Catherine de Lange, reporter Did this video mess with your mind? If you're wondering whether it's a camera trick, print off your own template of the illusion and try it yourself. It's an old trick devised by American psychologist Joseph Jastrow. Although both of the shapes are the same size, the one on the bottom looks bigger. The brain trick is thought to occur because the short edge of one shape is lined up against the longer side of the other. However, there is still no consensus among researchers on why our brains perceive this effect. The illusion was recreated here by psychologist Richard Wiseman, who will be revealing why our brain is hard-wired for weirdness in his new book, Paranormality, coming out next month. Last week's illusion We asked you for possible explanations for an illusion in which a ring of bubbles appeared to shift upwards as they changed from light to dark. We found a number of possible explanations for the effect, so we asked Arthur Shapiro from the American University of Washington, in Washington DC, who has conducted experiments with similar illusions, to help us out. He thought the illusion was delightful since it combines two different effects. One of these has to do with how our brains perceive light emitted from a surface. "The eye sends information to the brain based on the contrast between lights, not on the information at a single pixel itself," says Shapiro. When brightness suddenly changes at the edge of a shape, our brains perceive it as motion. This effect was first observed by psychologists Richard Gregory and Priscilla Heard in 1983. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 14955 - Posted: 02.05.2011

By MICHELLE ANDREWS MAYBE the question is not who suffers from some type of chronic pain, but who doesn’t? “If you tally up everybody who has chronic, recurring back, headache and musculoskeletal problems, it includes almost everybody by the time people get into their 30s,” said Dr. Perry Fine, a professor of anesthesiology at the Pain Research Center and the University of Utah and incoming chairman of the American Academy of Pain Medicine. Given the prevalence of chronic pain — often defined as recurrent pain that lasts more than three to six months — you might expect that by now medical science would have figured out how to alleviate it and that health insurers would routinely cover its treatment. If only it were that simple. Pain is a sneaky opponent. Invisible, it cannot be detected with a blood test or a scan; sometimes it has no identifiable cause. Pain is perception, and what one person considers intolerable may be only moderately uncomfortable to another. This makes treatment challenging. And insurers often do not make it any easier. For the last 15 years, Ernie Merritt III, 46, has been coping with the aftermath of a back injury he suffered working as a pipefitter in southeastern Maine. At the time, he thought he had just pulled a muscle. But after an M.R.I. revealed a herniated disc pressing on his sciatic nerve, he underwent the first of four operations. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 14954 - Posted: 02.05.2011

By DWIGHT GARNER Judith Guest’s 1976 novel, “Ordinary People,” and the 1980 film adaptation starring Timothy Hutton, were groundbreaking because they underscored Ms. Guest’s title. Mental illness could occur in the most ordinary families, these works suggested. It could happen to anyone. The appeal of the Irish journalist Patrick Cockburn’s distressing new memoir, written with his son Henry, is quite the opposite, because the large Cockburn family is completely extraordinary. “Henry’s Demons” is about how Henry Cockburn, in 2002, at the age of 20, received a diagnosis of schizophrenia. He was enrolled at the University of Brighton at the time. Trees began talking to him; he leapt naked into frozen lakes; he soiled his pants on a regular basis; he ate raw garlic; his hair became matted into a single mephitic dreadlock; he roamed the woods, his crotch becoming infested with insects; he began to resemble Jesus or a caveman. He would be in and out of mental institutions, all across England, for nearly the next decade. The charming young man his family had known was largely gone. This is an awful, hard-to-witness, downbound train of a story. The book’s last sentence, written by Henry, is as startling as the moment in a horror movie when the mutilated monster, long presumed dead, flicks opens its green eyes. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 14953 - Posted: 02.05.2011

