by Michael S. Gazzaniga We humans think we make all our decisions to act consciously and willfully. We all feel we are wonderfully unified, coherent mental machines and that our underlying brain structure must reflect this overpowering sense. It doesn’t. No command center keeps all other brain systems hopping to the instructions of a five-star general. The brain has millions of local processors making important decisions. There is no one boss in the brain. You are certainly not the boss of your brain. Have you ever succeeded in telling your brain to shut up already and go to sleep? Even though we know that the organization of the brain is made up of a gazillion decision centers, that neural activities going on at one level of organization are inexplicable at another level, and that there seems to be no boss, our conviction that we have a “self” making all the decisions is not dampened. It is a powerful illusion that is almost impossible to shake. In fact, there is little or no reason to shake it, for it has served us well as a species. There is, however, a reason to try to understand how it all comes about. If we understand why we feel in charge, we will understand why and how we make errors of thought and perception. When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time in the desert of Southern California—out in the desert scrub and dry bunchgrass, surrounded by purple mountains, creosote bush, coyotes, and rattlesnakes. The reason I am still here today is because I have nonconscious processes that were honed by evolution. © 2012, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Consciousness; Attention
Link ID: 17121 - Posted: 08.04.2012

By Michael Slezak, Even though women live longer than men, their brains seem to age faster. The reason? Possibly a more stressful life. As people age, some genes become more active while others become less so. In the brain, these changes can be observed through the transcriptome, a set of RNA molecules that indicate the activity of genes within a population of cells. When Mehmet Somel, a computational biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, and his colleagues compared the transcriptome of 55 brains, they found that the pattern of gene activation and deactivation that occurs with aging appeared to progress faster in women. “This was just the opposite of what we’d originally expected,” says Somel. He says that because women have longer lives, his group had expected to see slower or later aging-related brain changes. “But it fits everyday observations on aging. Not all organs within an individual age at the same rate.” Somel’s team compared the expression of more than 13,000 genes in four brain regions. In the superior frontal gyrus, which has been associated with self-awareness, the researchers found 667 genes that were expressed differently in men and women. Of those, 98 percent were skewed toward faster aging in women. Some of these gene changes have been linked to general cognitive decline and degenerative disease. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Stress
Link ID: 17120 - Posted: 08.04.2012

Scientists believe they have discovered a clue to why women tend to live longer than men - by studying fruit flies. Writing in Current Biology, they focus on mutations in mitochondrial DNA - the power source of cells. Mitochondria are inherited only from mothers, never from fathers, so there is no way to weed out mutations that damage a male's prospects. But one ageing expert said there were many factors that explained the gender difference in life expectancy. By the age of 85, there are approximately six women for every four men in the UK, and by 100 the ratio is more than two to one. And females outlive males in many other species. In the research, experts from Australia's Monash University and the UK's Lancaster University analysed the mitochondria of 13 different groups of male and female fruit flies. Mitochondria, which exist in almost all animal cells, convert food into the energy that powers the body. Dr Damian Dowling, of Monash University who was one of the researchers, said the results point to numerous mutations within mitochondrial DNA that affect how long males live, and the speed at which they age. "Intriguingly, these same mutations have no effects on patterns of ageing in females," he said. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 17119 - Posted: 08.04.2012

By Judy Stone As expected, the FDA recently announced approval of a second drug for obesity within a month, Vivus’ Qnexa, now renamed Qsymia. This approval is less of a surprise, as the data appeared somewhat stronger than that for Arena’s lorcaserin (Belviq). What was rather curious is that USA Today broke news of the drug’s approval before the FDA had announced their decision. The FDA is responding to the growing crisis of obesity. As noted in my post, “A Glut of Obesity Drugs?” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has established that more than one-third of adults in the United States are obese, defined as having a Body-Mass Index of ­> 30. In the U.S. alone, 78 million U.S. adults are obese; another 34% of adults are overweight > 25-29. So 70% of US adults have a problem with weight. This results in an estimated 300,000 deaths per year. And the burden of obesity is increasing, expected to rise to 42% by 2030, with an additional 11% prevalence of severe obesity (BMI >40, or ~80+ lbs overweight). Obesity is the second cause of preventable deaths, after smoking. The costs of obesity are also staggering, and may be as high as $147 billion per year, or roughly 9% of U.S. annual medical expenditures. The health crisis from obesity is drawing increasing attention, as outlined in the documentary, “The Weight of the Nation,” a project of HBO, the Institute of Medicine (IOM), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and Kaiser Permanente. In my previous post, we looked at how obesity drugs work and how there are many different targets that are under study. Lorcaserin (Belviq) works by targeting the activation of the serotonin 5HT2C receptor in the brain. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17118 - Posted: 08.04.2012

