By Mahir Ozdemir Hardly a week passes without some sensational news about brain scans unleashing yet another secret of our cognitive faculties. Very recently I stumbled upon the news that according to recent research neuroscientists can tell, depending on your brain responses, whether you and your significant one will still be together in a few years: “You might hide it from friends and family. But you can’t hide it from neuroscientists”. The technique at the bottom of the study, just like the majority of studies making a big splash, is functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI. Researchers have been struggling to unfold ‘what’s under the hood’ through the lens of Neuroscience and they have been finding all sorts of insights into human behavior. They have been looking at everything from how multitasking is harder for seniors to how people love talking about themselves. Neural basis of love and hatred, compassion and admiration have all been studied with fMRI, yielding colored blobs representing the corresponding love or hatred centers in our brains. First a brief background: The fMRI technique measures brain activity indirectly via changes in blood oxygen levels in different parts of the brain as subjects participate in various activities. While lying down with head immobilized in a small confined chamber of the notoriously noisy MR scanner, subjects are shown experimental stimuli. They wear earplugs to reduce at least some part of the noise while performing these cognitive tasks. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 17005 - Posted: 07.07.2012

by Sarah C. P. Williams Talk about showing your feminine side. On one flank, a courting male cuttlefish looks like a normal male of his species, with tigerlike stripes extending horizontally down his skin. But on the other, he resembles a female, displaying marbled browns and whites. He needs the male pattern to attract the female, while the female motif keeps competing males from fighting him. That’s scientists’ best guess for now, at least, to explain the devious cuttlefish behavior that they’ve observed and reported for the first time. “Cuttlefish are a very smart group of fish,” says lead researcher and ecologist Culum Brown of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. “And it’s pretty obvious that they are specifically using this display in a tactical way.” Researchers knew that cuttlefish (Sepia plangon) could camouflage their skin to match their surroundings, and that they could show different patterns on each side. Their skin contains a highly concentrated layer of chromatophores—various colored pigment-containing cells—that can be moved closer or further from the surface to change the pattern on the fish. But scientists had never seen a male fish mimicking a female on only one side as a trick of courtship. Brown and his colleagues first observed the behavior in a large aquarium in their lab. They wondered whether males in the wild did the same thing, and if so, when and why. So they combed through photos of 108 distinct groups of cuttlefish taken on previous dives of Sydney Harbour. They found that when a male was in a group with one female and one other male, he displayed the dual patterns—a male side facing the female and a female side facing the male—39% of the time. In other situations, such as an all-male group or a male matched with two females, the dual display was never seen. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17004 - Posted: 07.05.2012

By James Gallagher Health and Science reporter, BBC News, Istanbul Time-lapse photography has shown that embryos of smoking women develop more slowly. French academics in an IVF clinic took regular pictures of an egg from the moment it was fertilised until it was ready to be implanted into the mother. At all stages of development, embryos from smokers were consistently a couple of hours behind, a study showed. The lead researcher, from Nantes University Hospital, said: "You want a baby, quit smoking". Smoking is known to reduce the chances of having a child. It is why some hospitals in the UK ask couples to give up smoking before they are given fertility treatment. As eggs fertilised through IVF initially develop in the laboratory before being implanted, it gave doctors a unique opportunity to film the embryos as they divide into more and more cells. Researchers watched 868 embryos develop - 139 from smokers. In the clinic the embryos of non-smokers reached the five-cell stage after 49 hours. In the smokers it took 50 hours. The eight-cell stage took 62 hours in smokers' embryos, while non-smokers' embryos reached that point after 58 hours. Senior embryologist and lead researcher, Dr Thomas Freour, told the BBC: "Embryos from smoking women, they behave slower, there is a delay in their development. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17003 - Posted: 07.05.2012

