Charlotte Schubert Human neurons, derived from embryonic stem cells, can modulate the behavior of a network of host neurons, according to a study examining the cells in culture and transplanting them into a mouse brain. The findings, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, lay the foundations for potential future treatments of Parkinson's disease, stroke and other conditions. Previous studies have shown that transplanted human neurons derived from stem cells look and act like functional nerve cells. For instance, such cells form connections with host neurons in the mouse brain, and receive signals from them. But it has been a challenge to show that the transplanted cells can successfully signal to and regulate the behaviour of host neurons. To address this question, Jason Weick and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin in Madison harnessed a technique known as optogenetic targeting. This involves genetically engineering neurons to produce an ion channel (a protein-lined pore that spans the cell membrane) that opens in response to light, allowing positive ions such as sodium and calcium to flow through it and activate the neuron. In this way the researchers can selectively activate human neurons in a mixture of human and mouse cells. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Stem Cells; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 16064 - Posted: 11.22.2011

By Katherine Lymn As head of Experimental Surgical Services at the University of Minnesota, he’s been the focus of animal rights activists’ rage. Bianco estimated that up to 300 sheep are “sacrificed” each year as part of his experiments in heart valve research. Pathology staff members kill the sheep with an overdose injection of a drug similar to what a veterinarian would use to euthanize a pet. Bianco speaks out in support of animal experimentation and accepts his status as a public figure of the biomedical research industry. But he sees it differently when animal rights groups try to influence students. “My solution is to bring the students to us,” he said. He invites high school students to his lab for field trips to “counteract” PETA’s message that using animals for research is wrong. Bianco tests heart valves in animals before the valves go on to human trials. He proactively promotes research like this, which has drawn threats in the past. Activist Camille Marino, out of Florida, posted a threat against Bianco on her website negotioationisover.net in 2009. “We should not be surprised when the unconscionable violence inflicted upon animals is justifiably visited upon their tormentors,” she wrote. Animal rights organizations have demonstrated at the University in the past. In 1999, the Animal Liberation Front claimed responsibility for vandalizing research facilities and stealing more than 100 animals. © 1900 - 2011 The Minnesota Daily

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 16063 - Posted: 11.22.2011

By TARA PARKER-POPE Like most creatures on earth, humans come equipped with a circadian clock, a roughly 24-hour internal timer that keeps our sleep patterns in sync with our planet. At least until genetics, age and our personal habits get in the way. Even though the average adult needs eight hours of sleep per night, there are “shortsleepers,” who need far less, and morning people, who, research shows, often come from families of other morning people. Then there’s the rest of us, who rely on alarm clocks. For those who fantasize about greeting the dawn, there is hope. Sleep experts say that with a little discipline (well, actually, a lot of discipline), most people can reset their circadian clocks. But it’s not as simple as forcing yourself to go to bed earlier (you can’t make a wide-awake brain sleep). It requires inducing a sort of jet lag without leaving your time zone. And sticking it out until your body clock resets itself. And then not resetting it again. To start, move up your wake-up time by 20 minutes a day. If you regularly rise at 8 a.m., but really want to get moving at 6 a.m., set the alarm for 7:40 on Monday. The next day, set it for 7:20 and so on. Then, after you wake up, don’t linger in bed. Hit yourself with light. In theory, you’ll gradually get sleepy about 20 minutes earlier each night, and you can facilitate the transition by avoiding extra light exposure from computers or televisions as you near bedtime. (The light from a computer screen or an iPad has roughly the same effect as the sun.) “Light has a very privileged relationship with our brain,” says Dr. Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen, chief of sleep medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. While most sensory information is “processed” by the thalamus before being sent on its way, Ellenbogen says, light goes directly to the circadian system. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 16062 - Posted: 11.21.2011