By Melissa Healy Los Angeles Times Measuring human intelligence may be controversial and oh-so-very-tricky to do. But like obscenity, we think we know it when we see it. A new study, however, demonstrates a more rigorous way to see and measure differences in intelligence between individuals. It finds that connectedness among the brain's disparate regions is a key factor that separates the plodding from the penetrating. As many researchers have long suspected, intelligence does have a "seat" in the human brain: an area just behind each of the temples called the lateral prefrontal cortex. But researchers writing in the journal Neuroscience found that human behavior that is exceptionally flexible, responsive and capable of navigating complexity requires something beyond a strong and active prefrontal cortex: strong and agile runners must link that seat to brain regions involved in perception, memory, language and mobility. The researchers estimate that the strength of those connections, as measured when subjects rested between mental tasks, explains about 10% of differences in intelligence among individuals. That makes this measure an even better predictor of intelligence than brain size -- a measure that scientists believe may explain about 7% of the variation in intelligence among individuals. To detect this relationship, the Neuroscience study compared functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans of 78 men and women between 18 and 40 years old with those subjects' performance on tests of cognitive performance that required "fluid intelligence" and "cognitive control." Subjects, for instance, were asked to count backwards by, say, nine, or to watch a series of visual images and then indicate whether a single image shown had been among them. Copyright 2012

Keyword: Intelligence; Brain imaging
Link ID: 17117 - Posted: 08.04.2012

Published by scicurious under Behavioral Neuro Imagine for a minute. You're in a coffeeshop, or a bar, or at a swanky cocktail party (whichever you prefer). There are people around, chatting nearby. But you're speaking to the person directly across from you. Somehow, you can pick their voice out of the chatter and attend to what they are saying, even though the conversations around you might be just as loud or louder (especially in a bar!) than the one you're interested in. Have you ever wondered how you do that? I know I have. It's kind of a mind-boggling problem (and is, in fact, called the Cocktail party problem), trying to separate out speech, and make sense of it, in comparison to all the noise. And it's not just something to think about for us humans. Voice recognition technology and recording wrestles with this all the time: how to pick out the voice from the crowd? As it turns out, it's all about attention, and how that attention can change your brain. The authors of this study were interested in what happens in the brain when someone tries to pick out a single speaker in a room full of people. To look at this, they actually used electrodes implanted subdurally (beneath the tough dura mater on the outside of the brain) in three human patients. Three is a really small number, but they had to use patients who were receiving this electrode implant clinically, in this case for treatment of epilepsy, and who were known to have normal hearing and language skills. Copyright © 2012

Keyword: Attention; Hearing
Link ID: 17116 - Posted: 08.04.2012

By Emily Selvadurai Health reporter, BBC News online People with mild mental illnesses such as anxiety or depression are more likely to die early, say researchers. They looked at the premature deaths from conditions such as heart disease and cancer of 68,000 people in England. The research suggested low level distress raised the risk by 16%, once lifestyle factors such as drinking and smoking were taken into account. More serious problems increased it by 67%, the University College London and Edinburgh University team said. The risk among those with severe mental health problems is already well documented. But researchers said the finding among those with milder cases - thought to be one in every four people - was concerning, as many would be undiagnosed. The Wellcome Trust-funded study, published in the British Medical Journal, looked at data over 10 years and matched it to information on death certificates. This is the largest study so far to show an association between psychological distress and death, according to scientists. Lead author Dr Tom Russ said: "The fact that an increased risk of mortality was evident, even at low levels of psychological distress, should prompt research into whether treatment of these very common, minor symptoms can modify this increased risk of death." BBC © 2012

