By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D. WASHINGTON — Ron Reagan’s new memoir, “My Father at 100,” has touched off sensational headlines with its suggestion that President Ronald Reagan might have begun showing hints of Alzheimer’s disease while still in the White House. But in two interviews this month, the younger Mr. Reagan said he never meant to suggest that his father had dementia before leaving office in 1989. And he graciously took the blame for not being more explicit in a passage that described a few personal observations along with comments from the former president’s doctors. A “rather small section of the book has attracted outsize attention,” he said in a telephone interview from Seattle, where he lives. All he meant, he continued, was that the amyloid plaque characteristic of Alzheimer’s can start forming years before it leads to dementia. The former president’s diagnosis was made in 1993, four years after he left office. “Given what we know about the disease,” his son told me, “I don’t know how you could say that the disease wasn’t likely present in him during the presidency.” Had it been stated that way, the assertion about Alzheimer’s would have stirred little if any debate. Still, the issue is important for anyone — including candidates for office — because of the difficulty of distinguishing the initial symptoms of Alzheimer’s from, say, simple forgetfulness. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15035 - Posted: 02.22.2011

By JOHN TIERNEY The 21-year-old woman was carefully trained not to flirt with anyone who came into the laboratory over the course of several months. She kept eye contact and conversation to a minimum. She never used makeup or perfume, kept her hair in a simple ponytail, and always wore jeans and a plain T-shirt. Each of the young men thought she was simply a fellow student at Florida State University participating in the experiment, which ostensibly consisted of her and the man assembling a puzzle of Lego blocks. But the real experiment came later, when each man rated her attractiveness. Previous research had shown that a woman at the fertile stage of her menstrual cycle seems more attractive, and that same effect was observed here — but only when this woman was rated by a man who wasn’t already involved with someone else. The other guys, the ones in romantic relationships, rated her as significantly less attractive when she was at the peak stage of fertility, presumably because at some level they sensed she then posed the greatest threat to their long-term relationships. To avoid being enticed to stray, they apparently told themselves she wasn’t all that hot anyway. This experiment was part of a new trend in evolutionary psychology to study “relationship maintenance.” Earlier research emphasized how evolution primed us to meet and mate: how men and women choose partners by looking for cues like facial symmetry, body shape, social status and resources. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 15034 - Posted: 02.22.2011

By Laura Sanders WASHINGTON — A panel of neuroscientists describing their basic research on how the brain work were called out on February 20 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Though the work ranged from preliminary studies on the neural networks of songbirds to how humans recognize their bodies, at some point during each presentation, each scientist made mention of the potential medical benefits of his or her work. At the end of all the presentations, session moderator Story Landis of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., pointed this out, calling attention to what may have been an unconscious desire to package their data in disease, and so perhaps funding-friendly, terms. “I was struck that all the speakers justify the science that they were doing in the context of human disease, even David [Clayton], who works on archetypal model systems — songbirds — chose or felt obligated to say something about alpha-synuclein and Parkinson’s disease,” she said. “I would be interested in challenging the speakers: Do we have to justify what neuroscientists do in a context of disease, or can we make a sufficiently compelling argument for its intrinsic interest and excitement of neuroscience without having to do that?” David Clayton, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, treaded carefully between the two answers by pointing out that while basic research is valuable, scientists can’t lose sight of what taxpayers are getting for their money: “Understanding how the brain works — that’s the grand challenge — doesn’t exclusively have human medical context,” he said. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 15033 - Posted: 02.22.2011

High levels of cholesterol do not predict the risk of stroke in women, according to researchers in Denmark. They did detect an increased risk in men, but only when cholesterol was at almost twice the average level. The report in Annals of Neurology recommends using a different type of fat in the blood, non-fasting triglycerides, to measure the risk. The Stroke Association said triglyceride tests needed to become routine to reduce the risk of stroke. A total of 150,000 people have a stroke in the UK each year. Most are ischemic strokes, in which a clot in an artery disrupts the brain's blood supply. The research followed 13,951 men and women, who took part in the Copenhagen City Heart Study. During the 33-year study, 837 men and 837 women had strokes. They reported that the cholesterol levels in women were not associated with stroke, while there was only an association in men with levels higher than 9mmol/litre. The average in UK men is 5.5. BBC © MMXI

Keyword: Stroke; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15032 - Posted: 02.21.2011