By Jennifer Viegas In socially monogamous species, from birds to humans, most individuals find partners. A large proportion of females, however, wind up with unattractive males of below-average quality, according to a new study that also found such less-than-ideal relationships raise female stress levels. The findings negate prior theories that, in monogamous species throughout the animal kingdom, each female has a good chance of pairing with a male that matches her ideal choice of partner. "In socially monogamous animals, very few individuals end up with the perfect partner because, of course, he or she is likely to be paired to someone else. That is, lots of men would like to be married to, say, Angelina Jolie, and lots of women would love to be married to Brad Pitt. But the reality is that they can't and only someone like Brad Pitt is able to marry someone like Angelina Jolie," lead author Simon Griffith told Discovery News. "So how does a female respond to her real partner?" Griffith, an associate professor in Macquarie University's Department of Biological Sciences, asked. "Work over the past few decades has shown that females can actually make a number of subtle strategies to improve their own fitness," he added, explaining that these include sleeping with other males that could improve the genetic fitness of any potential offspring. To determine what might underlie such behavior, Griffith and colleagues Sarah Pryke and William Buttemer observed partnerships and mating in Gouldian finches. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14952 - Posted: 02.03.2011

By Jennifer Viegas When a Southpaw shakes hands, his left eye and the right portion of his brain are working hard to process the other individual, suggests a new study. The research helps to explain why hand and limb preferences exist across numerous species. The predisposition, as it turns out, are tied to ocular dominance, or the tendency to prefer visual input from one eye over the other, according to the study, published in the latest Royal Society Biology Letters. Ocular dominance, in turn, is driven by cerebral lateralization, which refers to how information processing is divided and coordinated between the brain's left and right hemispheres. In recent U.S. history, the majority of presidents have been left-handed (Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, William Clinton and Barack Obama), but scientists haven't yet found a link between hand preference and an individual's abilities. "At this stage we have no reason to think that left- or right-brained animals are superior or analyze information differently, except that it's the mirror image," co-author Culum Brown told Discovery News. Brown, director of Advanced Biology at Macquarie University, and colleague Maria Magat studied the phenomenon in Australian parrots. These birds, like humans, have a tendency to use either their right or left limb more than the other. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC. T

Keyword: Laterality; Vision
Link ID: 14951 - Posted: 02.03.2011

by Ferris Jabr While we doze, our brain busily squirrels away memories. But not just any memories – it turns out that during sleep the brain specifically preserves nuggets of thought it previously tagged as important. Jan Born of the University of Tübingen in Germany and his colleagues asked 191 adults to perform different memory tasks, such as learning word-pairs. Half were told to expect a test on the task 9 hours later, while the others were told they would have a different kind of task. During the interval some members of each group were allowed to sleep. Participants who went to bed anticipating a post-nap quiz recalled 12 per cent more word pairs than those who slept with no expectation of a test. Furthermore, those anticipating a test also experienced more slow-wave sleep, known to be linked to memory consolidation. By itself sleep did not significantly improve memory – participants who were not anticipating a test performed just as badly as one another regardless of whether or not they'd had a nap before the exam. The results improve our understanding of sleep, says Born. "There is an active memory process during sleep that selects certain memories and puts them in long-term storage." Journal reference: Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.3575-10.2011 Issue 2798 of New Scientist magazine © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 14950 - Posted: 02.03.2011

By Nathan Seppa Any speculation drawing an ongoing link between flu vaccination and the risk of a rare, paralyzing neuromuscular disorder has been dashed by a huge study. An analysis of side effects recorded among nearly 90 million people in China who were vaccinated during the 2009–2010 flu season found that only 11 people subsequently were diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rate no greater than what normally appears in the population. The study appears online February 2 in the New England Journal of Medicine. In 1976, a strain of swine flu showed up in the United States, prompting the manufacture and delivery more than 40 million doses of vaccine against it. The epidemic ultimately never materialized, but studies noted that hundreds of cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome were reported after the vaccination campaign. The vaccine was withdrawn. In 2003, an Institute of Medicine review found that the evidence pointed to an association between the 1976 swine flu vaccine and the syndrome. IOM found no clear evidence of such a link with subsequent flu vaccines, but some concerns have lingered vis-à-vis flu vaccination. These fears intensified in 2009 when another swine flu emerged, this time known as the H1N1 flu, and a vaccine was made for it. After mass vaccinations, physician Yu Wang and colleagues at the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing collected data on all adverse effects reported by the 89.6 million people in China who received the flu vaccine in 2009 and 2010. The researchers found an exceptionally low rate of Guillain-Barré syndrome among those who had been vaccinated — less than the background rate in the population. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 14949 - Posted: 02.03.2011

