By Stephen Dougherty In the film Amèlie, the main character is a young eccentric woman who attempts to change the lives of those around her for the better. One day Amèlie finds an old rusty tin box of childhood mementos in her apartment, hidden by a boy decades earlier. After tracking down Bretodeau, the owner, she lures him to a phone booth where he discovers the box. Upon opening the box and seeing a few marbles, a sudden flash of vivid images come flooding into his mind. Next thing you know, Bretodeau is transported to a time when he was in the schoolyard scrambling to stuff his pockets with hundreds of marbles while a teacher is yelling at him to hurry up. We have all experienced this: a seemingly insignificant trigger, a scent, a song, or an old photograph transports us to another time and place. Now a group of neuroscientists have investigated the fascinating question: Can a few neurons trigger a full memory? In a new study, published in Nature, a group of researchers from MIT showed for the first time that it is possible to activate a memory on demand, by stimulating only a few neurons with light, using a technique known as optogenetics. Optogenetics is a powerful technology that enables researchers to control genetically modified neurons with a brief pulse of light. To artificially turn on a memory, researchers first set out to identify the neurons that are activated when a mouse is making a new memory. To accomplish this, they focused on a part of the brain called the hippocampus, known for its role in learning and memory, especially for discriminating places. Then they inserted a gene that codes for a light-sensitive protein into hippocampal neurons, enabling them to use light to control the neurons. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16582 - Posted: 03.29.2012

By Scicurious Could stress play a role in the development of Alzheimer’s? Right now we’re not sure, but this latest study shows that it may play a role, though exactly how? Well, we’re still not sure. So what does stress have to do with Alzheimer’s? To look at this we’ll have to start by bringing two areas of study together: stress, and Tau. Alzheimer’s Disease is characterized by the development of two different globs of proteins, beta-amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. This study focuses on neurofibrillary tangles, or NFTs, which are made up of aggregates of a protein called tau. Tau is normally a protein used in the cytoskeleton to build and maintain cellular structure. In the case of Alzheimer’s Disease, tau proteins end up getting phosphorylated, have phosphorous attached to them, which causes them to be able to aggregate in groups, and if those get large enough, into neurofibrillary tangles. These tangles in your brain cells correlate with the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer’s (though as yet we have no definitive proof that they CAUSE Alzheimer’s). Studying the tau protein, how it becomes phosphorylated and then aggregates, could thus allow us to study one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease, and if these tangles cause some of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s, studies of tau could also provide us with new methods to attack the development of the disease. And now what about stress? Stress has been linked to the development of many psychiatric diseases such as anxiety and depression, but it is also a natural response to, well, stressful situations. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Alzheimers; Stress
Link ID: 16581 - Posted: 03.27.2012

OUR intelligence, more than any particular behaviour or anatomical feature, is what distinguishes humans from the myriad other species with which we share our planet. It is a key factor in everything from our anatomy to our technology. To ask why we are intelligent is to ask why we are human; it admits no discrete answer. But let's ask it here anyway. Why are we, alone in nature, so smart? Perhaps we are not. Maybe our anthropocentric conceit prevents us from fully appreciating the intelligence of other animals, be they ants, cephalopods or cetaceans. As Douglas Adams put it: "Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons." So let's rephrase the question. There is a cluster of abilities that seems unique to humans: language, tool use, culture and empathy. Other animals may have rudimentary forms of these abilities, but they do not approach humans' sophistication and flexibility. Why not? Some come closer than others. German psychologists say they have identified a chimp whose mental abilities far surpass those of its peers (see "Chimp prodigy shows signs of human-like intelligence"). Intriguingly, they go on to suggest that this might be because Natasha, the simian prodigy, exhibits strong social-reasoning skills, such as learning from others. These are the same skills to which the explosive development of human intelligence is increasingly attributed. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 16580 - Posted: 03.27.2012

