Jeannine Stamatakis We often feel rejected when faced with the popular clique at school or the office bully. Learning to protect yourself against such social assaults can prove quite difficult, but new research shows a common painkiller may reduce the impact of these upsetting interactions. A recent study published in the journal Psychological Science suggests that acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, may buffer against social pain. The lead investigator, psychologist C. Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky, hypothesized that the neural overlap between physical and emotional pain might enable a drug designed to alleviate physical pain to cushion emotional pain. In one experiment, DeWall and his team examined 62 healthy volunteers who took 1,000 milligrams of either acet­aminophen or a placebo daily for three weeks. In the evening the participants described to what extent they experienced social disappointment or felt upset during the day using a version of the Hurt Feelings Scale, a social pain measurement tool. Participants who took acet­­amin­o­phen reported fewer hurt feelings and more resilience to social pain than the subjects receiving the placebo. In a second experiment, the investigators looked at 25 healthy volunteers who ingested 2,000 milligrams of either acet­aminophen or a placebo every day over the course of three weeks. During the investigation, subjects played a computer game geared to evoke feelings of social rejection while lying in a functional MRI machine. The resulting brain scans revealed that the participants who received the drug exhibited reduced neural responses to social rejection in brain regions associated with interpreting emotional and physical pain. In contrast, the regions associated with physical pain became more active in the placebo subjects when they were rebuffed in the video game. Overall, these results indicate that acetaminophen may decrease self-reported social pain over time. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16697 - Posted: 04.24.2012

By Sandra G. Boodman, Liisa Ecola lay on the sofa in the living room of her Capitol Hill home counting the hours until she could see a specialist who, she fervently hoped, would tell her why she could no longer keep her eyes open. For several months, the 42-year-old transportation policy researcher for Rand had been squinting, even in the dark. Her puzzled optometrist had suggested she consult a neuro-ophthalmologist, a doctor who specializes in diseases of the eye originating in the central nervous system. Ecola had waited weeks to get an appointment, which was scheduled for Dec. 15, 2010. But the day before, Ecola recalled, “I opened my laptop and my eyes snapped shut.” To her horror, she discovered that her eyes would stay open only for a few minutes at a time. Panicked, she called the specialist to confirm the appointment, only to discover that she wouldn’t be seeing him at all. The office had no record of her. “I was really scared,” said Ecola, who called it the lowest moment in her quest for a diagnosis. “I was convinced I had a brain tumor.” Her problem turned out to be far less serious and far more easily treated. The following day she lucked into an appointment with another specialist, who explained the odd constellation of symptoms that had left her unable to leave her house. For several years, Ecola had suffered an unexplained, intermittent facial tic, in which she scrunched up her face as if she were tasting something awful. Because it seemed linked to stress, Ecola consulted a behavioral therapist in an effort to banish it through habit reversal training — using relaxation exercises and making a conscious effort to stop the tic. Until early 2010, the treatment usually worked, and Ecola seemed able to control it. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Vision
Link ID: 16696 - Posted: 04.24.2012

By Andrew M. Seaman NEW YORK — Doctors' belief that certain antidepressants can help to treat repetitive behaviors in kids with autism may be based on incomplete information, according to a new review of published and unpublished research. The drugs, which include popular selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), are sometimes used to treat repetitive behaviors in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). "The main issue to emphasize is that SSRIs are perhaps not as effective at treating repetitive behaviors as previously thought. Further research will help confirm these findings in the long run," said Melisa Carrasco, the study's lead author, in an email. For their analysis, Carrasco, a researcher at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and her colleagues examined PubMed and ClinicalTrials.gov for randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled trials -- considered the gold standard in medical research -- supporting the use of SSRIs and similar antidepressants in children with autism. Their search yielded 15 trials. Five studies were excluded because they did not meet the researchers' criteria. Another five were listed as completed but never published. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Autism; Depression
Link ID: 16695 - Posted: 04.24.2012

