By Lauran Neergaard WASHINGTON—The obesity epidemic may be slowing, but don't take in those pants yet. Today, just over a third of U.S. adults are obese. By 2030, 42 percent will be, says a forecast released Monday. That's not nearly as many as experts had predicted before the once-rapid rises in obesity rates began leveling off. But the new forecast suggests even small continuing increases will add up. "We still have a very serious problem," said obesity specialist Dr. William Dietz of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Worse, the already obese are getting fatter. Severe obesity will double by 2030, when 11 percent of adults will be nearly 100 pounds overweight, or more, concluded the research led by Duke University. That could be an ominous consequence of childhood obesity. Half of severely obese adults were obese as children, and they put on more pounds as they grew up, said CDC's Dietz. While being overweight increases anyone's risk of diabetes, heart disease and a host of other ailments, the severely obese are most at risk -- and the most expensive to treat. Already, conservative estimates suggest obesity-related problems account for at least 9 percent of the nation's yearly health spending, or $150 billion a year. © Copyright 2012 Associated Press

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16771 - Posted: 05.09.2012

By BENEDICT CAREY In a rare step, doctors on a panel revising psychiatry’s influential diagnostic manual have backed away from two controversial proposals that would have expanded the number of people identified as having psychotic or depressive disorders. The doctors dropped two diagnoses that they ultimately concluded were not supported by the evidence: “attenuated psychosis syndrome,” proposed to identify people at risk of developing psychosis, and “mixed anxiety depressive disorder,” a hybrid of the two mood problems. They also tweaked their proposed definition of depression to allay fears that the normal sadness people experience after the loss of a loved one, a job or a marriage would not be mistaken for a mental disorder. But the panel, appointed by the American Psychiatric Association to complete the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or D.S.M., did not retreat from another widely criticized proposal, to streamline the definition of autism. Predictions by some experts that the new definition will sharply reduce the number of people given a diagnosis are off base, panel members said, citing evidence from a newly completed study. Both the study and the newly announced reversals are being debated this week at the psychiatric association’s annual meeting in Philadelphia, where dozens of sessions were devoted to the D.S.M., the standard reference for mental disorders, which drives research, treatment and insurance decisions. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 16770 - Posted: 05.09.2012

By Ferris Jabr* In the offices of psychiatrists and psychologists across the country you can find a rather hefty tome called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM). The current edition of the DSM, the DSM-IV, is something like a field guide to mental disorders: the book pairs each illness with a checklist of symptoms, just as a naturalist’s guide describes the distinctive physical features of different birds. These lists of symptoms, known as diagnostic criteria, help psychiatrists choose a disorder that most closely matches what they observe in their patients. Every few decades, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) revises the diagnostic criteria and publishes a brand new version of the DSM. The idea is to make the criteria more accurate, drawing on what psychologists and psychiatrists have learned about mental illness since the manual’s last update. In May 2013, the APA plans to publish the fifth and newest edition of the DSM, which it has been preparing for more than 11 years. On its DSM-5 Development website, the APA states that the motivation for the ongoing revisions was an agreement to “expand the scientific basis for psychiatric diagnosis and classification.” The website further states that “over the past two decades, there has been a wealth of new information in neurology, genetics and the behavioral sciences that dramatically expands our understanding of mental illness.” © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 16769 - Posted: 05.09.2012

Older obese men could shift excess weight by taking testosterone supplements, suggest findings announced at the European Congress on Obesity. In a study, hormone-deficient men were given testosterone supplements in a similar way to HRT for older women. Men lost an average of 16kg over five years when testosterone levels were increased back to normal. But experts warn that supplements may not be the answer due to possible risks of prostate cancer and heart disease. Prof Richard Sharpe from the University of Edinburgh Centre for Reproductive Health said: "The notion that this is a quick fix for obese older men is, as always, simplistic. It is far more sensible and safer for men to reduce their food intake, reduce their obesity, which will then elevate their own testosterone." The findings announced at the conference also suggest that raising testosterone levels could reduce waist circumference and blood pressure. Dr Farid Saad, lead author of the study said: "We came across this by accident. These men were being given testosterone for a hormone deficiency - they had a range of problems - erectile dysfunction, fatigue and lack of energy. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Obesity; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 16768 - Posted: 05.09.2012

