By ALASTAIR GEE OXFORD, England — The task given to participants in an Oxford University depression study sounds straightforward. After investigators read them a cue word, they have 30 seconds to recount a single specific memory, meaning an event that lasted less than one day. Cues may be positive (“loved”), negative (“heartless”) or neutral (“green”). For “rejected,” one participant answered, “A few weeks ago, I had a meeting with my boss, and my ideas were rejected.” Another said, “My brothers are always talking about going on holiday without me.” The second answer was wrong — it is not specific, and it refers to something that took place on several occasions. But in studies under way at Oxford and elsewhere, scientists are looking to such failures to gain new insights into the diagnosis and treatment of depression. They are focusing not on what people remember, but how. The phenomenon is called overgeneral memory, a tendency to recall past events in a broad, vague manner. “It’s an unsung vulnerability factor for unhelpful reactions when things go wrong in life,” said Mark Williams, the clinical psychologist who has been leading the Oxford studies. Some forgetting is essential for healthy functioning — “If you’re trying to remember where you parked the car at the supermarket, it would be disastrous if all other times you parked the car at the supermarket came to mind,” said Martin Conway, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Leeds in England. But, a chronic tendency to obliterate details has been linked to longer and more intense episodes of depression. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15313 - Posted: 05.10.2011

by Catherine de Lange You might think that being able to distinguish between a noise associated with danger and a similar but innocuous one would be a useful skill. Yet people find it hard to tell similar sounds apart if one is linked to a bad experience. The finding could help explain how people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may become hypersensitive to certain types of sound. Rony Paz and colleagues from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, repeatedly played one of two tones to volunteers. One group heard a tone followed by an unpleasant smell, the other a tone followed by a pleasant, melon-like odour. The team then tested how well each person could distinguish between the tones they had heard and similar sounds. On average, those who had heard the sound that was followed by an unpleasant smell performed worse at this task. The effect persisted 24 hours later. Evolutionary sense This makes sense from an evolutionary point of view, says Paz. "If you hear a lion and you see a zebra get eaten, that should be enough for you to know that a lion is bad and to avoid it." If you subsequently hear a different lion, you want your system to respond quickly to the threat rather than try to distinguish between the two lions. Paz thinks this conditioning may involve rewiring of the amygdala, the part of the brain which controls the fear response. Understanding this mechanism could lead to better treatments for PTSD, he says. Journal reference: Nature Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1038/nn.2802 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions; Hearing
Link ID: 15312 - Posted: 05.10.2011

Tiffany O'Callaghan, CultureLab editor AS ANIMAL behaviourist Jonathan Balcombe sees it, too often the animal kingdom is portrayed solely as a realm of dire and perpetual struggle for survival. He argues that observations of playfulness or expressions of pleasure by non-human creatures of all stripes, feathers and fins are depicted as nothing more than evolutionary adaptation. The Exultant Ark, his pictorial exploration of pleasure among creatures from primate to porpoise, challenges this idea. It intersperses glorious images of animals preening, grooming and gallivanting with snippets of studies suggesting such behaviours belie an overly utilitarian interpretation. Sleepy, full-bellied kittens snuggling up to their mothers, dozing sea otters drifting on their backs with linked paws, frolicking alpine ibex - Balcombe revels in images that convey intimacy, comfort and even love, terms usually reserved for humans. A key point for Balcombe, though, is that we must go beyond anthropomorphism to get to the root of what non-human animals feel. Balcombe laments the fact that scientific understanding of animal pleasure remains in its infancy, but cobbles together anecdotes and preliminary research to raise questions about animals' experience. For instance, in highlighting the relationship between hippos and the fish that scrounge between their toes and teeth, he explores its potential interpretation as a mutually enjoyable experience. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 15311 - Posted: 05.10.2011

