Sperm whales speak in distinct regional dialects that appear closely linked to different "cultural groups," a Canadian researcher says. "The animals in the Caribbean sound different than the animals in the Pacific — even the Gulf of Mexico, which is right beside the Caribbean," said Shane Gero, a researcher at Dalhousie University in Halifax. "In a lot of ways, that's very similar to us. We can identify someone from the U.K. versus Canada because they say 'lorry' and not 'truck.'" Sperm whales from many different regions meet in some "multicultural" areas of the ocean but tend to associate with whales that speak their own dialect, Gero told CBC's Quirks & Quarks in an interview that airs Saturday. "Their society really is divided based on culture," he said. "Animals that have different dialects behave differently. They feed on different things. They raise their babies differently." Gero has been studying sperm whales in the Caribbean for his PhD thesis. He and his collaborators in Canada and Scotland have been trying to decode sperm whale language by recording the voices of pairs of animals talking to one another and noting differences among the sounds they make. Female sperm whales spend all year in family groups in subtropical regions of the ocean, while males roam all over the world. When two whales encounter each other, they make patterns of clicks called codas. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Animal Communication; Evolution
Link ID: 15353 - Posted: 05.21.2011

By Deborah Kotz, Binge drinking has been named by university presidents as the single biggest problem on college campuses, responsible for accidental injuries, unintended pregnancies, date rapes, and alcohol poisoning. If that's not enough to stop students from drinking excessively, perhaps they'll be influenced by this new Spanish study: College students who binge drink have a slightly lowered ability to remember lists of words when the alcohol wears off compared with those who don't binge drink. While it's not clear from the study if binge drinking actually caused these memory defects, this and previous research "supports that possibility," says Aaron White, a college drinking prevention researcher at the US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism who is familiar with the study. And that could mean that students, say, have trouble remembering a list of dates for history class or an equation in math class. How many drinks is a binge? Five or more servings of alcohol in a day for a man and four or more servings for a woman, according to Harvard researchers who studied alcohol's effects on different genders. A serving of alcohol is defined as 12 ounces of beer, 8 ounces of malt liquor, 5 ounces of wine, or 1.5 ounces, or a shot, of spirits or liquor (rum, vodka, whiskey). "This is not about getting drunk one time but binging with some regularity," says White. "The strongest evidence we have suggests that those at greatest risk for memory impairment drink heavily and often -- often to the point of developing withdrawal symptoms." © 2011 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15352 - Posted: 05.21.2011

Fix your eyes on the red dot in the animation above. As the circular pattern turns, it may appear to jump backwards but the skipping motion is all in your mind. What's actually happening in this illusion, created by Mark Wexler from Paris Descartes University, France, is that the random lines that make up the circle are suddenly replaced by a different pattern. In the video above, you can see a few variations of the illusion that demonstrate that the effect is perceived regardless of the rotation's direction. "The jumps can also be seen if white lines are suddenly made black and vice versa," says Wexler: "If the lines are randomised again for a slightly longer duration, the jumps seem to go further back." There is currently no known explanation for this brain trick. But Wexler thinks it's a type of motion after-effect, with two main differences. Typically, the illusory motion is much slower than the main one but in this case it's extremely fast. In addition, many observers reported a change in amplitude accompanying the switch whereas motion after-effects don't usually involve a change in position. By making the change of pattern occur more slowly, Wexler found that many people perceived a net motion in the opposite direction to the original rotation. He says: The illusory motion is more pronounced than the (real) motion we put in: a perceptual, perpetual motion machine! © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15351 - Posted: 05.21.2011