Jon Bardin Growing up in the suburbs of New York City, Takao Hensch learned German from his father, Japanese from his mother and English from the community around him. “I was always wondering,” he says, “what is it that makes it so easy to learn languages when you're young, and so hard once you begin to get older?” Today, as a neuroscientist at Boston Children's Hospital in Massachusetts, Hensch is at the forefront of efforts to answer that question in full molecular detail. Language acquisition is just one of many processes that go through a 'sensitive' or 'critical' period — an interval during development when the neural circuits responsible for that process can be sculpted, and radically changed, by experience (see 'Open and shut'). During critical periods, children can make rapid progress at discerning facial features that look like their own, recognizing spoken language and locating objects in space. But within a few months or years, each window of opportunity slams shut, and learning anything new in that realm becomes difficult, if not impossible. Or maybe not. What Hensch and others in the small, but rapidly advancing, field of critical-period research are finding is that those windows can be prised back open. “For the first time, we are beginning to understand the biology that underlies critical periods,” says Hensch. And that understanding is suggesting ways to intervene in various neural disorders, including intractable conditions such as adult amblyopia, in which information from one eye is not correctly processed by the brain, and possibly even autism. The work could even lead to 'plasticity pills' that enhance learning or help to wipe out traumatic memories. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Language
Link ID: 17002 - Posted: 07.05.2012

By Scott O. Lilienfeld and Hal Arkowitz Imagine an eight-year-old boy whom we will call Eric. He is irritable and talks incessantly. Unable to sit still and concentrate, he does poorly at school. Nevertheless, he claims to be one of the smartest kids in the world and blames his poor academic performance on his “horrible” teachers. There are periods when his mood changes abruptly from euphoria to depression and then swings back again. Eric's symptoms qualify him for a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, which is characterized by episodes of full-blown mania or a less severe form called hypomania. These moods usually alternate with periods of depression [see box on opposite page]. Until about 1980 most mental health professionals believed that bipolar disorder did not occur in children. Although a few still hold this view, the general opinion of the psychiatric community has drastically shifted over the past 30 years, a period in which diagnoses of the disorder in kids have skyrocketed. In a study published in 2007 psychiatrist Carmen Moreno, then at Gregorio Marañón University General Hospital in Madrid, and her colleagues found a 40-fold increase between 1994 and 2003 in the number of visits to a psychiatrist in which a patient younger than 19 was given this diagnosis. By 2003, the researchers reported, the number of office visits resulting in a bipolar diagnosis in these youths had risen from 25 per 100,000 people to 1,003 per 100,000 people, a rate almost as high as that for adults. Such data have sparked widespread concern that the condition is egregiously overdiagnosed, perhaps contributing to the use of ineffective and even harmful medical treatments. In this column, we discuss controversies regarding the overdiagnosis of bipolar disorder in children and recent attempts to remedy this situation. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17001 - Posted: 07.05.2012

An Ontario study of two drugs — one approved to treat wet age-related macular degeneration, and the other used off-label to fight the eye disease —suggests neither increases the risk of stroke or heart attack, adding to the debate over why both treatments from the same company aren't covered under provincial drug plans when used for AMD. AMD, which affects about one million Canadians mostly over age 65, is a progressive condition that damages the macula in the eye, and is a leading cause of blindness. Researchers from Toronto, Hamilton and Kingston, Ont., followed 91,378 older adults with a history of retinal disease between April 1, 2006 and March 31, 2011, to determine if injections of bevacizumab (trade name Avastin) or ranibizumab (Lucentis) could be linked to increased vascular risks including stroke, heart attack or congestive heart failure. Avastin and Lucentis, both manufactured by Roche, are vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) inhibiting drugs, and both have the potential to cause vascular side-effects. However, the research done at Ontario's Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES), and published in Wednesday's edition of BMJ (British Medical Joural) concludes injections of these drugs into the eyes of patients with retinal disease did not increase such risks. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 17000 - Posted: 07.05.2012

By Helen Shen, Globe Correspondent The International Olympic Committee has issued new rules for the 2012 London Games that would require checking testosterone levels in athletes whose eligibility as females is called into question. Several elite female athletes have previously been accused of secretly being males, including South African runner Caster Semenya , who was investigated and later cleared after her 2009 world championship victory in the 800-meter event drew accusations from competitors. The IOC says its intent is to identify athletes who would be ineligible “by reason of hormonal characteristics” -- not to determine gender, but the policy has drawn criticism. Stanford University bioethicist Katrina Karkazis said the inclusion of a gynecologist and geneticist on the IOC examining panel contradicts this message. “It’s way more than a blood test or a series of blood tests. There will be genital exams, there will be genetic testing,” she said. Athletes will be disqualified to compete as females if they are found with testosterone levels typical of males, and if they possess cellular receptors that respond to the hormone’s effects, which include boosting muscle mass and strength. “They chose something that really does discriminate between males and females,” said Dr. Joshua Safer, an endocrinologist at Boston Medical Center and expert in transgender care. Testosterone levels vary from one individual to another and, for a given individual, can vary widely by time of day. But the overall ranges of testosterone are about 10 times higher in men than in women, he said. © 2012 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 16999 - Posted: 07.03.2012

