, who showed signs of C.T.E. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 17565 - Posted: 12.03.2012

By Brian Mossop Ten years into serving a life sentence for the rape of Jennifer Thompson, Ronald Cotton stepped out of prison a free man. It took that long for DNA evidence to exonerate Cotton, refuting a weak case built mostly on eyewitness accounts. According to Simon's new book In Doubt, despite advances in DNA forensic technologies, eyewitness testimony remains the most common way to nab criminals in the Anglo-American justice system. The problem, however, is that our mind often subconsciously twists the evidence to coincide with our biases, and we end up incarcerating innocent people. Simon, a professor of law and psychology at the University of Southern California, says that the false conviction rate, based on exoneration data from capital murder cases, is estimated to be near 5 percent, although that figure represents only a fraction of those wrongly imprisoned. Eyewitness testimony boils down to how well the witness remembers the event. Studies have shown that a victim of a crime may remember a specific piece of information from the horrid event, such as the attacker's jacket or a strange smell, but fail to recall other details. Investigators are left with a weak profile of the perpetrator. In Cotton's case, the victim initially chose two men from the lineup, and only after repeated questioning from investigators could Thompson say Cotton was her assailant. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17564 - Posted: 12.03.2012

By Michelle Warwicker BBC Nature The youngest members of zebra finch broods "explore more" than older siblings in adult life, say scientists. Researchers investigated how the birds' behaviour was affected by the way their parents cared for them as hatchlings. The team studied broods where females lay and incubate a clutch of eggs over a period of days, resulting in a size hierarchy within the clutch. They found the youngest birds were more likely to explore their environment as adults in search of food. The study, published in Animal Behaviour, tested over 100 captive zebra finches' exploratory behaviour to see whether hatching order, and consequently parental investment, affected their behaviour in adulthood. Late hatched birds are smaller than their older siblings, and it is the larger hatchlings that "get the lion's share" when parents bring in food "because they can reach up higher and beg better," explained research team member Dr Ian Hartley from Lancaster University. Hatching eggs over a span of time, rather than all at once, is known as "hatching asynchrony" and occurs when eggs are incubated as soon as they are laid. For zebra finch, this means that birds born up to four days apart can share the same nest and must compete for food. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Emotions
Link ID: 17563 - Posted: 12.03.2012

Barry Gordon, professor of neurology and cognitive science at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, replies: Forgive your mind this minor annoyance because it has worked to save your life—or more accurately, the lives of your ancestors. Most likely you have not needed to worry whether the rustling in the underbrush is a rabbit or a leopard, or had to identify the best escape route on a walk by the lake, or to wonder whether the funny pattern in the grass is a snake or dead branch. Yet these were life-or-death decisions to our ancestors. Optimal moment-to-moment readiness requires a brain that is working constantly, an effort that takes a great deal of energy. (To put this in context, the modern human brain is only 2 percent of our body weight, but it uses 20 percent of our resting energy.) Such an energy-hungry brain, one that is constantly seeking clues, connections and mechanisms, is only possible with a mammalian metabolism tuned to a constant high rate. Constant thinking is what propelled us from being a favorite food on the savanna—and a species that nearly went extinct—to becoming the most accomplished life-form on this planet. Even in the modern world, our mind always churns to find hazards and opportunities in the data we derive from our surroundings, somewhat like a search engine server. Our brain goes one step further, however, by also thinking proactively, a task that takes even more mental processing. So even though most of us no longer worry about leopards in the grass, we do encounter new dangers and opportunities: employment, interest rates, “70 percent off” sales and swindlers offering $20 million for just a small investment on our part. Our primate heritage brought us another benefit: the ability to navigate a social system. As social animals, we must keep track of who's on top and who's not and who might help us and who might hurt us. To learn and understand this information, our mind is constantly calculating “what if?” scenarios. What do I have to do to advance in the workplace or social or financial hierarchy? What is the danger here? The opportunity? © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 17562 - Posted: 12.03.2012