• Kat Arney Last month US clothing retailer J Crew released photos showing the company's president, Jenna Lyons, painting her 5-year-old child's toenails their favourite shade of hot pink. No big deal, you might think, until you notice the child is a boy. The ensuing media kerfuffle highlights what anyone from a toddler to Dame Barbara Cartland could have told you. Pink is a girl's colour, and is certainly not fit for a boy's toenails. Take a trip to a toy store and you'll see this gender divide writ large in the aisles. On one side, the boys' toys – Lego and other construction kits, pirate costumes, toy guns, racing cars and so on – boxed in blue and other "manly" colours and illustrated with pictures of boys. Turn a corner, and you're assaulted by a wall of pink built from Barbie dolls, multi-packs of miniature high heels, princess outfits and tea sets. The message is clear: these are boys' toys, and those are girls' toys. And in this particular battle of the sexes, there's very little neutral territory. Many people – such as the Pink Stinks campaign – are fighting against the power of pink. In response to complaints about the pink/blue divide in their wares, toy retailer the Early Learning Centre points vaguely to research showing that "gender is a major factor in determining children's colour preferences, with most boys typically preferring blue and girls preferring pink from infancy." But is this really true? And does it even matter? Together with radio producer Jolyon Jenkins, I've been searching for the scientific truth behind the rampant pinkification of toys for girls. © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 15310 - Posted: 05.10.2011

Erin Allday, Chronicle Staff Writer Jeanne Nollman was a later bloomer. She waited and waited for puberty to hit, and when she was 17 and still nothing had happened, she got tested - and found out she had a rare condition called Swyer syndrome and would need supplemental hormones. What no one told her until eight years later, when she demanded more information about her condition, was that she had the male X-Y chromosome pattern. "That was typical back then, in the '70s," said Nollman, who is now 51 and lives in San Leandro with her husband and two adopted teenage children. "I guess they thought I might go jump off a roof and commit suicide with this information. But I must be an odd duck because I was just relieved." Now she's trying to help other children - and their parents - learn about and even embrace their "disorder of sex differentiation," or DSD, which is the medical term for hermaphrodite, a word that is no longer used by doctors and patients. The Bay Area is getting its first DSD parent support group next week, with a meeting Thursday at UCSF. Organizers, including Nollman, hope the group will become a resource for families to talk openly about the unique problems that come with raising kids who have sex development disorders. Such disorders, which may occur in as many as 1 in 3,000 births, include a wide variety of conditions, from something that's not obvious at birth, like Swyer syndrome, to babies born with ambiguous genitalia who cannot immediately be labeled male or female. © 2011 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15309 - Posted: 05.10.2011

Jeff Warren “If you get into any trouble, try concentrating on your breath. Sometimes the breath is all you have.” Brian looked concerned, though he also looked weirdly elongated, ­so it was hard to tell what was actually happening. I was on drugs, you see, and not just any drug. Thirty minutes earlier I had gulped back a cupful of ayahuasca, a plant-based hallucinogen that William Burroughs—no slouch when it came to chemical experimentation—once described as the most powerful he had ever experienced. This was my third trip in six days, and I’d taken half again as much as anyone else in the group. Now nobody would look me in the eye. This was several years ago, during a perspective-altering ten-day workshop in South America. Today, most armchair adventurers will have heard of ayahuasca, which first escaped from the Amazon jungle in the 1930s and has recently leapt from underground curiosity to zeitgeist sensation. Following in the footsteps of celebrities such as Sting and Oliver Stone, every year thousands of people fly to countries like Peru, Brazil and Ecuador, where ayahuasca can be sampled in the company of professional shamans—some respectable, some not. Having had their fill of physical travel, Westerners now want to sail right out of their minds. Others quaff more locally. British Columbia’s Pender Island, Toronto’s beaches and Montreal’s suburbs host gatherings of the curious (supervised by imported boutique shamans) and congregations of the two fastest-growing syncretic churches that use ayahuasca as a sacrament: the Santo Daime and the União do Vegetal. Both churches—part animist, part Christian—have outposts across Latin America, Europe and North America; none other than Jeffrey Bronfman, third-generation member of the famous Montreal whisky family, heads the Santa Fe chapter of the União do Vegetal. Ayahuasca’s precise legal status in the US and Canada is ambiguous. But, if you’re determined, getting your hands on the stuff isn’t hard. © 2010 Maisonneuve Magazine