by Miguel Nicolelis ANSWER quickly: what links the internet, the stock market, democratic elections, a perfect soccer play, the big bang theory, the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel and the iPad? Most people guess that the only possible link is they are all created by humans. While this is technically correct, it doesn't credit the true creator of such macro structures and exquisite tools: the human brain. As well as the almost infinite catalogue of artificial tools and beliefs that rule most of our lives, our cherished social, political, and economic systems also blossom as by-products of the incessant electrochemical storms brewed by the brain circuits formed by billions of interconnected cellular elements. These neurons make up an organic structure so majestic and mysterious that its only true rival in complexity and power is the cosmos that hosts us all. For the past 200 years or so, neuroscientists have been obsessed with understanding how the roots of all our glory and disgrace, as individuals and as a species, emerge from waves of neuronal electrical activity that propagate through a neural ocean. Just how do they morph into what is conventionally known as thinking, the main currency of our primate brains? In the early 19th century, Franz Joseph Gall in Germany and Thomas Young in Britain pioneered the modern age of neuroscience with opposing theories of how the brain worked. Gall's phrenology proposed that brain functions were localised in particular spatial territories of the human cortex, the most superficial part of the nervous system, just beneath the skull. Gall and his disciples made a living by claiming to ascertain the key personality traits of his patients by palpating the bumps on their heads. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 15350 - Posted: 05.21.2011

By Bruce Bower Faces of people who get tarred in the press or blasted behind their backs in snarky gabfests may literally stand out in the crowd. People find it particularly easy to see the faces of individuals about whom they’ve heard nasty or unpleasant gossip, reports a team led by psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University in Boston. “Encountering negative gossip about someone makes it easier to register that person’s face than neutral or positive gossip does,” says Feldman Barrett. Not only does the new study show that disapproving gossip quickly gets associated with a matching face, but that this connection operates outside conscious awareness, remarks cognitive neuroscientist Moshe Bar of Harvard Medical School. “A negative bias that originated in gossip made corresponding faces pop out in conditions where observers would have otherwise remained unconscious of those faces,” Bar says. A gossip-schooled eye for bad eggs provides social protection, the researchers propose, by extending opportunities to scrutinize potential liars and cheats. That argument fits with a previous proposal that gossip enabled the evolution of larger social groups in which people used spoken language to learn whom to befriend and whom to avoid. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 15349 - Posted: 05.21.2011

by Ann Gibbons While dinosaurs ruled the world some 200 million years ago, a group of nocturnal, shrewlike proto-mammals unwittingly sniffed out a strategy for survival that eventually led to the evolution of larger brains. Fossil skulls of two ancient, mammal-like reptiles suggest that natural selection for a keener sense of smell was the initial spur behind bigger brains in early mammals, according to a report online today in Science. “Mammals didn’t get our larger brains for thinking,” says co-author Zhe-Xi Luo, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “We got it for a more urgent and more basic need—our sense of smell was far more important.” Birds and mammals have brains that are up to 10 times larger, relative to body size, than those of reptiles and other animals. Why? Some researchers have proposed that the early, nocturnal mammals evolved larger brains to boost their hearing, because sight was less important at night. Others have suggested that mammals’ brains are proportionately larger because as many early mammals evolved smaller bodies, their brains failed to shrink to scale. By reconstructing the two oldest known skulls of proto-mammals—fossils of Morganucodon and Hadrocodium discovered in the famed Lufeng Formation in Yunnan, China, in 1986—Luo and colleagues found clues to how the mammalian brain began to enlarge. The researchers scanned the skulls with computed tomography (CT) scans, creating three-dimensional, virtual endocasts of the brain, based on the impressions brain tissue and spaces left on the inside of the skull. That gave them a detailed view of the surface of the brain and the nasal cavities. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 15348 - Posted: 05.21.2011

By DENISE GRADY A young man paralyzed by an injury to his spinal cord has regained the ability to stand for short periods, take steps with help and move his legs and feet at will, with the help of an electrical stimulator implanted in his lower back. Rob Summers, 25, paralyzed for five years, regained some ability to stand after surgeons implanted electrodes in the lower part of his back to stimulate his spinal cord. The device is experimental and not available to other patients, and because it has been studied in only one person it is not known whether it would work as well in other people with different types of spinal injury. But the researchers say that scientifically the work is an important advance, because it shows that a bit of electrical stimulation can unlock the ability of the spinal cord to control movement — even if its signals from the brain have been cut off by injury. Similar findings had been made in animals. “It’s been thought that the brain controls all our movement,” said Susan Harkema, research director at the Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center in Louisville and the lead author of an article about the research being published online on Thursday in the journal Lancet. “But the spinal cord is the primary controller.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Regeneration; Robotics
Link ID: 15347 - Posted: 05.21.2011

