David Cyranoski Adrian Owen still gets animated when he talks about patient 23. The patient was only 24 years old when his life was devastated by a car accident. Alive but unresponsive, he had been languishing in what neurologists refer to as a vegetative state for five years, when Owen, a neuro-scientist then at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues at the University of Liège in Belgium, put him into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and started asking him questions. Incredibly, he provided answers. A change in blood flow to certain parts of the man's injured brain convinced Owen that patient 23 was conscious and able to communicate. It was the first time that anyone had exchanged information with someone in a vegetative state. Patients in these states have emerged from a coma and seem awake. Some parts of their brains function, and they may be able to grind their teeth, grimace or make random eye movements. They also have sleep–wake cycles. But they show no awareness of their surroundings, and doctors have assumed that the parts of the brain needed for cognition, perception, memory and intention are fundamentally damaged. They are usually written off as lost. Owen's discovery1, reported in 2010, caused a media furore. Medical ethicist Joseph Fins and neurologist Nicholas Schiff, both at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, called it a “potential game changer for clinical practice”2. The University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, soon lured Owen away from Cambridge with Can$20 million (US$19.5 million) in funding to make the techniques more reliable, cheaper, more accurate and more portable — all of which Owen considers essential if he is to help some of the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide in vegetative states. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Attention; Consciousness
Link ID: 16911 - Posted: 06.14.2012

By Hilda Bastian What do you believe about the effects of exercise and depression – and why do you believe it? Are you personally unenthusiastic about exercising, or are you closer to religious fervor about it? These are critical questions. Because it doesn’t matter how much you believe in the importance of science. If you have a very strong prior existing belief, chances are it’s going to exert a strong bias on how you select and react to evidence on the subject. In the ideal rational world with loads of expertise and time on your hands, that wouldn’t matter when you came across research. If you were interested in the issue, you would carefully assess the biases and strengths of new research, with an equally careful assessment of the existing body of research. You wouldn’t make up your mind about the current state of knowledge till after this systematic assessment was done. But that’s not what it’s like, is it? In the real world, what we already believe often determines whether we even read something at all. And if it reinforces our belief – “Ha! See? I knew it! More proof!” – we might whizz off an email or a tweet without more than a brief skim of the abstract (or even less). But if research challenges beliefs we hold dear, we might tear the challenging article to pieces. We tend to look for methodological weaknesses in a way that we don’t do if we agree with conclusions. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 16910 - Posted: 06.14.2012

By Janet Raloff By baffling the brain, saccharin and other sugar-free sweeteners — key weapons in the war on obesity — may paradoxically foster overeating. At some level, the brain can sense a difference between sugar and no-calorie sweeteners, several studies have demonstrated. Using brain imaging, San Diego researchers now show that the brain processes sweet flavors differently depending on whether a person regularly consumes diet soft drinks. “This idea that there could be fundamental differences in how people respond to sweet tastes based on their experience with diet sodas is not something that has gotten much attention,” says Susan Swithers of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. A key finding, she says: Brains of diet soda drinkers “don’t differentiate very well between sucrose and saccharin.” Erin Green and Claire Murphy of the University of California, San Diego and San Diego State University recruited 24 healthy young adults for a battery of brain imaging tests. Half reported regularly drinking sugar-free beverages, usually at least once a day. The rest seldom if ever consumed such drinks. While the brain scans were underway, the researchers pumped small amounts of saccharin- or sugar-sweetened water in random order into each recruit’s mouth as the volunteer rated the tastes. Both the diet soda drinkers and the nondrinkers rated each sweetener about equally pleasant and intense, Green and Murphy report in an upcoming Physiology & Behavior. But which brain regions lit up while making those judgments differed sharply based on who regularly consumed diet drinks. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Obesity; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 16909 - Posted: 06.14.2012