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15308 - Posted: 05.10.2011

By ALAN SCHWARZ When the N.F.L. veteran Andre Waters killed himself in late 2006, the subsequent discovery of damage in his brain shocked the football community into asking how many other retired players might have an incurable disease. After the recent suicide of Dave Duerson, however, and last Monday’s announcement that he also had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the brain damage formerly associated with boxers, the finding shocked no one. Duerson became the 14th retired N.F.L. player — of 15 examined by Boston University researchers — to test positive for the condition. Waters and Duerson bookend a remarkable shift in the understanding of football brain trauma: four years after a few positive tests begged explanation, questions mainly surround the absence of negatives. “It makes you worry as a player — I would imagine all of us have it,” said Chidi Ahanotu, 40, who played defensive lineman mostly for Tampa Bay from 1993 to 2004. “To what degree, I don’t know. But I don’t know how you can’t think that.” So far, though, each successive case of C.T.E. has said more about the existence of the disease than the true breadth of it. The set of 15 players tested by B.U. researchers to this point is far from a random sample of N.F.L. retirees that could represent the wider population. Many of the players died under conditions that could be related to C.T.E.: Waters and Duerson by suicide, John Grimsley from a gun accident, Tom McHale from a drug overdose. Their families then donated the brains largely to seek an explanation for their behavior. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 15307 - Posted: 05.09.2011

By BRYSON VOIRIN The morning after our first successful frigate bird capture, I slowly creep through the thorny brush toward the field tent to check up on the female. It’s been about 12 hours since I put her back on her nest with a sleep logger and GPS unit, and I’m keen to see how she is doing, and if she is still here or if she has switched with her mate and is out foraging. Gazing through my binoculars, I spot her, sitting alert on her nest. I breathe a deep sigh of relief, knowing that her late-night capture did not cause nest abandonment. As in any zoology fieldwork, our first priority is the well-being of our study species. Before starting any project with animals, there is a stringent animal care committee that reviews and approves our protocols and procedures. Even though previous work on frigate birds shows that the birds would not be spooked off their nests, seeing this confirmed the morning after is a welcome sign. Her sleep logger is still attached and looking fine, held on by the curious skin glue. I watch her head movements as she follows other birds floating overhead; she doesn’t seem affected at all by the device. However, judging by the angry glare she gives me, my presence is making her nervous. I want to avoid stressing the female any more than necessary, so I head back to camp and leave her alone for the rest of the day. The next morning Sebastian Cruz reports back that a male has switched with her on the nest, meaning that she is out foraging. By the pinkish color of his throat we can tell that this is her nesting mate. Had she abandoned her nest, and another male taken over, that male would have a bright red inflated gular sac. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Evolution
Link ID: 15306 - Posted: 05.09.2011

By CLAUDIA WALLIS An ambitious six-year effort to gauge the rate of childhood autism in a middle-class South Korean city has yielded a figure that stunned experts and is likely to influence the way the disorder’s prevalence is measured around the world, scientists reported on Monday. The figure, 2.6 percent of all children aged 7 to 12 in the Ilsan district of the city of Goyang, is more than twice the rate usually reported in the developed world. Even that rate, about 1 percent, has been climbing rapidly in recent years — from 0.6 percent in the United States in 2007, for example. But experts said the findings did not mean that the actual numbers of children with autism were rising, simply that the study was more comprehensive than previous ones. “This is a very impressive study,” said Lisa Croen, director of the autism research program at Kaiser-Permanente Northern California, who was not connected with the new report. “They did a careful job and in a part of the world where autism has not been well documented in the past.” For the study, which is being published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, researchers from the Yale Child Study Center, George Washington University and other leading institutions sought to screen every child aged 7 to 12 in Ilsan, a community of 488,590, about the size of Staten Island. By contrast, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States and most other research groups measure autism prevalence by examining and verifying records of existing cases kept by health care and special education agencies. That approach may leave out many children whose parents and schools have never sought a diagnosis. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 15305 - Posted: 05.09.2011