By Steve Connor, Science Editor The mystery of why some children begin to stutter in the first few years of life, and never fully recover from the speech impediment, may soon be solved with the creation of the world’s first “stuttering” mouse. Scientists have generated laboratory mice with the same genetic mutations believed to be involved in triggering the speech disorder in humans in the hope that the genetically engineered animals will provide new insights into understanding and treating the condition in people. The mice are currently undergoing tests to determine whether their high-pitched calls, which cannot be heard by the human ear, display any characteristic signs that could be linked with the mutations inserted into their DNA. The researchers believe that the prospect of creating stuttering laboratory mice could revolutionise research into the human condition because it would allow scientists to make detailed studies of the chemical changes within the brain cells of individuals with a stutter. Although not all stuttering is caused by genes alone, scientists have shown that a sizeable proportion of people who suffer from a stutter are likely to have inherited genetic mutations that predispose them to developing the condition, which usually begins between the ages of three or four. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Language; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15031 - Posted: 02.21.2011

By ANDREW POLLACK HILLSBORO, Ore. — Like many these days, Shiva sits around too much, eating rich, fatty foods and sipping sugary drinks. He has the pot belly to prove it, one that nearly touches the floor — when he’s on all fours, that is. At 45 pounds, Shiva is twice his normal weight and carries much of it in his belly. He can eat all the pellets he wants and snack on peanut butter, but gets barely any exercise. More Photos » Shiva belongs to a colony of monkeys who have been fattened up to help scientists study the twin human epidemics of obesity and diabetes. The overweight monkeys also test new drugs aimed at treating those conditions. “We are trying to induce the couch-potato style,” said Kevin L. Grove, who directs the “obese resource” at the Oregon National Primate Research Center here. “We believe that mimics the health issues we face in the United States today.” The corpulent primates serve as useful models, experts say, because they resemble humans much more than laboratory rats do, not only physiologically but in some of their feeding habits. They tend to eat when bored, even when they are not really hungry. And unlike human subjects who are notorious for fudging their daily calorie or carbohydrate counts, a caged monkey’s food intake is much easier for researchers to count and control. “Nonhuman primates don’t lie to you,” said Dr. Grove, who is a neuroscientist. “We know exactly how much they are eating.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 15030 - Posted: 02.21.2011

by Sara Reardon WASHINGTON, D.C.—Former army sergeant Glen Lehman lost his arm in Iraq. But he can still pick up small objects with fine motor control, thanks to a bionic appendage wired to his remaining nerves. “Just by believing I’m moving my phantom limb," he said, "the arm is in tune with my thoughts." Lehman showed off his new arm here yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes ScienceNOW). His demonstration was part of a session on breaking down the barriers between mind and machine. In addition to creating better prosthetics for amputees, scientists talked about developing communication devices for locked-in patients and even creating virtual reality avatars that might someday allow people to transfer their entire consciousness into a machine. But first back to Lehman's arm. Previous arm prosthetics have relied on the remaining muscles of the arm to guess at what the amputee wants to do, which panelist Todd Kuiken of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, described as a “Morse code game.” The technique his group is developing, by contrast, uses the arm’s nerves, which appear to remain intact even 10 years after an amputation. Using this method, his advanced prosthetics can restore fine motor control down to the fingers. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 15029 - Posted: 02.21.2011

by Elizabeth Pennisi WASHINGTON, D.C.—A chance discovery of a macaque behavior could lead to new insights into autism. Among adult rhesus macaques, eye contact is a good way to get into a fight. But for newborns, time spent looking directly at the mother and, subsequently, imitating her facial gestures may be key to a well-adjusted adulthood. Individuals who don’t get this face-time tend to develop autistic-like behavior, rocking back and forth and failing to maintain good social connections, Stephen Suomi reported here yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes ScienceNOW). Suomi studies macaques at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and has a large program in which he raises some newborns separated from their mothers to assess the effects of early development on adult behavior. In 2006, while filming macaque behavior, he and his colleagues discovered that mother macaques spend their newborn’s first week encouraging infants to look directly at them, a behavior thought to occur only in humans (see video). This contact and the imitative behavior that ensues—the infants will smack their lips in response to the mother doing the same, for example—helps bond the infant to the mother. Within a month, however, these face-to-face encounters cease; newborns stop imitating their mothers after just a week. About half of the infants separated from their mothers, fed briefly by humans, and then raised among peers don’t respond to human efforts to get them to imitate. They quickly start lagging behind in their ability to reach out and grab objects, play half as much, and some later seem autistic. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 15028 - Posted: 02.21.2011