Erin Allday A gene that's been known for two decades as the largest inheritable risk for developing Alzheimer's disease mostly affects the brains of women, not men, according to a team of researchers from Stanford and UCSF. The gene variant known as APOE4 is the most common genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's - only about 15 percent of people carry the gene, but it's found in more than half of all Alzheimer's patients. The variant was first connected to Alzheimer's in 1993, but doctors and scientists for the most part have been unaware of any gender differences, despite early studies that showed an increased risk for women with the gene. The new research, which is being published Wednesday in the Journal of Neuroscience, looked at two biological indicators - or biomarkers - associated with Alzheimer's disease: decreased activity in a brain network related to memory, and increased levels of the tau protein in spinal fluid. Women with the APOE4 gene were more likely to test positive for both markers than men who had the gene and women who didn't have the gene. The findings will not have any immediate clinical impact - very few people are encouraged to learn their APOE4 status because there is no treatment for Alzheimer's. But the results could open a torrent of new research possibilities, such as studying the relationship between hormones and Alzheimer's, or looking for other gender differences that could be making women with the gene more vulnerable, scientists said. © 2012 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16908 - Posted: 06.13.2012

By Meghan Holohan You’re staring at your blank computer screen when dots drift into your line of vision. They resemble specks of dust or perhaps clouds or cobwebs. Don’t panic -- you’re not seeing things. You’re witnessing eye floaters, not tricks of the eye or mind. “Floaters are a part of the normal aging process,” says Dr. Pravin Dugel, managing partner at Retinal Consultants of Arizona in Phoenix. Eye floaters are fibers that detach from the eye. A hollow cavity filled with a vitreous jelly, composed of 99 percent water and 1 percent collagen, lies in the center of the eye. This gel helps give eyes their round shape and aids in seeing. As we age, the vitreous liquefies and pieces of it begin to release from the back wall of the eye. The debris floats across the field of vision, causing people to see dots, flies, cobwebs, or clouds. “You can think of [floaters] as UFOs floating in the eye,” explains Dr. Abdhish R. Bhavsar, director of clinical research at the Retina Center of Minnesota. He explains that unlike UFOs, physicians know what floaters are, but like UFOs they often appear differently based on who sees them. While it seems that floaters glide across the front of the eye, they’re actually drifting through the eye. It’s the shadow of the fibers reflecting on the retina that people see. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16907 - Posted: 06.13.2012

by Helen Fields When a male club-winged manakin (Machaeropterus deliciosus) wants to attract a female in the Andean cloud forest, he raises his wings over his back and vibrates a pair of giant feathers to make a "PEEP!" sound (as in video above). A scientist at Cornell University suspected there were odd bones under those strange feathers, so she teamed up with colleagues to do computed-tomography scans of the manakin and some close relatives. Bird bones are hollow, with air pockets that make flight easier. But the club-winged manakin is an oddball. The scans revealed that its humerus, the bone that starts at the shoulder, is solid. The ulna, in the next section of wing, is also solid. It's also just plain wacky: While the other birds' ulnae are long, thin, and smooth with a knob at each end, the club-winged manakin's ulna is shaped like a club and covered with lumps and bumps. (And yet they still manage to fly.) The scientists, who report their findings online today in Biology Letters, think the bumps grasp the ends of the special resonating feathers, which poke through the skin, for better sound control, and that the dense bone may make the sound louder by bouncing it out through the feather. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 16906 - Posted: 06.13.2012

By Katherine Harmon Cholesterol-lowering statins have been credited with preventing countless heart attacks among at-risk adults. More than 20 million U.S. adults now take statins daily, making them some of the top-selling drugs of all time. Recent research, however, has indicated that they might sometimes contribute to cognitive problems, such as confusion and memory loss. And new findings suggest that they might also be to blame for additional fatigue. The new study followed 1,016 healthy adults, who were randomly assigned to take 20 milligrams of Zocor (simvastatin), 40 milligrams of Pravachol (pravastatin)—both relatively low doses—or a placebo every evening before bed for six months. At the end of the study period, they were asked to rate their energy levels and how they felt after exercising. Those who were taking the statins were more likely to report lower overall energy and more fatigue with exertion than those who had been randomized to the placebo. The findings were reported online June 11 in Archives of Internal Medicine. “Occurrence of this problem was not rare—even at these doses,” Beatrice Golomb, of the Department of Medicine at University of California, San Diego, and co-author of the study, said in a prepared statement. Subjects taking the Zocor ended up with the lowest cholesterol but were more likely to report decreased energy. The effect was more common in women, she noted, with 40 percent of women reporting either this lower energy or more fatigue with exertion while taking the daily Zocor dose. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 16905 - Posted: 06.13.2012