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Premature birth may increase the risk for serious mental illness in adolescence and young adulthood, a recent study reports. Researchers reviewed birth and hospital admissions records of more than 1.3 million Swedes born from 1973 to 1985. They found that compared with those born at term, young adults born very premature — at less than 32 weeks’ gestation — were more than twice as likely to be hospitalized for schizophrenia or delusional disorders, almost three times as likely for major depression, and more than seven times as likely for bipolar illness. The lead author, Chiara Nosarti, a senior lecturer in neuroimaging at Kings College London, emphasized that while the increase in relative risk is substantial, the absolute increase in numbers of people with the illnesses is not. “Despite these findings,” she said, “the majority of people born preterm have no psychiatric problems, and the number of people hospitalized with psychiatric disease is very low.” Still, she added, “routine screening may help to detect early signs of illness.” The risk also increased for people born late preterm, or 32 to 36 weeks’ gestation, but not as sharply. They were 60 percent more likely to be admitted for schizophrenia or delusional disorders, 34 percent more likely for depressive disorder, and about twice as likely to be hospitalized for bipolar illness. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 16998 - Posted: 07.03.2012

By Linda Searing, THE QUESTION Might fear of childbirth contribute to a longer labor? THIS STUDY involved 2,206 women who were pregnant with one child and had planned to have a vaginal birth. Based on their answers to questions about childbirth that they gave when they were 32 weeks pregnant, 165 women (about 8 percent) were classified as fearful. Those women spent more time in labor than did those who were not fearful: eight hours, on average, compared with 6 hours 28 minutes. Also, emergency Caesarean deliveries and births that involved the use of forceps or other instruments were more common among fearful women. Overall, 25 percent of women who feared childbirth delivered vaginally without intervention, compared with 44 percent of those who were not afraid. WHO MAY BE AFFECTED? Pregnant women. Worries related to childbirth generally focus on pain and how to cope with it. Medical experts say the pain varies from woman to woman and depends in part on a woman’s anatomy, the size and position of her baby and the strength of contractions as well as her emotional state and attitude. CAVEATS Some data in the study came from the women’s responses on questionnaires. FIND THIS STUDY June 27 online issue of BJOG: an International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (www.bjog.org). © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Stress; Emotions
Link ID: 16997 - Posted: 07.03.2012

By Scicurious When I saw all the headlines going around focused on this paper, I KNEW I had to check it out. Heck, sometimes Twitter is faster than my Pubmed alerts! “Chronic Stress, Mood Disorders Linked In New Research On Rats“, “Stress Blocks Gene That Guards Brain Against Depression” The link between stress, dysregulations of the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, and depressive-like symptoms in animals and depression in humans is actually really well known. We can put down our “stress linked to depression” headlines, now. In fact, other papers from the same lab as this paper have shown the link between stress and depression many, many times. We know stress correlates with depression and that stress can produce depressive like symptoms in animals. But this paper? This paper is very new, and very cool! Not because it shows a link between stress and depression. This new finding, the gene neuritin, joins a group of things linking stress and depression, including BDNF, glucocorticoid receptors, serotonin 1A receptors, and many more. This is not the first link between stress and depression and it won’t be the last. But it IS a cool finding. Because it presents us with a new antidepressant target, and we can always use one of those. All of the clinical antidepressants that are currently on the market work through one specific mechanism: they increase the levels of certain neurotransmitters in your brain. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Stress; Depression
Link ID: 16996 - Posted: 07.03.2012