Matt Kaplan Modern mammals often live in groups, but most marsupials are solitary. With no fossil evidence to suggest that the animals have ever behaved otherwise, palaeontologists have long assumed that marsupials have been loners throughout their evolutionary history. This notion is now being overturned by the analysis of a fossil site containing many marsupials that seem to have been living together. The site, in the Tiupampa locality of Bolivia, contains 35 specimens of Pucadelphys andinus, a primitive opossum from the early Palaeocene Epoch (64 million years ago). Teeth are usually all that palaeontologists can find of ancient mammals, because dentition is built to endure punishment, and fossilizes well. However, 22 of the 35 specimens at the Bolivian site consist of teeth, skulls and body skeletons in near-perfect shape. Sandrine Ladevèze, a palaeontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, and her colleagues publish an analysis of the specimens today in Nature1. "To find a sample of this quality is almost unheard of," says Richard Cifelli, a palaeontologist at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. Full house But it is not the condition, but the placement of the specimens at the fossil site that intrigued Ladevèze. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15304 - Posted: 05.09.2011

By Ella Davies Stress may play a crucial role in determining whether some birds mimic the sounds of others, say researchers. Scientists studied the vocal repertoire of bowerbirds. Best known for their elaborate nests or "bowers", the birds can also copy up to fifteen sounds. Bowerbirds were previously thought to mimic predators as a form of defence. But recordings reveal they prefer to copy a variety of alarm calls made by bird species that are either bullying each other, or which feel threatened. That suggests that the birds learn and reproduce calls only in stressful situations, say the researchers. Spotted bowerbirds (Ptilonorhynchus maculatus) are found in Australia and New Guinea and are best known for their elaborate "bowers", created by males seeking to impress a mate. Reports from egg collectors led scientists to believe the birds mimicked the calls of predators as a way of defending their territory. However, researchers from the University of St Andrews, UK and Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria, Australia found different results in their study. They have published details in the journal Naturwissenschaften. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Stress; Language
Link ID: 15303 - Posted: 05.09.2011

By Katherine Harmon The people we associate with can have a powerful effect on our behavior—for better or for worse. This holds true for human health and body mass, too. The heavier our close friends and family, the heavier we are likely to be. This correlation, described in 2007 by a team that analyzed data from the longitudinal Framingham Heart Study, is well established. But just how this transpires—whether via shared norms, common behavior or just similar environments—has been the subject of much debate. The authors of the 2007 study proposed that social norms shared among friends and relatives might be a strong determinant of body mass index (BMI). And a new study, published online May 5 in the American Journal of Public Health, drills down to see just how these social forces might be at work. The study of more than 100 women—and hundreds of their friends and family members—however, suggests that social attitudes might not be key in determining obesity clusters after all. "Going in as anthropologists we assumed that the norms would have a strong influence" on BMI, says Alexandra Brewis, executive director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University in Tempe. She and her colleagues found themselves surprised how small an effect the norms had on a person's BMI. Just one type of social dynamic seemed to play a statistically significant role—and that was only about 20 percent. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 15302 - Posted: 05.07.2011

By Bruce Bower Depression may have an analytical upside. People hospitalized for this mood disorder display a flair for making good choices when many options must be considered one at a time, a new study finds. Depression may prompt an analytical thinking style suited to solving sequential problems, such as deciding when to stop a house hunt and purchase a property or when to stop playing the field and marry a suitor, say psychologist Bettina von Helversen of the University of Basel in Switzerland and her colleagues. It’s also possible that depressed people adopt a pessimistic outlook that encourages a thorough evaluation of available options, von Helversen's team suggests in an upcoming Journal of Abnormal Psychology. “Depression may improve sequential decision making, which includes some high-stakes choices,” she says. Von Helversen’s study is the first to demonstrate a thinking advantage for clinically depressed patients, possibly because — unlike previous studies of people with the ailment — the team used a quantitative measure to evaluate the accuracy of realistic social choices, remarks psychologist Paul Andrews of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Andrews hypothesizes that depression evolved as an emotional response that induces people to isolate themselves and single-mindedly resolve painful personal problems. “Depressive cognition is more complex than has been assumed by clinicians,” he says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 15301 - Posted: 05.07.2011