By Bruce Bower WASHINGTON — When an unrelenting penchant for misbehaving joins forces with lack of emotion, guilt and empathy, 7-year-olds are headed for years of severe conduct problems, a long-term study of English youngsters suggests. Youngsters who regularly misbehave and get into trouble at age 7, and who also display so-called callous-unemotional traits, frequently stay on a troubled course until at least age 12, according to a new investigation described February 20 in Washington, D.C., at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancenent of Science. “I’m not suggesting that these children are psychopaths, but callous-unemotional traits can be used to identify kids at risk of persistent, severe antisocial behavior,” said psychologist Nathalie Fontaine of Indiana University in Bloomington, who directed the study. Adult psychopaths similarly show no remorse for crimes and blunted emotional reactions, although they often possess considerable empathy that they use to prey on others. These findings indicate that callous-unemotional traits should be factored into the definition of a particularly virulent form of childhood conduct disorder in the next manual of psychiatric disorders, Fontaine said. Chronic misbehavior alone defines conduct disorder in the current fourth edition of the psychiatric manual used by doctors to define mental ailments, now being revised. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Aggression; ADHD
Link ID: 15027 - Posted: 02.21.2011

By Rachel Ehrenberg, Science News Email Author Nerve cells from developing brains as young as 20 weeks old fire in a pattern that persists into adulthood, researchers reported Tuesday in the Journal of Neuroscience. The research provides a glimpse into the behavior of extremely young brain cells and could help scientists understand what happens when brain development goes awry. Cells from the cerebral cortices of 20- to 21-week-old fetuses exhibit bursts of electrical activity interspersed with periods of quiet, researchers from the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington found. When the adult brain is sleeping, or under anesthesia, it also displays this busy-then-quiet firing pattern, suggesting it may be an intrinsic property of human brains. The cerebral cortex deals with sensory information, thinking, emotion and consciousness. But even when not receiving input from the outside world, the nerve cells, or neurons, in this region oscillate between firing and resting. “In adults, we go to sleep and the cortex is disconnected from the outside environment — it sleeps alone. But you see this quiet synchronized activity,” says Igor Timofeev of Laval University in Québec. That young nerve cells behave in a similar way long before they grapple with outside input suggests that the firing pattern “is a very basic feature of the brain that occurs in very early stages of development,” says Timofeev. © 2010 Condé Nast Digital.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Brain imaging
Link ID: 15026 - Posted: 02.21.2011

by Michael Marshall When we look for examples of intelligent animals, certain species always leap to mind. Ourselves of course, and our close relatives the chimpanzees and other primates. Perhaps the cunning corvids – crows and scrub jays – with their prodigious memories and talent for deception. Dolphins and whales are pretty bright. Many would even agree that there is a sort of intelligence governing the behaviour of social insects like ants. But sheep? Sheep are just thick. Except that they aren't. Over the past few decades, evidence has quietly built up that sheep are anything but stupid. It now turns out that the humble domestic sheep can pass a psychological test that monkeys struggle with, and which is so sensitive it is used to look for neurological decline in human patients. Woolly thinkers Laura Avanzo and Jennifer Morton of the University of Cambridge were interested in a new kind of genetically modified sheep. These animals carry a defective gene that in humans causes Huntington's disease, an inherited disorder that leads to nerve damage and dementia. The hope is that the Huntington's sheep could be a testing ground for possible treatments. For that to work, they reasoned, researchers will have to be able to track changes in the cognitive abilities of the Huntington's sheep. So they decided to find out whether normal sheep could pass some of the challenging tests given to people with Huntington's. If the sheep passed, that would mean that the Huntington's sheep could be seen losing the ability as their disease progressed – and maybe regaining it if any treatments worked. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 15025 - Posted: 02.21.2011

By James Gallagher Health reporter, BBC News Scientists in the US have identified an area of the brain which makes heroin-addicted rats relapse. The study, published in Nature Neuroscience, showed that part of the medial prefrontal cortex was activated. When the researchers blocked nerve cells in the region, there were fewer relapses. Experts in the UK said the study was a technical 'tour de force'; however, it did not promise new treatments in humans. The study worked on the idea that when addicts stopped taking drugs, but then returned to the place they were taking drugs, they were likely to relapse. Rats were trained to take drugs in one environment, where they were delivered a dose of heroin. The rodents then "went to rehab" in another environment where the feel of the floor, lights and sounds were different and there was no access to heroin. Once the rats were "clean" they were returned to the drug-taking environment, where they demonstrated heroin-seeking behaviour. By examining the rats' brains, the researchers showed increased activity in some neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex. BBC © MMXI