Scientists have identified five new genes linked to Parkinson's disease in a large genetic analysis of the illness, according to a new study. After reviewing nearly 8 million possible genetic mutations, researchers pinpointed five genes connected to Parkinson's disease. Previously, six other genes were identified, and experts say there is now increasing proof the degenerative disease is sparked by peoples' genes. The discovery doesn't mean there are any new treatments just yet, but experts are optimistic they are getting closer. "The major common genetic variants for Parkinson's have been found," said Nick Wood, a professor at the Institute of Neurology at University College London, one of the researchers who led the study. "We haven't put together all the pieces of the puzzle yet, but we're not that far off," he said. He predicted a diagnostic test might be ready within a few years. Until recently, scientists hadn't been sure what caused Parkinson's disease, but assumed environmental factors such as exposure to chemicals or past head injuries were largely to blame. Scientists analyzed genetic samples from more than 12,000 people with Parkinson's disease and more than 21,000 from the general population in Europe and the U.S. They found people with the highest number of mutations in the 11 genes linked to Parkinson's were two-and-a-half times more likely to develop the disease than people who had the least amount of mutations. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Parkinsons; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14948 - Posted: 02.03.2011

By Rob Stein The federal government has rejected yet another new weight-loss drug. The Food and Drug Administration notified Orexigen Therapeutics of San Diego that it would not authorize the sale of the drug Contrave, according to a statement released Tuesday by the company. The FDA "noted concern about the cardiovascular safety profile" of the drug when used "long-term in a popularion of overweight and obese subjects," the company said. The agency said the drug could not be approved before the company conducted a study big enough and long enough to show that the risks do not outweigh the benefits. The decision comes as somewhat of a surprise. An FDA advisory panel in December endorsed the drug's approval, breaking a string of disappointments in the effort to find the first new pharmacological weapon to fight the obesity epidemic in more than a decade. "We are surprised and extremely disappointed with the agency's request in light of the extensive discussion and resulting vote on this topic at the December 7 advisory committee meeting," Orexigen President and chief executive Michael Narachi said in a statement. "We plan to work closely with the agency to gain more information to determine the appropriate next steps regarding the Contrave application." Contrave is a combination of naltrexone, which is used to treat alcohol and drug addiction, and buproprion, which is sold as Wellbutrin when used as an antidepressant and Zyban when used to help people quit smoking. © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

Keyword: Obesity; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 14947 - Posted: 02.03.2011

By NATALIE ANGIER Amid all the psychosocial caterwauling these days over the relative merits of tiger mothers and helicopter dads, allow me to make a pitch for the quietly dogged parenting style of the New Caledonian crow. In the complexity, fluidity and sophistication of their tool use, their ability to manipulate and bird-handle sticks, leaves, wires, strings and any other natural or artificial object they can find into the perfect device for fishing out food, or fishing out second-, third- or higher-order tools, the crows have no peers in the nonhuman vivarium, and that includes such textbook dexterous smarties as elephants, macaques and chimpanzees. Videos of laboratory studies with the crows have gone viral, showing the birds doing things that look practically faked. In one famous example from Oxford University, a female named Betty methodically bends a straight piece of wire against the outside of a plastic cylinder to form the shape of a hook, which she then inserts into the plastic cylinder to extract a handled plug from the bottom as deftly as one might pull a stopper from a drain. Talking-cat videos just don’t stand a chance. So how do the birds get so crafty at crafting? New reports in the journals Animal Behaviour and Learning and Behavior by researchers at the University of Auckland suggest that the formula for crow success may not be terribly different from the nostrums commonly served up to people: Let your offspring have an extended childhood in a stable and loving home; lead by example; offer positive reinforcement; be patient and persistent; indulge even a near-adult offspring by occasionally popping a fresh cockroach into its mouth; and realize that at any moment a goshawk might swoop down and put an end to the entire pedagogical program. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Intelligence
Link ID: 14946 - Posted: 02.03.2011