By JOHN O’NEIL The first time Jillian Serpa tried to learn to drive, the family car wound up straddling a creek next to her home in Ringwood, N.J. Ms. Serpa, then 16, had gotten flustered trying to sort out a rapid string of directions from her father while preparing to back out of their driveway. “There was a lack of communication,” she said. “I stepped on the gas instead of the brake.” On her second attempt to learn, Ms. Serpa recalled, she “totally freaked out” at a busy intersection. It was four years before she tried driving again. She has made great progress, but so far has still fallen short of her goal: Two weeks ago she knocked over a cone while parallel parking and failed the road test for the fourth time. Learning to drive is hard and scary for many teenagers, and driving is far and away the most dangerous thing teenagers do. But the challenges are significantly greater for young people who, like Ms. Serpa, have attention problems. A number of cognitive conditions can affect driving, and instructors report a recent increase in the number of teenagers with Asperger syndrome seeking licenses. But the largest group of challenged teenage drivers — and the mostly closely studied — appears to be those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. A 2007 study, by Russell A. Barkley of the Medical University of South Carolina and Daniel J. Cox of the University of Virginia Health System, concluded that young drivers with A.D.H.D. are two to four times as likely as those without the condition to have an accident — meaning that they are at a higher risk of wrecking the car than an adult who is legally drunk. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD; Attention
Link ID: 16579 - Posted: 03.27.2012

By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. Like creatures battling undersea, pro-life and right-to-die forces are locked in mortal but only intermittently visible combat. The last prominent battle ended almost seven years ago, after the death of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman with brain damage whose feeding tube was removed by court order in the spring of 2005. Since then, all has been quiet on the surface, belying the continuing turmoil in hospitals and courtrooms over what, exactly, marks the end of life. Invariably, the louder the background tumult, the more useful is the quiet, dispassionate narrative. And so one turns to Dick Teresi’s new book with considerable hope: Surely Mr. Teresi, a veteran science journalist, past editor in chief of Science Digest and Omni, will be the ideal guide through those dim purgatories where life and death can be difficult to distinguish. All starts out promisingly enough. An indefatigable researcher and fluid writer, Mr. Teresi provides a good long riff on death past and present, from the Egyptian mummies, dehydrated into “the deadest people on the planet,” to the ever-hopeful terminally ill of our own age, still flossing their teeth and eating healthy meals in hospice care. Mr. Teresi points out that conclusive signs of death have always been subject to debate. All the great civilizations argued about them, with various expert commentators proposing various fail-safe criteria and yet (Mr. Teresi notes with some pleasure) specifying that they themselves should be left unburied for a few days just to avoid any unfortunate mistakes. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16578 - Posted: 03.27.2012

By Robert Bazell, Chief Science and Health Correspondent A "sensational" new finding could be the beginning of a cure for type 2 diabetes, a disease described in an editorial accompanying the research in the New England Journal of Medicine as “one of the fastest growing epidemics in human history.” Two studies find that weight loss surgery can eliminate the symptoms of type 2 diabetes in a large proportion of volunteers. That might not seem surprising, since obesity is the major risk factor for the disease. But in these studies, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented Monday at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology, many of the patients got better within weeks, days, sometimes even hours after the surgery -- long before they lost any weight. “It’s pretty amazing,” said Dr. Phil Schauer of the Cleveland Clinic, the lead author on one of the studies. Schauaer’s study divided 150 patients with out-of-control diabetes into three groups. One-third got the best drug therapy, the next gastric-banding surgery, and last gastric bypass. The goal was to get the patients’ blood sugar (measured by the A1C test familiar to diabetics) below the normal level of 6 percent. Forty-two percent of the bypass patients reached the goal after one year compared to 37 percent of the banding patients and only 12 percent on medical therapy. But those numbers “don’t even begin to show how successful this was," according to Dr. Steve Nissen, another author of the paper from the Cleveland Clinic. He points out that at the beginning of the study most of the patients were taking three or more medications to control their diabetes. But after a year almost none of the gastric-bypass patients needed medication. Forty-four percent required daily insulin injections before surgery and none did after. Diabetes is a major risk factor for heart disease. Most of the surgery patients saw their HDL, the good cholesterol, shoot way up and their artery clogging triglycerides drop sharply. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16577 - Posted: 03.27.2012