By Katherine Harmon Eager eaters know that gulping a Slurpee or inhaling a sundae can cause that brief seizing sensation known in the not-so-technical literature as “brain freeze” or “ice cream headache.” Just what causes this common cautionary condition has remained mysterious to sufferers and scientists alike (not that the two categories need remain mutually exclusive). A new study, presented April 22 at the Experimental Biology 2012 annual meeting in San Diego, proposes a probable answer. And it’s one that could also suggest new treatments for more serious conditions, such as migraines and traumatic brain injuries. The findings were not easy to obtain and required 17 courageous volunteers to submit themselves to brain freeze. These healthy, self-sacrificing adults took sips of extra-cold water through a straw, which they aimed at the roof of their mouths. While their lips were sipping away, subjects’ brains were monitored via transcranial Doppler, which can sense changes in arterial blood flow. As soon as volunteers achieved and then emerged from a freeze, they alerted the researchers. Researchers then were able to pinpoint changes in brain activity at those precise moments, comparing those signals with measurements taken under control conditions when subject sipped on room temperature water. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16694 - Posted: 04.23.2012

A "miniature honeycomb" - or scaffold - could one day be used to encourage damaged nerves to grow and recover, according to an international group of researchers. The scaffold can channel clusters of nerves through its honeycomb of holes, eventually healing a severed nerve. The findings of their study on mouse nerves are published in the journal Biofabrication. Academics hope to one day treat spinal cord injuries with the scaffold. When nerves are severed, such as in car accidents, it can result in a loss of feeling and movement. Repairing this damage can be a challenge - but nerves outside of the brain and spinal cord can repair themselves, if only over short distances. One technique to improve this repair is to use tubes. Either end of the severed nerve is placed in a tube and the two ends of the nerve should grow and join in the middle. Researchers at the University of Sheffield and Laser Zentrum Hannover, Germany, investigated using a honeycomb structure. Dr Frederik Claeyssens, from the department of materials science and engineering at Sheffield, told the BBC: "That is much more like the structure of the nerve itself. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 16693 - Posted: 04.23.2012

By Scicurious Drug addiction is a vicious cycle, but the original high is not the problem. What is the problem are the changes in our brains and behavior that drive us to seek the next high, and the next. The relationship between drug-taking and the resulting high is what behavioral pharmacologists refer to as “reinforcement”. And if we are able to alter the reinforcing value of a drug, how much we desire to get that next hit, we might be able to help addicts overcome their addictions. There are various methods that pharmacologists have tried over the years to decrease the reinforcing value of drugs in experimental situations. You can accompany a drug with an antagonist that blocks the drug effects, like combining heroin with naltrexone so that an addict attempting to take the drug cannot get high. This blocks the high, but people can always try to take more drug to overcome the antagonist effects. Another method is using long-acting, low dose drugs as replacements, such as methadone, to block the withdrawal of from drugs such as heroin or morphine. But again, people can always take more drug on top of it. Finally, there is the idea of using drug punishment. In this paradigm, you use a drug that induces nasty effects, like nausea or pain, in conjunction with the abused drug, to make people stop taking the drug. We call this paradigm a “drug punisher”. This is the idea that Kevin Freeman, Brian McMaster, and William Woolverton, in their presentation at the Experimental Biology 2012 Behavioral Pharmacology meeting, have decided to work with in cocaine using rhesus monkeys. They trained the monkeys to self-administer cocaine by pressing a lever, which delivered a shot of cocaine into the monkey’s veins. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16692 - Posted: 04.23.2012

