Daniel Cressey With the official opening of a £5.4-million (US$8.7-million) facility at its UK base on 30 April, pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly says it is reaffirming its commitment to neuroscience research at a time when other drug firms are mostly avoiding the field. The site, at Erl Wood in Windlesham, Surrey, will house around 130 scientists working on the early phases of clinical drug development, making it Lilly's second-largest research site worldwide, after the company’s headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana. Researchers will work on conditions ranging from cancer and diabetes to Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia, says Sarah Chatham, managing director of the centre. The investment contrasts with lay-offs at other pharma companies. Many have turned their attention to acquiring smaller firms to get new drugs, instead of using large in-house research teams. Lilly’s focus on neuroscience is also unusual, with Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca all bailing out of much brain work in recent years (see 'Novartis to shut brain research facility'). The centre was welcomed by UK science minister David Willetts, not least because policy-makers have grown anxious that Britain is no longer perceived as a good place to do medical research. Academics are concerned that their research environment is overburdened with red tape, especially because of what they see as the bureaucratic way the United Kingdom implemented the European Union Clinical Trials Directive in 2004 (see 'UK health research to be rehabilitated'). © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Alzheimers
Link ID: 16742 - Posted: 05.03.2012

By Neil Bowdler Health reporter, BBC News A trial has begun of a portable brain-cooling device which could enhance the survival prospects of cardiac patients. Ground-based cars in the service of the charity London's Air Ambulance are the first in the UK to carry the Rhinochill machine. Larger brain-cooling devices are already used in UK hospitals on cardiac and stroke patients to aid recovery. But cooling the body earlier in the field, during resuscitation, could save more lives, early research suggests. "We know quite well that if you're cooled after your heart attack, it can not only mean that your chances of surviving are greatly increased, but your chances of surviving without brain damage are too," Dr Richard Lyon, a registrar with London's Air Ambulance, told BBC News. "For the last 10 years or so, the big thrust has been to cool you as quickly as possible, but usually after you get delivered to hospital, after your heart has been restarted. "What we're doing is bringing everything much further forward - starting this brain-cooling process while CPR is still being carried out in the field." BBC © 2012

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 16741 - Posted: 05.03.2012

by Helen Thompson Reports of ‘mad cow’ disease in the United States erupted in the news this week after the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) confirmed that the remains of a California dairy cow had tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). This marks the fourth case of BSE identified in the US, and the first case in six years. In spongiform encephalopathy diseases, abnormally folded prion proteins accumulate in the brain, causing other proteins to deform as well. BSE has proved to be unusually adept at jumping between species; humans exposed to BSE can develop its human counterpart: Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). In a statement released on 24 April, Karen Ross, Secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture said, “The detection of BSE shows that the surveillance program in place in California and around the country is working.” Food safety advocates such as Yonkers, New York, -based Consumers Union say it’s a warning sign that surveillance is inadequate and needs to be stepped up. Ross’s statement also makes a point of noting a key feature of this particular case: The infected cow carried what is known as ‘L-type’ BSE, a version of the disease that has not been detected before in the US and has so far not been associated with transmission through animal feed. As the policy debate over testing rumbles on, here is a short guide to what is known and not known about this rare strain and its unexpected appearance. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 16740 - Posted: 05.02.2012

By Christof Koch In the 1954 foundational text of the Age of Aquarius, The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley describes his encounters with mescaline, a psychoactive substance derived from the peyote cactus and traditionally used by Native Americans for religious purposes. Huxley’s experiences include profound changes in the visual world, colors that induce sound, the telescoping of time and space, the loss of the notion of self, and feelings of oneness, peacefulness and bliss more commonly associated with religious visions or an exultant state: “A moment later a clump of Red Hot Pokers, in full bloom, had exploded into my field of vision. So passionately alive that they seemed to be standing on the very brink of utterance, the flowers strained upwards into the blue.... I looked down at the leaves and discovered a cavernous intricacy of the most delicate green lights and shadows, pulsing with undecipherable mystery.” Yet remarkably these enhanced percepts are not grounded in larger but in reduced brain activity, as a recent experiment reports. More on that in a moment. Mescaline, together with psilocybin, another natural psychoactive compound produced by “magic” mushrooms, and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD or, simply, acid), a potent synthetic psychedelic drug, became widely popular in the 1960s counterculture. The striking similarities between the reports of LSD users and symptoms of acute psychosis led researchers to postulate that serotonin, a chemical-signaling compound or neurotransmitter released by certain groups of neurons in the brain stem, helped to mediate both types of experiences. Indeed, it is now quite certain that the characteristic subjective and behavioral effects of psychedelics are initiated via stimulation of serotonin 2A receptors (known as 5-HT2A) on cortical neurons. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16739 - Posted: 05.02.2012

