By Charles Q. Choi People with schizophrenia often experience the unnerving feeling that outside forces are controlling them. Other times they feel an illusory sense of power over uncontrollable events. Now scientists find these symptoms may arise from disabilities in predicting or recognizing their own actions. The findings suggest new therapies for treating schizophrenia, which afflicts an estimated 1 percent of the world population. To see where this confusion might stem from, researchers tested two ways people are known to link actions and their outcomes. We either predict the effects of our movements or retrospectively deduce a causal connection. Healthy participants and schizophrenic patients were asked to look at a clock and occasionally push a button. Most of the time the button push was followed by a tone. The participants then told researchers what time they had pushed the button and when the tone had occurred. Healthy volunteers reported later times for each button push if it was followed by a tone. This result suggests that awareness of a link between the two events causes people to perceive less time between them. Participants also tended to estimate later button pushes even in the few cases when no tone was emitted, revealing that the subjects were predicting they would hear the sound, says psychiatrist and cognitive neuroscientist Martin Voss of Charité University Hospital and St. Hedwig Hospital in Berlin. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Attention
Link ID: 17481 - Posted: 11.13.2012

David Cyranoski In December 2010, Robin Ali became suddenly excited by the usually mundane task of reviewing a scientific paper. “I was running around my room, waving the manuscript,” he recalls. The paper described how a clump of embryonic stem cells had grown into a rounded goblet of retinal tissue. The structure, called an optic cup, forms the back of the eye in a growing embryo. But this one was in a dish, and videos accompanying the paper showed the structure slowly sprouting and blossoming. For Ali, an ophthalmologist at University College London who has devoted two decades to repairing vision, the implications were immediate. “It was clear to me it was a landmark paper,” he says. “He has transformed the field.” 'He' is Yoshiki Sasai, a stem-cell biologist at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan. Sasai has impressed many researchers with his green-fingered talent for coaxing neural stem cells to grow into elaborate structures. As well as the optic cup1, he has cultivated the delicate tissue layers of the cerebral cortex2 and a rudimentary, hormone-making pituitary gland3. He is now well on the way to growing a cerebellum4 — the brain structure that coordinates movement and balance. “These papers make for the most addictive series of stem-cell papers in recent years,” says Luc Leyns, a stem-cell scientist at the Free University of Brussels. Sasai's work is more than tissue engineering: it tackles questions that have puzzled developmental biologists for decades. How do the proliferating stem cells of an embryo organize themselves seamlessly into the complex structures of the body and brain? And is tissue formation driven by a genetic program intrinsic to cells, or shaped by external cues from neighbouring tissues? © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Stem Cells
Link ID: 17480 - Posted: 11.13.2012

By Wynne Parry and LiveScience The realm of sleep and dreams has long been associated with strangeness: omens or symbols, unconscious impulses and fears. But this sometimes disturbing world of inner turmoil, fears and desires is grounded in our day-to-day experience, sleep researchers say. "The structure and content of thinking looks very much like the structure and content of dreaming. They may be the product of the same machine," said Matthew Wilson, a neuroscientist at MIT and a panelist at the New York Academy of Sciences discussion "The Strange Science of Sleep and Dreams" on Friday (Nov. 9). His work and others' explores the crucial link between dreams and learning and memory. Dreams allow the brain to work through its conscious experiences. During them, the brain appears to apply the same neurological machinery used during the day to examine the past, the future and other aspects of a person's (or animal's) inner world at night. Memory is the manifestation of this inner world, Wilson said. "What we remember is the result of dreams rather than the other way around," he said. His work, and that of fellow panelist Erin Wamsley, a sleep scientist at Beth Israel Medical Center/Harvard Medical School, focuses on the relationship between memory and dreams in non-REM sleep. Vivid dreams often occur during REM sleep, named for the rapid eye movement associated with it, however, non-REM sleep also brings dreams but they are more fragmentary. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 17479 - Posted: 11.13.2012

By Maggie Fox, NBC News Doctors trying to find some of the causes of autism put another piece into the puzzle on Monday: They found women who had flu while they were pregnant were twice as likely to have a child later diagnosed with autism. Those who had a fever lasting a week or longer -- perhaps caused by flu or maybe by something else -- were three times as likely to have an autistic child. The study of 96,000 children in Denmark raises as many questions as it answers. But it fits in with a growing body of evidence that suggests that, in at least some cases, something is going on with a mother’s immune system during pregnancy that affects the developing child’s brain. Autism seems to be a growing problem in the United States. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, autism spectrum disorder affects one in 88 children, including about one in 54 boys. The autism spectrum refers to a broad range of symptoms, from the relatively mild social awkwardness of Asperger’s syndrome to profound mental retardation, debilitating repetitive behaviors and an inability to communicate. Scientists agree that it’s not just a matter of better diagnosis; the numbers seem to be growing because more children are indeed developing autism. But no one is sure why. Genetics are a large factor -- if one twin has autism the other twin is very likely to -- but genes don’t explain it all. © 2012 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Autism; Epigenetics
Link ID: 17478 - Posted: 11.12.2012