By Susan Gaidos Emery Brown knows how to take the sting out of surgery. As an anesthesiologist, he has steered hundreds of patients to pain-free oblivion, allowing doctors to go about their business resetting bones, repairing heart valves or removing tumors. During surgery he continually monitors his patients, keeping tabs on their heart rate, blood pressure and breathing. Recently, he has also been eyeing what happens in their brains. Rather than going under the knife, some of the people in Brown’s care are going into scanners to reveal how the brain responds when people are knocked out. These deep glimpses could answer vexing questions about how people enter the state of unconsciousness known as general anesthesia and what happens in the brain while they are there. Although it is widely used and remarkably effective, anesthesia’s neural mechanisms have long remained mostly mysterious. While every anesthetic drug has its own effect, scientists know little about how the various versions work on the brain to transport patients from normal waking awareness to dreamless nothingness. Understanding how such compounds meddle with the nervous system might lead to anesthetics capable of tweaking neural circuits more precisely, delivering only what is needed where it’s needed, says Brown, of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Fine-tuning the drugs’ effects could also help doctors bring patients into and out of consciousness more quickly and safely, avoiding the side effects that can occur when medications act at brain sites other than those intended or act at targeted sites for too long a time. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 15300 - Posted: 05.07.2011

By Victoria Gill Wild chimpanzees use at least 66 distinct gestures to communicate with each other, according to scientists. A team of researchers from the University of St Andrews in Scotland filmed a group of the animals in order to decipher this "gestural repertoire". The team then studied 120 hours of footage of the chimps interacting, looking for signs that the animals were intentionally signalling to each other. The findings are published in the journal Animal Cognition. Previous studies on captive chimps have suggested the animals have about 30 different gestures. "So this [result] shows quite a large repertoire," lead researcher Dr Catherine Hobaiter told BBC News. "We think people previously were only seeing fractions of this, because when you study the animals in captivity you don't see all their behaviour. "You wouldn't see them hunting for monkeys, taking females away on 'courtships', or encountering neighbouring groups of chimpanzees." Dr Hobaiter spent 266 days observing and filming a group of chimpanzees in Budongo Conservation Field Station, Uganda. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 15299 - Posted: 05.07.2011

by Jessica Hamzelou Those who are easily distracted from the task in hand may have "too much brain". So says Ryota Kanai and his colleagues at University College London, who found larger than average volumes of grey matter in certain brain regions in those whose attention is readily diverted. To investigate distractibility, the team compared the brains of easy and difficult-to-distract individuals. They assessed each person's distractibility by quizzing them about how often they fail to notice road signs, or go into a supermarket and become sidetracked to the point that they forget what they came in to buy. The most distractible individuals received the highest score. The team then imaged the volunteers' brains using a structural MRI scanner. The most obvious difference between those who had the highest questionnaire scores – the most easily distracted – and those with low scores was the volume of grey matter in a region of the brain known as the left superior parietal lobe (SPL). Specifically, the easily distracted tended to have more grey matter here. To find out whether activity in the left SPL plays a role in distractibility, the team turned to transcranial magnetic stimulation. This hand-held magnet dampens the activity of the part of the brain beneath it for around half an hour. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: ADHD; Attention
Link ID: 15298 - Posted: 05.07.2011

By LISA SANDERS, M.D. A fiercely independent and active 76-year-old woman spent the past decade caring for her aged mother, who died at 99. Weeks after her mother’s death, the woman collapsed at home. She was found to have bleeding from a collection of abnormal blood vessels (known as AVMs, or arteriovenous malformations) in her colon. In the months after, the patient’s red-blood-cell count returned to normal, but she never regained her old energy and strength. She told her daughters that she was weaker and more tired than she had ever been in her life. Dr. Susan Wiskowski, a family physician in Hartford, was the woman’s doctor. Until recently, the patient was in good health for her age, with only a few medical problems: high blood pressure, which was controlled with one medication; hypothyroidism, treated with Synthroid; and cataracts, which had been surgically repaired. Now, out of the blue, she was experiencing rapid weight gain, swelling and weakness in her legs, which made it hard to walk. A couple of weeks after the cardiac work-up, the patient’s behavior became erratic and strange. Despite her complaints of weakness, she veered between bursts of activity — endlessly cleaning her house, giving large dinner parties — and days of isolation and fatigue. She was sometimes elated, telling her four daughters that she’d found where heaven was located. She began to talk about giving away her possessions. One afternoon she seemed completely out of control. A neighbor called 911, and the patient was rushed by ambulance to St. Francis Hospital in Hartford. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 15297 - Posted: 05.07.2011