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 17115 - Posted: 08.01.2012

By Maria Konnikova It’s 1879, and psychology is just about to be born. The place: the University of Leipzig. The birth parent: Wilhelm Wundt. The deed: establishing the first official university laboratory for the study of psychology, an event taken by many as the line that marks unofficial explorations from empirical, accepted science. The laboratory has four rooms and a handful of students. By the early 1880s, it will grow to an astounding six rooms—and a total of 19 students. In 1883, it will award its first doctoral degree, to the first of Wundt’s advisees, Max Friedrich, on the topic of the time-course of individual psychological processes. That same year will see the publication of the first issue of the Journal Philosophische Studien, the first journal of experimental psychology, established—fittingly—by none other than Wundt. From that point on, the future of the discipline will be assured: psychology will survive, and perhaps even flourish, with the dawn of the new century. It will not be just another experiment gone wrong. That, at least, is the most straightforward story. It’s difficult to pinpoint a date for the birth of Psychology as such. That 1879 laboratory is but one contender, and Wundt, but one possible father. But just think of how many paved the way for Wundt’s achievements. Is it fair to call him the start, or is he rather more of a point of coalescence (if that)? And how far back must we go, if we’re to be really fair? © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 17114 - Posted: 08.01.2012

By RONI CARYN RABIN Older people who have eye surgery to remove cataracts and improve their vision also significantly reduce their risk of breaking a hip in a fall, with the sickest among them and those in their early 80s experiencing nearly 30 percent fewer hip fractures in the first year, a large study reports. The study adds to findings from earlier papers indicating that the benefits of cataract surgery, a relatively safe outpatient procedure with a high success rate, may significantly enhance the quality of life for the elderly, improving sleep, enabling them to be more engaged and mentally alert and curbing depression. “This is elective surgery, and sometimes people think, ‘I’m too sick to have my cataracts out,’ or ‘I’m too old,’ ” said Dr. Anne L. Coleman, the study’s lead author and a professor of ophthalmology at the Jules Stein Eye Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But the take-home message from this study is that if you’re starting to have vision problems and the doctor says you have cataracts, you should probably think of having them removed.” Hip fractures, which become more common with age, are serious injuries for elderly people, with complications that can be life-threatening. The new study, published on Tuesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, examined the incidence of hip fractures within a year of cataract surgery in a random sample of 1.1 million Medicare beneficiaries age 65 and older who were given a cataract diagnosis from 2002 to 2009. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17113 - Posted: 08.01.2012

By Tina Hesman Saey Expeditions to Africa may have brought back evidence of a hitherto unknown branch in the human family tree. But this time the evidence wasn’t unearthed by digging in the dirt. It was found in the DNA of hunter-gatherer people living in Cameroon and Tanzania. Buried in the genetic blueprints of 15 people, researchers found the genetic signature of a sister species that branched off the human family tree at about the same time that Neandertals did. This lineage probably remained isolated from the one that produced modern humans for a long time, but its DNA jumped into the Homo sapiens gene pool through interbreeding with modern humans during the same era that other modern humans and Neandertals were mixing in the Middle East, researchers report in the August 3 Cell. The evidence for ancient interbreeding is surprisingly convincing, says Richard “Ed” Green, a genome biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “There is a signal that demands explanation, and archaic admixture seems to be the most reasonable one at this point,” he says. Scientists have discovered that some people with ancestry outside Africa have DNA inherited from Neandertals or Denisovans, a mysterious group known only through DNA derived from a fossil finger bone found in a Siberian cave (SN: 6/5/10, p. 5; SN: 1/15/11, p.10). But those researchers had DNA from fossils to guide their research. This time, researchers led by Sarah Tishkoff at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia didn’t have fossil DNA, or even fossils. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 17112 - Posted: 08.01.2012