By Lindsey Tanner, The Associated Press CHICAGO -- The now familiar term "Asperger's disorder" is being dropped. And abnormally bad and frequent temper tantrums will be given a scientific-sounding diagnosis called DMDD. But "dyslexia" and other learning disorders remain. The revisions come in the first major rewrite in nearly 20 years of the diagnostic guide used by the nation's psychiatrists. Changes were approved Saturday. Full details of all the revisions will come next May when the American Psychiatric Association's new diagnostic manual is published, but the impact will be huge, affecting millions of children and adults worldwide. The manual also is important for the insurance industry in deciding what treatment to pay for, and it helps schools decide how to allot special education. This diagnostic guide "defines what constellations of symptoms" doctors recognize as mental disorders, said Dr. Mark Olfson, a Columbia University psychiatry professor. More important, he said, it "shapes who will receive what treatment. Even seemingly subtle changes to the criteria can have substantial effects on patterns of care." Olfson was not involved in the revision process. The changes were approved Saturday in suburban Washington, D.C., by the psychiatric association's board of trustees. The aim is not to expand the number of people diagnosed with mental illness, but to ensure that affected children and adults are more accurately diagnosed so they can get the most appropriate treatment, said Dr. David Kupfer. He chaired the task force in charge of revising the manual and is a psychiatry professor at the University of Pittsburgh. © 2012 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 17561 - Posted: 12.03.2012

By Kate Shaw Early one morning I caught sight of Morpheus, silhouetted against a pink African dawn. Her long, sloping neck was stretched out as she loped away from me, disappearing over a hill. I followed her to a nearby plain and was met with the unmistakable sound of a group of hyenas squabbling over a carcass. Morpheus entered the fray, first lunging at a smaller male on her right. A moment later, she looked up briefly, her nose and mouth covered in blood, then turned and snapped at a hyena feeding nearby. I’m intimately acquainted with Morpheus and these other hyenas because they have been studied for more than twenty years by various members of the lab where I did my Ph.D. research; I’ve staked these hyenas out at dens for hours on end and followed them as they raced across open plains. From watching these animals, we’ve learned about hyenas’ social system, their physiology, and the conservation challenges they face. But to me, it’s the aggression that is the most fascinating thing about hyenas. It’s rule-based and constrained by specific social norms, but at the same time, it’s incredibly primal and ruthless. Studying aggression has helped us understand what makes hyenas tick, offering us a glimpse into the evolutionary pressures that have made them one of the most unusual and misunderstood species in the animal kingdom. For more than 1000 years, people believed that hyenas were hermaphrodites, since female hyenas have long, fully-erectile pseudopenises that mimic male genitalia. Seeing a hyena play the role of mom while sporting what looks like a penis would bewilder even an astute naturalist. Not only do female hyenas look like males, they are also the more aggressive and socially dominant sex, exhibiting aggression more than three times more often than male hyenas do. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Aggression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 17560 - Posted: 12.01.2012

Children who are obese may be more vulnerable to food advertising, a brain scanning study suggests. Food and beverage companies market to children to establish brand recognition, brand preference and loyalty. Previous studies found preschoolers said foods tasted better wrapped in branded packaging than plain packaging and kids were more likely to try to influence their parents' purchases when exposed to ads. Researchers in the U.S. suspected that children who are obese would show greater activation to food logos in the "drive" regions of the brain compared with healthy weight children. Amanda Bruce of the psychology department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and her colleagues looked at 10 healthy children and 10 obese children aged 10 to 14 using questionnaires measuring self-control and functional magnetic resonance imaging of brain activity. Other corporate logos and blurred images were also tested. Obese children showed more activation in some reward regions of the brain than the healthy weight children when shown food logos. But that wasn't the case for the control regions of the brain. "When shown food logos, obese children showed significantly less brain activation than the healthy weight children in regions association with cognitive control," the study's authors concluded in Friday's issue of The Journal of Pediatrics. "This provides initial neuroimaging evidence that obese children may be more vulnerable to the effects of food advertising." © CBC 2012

