Scottish research has shown it could be possible to reverse the muscle damage seen in children with a form of motor neurone disease. Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) - 'floppy baby syndrome' - is the leading genetic cause of death in children. It affects one in 6,000 births, but 50% of those with the most severe form die before the age of two. The University of Edinburgh mouse study suggests a drug could boost levels of a protein and so reverse muscle damage. Children with SMA experience progressive muscle wastage, loss of mobility and motor function. Now 13, he was diagnosed at the age of three. "My wife first knew there was something wrong when he was two. He was just walking funnily. "But he wasn't diagnosed until the third time she took him to the doctors. "Initially there was a question as to whether it was SMA or muscular dystrophy. "We'd heard of muscular dystrophy - but not SMA. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Muscles
Link ID: 16437 - Posted: 02.27.2012

By Dwayne Godwin and Jorge Cham © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 16436 - Posted: 02.27.2012

By Hannah Tepper At the end of his second year of Harvard graduate school, neuroscientist and bestselling author Richard Davidson did something his colleagues suspected would mark the end of his academic career: He skipped town and went to India and Sri Lanka for three months to “study meditation.” In the ’70s, just as today, people tended to lump meditation into the new-age category, along with things like astrology, crystals, tantra and herbal “remedies.” But contrary to what his skeptics presumed, not only did Davidson return to resume his studies at Harvard, his trip also marked the beginning of Davidson’s most spectacular body of work: neuroscientific research indicating that meditation (and other strictly mental activity) changes the neuroplasticity of the brain. Thirty years later, Davidson is still researching and writing about the intersection of neuroscience and emotion — he currently teaches psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In his new book, written with Sharon Begley, “The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live, and How You Can Change Them,” Davidson lays out a fascinating theory that parses out emotional style into six dimensions, giving readers a better understanding of where they stand on this emotional plane and how emotional styles affect the qualities of their everyday lives. Last week Salon spoke over the phone with Davidson about how Botox injections disrupt our ability to emote, the connection between happiness and health, and why emotion has been unfairly and historically underappreciated. © 2012 Salon Media Group,

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 16435 - Posted: 02.27.2012

By JoNel Aleccia For Kelly Wooldridge of St. Louis, the change in her son’s behavior was so abrupt, it was like someone flipped a switch. Overnight, Brendan, now 10, went from being an easy-going, “huggy-kissy” kid to a rageful child plagued with tics, compulsions and obsessions, she said. “He would walk up and choke kids at school, or pick up a chair and throw it at them,” recalled Wooldridge, 37. Brendan developed facial tics, constant throat clearing, some humming. "He was just miserable in his own skin," his mother said. The shift first occurred when Brendan was 3, just after several recurring bouts of strep throat. The disturbing behaviors lingered, seeming to wax and wane for the next few years with no clear cause or explanation. It wasn’t until last year that Wooldridge -- like a growing number of parents, pediatricians and researchers -- finally connected the dots between the common childhood infection and the sudden onset of some forms of mental illness. “Last spring, we learned about PANDAS,” said Wooldridge. “I thought it sounded a little crazy, but it totally fit.” PANDAS -- or Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections -- is the unusual diagnosis given to a group of children who abruptly develop Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or tic disorders such as Tourette’s Syndrome – but only after contracting infections such as scarlet fever or strep throat caused by Group A streptococcus bacteria. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 16434 - Posted: 02.25.2012

Erin Allday For a few months after she was born, Ashley Chase cried inconsolably every day, for hours at a time. Her mother didn't call it colic at the time, but now she wonders. There was never any obvious cause for Ashley's distress, and she was an otherwise happy and healthy baby. The fussiness eventually went away without cause, as is often the case with colicky babies. And perhaps most intriguing - Ashley, now 14, suffers migraines. Just like her mom. Colic, it turns out, may be closely connected to migraines, say researchers at UCSF. A study released this week found that moms who suffer migraines are 2 1/2 times more likely to have colicky infants than those who don't. "It kind of makes sense," said Ashley, a patient at the UCSF Headache Center who lives in Pleasanton with her parents. "Everything's 'more' when you have a migraine. Everything's too loud, everything's too much. I imagine it would feel the same for a baby." The UCSF research, which will be formally presented at an American Academy of Neurology meeting in New Orleans next month, could shed light on two poorly understood and difficult-to-treat conditions: migraines and colic. Earlier research has hinted at a connection between the two conditions, but the UCSF study is the most convincing so far, neurologists and headache experts said. The study looked at 154 mothers of infants and found that more than 28 percent of women who suffered migraines had colicky babies, compared with 11 percent of women without migraines. © 2012 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16433 - Posted: 02.25.2012