By BENEDICT CAREY Foster children are being prescribed cocktails of powerful antipsychosis drugs just as frequently as some of the most mentally disabled youngsters on Medicaid, a new study suggests. The report, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, is the first to investigate how often youngsters in foster care are given two antipsychotic drugs at once, the authors said. The drugs include Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa — among other so-called major tranquilizers — which were developed for schizophrenia but are now used as all-purpose drugs for almost any psychiatric symptoms. “The kids in foster care may come from bad homes, but they do not have the sort of complex medical issues that those in the disabled population do,” said Susan dosReis, an associate professor in the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy and the lead author. The implication, Dr. dosReis and other experts said: Doctors are treating foster children’s behavioral problems with the same powerful drugs given to people with schizophrenia and severe bipolar disorder. “We simply don’t have evidence to support this kind of use, especially in young children,” Dr. dosReis said. In recent years, doctors and policy makers have grown concerned about high rates of overall psychiatric drug use in the foster care system, the government-financed program that provides temporary living arrangements for 400,000 to 500,000 children and adolescents. Previous studies have found that children in foster care receive psychiatric medications at about twice the rate among children outside the system. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16061 - Posted: 11.21.2011

By ANDREW POLLACK It has three Nobel Prize winners on its board. Its chairman, P. Roy Vagelos, is a pharmaceutical industry star who ran Merck during its heyday. Its chief scientist has written frequently cited biomedical papers. Yet for all that, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals has known mostly failure in nearly 24 years of existence, piling up cumulative losses of $1.2 billion. But that is now changing. Late Friday, the company won approval from the Food and Drug Administration for what is expected to be its first big drug — to treat the wet form of age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of severe vision loss in the elderly. The drug, called Eylea, can be injected into the eye less frequently than the current standard, Genentech’s Lucentis, according to the labels of the two drugs. Eylea is also slightly less expensive, at $1,850 an injection versus $1,950 for Lucentis. Regeneron argues that Eylea would save the health care system thousands of dollars a year per patient, factoring in the fewer injections and also fewer doctor visits and examinations. Eylea, however, is still more expensive that Avastin, a Genentech cancer drug that costs only $50 a dose when used off-label to treat macular degeneration. Avastin accounts for more than half the macular degeneration market, despite some recent contamination incidents that have raised safety concerns. The approval is a vindication for Dr. Leonard S. Schleifer, 59, who has been chief executive since founding Regeneron in early 1988, making him almost certainly the longest-reigning chief executive in the biotechnology industry. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16060 - Posted: 11.21.2011

By Alan Boyle Slides containing thin slices of Albert Einstein's brain will go on display at Philadelphia's Mutter Museum, thanks to a donation from a neuropathologist who has been holding onto the samples for decades. Lucy Rorke-Adams of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia received the box of 46 slides in the mid-1970s from the widow of a physician who helped arrange the preparation of the brain samples, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Thomas Stoltz Harvey, a doctor at Princeton Hospital, conducted the autopsy on the famed physicist just hours after his death in 1955. Apparently without the family's permission, Harvey preserved Einstein's brain and sectioned it into hundreds of specimens on microscope slides for study. The controversy, as well as the strange journey of Einstein's brain, are detailed in Michael Paterniti's book "Driving Mr. Albert." Harvey and other researchers found nothing unusual about the brain's size, but there was evidence that Einstein's brain contained more than the expected proportion of glial cells, which play a role in supporting connections between neurons. Rorke-Adams, whose research focuses on comparisons of brain cells at different ages, said Einstein's brain looks remarkably youthful under a microscope: "“It does not show any of the changes that we associate with age," CBS Philly quoted her as saying. © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16059 - Posted: 11.21.2011

Ewen Callaway A mutation that appeared more than half a million years ago may have helped humans learn the complex muscle movements that are critical to speech and language. The claim stems from the finding that mice genetically engineered to produce the human form of the gene, called FOXP2, learn more quickly than their normal counterparts. The work was presented by Christiane Schreiweis, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, at the Society for Neuroscience meeting this week in Washington DC this week. Scientists discovered FOXP2 in the 1990s by studying a British family known as 'KE' in which three generations suffered from severe speech and language problems1. Those with language problems were found to share an inherited mutation that inactivates one copy of FOXP2. Most vertebrates have nearly identical versions of the gene, which is involved in the development of brain circuits important for the learning of movement. The human version of FOXP2, the protein encoded by the gene, differs from that of chimpanzees at two amino acids, hinting that changes to the human form may have had a hand in the evolution of language2. A team led by Schreiweis’ colleague Svante Pääbo discovered that the gene is identical in modern humans (Homo sapiens) and Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis), suggesting that the mutation appeared before these two human lineages diverged around 500,000 years ago3. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Language; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16058 - Posted: 11.19.2011

