by Gisela Telis Stress really does mess with your mind. A new study has found that chronic stress can create many of the brain changes associated with mood disorders by blocking a gene called neuritin—and that boosting the gene's activity can protect the brain from those disorders. The results provide new insight into the mechanisms behind depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder, and could offer researchers a novel target for drugs to treat those conditions. Research has shown that mood disorders take a toll on patients' brains as well as on their lives. Postmortem studies and brain scans have revealed that the hippocampus (the brain's memory center) can shrink and atrophy in people with a history of depression and other mood disorders. People who live with mood disorders are also known to have low levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a growth factor that keeps neurons healthy. They also have low activity in the neuritin gene, which codes for a protein of the same name that may protect the brain's plasticity: its ability to reorganize and change in response to new experiences. Ronald Duman, a neurobiologist at Yale University, and colleagues wondered if the poorly understood neuritin might play an important -- and heretofore overlooked -- role in depression and other mood disorders. They induced depression in a group of rats by subjecting them to chronic, unpredictable stress. Depriving them of food and play, isolating them, and switching around their day/night cycles for about 3 weeks left the rats with little interest in feeding or enjoying a sweetened drink. The rats also gave up and became immobile instead of swimming when placed in a tub of water—another measure of rodent depression. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Stress; Depression
Link ID: 16971 - Posted: 06.26.2012

By Scicurious A colleague handed me this paper, not just as an interesting aspect of Parkinson’s, but as somewhat supportive paper for the role of serotonin in depression. I have said before that I think the serotonin theory of depression (as depicted in Zoloft commercials) is probably wrong, but my views are actually a bit more nuanced than that. The serotonin theory is probably wrong, but not because it is wrong, rather, it is oversimplified. I think that low serotonin levels on their own probably don’t cause depression, but it looks like there may still be a role for serotonin in depressive symptoms, and this paper seems to agree. Science, it’s always more complicated than you think at first. Parkinson’s is something that no one wants to get. It’s a degenerative disorder of the nervous system, which results in a wide variety of symptoms. Most people think of Parkinson’s and picture a shuffling gait, severe hand tremor, slowness of movement and rigidity. But there are other symptoms as well, include depression, hallucinations, fatigue, sleep disturbances, and cognitive deficits as the disease progresses. And when most people think of potential causes for Parkinson’s, they think of a deficit in dopamine, the neurotransmitter that I usually think of with regard to reward and reinforcement, but which is extremely important in motor systems as well. In Parkinson’s patients, you see a striking loss of dopamine neurons in motor areas like the substantia nigra (it’s easy to see because the melanin in the substantia nigra, which is latin for “black substance” dyes the cells black, and when those cells die, the stubstantia nigra becomes a lot less substantia and nigra). But again, it’s not just dopamine in the substantia nigra, there are other systems involved and differences in signaling that also play a role as the disease progresses. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Parkinsons; Depression
Link ID: 16970 - Posted: 06.26.2012

By Jennifer Huget One of the best-kept secrets among women over 50 is not so secret any more, thanks to a study published last week that shows eating disorders and body-image problems aren’t uncommon among that demographic. There’s been lots of concern over the years about young women’s eating disorders. But a disturbing picture of older women’s bingeing, purging and using extreme measures such as diet drugs, diuretics, laxatives and excessive exercise to promote weight loss is starting to emerge. The new study, conducted through the Eating Disorders Program at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and published June 21 in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, was based on an online survey of 1,849 women age 50 or older. Their average age was 59, and about 92 percent of respondents were white. Only 42 percent of the women were of normal weight, according guidelines set by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Among the others, 29 percent were overweight and 27 percent obese. (Two percent were underweight.) Fully two-thirds of the women reported being unhappy with their appearance. More than one-third — 36 percent — said they’d spent at least half of their past five years dieting. Forty percent said they weighed themselves more than once a week, and — ugh, this sounds familiar — 41 percent reported checking their body daily through such measures as pinching their belly fat or noting whether their thighs rubbed together. And almost 80 percent said their weight and shape was either moderately important to or the most important factor influencing their self-perception. © 2011 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 16969 - Posted: 06.26.2012