By Jesse Bering There are so many obscure specializations, subspecializations and subcortical subspecializations within the brain sciences that even the sharpest brain has scarcely enough brainpower to learn everything there is to know about itself. But if there's one fact that the teacup-Yorkie-sized prune in your head might want to ponder, it's that it shares a peculiar past with something considerably lower in your anatomy—your genitalia. I don't mean that our brains and reproductive organs share some embryological or evolutionary history, but rather that they were once (and, to some extent, still are) entwined in the language of the body. What this odd story reveals is that the ancient anatomists were major dickheads. We all were, back then. Régis Olry, of the University of Quebec, and Duane Haines, of the University of Mississippi, brought the whole sordid tale to light in an intriguing pair of articles for the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences. These "historians of neuroanatomy" (yes, there is such a profession, and we should be grateful for it) reviewed a very old, circuitous medical literature and found that the human brain was once described as comprising its very own vulva, penis, testicles, buttocks, and even an anus. In fact, part of the cerebrum is still named in honor of long-forgotten whores. In their first article from 1997, epochs ago in academic terms, Olry and Haines revealed the surprising origins of the term "fornix." For those illiterate in neuroanatomy, which I'll assume is 99.9 percent of you, the fornix is a fibrous, arching band of nerve fibers that connects the hippocampus and the limbic system, and spans certain fluid-filled chambers of the brain known as ventricles. You'd have numerous and noticeable problems if your fornix weren't functioning properly, including serious impairments in spatial learning and overall navigation. © 2011 The Slate Group, LLC

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 15346 - Posted: 05.21.2011

by Carl Zimmer In the 1940s, the Nobel prize–winning neurobiologist Roger Sperry performed some of the most important brain surgeries in the history of science. His patients were newts. Sperry started by gently prying out newts’ eyes with a jeweler’s forceps. He rotated them 180 degrees and then pressed them back into their sockets. The newts had two days to recover before Sperry started the second half of the procedure. He sliced into the roof of each newt’s mouth and made a slit in the sheath surrounding the optic nerve, which relays signals from the eyes to the brain. He drew out the nerve, cut it in two, and tucked the two ragged ends back into their sheath. If Sperry had performed this gruesome surgery on a person, his patient would have been left permanently blind. But newts have a remarkable capacity to regrow nerves. A month later Sperry’s subjects could see again. Their vision, he wrote, “was not a blurred confusion.” When he dangled a lure in front of one of the newts, the creature responded with a quick lunge. It was a peculiar sort of lunge, though: The animal looked up when the lure was held below and down when it was dangled overhead. Sperry had turned the newt’s world upside down. The experiment revealed that nerve cells, or neurons, possess a tremendous capacity for wiring themselves. Neurons grow branches known as dendrites for receiving signals, and sprout long outgrowths called axons to relay the signals to other neurons. Axons in particular can travel spectacular distances to reach astonishingly precise targets. They can snake through the brain’s dense thicket, pushing past billions of other neurons, in order to form tight connections, or synapses, with just the right partners. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Regeneration
Link ID: 15345 - Posted: 05.19.2011

Scientists believe they are a step closer to being able to read people's minds after decoding human brainwaves. Glasgow University researchers asked volunteers to identify different emotions on images of human faces. They then measured the volunteers' resulting brainwaves using a technique called electroencephalography (EEG). Once researchers compared the answers to the brainwaves recorded, they were able to decode the type of information the brainwaves held relating to vision. The research was carried out by the university's institute of neuroscience and psychology. Six volunteers were presented with images of people's faces, displaying different emotions such as happiness, fear and surprise. On different experimental trials, parts of the images were randomly covered so that, for example, only the eyes or mouth were visible. The volunteers were then asked to identify the emotion being displayed. The participants' brainwaves were measured using EEG which allowed the researchers to identify which parts of the brain were active when looking at different parts of the face. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 15344 - Posted: 05.19.2011