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS The value of mental-training games may be speculative, as Dan Hurley writes in his article on the quest to make ourselves smarter, but there is another, easy-to-achieve, scientifically proven way to make yourself smarter. Go for a walk or a swim. For more than a decade, neuroscientists and physiologists have been gathering evidence of the beneficial relationship between exercise and brainpower. But the newest findings make it clear that this isn’t just a relationship; it is the relationship. Using sophisticated technologies to examine the workings of individual neurons — and the makeup of brain matter itself — scientists in just the past few months have discovered that exercise appears to build a brain that resists physical shrinkage and enhance cognitive flexibility. Exercise, the latest neuroscience suggests, does more to bolster thinking than thinking does. The most persuasive evidence comes from several new studies of lab animals living in busy, exciting cages. It has long been known that so-called “enriched” environments — homes filled with toys and engaging, novel tasks — lead to improvements in the brainpower of lab animals. In most instances, such environmental enrichment also includes a running wheel, because mice and rats generally enjoy running. Until recently, there was little research done to tease out the particular effects of running versus those of playing with new toys or engaging the mind in other ways that don’t increase the heart rate. So, last year a team of researchers led by Justin S. Rhodes, a psychology professor at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, gathered four groups of mice and set them into four distinct living arrangements. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Attention
Link ID: 16691 - Posted: 04.23.2012

By DAN HURLEY Early on a drab afternoon in January, a dozen third graders from the working-class suburb of Chicago Heights, Ill., burst into the Mac Lab on the ground floor of Washington-McKinley School in a blur of blue pants, blue vests and white shirts. Minutes later, they were hunkered down in front of the Apple computers lining the room’s perimeter, hoping to do what was, until recently, considered impossible: increase their intelligence through training. Games based on N-back tests require players to remember the location of a symbol or the sound of a particular letter presented just before (1-back), the time before last (2-back), the time before that (3-back) and so on. Some researchers say that playing games like this may actually make us smarter. “Can somebody raise their hand,” asked Kate Wulfson, the instructor, “and explain to me how you get points?” On each of the children’s monitors, there was a cartoon image of a haunted house, with bats and a crescent moon in a midnight blue sky. Every few seconds, a black cat appeared in one of the house’s five windows, then vanished. The exercise was divided into levels. On Level 1, the children earned a point by remembering which window the cat was just in. Easy. But the game is progressive: the cats keep coming, and the kids have to keep watching and remembering. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Intelligence
Link ID: 16690 - Posted: 04.23.2012

By SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE Few medicines, in the history of pharmaceuticals, have been greeted with as much exultation as a green-and-white pill containing 20 milligrams of fluoxetine hydrochloride — the chemical we know as Prozac. In her 1994 book “Prozac Nation,” Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote of a nearly transcendental experience on the drug. Before she began treatment with antidepressants, she was living in “a computer program of total negativity . . . an absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest.” She floated from one “suicidal reverie” to the next. Yet, just a few weeks after starting Prozac, her life was transformed. “One morning I woke up and really did want to live. . . . It was as if the miasma of depression had lifted off me, in the same way that the fog in San Francisco rises as the day wears on. Was it the Prozac? No doubt.” Like Wurtzel, millions of Americans embraced antidepressants. In 1988, a year after the Food and Drug Administration approved Prozac, 2,469,000 prescriptions for it were dispensed in America. By 2002, that number had risen to 33,320,000. By 2008, antidepressants were the third-most-common prescription drug taken in America. Fast forward to 2012 and the same antidepressants that inspired such enthusiasm have become the new villains of modern psychopharmacology — overhyped, overprescribed chemicals, symptomatic of a pill-happy culture searching for quick fixes for complex mental problems. In “The Emperor’s New Drugs,” the psychologist Irving Kirsch asserted that antidepressants work no better than sugar pills and that the clinical effectiveness of the drugs is, largely, a myth. If the lodestone book of the 1990s was Peter Kramer’s near-ecstatic testimonial, “Listening to Prozac,” then the book of the 2000s is David Healy’s “Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression.” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 16689 - Posted: 04.23.2012