By PERRI KLASS, M.D. Like many other pediatricians, I do not wear a white coat. Many of us believe that babies and small children suffer from a special form of “white coat syndrome,” that mix of trepidation and anxiety that some adults experience — to the point of high blood pressure — in a medical setting. The pediatric version is easy to diagnose: Doctor in white coat walks into room, kid starts to cry. I worry that a child like this has recalled shots or an unpleasant ear check and has connected that memory to a particular garment, rather than to my face, or my exam room, or my stethoscope. But how realistic is that? Do babies remember past events? Starting when? Recent investigations of memory formation raise fascinating questions about how young children store and retrieve experiences and information. In some ways, I believe we tend to exalt the memory-related feats of the infant and the toddler. True, they can learn language, even more than one; sorting out words and syntax from the surrounding noise is in many ways a defining human use of memory. Nora Newcombe, a professor of psychology at Temple University, points out that there may be evolutionary reasons that this kind of memory — semantic memory — is so strong in the early years of life, when babies are faced with learning so many facts about the world. And yet, every adult lacks memories from the very early years. Freud called it “infantile amnesia,” describing “the peculiar amnesia which veils from most people (not from all!) the first years of their childhood.” Not surprisingly, he felt we repress those early childhood memories because they contain the beginnings of sexual feeling. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16904 - Posted: 06.12.2012

By AMANDA SCHAFFER In recent decades, there have been few new treatments for people with stubbornly high blood pressure. Exercise and a low-sodium diet, along with such stalwart drugs as diuretics, ACE inhibitors and beta-blockers, have made up the standard regimens. But these efforts fail in a surprising number of patients. On three or more medications, many still suffer from uncontrolled hypertension and with it a heightened risk of heart attack and stroke. Now, doctors are experimenting with an innovative but drastic new approach that may help lessen the danger in patients for whom nothing else works. During the procedure, called renal denervation, a physician threads a catheter into the arteries leading to the kidney, then delivers pulses of radio-frequency energy that interrupt the signaling in nerves to and from that organ. The damage to the nerves is probably permanent, although no one is certain. Small clinical trials, conducted mainly outside the United States, have suggested that in combination with drugs, renal denervation may help to reduce high blood pressure in patients with so-called treatment-resistant disease. The treatment is already available in Australia and Europe. The largest randomized controlled trial to date is now under way in the United States. It is sponsored by Medtronic, which hopes to win Food and Drug Administration approval for a specialized catheter and generator used in the procedure. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 16903 - Posted: 06.12.2012

By JAMES GORMAN The extremes of animal behavior can be a source of endless astonishment. Books have been written about insect sex. The antics of dogs and cats are sometimes hard to believe. And birds, those amazing birds: They build elaborate nests, learn lyrical songs, migrate impossibly long distances. But “Gifts of the Crow,” by John N. Marzluff and Tony Angell, includes a description of one behavior that even Aesop never imagined. “On Kinkazan Island in northern Japan,” the authors write, “jungle crows pick up deer feces — dry pellets of dung — and deftly wedge them in the deer’s ears.” What!? I checked the notes at the back of the book, and this account comes from another book, written in Japanese. So I can’t give any more information on this astonishing claim, other than to say that Dr. Marzluff, of the University of Washington, and Mr. Angell, an artist and observer of birds, think that the crows do it in the spirit of fun. Deer droppings, it must be said, are only one of the crows’ gifts. The authors’ real focus is on the way that crows can give us “the ephemeral and profound connection to nature that many people crave.” To that end, however, they tell some wild anecdotes and make some surprising assertions. Many of the behaviors they describe — crows drinking beer and coffee, whistling and calling dogs and presenting gifts to people who feed them — are based on personal testimony and would seem to fall into the category of anecdote rather than science. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 16902 - Posted: 06.12.2012