By Sandra G. Boodman, Of course Diane O’Leary was seriously tired — who wouldn’t be? A doctoral candidate in philosophy with a demanding academic schedule and a 3-year-old son, O’Leary had flown home to Sydney after her family’s annual visit to relatives in Upstate New York. A few days after that 1994 flight, when O’Leary had to stop in the middle of a dance class because she was too exhausted to continue, she chalked it up to bad jet lag. And a week or so later, when she couldn’t walk up a small hill with her son without stopping to rest on a bench, the 33-year-old wasn’t alarmed. “I managed to get myself through it,” she recalled, adding that she was accustomed to being somewhat tired. But a few weeks later, when the exhaustion didn’t recede, O’Leary consulted her general practitioner. He sent her to a specialist, who made a worrisome diagnosis that would prove to be the first of many wrong answers: chronic fatigue syndrome, an illness that is not relieved by rest. Several months later, after she developed joint pain along with the fatigue, doctors decided she had rheumatoid arthritis, a serious inflammatory disorder that can cause joint destruction. The following year, that diagnosis was jettisoned in favor of a severe form of lupus, an autoimmune disease in which the body attacks its own tissues. But after medications that are the mainstay of treating lupus had no effect — and she developed strange new symptoms — O’Leary’s doctors shifted focus, suggesting that she was also suffering from an underlying psychological disorder. She said she remembers one doctor telling her, “You’re just nervous, honey.” © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Stroke; Depression
Link ID: 16995 - Posted: 07.03.2012

Stephanie Pappas Women infected with the cat parasite Toxoplasma gondii are more likely to attempt suicide than non-infected women, new research finds. The reason for this connection, however, remains mysterious. T. gondii is a protozoa that prefers to infect cats, but can make its home in any warm-blooded animal. Humans can pick up the parasite from contact with cat feces, or by eating undercooked meat or unwashed vegetables. Once ingested, T. gondii can make a home for itself inside the brain and muscle tissues, protected inside cysts that are resistant to attacks by the host's immune system. Some studies have linked infection by this parasite with a variety of mental health and brain problems, including schizophrenia, neurosis and brain cancer. But scientists aren't clear on whether the parasite contributes to these problems or is a mere side effect. Someone with schizophrenia, for example, might struggle to keep up good hygiene, meaning the mental disorder could increase the risk for infection. The new study linking suicide and T. gondii has the same limitation. Researchers can't say for sure whether the parasite somehow drives people to suicide. But in women with infections, they found, the risk of an attempt is 1.5 times greater than in women without. "We can't say with certainty that T. gondii caused the women to try to kill themselves, but we did find a predictive association between the infection and suicide attempts later in life that warrants additional studies," lead researcher Teodor Postolache, a psychiatrist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said in a statement. "We plan to continue our research into this possible connection." © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 16994 - Posted: 07.03.2012

Content provided by Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Sometimes mind-blowing sex is not cause for celebration, as some individuals experience intense headaches that explode in pain at the moment of orgasm. Until now, only two cases of these sex headaches had been reported in teenagers. Two new cases, 16-year-old boy and an 18-year-old girl, bring the odd, though not life-threatening, phenomenon to light. And doctors are hoping the sex-headache cases will make both other doctors and teens aware of the temporary disorder. "What I wonder about is whether there are many other adolescents out there who are having this problem and aren't telling anyone," said Dr. Amy Gelfand, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. "This is why pediatricians should be aware of this, so an adolescent doesn't have to raise this issue." About 1 percent of Americans have experienced a headache as the result of sex, called a primary sex headache, in their lifetimes; about 50 percent of individuals who have primary sex headaches also get migraine headaches. Even so, their cause remains a mystery. Primary sex headaches come in two varieties — one that gradually builds up in intensity during sex and the other develops explosively at orgasm. © 2012 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16993 - Posted: 07.03.2012