By Brian Mossop In 2007, James Watson eyed his genome for the very first time. Through more than 50 years of scientific and technological advancement, Watson saw the chemical structure he once helped unravel now fused into a personal genetic landscape laid out before him. Yet there was a small stretch of nucleic acids on chromosome 19 that he preferred to leave uncovered, a region that coded the apolipoprotein E gene. APOE, as it’s called, has been a telling genetic landmark of Alzheimer’s risk, strongly correlated to the disease since the early 90s. Watson’s grandmother suffered from Alzheimer’s, and without any reasonable treatments or suitable preventive strategies, the father of DNA decided the information was too volatile, its revelation creating more potential harm than good. Watson’s apprehension was warranted. Treatments for Alzheimer’s Disease have consistently failed, sometimes miserably. But as we learn more and more about the brain, it has become apparent that genetics alone rarely dictate the course of disease. Instead, brain disorders result from a complex interaction of our genes and the environments to which we’re exposed. And now, a recent wave of research has unveiled another player in the genesis of neurodegenerative disease: stress. While scientists have already catalogued the effect of our surroundings and environment on psychological conditions – including depression and anxiety disorders – new studies suggest that stress may also figure into the complex equation that determines if someone will develop a neurodegenerative disease or not. Because stress can be mitigated through lifestyle changes, people may finally gain some control over these devastating, and feared, illnesses. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Stress; Alzheimers
Link ID: 14945 - Posted: 02.01.2011

Researchers have found a way to predict how successful a smoker will be at quitting by using an MRI scan to look for activity in a region of the brain associated with behavior change. The scans were performed on 28 heavy smokers who had joined an anti-smoking program, according to the study published Monday in the peer-reviewed journal Health Psychology. Participants were asked to watch a series of commercials about quitting smoking while a magnetic resonance imaging machine scanned their brains for activity. After each ad, subjects in the study "rated how it affected their intention to quit, whether it increased their confidence about quitting, and how much they related to the message," researchers explained. Those who showed activity in the medial prefrontal cortex during the ads were "significantly linked to reductions in smoking behavior" in the month that followed, regardless of how the people said they were affected by the ad. "What is exciting is that by knowing what is going on in someone's brain during the ads, we can do twice as well at predicting their future behavior, compared to if we only knew their self-reported estimate of how successful they would be or their intention to quit," said lead author Emily Falk. "It seems that our brain activity may provide information that introspection does not," added Falk, director of the Communication Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Michigan. 4 © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 14944 - Posted: 02.01.2011

By Laura Sanders A year of moderate exercise doesn’t just bulk up muscles — it beefs up the brain, too, a new study finds. A memory center in the brain called the hippocampus shrinks a little bit each year with age, but older adults who walked routinely for a year actually gained hippocampus volume, researchers report in a study to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “I think it’s a very exciting contribution to see that walking at a fairly vigorous rate will actually affect a key structure of the brain,” says neuroscientist Carl Cotman of the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the study. “So for healthy elderly, it’s good news and would hopefully encourage people to figure that exercise is worth it.” In the study, 60 adults aged 55 to 80 scaled up gradually until they walked for 40 minutes three times a week, enough to get their heart rates up. Sixty other participants did toning workouts that included weight training, yoga sessions and stretching for the same amount of time. After a year of toning, a part of these subjects’ brains called the anterior hippocampus lost a little over 1 percent of its volume. In contrast, a year of aerobic exercise led to about a 2 percent increase in anterior hippocampus volume. Study participants who got their heart rates up performed slightly better on a memory test and had higher levels of a brain-aiding molecule called BDNF, the researchers found. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 14943 - Posted: 02.01.2011