By LAUREN SLATER Pam Sakuda was 55 when she found out she was dying. Shortly after having a tumor removed from her colon, she heard the doctor’s dreaded words: Stage 4; metastatic. Sakuda was given 6 to 14 months to live. Determined to slow her disease’s insidious course, she ran several miles every day, even during her grueling treatment regimens. By nature upbeat, articulate and dignified, Sakuda — who died in November 2006, outlasting everyone’s expectations by living for four years — was alarmed when anxiety and depression came to claim her after she passed the 14-month mark, her days darkening as she grew closer to her biological demise. Norbert Litzinger, Sakuda’s husband, explained it this way: “When you pass your own death sentence by, you start to wonder: When? When? It got to the point where we couldn’t make even the most mundane plans, because we didn’t know if Pam would still be alive at that time — a concert, dinner with friends; would she still be here for that?” When came to claim the couple’s life completely, their anxiety building as they waited for the final day. As her fears intensified, Sakuda learned of a study being conducted by Charles Grob, a psychiatrist and researcher at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center who was administering psilocybin — an active component of magic mushrooms — to end-stage cancer patients to see if it could reduce their fear of death. Twenty-two months before she died, Sakuda became one of Grob’s 12 subjects. When the research was completed in 2008 — (and published in the Archives of General Psychiatry last year) — the results showed that administering psilocybin to terminally ill subjects could be done safely while reducing the subjects’ anxiety and depression about their impending deaths. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 16688 - Posted: 04.23.2012

CBC News A special computer game is as effective for treating adolescent depression as one-on-one counselling with trained clinicians, Australian researchers report in the British Medical Journal. Researchers at the University of Auckland in New Zealand observed 187 young people12 to 19 years old who showed mild to moderate depressive symptoms. Roughly half played SPARX, a 3D fantasy game that has users work through a series of seven levels dealing with a range of topics, including: Emotions. Finding hope. Recognizing unhelpful thoughts. Over four to seven weeks, players must restore balance in a world dominated by GNATs, or gloomy negative automatic thoughts. Another group underwent face-to-face treatment by trained counsellors and psychologists. According to the researchers, SPARX was as effective in reducing symptoms of depression. Moreover, 44 per cent of those who played at least four levels completely recovered compared to 26 per cent in usual care. The results were based on several depression rating scales. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16687 - Posted: 04.21.2012

By Harvey Black Some people are friendly drunks, whereas others are hostile, potentially endangering themselves and others. The difference may lie in their ability to foresee the consequences of their actions, according to a recent study in the online Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Brad Bushman, a psychologist at Ohio State University, and his colleagues asked nearly 500 volunteers to play a simple game. The subjects, an even mix of women and men, believed they were competing against an opponent to press a button as quickly as possible. In reality, they were simply using a computer program that randomly decided if they had won or lost. When they lost, they received a shock. When the “opponent” lost, the participant gave the shock and chose how long and intense it should be. Before playing, the participants completed a survey designed to measure their general concern for the future consequences of their actions. Half the partici­pants then received enough alcohol mixed with orange juice to make them legally drunk, and the other half received a drink with a very tiny amount of alcohol in it. Subjects who expressed little interest in consequences were more likely to administer longer, more intense shocks. In the sober group, they were slightly more aggressive than people who cared about consequences. When drunk, however, their belligerence was off the charts. “They are by far the most aggressive people in the study,” Bushman says. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Aggression
Link ID: 16686 - Posted: 04.21.2012

By JAMES GORMAN First things first: The hyrax is not the Lorax. And it does not speak for the trees. It sings, on its own behalf. The hyrax is a bit Seussian, however. It looks something like a rabbit, something like a woodchuck. Its closest living relatives are elephants, manatees and dugongs. And male rock hyraxes have complex songs like those of birds, in the sense that males will go on for 5 or 10 minutes at a stretch, apparently advertising themselves. One might have expected that the hyrax would have some unusual qualities — the animals’ feet, if you know how to look at them, resemble elephants’ toes, the experts say. And their visible front teeth are actually very small tusks. But Arik Kershenbaum and colleagues at the University of Haifa and Tel Aviv University have found something more surprising. Hyraxes’ songs have something rarely found in mammals: syntax that varies according to where the hyraxes live, geographical dialects in how they put their songs together. The research was published online Wednesday in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Bird songs show syntax, this ordering of song components in different ways, but very few mammals make such orderly, arranged sounds. Whales, bats and some primates show syntax in their vocalizations, but nobody really expected such sophistication from the hyrax, and it was thought that the selection of sounds in the songs were relatively random. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16685 - Posted: 04.21.2012