People who eat chocolate frequently tend to have a lower body mass index than those who don't eat it as often, U.S. researchers have found. For the study in Monday's online issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers asked 1,017 healthy men and women aged 20 to 85 how many times a week they ate chocolate. Participants also filled in questionnaires about their diet and lifestyle. Study author Dr. Beatrice Golomb, a professor in the medical department at the University of California, San Diego, advised people to feel less guilty about indulging in the sweet treat. "I joke that chocolate is my favourite vegetable," Golomb said in an email. In the study, Golomb and her colleagues concluded that adults who ate chocolate more frequently had a lower BMI than those who ate it less often. Earlier studies suggested that chocolate has beneficial effects on metabolism, which may extend to lower body mass index, the researchers said. In human experiments, chocolate showed benefits for insulin sensitivity, blood pressure and cholesterol levels. To explore how the rich dessert may help, the researchers considered factors like the saturated fat content of chocolate, calories, physical activity levels and mood. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16576 - Posted: 03.27.2012

By Laura Sanders Cheeseburgers pack on the pounds, but in mice a high-fat diet also packs on new nerve cells in the brain. More brain cells may seem like a good thing, but these newly sprouted cells appear to trigger weight gain in the animals, a new study finds. The results offer insight into how the brain controls weight. If the same thing happens in humans, these nerve cells may be a target for anti-obesity treatments. “This kind of work will definitely inform how we think about the underlying factors that relate to obesity,” says endocrinologist Jeffrey Flier of Harvard Medical School in Boston. There’s increasing interest, he says, in how long-term changes in brain circuitry — like new nerve cell production — affect eating and hunger. “That is going to be a very interesting frontier.” With some key exceptions, most regions in the adult brain don’t make new nerve cells. But in a small sliver of brain tissue called the median eminence, new nerve cells are born throughout life, neuroscientist Seth Blackshaw of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and colleagues report online March 25 in Nature Neuroscience. The median eminence is part of the brain’s metabolism hub known as the hypothalamus. And one signal to step up production in the median eminence, the team found, is a diet high in fat. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16575 - Posted: 03.26.2012

By Bruce Bower Meeting the Almighty takes hallucinatory talent and training. And Hannah, a member of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, has got it down. She talks with God every day. Sometimes she imagines that God is walking beside her, although no vision of the Almighty appears. On other occasions, Hannah goes on what she calls “date nights” with God. She buys a sandwich, finds a secluded bench and imagines that the big guy is sitting next to her. In both cases, imagination occasionally gives way to a sense of truly hearing God speak. During these divine experiences, Hannah gets in touch with her unconscious mind, an undercurrent of thoughts and feelings she regards not as her own but as those of the Holy Spirit. “I recognize that it’s not me, but God inside me, that I’m having a conversation with,” Hannah told Stanford University anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann. “Which makes this relationship way more complicated … trying to imagine some real but not real figure outside of my own self.” Luhrmann spent more than four years interviewing evangelical Christians in Chicago and Palo Alto, Calif., for her 2012 book When God Talks Back. Her conversations with Vineyard members, including the young woman given the pseudonym Hannah, are part of an ongoing effort to try to understand how ordinary people can meet God through spiritual hallucinations. Researchers studying hallucinations often focus on people with schizophrenia and other psychotic ailments who experience incessant, unwanted and distressing hallucinations. But emotionally stable, well-functioning individuals can have unusual sensory experiences too. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Emotions; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16574 - Posted: 03.26.2012

Roger Dobson , Sanjeela Pahl It's bad enough that they suffer second-degree burns at the drop of a sunhat and hurt feelings from a barrage of barbs aimed at their fiery heads. Now it seems nature might have added injury to the insults heaped on redheads, by making them extra sensitive to physical pain. Researchers at Southampton University Hospital are carrying out trials this year to discover whether pale-skinned patients who share their hair colour with Elizabeth I may require more anaesthetic than the rest of the population. The results should either confirm or disprove previous research in the United States suggesting that redheads are indeed more susceptible to pain. Red hair results from variants of a gene that plays a key role in human hair and skin colour. The same gene is involved in the production of endorphins, the body's natural painkillers. The Southampton study aims to find out whether this could explain redheads' apparently heightened sensitivity. In the trials, due to end in September, volunteers aged over 30 with red hair are anaesthetised and subjected to electrical charges through their thigh. Their reactions will be compared with those of a group of men and women with brown or black hair. If it turns out that red-haired people do feel more pain, it will help to explain previous research showing they are more fearful than other groups about visiting the dentist. An American study found that redheads were more anxious about dental treatment and more than twice as likely to avoid it. A second study by the same researchers found that women with red hair needed 19 per cent more painkiller to stop them flinching from unpleasant stimulation than women with dark hair. "Redheads experience more pain from a given stimulus and therefore require more anaesthesia to alleviate that pain," said Dr Edwin Liem, who led the study at Louisville University. © independent.co.uk