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR Heart failure can take a heavy psychological toll, with many patients developing symptoms of depression. But a new study suggests that an exercise plan can ease the melancholy, creating improvements in mood that are comparable to the effects seen with medication. For roughly a year, researchers followed more than 2,000 people treated for congestive heart failure at 82 medical centers in the United States, France and Canada. Those who were assigned to a moderate aerobic exercise program — about 90 to 120 minutes a week — saw greater reductions in symptoms of depression than those who were not enrolled in such a program. “I think this shows that for patients who have heart failure, exercise is certainly an excellent treatment,” said Dr. James A. Blumenthal, a professor of medical psychology at Duke University Medical Center and the lead author of the study, which was published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. “It’s something that most patients can engage in. It results in improved cardiorespiratory fitness, they have more stamina, and now we see that not only do they derive these physical benefits, but they also derive psychological benefits as well.” An estimated five million Americans are living with heart failure, with more than half a million new cases diagnosed each year. Patients often experience a drastic decline in their physical abilities, and with it a blow to their mental health. Up to 75 percent of patients develop some symptoms of depression, with about 40 percent suffering from full-blown clinical depression, which can worsen their overall prognosis. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Stress
Link ID: 17111 - Posted: 08.01.2012

By Winnie Yu If you want to keep your cool, you might want to pass up those greasy wings and gooey dessert. A new study from the University of California, San Diego, suggests that people whose diets are higher in trans fats are more prone to aggression. Trans fats, or hydrogenated oils, have made the news in recent years because studies have strongly linked them to heart disease and cancer, and some locales have passed laws restricting their use. They are still common, however, in restaurant food and many grocery items. Beatrice Golomb, a physician and associate professor of medicine at U.C. San Diego, wondered if trans fats might affect behavior, after noting how they interact with a type of healthy fat. Past studies found that docosahexaenoic acid—or DHA, a long-chain omega-3 fatty acid—has a calming, antidepressant effect. Trans fats disrupt the chemical process that leads to the conversion of fatty acids into DHA, which led Golomb to suspect that trans fats might be linked to aggression. Her study, which was published in March in PLoS ONE, involved 1,018 men and women older than 20 who filled out a food questionnaire and several other surveys that measure impatience, irritability and aggression. Even after considering other influences, Golomb's team found a strong link between the intake of trans fats and aggression. “Trans-fatty acids were a more consistent predictor of aggression than some traditional risk factors such as age, male sex, education and smoking,” Golomb says. The findings were consistent across both sexes and across all ages, ethnicities and socioeconomic groups. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 17110 - Posted: 08.01.2012

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Two groundbreaking new studies address the irksome question of why so many of us who work out remain so heavy, a concern that carries special resonance at the moment, as lean Olympians slip through the air and water, inspiring countless viewers to want to become similarly sleek. And in a just world, frequent physical activity should make us slim. But repeated studies have shown that many people who begin an exercise program lose little or no weight. Some gain. To better understand why, anthropologists leading one of the new studies began with a research trip to Tanzania. There, they recruited volunteers from the Hadza tribe, whose members still live by hunting and gathering. Providing these tribespeople with a crash course in modern field-study technology, the researchers fitted them with GPS units, to scrupulously measure how many miles each walked daily while searching for food. They also asked them to swallow so-called doubly labeled water, a liquid in which the normal hydrogen and oxygen molecules have been replaced with versions containing tracers. By studying these elements later in a person’s urine, researchers can precisely determine someone’s energy expenditure and metabolic rate. The researchers gathered data for 11 days, then calculated the participants’ typical daily physical activity, energy expenditure and resting metabolic rates. They then compared those numbers with the same measures for an average male and female Westerner. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17109 - Posted: 08.01.2012

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD In the widening search for the origins of modern human evolution, genes and fossils converge on Africa about 200,000 years ago as the where and when of the first skulls and bones that are strikingly similar to ours. So this appears to be the beginning of anatomically modern Homo sapiens. But evidence for the emergence of behaviorally modern humans is murkier — and controversial. Recent discoveries establish that the Homo sapiens groups who arrived in Europe some 45,000 years ago had already attained the self-awareness, creativity and technology of early modern people. Did this behavior come from Africa after gradual development, or was it an abrupt transition through some profound evolutionary transformation, perhaps caused by hard-to-prove changes in communication by language? Now, the two schools of thought are clashing again, over new research showing that occupants of Border Cave in southern Africa, who were ancestors of the San Bushmen hunter-gatherers in the area today, were already engaged in relatively modern behavior at least 44,000 years ago, twice as long ago as previously thought. Two teams of scientists reported these findings Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Since this early date for the San culture is close to when modern humans first left Africa and reached Europe, proponents of the abrupt-change hypothesis took the findings as good news. Richard G. Klein, a paleoanthropologist at Stanford University, said in an e-mail from South Africa that the new evidence “supports my view that fully modern hunter-gatherers emerged in Africa abruptly around 50,000 years ago, and I remain convinced that the behavior shift, or advance, underlies the successful expansion of modern Africans to Eurasia.” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 17108 - Posted: 07.31.2012