The number of babies born in the United States with signs of drug withdrawal has tripled in a decade because more pregnant women are using narcotics, according to a new study. The rate of infants born with withdrawal symptoms reached about one every hour in 2009, researchers report in this week’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Aileen Dannelley and her baby, Savannah, of Oak Lawn, Ill., both fought addiction to prescription painkillers, an increasing issue in the U.S. Aileen Dannelley and her baby, Savannah, of Oak Lawn, Ill., both fought addiction to prescription painkillers, an increasing issue in the U.S. (Dannelley Family/Associated Press) "What we found was that from 2000 to 2009, the number of babies having drug withdrawal increased by three times," said the study’s lead author, Dr. Stephen Patrick of the University of Michigan's division of neonatal-perinatal medicine in Ann Arbor. For the study, Patrick and his co-authors reviewed hospital billing data from across the U.S. They looked at how many women were using opiates at the time of delivery as well as whether the newborns showed drug withdrawal symptoms. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16738 - Posted: 05.02.2012

By David Biello Banned for indoor use since 2001, the effects of the common insecticide known as chlorpyrifos can still be found in the brains of young children now approaching puberty. A new study used magnetic imaging to reveal that those children exposed to chlorpyrifos in the womb had persistent changes in their brains throughout childhood. The brains of 20 children exposed to higher levels of chlorpyrifos in their mother’s blood (as measured by serum from the umbilical cord) “looked different” compared to those exposed to lower levels of the chemical, says epidemiologist Virginia Rauh of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, who led the research published online by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on April 30. “During brain development some type of disturbance took place.” The 6 young boys and 14 little girls, whose mothers were exposed to chlorpyrifos when it was used indoors to control pests prior to the ban, ranged in age from seven to nearly 10. All came from Dominican or African American families in the New York City region. Compared to 20 children from the same kinds of New York families who had relatively low levels of chlorpyrifos in umbilical cord blood, the 20 higher dose kids had protuberances in some regions of the cerebral cortex and thinning in other regions. “There were measurable volumetric changes in the cerebral cortex,” Rauh notes. Though the study did not map specific disorders associated with any of these brain changes, the regions affected are associated with functions like attention, decision-making, language, impulse control and working memory. The “structural anomalies in the brain could be a mechanism, or explain why we found cognitive deficits in children” in previous studies, Rauh notes. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 16737 - Posted: 05.02.2012

John von Radowitz Slackers may have brains that are wired for under-achievement, a study suggests. Scientists have identified neural pathways that appear to influence an individual's willingness to work hard to earn money. Scans showed differences between "go-getters" and "slackers" in three specific areas of the brain. People prepared to work hard for rewards had more of the nerve-signalling chemical dopamine in two brain regions called the striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Both are known to play an important role in behaviour-changing reward sensations and motivation. But "slackers", who were less willing to work hard for reward, had higher dopamine levels in the anterior insula. This is a brain region involved in emotion and risk perception. Dopamine is a "neurotransmitter" that helps nerves "talk" to each other by sending chemical signals across connection points called synapses. Psychologist Michael Treadway, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, US, who co-led the research, said: "Past studies in rats have shown that dopamine is crucial for reward motivation. But this study provides new information about how dopamine determines individual differences in the behaviour of human reward-seekers." The findings are reported in the latest issue of the Journal of Neurosciences. © independent.co.uk

Keyword: Attention; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16736 - Posted: 05.02.2012

At two years, Avastin (bevacizumab) and Lucentis (ranibizumab injection), two widely used drugs to treat age-related macular degeneration (AMD), improve vision when administered monthly or on an as needed basis, although greater improvements in vision were seen with monthly administration for this common, debilitating eye disease, according to researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health. Of the two drugs, Avastin is most frequently used to treat AMD.However, prior to the Comparison of AMD Treatments Trials (CATT), a two-year clinical trial, the two drugs had never been compared head-to-head. Second year results were published today in the journal Ophthalmology. First year results were published in the May 19, 2011 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. AMD is the leading cause of vision loss and blindness in older Americans. In its advanced stages, the wet form of AMD spurs the growth of abnormal blood vessels, which leak fluid and blood into the macula and obscure vision. The macula is the central portion of the retina that allows us to look straight ahead and to perceive fine visual detail. Accumulation of fluid and blood damages the macula, causing loss of central vision, which can severely impede mobility and independence. Without treatment, most patients become unable to drive, read, recognize faces or perform tasks that require hand-eye coordination. Avastin and Lucentis block growth of abnormal blood vessels and leakage of fluid from the vessels.

