by Gregory Mone In June 2006 pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis began selling a new weight-loss drug called rimonabant in Europe. Rimonabant worked in part by reducing appetite, and the company claimed it could also treat addiction, harmful cholesterol, and diabetes. Lab tests even suggested the drug produced healthier sperm. But within six months, the company had received more than 900 reports of nausea, depression, and other side effects. By the following summer, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had rejected rimonabant, noting that relative to a placebo, patients taking it were twice as likely to contemplate, plan, or attempt suicide. The European Medicines Agency soon asked Sanofi-Aventis to address the safety concerns, and on December 5, 2008, the company pulled the drug off the European market. Rimonabant was a spectacular flop, and yet its lure today is stronger than ever. Researchers worldwide are pursuing novel drugs aimed at the exact same target: the endocannabinoid system, an elaborate network of receptors and proteins that operate within the brain, heart, gut, liver, and throughout the central nervous system. For drug designers, the system’s powerful role in regulating cravings, mood, pain, and memory makes it a tantalizing target. The challenge now is finding sharper, more refined ways to manipulate it without causing the sort of debilitating side effects that derailed rimonabant. “The system is very, very widespread and very effective at a variety of levels,” says neuroscientist Keith Sharkey, who studies the role of endocannabinoids in the gut at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute at the University of Calgary. “It seems to be very important in the body, which is a concern when you develop drugs for it because you will get a range of effects.” © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Obesity; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16104 - Posted: 12.03.2011

Alla Katsnelson Some people say they never forget a face, and they aren't alone — the golden paper wasp can also recognize the faces of other members of its species. In humans, this cognitive feat is thought to rely on specialized brain areas evolved specifically for the task, and work published today in Science1 suggests that the same may be true for these wasps. “Fifteen years ago, if people had claimed [face recognition] existed in insects, others would have thought they were mad,” says Lars Chittka, a behavioural and sensory ecologist at Queen Mary University of London who was not involved in the study. But in 2002, Elizabeth Tibbetts, then a graduate student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, demonstrated that the golden paper wasp, Polistes fuscatus, can recognize individuals of the same species from their facial markings2. However, scientists have long debated whether mental abilities such as face recognition are evolutionary adaptations or simply skills learned over an organism’s lifetime. So Michael Sheehan, a graduate student in Tibbetts' lab at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, explored this question by comparing two species of wasp. The faces of P. fuscatus have clearly variable features, and the organism’s social structure depends on individuals being able to tell one another apart. Often several queens form a nest together, and then establish a strict social hierarchy; individuals must be able to recognize each others’ status to avoid fights. Sheehan and Tibbetts compared this wasp’s face-recognition abilities with those of a closely related species, Polistes metricus. P. metricus wasps have much less recognizable facial markings and live a less socially complex lifestyle, with just one queen ruling a nest of underlings and no need to differentiate between one another. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16103 - Posted: 12.03.2011

Caitlin Stier, video intern Think hard: you can transform a circle into a hexagon using the power of your mind. New animations created by Hiroyuki Ito from Kyushu University show how staring at coloured shapes can produce an afterimage that varies in form as well as hue. "This is the first study to show systematic shape changes in after-images involving shape processing mechanisms in the brain," says Ito. The first version of the illusion uses solid, stationary shapes. After focusing on yellow circles, blue hexagons typically appear and vice versa. The same effect also occurs with outlines of the shapes. In another variation, hexagons and circles rotate. Although the movement paints circular shapes on the retina, the animations produce the same shape-changing effect as the static illusions. After-images are thought to occur when three types of retinal cells are overstimulated. Due to signals lingering on the retina, a blurred version in complimentary colours typically arises after the image disappears. But in this case, the additional shape change could be caused by tiring out areas in the cortex that detect corners and curves. Ito now plans to investigate the neural mechanism involved and explore the influence of colour and brightness on after-images. He became fascinated by the phenomenon after staring at his circular ceiling light and noticing a ghostly image shaped like a polygon afterwards. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16102 - Posted: 12.03.2011