By Emily Willingham Attention Deficit–Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) had a star turn in the recent, high-profile murder trial of University of Virginia lacrosse star George Huguely. Lawyers for the defense aren’t using the condition to explain away their client’s presumed violent behavior; rather, they’re saying that the woman he’s accused of killing may have died from her own, personal battle with ADHD. Amidst their exculpatory evidence was the victim’s prescription for Adderall, and they offered that she could have died from a mix of the drug (which is prescribed to treat ADHD) and alcohol. The medical examiner has discounted that notion, calling the very low levels of Adderall in the victim’s blood “within therapeutic range.” The cause of her death rather seems to have been a blunt force trauma to the head. The idea that ADHD drugs might be killing us—and in ways that resemble being bashed in the head—represents just one of several ominous storylines associated with the disorder. In recent years, we’ve also heard speculation about whether ADHD is real, and if it is real, whether it’s being grossly overdiagnosed. And then there are the drugs. A recent opinion piece in the New York Times by psychology professor L. Alan Sroufe argues at great length that attention-deficit drugs do more harm than good over the long term, a conclusion other professionals in his field dispute. The backlash against ADHD—which often targets the drugs used to treat it, the people who have it, and the therapists and parents who make treatment decisions—has again reached a fever pitch. These backlashes against childhood developmental diagnoses seems to rise and fall every few years, but lately it’s burgeoning. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: ADHD; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16432 - Posted: 02.25.2012

Dementia is estimated to affect about 500,000 Canadians and up to five million people in the U.S.Dementia is estimated to affect about 500,000 Canadians and up to five million people in the U.S. (Associated Press) An analysis of tens of thousands of people in nursing homes in the U.S. suggests that residents who take certain antipsychotic drugs for dementia are at about double the risk of dying compared to residents not taking those specific medications. All the residents in the study, published Friday in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), were over age 65. The Harvard Medical School study, the largest ever undertaken among U.S. nursing home residents, focused on 75,445 nursing-home residents from 45 states from 2001 to 2005. Their risks of death were looked at during a six-month period. Facts about dementia in Canada What is it? An umbrella term for a variety of brain disorders. Symptoms include loss of memory, judgment and reasoning, and changes in mood and behaviour. Prevalence: In 2010, more than 500,000 Canadians were living with dementia. Of these, about 71,000 were under age 65. One in 11 Canadians over 65 have the condition. Who is most at risk? Women account for 72 per cent of all Alzheimer's cases, and 62 per cent of all dementia cases. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Alzheimers; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 16431 - Posted: 02.25.2012

Caitlin Stier, video intern If you know where to fix your gaze, you can make a dull diamond sparkle using the power of your mind. In this animation, a striped diamond seems to twinkle when you track a circle moving back and forth within the shape. Created by psychology researcher Sebastiaan Mathôt of VU University in Amsterdam, the trick seems to be caused by poor estimation of what's happening in our peripheral vision. While focusing on the moving object, our brain only perceives a small part of the diamond shape. According to Mathôt, we expect to see the diamond's outline move perpendicular to the line due to a bias of our visual system. But when we move our gaze to the right, it confuses our brain, perhaps causing a compromise between the conflicting directions of motion that results in a sparkling effect along the line. The animation is a variation of the boogie-woogie illusion devised by psychologists Patrick Cavanagh and Stuart Anstis from Harvard University. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16430 - Posted: 02.25.2012

by Vivien Marx Call it the fish version of instant messaging. When a fish is injured, it secretes a compound that makes other fish dart away (as seen in the latter half of the sped up video above, when the red light flashes). The substance, named Schreckstoff (German for "scary stuff"), protects the entire community of fish, but no one knew how it worked. Now they do, thanks to an analysis of fish mucus reported today in Current Biology. The key ingredient in Schreckstoff is a sugar called chondroitin sulfate, which is found in abundance in fish skin. When the skin is torn, enzymes break the compound down into sugar fragments that activate an unusual class of sensory neurons known as crypt cells in other fish. And the fish take off. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Emotions
Link ID: 16429 - Posted: 02.25.2012