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16735 - Posted: 05.01.2012

By NATALIE ANGIER CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Seated in a cheerfully cramped monitoring room at the Harvard University Laboratory for Developmental Studies, Elizabeth S. Spelke, a professor of psychology and a pre-eminent researcher of the basic ingredient list from which all human knowledge is constructed, looked on expectantly as her students prepared a boisterous 8-month-old girl with dark curly hair for the onerous task of watching cartoons. The video clips featured simple Keith Haring-type characters jumping, sliding and dancing from one group to another. The researchers’ objective, as with half a dozen similar projects under way in the lab, was to explore what infants understand about social groups and social expectations. Yet even before the recording began, the 15-pound research subject made plain the scope of her social brain. She tracked conversations, stared at newcomers and burned off adult corneas with the brilliance of her smile. Dr. Spelke, who first came to prominence by delineating how infants learn about objects, numbers, the lay of the land, shook her head in self-mocking astonishment. “Why did it take me 30 years to start studying this?” she said. “All this time I’ve been giving infants objects to hold, or spinning them around in a room to see how they navigate, when what they really wanted to do was engage with other people!” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16734 - Posted: 05.01.2012

TIM JOHNSON, Free Press When it comes to unfathomed mysteries, few are more persistent than this one: Just what is it that goes on in the brain of an impulsive, risk-taking teenager? Thirty-two international researchers — including two from the University of Vermont — have managed to shed some light on this question. In a journal article published Sunday, they identify patterns of brain activity that are characteristic of teens who are prone to use drugs or alcohol. What’s new about this study, by a European group called IMAGEN Consortium, is that it reveals distinct neural networks in the adolescent brain in which measurable activity can be linked to various forms of impulsivity — the likelihood of doing something risky. The researchers identified seven networks that were activated when the teenagers successfully controlled impulses; and six networks activated when impulses failed to be controlled. If you’re a worried parent looking for risk-averting strategies, don’t get your hopes up. This study isn’t about to spawn new ways to discourage teen drug and alcohol use — it’s just the the first of an anticipated series of research projects that might hold some promise for that. © 2012 www.burlingtonfreepress.com.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16733 - Posted: 05.01.2012

By Rebecca Cheung Unique wings allow one type of male tree cricket to hum a different sort of tune — one that encompasses a wide range of pitches. The discovery could mean that these males are saying a lot more than previously thought, and that potential mates might be listening for these notes. “The frequencies might be carrying some information about the condition of the male. An insect that is able to sing faster, and hence at a higher frequency, might actually be quite well fed, or he’s in a nice warm place you might want to be in,” says Natasha Mhatre of the University of Bristol in England. “You now have to ask: ‘What kind of information is that frequency carrying?’” Crickets produce sound by rubbing their wings together. For most crickets — including field and bush crickets — males can produce only one musical note. Generally, the pitch of the male’s song is directly related to his size. Researchers believe that when females scout for a potential mate, they tend to be drawn to songs of deeper frequency or pitch, which are produced by larger crickets. But certain tree crickets were known to vary their tune. Scientists had observed, for instance, that a species from southern India called Oecanthus henryi produces high-pitch sounds at warmer temperatures. Until now, it wasn’t fully understood how these critters could do this. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hearing
Link ID: 16732 - Posted: 05.01.2012

Kat Austen, CultureLab editor Neuroanatomist and stroke survivor Jill Bolte Taylor explains why she hopes her display of cerebral artwork will raise awareness of the brain Why are you opening an outdoor exhibition of giant brains? I care about the brain. I grew up wanting to study it because I have a brother diagnosed with schizophrenia. Then in 1996, when I was a neuroscience researcher at Harvard Medical School, I experienced a rare form of stroke. A few years later, during my recovery, I was in Chicago, and on the streets they had sculptures of these enormous cows painted by individual artists so that every cow was different. I thought, wouldn't it be cool to have brains on public display for art? So for the past 10 years, I've been dreaming about having brains on display. And last year I started a not-for-profit organisation to raise appreciation for and awareness about the human brain. The Brain Extravaganza in Bloomington, Indiana, where I live, is the first project. There are 22 enormous brains - five feet long, five feet high and four feet wide. Every brain is anatomically correct with 12 pairs of cranial nerves, and each is decorated by a different artist using different kinds of media. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 16731 - Posted: 05.01.2012