by Jon White David Nutt, former adviser to the UK government, says the ban on drugs like ecstasy is hampering neuroscience How do the drug laws in most countries affect scientific research? One of the things I find very disturbing about the current approach to drugs, which is simply prohibition without necessarily any full understanding of harms, is that we lose sight of the fact that these drugs may well give us insights into areas of science that need to be explored and may give us new opportunities for treatment. In what way? Almost all the drugs of interest in terms of understanding brain phenomena such as consciousness, perception, mood and psychosis are illegal. And so there is almost no work done in this field. How bad is the impact? The effects these laws have had on research is greater than those caused by the US government hindering stem cell research. No one has done an imaging neuroscience study of smoking cannabis. I can show you 150 papers telling you how the brain reacts to an angry face, but I can't show you a single paper that tells you what cannabis does. Any examples of missed opportunities? There were six trials of LSD as a treatment for alcoholism, the last one in 1965. The evidence is it's as good as anything we've got, maybe better. But no one is using it for this. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16901 - Posted: 06.12.2012

By JoNel Aleccia Attention, busy middle-aged folks. You may be healthy and thin, but if you habitually sleep less than six hours a night, you still could be boosting your risk of a stroke. That’s the surprising conclusion of a new study being presented Monday at SLEEP 2012, the annual meeting of the nation’s sleep experts. Getting too little shut-eye appeared to more than quadruple the risk of stroke symptoms among healthy, normal-weight people aged 45 and older, according to a study of some 5,600 people followed for up to three years. “The really important take-home message is this: Don’t blow it off. Sleep is just as important as diet and exercise,” said Megan Ruiter, the University of Alabama at Birmingham researcher who led the study. Experts recommend that healthy adults get between seven and nine hours of sleep a night. But about one in three U.S. workers regularly gets less than seven hours of snooze time, according to a recent government health report. Ruiter and her colleagues reviewed data from some 30,239 people participating in the REGARDS study – Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke – sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Of those, they teased out some 5,666 people who were healthy at the start of the study – no history of stroke, stroke symptoms, so-called “mini-stroke” or transient ischemic attack, or elevated risk for sleep apnea and other sleep-disordered breathing problems. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Sleep; Stroke
Link ID: 16900 - Posted: 06.12.2012

Content provided by Jennifer Welsh, LiveScience Night owls often wake up for work or school with a scowl on their faces and wishing for an IV drip of coffee, while morning people come skipping in 15 minutes early. However, morning people aren't chipper just as the sun is coming up; they are happier and more satisfied with life overall, a new study suggests. Teenagers' night owl tendencies fade as they age, and the study says this switch to a morning-focused schedule could be why older adults are happier than younger ones. "Past research has suggested that morning-type people report feeling happier than evening-type people, and this research was only on young adults," study researcher Renee Biss, a graduate student at the University of Toronto, told LiveScience. The new study looked across the lifespan to see if the morning habits of older individuals contributed to their overall life outlook. The researchers studied two populations: a group of 435 adults ages 17 to 38, and a group of 297 older adults, ages 59 to 79. Both groups filled out questionnaires about their emotional state, how healthy they feel and their preferred "time of day." [Life's Extremes: Early Birds vs. Night Owls] By age 60, most people are morning types, the researchers found. Only about 7 percent of young adults are morning larks, but as the population ages, this switches — in the older years only about 7 percent of the population are still night owls. © 2012 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Emotions
Link ID: 16899 - Posted: 06.12.2012

By Scicurious When I first saw the coverage of the article appear on Jezebel saying that exercise doesn’t help depression, I didn’t believe it. I read the press release, and really didn’t believe it. And then, I read the article. Do I believe the article? Yes, I believe that the data are as they say they are. But do I believe that exercise doesn’t help depression? Nope. Not a chance. Because that’s not what this study says. And in a truly massive failure” of press release and media coverage (some of which was elegantly skewered by Martin Robbins and Tom Chivers), everyone is going to get the wrong idea. Contrary to some of the statements in the introduction of the paper, there are several meta-analyses which support the effects of exercise in treating symptoms of depression. However, they authors are right, many of the studies have small numbers of people and have extensive exercise interventions. The authors of this study were interested in a milder intervention in a larger group of people: could moderate increases in physical activity buttress depression treatment? To look at this, they recruited around 360 people who were experiencing a new episode of depression. They assigned half of them to an exercise intervention, and half to control. ALL of them got “normal” treatment, meaning some additionally got talk therapy, some additionally got antidepressants of various types, etc. In the exercise intervention, the group received three meetings with a trained facilitator and 10 phone calls during the year, encouraging them to exercise for 150 minutes per week of moderate to vigorous physical activity in bouts of at least 10 minutes. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 16898 - Posted: 06.12.2012