Keyword: Obesity; Attention
Link ID: 17559 - Posted: 12.01.2012

by Emily Underwood On the reality television show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, the lucky recipient gets a first look at his newly renovated home. For a split second, his face contorts with—shock? Joy? During intense emotional experiences, there's a fleeting moment when expressions of pleasure and pain are hard to distinguish. In fact, others read intense emotion more effectively by looking at a person's body language than by watching his facial expressions, a new study suggests. Most studies of facial cues rely on a set of stylized, recognizable expressions—perhaps made by actors in photographs. The actors make expressions meant to be obvious enough to translate across cultures: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. But these stylized images don't necessarily reflect the expressions that people make in the real world, says Hillel Aviezer, a neuropsychologist at who is now at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and lead author of the new study, published online today in Science. Moreover, when emotions get particularly extreme, people undergoing fleeting peaks of intense pain, joy, grief, or anger look surprisingly similar, Aviezer says. From the face, at least, "when you compare extreme pain to extreme pleasure, you really can't tell them apart," he says. And yet most people are rarely confused about whether someone is experiencing grief or joy. To figure out what tips us off, Aviezer and his colleagues showed photos of professional tennis players to 45 Princeton University students, randomly divided into three groups of 15. Each tennis player had just won or lost an important match, and the participants rated the players' contorted facial expressions from negative to positive on a scale from 1 to 9, with 5 marking the neutral midway point. One group of participants looked at head-to-toe photos of the players, the second group looked at only the players' bodies, and the third group looked at only their heads. Only the final group had trouble making the correct identification, suggesting that facial expressions alone didn't tell them whether the players were joyous or in despair. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 17558 - Posted: 12.01.2012

By Laura Sanders A new computer simulation of the brain can count, remember and gamble. And the system, called Spaun, performs these tasks in a way that’s eerily similar to how people do. Short for Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network, Spaun is a crude approximation of the human brain. But scientists hope that the program and efforts like it could be a proving ground to test ideas about the brain. Several groups of scientists have been racing to construct a realistic model of the human brain, or at least parts of it. What distinguishes Spaun from other attempts is that the model actually does something, says computational neuroscientist Christian Machens of the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal. At the end of an intense computational session, Spaun spits out instructions for a behavior, such as how to reproduce a number it’s been shown. “And of course, that’s why the brain is interesting,” Machens says. “That’s what makes it different from a plant.” Like a digital Frankenstein’s monster, Spaun was cobbled together from bits and pieces of knowledge gleaned from years of basic brain research. The behavior of 2.5 million nerve cells in parts of the brain important for vision, memory, reasoning and other tasks forms the basis of the new system, says Chris Eliasmith of the University of Waterloo in Canada, coauthor of the study, which appears in the Nov. 30 Science. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 17557 - Posted: 12.01.2012

By LISA SANDERS, M.D. On Thursday, we challenged Well readers to puzzle their way through the case of a 25-year-old elephant trainer who developed “the worst headache of his life.” The case was made more confusing by the fact that he had been head-butted by a zebra several years earlier. Turns out the zebra was a bit of a red herring – for the doctors at the time, and for many of you. The correct diagnosis is… Herpes zoster, commonly known as shingles The internist assigned to the case, Dr. Bilal Ahmed, was able to make the diagnosis because when he examined the patient the next day, he saw the characteristic zoster rash above the patient’s right eye that had developed overnight. Nearly 200 people wrote in with their thoughts on what Dr. Ahmed might have seen to reveal the diagnosis when he looked at the patient. The first person to guess the correct diagnosis was Lotty Fulkerson of Massachusetts, a licensed practical nurse who has seen a lot of zoster. It was the combination of the patient’s terrible pain and the fact that the doctor saw something that told him the diagnosis that made her think it was probably shingles. Only three other readers guessed correctly. Herpes zoster, also known as shingles, is caused by the re-emergence of the herpes virus that is the source of the childhood illness chickenpox. The term “shingles” comes from the Latin word “cingulum,” which means belt or girdle; the rash of herpes zoster often appears in a band or belt-like pattern. When the original chickenpox infection resolves, the virus doesn’t die but instead takes refuge in branches of the nerves just outside the spinal cord, where it will reside for decades. In up to a third of patients who have had chickenpox, it re-emerges, causing pain and a rash and sometimes more. Why these survivor viruses re-emerge is unclear, but it may be linked to a weakened immune system. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 17556 - Posted: 12.01.2012