By Ferris Jabr There's a scene in Pixar's Finding Nemo when Dory, a yellow-finned regal tang, injures herself in a tug-of-war over a snorkel mask. A tiny plume of blood curls away from Dory's face into the water around her, where it is sucked into the nostrils of Bruce, a "vegetarian" shark who immediately recants his no-sushi policy. (Fortunately, Dory escapes.) Scientists have known for some time that many ocean predators relish the scent of an injured fish, whereas fish that are more likely to end up as a meal flee from the same scent. Now, researchers think they have pinpointed the key chemical in fish skin that warns nearby fish of danger—a chemical related to a supplement some people take for joint pain. In the 1930s Austrian animal behavior scientist Karl von Frisch accidentally injured a minnow in a tank. He noticed that the other fish in the tank began alternately darting back and forth and freezing in place—classic predator-evading behavior. Subsequent experiments established that the frightened fish were responding to chemicals released from the skin of their injured peer—a cocktail dubbed schreckstoff, which is German for "scary stuff." For decades, the chemistry of schreckstoff remained unknown. In the 1970s and '80s some scientists discovered that exposing fish to a chemical known as hypoxanthine-3-N-oxide (H3NO) frightened them in the same way as schreckstoff, albeit to a lesser degree. H3NO, they concluded, was probably the active compound in schreckstoff. But there was a problem with that idea: scientists had never reliably detected H3NO in fish skin. Instead, some researchers proposed, H3NO may mimic the genuine active compound. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Emotions
Link ID: 16428 - Posted: 02.25.2012

By Melinda Wenner Moyer The mystery of Whitney Houston's death will not be solved for several weeks, as the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office awaits a full toxicology report. But many experts speculate that the singer's tragic demise involved a deadly cocktail of alcohol and prescription drugs, including Xanax. Houston wouldn't be the first star to suffer such a fate: Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson and Anna Nicole Smith are all thought to have died in part from prescription drug overdoses, which can involve painkillers, sedatives and stimulants, often in combination with alcohol. But the problem extends far beyond Hollywood. In 2007 some 27,000 Americans died from unintentional prescription drug overdoses—making prescription drugs a more common cause of accidental death in many states than car crashes are. Although sedatives are thought to have played a role in Houston’s death, most prescription drug overuse involves opioid painkillers. Approximately 3 to 5 percent of people who take pain medication eventually end up addicted, according to Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, an arm of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. And "individuals who have a past history of a substance-use disorder—from smoking, drinking or other drugs—are at greater risk," she says. Addiction to other classes of prescription drugs such as sedatives, stimulants and sleep medications is thought to be less common—but it occurs, and even users who do not become compulsively addicted can, over time, become physically dependent and experience intense withdrawal symptoms when their prescriptions run out. They might also develop drug tolerance, the need to take higher doses over time to feel the same effects. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16427 - Posted: 02.25.2012

By Laura Sanders As a scientist, Giulio Tononi’s goal is as lofty as it gets: He wants to understand how the brain generates consciousness. In his hunt, he and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin–Madison routinely use state-of-the-art brain scanners to produce torrents of information that stream into sophisticated computer programs describing various aspects of brain function. But Tononi’s most profound insight didn’t spring from this huge cache of scientific data. It came instead from a moment of quiet reflection. When he stepped away from his scanners and data and the hustle of the lab and thought — deeply — about what it was like to be conscious, he realized something: Each split second of awareness is a unified, holistic experience, completely different from any experience before or after it. From that observation alone, Tononi intuited a powerful new theory of consciousness, a theory based on the flow of information. He and others believe that mathematics — in particular, a set of equations describing how bits of data move through the brain — is the key to explaining how the mind knits together an experience. Because of its clarity, this informational intuition has resonated with other researchers, inspiring a new way to see the consciousness problem. “This insight was very important to me,” says Anil Seth of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. “I thought, there’s something right about all this.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Consciousness; Attention
Link ID: 16426 - Posted: 02.25.2012

Europe's top human rights watchdog, the Council of Europe, has urged Germany to end the practice of surgically castrating sex offenders. The council's anti-torture committee said such voluntary treatment, albeit rare in Germany, was "degrading". In Germany no more than five sex offenders a year have been opting for castration, hoping it will lower their sex drives and reduce their jail term. The committee's recommendations are not binding but have great influence. The committee's official title is the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT). "Surgical castration is a mutilating, irreversible intervention and cannot be considered as a medical necessity in the context of the treatment of sexual offenders", the CPT report said. It was based on an investigation in Germany carried out in November-December 2010. The BBC's Stephen Evans in Berlin says the German authorities argue that castration is not a punishment but a treatment which enables, as a government statement put it, "suffering tied to an abnormal sex drive… to be cured, or at least alleviated". Research for the report revealed that of the 104 people operated on between 1970 and 1980, only 3% reoffended, compared with nearly half of those who refused castration or were denied it by the authorities. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Aggression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 16425 - Posted: 02.25.2012