By Scicurious We hear a lot about PTSD these days, and with good reason. As more people confront trauma and come away with severely debilitating disorders, it becomes that much more important to understand the mechanism, in order to find ways to treat or prevent it. And one of the ways people are seeking to understand PTSD is by trying to find genetic risk factors for the disorder, in the hope that familial traits will be able to predict who might develop PTSD and who might not, allowing for preventative treatments before exposure, and better treatments after trauma. And if you’re going to study familial components in humans, one of the best ways to do that is to study twins. For this study, the authors are looking at two different groups of twins (the study is still ongoing) recruited from the Vietnam Era Twin Registry. In the first group of twins, one twin fought in the Vietnam war and got PTSD, the other twin didn’t fight. In the second group of twins, one twin fought in Vietnam and did NOT get PTSD, and the other twin did not fight. They took these groups of twins and put them in fMRI, where they exposed them to sets of fearful or non-fearful faces. Fearful faces can provoke a response from the amygdala, an area of the brain associated with processing emotions such as fear. People with PTSD are known to have differences in amygdala responses, and this study wanted to confirm this, as well as examining their twins, to see if there was any indication in twins who had not been exposed to combat. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Stress; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16057 - Posted: 11.19.2011

by Elizabeth Norton A loud shirt. A gravelly voice. Purple prose. The merging of the senses, called synesthesia, is a literary device that makes for vivid imagery. But in a neurological condition with the same name, a single perception can involve a second, linked sense that most people would not experience. "Synesthetes" may taste chocolate when hearing a song or see numbers as colors. The reason, new research suggests, may be that the brain cells in the area responsible for the secondary, or extra, sense—for instance, the chocolate taste—are overly active. In addition to shedding light on an unusual mode of perception, the findings could lead to treatments for brain disorders—showing ways to reduce hallucinations, for example, or correcting various types of impaired perception that can follow a stroke. Synesthesia can occur early in life due to the explosive growth of a young child's brain, explains neuroscientist Devin Terhune of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Normally, as the child grows older and brain circuits are refined, the linkages break up. But in synesthetes, for some reason, the secondary sense persists throughout life. The simplest explanation, Terhune and his colleagues believe, is that neurons in the area responsible for the extra sense are more responsive, or "excitable," than usual, strengthening a sensory association that the person wouldn't normally be aware of. The investigators tested their hypothesis with a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, which, as the name suggests, stimulates a specific part of the brain with a weak magnetic field applied to the scalp. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16056 - Posted: 11.19.2011

By Scicurious Brain Now we come to the Ig Nobel Physiology Prize. Yawns are notoriously contagious in humans and in other social animals, especially primates. In humans, yawning has been thought to do various things, including cooling the brain, increasing arousal when you’re sleepy and, possibly, helping to synchronize group behavior. Could yawning be a form of unconscious empathy? This would mean that in order to have a contagious yawn, the animals involved would have to be capable of empathy, of fellow feeling. We know that dogs and primates, and humans, probably are, but that means we can’t really test for whether it’s empathy or not. We need a species that is social but probably can’t feel for its compatriots. That’s where tortoises come in. To test whether yawning requires empathy and thus get at the real purpose that yawning might serve, Anna Wilkinson of the University of Lincoln in England and her colleagues took a group of red-footed tortoises that lived together and trained one of them to yawn when exposed to a red square. Then they had tortoises watch the trained tortoise in action and checked them for yawns. The researchers also checked for yawns when no other tortoise was present and when the trained tortoise had no red square and so wasn’t yawning. What they got was a big, fat negative. The test tortoises showed no notice of the other animals’ huge yawns. This may mean that contagious yawning is not just the result of a fixed-action pattern triggered when you see someone else yawn. If that were the case, the tortoises would have yawned right along with their compatriots. Contagious social yawning may require something more, a social sense or a sense of empathy resulting from complex social interactions. Of course, it could also mean that tortoises are just a really bad choice for contagious yawning. But the social explanation seems a little more supported. —From the Scicurious Brain at http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 16055 - Posted: 11.19.2011