By Sandra Upson If there is one general rule about the limitations of the human mind, it is that we are terrible at multitasking. The old phrase “united we stand, divided we fall” applies equally well to the mechanisms of attention as it does to a patriotic cause. When devoted to a single task, the brain excels; when several goals splinter its focus, errors become unavoidable. But clear exceptions challenge that general rule. Two weeks ago, thousands of computer game enthusiasts descended on a convention center in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, to observe some of these exceptions in action. They were attending the championships of one of the world’s hottest computer games, StarCraft 2. Hands fluttered over keyboards like hummingbirds mid-hover at about fifty computers set up in a dimly lit open hall. Players, many of whom flew in from South Korea to compete, vied to advance through their brackets to the finals. This game is no joke, with the prize money to prove it—$50,000 went to the winner, a 16-year-old Korean who goes by the name Leenock. The agility on display in Providence —as seen in the players’ multitasking, their nonstop decision-making, and the stunning speed of their fingers—has not gone unnoticed by cognitive scientists. For decades, a different game, chess, has held the exalted position of “the drosophila of cognitive science”—the model organism that scientists could poke and prod to learn what makes experts better than the rest of us. StarCraft 2, however, might be emerging as the rhesus macaque: its added complexity may confound researchers initially, but the answers could ultimately be more telling. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Attention
Link ID: 16101 - Posted: 12.03.2011

By JENEEN INTERLANDI The moment she saw him, Judy Cox knew her son was dead. It was an October morning in 2008, and she had just stepped out the door to run an errand when she found him lying faceup in the driveway, ghost white, covered in purple splotches. He wasn’t breathing, and when she couldn’t revive him, she ran screaming into the house where her husband, Wayne, was still asleep. “Chris is dead,” she cried. “Call 911!” Wayne jumped out of bed and raced down to the driveway, where he knelt over his son’s limp frame and tried frantically to elicit a breath or a heartbeat. As he pumped Chris’s chest and scooped out the vomit that had collected in his mouth, Judy ran to the kitchen and steadied herself long enough to call for an ambulance. Chris was 26. He had not been well. An A.T.V. accident the previous August left him with debilitating back pain that physical therapy did nothing to alleviate. His doctor had recently prescribed Oxycontin. His parents learned later that he had taken too much. By the time the ambulance arrived, Chris’s heart had been still for at least 15 minutes. It took the paramedics another 15 to get it pumping again; even then, doctors had little hope he would survive. Brain cells begin dying off just five minutes after blood stops delivering oxygen. After 30 minutes, there is likely to be more dead tissue than living. Nonetheless, the emergency-room staff members at the local hospital did their best. They hooked Chris up to a tangle of tubes and machines and injected him with drugs to stabilize his heart rate. Wayne and Judy watched helplessly from the hallway. After four hours, a doctor finally summoned them to a secluded corridor. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Sleep
Link ID: 16100 - Posted: 12.03.2011

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS To learn more about how exercise affects the brain, scientists in Ireland recently asked a group of sedentary male college students to take part in a memory test followed by strenuous exercise. First, the young men watched a rapid-fire lineup of photos with the faces and names of strangers. After a break, they tried to recall the names they had just seen as the photos again zipped across a computer screen. Afterward, half of the students rode a stationary bicycle, at an increasingly strenuous pace, until they were exhausted. The others sat quietly for 30 minutes. Then both groups took the brain-teaser test again. Notably, the exercised volunteers performed significantly better on the memory test than they had on their first try, while the volunteers who had rested did not improve. Meanwhile, blood samples taken throughout the experiment offered a biological explanation for the boost in memory among the exercisers. Immediately after the strenuous activity, the cyclists had significantly higher levels of a protein known as brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, which is known to promote the health of nerve cells. The men who had sat quietly showed no comparable change in BDNF levels. For some time, scientists have believed that BDNF helps explain why mental functioning appears to improve with exercise. However, they haven’t fully understood which parts of the brain are affected or how those effects influence thinking. The Irish study suggests that the increases in BDNF prompted by exercise may play a particular role in improving memory and recall. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Trophic Factors
Link ID: 16099 - Posted: 12.01.2011