By Nathan Seppa HOUSTON — Men with low testosterone who are given replacement doses of the hormone shed weight steadily for years, researchers in Germany reported June 23 at a meeting of the Endocrine Society. Study participants, nearly all of whom were overweight or obese at the start of the study, lost 36 pounds on average. “This was an unintended effect,” said study coauthor Farid Saad, a research endocrinologist at Bayer Pharma in Berlin. “The big surprise was that when we analyzed the data [we found] that these men had lost weight continuously...year by year.” The men didn’t diet as part of the study, and any increase in their activity was voluntary, Saad said. He and his colleagues studied 116 men, average age 61, who had low testosterone levels. Each received quarterly injections of the hormone for five years. At the start, 71 percent were obese and another 24 percent were overweight. After five years, 97 percent of the men showed a reduction in waist circumference, on average losing “three to four trouser sizes,” Saad said. Average weight dropped from 236 pounds to about 200. “This definitely offers some insight that we can apply to our clinical practices,” said Vineeth Mohan, a clinical endocrinologist at Cleveland Clinic Florida in Weston. High testosterone levels have been linked to prostate cancer risk (SN: 10/8/05, p. 238), and a small portion of men taking high doses of it experience mania (SN: 2/19/00, p. 119). But in this study, Saad said, men received testosterone in doses just high enough to bring them back to normal levels. Three men in the test group were diagnosed with prostate cancer during the study, a rate lower than the incidence found in routine screening programs for men that age, he said. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Obesity; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 16968 - Posted: 06.26.2012

By Genevra Pittman NEW YORK — New research from Iceland suggests kids who get early treatment for their attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder don't have as much trouble on national standardized tests as those who aren't prescribed medication until age 11 or 12. Common medications used to treat ADHD include stimulants such as Vyvanse, Ritalin and Concerta. "Their short-term efficacy in treating the core symptoms of ADHD -- the symptoms of hyperactivity and attention and impulsivity -- that has been established," said Helga Zoega, the lead author on the new study from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. "With regard to more functional outcomes, for example academic performance or progress, there's not as much evidence there as to whether these drugs really help the kids academically in the long term," she told Reuters Health. To try to answer that question, Zoega and colleagues from the United States and Iceland consulted prescription drug records and test scores from Icelandic elementary and middle school students between 2003 and 2008. Out of more than 13,000 kids registered in the national school system, just over 1,000 were treated with ADHD drugs at some point between fourth and seventh grade - 317 of whom began their treatment during that span. Kids with no record of an ADHD diagnosis tended to score similarly on the standardized math and language arts tests given in fourth and seventh grade. Those who were medicated for the condition were more likely to have their scores decline over the years - especially when stimulants weren't started until later on. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 16967 - Posted: 06.26.2012

By SINDYA N. BHANOO If you’ve heard one pygmy goat kid bleating, you’ve heard them all — unless, that is, you’re a mother goat. A new study reports that mothers can recognize the calls of their kids even after more than a year of separation. In the wild, female goats tend to stay within their groups, while males disperse. For their study, researchers separated the goats after weaning, and found that the mothers remembered the calls of their offspring for 7 to 13 months. The study appears in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. “Mothers responded more to their kids born the previous year than to newborn kids born to other mothers,” said Elodie F. Briefer, an evolutionary biologist at Queen Mary, University of London, and one of the study’s authors. Dr. Briefer and her colleagues recorded kids when they were 5 weeks old, and played the recordings back to the mothers through a loudspeaker later. It isn’t clear why mother goats have this ability, but it could help mothers and daughters stay bonded and prevent mothers from inbreeding with their sons, Dr. Briefer said. “These functions would happen later in life, but the mothers would need to recognize their grown-up kids,” she said. The researchers worked with nine female pygmy goats and their kids at a farm in Nottinghamshire, England. They measured how quickly the goats responded to recorded calls, how many calls they made in response to what they heard, and how long they looked at the loudspeaker. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 16966 - Posted: 06.26.2012