by Jane J. Lee Whales use sound to communicate over entire oceans, search for food, and coordinate attacks. But just how baleen whales—a group that uses comblike projections from the roof of their mouth to catch food—heard these grunts and moans was something of a mystery. Toothed whales, including dolphins and porpoises, use lobes of fat connected to their jawbones and ears to pick up sounds. But in-depth analyses of baleen whales weren't previously possible because their sheer size made them impossible to fit into scanners such that use computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, which analyze soft tissues. So in a new study, published online this month in The Anatomical Record, researchers focused on one of the smaller species, minke whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata). They found that triangular patches of fat surrounding minke whale ears (yellow patches, above) could be key to how they hear. They scanned seven minke whale heads in CT and MRI machines, created computer models of the ears and surrounding soft tissue, and dissected the whale noggins to reveal ear fat running from blubber just under the skin to the ear bones. This is similar to the arrangement found in toothed whales. The novel analysis allowed the authors to speculate that the ear fat in both toothed and baleen whales could have shared a common evolutionary origin. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 16684 - Posted: 04.21.2012

By Nathan Seppa Neighborhood amenities such as green space and a nearby grocery store may offer residents more than just curb appeal. Children who live in such neighborhoods are roughly half as likely to be obese as kids living in areas lacking these features, researchers report in two studies in the May American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The research combines two health aspects of residential life that studies usually examine separately — neighborhood amenities that boost physical activity and ready access to a grocery store in place of fast food outlets. The new studies “are important contributions to the needed evidence documenting the influence of environmental factors on people's health, in particular obesity,” says Laura Kettel Khan, a nutritionist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. To assess those effects, Lawrence Frank, an urban planner and public health researcher at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and his colleagues rated the “built environment” of hundreds of neighborhoods in San Diego County, Calif., and King County, Wash., which includes Seattle. The researchers rated the number and quality of parks and a neighborhood’s “walkability” — whether its layout had a low level of sprawl, few cul-de-sacs and easy access to retail outlets. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16683 - Posted: 04.21.2012

By LINDA LEE A Field Notes column last Sunday (“Bridal Hunger Games”) reported on some diets that brides use to drop 15 or 20 pounds before their weddings: Weight Watchers and a personal fitness trainer, juice cleanses, the Dukan diet, diet pills, hormone shots and, new to the United States, a feeding tube diet. Readers began to respond as soon as the article went online and was posted on the Times’s Facebook page. “If you’re with someone who wants a swimsuit model for a partner, then he is free to contact Sports Illustrated and ask to date one directly,” one woman wrote on Facebook. Or why not just buy a larger size dress, asked one reader, a man. Several commenters suggested that the solution to looking good in wedding photos wasn’t losing weight, but acquiring skills in Photoshop. There were complaints about the commodification of marriage: “Just one more example of the disgusting spectacle weddings have become,” another grumped. A man jokingly suggested reverse psychology: “I say balloon up so you look as big as a house on your wedding day (wear a fat suit if you have to).” Ten years later, he wrote, people “will say admiringly how great you look today.” BluePrintCleanse’s Web site was mentioned in the column for suggesting that a bridal party cleanse together. “If a friend asked me to lose weight, or join her in such an awful venture, to be in her wedding, she wouldn’t be my friend any longer,” a woman wrote. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 16682 - Posted: 04.21.2012

By LINDA LEE JENNIFER DERRICK’S weight had crept to 159 pounds from 125, and she knew she would not fit into her grandmother’s wedding dress. “Women were smaller back then, and there was nothing to let out,” said Ms. Derrick, of Rockford, Ill. She took prescription pills, had vitamin B shots and made weekly $45 visits to a Medithin clinic in Janesville, Wis. When she married on March 18, she was back to 125 pounds; the gown, from 1938, fit perfectly. In March, Jessica Schnaider, 41, of Surfside, Fla., was preparing to shop for a wedding gown by spending eight days on a feeding tube. The diet, under a doctor’s supervision, offered 800 calories a day while she went about her business, with a tube in her nose. A 2007 Cornell University study by Lori Neighbors and Jeffery Sobal found that 70 percent of 272 engaged women said they wanted to lose weight, typically 20 pounds. So brides are increasingly going on crash diets, inspired by seeing celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker or Gwyneth Paltrow, cowed by the prospect of wearing a revealing and expensive gown and knowing that wedding photos (if not the marriage) are forever. In the two months of fittings before most clients’ weddings at Kleinfeld Bridal in New York, seamstresses are kept busy taking in gowns. Brides-to-be say, “I don’t want the size 16, I want the 14 or the 12,’ ” said Jennette Kruszka, Kleinfeld’s marketing director. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 16681 - Posted: 04.21.2012