By Charles Q. Choi Ravens use their beaks and wings much like humans rely on our hands to make gestures, such as for pointing to an object, scientists now find. This is the first time researchers have seen gestures used in this way in the wild by animals other than primates. From the age of 9 to 12 months, human infants often use gestures to direct the attention of adults to objects, or to hold up items so that others can take them. These gestures, produced before children speak their first words, are seen as milestones in the development of human speech. Dogs and other animals are known to point out items using gestures, but humans trained these animals, and scientists had suggested the natural development of these gestures was normally confined only to primates, said researcher Simone Pika, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany. Even then, comparable gestures are rarely seen in the wild in our closest living relatives, the great apes—for instance, chimpanzees in the Kibale National Park in Uganda employ so-called directed scratches to indicate distinct spots on their bodies they want groomed. Still, ravens and their relatives such as crows and magpies have been found to be remarkably intelligent over the years, surpassing most other birds in terms of smarts and even rivaling great apes on some tests. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 16098 - Posted: 12.01.2011

By Rose Eveleth When I was in fifth grade, my brother Alex started correcting my homework. This would not have been weird, except that he was in kindergarten—and autistic. His disorder, characterized by repetitive behaviors and difficulty with social interactions and communication, made it hard for him to listen to his teachers. He was often kicked out of class for not being able to sit for more than a few seconds at a time. Even now, almost 15 years later, he can still barely scratch out his name. But he could look at my page of neatly written words or math problems and pick out which ones were wrong. Many researchers are starting to rethink how much we really know about autistic people and their abilities. These researchers are coming to the conclusion that we might be underestimating what they are capable of contributing to society. Autism is a spectrum disease with two very different ends. At one extreme are “high functioning” people who often hold jobs and keep friends and can get along well in the world. At the other, "low functioning" side are people who cannot operate on their own. Many of them are diagnosed with mental retardation and have to be kept under constant care. But these diagnoses focus on what autistic people cannot do. Now a growing number of scientists are turning that around to look at what autistic people are good at. Researchers have long considered the majority of those affected by autism to be mentally retarded. Although the numbers cited vary, they generally fall between 70 to 80 percent of the affected population. But when Meredyth Edelson, a researcher at Willamette University, went looking for the source of those statistics, she was surprised that she could not find anything conclusive. Many of the conclusions were based on intelligence tests that tend to overestimate disability in autistic people. "Our knowledge is based on pretty bad data," she says. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism; Intelligence
Link ID: 16097 - Posted: 12.01.2011

By Laura Sanders Brain differences might help explain psychopaths’ cold, calculated and often antisocial behavior, and perhaps even point out better ways to treat or prevent the disorder, a study of Wisconsin prison inmates suggests. Compared with a group of 13 non-psychopathic criminals, a group of 14 psychopaths had weaker connections between an area near the front of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, or vmPFC, and the amygdala, a pair of almond-shaped structures deep in the brain. Earlier studies have hinted that this particular link is important for emotional regulation and aggression. Neuroscientist Michael Koenigs of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and colleagues discovered the weaker connection by taking a mobile brain scanner to a medium-security prison. Psychopaths are overrepresented in prison populations thanks to their lack of empathy and tendency toward antisocial behavior. After interviewing inmates and scrutinizing their disciplinary records to determine whether they were psychopaths, the scientists conducted two kinds of brain scans. The first measured the strength of brain connections called white matter tracts, which are bundles of nerves that serve as information superhighways that shuttle information between different brain regions. It was those scans that revealed the weaker link between the vmPFC and the amygdala in psychopaths, the team reports November 30 in the Journal of Neuroscience. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Aggression; Emotions
Link ID: 16096 - Posted: 12.01.2011