By ABBY ELLIN Since Ms. B. entered her mid-40s, she says, sex has been more about smoke and mirrors than thunder and lightning. She is rarely if ever interested enough to initiate it with her partner of 10 years, and she does not reach climax during the act. She wishes it were otherwise. “Sex just isn’t a priority anymore,” said Ms. B., 45, a professor in New York who spoke on the condition that only her last initial be used. “Still, it would be nice not to feel sexually dead.” Ms. B.’s plight is far from unique, and now the marketplace is starting to respond. In the absence of a government-approved female counterpart to men’s potency drugs like Viagra, Cialis and Levitra, many women are turning to over-the-counter products, including lubricants, arousal gels, massage oils, nutritional and herbal supplements, and vibrators. Drugstore chains are now selling these products right next to the bandages and heating pads. K-Y Intense, a female arousal gel that claims to heighten clitoral sensitivity, is sold in Walmart, Walgreen and Rite Aid. Sensuva’s ON, an arousal oil, can be found in 640 GNC stores nationwide. Intimina by LELO, an “intimate lifestyle line” that manufactures personal massagers, apparel and “intimate cosmetics,” is sold at Pharmaca Integrative pharmacies. And Zestra Essential Arousal Oil is now sold in 1,800 Walmarts, up from 880 in 2010. “The average woman in a committed relationship is having sex once a week,” said Rachel Braun Scherl, president of Semprae Laboratories, the manufacturer of Zestra, which recently signed Kris Kardashian Jenner as a spokeswoman. “Our idea is not to get them to have more sex — it’s that if they’re having sex they should enjoy it.” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16992 - Posted: 07.03.2012

By Morgen E. Peck Anyone who has pulled an all-nighter knows it is possible to be tired without being sleepy. The body slows and concentration slips, even as thoughts spin toward a manic blur. It feels as though the sleep-deprived brain is actually becoming more active. And indeed it is, according to a recent study in the journal Cerebral Cortex. Marcello Massimini, a neurophysiologist at the University of Milan in Italy, found that the brain becomes more sensitive as the day wears on. The experiment, he explains, is like poking a friend in the ribs to see how high he jumps. Massimini prodded brain cells in the frontal cortex with a jolt of electricity, delivered via noninvasive transcranial magnetic stimulation. Then he observed how the rest of the brain responded, comparing results from subjects who had been awake for two, eight, 12 or 32 hours. “I'm sure if you bump your friend when he's sleep-deprived, he's going to jump higher,” he says. The sleep-deprived brain, it turns out, also gets jumpy, responding to the electrical jolt with stronger, more immediate spikes of activity. The results jibe with a widely held theory that while we are awake, our neurons are constantly forming new synapses, or connections to other neurons, which ramps up the activity in our brain. Many of these connections are irrelevant, but the only way to prune them is by shutting down for a while. The theory explains why it is difficult to cram new information into a sleepy brain. But it also helps to explain some unusual medical observations: epileptics are more likely to have seizures the longer they stay awake, and severely depressed patients with abnormally low brain activity sometimes improve after skipping sleep. “You keep them awake for one night, and, incredibly, they get better,” Massimini says. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Sleep; Depression
Link ID: 16991 - Posted: 07.02.2012

Adults who were subjected to physical punishment such as spanking as children are more likely to experience mental disorders, say Canadian researchers who encourage other forms of discipline. Monday's issue of the journal Pediatrics includes a study on the proportion of illnesses such as depression, anxiety, alcohol and drug abuse as well as personality disorders that may be attributable to physical punishment. Positive reinforcement techniques have more evidence backing them than physical punishment.Positive reinforcement techniques have more evidence backing them than physical punishment. (Evan Vucci/Associated Press) Physical punishment was defined as pushing, grabbing, shoving, slapping and hitting in the absence of more severe maltreatment of a child through physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect or exposure to intimate partner violence. "It definitely points to the direction that physical punishment should not be used on children of any age and we need to be considering that when we're thinking about policy and programs so we can protect children from potentially harmful outcomes," said study author Tracie Afifi, who is in the department of community health sciences at the University of Manitoba. Afifi hopes the findings from the study that involved more than 34,000 U.S. adults will make parents think twice about spanking. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Stress; Depression
Link ID: 16990 - Posted: 07.02.2012