By Brian Fung We often like to think of our brains as a single device, the unitary executive governing the republic of our limbs and thoughts. While there's some truth to that, the reality is much more complex. In fact, not only do different parts of the brain perform different functions, but many of our basic activities -- such as quoting a song lyric or calculating a waiter's tip -- actually activate multiple regions of the brain that fire in perfect coordination with one another. When these otherwise independent parts of the brain work together, they operate in what's called a brain network: Large scale brain network research suggests that cognitive functioning is the result of interactions or communication between different brain systems distributed throughout the brain. That is, when performing a particular task, just one isolated brain area is not working alone. Instead, different areas of the brain, often far apart from each other within the geographic space of the brain, are communicating through a fast-paced synchronized set of brain signals. These networks can be considered preferred pathways for sending signals back and forth to perform a specific set of cognitive or motor behaviors. With all that the brain has to process over the course of a day, you might expect the various networks' signals to interfere with one another, much as overloading a cell phone tower might result in a dropped call or two. © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16767 - Posted: 05.09.2012

Awake mental replay of past experiences is essential for making informed choices, suggests a study in rats. Without it, the animals’ memory-based decision-making faltered, say scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health. The researchers blocked learning from, and acting on, past experience by selectively suppressing replay — encoded as split-second bursts of neuronal activity in the memory hubs of rats performing a maze task. "It appears to be these ripple-like bursts in electrical activity in the hippocampus that enable us to think about future possibilities based on past experiences and decide what to do," explained Loren Frank, Ph.D., of the University of California, San Francisco. "Similar patterns of hippocampus activity have been detected in humans during similar situations." Frank, Shantanu Jadhav, Ph.D., and colleagues, report on their discovery online in the journal Science, Thursday, May 3, 2012. "These results add to evidence that the brain encodes information not only in the amount of neuronal activity, but that its rhythm and synchronicity also play a crucial role," said Bettina Osborn, Ph.D., of the NIMH Division of Neuroscience and Basic Behavioral Science, which funded the research. Frank and colleagues had discovered in previous studies that the rhythmic ripple-like activity in the hippocampus coincided with awake mental replay of past experiences, which occurs during lulls in the rats' activity. The same signal during sleep is known to help consolidate memories.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16766 - Posted: 05.08.2012

by Catherine de Lange WHEN I was just a newborn baby, my mother gazed down at me in her hospital bed and did something that was to permanently change the way my brain developed. Something that would make me better at learning, multitasking and solving problems. Eventually, it might even protect my brain against the ravages of old age. Her trick? She started speaking to me in French. At the time, my mother had no idea that her actions would give me a cognitive boost. She is French and my father English, so they simply felt it made sense to raise me and my brothers as bilingual. Yet as I've grown up, a mass of research has emerged to suggest that speaking two languages may have profoundly affected the way I think. Cognitive enhancement is just the start. According to some studies, my memories, values, even my personality, may change depending on which language I happen to be speaking. It is almost as if the bilingual brain houses two separate minds. All of which highlights the fundamental role of language in human thought. "Bilingualism is quite an extraordinary microscope into the human brain," says neuroscientist Laura Ann Petitto of Gallaudet University in Washington DC. The view of bilingualism has not always been this rosy. For many parents like mine, the decision to raise children speaking two languages was controversial. Since at least the 19th century, educators warned that it would confuse the child, making them unable to learn either language properly. At best, they thought the child would become a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. At worst, they suspected it might hinder other aspects of development, resulting in a lower IQ. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16765 - Posted: 05.08.2012

By PERRI KLASS, M.D. Like many other primary care doctors, I sometimes sense the shadow of depression hovering at the edges of the exam room. I am haunted by one mother with severe postnatal depression. Years ago, I took proper care of the baby, but I missed the mother’s distress, as did everyone else. Nowadays it’s increasingly clear that pediatricians, obstetrician-gynecologists and internists must be more alert. Research into postnatal depression in particular has underscored the importance of checking up on parents’ mental health in the first months of a baby’s life. But a parent’s depression, it turns out, can be linked to all kinds of problems, even in the lives of older children. “Depression is an illness that feeds upon itself,” said Dr. William Beardslee, professor of child psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who has spent his career studying depression in children and developing family interventions. “Very often people who are depressed don’t seek the care they need.” In 2009, the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council issued a report, “Depression in Parents, Parenting, and Children,” that summarized a large and growing body of research on the ways that parental depression can affect how people take care of their children, and how those children fare. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16764 - Posted: 05.08.2012