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15024 - Posted: 02.21.2011

by Jessica Hamzelou Beyond erasing wrinkles, Botox can now help people who spend more than half their lives in headache agony. But is there enough evidence to support treating chronic migraine sufferers with regular shots of the toxin around the head and neck? Doctors are divided. What is Botox? Botox is the trade name for botulinum toxin – a protein produced by the Clostridium botulinum bacterium. By blocking the release of a chemical messenger in the brain, the toxin stops muscles from contracting. Why try preventing migraines with it? The story starts around 10 years ago, with some of Hollywood's most revered residents – cosmetic surgeons. "The plastics people suggested that some of their patients had relief from migraine after Botox treatment," says Peter Goadsby, director of the University of California, San Francisco's Headache Centre. The idea began to spread and clinicians started giving Botox as an "off-label" treatment – that is, in a way not approved by regulators – to people with migraines. Allergan, the pharmaceutical company that developed Botox, soon cottoned on and started marketing Botox as a migraine treatment. However, with no proof that the treatment worked, last year the company was fined $375 million for unlawful marketing. Since then, a number of clinical trials have ruled out any significant reduction in normal tension headaches and non-chronic migraine after Botox treatment. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15023 - Posted: 02.19.2011

by Aria Pearson LEARNING and memory problems have been reversed in mice with a syndrome that mimics Down's. Catherine Spong and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, found they could prevent developmental problems in mice engineered to have Down's syndrome by injecting their mothers with two proteins, called NAP and SAL, while they were still in the womb. This treatment would carry many risks for humans, so the team wondered whether the proteins might also help adult mice. Spong's team engineered mice to have an extra chromosome 16, which causes similar problems to those caused by an extra chromosome 21 in humans, the trigger for Down's (see picture). The mice then had to find a submerged platform in a water maze using visual cues. Down's mice usually take twice as long to find the platform as healthy mice. However, after four days of oral treatment with NAP and SAL, the Down's mice learned to navigate the maze just as easily as normal mice. NAP and SAL are fragments of proteins normally produced by glial cells - brain cells that provide nourishment to neurons. We know that glial cells malfunction in people with Down's. Mice treated with the proteins had markers of healthy glial function that were missing in the untreated Down's mice. In a second experiment, the team investigated whether the treatment caused changes in chemicals known to be involved in "long-term potentiation" (LTP) - a type of brain activity key to memory formation. People and mice with Down's have decreased levels of many chemicals involved in this process. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15022 - Posted: 02.19.2011

Catherine de Lange, reporter You've probably seen the Dutch artist M. C. Escher's work, even if you don't know him by name. Escher is famous for mathematically-inspired pictures of structures that look perfectly normal at first glance, but turn out to be impossible on closer inspection. One of his most famous works is Waterfall, in which a stream of water pours from the top of a watermill into a pool at its base - and then bafflingly flows "uphill" to pour from the top all over again. The visual effect is certainly clever, but impossible to recreate in the real world - or is it? In the video above, when water is poured into the bottom of the contraption it appears to flow upwards, seemingly in defiance of gravity. Of course, there must be some sort of trick involved: we've shown you before how careful camera-work and clever 3D structures can play games with your brain. But so far, the ingenious builder of this illusion - known as mcwolles on YouTube - has yet to reveal how he created it. Can you figure it out? Let us know in the comments! And we'll ask the experts for their opinions too. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15021 - Posted: 02.19.2011

By Susan Milius Don’t judge a bear by its temperature, or so suggests first-of-its-kind data on hibernation physiology. There’s something as-yet-unknown going on with black bear hibernation that slows metabolic rates more than lower body temperatures alone can explain, reports ecological physiologist Øivind Tøien of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. In the depths of Alaskan winters, closely monitored black bears dropped their temperatures only a modest 5.5 degrees Celsius on average, Tøien and his colleagues report in the Feb. 18 Science. A standard physiologist’s calculation predicts that such a chill would slow metabolism to 65 percent of nonhibernating resting rates. But the bears’ metabolisms plunged down to even more energy-saving zones, averaging only 25 percent of the basic summer rate. This sustained, big disconnect hasn’t shown up so far in research on any other hibernating mammal, says study coauthor Brian M. Barnes, also of UA Fairbanks. Mammal hibernation matters to human medical research, says physiological ecologist Hank Harlow of the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Relying on mechanisms that scientists would love to understand, black bears spend five to seven months without eating, drinking or taking a single bathroom break. But unlike bedridden or spacefaring people, the hibernators don’t lose their muscle strength or bone mass. “Bears are just remarkable,” Harlow says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 15020 - Posted: 02.19.2011