By JIM DENT Three days before his death last week at 88, Darrell Royal told his wife, Edith: “We need to go back to Hollis” — in Oklahoma. “Uncle Otis died.” “Oh, Darrell,” she said, “Uncle Otis didn’t die.” Royal, a former University of Texas football coach, chuckled and said, “Well, Uncle Otis will be glad to hear that.” The Royal humor never faded, even as he sank deeper into Alzheimer’s disease. The last three years, I came to understand this as well as anyone. We had known each other for more than 40 years. In the 1970s, Royal was a virile, driven, demanding man with a chip on his shoulder bigger than Bevo, the Longhorns mascot. He rarely raised his voice to players. “But we were scared to death of him,” the former quarterback Bill Bradley said. Royal won 3 national championships and 167 games before retiring at 52. He was a giant in college football, having stood shoulder to shoulder with the Alabama coach Bear Bryant. Royal’s Longhorns defeated one of Bryant’s greatest teams, with Joe Namath at quarterback, in the 1965 Orange Bowl. Royal went 3-0-1 in games against Bryant. Royal and I were reunited in the spring of 2010. I barely recognized him. The swagger was gone. His mind had faded. Often he stared aimlessly across the room. I scheduled an interview with him for my book “Courage Beyond the Game: The Freddie Steinmark Story.” Still, I worried that his withering mind could no longer conjure up images of Steinmark, the undersize safety who started 21 straight winning games for the Longhorns in the late 1960s. Steinmark later developed bone cancer that robbed him of his left leg. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 17477 - Posted: 11.12.2012

By Laura Sanders The effects of a baby’s rough start can linger. An early stressful environment during a baby girl’s first year was associated with altered brain behavior and signs of anxiety in her late teens, scientists report online November 11 in Nature Neuroscience. Although the results are preliminary, they may help reveal how negative experiences early on can sculpt the brain. Studies in animals have pointed out how tough times in childhood can influence the brain and the animals’ behavior later in life. But it’s been hard to figure out how that process works in people, says Lawrence Price, a psychiatrist and clinical neuroscientist at Brown University in Providence, R.I. “One of the real advances of this paper is that it helps move us along on that pathway,” he says. The study, led by Cory Burghy of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, drew from the Wisconsin Study of Family and Work, which in 1990 recruited pregnant women in southern Wisconsin at prenatal visits. Three times during the first year of their babies’ lives, the mothers reported whether they were experiencing stressful situations such as depression, marital conflict, money woes or parenting stress. Researchers assumed that women who reported higher stress levels created a more stressful situation for their baby. Four and a half years later, daughters whose moms reported higher levels of stress had more of the stress hormone cortisol in their blood. That observation suggests the girls had trouble shutting down a hyperactive stress response. The same effect wasn’t found in boys. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Stress; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17476 - Posted: 11.12.2012

By MICHAEL TRIMBLE IN 2008, at a zoo in Münster, Germany, a gorilla named Gana gave birth to a male infant, who died after three months. Photographs of Gana, looking stricken and inconsolable, were ubiquitous. “Heartbroken gorilla cradles her dead baby,” Britain’s Daily Mail declared. Crowds thronged the zoo to see the grieving mother. Sad as the scene was, the humans, not Gana, were the only ones crying. The notion that animals can weep — apologies to Dumbo, Bambi and Wilbur — has no scientific basis. Years of observations by the primatologists Dian Fossey, who observed gorillas, and Jane Goodall, who worked with chimpanzees, could not prove that animals cry tears from emotion. In his book “The Emotional Lives of Animals,” the only tears the biologist Marc Bekoff were certain of were his own. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy, the authors of “When Elephants Weep,” admit that “most elephant watchers have never seen them weep.” It’s true that many mammals shed tears, especially in response to pain. Tears protect the eye by keeping it moist, and they contain antimicrobial proteins. But crying as an embodiment of empathy is, I maintain, unique to humans and has played an essential role in human evolution and the development of human cultures. Within two days an infant can imitate sad and happy faces. If a newborn mammal does not cry out (typically, in the first few weeks of life, without tears) it is unlikely to get the attention it needs to survive. Around three to four months, the relationship between the human infant and its environment takes on a more organized communicative role, and tearful crying begins to serve interpersonal purposes: the search for comfort and pacification. As we get older, crying becomes a tool of our social repertory: grief and joy, shame and pride, fear and manipulation. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 17475 - Posted: 11.12.2012