Amy Maxmen By tacking drugs onto molecules targeting rogue brain cells, researchers have alleviated symptoms in newborn rabbits that are similar to those of cerebral palsy in children. Cerebral palsy refers to a group of incurable disorders characterized by impairments in movement, posture and sensory abilities. In general, medicines tend to act broadly rather than influence certain sets of cells in the brain. “You don’t expect large molecules to enter the brain, and if they do, you don’t expect them to target specific cells, and immediately act therapeutically — but all of this happened,” says study co-author Rangaramanujam Kannan, a chemical engineer at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. The paper is published today in Science Translational Medicine1. According the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 1 in 303 children have cerebral palsy by age 8, which usually results from neurological damage in the womb, caused by, for example, a kink in the umbilical cord that briefly dimishes the foetus' oxygen, or maternal infection. Such injuries lead to the activation of immune cells in the brain called microglia and astrocytes, which cause further inflammation and exacerbate the damage. Calming the cells is difficult, because anti-inflammatory drugs don’t easily cross the blood–brain barrier. And those that do tend to diffuse nonspecifically. “What’s amazing here is that the authors target the drug directly to the microglia,” says Mike Johnston, a paediatric neurologist at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Glia
Link ID: 16680 - Posted: 04.21.2012

Ewen Callaway Medical geneticists are giving genome sequencing its first big test in the clinic by applying it to some of their most baffling cases. By the end of this year, hundreds of children with unexplained forms of intellectual disability and developmental delay will have had their genomes decoded as part of the first large-scale, national clinical sequencing projects. These programmes, which were discussed last month at a rare-diseases conference hosted by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge, UK, aim to provide a genetic diagnosis that could end years of uncertainty about a child’s disability. In the longer term, they could provide crucial data that will underpin efforts to develop therapies. The projects are also highlighting the logistical and ethical challenges of bringing genome sequencing to the consulting room. “The overarching theme is that genome-based diagnosis is now hitting mainstream medicine,” says Han Brunner, a medical geneticist at the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands, who leads one of the projects. About 2% of children experience some form of intellectual disability. Many have disorders such as Down’s syndrome and fragile X syndrome, which are linked to known genetic abnormalities and so are easily diagnosed. Others have experienced environmental risk factors, such as fetal alcohol exposure, that rule out a simple genetic explanation. However, a large proportion of intellectual disability cases are thought to be the work of single, as-yet-unidentified mutations. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16679 - Posted: 04.19.2012

Teenagers can suffer severe sleep deprivation when the clocks change, say researchers at the University of Surrey. The amount they sleep decreases to less than six hours a night on average the week following the move to British Summer Time. During this period their concentration may be lower and mood affected. Scientists also found that even before the change, teenagers were getting less than the recommended hours of sleep. The activity of some sixth-form students from Claremont Fan Court School in Surrey was studied using wristwatches. These were worn constantly over a 10-day period before and after the clocks moved forward on 25 March. The watches reliably indicated when the teenagers were awake and asleep. The researchers found that in the days following the clock change, the teenagers had less than six hours of sleep a night. Adults generally have eight. Joanne Bower, a sleep researcher at the University of Surrey said: "During adolescence, teenagers experience a shift in their circadian rhythm [body clock] - these make sure the same things happen at the same time every day. One of these things is the production of the sleep-promoting hormone, melatonin. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16678 - Posted: 04.19.2012