By Laura Sanders Wiping out chronic pain in the lower back doesn’t just dull the agony. It allows the brain to recover, too. Six months after people’s backaches were eased, their brains showed fewer signs of the abnormalities that accompany chronic pain, a new study shows. This brain recovery is “a concrete message that certainly brings hope and relief to those suffering from this condition,” says UCLA neuroscientist Dante Chialvo. In the study, neuroscientist Laura Stone of McGill University in Montreal and colleagues scanned the brains of people who had experienced back pain for at least a year. Compared to healthy controls, chronic pain sufferers had thinning in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain region that’s been linked to pain modulation. This region also showed abnormal activity when people with chronic back pain took a simple cognitive test while in a brain scanner, the team found. But six months after treatment with either spine surgery or pain-relieving injections, scans revealed that the pain sufferers’ brains bounced back. Their thin dorsolateral prefrontal regions grew larger, and their brain activity began to look more normal. These brain changes depended on the level of pain relief: The less pain a person reported after treatment the greater the improvement, the team reports in the May 18 Journal of Neuroscience. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15343 - Posted: 05.19.2011

By Christof Koch The ancient debate surrounding the existence of free will appears unresolvable, a metaphysical question that generates much heat yet little light. Common sense and volumes of psychological and neuroscientific research reveal, however, that we are less free than we think we are. Our genes, our upbringing and our environment influence our behaviors in ways that often escape conscious control. Understanding this influence, the advertisement industry spent approximately half a trillion dollars worldwide in 2010 to shape the buying decisions of consumers. And extreme dictatorships, such as that in North Korea, remain in power through the effective use of insidious and all-pervasive forms of propaganda. Yet nothing approaches the perfidy of the one-celled organism Toxoplasma gondii, one of the most widespread of all parasitic protozoa. It takes over the brain of its host and makes it do things, even actions that will cause it to die, in the service of this nasty hitchhiker. It sounds like a cheesy Hollywood horror flick, except that it is for real. We know that illness in general can slow us down, incapacitate us and, in the worst case, kill us. Yet this organism is much more specific. Natural selection has given rise to pathogens that infiltrate the nervous system and change that system’s wiring to achieve its ultimate purpose, replication—like a computer virus that reprograms an infected machine. Such is the case with T. gondii. It sexually reproduces only in the intestines of cats yet can maintain itself indefinitely in any warm-blooded animal. Infected cats shed millions of their oocysts in their feces. Taken up by all kinds of animals, including dogs, rodents and humans, they infect muscle and the brain to escape attacks by the host’s immune system. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 15342 - Posted: 05.19.2011

By Jamie Horder The search for the genetic roots of psychiatric illnesses and behavioral disorders such as schizophrenia, autism and ADHD has a long history, but until recently, it was one marked by frustration and skepticism. In the past few years, new techniques have begun to reveal strong evidence for the role of specific genes in some cases of these conditions but in a way few people expected. To understand what makes the new discoveries so novel, it’s necessary to appreciate how our genes can go wrong. The human genetic code can be thought of as an encyclopedia in multiple volumes. Our normal genome contains 46 chromosomes, so that’s 46 volumes. Each chromosome is a long string of the chemical DNA and the information is “written” in the form of a molecular alphabet with just four letters: A, T, C and G. There are three ways in which something can go wrong here. First, a whole chromosome can be either missing or duplicated. This drastic change is almost always fatal. (The exceptions include Downs Syndrome.) Second, single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, or “snips” as everyone calls them) are when a single base-pair is different, corresponding to a misprinted character. Finally, copy-number variants (CNVs) are when a stretch of DNA is either missing (deleted), or repeated (duplicated), a bit like a page that’s either fallen out or been printed twice. As you can imagine, CNVs tend to be more serious than SNPs, because they affect more of the DNA. This is only a general rule, however. There are plenty of serious SNPs, and plenty of harmless CNVs. It all depends on where they happen, and whether they interfere with important genes. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15341 - Posted: 05.19.2011