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16573 - Posted: 03.26.2012

By Sandra G. Boodman, Driving south on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway bound for his Adams Morgan home in June 2009, Michael Herndon struggled to cope with the implications of what the doctor had just told him. For months Herndon had tried to find out why the headache he developed on Nov. 15, 2008 — he remembered the exact date — had not gone away. The 41-year-old had consulted neurologists and ear, nose and throat specialists as well as an allergist and ophthalmologist, but none of them had figured out what was causing his pain. “I was starting to hit a mental and physical wall,” recalled Herndon, a consumer outreach specialist at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. “I’d been chasing this for more than six months. No one could tell me what it was. I just remember thinking, ‘How am I going to be able to function if it never goes away?’ ” He had taken multiple courses of antibiotics and corticosteroids as well as over-the-counter pain relievers, and he had even undergone sinus surgery, all to no avail. Doctors had ruled out a brain tumor and other ailments but had no idea why his head, and increasingly his nose, still hurt. A month later, Herndon learned the name of his disorder. It would be another year before he found effective help to cope with his chronic, and still largely inexplicable, head pain. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16572 - Posted: 03.26.2012

By DIANE ACKERMAN A RELATIVELY new field, called interpersonal neurobiology, draws its vigor from one of the great discoveries of our era: that the brain is constantly rewiring itself based on daily life. In the end, what we pay the most attention to defines us. How you choose to spend the irreplaceable hours of your life literally transforms you. All relationships change the brain — but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self. Every great love affair begins with a scream. At birth, the brain starts blazing new neural pathways based on its odyssey in an alien world. An infant is steeped in bright, buzzing, bristling sensations, raw emotions and the curious feelings they unleash, weird objects, a flux of faces, shadowy images and dreams — but most of all a powerfully magnetic primary caregiver whose wizardry astounds. Brain scans show synchrony between the brains of mother and child; but what they can’t show is the internal bond that belongs to neither alone, a fusion in which the self feels so permeable it doesn’t matter whose body is whose. Wordlessly, relying on the heart’s semaphores, the mother says all an infant needs to hear, communicating through eyes, face and voice. Thanks to advances in neuroimaging, we now have evidence that a baby’s first attachments imprint its brain. The patterns of a lifetime’s behaviors, thoughts, self-regard and choice of sweethearts all begin in this crucible. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16571 - Posted: 03.26.2012

Criteria for a broadened syndrome of acute onset obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) have been proposed by a National Institutes of Health scientist and her colleagues. The syndrome, Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome (PANS), includes children and teens that suddenly develop on-again/off-again OCD symptoms or abnormal eating behaviors, along with other psychiatric symptoms — without any known cause. PANS expands on Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Streptococcus (PANDAS), which is limited to a subset of cases traceable to an autoimmune process triggered by a strep infection. A clinical trial testing an immune-based treatment for PANDAS is currently underway at NIH and Yale University (see below). "Parents will describe children with PANS as overcome by a 'ferocious' onset of obsessive thoughts, compulsive rituals and overwhelming fears," said Susan Swedo, M.D., of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), who first characterized PANDAS two decades ago. “Clinicians should consider PANS when children or adolescents present with such acute-onset of OCD or eating restrictions in the absence of a clear link to strep.” The PANS criteria grew out of a PANDAS workshop convened at NIH in July 2010, by the NIMH Pediatric and Developmental Neuroscience Branch, which Swedo heads. It brought together a broad range of researchers, clinicians and advocates. The participants considered all cases of acute-onset OCD, regardless of potential cause.