by Terrence W. Deacon IN A 1992 issue of The Times Literary Supplement, the philosopher Jerry Fodor famously complained that: "Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious." In 2011, despite two decades of explosive advances in brain research and cognitive science, Fodor's assessment still rings true. Why is that? Is it just that cognitive neuroscience still has a long way to go? Or have we been looking in the wrong places for clues? For hints to this mystery, brain researchers and philosophers of mind have focused on brain processes, neural computations and their correspondences with the physical world. But what if we should be focusing on what is not there instead? This proposal is at the heart of my new book Incomplete Nature. I believe that in order to overcome this stalemate we need to pay more attention to what is intrinsically not present in everything - from life's functions and meanings to mind's experiences and values. This suggestion is not intended as an invitation to mysticism, rather it is a way of pointing to the importance of what the field of statistical mechanics calls "constraint": the degrees of freedom not realised in a dynamical process. To illustrate, consider how a quickly flowing stream forms stable eddies as it curls around a boulder, or how a snow crystal spontaneously grows its precise, hexagonally symmetric, yet idiosyncratic branches. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16095 - Posted: 12.01.2011

by Marion Long and Valerie Ross For centuries experts held that every language is unique. Then one day in 1956, a young linguistics professor gave a legendary presentation at the Symposium on Information Theory at MIT. He argued that every intelligible sentence conforms not only to the rules of its particular language but to a universal grammar that encompasses all languages. And rather than absorbing language from the environment and learning to communicate by imitation, children are born with the innate capacity to master language, a power imbued in our species by evolution itself. Almost overnight, linguists’ thinking began to shift. Avram Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928, to William Chomsky, a Hebrew scholar, and Elsie Simonofsky Chomsky, also a scholar and an author of children’s books. While still a youngster, Noam read his father’s manuscript on medieval Hebrew grammar, setting the stage for his work to come. By 1955 he was teaching linguistics at MIT, where he formulated his groundbreaking theories. Today Chomsky continues to challenge the way we perceive ourselves. Language is “the core of our being,” he says. “We are always immersed in it. It takes a strong act of will to try not to talk to yourself when you’re walking down the street, because it’s just always going on.” Chomsky also bucked against scientific tradition by becoming active in politics. He was an outspoken critic of American involvement in Vietnam and helped organize the famous 1967 protest march on the Pentagon. When the leaders of the march were arrested, he found himself sharing a cell with Norman Mailer, who described him in his book Armies of the Night as “a slim, sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity.” © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 16094 - Posted: 12.01.2011

By Michelle Roberts Health reporter, BBC News Frequently heading a football can lead to brain injury, warn doctors who say they have found proof on brain scans. Imaging of 32 keen amateur players revealed patterns of damage similar to that seen in patients with concussion. There appears to be a safe cut off level of 1,000 or fewer headers a year below which no harm will be done, but the US investigators say more work is needed to confirm this. Heading is believed to have killed the English footballer Jeff Astle. Astle, 59, who died in 2002, developed cognitive problems after years of playing for England and West Bromwich Albion. The coroner ruled that his death resulted from a degenerative brain disease caused by heading heavy leather footballs. Although the balls used to play soccer today are much lighter than those used in the 1960s when Astle was playing, they can still pack a punch, says lead researcher Dr Michael Lipton of Montefiore Medical Center, the university hospital for the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 16093 - Posted: 11.29.2011

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who attend regular education classes may be more likely to improve their social skills if their typically developing peers are taught how to interact with them than if only the children with ASD are taught such skills. According to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health, a shift away from more commonly used interventions that focus on training children with ASD directly may provide greater social benefits for children with ASD. The study was published online ahead of print on November 30, 2011, in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. The most common type of social skills intervention for children with ASD is direct training of a group of children with social challenges, who may have different disorders and may be from different classes or schools. The intervention is usually delivered at a clinic, but may also be school-based and offered in a one-on-one format. Other types of intervention focus on training peers how to interact with classmates who have difficulty with social skills. Both types of intervention have shown positive results in studies, but neither has been shown to be as effective in community settings. Connie Kasari, Ph.D., of the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues compared different interventions among 60 children, ages 6-11, with ASD. All of the children were mainstreamed in regular education classrooms for at least 80 percent of the school day.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 16092 - Posted: 11.29.2011