By Ferris Jabr The human body is a tireless gardener, growing new cells throughout life in many organs—in the skin, blood, bones and intestines. Until the 1980s most scientists thought that brain cells were the exception: the neurons you are born with are the neurons you have for life. In the past three decades, however, researchers have discovered hints that the human brain produces new neurons after birth in two places: the hippocampus—a region important for memory—and the walls of fluid-filled cavities called ventricles, from which stem cells migrate to the olfactory bulb, a knob of brain tissue behind the eyes that processes smell. Studies have clearly demonstrated that such migration happens in mice long after birth and that human infants generate new neurons. But the evidence that similar neurogenesis persists in the adult human brain is mixed and highly contested. A new study relying on a unique form of carbon dating suggests that neurons born during adulthood rarely if ever weave themselves into the olfactory bulb's circuitry. In other words, people—unlike other mammals—do not replenish their olfactory bulb neurons, which might be explained by how little most of us rely on our sense of smell. Although the new research casts doubt on the renewal of olfactory bulb neurons in the adult human brain, many neuroscientists are far from ready to end the debate. In preparation for the new study, Olaf Bergmann and Jonas Frisén of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and their colleagues acquired 14 frozen olfactory bulbs from autopsies performed between 2005 and 2011 at the institute's Department of Forensic Medicine. To determine whether the neurons were younger than the people they came from—which would mean the cells were generated after birth—the researchers needed to isolate the cells' DNA. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Neurogenesis; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 16897 - Posted: 06.11.2012

By ALAN SCHWARZ He steered into the high school parking lot, clicked off the ignition and scanned the scraps of his recent weeks. Crinkled chip bags on the dashboard. Soda cups at his feet. And on the passenger seat, a rumpled SAT practice book whose owner had been told since fourth grade he was headed to the Ivy League. Pencils up in 20 minutes. The boy exhaled. Before opening the car door, he recalled recently, he twisted open a capsule of orange powder and arranged it in a neat line on the armrest. He leaned over, closed one nostril and snorted it. Throughout the parking lot, he said, eight of his friends did the same thing. The drug was not cocaine or heroin, but Adderall, an amphetamine prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that the boy said he and his friends routinely shared to study late into the night, focus during tests and ultimately get the grades worthy of their prestigious high school in an affluent suburb of New York City. The drug did more than just jolt them awake for the 8 a.m. SAT; it gave them a tunnel focus tailor-made for the marathon of tests long known to make or break college applications. “Everyone in school either has a prescription or has a friend who does,” the boy said. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; ADHD
Link ID: 16896 - Posted: 06.11.2012

by Dan Hurley Marilyn 
Monroe and Jane Russell appeared 
outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre 
to write their names and leave imprints 
of their hands and high heels in the 
wet concrete. Down on their knees, 
supported by a velvet-covered pillow for their elbows, they wrote “Gentlemen 
Prefer Blondes” in looping script, followed by their signatures and the date, 6-26-53. But how did those watching the 
events of that day manage to imprint a memory trace of it, etching the details with neurons and synapses in the soft cement of the brain? Where and how are those memories written, and what is the molecular alphabet that spells out the 
rich recollections of color, smell, and sound? After more than a century of searching, an answer was recently found, strangely enough, just eight miles from Grauman’s. Although not located on any tourist map, the scene of the discovery can be reached easily from Hollywood Boulevard by heading west on Sunset to the campus of UCLA. There, amid one of the densest clusters of neuroscience research facilities in the world, stands the Gonda (Goldschmied) Neuroscience and Genetics Research Center. And sitting at a table in the building’s first-floor restaurant, the Café Synapse, is the neuroscientist who has come closer than anyone ever thought possible to finding the place where memories are written in the brain. That spot, the physical substrate of a particular memory, has long been known in brain research as an engram. Decades of scientific dogma asserted that engrams exist only in vast webs of connections, not in a particular place but in distributed neural networks running widely through the brain. Yet a series of pioneering studies have demonstrated that it is possible to lure specific memories into particular neurons, at least in mice. If those neurons are killed or temporarily inactivated, the memories vanish. If the neurons are reactivated, the memories return. These same studies have also begun to explain how and why the brain allocates each memory to a particular group of cells and how it links them together and organizes them—the physical means by which the scent of a madeleine, the legendary confection that sparked Marcel Proust’s memory stream, leads to remembrance of things past. © 2012, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16895 - Posted: 06.11.2012