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 16570 - Posted: 03.24.2012

A personality profile marked by overly gregarious yet anxious behavior is rooted in abnormal development of a circuit hub buried deep in the front center of the brain, say scientists at the National Institutes of Health. They used three different types of brain imaging to pinpoint the suspect brain area in people with Williams syndrome, a rare genetic disorder characterized by these behaviors. Matching the scans to scores on a personality rating scale revealed that the more an individual with Williams syndrome showed these personality/temperament traits, the more abnormalities there were in the brain structure, called the insula. "Scans of the brain's tissue composition, wiring, and activity produced converging evidence of genetically-caused abnormalities in the structure and function of the front part of the insula and in its connectivity to other brain areas in the circuit," explained Karen Berman, M.D., of the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Berman, Drs. Mbemda Jabbi, Shane Kippenhan, and colleagues, report on their imaging study in Williams syndrome online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Williams syndrome is caused by the deletion of some 28 genes, many involved in brain development and behavior, in a particular section of chromosome 7. Among deficits characteristic of the syndrome are a lack of visual-spatial ability – such as is required to assemble a puzzle — and a tendency to be overly-friendly with people, while overly anxious about non-social matters, such as spiders or heights. Many people with the disorder are also mentally challenged and learning disabled, but some have normal IQs.

Keyword: Language; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16569 - Posted: 03.24.2012

By Rebecca Cheung Some larval sponges search for a shady place to settle down, but they don’t have optic nerves or the genes that are important for vision in most animals. Now biologists have new insight into how sponges might see light. Larvae of the sponge Amphimedon queenslandica have unique eyes made up of cells that contain pigment, a chemical that absorbs certain wavelengths of light, and cilia, which look like tiny hairs. Right next to these pigmented cells are cells with high levels of activated cry2, a gene that makes light-sensitive proteins, Todd Oakley of the University of California, Santa Barbara and others report in the April 15 Journal of Experimental Biology. These light-sensitive proteins could be involved in directing movement in cilia and steering these sponges.The finding could provide clues in how vision developed in these simple animals, Oakley says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 16568 - Posted: 03.24.2012

By Laura Sanders In the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, scientists erase troubling memories from Jim Carrey’s head. In real life, scientists have done the opposite. By reactivating certain nerve cells, researchers make artificial memories pop into mice’s heads. The results, published in the March 23 Science and online March 22 in Nature, offer a deeper understanding of how the brain creates and uses memories. Much of what scientists know about how the brain remembers comes from studies that look for signs of natural memories in the brain or that disrupt memories. In the new work, memories are actually created, says neuroscientist Richard Morris of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. “To my mind, this is an extremely important step forward,” he says. Though the two teams used different approaches, they both created a false memory of a fearful situation in mice. In the work reported in Science, neuroscientist Mark Mayford and colleagues relied on a molecule that, upon binding a particular drug, could activate nerve cells. The team genetically engineered the mice so that only the nerve cells active during the formation of a particular memory would make the molecule. In a sense, this molecule acts as a trail of bread crumbs in a forest, marking cells in the brain that make a memory and allowing scientists to reactivate those cells later. The marked memory was of a square room with opaque white walls and floor, and no particular odors. The mice played in this room, had their memory tagged and later went into a different room — this time, a wintergreen-scented room with a black-and-white checkered wall and a gridded floor. Here, the animals were subjected to shocks. After a while, the animals learned to freeze in response to being in the room. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16567 - Posted: 03.24.2012

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV Your eyes and ears can sometimes join forces to trick you. A new illusion, created by Wataru Teramoto from Tohoku University in Japan and colleagues, shows for the first time how the direction of a sound can affect how you perceive motion. The animation above should be viewed up close, while fixing your eyes on the red dot. A white square moves up and down in the periphery as a sound pans back and forth between your left and right ears. How does the square appear to move? The team found that the motion of the square either appeared to be consistent with the changing direction of the sound, in this case horizontally, or it seemed to move diagonally, lying in between the real motion and the motion of the sound. According to Teramoto, this occurs because we use auditory spatial information to help us make sense of what we see. "Sound is especially useful when the reliability of visual information is low, for example in your peripheral vision," he says. Previous studies probing whether sound can modulate motion didn't find an effect but they always considered stimuli central to a scene. Our visual system can clearly interpret detail in this region but it's much less effective when considering information even slightly off centre. In another recent study, Teramoto and his team have shown another example of how our brain links visual and audio information. After being exposed to a sound accompanied by moving visuals for three minutes, the same audio made a static object appear to move. "This indicates that even a very short observation period is enough to associate sound sequences with visual motion in the adult brain," says Teramoto. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Hearing
Link ID: 16566 - Posted: 03.24.2012