By SETH S. HOROWITZ HERE’S a trick question. What do you hear right now? If your home is like mine, you hear the humming sound of a printer, the low throbbing of traffic from the nearby highway and the clatter of plastic followed by the muffled impact of paws landing on linoleum — meaning that the cat has once again tried to open the catnip container atop the fridge and succeeded only in knocking it to the kitchen floor. The slight trick in the question is that, by asking you what you were hearing, I prompted your brain to take control of the sensory experience — and made you listen rather than just hear. That, in effect, is what happens when an event jumps out of the background enough to be perceived consciously rather than just being part of your auditory surroundings. The difference between the sense of hearing and the skill of listening is attention. Hearing is a vastly underrated sense. We tend to think of the world as a place that we see, interacting with things and people based on how they look. Studies have shown that conscious thought takes place at about the same rate as visual recognition, requiring a significant fraction of a second per event. But hearing is a quantitatively faster sense. While it might take you a full second to notice something out of the corner of your eye, turn your head toward it, recognize it and respond to it, the same reaction to a new or sudden sound happens at least 10 times as fast. This is because hearing has evolved as our alarm system — it operates out of line of sight and works even while you are asleep. And because there is no place in the universe that is totally silent, your auditory system has evolved a complex and automatic “volume control,” fine-tuned by development and experience, to keep most sounds off your cognitive radar unless they might be of use as a signal that something dangerous or wonderful is somewhere within the kilometer or so that your ears can detect. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Hearing
Link ID: 17474 - Posted: 11.12.2012

By Lindsey Emery, Men’s Health When most people finish a hard workout, they want a reward — possibly a sandwich, or some pancakes, or maybe even a burger and fries. What they don’t want? To not eat anything. And yet, a few recent studies found that moderate intensity aerobic training could actually decrease your appetite or increase your feelings of fullness or satiety. Strange, right? Previous research has shown that people who exercise often reward themselves with food, increasing overall calorie consumption, and often sabotaging their weight loss goals. So, what gives? “Exercise can definitely suppress hunger,” says Barry Braun, director of the Energy Metabolism Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who has co-authored multiple studies on the subject. How, why, and for how long afterward is something researchers are still working out. They do know that workouts trigger changes in the hunger hormone ghrelin and the satiety hormones, PYY and GLP-1 — though research has yet to establish the exact relationship. A recent study published in the journal Metabolism found that perceived fullness — both while fasting and after eating — was higher among participants after 12 weeks of aerobic training, but not after resistance training for the same amount of time. And another study out of Brigham Young University revealed that women appeared to be less interested in food on mornings when they walked on a treadmill for 45 minutes than on days they didn’t. © 2012 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17473 - Posted: 11.10.2012

By Noah Hutton and Ferris Jabr "Nothing quite like it exists yet, but we have begun building it," Henry Markram wrote in the June 2012 issue of Scientific American. He was referring to a "fantastic new scientific instrument"—a biologically realistic and detailed model of a working human brain hosted on supercomputers. Markram, who directs the Brain Mind Institute at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, has been working on the Blue Brain Project, more recently known as the Human Brain Project, since 2005. "A digital brain will be a resource for the entire scientific community: researchers will reserve time on it, as they do on the biggest telescopes, to conduct their experiments," Markram wrote in SA. "They will use it to test theories of how the human brain works in health and in disease. They will recruit it to help them develop not only new diagnostic tests for autism or schizophrenia but also new therapies for depression and Alzheimer's disease. The wiring plan for tens of trillions of neural circuits will inspire the design of brainlike computers and intelligent robots. In short, it will transform neuroscience, medicine and information technology." Markram has claimed, at various times, that he can complete this ambitious project within 10 years. His critics argue that his ultimate goal is unachievable because the human brain is too complex to simultaneously simulate at every level, from the molecule to the cortex. Say one wanted to build an exact replica of a large and intricate circuit board. One would first need to map every wire linking every component and then re-create these links. In the same way, making a model of the human brain requires knowing the trillions of connections between its neurons. A map of all the connections between neurons in a brain is called a connectome, and no such map exists for the human brain. In fact, the only organism with a complete connectome is the tiny nematode C. elegans, which has 302 neurons total. The human brain has more than 80 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections between those cells. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17472 - Posted: 11.10.2012