By Bruce Bower SAN ANTONIO — Oxytocin, a hormone with a rosy reputation for getting people to love, trust and generally make nice with one another, can get down and dirty, according to evidence presented on January 28 at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. This brain-altering substance apparently amplifies whatever social proclivities a person already possesses, whether positive or negative, says psychologist Jennifer Bartz of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. Previous work has shown that a nasal blast of the hormone encourages a usually trusting person to become more trusting (SN Online: 5/21/08), but now Bartz and her colleagues find that it also makes a highly suspicious person more uncooperative and hostile than ever. “Oxytocin does not simply make everyone feel more secure, trusting and prosocial,” Bartz says. These new results raise concerns about plans by some researchers to administer oxytocin to people with autism and other psychiatric conditions that include social difficulties, she adds. Her team studied 14 people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and 13 volunteers with no psychiatric conditions. Symptoms of borderline personality disorder include severe insecurity about relationships, fears of abandonment and constant, needy reassurance-seeking from partners. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 14942 - Posted: 02.01.2011

By C. CLAIBORNE RAY Q. Does the body put on fat in actual layers, or does fat I accumulate now mix with body fat I’ve had for years? A. “Fat is deposited diffusely and not in layers,” said Louis J. Aronne, director of the comprehensive weight control center at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. “It is added to fat cells that already contain fat and expands them." If weight is gained rapidly, Dr. Aronne said, new fat cells may be made, but they do not accumulate in layers. “If subcutaneous fat stores cannot accept all the fat for genetic, medical or other reasons,” he said, “more of it winds up inside the abdomen, where it presents a greater metabolic risk because it is in the circulation of the liver.” A 2008 study in the journal Nature found that the number of fat cells in the body is set in childhood and early adolescence and stays constant even after significant weight loss, for both lean and obese people. “This explains why it’s so difficult to lose weight,” Dr. Aronne said. “When fat cells shrink, levels of a fat-cell hormone, leptin, drop faster than fat mass is reduced. This tricks the brain into thinking you’ve lost more weight than you actually have. It’s also interesting that fat cells don’t live forever, but the number somehow remains constant.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 14941 - Posted: 02.01.2011

ANN CURRY, co-host: It sounds almost too incredible to imagine, doctors removing half of a person's brain so that they could live a better life . Well, that's exactly what they did to this two-year-old girl from Washington state to help her deal with a rare disorder. In a moment we're going to meet her and her parents, but first, NBC 's Miguel Almaguer has their story. MIGUEL ALMAGUER reporting: For two-year-old Katie Verdecchia , simple steps have meant great strides in her recovery. Katie was a beautiful baby and appeared to be healthy, but just a month after her parents, Maryalicia and Brian , brought their little girl home, they noticed something was wrong. Katie had a twitch in her arm, a shake in her leg. She was having seizures. Mr. BRIAN VERDECCHIA: She was seizing 25, 30 percent of the time, at -- any time she was awake. Ms. MARYALICIA VERDECCHIA: Sometimes as much as 10 minutes, you know, in length, each episode. ALMAGUER: The diagnosis, Aicardi syndrome , a rare disorder where the right and left sides of the brain don't connect. The seizures meant Katie 's brain couldn't develop. Ms. VERDECCHIA: When you're told that your child's going to be going downhill and possibly having, you know, a shorter life than eight years, you're going to do what you have to do for your child. © 2011 MSNBC Interactive