By BENEDICT CAREY Clare True had autism and periodic seizures, but nothing prepared her family for Christmas Eve in 2006, when the 26-year-old went to bed after watching a movie and stopped breathing. “I got home from a party, went to check on her just after midnight, and she was — she was gone,” said her mother, Jane True. Paramedics tried to revive the young woman, then rushed her to the hospital, and somewhere in that firestorm of activity and grief, the Trues, Jane and her husband, Jim, considered donation. “I thought of it as a gift, her brain,” she said. “To my mind, the idea that scientists would be learning from her for years to come — how can you put a price on that?” Clare True’s was one of 150 specimens stored in a Harvard brain bank that was ruined because of a freezer failure, doctors acknowledged this month. The loss, while a setback for scientists studying disorders like Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia, especially mortified those working on autism, for it exposed what is emerging as the largest obstacle to progress: the shortage of high-quality autopsied brains from young people with a well-documented medical history. The malfunction reduced by a third Harvard’s frozen autism collection, the world’s largest. A bank maintained by the University of Maryland has 52, and there are smaller collections elsewhere. Altogether there are precious few, given escalating research demands. The loss at the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center makes donations from parents like the Trues only more urgent. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 16965 - Posted: 06.26.2012

By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online A simple brain trace can identify autism in children as young as two years old, scientists believe. A US team at Boston Children's Hospital say EEG traces, which record electrical brain activity using scalp electrodes, could offer a diagnostic test for this complex condition. EEG clearly distinguished children with autism from other peers in a trial involving nearly 1,000 children. Experts say more work is needed to confirm the BMC Medicine study results. Early detection There are more than 500,000 people with autism in the UK. Autism is a spectrum disorder, which means that it is not a single condition and will affect individuals in different ways. Commonly, people with autism have trouble with social interaction and can appear locked in their own worlds. It can be a difficult condition to diagnose and can go undetected for years. The latest study found 33 specific EEG patterns that appeared to be linked to autism. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 16964 - Posted: 06.26.2012

By Laura Sanders A dreamland ditty played softly during a nap helps people hit the right notes while awake. Soft tones during sleep creep into the napping brain and strengthen playing skills, researchers report online June 24 in Nature Neuroscience. The results don’t mean that after a nighttime Beethoven sonata, a piano novice will wake up with the ability to play it. But the results do suggest that an existing skill can be sharpened during a nap, says study coauthor Ken Paller of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Earlier work by Paller and others has found that sound and odor cues during sleep can improve a person’s memory for the locations of objects. The new study extends those results by showing that a learned skill — in this instance, playing music — can also be influenced during sleep. Although these sorts of experiments are just getting started, “the door is wide open,” Paller says. Musical ability, athletic prowess and other talents that normally require a lot of practice may be amenable to boosts during sleep. Before the easy job of having a nap, 16 right-handed participants in the study had to do some actual work. Volunteers learned two different not-very-catchy tunes, played with their left hands on the a, s, d and f keys of a computer. In an arrangement similar to that of Guitar Hero, circles that floated up the screen told participants which key to hit and when. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Sleep
Link ID: 16963 - Posted: 06.25.2012

By KATIE THOMAS A research director for Pfizer was positively buoyant after reading that an important medical conference had just featured a study claiming that the new arthritis drug Celebrex was safer on the stomach than more established drugs. “They swallowed our story, hook, line and sinker,” he wrote in an e-mail to a colleague. The truth was that Celebrex was no better at protecting the stomach from serious complications than other drugs. It appeared that way only because Pfizer and its partner, Pharmacia, presented the results from the first six months of a yearlong study rather than the whole thing. The companies had a lot riding on the outcome of the study, given that Celebrex’s effect on the stomach was its principal selling point. Earlier studies had shown it was no better at relieving pain than common drugs — like ibuprofen — already on the market. The research chief’s e-mail, sent in 2000, is among thousands of pages of internal documents and depositions unsealed recently by a federal judge in a long-running securities fraud case against Pfizer. While the companies’ handling of the research was revealed a dozen years ago, the documents provide a vivid picture of the calculation made by Pfizer at the time and its efforts ever since to overcome doubts about the drug. The documents suggest that officials made a strategic decision during the early trial to be less than forthcoming about the drug’s safety. They show that executives considered attacking the trial’s design before they even knew the results and disregarded the advice of an employee and an outside consultant who had argued the companies should disclose the fact that they were using incomplete data. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16962 - Posted: 06.25.2012

SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer WASHINGTON (AP) — The more we study animals, the less special we seem. Baboons can distinguish between written words and gibberish. Monkeys seem to be able to do multiplication. Apes can delay instant gratification longer than a human child can. They plan ahead. They make war and peace. They show empathy. They share. "It's not a question of whether they think — it's how they think," says Duke University scientist Brian Hare. Now scientists wonder if apes are capable of thinking about what other apes are thinking. The evidence that animals are more intelligent and more social than we thought seems to grow each year, especially when it comes to primates. It's an increasingly hot scientific field with the number of ape and monkey cognition studies doubling in recent years, often with better technology and neuroscience paving the way to unusual discoveries. This month scientists mapping the DNA of the bonobo ape found that, like the chimp, bonobos are only 1.3 percent different from humans. Says Josep Call, director of the primate research center at the Max Planck Institute in Germany: "Every year we discover things that we thought they could not do." Call says one of his recent more surprising studies showed that apes can set goals and follow through with them. © 2012 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Evolution; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16961 - Posted: 06.25.2012

By Susan Carnell One of the strangest findings to emerge from the world of obesity science lately is that people who sleep less tend to weigh more. But until recently, we have been stifling our yawns and scratching our heads about why: Does lack of sleep alter our biology? Or does it affect our eating behavior? Now two brain-imaging reports suggest the answer is both. The first study, published in March in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, looked at the effects of one night of no sleep. The second, published in April in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, tested the impact of nearly a week of more commonly experienced levels of sleep deprivation (four hours of sleep for six nights). Both studies used functional MRI to measure brain activation as their subjects viewed food pictures—analogous to being bombarded with a stream of McMuffin ads after a long night of working (or partying). Each study discovered that sleep loss caused areas within a key motivation network, including the striatum and anterior cingulate cortex, to go into overdrive at the mere sight of food. The same circuit perks up when addicts view images of their substance of choice. “Calories are energy, and your brain subconsciously knows they will wake you up,” says Marie-Pierre St-Onge of Columbia University, lead investigator of the April study. She likens the superresponsive sleep-poor brain to that of someone who has lost weight on a drastic diet—devouring the first snack you can get your hands on is a “no-brainer.” © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Sleep; Obesity
Link ID: 16960 - Posted: 06.25.2012

By Madeline Haller Prepping for a big presentation but can't seem to remember any of the content? Blame your sweet tooth. A diet high in sugar may hamper your memory and ability to learn, says a study published in the Journal of Physiology. Researchers had two groups of rats drink water mixed with fructose, a type of sugar. One of the groups also received omega-3 fatty acids as a part of their diet. After 6 weeks, the rats who drank only sugar water completed a maze slower than the omega-3-fed mice. (We know you're not a mouse -- but you can still take steps to navigate the maze of life. Check out these 27 Ways to Power Up Your Brain.) Not only were they slower in the maze, the rats who drank only sugar water had higher triglyceride, glucose, and insulin levels. It appears that they entered a state of insulin resistance, which is where the hormone insulin becomes less effective at lowering your blood sugar, says Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, Ph.D., lead study author and a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Here's how it works: Insulin, in addition to controlling blood sugar, also influences the ways in which your brain cells operate. And within the hippocampus -- the part of the brain responsible for short-term and long-term memory -- insulin signaling actually facilitates memory. Therefore, an insulin resistance may be what's causing a disruption in the rats' ability to recall the route they'd learned 6 weeks ago, the researchers hypothesize. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Obesity
Link ID: 16959 - Posted: 06.25.2012