Sandrine Ceurstemont, New Scientist TV The mysterious origin of the female orgasm hasn't yet been solved, but now the world's first movie of the brain during sexual climax maps activity before, during and after the event. Created by animators from theVisualMD, it's based on brain scans captured by Barry Komisaruk of Rutgers University, New Jersey, and his team as a woman stimulated herself inside an fMRI machine. The animation uses a colour scale that varies from red to white, where yellow and white are linked to highest levels of activity. The first sequence uses snapshots of 20 moments during the 7-minute scan. Initially, genital touching fires up a region of the sensory cortex but signals quickly spread to the limbic system, an area linked to emotion, behaviour and long-term memory. Then the cerebellum and frontal cortex light up as muscles become tense before climax. During orgasm, almost the whole brain becomes highly active, as demonstrated by the bright yellow colours. This stage is highlighted in the second part of the animation. Activity then returns to lower levels. Komisaruk hopes that this map of the brain will help explain conditions where women have difficulty achieving orgasm, by showing where the process breaks down. He's also developing a technique where people can watch their brain activity while inside an fMRI scanner, allowing them to learn how to change brain patterns. This could help treat a range of conditions such as pain, anxiety and depression. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Brain imaging
Link ID: 16054 - Posted: 11.19.2011

Scientists are getting closer to the dream of creating computer systems that can replicate the brain. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have designed a computer chip that mimics how the brain's neurons adapt in response to new information. Such chips could eventually enable communication between artificially created body parts and the brain. It could also pave the way for artificial intelligence devices. There are about 100 billion neurons in the brain, each of which forms synapses - the connections between neurons that allow information to flow - with many other neurons. This process is known as plasticity and is believed to underpin many brain functions, such as learning and memory. Neural functions The MIT team, led by research scientist Chi-Sang Poon, has been able to design a computer chip that can simulate the activity of a single brain synapse. Activity in the synapses relies on so-called ion channels which control the flow of charged atoms such as sodium, potassium and calcium. The 'brain chip' has about 400 transistors and is wired up to replicate the circuitry of the brain. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 16053 - Posted: 11.19.2011

Caitlin Stier, video intern In this video, a straw appears to pass through a safety pin. Wonder what the trick is? Developed by illusion enthusiast Greg Ross of Greeenpro Productions in Pennsylvania, it's a variation of a well-known sleight of hand that exploits the limitations of sight. Ross devised the set-up while tinkering with a straw, toothpick, and safety pin. He first pierced the straw and toothpick and fastened the two with the pin. By applying pressure on the pin with the straw and toothpick combo, the straw spins around 180 degrees. But it moves so fast that neither our eyes nor the camera can detect the half-rotation. "I wanted to somehow create a solid through solid effect, which took that a step further into the realm of optical illusions rather than magic," Ross explains. Super-fast motion is necessary for the trick to work. According to psychologist Stephen Macknik, author of the book Sleights of Mind, assuming the narrow straw is about the same size as a nail, we don't see it until it stops if it completes more than about one rotation in three seconds. Macknik estimates that the straw in this clip takes a mere 100 milliseconds to complete nearly half a rotation. That's fifteen times faster than the human motion system can detect for an object of that size. If you would like to recreate the illusion yourself, you can follow a tutorial prepared by Ross that demonstrates how to make your own straw and pin trick. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16052 - Posted: 11.19.2011