By Ferris Jabr When a researcher asks a volunteer to slide head-first into the open eye of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, the expectation is that the device's magnetic field will penetrate the skull to produce a faithful picture of the brain without changing its behavior. A new study suggests, however, that MRI machines do, in fact, manipulate brain activity—and they change the brain in a way that helps treat depression. In other words, MRIs may be unintentional antidepressants. Hadi Rokni-Yazdi of Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Iran and his colleagues organized 51 volunteers with major depressive disorder into three 17-person groups. Volunteers in the first two groups received one of two kinds of MRI scan. Those in the third group received phony MRI scans: The magnet was never switched on, but a recording of the sound generated by a genuine session was played to convince the volunteers they had been scanned. All the subjects were taking common antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and all had their level of depression assessed by standard scales before and after the procedure. Two weeks after the scans, volunteers in the first two groups scored between 35 and 40 percent lower on the depression scales than they scored before the scan. The placebo effect may have played a role; when people believe they are receiving a helpful treatment for anything, they often feel better afterward. But volunteers in the pretend MRI group improved less, only by 15 to 19 percent. So, the researchers reasoned, some other factor must explain why volunteers who received phony MRIs showed less improvement. The results are discussed in the November issue of Brain Imaging and Behavior. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Depression; Brain imaging
Link ID: 16091 - Posted: 11.29.2011

By JANE E. BRODY Ilsa Katz was 85 when her daughter, Vivian Atkins, first noticed that her mother was becoming increasingly confused. “She couldn’t remember names, where she’d been or what she’d done that day,” Ms. Atkins recalled in an interview. “Initially, I was not too worried. I thought it was part of normal aging. But over time, the confusion and memory problems became more severe and more frequent.” Her mother couldn’t remember the names of close relatives or what day it was. She thought she was going to work or needed to go downtown, which she never did. And she was often agitated. A workup at a memory clinic resulted in a diagnosis of early Alzheimer’s disease, and Ms. Katz was prescribed Aricept, which Ms. Atkins said seemed to make matters worse. But the clinic also tested Ms. Katz’s blood level of vitamin B12. It was well below normal, and her doctor thought that could be contributing to her symptoms. Weekly B12 injections were begun. “Soon afterward, she became less agitated, less confused and her memory was much better,” said Ms. Atkins. “I felt I had my mother back, and she feels a lot better, too.” Now 87, Ms. Katz still lives alone in Manhattan and feels well enough to refuse outside assistance. Still, her daughter wondered, “Why aren’t B12 levels checked routinely, particularly in older people?” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16090 - Posted: 11.29.2011

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Just in time for Thanksgiving, a major new study offers some hopeful news about fat and fate, as well as about the consequences of the choices we make. For the research, investigators tallied the results of dozens of studies about the effects of exercise on the so-called fat gene, which is believed to increase the risk that carriers will be overweight or obese by 12 percent or more. Scientists first identified this gene, called the “fat mass and obesity-associated” gene, or FTO gene, several years ago, and as it turns out, it’s distressingly common. By most estimates, about 65 percent of people of European or African descent and perhaps 44 percent of Asians carry some version of the FTO gene. These findings would seem to suggest that most of us are doomed to be tubby, an enervating idea — and one that may even be self-fulfilling. In a study published in February in The New England Journal of Medicine, volunteers who learned that they carried the FTO gene or similar fat-promoting genes frequently turned afterward to heedless binging, consuming more fatty foods in the next 90 days than they had in the preceding months, presumably because they believed that their fate, at least in terms of weight, was sealed. But the new report, published this month in the journal PLoS Medicine, emphatically suggests otherwise. It found that physical activity, even in small doses, may subvert genetic destiny. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16089 - Posted: 11.29.2011