New findings might help explain why risk of drug abuse and addiction increase so dramatically when cocaine use begins during teenage years. When first exposed to cocaine, the adolescent brain launches a strong defensive reaction designed to minimize the drug’s effects, according to scientists. Now two new studies by a Yale University team identify key genes that regulate this response and show that interfering with this reaction dramatically increases a mouse’s sensitivity to cocaine. The results were published in the February 14 and February 21, 2012 issues of the Journal of Neuroscience. Research has shown that vulnerability to cocaine is much higher in adolescence, when the brain is shifting from an explosive and plastic growth phase to more settled and refined neural connections characteristic of adults. Photo credit: Lil Larkie Researchers have shown that vulnerability to cocaine is much higher in adolescence, when the brain is shifting from an explosive and plastic growth phase to more settled and refined neural connections characteristic of adults. Past studies at Yale University have shown that the neurons and their synaptic connections in adolescence change shape when first exposed to cocaine through molecular pathway regulated by the gene integrin beta1, which is crucial to the development of the nervous system of vertebrates. Anthony Koleske, professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry and of neurobiology At Yale University, is senior author of both papers. He said: This suggests that these structural changes observed are probably protective of the neurocircuitry, an effort of the neuron to protect itself when first exposed to cocaine. © 2011 Earthsky Communications Inc.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16424 - Posted: 02.25.2012

By Yardena Schwartz Brick, N.J.: Lindsey Avon and her 28-year-old husband Victor have been together for 10 years. But when Victor decided to lose some weight in college, Lindsey had no idea what he was really going through. It wasn’t until Victor checked himself into an inpatient eating disorder treatment center that Lindsey, 29, realized her then-boyfriend was fatally anorexic. Santa Cruz, Calif.: Nearly all of Avi Sinai’s school friends were girls, who constantly talked about how “fat” they were and how they longed to be thinner. Avi’s mom and his girlfriends’ mothers were shocked that Avi, just 10 at the time, was the one who succumbed to the obsession with being skinny. Okemos, Mich.: Susan Barry, 60, spends every day wishing she had known more about male anorexia when her son, TJ Warschefsky, was still alive. He died in 2007 at the age of 22 after an eight-year battle with the disease. His heart gave out in the middle of his nightly routine of 1,000 sit-ups. He weighed 78 pounds. “He didn’t want to be skinny,” Barry said of TJ, who was a star athlete and straight-A student. “He wanted a six pack, he wanted rock hard abs. That’s how it all started.” Their stories may sound rare, but experts say cases like Avi Sinai, Victor Avon and TJ Warschefsky are growing more and more common. Far from the world of beauty magazines, pin-thin celebrities and runway models, anorexia is striking what many consider to be an unlikely group: boys and young men. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 16423 - Posted: 02.23.2012

SILVER SPRING, Md. — A panel of advisers to the Food and Drug Administration overwhelmingly backed approval for a highly anticipated anti-obesity pill called Qnexa, a drug which the FDA previously rejected due to safety concerns. The FDA panel of outside physicians voted 20-2 Wednesday in favor of the weight loss drug from Vivus Inc., setting the stage for a potential comeback for a drug that has been plagued by safety questions since it was first submitted to the agency in 2010. A majority of panelists ultimately backed the drug due to its impressive weight loss results, with most patients losing nearly 10 percent of their overall weight after a year on the drug. But the group stressed that the drugmaker must be required to conduct a large, follow-up study of the pill's effects on the heart. Studies of Qnexa show it raises heart rate and causes heart palpitations, a longtime concern with diet pills over the years. The group of experts said it is still unclear if those side effects lead to heart attack and more serious cardiovascular problems. "The potential benefits of this medication seem to trump the side effects, but in truth, only time will tell," said Dr. Kenneth Burman of the Washington Hospital Center. The FDA is not required to follow the advice of its panels, though it often does. A final decision on the drug is expected in April. In a key question, the physicians said Vivus could conduct its study after FDA approval. Conducting the study ahead of market approval would cost the company millions of dollars and take at least three more years. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16422 - Posted: 02.23.2012

By Robin Anne Smith Recently while visiting the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., I found myself pondering the noggins of some very, very, old apes. Along one wall of the Hall of Human Origins — an exhibit on human evolution that opened in 2010 — were 76 fossil skulls from 15 species of early humans. Looking at these skulls, one thing was clear: millions of years of evolution have given us much bigger brains. In the 8 million to 6 million years since the ancestors of humans and chimps went their separate ways, the human brain more than tripled in size. If the earliest humans had brains the size of oranges, today’s human brains are more akin to cantaloupes. As for our closest primate relatives, the chimps? Their brains haven’t budged. With our big brains we compose symphonies, write plays, carve sculptures and do math. But our big brains came at a cost, some scientists say. In two recent studies, researchers from Duke University suggest the human brain boost may have been powered by a metabolic shift that meant more fuel for brains, and less fuel for muscles. Co-author Olivier Fedrigo told me the full story one morning over coffee near his home in Durham, North Carolina. The human brain isn’t just big, he explained. It’s also hungry. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 16421 - Posted: 02.23.2012