By Tina Hesman Saey WASHINGTON — Separation anxiety in some children may be due to extra doses of a particular gene. The gene, GTF2I, is located on human chromosome 7. People missing part of the chromosome that contains GTF2I have a condition called Williams syndrome and are generally extra social. On the other hand, people who have extra copies of that part of chromosome 7 may have social and other types of anxiety: About 26 percent of children with an extra copy the region containing GTF2I have been diagnosed by a doctor as having separation anxiety, human geneticist Lucy Osborne of the University of Toronto said November 15 at a press conference at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting. Osborne and colleagues genetically engineered mice to have a duplicate copy or two of GTF2I, or to be missing one copy of the gene, then tested the effect of the gene dosage on separation anxiety with a squeak test. Week-old baby mice separated from their mothers send out ultrasonic distress calls. “It’s a ‘come get me’ signal,” Osborne said. Baby mice with a normal two copies of GTF2I squeaked an average of 192 times over four minutes when removed briefly from their nests. Mice with three or four copies squeaked nearly twice as much, indicating greater anxiety at being separated from their mothers. Mice missing one copy of the gene were a little bit less vocal. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 16051 - Posted: 11.19.2011

By Susan Milius Small rodents called voles have their own battles of the sexes over macho traits. And it turns out that dominant voles don’t always come out on top, which may explain one way a species maintains genetic diversity. Among European rodents called bank voles (Myodes glareolus), dominant males readily trounce meeker ones in disputes over rights to court females, explains Mikael Mokkonen of the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. But the genetic mix underlying these supercharged males doesn’t work well when females inherit it. Sisters of the truculent top voles tend to have small litters of pups, he and his colleagues confirm in the Nov. 18 Science. “You can think of sexual conflict as a tug-of-war over a trait value because what’s optimal for males is not optimal for females,” Mokkonen says. Researchers have proposed that the evolutionary push and pull of such conflicts — favoring a dominant genetic mix at times in males but disfavoring it in females — keeps variety in a population. That possibility has become a hot topic in recent years as one possible solution for a central puzzle in biology: “If selection strongly favors some gene or some trait, why do we see so much variation in natural populations?” says evolutionary biologist Robert Cox of the University of Virginia, who studies male-female issues in lizards. For bank voles, sexual conflict by itself isn’t enough to preserve variations indefinitely, Mokkonen and his colleagues conclude. Warring sides probably aren’t perfectly balanced, and the researchers’ computer simulations found that genetic variation dwindles over the course of generations. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 16050 - Posted: 11.19.2011

By Bruce Bower Infants generally thrive physically and mentally if their mothers’ emotional condition, whether healthy or depressed, remains stable before and after birth, say psychologist Curt Sandman of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues. Kids whose mothers stayed depressed from the fourth month of pregnancy on displayed first-year mental and physical development comparable to that of youngsters whose mothers stayed emotionally healthy for the same stretch, Sandman’s team will report in Psychological Science. In contrast, babies’ first-year physical and mental development lagged if their mothers’ emotional state during pregnancy changed after giving birth. That pattern held whether depression during pregnancy resolved after giving birth or depression first appeared after delivering a child. “A human fetus that prepares for inadequate care after birth based on biological messages from a depressed mother will have a survival advantage,” Sandman says. A fetus that gets thrown a caretaking curve upon leaving the womb — whether biologically primed to expect sufficient or deficient treatment — tends to struggle developmentally, at least for the first year, he suggests. Related investigations have found that people whose mothers nearly starved during pregnancy eventually developed higher rates of diabetes and other metabolic disorders if they received enough food after birth, but not if they too got inadequate nutrition. Until now, no one has reported a health advantage for babies exposed to maternal depression before and after birth. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Depression
Link ID: 16049 - Posted: 11.19.2011

By Nick Bascom Standing fully erect and balancing on only two feet gives humans a strange strut that sets them apart from all other mobile critters. Yet the basic motor commands that direct a human stride may also get other animals moving, a new study suggests. Although legged vertebrates come in many different shapes and sizes and exhibit a wide variety of walking styles, they may all employ a similar nerve system, located in the spine, to coordinate the muscle activity needed for locomotion, neurophysiologist Francesco Lacquaniti of the University of Rome Tor Vergata and colleagues report in the Nov. 18 Science. Networks of spinal nerve cells, called central pattern generators, contain all the necessary information to time the muscles for the step cycle, says neuroscientist Sten Grillner of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who was not involved in the study. The networks still need to be turned on by the brain, but once triggered, the spinal nerves handle locomotion all on their own. A message to start moving gets generated in the spinal cord and travels down the nerve pathway to specialized nerve cells that deliver the message directly to muscle fibers. The central pattern generators are so autonomous that, in some cases, cats can still walk after having their spinal cords severely damaged. It doesn’t work the same in humans, who typically suffer permanent paralysis after significant spinal shock. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16048 - Posted: 11.19.2011