Adam Kepecs A surprising view has been gathering momentum in neuroscience: most of our thoughts and actions are driven by unconscious brain processes that are hidden from conscious introspection. So if consciousness is rarely in the driver's seat, and if we cannot choose our genes or the childhood experiences whose interactions form our brains, then are we responsible for our actions? In Incognito, accomplished neuroscientist David Eagleman — author of the best-selling short-story collection Sum (Canongate, 2010) — examines this gap between our conscious and unconscious selves. He offers a whirlwind of stories, from visual illusions and sleep-walking killers to ovulating strippers, all carefully chosen to drive home his main point that our brains “neurally preordain” us to make decisions. As is common in books aimed at a general readership, the intriguing and sometimes bizarre case studies create a tension between journalistic musings and more detailed arguments. Although specialists may feel that the balance tilts toward the journalistic, Eagleman's expertise comes through. Since Sigmund Freud's famous psychological framing of the unconscious in the late nineteenth century, modern neuroscience has shown that most processing in the brain is unconscious. We are unaware of routine processes and have little insight into our choices and preferences. For instance, men unknowingly prefer photographs of women with dilated pupils, presumably because male brains evolved algorithms to recognize pupil dilation as an indicator of sexual arousal. In another experiment, people's descriptions of the strategies they used to make simple economic decisions differed from the rules that they actually used, suggesting that their conscious explanations were formed post hoc and without access to their decision-making process. Through such examples, Eagleman demonstrates that unconscious processes can be clever, adaptive and even outperform the best computer algorithms. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 15340 - Posted: 05.19.2011

Ker Than People may one day be able to hear what are now inaudible sounds, scientists say. New experiments suggest that just vibrating the ear bones could create shortcuts for sounds to enter the brain, thus boosting hearing. Most people can hear sounds in the range of about 20 hertz (Hz) at the low end to about 20 kilohertz (kHz) at the high end. Twenty kHz would sound like a very high-pitched mosquito buzz, and 20 Hz would be what you'd hear if "you were at an R&B concert and you just stood next to the bass," explained Michael Qin, a senior research scientist at the Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory in Connecticut. "It would be the thing that's moving your pants leg." Under certain circumstances, humans can also hear frequencies outside of this normal range. For instance, divers underwater can detect sounds of up to a hundred kHz, according to Qin's recent experiments. It's unclear why the divers have enhanced hearing underwater, but it may be because the sounds travel directly through the bones to the brain, he said. In normal hearing, sound waves traveling through the air or water enter our ear canals and strike our eardrums, causing them to vibrate. Our eardrums are connected to three tiny, connected bones called the malleus, incus, and stapes—popularly known as the hammer, anvil, and stirrup, due to their shapes. © 1996-2011 National Geographic Society

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 15339 - Posted: 05.19.2011

By Carolyn Y. Johnson WALTHAM — Lights dimmed, a hush fell over the hallway as Nicole Porter, cradling Ava in her arms, walked gingerly toward the powerful imaging equipment that would allow researchers to peer into her baby’s developing brain. Porter had spent hours coaxing Ava to sleep so she would lie still in the noisy scanner. Then, at the last minute, Ava’s eyes fluttered open and she gazed at the colorful ceiling. The experiment would have to start over. It was another frustrating moment in the difficult process of studying the brain during early development. Nothing was wrong with Ava; the 11-month-old from Boston was part of a study that uses brain imaging to see if early hallmarks of dyslexia can be seen years before children have trouble reading. Scientists believe that if they can identify nascent disorders such as dyslexia or autism earlier, and get a jump on therapy, they might eventually be able to prevent children from developing problems later. “We know many important pediatric disorders start to emerge early on, and some things, for example dyslexia, you might not pick up until they’re reading. But you know their brain has probably started to diverge from normal in some way early on,’’ said Dr. P. Ellen Grant of Children’s Hospital Boston, who is leading the study with Nadine Gaab, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Children’s. The research is being done at the hospital’s Waltham clinic. © 2011 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Dyslexia; Brain imaging
Link ID: 15338 - Posted: 05.17.2011