Jeannine Stamatakis, There is no denying the high you feel after a run in the park or a swim at the beach. Exercise not only boosts your physical health--as one can easily see by watching a marathon or a boxing match--but it also improves mental health. According to a recent study, every little bit helps. People who engaged in even a small amount of exercise reported better mental health than others who did none. Another study, from the American College of Sports Medicine, indicated that six weeks of bicycle riding or weight training eased stress and irritability in women who had received an anxiety disorder diagnosis. To see how much exercise is required to relieve stress, researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health observed how prior exercise changed the interactions between aggressive and reserved mice. When placed in the same cage, stronger mice tend to bully the meeker ones. In this study, the small mice that did not have access to running wheels and other exercise equipment before cohabitating with the aggressive mice were extremely stressed and nervous, cowering in dark corners or freezing when placed in an unfamiliar territory. Yet meek rodents that had a chance to exercise before encountering their bullies exhibited resistance to stress. They were submissive while living with the aggressive mice but bounced back when they were alone. The researchers concluded that even a small amount of exercise gave the meeker mice emotional resilience. The scientists looked at the brain cells of these so-called stress-resistant mice and found that the rodents exhibited more activity in their medial prefrontal cortex and their amygdala, both of which are involved in processing emotions. The mice that did not exercise before moving in with the aggressive mice showed less activity in these parts of the brain. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 16958 - Posted: 06.25.2012

By Daisy Yuhas At right is a picture of someone’s brain as seen through functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI. This particular subject is taxing his neurons with a working memory task—those sunny orange specks represent brain activity related to the task. fMRI images show the brain according to changes in blood oxygen level, a proxy for degree of mental activity. It’s a pretty amazing tool; it has validated a lot of assumptions about brain regions and helped us make comparisons between groups of people, shedding light on addiction, development and disease. Some scientists believe it can help us read minds (more on that later) or even predict the future. But fMRI doesn’t actually provide detail at the level of a cell. The 3-dimensionsal image it provides is built up in units called voxels. Each one represents a tidy cube of brain tissue—a 3-D image building block analogous to the 2-D pixel of computers screens, televisions or digital cameras. Each voxel can represent a million or so brain cells. Those orange blobs in the image above are actually clusters of voxels—perhaps tens or hundreds of them. fMRI is also too slow to capture all of the changes in the brain. Each scan requires a second or two, enough time for a neuron to fire more than a hundred times. That means it can’t provide a clear sense of precisely when things happen. Trying to explain whether activity in one spot causes activity in another is not possible through fMRI alone. Furthermore, you have to be careful with your conclusions. Just because voxels corresponding to one region ‘light up’ when your subject sees a terrifying tiger doesn’t mean that every time this region appears active, your subject is frightened. Many of the brain’s regions are quite complex and involved in multiple processes. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 16957 - Posted: 06.23.2012

An intervention in which adults actively engaged the attention of preschool children with autism by pointing to toys and using other gestures to focus their attention results in a long term increase in language skills, according to researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health. At age 8, children with autism who received therapy centered on sharing attention and play when they were 3 or 4 years old had stronger vocabularies and more advanced language skills than did children who received standard therapy. All of the children in the study attended preschool for 30 hours each week. “Some studies have indicated that such pre-verbal interactions provide the foundation for building later language skills,” said Alice Kau, Ph.D., of the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Branch of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver NICHD.“This study confirms that intensive therapy to engage the attention of young children with autism helps them acquire language faster and build lasting language skills.” The study findings appear in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. The 40 children who participated in the study were 8 and 9 years old. Five years earlier, they had been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder and received the intensive therapy program or standard intervention, as part of a separate study.

Keyword: Autism; Attention
Link ID: 16956 - Posted: 06.23.2012

By ALEX STONE PINCH a coin at its edge between the thumb and first fingers of your right hand and begin to place it in your left palm, without letting go. Begin to close the fingers of the left hand. The instant the coin is out of sight, extend the last three digits of your right hand and secretly retract the coin. Make a fist with your left — as if holding the coin — as your right hand palms the coin and drops to the side. You’ve just performed what magicians call a retention vanish: a false transfer that exploits a lag in the brain’s perception of motion, called persistence of vision. When done right, the spectator will actually see the coin in the left palm for a split second after the hands separate. This bizarre afterimage results from the fact that visual neurons don’t stop firing once a given stimulus (here, the coin) is no longer present. As a result, our perception of reality lags behind reality by about one one-hundredth of a second. Magicians have long used such cognitive biases to their advantage, and in recent years scientists have been following in their footsteps, borrowing techniques from the conjurer’s playbook in an effort not to mystify people but to study them. Magic may seem an unlikely tool, but it’s already yielded several widely cited results. Consider the work on choice blindness — people’s lack of awareness when evaluating the results of their decisions. In one study, shoppers in a blind taste test of two types of jam were asked to choose the one they preferred. They were then given a second taste from the jar they picked. Unbeknown to them, the researchers swapped the flavors before the second spoonful. The containers were two-way jars, lidded at both ends and rigged with a secret compartment that held the other jam on the opposite side — a principle that’s been used to bisect countless showgirls. This seems like the sort of thing that wouldn’t scan, yet most people failed to notice that they were tasting the wrong jam, even when the two flavors were fairly dissimilar, like grapefruit and cinnamon-apple. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16955 - Posted: 06.23.2012