By Larry Greenemeier Loud, concussive explosions on the battlefield may last only a few seconds, but many soldiers returning from combat in the Middle East are experiencing lingering symptoms that cause them to perceive sounds even when it is quiet. Doctors can do little to treat the problem—typically described as a ringing in the ears—because they lack an effective way of delivering medication to the inner ear. That could change in a few years, in the form of an implantable polymer-based microscale drug-release system that delivers medicine to the inner ear. Called tinnitus, the condition afflicts at least one in every 10 American adults and is the most common disability among Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Up to 40 percent of all veterans may be suffering from tinnitus, and the VA spends about $1 billion annually on disability payments for tinnitus, according to a study published last year in Nature. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) To address the problem, the U.S. Department of Defense has commissioned Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass., to spend the next year fleshing out a concept for a small delivery device inserted near the membrane-covered window—no more than three millimeters in diameter—separating the middle ear from the inner ear. Once at the membrane the device (essentially a polymer capsule, although Draper is not developing any of medicines that might be placed inside) would release a drug into the cochlea, the tubular organ residing in the inner ear that enables us to hear. The plan is to embed wireless communications into the capsule so that a patient or doctor can control the dosage. After the capsule finishes delivering its supply of drugs, it would dissolve. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 16565 - Posted: 03.24.2012

By KATIE THOMAS Four months before a best-selling Alzheimer’s drug was set to lose its patent protection, its makers received approval for a higher dosage that extended their exclusive right to sell the drug. But the higher dosage caused potentially dangerous side effects and worked only slightly better than the existing drugs, according to an article published Thursday in the British Medical Journal. The drug, Aricept 23, was approved in July 2010 against the advice of reviewers at the Food and Drug Administration. They noted that the clinical trial had failed to show that the higher dosage — 23 milligrams versus the previous dosages of 5 and 10 milligrams — met its goals of improving both cognitive and overall functioning in people with moderate to severe Alzheimer’s disease. The single clinical trial of 1,400 patients also found that the larger dosage led to substantially more nausea and vomiting, potentially dangerous side effects for elderly patients struggling with advanced Alzheimer’s disease. The drug was developed by the Japanese pharmaceutical company Eisai but is marketed in the United States in a partnership with Pfizer. “It doesn’t really have much benefit, but does substantially more harm,” said Dr. Steven Woloshin, one of the co-authors of the journal article and a professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. Aricept generated more than $2 billion in annual sales since its first approval in 1996, according to the journal article, but it was set to lose its patent protection in November 2010, opening the door to cheaper generic versions of the drug. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16564 - Posted: 03.24.2012

By MATT SEDENSKY LEESBURG, Fla. — Doreen Watson-Beard cared for more people with dementia than she could count. The nurse was so moved by her patients that she led Alzheimer's support groups. She knew the warning signs and understood there was no cure. But the 49-year-old never thought the disease would affect someone her age. The first clues surfaced around five years ago, when she was 44. She'd forget to pick up her grandchildren at school or plans she made with her husband. She wrote down the wrong medication dosage for a patient. "I have no idea what's going on," she remembered telling her doctor. About 200,000 Americans under 65 are among the 5.4 million Americans suffering from Alzheimer's disease, according to the Alzheimer's Association. Experts' estimates suggest there's a similar number of younger people with other types of dementia, meaning about a half-million Americans, some as young as their 30s, suffer from early-onset or younger-onset dementia. The number of people suffering from all types of dementia is rapidly increasing because of the aging of the baby boom generation — the 78 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 — though there's no sign the percentage of younger people with dementia is going up. Pat Summit, the 59-year-old Hall of Fame college women's basketball coach, is among the most famous to suffer publicly with it. Watson-Beard is one of a tiny minority, a fascinating, sorrowful subset to a disease trademarked by its slow, cruel overtaking of the mind. Copyright 2012 The Associated Press

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16563 - Posted: 03.24.2012