by Laurent Banguet and Marlowe Hood, AFP Chimpanzees are self-aware and can anticipate the impact of their actions on the environment around them, an ability once thought to be uniquely human, according to a study released Wednesday. The findings, reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, challenge assumptions about the boundary between human and non-human, and shed light on the evolutionary origins of consciousness, the researchers said. Earlier research had demonstrated the capacity of several species of primates, as well as dolphins, to recognize themselves in a mirror, suggesting a fairly sophisticated sense of self. The most common experiment consisted of marking an animal with paint in a place -- such as the face -- that it could only perceive while looking at its reflection. If the ape sought to touch or wipe off the mark while facing a mirror, it showed that the animal recognized itself. But even if this test revealed a certain degree self-awareness, many questions remained as to how animals were taking in the information. What, in other words, was the underlying cognitive process? To probe further, Takaaki Kaneko and Masaki Tomonaga of the Primate Research Institute in Kyoto designed a series of three experiments to see if chimps, our closest cousins genetically, to some extent "think" like humans when they perform certain tasks. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Attention; Evolution
Link ID: 15296 - Posted: 05.05.2011

By Laura Sanders Easily distracted people can stop blaming their lack of focus on the royal wedding, Facebook feeds and hilarious YouTube videos of honey badgers. Rather, a small network of cells in the back left part of the brain may be the culprit, researchers report in the May 4 Journal of Neuroscience. Knowing how the brain focuses on what’s important — and filters out noise — may help scientists come up with ways to counteract attention disorders. “Attention has a huge effect on our lives,” says cognitive neuroscientist Carmel Mevorach of the University of Birmingham in England, who was not involved in the study. “Everything we do — literally, everything we do — is affected by attention.” In this age of information overload, appropriating attention is a challenge, says study coauthor Ryota Kanai of University College London, and some people are much more susceptible to distractions. Kanai and his colleagues wanted to know if brain differences could explain why some people are easily distracted while others stay focused. For the study, 145 volunteers filled out a survey called the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire, which asks people to rate how frequently they experience mental lapses such as forgetting what they came to a shop to buy or bumping into people. Volunteers’ answers were used to calculate each person’s overall susceptibility to distraction in everyday life. (Incidentally, scores on the same questionnaire also predict how many car accidents someone has.) © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Attention; ADHD
Link ID: 15295 - Posted: 05.05.2011

By Rebecca Tuhus-DubrowPosted Last week, new guidelines for diagnosing Alzheimer's defined a "preclinical" stage of the dreaded disease. Evidently, the telltale pathology—in particular, the plaques that encroach on the brain—can be detected years, if not decades, before the patient ever forgets a familiar name or neglects to feed a pet. The announcement renewed a debate that has flared in recent months: Since there's no cure, critics believe that an early diagnosis of Alzheimer's would serve only sadistic doctors, masochistic patients, and greedy business interests. They worry that Big Pharma will sell snake oil to a huge, desperate market, and that health insurance companies and employers could use the information against patients. Others, however, point to the benefits of advance notice. You might take that long-deferred trip to Antarctica, for example, or try to squeeze in extra visits to the elliptical machine. (There is some evidence, albeit inconclusive, that exercise helps stave off the mind's deterioration.) Complicating matters, the "bio-markers" that show up in an early diagnosis do not necessarily lead to symptoms. For unclear reasons, some brains seem to function well despite the incursion, while others succumb more readily. In many cases, patients die from other causes before the plaques wreak havoc. Given the gaps in knowledge, the guidelines stress that the tests are for research purposes only. (The idea is that studying the earliest manifestations of the disease will illuminate its genesis and ultimately yield therapies that keep symptoms at bay.) Yet some are concerned that before long, bio-markers will be used to test regular patients. What are the implications of diagnosing an incurable disease in seemingly healthy people? © 2011 The Slate Group, LLC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15294 - Posted: 05.05.2011