By ARIEL KAMINER YOU could drive past the hulking warehouse on the rough patch of waterfront in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, several times without ever figuring it for the latest frontier of neurological thrill-seeking. But that’s where Yehuda Duenyas, 38, who calls himself “a creator of innovative experiences,” was camped out last week, along with his team of scrappy young technical wizards and a quarter-million dollars’ worth of circuitry, theatrical lighting and optimism called “The Ascent.” Part art installation, part adventure ride, part spiritual journey, “The Ascent” claims to let users harness their brain’s own electrical impulses, measured through EEG readings, to levitate themselves. During its brief stay in New York, it welcomed representatives from cultural organizations like PS 122 and Lincoln Center, event promoters and friends of the team. In the shadowy vastness of the warehouse, “The Ascent” looked spare and heroic, like the setting for the final showdown between good and evil. Up high, a large circular track of lights and equipment hung from the ceiling. Down on the floor, another circle mirrored the one above, with incandescent bulbs illuminating transient puffs of smoke and casting the apparatus in a ghostly light. In the 30 feet between the lights above and the lights below, the air seemed heavy with magic and danger. An assistant outfitted me with a harness around my middle and a couple of EEG sensors across my forehead. Another assistant led me to the center of the circle and snapped me into the two hanging cables. For one long and mysterious moment, I stood alone in silence. Then the fun began. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16954 - Posted: 06.23.2012

By Deborah Kotz, Globe Staff I get occasional migraines, and the only good thing about the throbbing pain, nausea, and depressed mood is the sense of euphoria that comes when the pain finally lifts. For some headache sufferers, however, the pain never goes away -- for months, years, or even decades. I received a call recently from a relative whose teenage son developed a headache one day that’s lasted two months and counting, causing him to miss his final months of high school. His diagnosis: new daily persistent headache, a wastebasket term given when everything else has been ruled out. Dr. Elizabeth Loder, chief of the division of headache and pain at Brigham and Women’s/Faulkner Hospital, estimated that about 5 percent of the patients she sees at her clinic have new daily persistent headache. More commonly, patients come in with chronic migraines that result from medication overuse or because a particular drug isn’t working for them or has been prescribed at too low a dose. With new daily persistent headache, or NDPH, however, none of the array of migraine medications seems to work, even when prescribed at optimal doses. There’s no known cause such as a head injury, tumor, or seizure condition. And, unlike the typical headache sufferer, those with NDPH can name the exact day when their headache began -- even what they were doing when it started -- because they’ve never before had a problem with headaches and suddenly they’re in pain all the time with no relief in sight. © 2012 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16953 - Posted: 06.23.2012

By John de Dios Derek, left, and Zachary Francis spends most of their together. However, this fall the twins will be attending separate universities Ğ the first time for them to be separated for an extended period of time. Derek, left, and Zachary Francis spends most of their together. However, this fall the twins will be attending separate universities - the first time for them to be separated for an extended period of time. Twins Derek and Zachary Francis sit across from each other in Caffe Luce, a popular coffee shop near the University of Arizona campus. Their faces, still showing signs of youthful hormones, are nearly identical. Their hairstyles, their fashion styles and even their mannerisms are almost mirror images. Derek, the older brother, has a wider jaw and short hair. A red string adorns his left wrist as he writes left-handed. Zachary, with his short hair coifed similar to his brother’s and a small birthmark behind his neck, is more reserved, listening to headphones while he scrolls through his computer with his right hand. The brothers have spent 99 percent of their 19 years of life at each other’s side. They also share an even rarer bond than your typical identical twin: The Francis twins are also mirror-image twins. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16952 - Posted: 06.23.2012