by Ferris Jabr More men than women have autism – now we may know why. Sex hormones regulate a gene linked with the condition, making it more likely that males will accumulate testosterone in the dangerous amounts that are thought to lead to autism. For every female that has autism there are four males. To better understand this sex bias, Valerie Hu at the George Washington University Medical Center in Washington DC and colleagues studied a gene implicated in autism called retinoic acid-related orphan receptor-alpha (RORA). This gene controls a molecule that switches many subsequent genes on and off. Previous research has shown that RORA is important for development of the cerebellum and that the brains of people with autism expressed less of it than normal. Mice that likewise express less RORA than normal display symptoms that resemble autism in humans, such as repetitive behaviours and deficits in spatial learning. Hormone bath To find out how RORA is affected by hormones, Hu's team bathed human brain cells expressing the gene in either oestradiol – a form of the major female sex hormone oestrogen – or the male sex hormone dihydrotestosterone (DHT), which is derived from testosterone. They found that oestradiol enhanced the gene's expression, whereas DHT suppressed it. The team also discovered that RORA regulates another gene which controls aromatase, an enzyme that converts testosterone to oestrogen. If RORA is under-expressed, then aromatase cannot function properly and testosterone will accumulate. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Autism; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 15019 - Posted: 02.19.2011

Analysis by Amanda Onion KCBS-TV reporter Serene Branson's now infamous garbled on-air appearance during last week's Grammy Awards is revealing how migraines can be so much more than headaches. After speculation roiled for days about what may have caused the Los Angeles-based reporter to start speaking in jumbled nonsense during her live on-air report from the Grammys last week (Was she drunk? Did she suffer a stroke?), Branson said in a TV interview with her station that the cause was most likely migraine. That night, she said, she started to get "a really bad headache," and things got strange from there. "At around 10 o'clock that night I was sitting in the live truck with my field producer and the photographer and I was starting to look at some of my notes," she said in the interview. "I started to think, the words on the page are blurry and I could notice that my thoughts were not forming the way they normally do." This might come as a surprise to those who don't suffer from migraines -- and even to some who do. The fact is that migraines are complicated neurological events that come in a myriad of forms. As a migraine sufferer myself, I can attest that they can strike in many different ways -- even for one person. One of my earliest migraine memories is seeing lines of words suddenly float off the page of a book I was reading and start rotating in circles. These kinds of eye tricks are one form of migraine aura -- a condition experienced by about one in five people before a migraine. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15018 - Posted: 02.19.2011

By Steve Connor Speaking a second language may slow the rate at which the brain declines with age, showing that bilingual people are better protected against Alzheimer's disease than people who use only one language. Several studies have now demonstrated a clear link between using a second language and cognitive decline, which can be explained by the idea that bilingualism acts like a "mental gymnasium" that keeps the brain active in later life, scientists said. The latest study, presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, found bilingual patients with probable Alzheimer's were more likely have delayed symptoms compared to monolingual patients. In fact, the effect of speaking a second language produced a stronger effect on delaying the onset of Alzheimer's than any drug currently used to control the disease, said Ellen Bialystok, professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, Canada. "The finding of a four- to five-year delay in the onset of symptoms of Alzheimer's disease is dramatic. There are no pharmacologic interventions that have shown comparable effects." Our interpretation of the present findings is that bilingualism is a cognitively demanding condition that contributes to cognitive reserve in much the same way as do other stimulating intellectual and social activities." The researchers believe the effect is directly connected with using a second language, rather than a side-effect of differences in occupation or education between bilingual and monolingual people. Experiments suggest it has something to do with the extra mental effort that goes into using a second language, Professor Bialystok said. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Language; Alzheimers
Link ID: 15017 - Posted: 02.19.2011

By Bruce Bower WASHINGTON — Babies living in bilingual homes get a perceptual boost by 8 months of age that may set the stage for more resilient thinking later in life, scientists reported February 18 at the American Association of the Advancement of Science annual meeting. Infants raised bilingual from birth can distinguish not only between their two native tongues but between two languages they’ve never been exposed to, just by watching adults speak without hearing what they say, said psychologist Janet Werker of the University of British Columbia. Babies being raised to speak one language lack these visual discrimination skills, Werker and her colleagues have found. Given regular exposure to two languages, infants develop a general ability to track closely what they hear and see in decoding languages, Werker proposed. In the visual realm, such information may include lip movements, the rhythm of the jaw opening and closing, and the full ensemble of facial movements while talking. Her earlier studies found that newborn babies that had been exposed prenatally to two languages prefer to listen to those languages over others and distinguish between sounds in the tongues that they regularly hear spoken. “Bilingual infants are able to keep their languages distinct from birth and may develop an increased sensitivity to voice and face cues for different languages,” Werker said. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15016 - Posted: 02.19.2011