By Dan Hurley, New studies are raising the hope of finding a pill to improve the intellectual abilities of people with Down syndrome. One study, published online by the journal Translational Psychiatry, is the first ever to show that a drug might improve the verbal memory of people with the disorder. Although the benefits appeared modest and the study was small, Down syndrome experts meeting last week in Washington called it a major development after more than a decade of research in mice and test tubes. “A lot of us are well aware of progress we’ve seen . . . in the past five to 10 years,” said Jamie Edgin, a developmental psychologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Among those advances, she said, are tests designed to measure the cognitive abilities of people with Down syndrome. The development of mice with the genetic equivalent of Down syndrome, essential for studies of possible drug treatments, has been another milestone. “There’s a lot of excitement,” Edgin said. The drug used in the recent study, Namenda, is approved for treating Alzheimer’s disease. Although it has shown only a slim and temporary benefit for that condition, a 2007 study of mice with the genetic equivalent of Down syndrome showed that it almost entirely normalized their ability to learn and remember. The effects in humans appeared far less striking. Alberto Costa, a physician and neuroscientist at the University of Colorado in Denver, ran a test involving 42 young adults with Down syndrome, half of whom received a placebo. After 16 weeks, most of the people who received Namenda performed better on tests of memory than they had at the beginning of the study. But the effect was statistically significant on only one of the 14 tests, which some researchers at last week’s meeting said they considered disappointing. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17107 - Posted: 07.31.2012

The cause of a type of hereditary blindness has been traced to a genetic mutation, a discovery that potentially opens a new treatment approach, Canadian and international researchers say. The inherited eye disease, called Leber congenital amaurosis, usually shows its first signs at birth or in the months following. It affects about one in 80,000 newborns. About 1,000 Canadians live with the effects. The researchers' genetic discovery helps provide families with a firm diagnosis, Robert Koenenkoop says.The researchers' genetic discovery helps provide families with a firm diagnosis, Robert Koenenkoop says. (CBC) Scientists at Montreal's McGill University and their co-authors have identified that a gene called NMNAT1 can cause LCA. "We're getting closer to finding 100 per cent of the genes causing Leber congenital amaurosis," said Dr. Robert Koenekoop, director of the McGill Ocular Genetics Laboratory, who led the research team. "That gives an immediate relief to the families, because it confirms the diagnosis [and] gives you a treatment avenue." The disease was considered untreatable, but that is no longer the case for some subtypes, Koenekoop said. For the study in this week's issue of Nature Genetics, scientists analyzed the genomes of 60 infants with LCA of unknown cause. They discovered a mutation on the NMNAT1 gene, which is found in all human cells. It produces a coenzyme called NAD that is involved in hundreds of reactions. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Vision; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 17106 - Posted: 07.31.2012

by Amy West Many deep-sea squid dispel an ink cloud to flee a predator, but one species goes a step farther: It ensures a getaway by counterattacking and then ditching the tips of its arms. These detached bits can continue to twitch and emit bioluminescent light—likely providing a vital distraction. By catching this strange maneuver on camera, scientists have established Octopoteuthis deletron as the only known squid to drop portions of its arms in self-defense, much as lizards drop their tails before escaping. O. deletron inhabits depths of 500 to 600 meters. Little is known about the biology of these gelatinous deep-dwellers, but recently they have begun to yield their secrets—including some bizarre mating behavior—thanks to powerful video cameras mounted on robotic submersibles operated by researchers at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Moss Landing, California. Viewing some of this footage, Stephanie Bush, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rhode Island, Kingston, noticed many individuals with arms of different lengths, and suspected that these cephalopods lost their arms during an attack. To investigate, Bush collaborated with researchers at MBARI. With a bit of luck, the team found squid off the coast of California, and tried poking them with the control arm of the submersible. The creatures attacked the vehicle but never held on, perhaps because they couldn't grip its smooth metal surface, Bush says. Eventually, the researchers resorted to attaching the bottle-brush they used to wash their laboratory glassware to the submersible. When they nudged the next squid they encountered, the squid attacked the brush and immediately left behind parts of two arms. Fortunately the team caught the action with a high-resolution camera (see video). As the scientists erupted into cheers in the control room, Bush says she wondered why she hadn't tried this earlier. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 17105 - Posted: 07.30.2012