By LAURA BEIL Witness testimony has been the gold standard of the criminal justice system, revered in courtrooms and crime dramas as the evidence that clinches a case. Yet scientists have long cautioned that the brain is not a filing cabinet, storing memories in a way that they can be pulled out, consulted and returned intact. Memory is not so much a record of the past as a rough sketch that can be modified even by the simple act of telling the story. For scientists, memory has been on trial for decades, and courts and public opinion are only now catching up with the verdict. It has come as little surprise to researchers that about 75 percent of DNA-based exonerations have come in cases where witnesses got it wrong. This month, the Supreme Court heard its first oral arguments in more than three decades that question the validity of using witness testimony, in a case involving a New Hampshire man convicted of theft, accused by a woman who saw him from a distance in the dead of night. And in August the New Jersey Supreme Court set new rules to cope with failings in witness accounts, during an appeal by a man picked from a photo lineup, and convicted of manslaughter and weapons possession in a 2003 fatal shooting. Rather than the centerpiece of prosecution, witness testimony should be viewed more like trace evidence, scientists say, with the same fragility and vulnerability to contamination. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16088 - Posted: 11.29.2011

By CARL ZIMMER CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Steven Pinker was a 15-year-old anarchist. He didn’t think people needed a police force to keep the peace. Governments caused the very problems they were supposed to solve. Besides, it was 1969, said Dr. Pinker, who is now a 57-year-old psychologist at Harvard. “If you weren’t an anarchist,” he said, “you couldn’t get a date.” At the dinner table, he argued with his parents about human nature. “They said, ‘What would happen if there were no police?’ ” he recalled. “I said: ‘What would we do? Would we rob banks? Of course not. Police make no difference.’ ” This was in Montreal, “a city that prided itself on civility and low rates of crime,” he said. Then, on Oct. 17, 1969, police officers and firefighters went on strike, and he had a chance to test his first hypothesis about human nature. “All hell broke loose,” Dr. Pinker recalled. “Within a few hours there was looting. There were riots. There was arson. There were two murders. And this was in the morning that they called the strike.” The ’60s changed the lives of many people and, in Dr. Pinker’s case, left him deeply curious about how humans work. That curiosity turned into a career as a leading expert on language, and then as a leading advocate of evolutionary psychology. In a series of best-selling books, he has argued that our mental faculties — from emotions to decision-making to visual cognition — were forged by natural selection. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 16087 - Posted: 11.29.2011

A new report shows that female Grade 8 students are outperforming their male counterparts in Canada on reading and science, with no discernable difference between the two genders in math skills. The report, released Monday, outlines the results of the 2010 Pan-Canadian Assessment Program (PCAP) from the Council of Ministers of Education in Canada. It's based on test results from 32,000 Grade 8 students from more than 1,600 schools across the country, providing a national report card. Girls scored better than boys in both science and reading, lending credence to the view that boys need a push in several subjects. Break-down by province Students in Quebec and Ontario scored above the national average on math. They scored near the national average in Alberta, and below the average in all other provinces and territories tested. When it comes to science, students in Alberta and Ontario scored above the national average. They scored near the national average in British Columbia and Prince Edward Island, and below the average in all other provinces and territories tested. On the reading portion, students in Ontario and Alberta scored above the national average. They scored near the national average in British Columbia, and below the average in all other provinces and territories tested. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16086 - Posted: 11.29.2011

Cells taken from people with a rare syndrome linked to autism could help explain the origins of the condition, scientists suggest. The Stanford University team turned skin cells from people with "Timothy syndrome" into fully-fledged brain cells. The abnormal activity found in these cells could be partially corrected using an experimental drug, Nature Medicine reports. UK researchers warned the findings might not apply to everyone with autism. Compared with the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide thought to show characteristics of autism, "Timothy syndrome" is vanishingly rare, affecting an estimated 20 people across the planet. People who have the syndrome frequently display autistic behaviour, such as problems with social development and communication. Because it is caused by a single gene defect rather than a combination of small genetic flaws, each making a tiny contribution, it presents a useful target for scientists looking to examine what goes wrong in the developing brain of a child with autism. The US researchers used a technique developed recently to generate brain cells called neurons from only a sample of the patient's skin. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16085 - Posted: 11.29.2011