Keyword: Epilepsy; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14940 - Posted: 02.01.2011

by Elizabeth Pennisi Are you a worrier? Low on energy? You might be able to blame your state of mind on the bugs in your gut. Researchers studying behavior and gene activity in mice have found that these microbes appear to help shape brain development. If the findings translate to humans, they could lead to new ways to treat depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders. Twenty years ago, people would have laughed at the suggestion that gut microbes could influence brain function, says immunologist Sven Pettersson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. But in the past decade, researchers have come to appreciate that the bacteria living in and on our bodies—collectively called the human microbiome—play a role in how our bodies work, affecting everything from allergies to obesity. Pettersson began to suspect a mind-microbe link 5 years ago when he and genomicist Shugui Wang of the Genome Institute of Singapore found through gene-expression studies that gut microbes regulated the activity of a gene important to the production of serotonin, a key brain chemical. He recruited Karolinska Institute neurobiologist Rochellys Diaz Heijtz to assess behavioral differences between germ-free mice—which have been bred to lack any microbial partners—and mice with intact gut bacteria. The researchers also dissected out major regions of the brain and measured gene activity in each region in both types of animals. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Depression; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 14939 - Posted: 02.01.2011

PEOPLE with busy lives don't necessarily live longer, but they might feel as if they do. Our brains use the world around us to keep track of time, and the more there is going on, the slower time feels. Brains were thought to measure time by using some kind of internal clock that generates events at a relatively regular rate. To test whether external stimuli might also play a role in our ability to process time, Misha Ahrens and Maneesh Sahani at University College London showed 20 subjects a video of either a randomly changing stimulus - statistically modelled on the way that things naturally change randomly in the world around us - or a static image, for a set period of time. When asked to judge how much time had passed, the volunteers who had been shown the moving stimulus were significantly more accurate. The subjects were also shown the video at two different speeds and asked to rate the duration of each clip. They thought both clips lasted the same amount of time, even though the faster version was shorter (Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2010.12.043). The results suggest that the brain exploits changes in visual information, when it's available, to judge time, says Sahani. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 14938 - Posted: 01.31.2011

By Laura Sanders Amputees whose “sense of touch” was rerouted from their missing limbs view their prosthetic not as a tool, but as part of the body, a study to appear in Brain suggests. Such enhanced sense of ownership, scientists say, might lead to prosthetics that operate seamlessly in place of a missing limb. The new study was conducted with two arm amputees who had undergone a surgery called targeted reinnervation, in which the remaining nerve ends from the severed arm were rerouted to an area on the arm above the site of amputation. This patch of skin serves as a proxy — touching different parts of the area makes the amputee feel as though distinct parts of his or her missing arm were being touched. The research “tells us about the brain — that the brain can take this abnormal sensation and attribute it to the hand, to the arm,” says neuroscientist Steven Hsiao of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who wasn’t involved in the work. “These people are feeling something. They feel like they’re really touching something, presumably.” To create that feeling of limb ownership, or “embodiment,” researchers in Chicago led by Paul Marasco designed a pressure-sensing system for the prosthetics. Each time a sensor on the prosthetic hand detected a touch, it would send a signal to a small robot that would poke a targeted area of the reinnervated skin. Using the robot system, Marasco and his team had each subject sit at a table, with the prosthetic arm unattached but arranged in a natural position. As the subject watched a researcher touch the prosthetic hand, the robot would simultaneously press on the reinnervated skin. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Robotics
Link ID: 14937 - Posted: 01.31.2011

By Katherine Harmon Although most people in developed countries get plenty of calories each day, their diets are often lacking in key nutrients that their bodies have evolved to expect. Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, such as those found in fish and walnuts, are one category of crucial ingredients that the body cannot make on its own. Although these beneficial fatty acids are known to be good for heart health, researchers are just beginning to learn how omega-3s impact our brains—and by extension, our moods and behavior. Lipids are integral to the central nervous system, and as studies of statins and diabetes drugs have shown, dropping levels of some lipids can have deleterious cognitive effects. Omega-3 deficiencies specifically have been linked to mood disorders, such as depression, but the underlying neural mechanism has been subject to debate. New research in mice, published online January 30 in Nature Neuroscience, offers insights into just how dietary intake of these fatty acids might alter the brain's function. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) "Our results can now corroborate clinical and epidemiological studies which have revealed associations between an omega-3/omega-6 imbalance and mood disorders," scientists behind the new study commented in a prepared statement. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Depression; Obesity
Link ID: 14936 - Posted: 01.31.2011