by Kai Kupferschmidt Tabloid journalists have long known that you can discover dirty secrets by going through people's garbage. Now, researchers have done something similar in the name of science, albeit on a grander—and smellier—scale. They have analyzed the sewage of 19 European cities to find out how much of certain illicit drugs people in those cities consume. "The technique needs further work and validation, but this paper shows that it is a feasible approach for estimating drug use on a large scale," says Fritz Sörgel, head of the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research in Nuremberg, Germany, who was not involved in the work. To put figures on illicit drug use, researchers routinely use surveys, supplemented by data from police and customs. But they have been pushing for more accurate and objective methods to estimate the amounts consumed. One possibility is to sample the sewage of a city and look for chemical traces of the drugs themselves or metabolites created when a drug passes through the human body. "The surveys tell you what people take, but not how much, not how big the market is," says Kevin Thomas, a toxicologist at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research in Oslo and one of the authors of the new paper. "Sewage tells you that." During one week in March 2011, Thomas and colleagues collected daily samples representing 24 hours of sewage flow from 21 sewage treatment plants in 19 cities across Europe—from Antwerp to Zagreb. The samples were analyzed for traces of five different drugs by local labs according to a fixed protocol. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 17104 - Posted: 07.30.2012

Shift workers are slightly more at risk of having a heart attack or stroke than day workers, research suggests. An analysis of studies involving more than 2m workers in the British Medical Journal said shift work can disrupt the body clock and have an adverse effect on lifestyle. It has previously been linked to an increased risk of high blood pressure and diabetes. Limiting night shifts would help workers cope, experts said. The team of researchers from Canada and Norway analysed 34 studies. In total, there were 17,359 coronary events of some kind, including cardiac arrests, 6,598 heart attacks and 1,854 strokes caused by lack of blood to the brain. These events were more common in shift workers than in other people. The BMJ study calculated that shift work was linked to a 23% increased risk of heart attack, 24% increased risk of coronary event and 5% increased risk of stroke. But they also said shift work was not linked to increased mortality rates from heart problems and that the relative risks associated with heart problems were "modest". The researchers took the socioeconomics status of the workers, their diet and general health into account in their findings. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Stress
Link ID: 17103 - Posted: 07.30.2012

By RODNEY MUHUMUZA KITGUM, Uganda — Augustine Languna's eyes welled up and then his voice failed as he recalled the drowning death of his 16-year-old daughter. The women near him looked away, respectfully avoiding the kind of raw emotion that the head of the family rarely displayed. "What is traumatizing us," he said after regaining his composure, "is that the well where she died is where we still go for drinking water." Joyce Labol was found dead about three years ago. As she bent low to fetch water from a pond a half mile from Languna's compound of thatched huts, an uncontrollable spasm overcame her. The teen was one of more than 300 young Ugandans who have died as a result of the mysterious illness that is afflicting more and more children across northern Uganda and in pockets of South Sudan. The disease is called nodding syndrome, or nodding head disease, because those who have it nod their heads and sometimes go into epileptic-like fits. The disease stunts children's growth and destroys their cognition, rendering them unable to perform small tasks. Some victims don't recognize their own parents. Ugandan officials say some 3,000 children in the East African country suffer from the affliction. Some caregivers even tie nodding syndrome children up to trees so that they don't have to monitor them every minute of the day. Beginning Monday, Uganda hosts a four-day international conference on nodding syndrome that health officials believe will lead to a clearer understanding of the mysterious disease. © 2012 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Epilepsy
Link ID: 17102 - Posted: 07.30.2012