By NICHOLAS WADE Men, or at least male biologists, have long been alarmed that their tiny Y chromosome, once the same size as its buxom partner, the X, will continue to wither away until it simply vanishes. The male sex would then become extinct, they fear, leaving women to invent some virgin-birth method of reproduction and propagate a sexless species. The fear is not without serious basis: The Y and X chromosomes once shared some 800 genes in common, but now, after shedding genes furiously, the Y carries just 19 of its ancestral genes, as well as the male-determining gene that is its raison d’être. So much DNA has been lost that the chromosome is a fraction of its original size. But there are grounds for hope that the Y chromosome has reached a plateau of miniaturized perfection and will shrivel no more. Researchers led by Jennifer F. Hughes and David C. Page of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., have reconstructed the Y chromosome’s past and find that its gene-shedding days seem to be over. Men are not living on borrowed time after all, they reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature. In people, sex is determined by a single gene that resides on the Y chromosome. Chromosomes come in pairs, with one set bequeathed by each parent, and the Y is paired with X such that men have an X-Y pair and women an X-X. When the male-determining gene first arose, some 320 million years ago, the X and Y were both full-length chromosomes, each bearing the same set of 1,000 or so genes. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 16420 - Posted: 02.23.2012

By Scicurious Obviously, we’ve known about mice “squeaking” for ages. Some of them even HOWL. But mice also communicate with sounds that are too high pitched for humans to hear. These ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) are used primarily by male mice, and the male mice make them when they scent or are near a likely lady. Female mice apparently like being serenaded, they respond to male’s USVs, and can even distinguish between the USVs of their close kin vs the USVs of unrelated mice. So we know that females can discriminate between close kin USVs and non-kin USVs. Is this because they simply memorize the ones closest to them and look for ones that are different? Or is there something addition, say that male mice USVs can reveal kinships between mice? To test this, the authors of this study captured a bunch of wild house mice (laboratory mice won’t work here, you wouldn’t be able to really determine kinship vs non, each strain is inbred to have the same DNA, so unless you compared strains…). They cross bred the wild house mice together in the lab to make sure everyone had the same social background and age, and recorded the mice calling. They pulled apart the recordings and classified them by the types of sounds, and the similarities between the calls in related and non-related mice. And it turns out that, when translated into tones that human ears can hear, mouse USVs sound a lot like bird chirps. And they have things in common with bird chirps as well: kinship and individuality. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hearing
Link ID: 16419 - Posted: 02.23.2012

By Hal Arkowitz and Scott O. Lilienfeld In the classic 1936 cult film Reefer Madness, well-adjusted high school students who try marijuana suddenly sink into a life of addiction, promiscuity, aggression, academic failure, homicide and mental illness. The movie concludes with the ominous warning that “The dread marijuana may be reaching forth next for your son or daughter ... or yours ... or YOURS!” Newspaper headlines of the day often reflected a similar sentiment. On February 10, 1938, a headline in the Beloit (Wisc.) Daily News read, “Authorities Warn against Spread of Marijuana Habit—Insanity, Degeneracy and Violence Follow Use of Weed.” Such a position on pot seems extreme. Yet just as people have since cast aside the notion that marijuana use inevitably culminates in the destruction of the mind, so have they also begun to question the concept that it is benign. In particular, some evidence suggests that marijuana can, in some cases, be addictive and that it may present other health problems as well, particularly in heavy users. That said, most people suffer no ill effects from a single or occasional use of the drug. Marijuana, which is also known as cannabis, is the most widely used illicit substance in the world, according to a United Nations report from 2002. Recreational use is widespread in the U.S., and medical use is on the rise. In a 2007 study psychologist Louisa Degenhardt of Michigan State University and her colleagues found that 43 percent of U.S. adults aged 18 or older have tried marijuana at least once. Many adolescents are drawn to the drug as well. In the large, ongoing Monitoring the Future study, researchers at the University of Michigan found that 14 percent of eighth graders had used marijuana at least once in the previous year with the number increasing to 35 percent for 12th graders. Marijuana use will undoubtedly grow in the near future because 16 states have already legalized it for medical use, and many more are considering legislation that would make it legal. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16418 - Posted: 02.23.2012