By Karen Weintraub A freezer malfunction at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital has severely damaged one-third of the world’s largest collection of autism brain samples, potentially setting back research on the disorder by years, scientists say. An official at the renowned brain bank in Belmont discovered that the freezer had shut down in late May, without triggering two alarms. Inside, they found 150 thawed brains that had turned dark from decay; about a third of them were part of a collection of autism brains. “This was a priceless collection,’’ said Dr. Francine Benes, director of the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, where the brains were housed. “You can’t express its value in dollar amounts,’’ said Benes, who is leading one of two internal investigations into the freezer failure. The damage to these brains could slow autism research by a decade as the collection is restored, said Carlos Pardo, a neuropathologist and associate professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University. The collection, owned by the advocacy and research organization Autism Speaks, “yields very, very important information that allows us to have a better understanding of what autism is, as well as the contribution of environmental and immune factors,’’ said Pardo, whose 2004 study of brains stored in the bank was the first to find that autism involves the immune system. “The benefit has been great.’’ © 2012 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 16894 - Posted: 06.11.2012

by Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Managing Editor Intense and lasting stress may deliver a blow to a kid's noggin, say researchers who found that a brain area linked to memory was smaller in children who had experienced chronic stress compared with their less-strained counterparts. The brain differences also bore out in cognitive ability, with those children with highly stressful lives performing poorer than other kids on spatial memory tests. The highly stressed children also had more trouble with tests of short-term memory, including tasks such as finding a token in a series of boxes, the researchers said. "All families experience some stress, so it is important to note that effects were found for high levels of stress," study researcher Jamie Hanson, a psychology graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told LiveScience, adding that some extreme examples would include family members falling victim to violent crimes or the chronic illness of a child or other family member. The research, detailed in the June 6 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, adds to other evidence of the impacts of stress, with one recent study showing that children exposed to multiple instances of violence age faster on a cellular level. Another past study suggested childhood stress could actually take years off an individual's life. The team was inspired by work in animals that has found a link between stress and brain changes, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in working memory, or the part of your memory that's available for quick recall. © 2012 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16893 - Posted: 06.09.2012

by Linda Geddes They might share the same DNA and cramped living space, but as these images reveal, life is anything but identical for unborn twins. This unprecedented glimpse into their inner world is afforded through a recently developed form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which is being turned on twins for the first time. Whereas conventional MRI takes snapshots of thin slices of the body as it penetrates through it, so-called cinematic-MRI takes repeated images of the same slice, then stitches them together to create a videoMovie Camera. This means that a moving structure such as a fetus – or several fetuses – can be visualised in unprecedented detail. "A lot of the so-called videos in the womb are very processed, so they do a lot of reconstructing and computer work afterwards. These are the raw images that are acquired immediately," says Marisa Taylor-Clarke of the Robert Steiner MR Unit at Imperial College London, who recorded the images. She has been using the technique to study twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, a relatively common complication in which the blood supplies of twins sharing the same placenta become connected. As the twin receiving its sibling's blood grows larger, the growth of the donor twin becomes stunted. In the worst cases it can prove fatal to both twins. Fortunately, an operation that involves blocking the shared blood vessels usually saves them, but its impact on brain development is relatively unknown. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16892 - Posted: 06.09.2012