by Will Ferguson For the first time, an electrical device has been powered by the ear alone. The team behind the technology used a natural electrochemical gradient in cells within the inner ear of a guinea pig to power a wireless transmitter for up to five hours. The technique could one day provide an autonomous power source for brain and cochlear implants, says Tina Stankovic, an auditory neuroscientist at Harvard University Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. Nerve cells use the movement of positively charged sodium ions and negatively charged potassium ions across a membrane to create an electrochemical gradient that drives neural signals. Some cells in the cochlear have the same kind of gradient, which is used to convert the mechanical force of the vibrating eardrum into electrical signals that the brain can understand. Tiny voltage A major challenge in tapping such electrical potential is that the voltage created is tiny – a fraction of that generated by a standard AA battery. "We have known about DC potential in the human ear for 60 years but no one has attempted to harness it," Stankovic says. Now, Stankovic and her colleagues have developed an electronic chip containing several tiny, low resistance electrodes that can harness a small amount of this electrical activity without damaging hearing. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hearing; Robotics
Link ID: 17471 - Posted: 11.10.2012

By Tia Ghose, LiveScience Humans can smell fear and disgust, and the emotions are contagious, according to a new study. The findings, published Nov. 5 in the journal Psychological Science, suggest that humans communicate via smell just like other animals. "These findings are contrary to the commonly accepted assumption that human communication runs exclusively via language or visual channels," write Gün Semin and colleagues from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Most animals communicate using smell, but because humans lack the same odor-sensing organs, scientists thought we had long ago lost our ability to smell fear or other emotions. To find out, the team collected sweat from under the armpits of 10 men while they watched either frightening scenes from the horror movie "The Shining" or repulsive clips of MTV's "Jackass." Next, the researchers asked 36 women to take a visual test while they unknowingly inhaled the scent of men's sweat. When women sniffed "fear sweat," they opened their eyes wide in a scared expression, while those smelling sweat from disgusted men scrunched their faces into a repulsed grimace. (The team chose men as the sweat donors and women as the receivers because past research suggests women are more sensitive to men's scent than vice versa.) © 2012 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Emotions
Link ID: 17470 - Posted: 11.08.2012

Seizures during childhood fever are usually benign, but when prolonged, they can foreshadow an increased risk of epilepsy later in life. Now a study funded by the National Institutes of Health suggests that brain imaging and recordings of brain activity could help identify the children at highest risk. The study reveals that within days of a prolonged fever-related seizure, some children have signs of acute brain injury, abnormal brain anatomy, altered brain activity, or a combination. "Our goal has been to develop biomarkers that will tell us whether or not a particular child is at risk for epilepsy. This could in turn help us develop strategies to prevent the disorder," said study investigator Shlomo Shinnar, M.D., Ph.D. Dr. Shinnar is a professor of neurology, pediatrics and epidemiology and the Hyman Climenko Professor of Neuroscience Research at Montefiore Medical Center, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York City. Seizures that occur during the course of a high fever, known as febrile seizures, affect 3 to 4 percent of all children. Most such children recover rapidly and do not suffer long-term health consequences. However, having one or more prolonged febrile seizures in childhood is known to increase the risk of subsequent epilepsy. Some experts estimate that the risk of later epilepsy is 30-40 percent following febrile status epilepticus (FSE), a seizure or series of seizures that can last from 30 minutes to several hours. "While the majority of children fully recover from febrile status epilepticus, some will go on to develop epilepsy. We have no way of knowing yet who they will be," Dr. Shinnar said.

Keyword: Epilepsy; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17469 - Posted: 11.08.2012

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS In recent years, some research has suggested that a high-fat diet may be bad for the brain, at least in lab animals. Can exercise protect against such damage? That question may have particular relevance now, with the butter-and cream-laden holidays fast approaching. And it has prompted several new and important studies. The most captivating of these, presented last month at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans, began with scientists at the University of Minnesota teaching a group of rats to scamper from one chamber to another when they heard a musical tone, an accepted measure of the animals’ ability to learn and remember. For the next four months, half of the rats ate normal chow. The others happily consumed a much greasier diet, consisting of at least 40 percent fat. Total calories were the same in both diets. After four months, the animals repeated the memory test. Those on a normal diet performed about the same as they had before; their cognitive ability was the same. The high-fat eaters, though, did much worse. Then, half of the animals in each group were given access to running wheels. Their diets didn’t change. So, some of the rats on the high-fat diet were now exercising. Some were not. Ditto for the animals eating the normal diet. For the next seven weeks, the memory test was repeated weekly in all of the groups. During that time, the performance of the rats eating a high-fat diet continued to decline so long as they didn’t exercise. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17468 - Posted: 11.08.2012

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