By CARL E. SCHOONOVER and ABBY RABINOWITZ Treating anxiety no longer requires years of pills or psychotherapy. At least, not for a certain set of bioengineered mice. In a study recently published in the journal Nature, a team of neuroscientists turned these high-strung prey into bold explorers with the flip of a switch. The group, led by Dr. Karl Deisseroth, a psychiatrist and researcher at Stanford, employed an emerging technology called optogenetics to control electrical activity in a few carefully selected neurons. First they engineered these neurons to be sensitive to light. Then, using implanted optical fibers, they flashed blue light on a specific neural pathway in the amygdala, a brain region involved in processing emotions. And the mice, which had been keeping to the sides of their enclosure, scampered freely across an open space. While such tools are very far from being used or even tested in humans, scientists say optogenetics research is exciting because it gives them extraordinary control over specific brain circuits — and with it, new insights into an array of disorders, among them anxiety and Parkinson’s disease. Mice are very different from humans, as Dr. Deisseroth (pronounced DICE-er-roth) acknowledged. But he added that because “the mammalian brain has striking commonalities across species,” the findings might lead to a better understanding of the neural mechanisms of human anxiety. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 15337 - Posted: 05.17.2011

By JOHN TIERNEY Is happiness overrated? Martin Seligman now thinks so, which may seem like an odd position for the founder of the positive psychology movement. As president of the American Pyschological Association in the late 1990s, he criticized his colleagues for focusing relentlessly on mental illness and other problems. He prodded them to study life’s joys, and wrote a best seller in 2002 titled “Authentic Happiness.” But now he regrets that title. As the investigation of happiness proceeded, Dr. Seligman began seeing certain limitations of the concept. Why did couples go on having children even though the data clearly showed that parents are less happy than childless couples? Why did billionaires desperately seek more money even when there was nothing they wanted to do with it? And why did some people keep joylessly playing bridge? Dr. Seligman, an avid player himself, kept noticing them at tournaments. They never smiled, not even when they won. They didn’t play to make money or make friends. They didn’t savor that feeling of total engagement in a task that psychologists call flow. They didn’t take aesthetic satisfaction in playing a hand cleverly and “winning pretty.” They were quite willing to win ugly, sometimes even when that meant cheating. “They wanted to win for its own sake, even if it brought no positive emotion,” says Dr. Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. “They were like hedge fund managers who just want to accumulate money and toys for their own sake. Watching them play, seeing them cheat, it kept hitting me that accomplishment is a human desiderata in itself.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 15336 - Posted: 05.17.2011

By TARA PARKER-POPE Consumer Reports, famous for its ratings of appliances and cars, has jumped into the diet wars. In an article in its June issue, published last week, the magazine declared Jenny Craig the winner among several commercial weight-loss plans, beating out Slim-Fast, Weight Watchers, the Zone fast weight-loss plan, Dr. Dean Ornish’s “Eat More, Weigh Less” diet, the Atkins diet and Nutrisystem. Consumer Reports said it relied on the available scientific evidence. But readers who try to follow its advice will discover that a Jenny Craig diet in the real world is far different from the one studied for the article. Indeed, the findings, which generated widespread news coverage, highlight just how little weight the participants in commercial diet plans manage to lose, despite considerable expense in money and time. The magazine said Jenny Craig had “the edge over the other big names” on the basis of a two-year study published last year in The Journal of the American Medical Association. In that study, 92 percent of 442 overweight and obese women stuck with the program for two years, which Consumer Reports called a “remarkable level of adherence.” They lost an average of about 16 pounds. But the magazine failed to report that the women in the study didn’t pay a dime to sign up for the Jenny Craig program. Unlike real Jenny Craig customers, they received $6,600 worth of membership fees and food during the two-year study. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 15335 - Posted: 05.17.2011

By Kate Kelland LONDON — Scientists say they have discovered the first solid evidence that variations in some peoples' genes may cause depression -- one of the world's most common and costly mental illnesses. And in a rare occurrence in genetic research, a British-led international team's finding of a DNA region linked to depression has been replicated by another team from the United States who were studying an entirely separate group of people. "What's remarkable is that both groups found exactly the same region in two separate studies," Pamela Madden, who led the U.S. team at Washington University, said in a statement. The researchers said they hoped the findings would bring scientists closer to developing more effective treatments for patients with depression, since currently available medicines for depression only work in around half of patients. "These findings ... will help us track down specific genes that are altered in people with this disease," said Gerome Breen of King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, who led the other research group. The researchers said they believed many genes were involved in depression. These findings are unlikely to benefit patients immediately, with any new drugs developed from them likely to take another 10 to 15 years. However, they will help scientists understand what may be happening at the genetic and molecular levels in people with depression. Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15334 - Posted: 05.16.2011