In his second year of neuroscience grad school, Greg Dunn was moonlighting with a different kind of experiment: blowing ink across pieces of paper. The neuron-like pattern it formed was instantly recognizable to him as a neuroscientist. "Ink spreads because it wants to go in the direction of less resistance, and that's probably also the case of when branches grow or neurons grow," he says. "The reason the technique works really well is because it's directly related to how neurons are actually behaving." Dunn calls this the "fractal solution to the universe," which he sees as the "fundamental beauty of nature." He's fascinated that this branching pattern holds true across orders of magnitude, whether that's nanometers for neurons, centimeters for ink, or meters for a tree branch. Since graduating with his PhD last fall, Dunn has continued to spend his days with neurons--big, golden ones ten thousand times the size of neurons in your brain. The former University of Pennsylvania grad student now creates paintings of neurons for a living. © 2012, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16730 - Posted: 05.01.2012

By Maria Konnikova In 1927, Gestalt psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed a funny thing: waiters in a Vienna restaurant could only remember orders that were in progress. As soon as the order was sent out and complete, they seemed to wipe it from memory. Zeigarnik then did what any good psychologist would: she went back to the lab and designed a study. A group of adults and children was given anywhere between 18 and 22 tasks to perform (both physical ones, like making clay figures, and mental ones, like solving puzzles)—only, half of those tasks were interrupted so that they couldn’t be completed. At the end, the subjects remembered the interrupted tasks far better than the completed ones—over two times better, in fact. Zeigarnik ascribed the finding to a state of tension, akin to a cliffhanger ending: your mind wants to know what comes next. It wants to finish. It wants to keep working – and it will keep working even if you tell it to stop. All through those other tasks, it will subconsciously be remembering the ones it never got to complete. Psychologist Arie Kruglanski calls this a Need for Closure, a desire of our minds to end states of uncertainty and resolve unfinished business. This need motivates us to work harder, to work better, and to work to completion. It adds impetus to minds that may otherwise be too busy or oversaturated to bother with the details. In other words, it ensures that those orders will stay in the waiters’ heads until it is certain that your food will hit the table as promised. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16729 - Posted: 05.01.2012

Horrific crimes, such as the Anders Breivik case, illustrate the misconceptions the public has about mental illness, a leading expert says. Professor Simon Wessely, of King's College London, said the simplest responses to mass killings were that the perpetrators "must be mad". But he said the way Breivik carried out the killings suggested otherwise. He said the idea a psychiatric diagnosis could help people avoid punishment was wrong too. Writing in the Lancet medical journal, Professor Wessely said putting forward a mental illness defence in the UK could lead a person to spending more time behind bars than less. "The forensic psychiatry system is not a soft or popular option," he added. The psychiatrist also said the Breivik case highlighted another misconception - that outrageous crimes must mean mental illness. "For schizophrenia to explain Breivik's actions, they would have to be the result of delusions." But he added: "The meticulous way in which he planned his attacks does not speak to the disorganisation of schizophrenia." BBC © 2012

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 16728 - Posted: 04.30.2012

By Kay Lazar LITTLETON - Marjorie Bontempo was a changed woman after moving into Life Care Center of Nashoba Valley, a Littleton nursing home where the staff doesn’t believe in using antipsychotic drugs simply to calm residents. A physician had prescribed an antipsychotic for Bontempo a year earlier, after Alzheimer’s disease had transformed her from an accomplished seamstress and demure family peacekeeper into a cantankerous, confused woman who refused to eat. The medicine eased her aggression but left her dazed, said her daughter, Patty Sinnett. Nashoba’s nurses took Bontempo off the powerful sedative. Sinnett went to visit soon after and found her mother in the activity room watching a Clark Gable movie. “She started explaining the whole movie to me, like a normal person would,’’ Sinnett said. “It was the first time I had had a conversation with her in a year. It was incredible.’’ The Littleton facility is one of a small but growing number of nursing homes that are treating the agitation and disruptive behavior that often accompany dementia without resorting to antipsychotics. Instead, Life Care Center and similar homes try to tailor care to each resident, to make it familiar and comforting. Staffers comb residents’ pasts to learn their preferences, hobbies, and accomplishments, tapping bedrock emotions that endure long after memory fades. © 2012 NY Times Co

Keyword: Alzheimers; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 16727 - Posted: 04.30.2012