By Rachel Saslow, By the time new parents take their babies home from the hospital, they have been thoroughly drilled on the litany of infant-sleep no-nos: No stomach-sleeping. No loose blankets. No pillows. No soft mattresses. No crib bumpers. The list goes on. Whether parents choose to follow these rules is another matter. When her twins were born in 2008, Amy Cress of Silver Spring dutifully put her babies on their backs to sleep. But at about 6 months of age, her son Nathan rolled onto his stomach during the night. Cress was so relieved that her son was asleep, she left him like that. He preferred sleeping on his stomach from then on. “We used bumpers, too, which is really not allowed,” she says. “We felt like rebels.” It has been 20 years since the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) first recommended that parents place their babies on their backs to sleep for the first year of life to prevent sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. The rate of SIDS in the United States has plummeted more than 50 percent since the government launched its “Back to Sleep” campaign in 1994. In 2006, 2,327 infants died from SIDS in the United States. Still, about 25 percent of U.S. babies sleep on their stomachs or sides, according to a national infant sleep position study. (In 1992, before the “Back to Sleep” campaign, that proportion was roughly 85 percent, according to the study.) © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16763 - Posted: 05.08.2012

By GINA KOLATA BALTIMORE — The patient founded a totalitarian state known for its “merciless terror,” Dr. Victoria Giffi told a rapt audience of doctors and medical students on Friday afternoon. He died suddenly at 6:50 p.m. on Jan. 21, 1924, a few months before his 54th birthday. The cause of death: a massive stroke. Experts differ on the likely causes of the stroke that killed Lenin at 53. The man’s cerebral arteries, Dr. Giffi added, were “so calcified that when tapped with tweezers they sounded like stone.” The occasion was a so-called clinicopathological conference, a mainstay of medical schools in which a mysterious medical case is presented to an audience of doctors and medical students. In the end, a pathologist solves the mystery with a diagnosis. But this was a conference with a twist. The patient was long dead — he was, in fact, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The questions posed to the conference speakers: Why did he have a fatal stroke at such a young age? Was there something more to his death than history has acknowledged? At the University of Maryland, an clinicopathological conference focused on historical figures has been an annual event for the past 19 years; attending doctors have reviewed the case records of Florence Nightingale, Alexander the Great, Mozart, Beethoven and Edgar Allan Poe. The pathologists’ conclusion that Poe died of rabies even became a final question on the “Jeopardy!” game show. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 16762 - Posted: 05.08.2012

by Zuberoa Marcos Yawn next to your dog, and she may do the same. Though it seems simple, this contagious behavior is actually quite remarkable: Only a few animals do it, and only dogs cross the species barrier. Now a new study finds that dogs yawn even when they only hear the sound of us yawning, the strongest evidence yet that canines may be able to empathize with us. Besides people and dogs, contagious yawning has been observed in gelada baboons, stump-tail macaques, and chimpanzees. Humans tend to yawn more with friends and acquaintances, suggesting that "catching" someone's yawn may be tied to feelings of empathy. Similarly, some studies have found that dogs tend to yawn more after watching familiar people yawning. But it is unclear whether the canine behavior is linked to empathy as it is in people. One clue might be if even the mere sound of a human yawn elicited yawning in dogs. To that end, scientists at the University of Porto in Portugal recruited 29 dogs, all of whom had lived for at least 6 months with their owners. To reduce anxiety, the study was performed in familiar rooms in the dogs' homes and in the presence of a known person but with no visual contact with their owners. The team, led by behavioral biologist Karine Silva, recorded yawning sounds of the dogs' owners and an unfamiliar woman as well as an artificial control sound consisting of a computer-reversed yawn. (To help induce natural yawning, volunteers listened to an audio loop of prerecorded yawns over headphones.) Each dog heard all of the sounds in two sessions, each carried out 7 days apart. During the sessions, the researchers measured the number of elicited yawns in dogs in response to sounds from known and unknown people. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 16761 - Posted: 05.08.2012

By Jeanna Bryner Managing editor Fido's expressive face, including those longing puppy-dog eyes, may lead owners to wonder what exactly is going on in that doggy's head. Scientists decided to find out, using brain scans to explore the minds of our canine friends. The researchers, who detailed their findings May 2 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, were interested in understanding the human-dog relationship from the four-legged perspective. "When we saw those first (brain) images, it was unlike anything else," said lead researcher Gregory Berns in a video interview posted online. "Nobody, as far as I know, had ever captured images of a dog's brain that wasn't sedated. This was (a) fully awake, unrestrained dog, here we have a picture for the first time ever of her brain," added Berns, who is director of the Emory University Center for Neuropolicy. He added, "Now we can really begin to understand what dogs are thinking. We hope this opens a whole new door into canine cognition, social cognition of other species." Berns realized dogs could be trained to sit still in a brain-scanning machine after hearing that a U.S. Navy dog had been a member of the SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden. "I realized that if dogs can be trained to jump out of helicopters and airplanes, we could certainly train them to go into an fMRI to see what they're thinking," Berns said. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 16760 - Posted: 05.08.2012