By R. Douglas Fields Children breast-fed longer than six months scored a 3.8-point IQ margin over those who were bottle-fed, according to a seven-year study by researchers at Jagiellonian University Medical College in Poland. Medical epidemiologist Wieslaw Jedrychowski and colleagues followed 468 babies born to nonsmoking mothers. The children were tested five times at regular intervals from infancy through preschool age. The data showed that cognitive abilities of preschoolers who were breast-fed scored significantly higher than bottle-fed infants, and IQ score was directly proportional to how long the infants had been breast-fed: IQs were 2.1 points higher in children who were breast-fed for three months; 2.6 points higher when babies were breast-fed for four to six months; 3.8 points higher in children breast-fed longer than six months. The results were published in the May 2011 issue of the European Journal of Pediatrics. This research confirms observations reported 70 years ago by Carolyn Hoefer and Mattie Hardy in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association, as well as many subsequent studies. This body of research provides the scientific basis for the World Health Organization's recommendation that all infants should be exclusively breast-fed for the first six months of life. But what is the missing ingredient that undermines the cognitive development of bottle-fed babies? Chemists searching for a specific compound in mother's milk have been overlooking the obvious difference between breast-feeding and bottle-feeding—something that could easily account for the difference in cognitive development, wrote Tonse Raju, a pediatrician and neonatalogist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in the current issue of Breastfeeding Medicine, October 2011. (Raju was not involved in the Jedrychowski study.) © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 16047 - Posted: 11.17.2011

By Heidi Ledford of Nature magazine It would not be the first psychiatric drug to run aground in a large study after sailing through early trials. But even though TC-5214 has failed to significantly relieve major depression in a phase III trial and investors are fleeing, some analysts and scientists argue that the setback need not spell the end for the drug, nor for other compounds that act on nicotinic receptors in nerve cells. On November 8, Targacept, a drug company based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, announced that TC-5214 had performed no better than placebo in one of four phase III trials. The results are a disappointment to clinicians eager for an innovative antidepressant. Because the drug exploits a previously untried mechanism, it might have helped the roughly one-third of people with depression who do not respond to current therapies. "We really need new options," says Noah Philip, a psychiatrist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. "People were very eager to see what this drug would do." Results from the other trials are expected by early 2012, but some analysts are pessimistic; Targacept's stock fell by 60% after the announcement. "I was stunned by the negative outcome," says Alan Carr, an analyst for the Needham & Co investment bank in New York. "I don't have high expectations for the remaining three trials." TC-5214 is a form of mecamylamine, a blood-pressure drug introduced in the 1950s. It targets nicotinic �4�2 receptors (see `Mixed signals'), which normally receive chemical signals from the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Because excess acetylcholine has been linked to major depression, blocking these signals might relieve the condition. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 16046 - Posted: 11.17.2011

By Emily Sohn Among the devastating consequences of her brain injury from a gunshot wound 10 months ago, Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords lost the ability to talk. But with help from music-based therapy, according to an ABC News segment that aired this week, Giffords has rediscovered her voice and, it seems, her spirit. The footage, which shows Giffords crying in frustration when she tries unsuccessfully to talk but looking joyful as she sings fluently, paints a dramatic picture of the power of music to help people overcome brain injuries. Giffords' story also highlights both the potential and the limitations of a fairly new field of medicine. Music brings so much pleasure to our everyday lives, and it would make sense if music also worked as a healing tool. But scientists are still awaiting solid data to prove what seems to work in case study after case study. "It used to be thought that music was a superfluous thing, and no one understood why it developed from an evolutionary standpoint," said Michael De Georgia, director of the Center for Music and Medicine at Case Western Reserve University's University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Stroke
Link ID: 16045 - Posted: 11.17.2011