By Deborah Kotz, Globe Staff Most people who suffer regularly from debilitating migraine headaches don’t get the appropriate treatment to prevent them, according to new guidelines issued earlier this week from the American Academy of Neurology. And a disappointing study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that injections of Botulinum toxin A, or Botox, had smaller-than-expected benefits for those with chronic, near-daily headaches, working only modestly better than a placebo. “There are several reasons why patients aren’t being properly treated,” said Dr. Stephen Silberstein, a neurologist at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia who led the guideline committee. “They may be misdiagnosed with tension or sinus headaches or may be using a medication that doesn’t work or is prescribed at too low a dose.” (Five of the six guideline authors, including Silberstein, disclosed that they had previously served on advisory boards or accepted honoraria or consulting fees from manufacturers of drugs used to treat migraines.) Migraines -- which are frequently accompanied by nausea, vomiting, visual disturbances or aura, and sensitivity to light -- affect about 1 in 10 Americans and can be triggered by certain foods, lack of sleep, stress, jet lag, fasting, and hormonal changes during a woman’s menstrual cycle. Nearly 40 percent of migraine sufferers have at least four or five headaches a month, and a smaller percentage have “chronic migraines” defined as having pain at least 15 days a month. Women are also more likely to get them than men. © 2012 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16726 - Posted: 04.30.2012

By DENISE GRADY Obesity and the form of diabetes linked to it are taking an even worse toll on America’s youths than medical experts had realized. As obesity rates in children have climbed, so has the incidence of Type 2 diabetes, and a new study adds another worry: the disease progresses more rapidly in children than in adults and is harder to treat. “It’s frightening how severe this metabolic disease is in children,” said Dr. David M. Nathan, an author of the study and director of the diabetes center at Massachusetts General Hospital. “It’s really got a hold on them, and it’s hard to turn around.” Before the 1990s, this form of diabetes was hardly ever seen in children. It is still uncommon, but experts say any increase in such a serious disease is troubling. There were about 3,600 new cases a year from 2002 to 2005, the latest years for which data is available. The research is the first large study of Type 2 diabetes in children, “because this didn’t used to exist,” said Dr. Robin Goland, a member of the research team and co-director of the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. She added, “These are people who are struggling with something that shouldn’t happen in kids who are this young.” Why the disease is so hard to control in children and teenagers is not known. The researchers said that rapid growth and the intense hormonal changes at puberty might play a part. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16725 - Posted: 04.30.2012

By Linda Carroll It sounds like the stuff of nightmares: A man wakes up in the middle of a surgery and can’t speak, or even twitch a muscle. But that’s exactly what a young man from Sweden says happened to him. The 22-year-old Swede was in the middle of surgery for a collapsed lung when he woke up to hear doctors moving around and operating on him, the Swedish newspaper The Local reported. “It was terrible, my worst nightmare,” he told the Sweden’s English-language paper. The operation was in March and the patient, Simon Rosenqvist, recently filed a complaint with Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare, according to a report in the New York Daily News. “My brain kept telling me over and over ‘say your name, say something, do something, wiggle your toes,’ but I was completely incapable of saying something or moving my body at all,’” Rosenqvist wrote in his report. Rosenqvist told The Local that he was awake for some 30 to 35 minutes of the 50 minute procedure and that he was in serious pain and was very angry at the end of the procedure. Experts say that although it’s rare, patients do sometimes wake up during surgeries even when they’ve been given general anesthesia. Overall, this happens in 1 to 2 out of 1,000 procedures, says Dr. Lee A. Fleisher, a professor and chair of anesthesiology and critical care at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Sleep; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16724 - Posted: 04.30.2012

by Jane J. Lee Companies and health organizations spend millions of dollars on surveys, polls, and focus groups trying to suss out what people will like, buy, or do. But research shows that these techniques aren't all that accurate. Can brain scans do any better? It's possible, according to a new study that finds that a neural activity predicts people's responses to a public service ad about cigarette smoking better than simply asking a focus group. Researchers led by neuroscientist Emily Falk at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Matthew Lieberman, a social neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, focused on the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), located at the front of the brain. Of the many roles its neurons play, scientists were most interested in the ones related to self-reflection, thinking of what you value, and identity. Activity in this region increases when people identify with what they see or try to determine the value of something as it relates to them. A previous study by Falk found that MPFC activity that was recorded while people viewed slides with messages urging regular sunscreen use predicted which individuals were most likely to comply. But Lieberman and Falk wanted to go a step further and see if activity in the MPFC in one group of people could predict the behavior of a much bigger population. They looked at the effectiveness of three ad campaigns aimed at getting smokers to call the National Cancer Institute's quit hotline. The researchers took functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of brain activity in 30 heavy smokers who intended to quit, evenly split between men and women and ranging from 28 to 69 years old, as they watched three ad campaigns. Then scientists asked participants to rank the campaigns according to how effective they thought they'd be for the public. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 16723 - Posted: 04.28.2012