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News The tantalising prospect of treating a range of brain diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, all with the same drug, has been raised by UK researchers. In a study, published in Nature, they prevented brain cells dying in mice with prion disease. It is hoped the same method for preventing brain cell death could apply in other diseases. The findings are at an early stage, but have been heralded as "fascinating". Many neuro-degenerative diseases result in the build-up of proteins which are not put together correctly - known as misfolded proteins. This happens in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's as well as in prion diseases, such as the human form of mad cow disease. Turn off Researchers at the University of Leicester uncovered how the build-up of proteins in mice with prion disease resulted in brain cells dying. They showed that as misfolded protein levels rise in the brain, cells respond by trying to shut down the production of all new proteins. It is the same trick cells use when infected with a virus. Stopping production of proteins stops the virus spreading. However, shutting down the factory for a long period of time ends up killing the brain cells as they do not produce the proteins they actually need to function. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Prions; Alzheimers
Link ID: 16759 - Posted: 05.07.2012

By Bruce Bower It’s prime time in social psychology for studying primes, a term for cues that go unnoticed but still sway people’s attitudes and behavior. Primes have been reported to influence nearly every facet of social life, at least in lab experiments. Subtle references to old age can cause healthy college students to slow their walking pace without realizing it. Cunningly presented cues about money nudge people to become more self-oriented and less helpful to others. And people holding a hot cup of coffee are more apt to judge strangers as having warm personalities. Over the last 15 years, many social psychologists have come to regard the triggering of personal tendencies by unnoticed cues as an established phenomenon. Priming may even inspire innovative mental health treatments, some argue. Yale University psychologist John Bargh likens primes to whistles that only mental butlers can hear. Once roused by primes, these silent inner servants dutifully act on a person’s preexisting tendencies and preferences without making a conscious commotion. Many animals reflexively take appropriate actions in response to fleeting smells and sounds associated with predators or potential mates, suggesting an ancient evolutionary heritage for priming, Bargh says. People can pursue actions on their own initiative, but mental butlers strive to ease the burden on the conscious lord of the manor. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16758 - Posted: 05.07.2012

By Tori Rodriguez Early birds, save your creative challenges for just before bed. Your least productive time of day may be the perfect opportunity for a moment of insight, according to a study from a recent issue of Thinking & Reasoning. Mareike Wieth, an assistant professor of psychological science at Albion College, and her colleagues divided study participants into morning types and evening types based on their answers on the Morningness Eveningness Question­naire (those who scored in the neutral range—about half of initial respondents—were excluded). Wieth instructed them to solve three analytic problems and three insight-oriented ones. No time-of-day effect was found for analytic problem solving, but subjects’ performance on tasks requiring creative insight was consistently better during their nonoptimal times of day. Wieth believes this effect is the result of a reduction in inhibitory attentional control—the ability to filter information that is irrelevant to the task at hand. “This less focused cognitive state makes people more susceptible to think about other, seemingly unrelated information—like things they experienced earlier or their to-do list,” she explains. “This additional information floating around in your mind during your nonoptimal time of day ultimately helps you reach that creative aha! moment.” © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Sleep; Attention
Link ID: 16757 - Posted: 05.07.2012

By DENISE GRADY He threw away tax documents, got a ticket for trying to pass an ambulance and bought stock in companies that were obviously in trouble. Once a good cook, he burned every pot in the house. He became withdrawn and silent, and no longer spoke to his wife over dinner. That same failure to communicate got him fired from his job at a consulting firm. By 2006, Michael French — a smart, good-natured, hardworking man — had become someone his wife, Ruth, felt she hardly knew. Infuriated, she considered divorce. But in 2007, she found out what was wrong. “I cried,” Mrs. French said. “I can’t tell you how much I cried, and how much I apologized to him for every perceived wrong or misunderstanding.” Mr. French, now 71, has frontotemporal dementia — a little-known, poorly understood and frequently misdiagnosed group of brain diseases that eat away at personality and language. Although it was first recognized more than 100 years ago, there is still no cure or treatment, and patients survive an average of only eight years after the diagnosis. But recently, researchers have been making important discoveries about the biochemical and genetic defects that cause some forms of the disease. And for the first time, they have identified drugs that may be able to treat one of those defects, the buildup of abnormal proteins in the brain. Tests in people, the first ever such drug trials in this disease, could begin as soon as early next year at the University of California, San Francisco. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Attention
Link ID: 16756 - Posted: 05.07.2012