by Beverly Purdy The Medivac helicopter made a noisy descent to the landing pad at University Medical Center in Salt Lake City. The patient on board was on the final leg of a long journey home from South Africa. Jeremy Clark, an ambitious 23-year-old college graduate, had been on a Mormon mission in Johannesburg when he awoke one day unable to move his legs. He was briefly hospitalized there, but the South African doctors could not explain his sudden paralysis and found no evidence of injury or infection, so he was transferred back to the States by air ambulance. Medics wheeled Jeremy to the neurology ward, where I was waiting. They said he had been about three weeks into his two-year commitment in South Africa when one morning he did not show up for his assignment, nor did he answer his 
phone. Someone finally went to his apartment and found him lying there, immobilized. “He’s been like this for a week, doctor,” the medic told me. “He hasn’t spoken since this happened.” As the neurology resident, I needed to test Jeremy for a number of disorders, including multiple sclerosis (ms); myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular autoimmune disease that causes varying degrees of muscle weakness; Guillain-Barré syndrome, an acute condition associated with progressive muscle weakness and paralysis; and stroke. I would also have to perform a lumbar puncture to collect fluid from around the brain and inside the spinal cord to rule out infection. Although his symptoms didn’t quite support the diagnosis, I also wondered if he could have been exposed to a toxin that can cause paralysis, such as botulism or tetanus. © 2012, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 16989 - Posted: 07.02.2012

by Sarah C. P. Williams The vast majority of adults have had a sore back at some point in their lives. If they're lucky, the pain subsides after a few days or weeks. But for some, whose initial injuries appear no different than the fortunate ones, back pain lasts for years. Now, researchers have discovered a difference in brain scans between the two groups of patients that appears early in the course of the pain. The finding could lead to not only ways of identifying patients who are the most at risk for long-term pain but to new treatments or preventions for chronic pain. "This is the very first time we can say that if we have two subjects who have the same type of injury for the same amount of time, we can predict who will become a chronic pain patient versus who will not," says neuroscientist Vania Apkarian of Northwestern University, Chicago, who led the new work. Over the past 2 decades, Apkarian's lab has run many studies comparing the brains of patients with chronic back pain with those of healthy people, finding differences in brain anatomy or the function of certain regions. But the study designs made it hard to sort out which brain changes were consequences of the chronic pain—or the patients' painkillers or altered lifestyles—versus those that drove the pain's chronic nature. Apkarian and colleagues have now tracked the brains of back pain patients over time rather than comparing single neural snapshots. His team began with 39 people who had experienced moderate back pain—a five or six on a self-described scale of 10—for 1 to 4 months. Over the next year, the team scanned the patients' brains four times and followed their pain. By year's end, 20 of the patients had recovered, while 19 continued to hurt, meeting the criteria for chronic pain. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Stress
Link ID: 16988 - Posted: 07.02.2012

by Andy Coghlan One of the key elements of memory – how we store and retrieve words according to what they mean – has been unravelled by analysing electrical signals from people's brains while they recalled lists of words. Although the discovery cannot identify the individual words being filed, which could effectively make a very basic form of mind-reading possible, it does for the first time reveal the electrical circuitry vital for storing words according to what they mean, rather than where they came in a sequence, for example. "Our main focus is on how people organise their memories," says Jeremy Manning, currently at Princeton University. "So we looked at the degree to which people organised their memories according to the meanings of words." Calling Roget The researchers recruited 46 patients with epilepsy who had already had electrodes implanted in their brains for treatment purposes. The electrodes allowed the researchers to measure electrical activity in the brain as the participants viewed lists of 15 to 20 words. A minute later, the patients were asked to recall aloud as many as possible, in any order. Collectively, the participants viewed 1550 lists, including a total of 24,760 words. The researchers included within each list words with similar meanings or associations, such as "goose" and "duck", to see if recall of one prompted recollection of the other. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Language
Link ID: 16987 - Posted: 06.30.2012

WASHINGTON — A Covidien device for rare malformed blood vessels can get stuck in the brain and has been linked to nine patient deaths, U.S. regulators warned. The device, made by Covidien unit ev3, uses a spongy material to block off blood flow to abnormal tangles of blood vessels before they are removed by surgery. The material is delivered to the brain through a tube inserted into a groin artery, known as a catheter. But the catheter can get stuck in the spongy material while inside the brain, causing serious complications including hemorrhage and death, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said in a notice posted to its website on Thursday. Since the device was approved in 2005, the FDA said it has received more than 100 reports of the catheter breaking after it became stuck, including nine deaths. In at least 54 cases, the catheter could not be removed, leaving it implanted in the patient. "Neither (the spongy material) nor the catheter is intended to be long-term implants, and patients may need additional medical interventions to have the catheter removed if it becomes entrapped," the FDA said in the notice. If the catheter is not removed, parts of it can also migrate to other parts of the body. (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2012

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 16986 - Posted: 06.30.2012