By ANNE EISENBERG DIGITAL hearing aids can do wonders for faded hearing. But other devices can help, too, as audio technology adds new options to help people converse at a noisy restaurant, or talk quietly with a pharmacist at a crowded drugstore counter. Richard Einhorn, a composer who suddenly lost much of his hearing two years ago, relies on his hearing aid, of course, for general use. But when he is meeting friends at a busy coffee shop — where his hearing aid is not always good at distinguishing their voices amid the clatter — he removes it. He has a better solution. He pops on a pair of in-ear earphones and snaps a directional mike on his iPhone, which has an app to amplify and process sound. “I put the iPhone on the table,” he said. “I point it at whoever’s talking, and I can have conversations with them. Soon we forget the iPhone is sitting there.” Mr. Einhorn’s ad hoc solution to restaurant racket is a feasible one, said Jay T. Rubinstein, a professor of bioengineering and otolaryngology at the University of Washington. “It makes sense when you need to capture a speaker’s voice in a noisy environment,” he said. “A system that gives you a high-quality directional mike and good earphones can help people hear in a complex setting.” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 16755 - Posted: 05.07.2012

By Gary Stix “Superwoman has been rumbled,” declared a Daily Telegraph article in 2001 that chronicled how the human brain’s inability to “multitask” undercuts the prospects for a woman to juggle career and family with any measure of success. The brain as media icon has emerged repeatedly in recent years as new imaging techniques have proliferated—and, as a symbol, it seems to confuse as much as enlighten. The steady flow of new studies that purport to reduce human nature to a series of illuminated blobs on scanner images have fostered the illusion that a nouveau biological determinism has arrived. More often than not, a “neurobiological correlate”— tying together brain activity with a behavioral attribute (love, pain, aggression)—supplies the basis for a journal publication that translates instantly into a newspaper headline. The link between blob and behavior conveys an aura of versimilitude that often proves overly seductive to the reporter hard up to fill a health or science quota. A community of neuroscience bloggers, meanwhile, has taken on the responsibility of rectifying some of these misinterpretations. A study published last week by University College of London researchers—“Neuroscience in the Public Sphere”—tried to imbue this trend with more substance by quantifying and formally characterizing it. “Brain-based information possesses rhetorical power,” the investigators note. “Logically irrelevant neuroscience information [the result of the multitude of correlations that turn up] imbues an argument with authoritative, scientific credibility.” © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16754 - Posted: 05.05.2012

Ewen Callaway Humans walk on two feet and (mostly) lack hair-covered bodies, but the feature that sets us furthest apart from other apes is a brain capable of language, art, science, and other trappings of civilisation. Now, two studies published online today in Cell1, 2 suggest that DNA duplication errors that happened millions of years ago might have had a pivotal role in the evolution of the complexity of the human brain. The duplications — which created new versions of a gene active in the brains of other mammals — may have endowed humans with brains that could create more neuronal connections, perhaps leading to greater computational power. The enzymes that copy DNA sometimes slip extra copies of a gene into a chromosome, and scientists estimate that such genetic replicas make up about 5% of the human genome. However, gene duplications are notoriously difficult to study because the new genes differ little from their forebears, and tend to be overlooked. Evan Eichler, a geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and lead author of one of the Cell papers, previously found that humans have four copies of a gene called SRGAP2, and he and his colleagues decided to investigate. In their new paper, they report that the three duplicated versions of SRGAP2 sit on chromosome 1, along with the original ancestral gene, but they are not exact copies. All of the duplications are missing a small part of the ancestral form of the gene, and at least one duplicate, SRGAP2C, seems to make a working protein. Eichler’s team has also found SRGAP2C in every individual human genome his team has examined – more than 2,000 so far – underscoring its significance. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Evolution; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16753 - Posted: 05.05.2012

By Bruce Bower Feeling peppy may lead older adults to settle for less. In a new study, seniors in a good mood compared fewer options and made worse choices than did those in a bad mood or younger participants. “Positive emotions may have costs for older adults’ decision making,” says study coauthor Bettina von Helversen, a psychologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland. A bright mood makes it harder to select a quality option from a series of choices, such as finding a bargain on a new computer offered at different prices by various online sites, say von Helversen and University of Basel colleague Rui Mata. Though the study looked at comparing prices on products, picking from a series of choices, what psychologists call sequential decision making, especially comes into play in situations such as choosing an apartment, hiring a caretaker or selecting a mate. Previous research has found that people’s moods generally become increasingly upbeat as they age. It’s this good mood, perhaps more than intellectual declines, that undermine seniors’ sequential decisions by promoting a limited search of available options, the researchers report in an upcoming Psychology and Aging. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Emotions; Attention
Link ID: 16752 - Posted: 05.05.2012