By EMILY BAZELON At 4 months, Noah Whitmer was an easy baby. Super tranquilo, remembers Trudy Eliana Muñoz Rueda, who took care of Noah at her home day care center in Fairfax County, Va. Rueda and Noah’s mother, Erin Whitmer, both noticed when he stopped taking his bottle well and napping as usual in the middle of his fifth month, in April 2009. Whitmer thought this was because Noah had just started eating solid food. She and Rueda talked about it early on April 20, both of them hunched over Noah in his car seat when Whitmer dropped him off. That afternoon, after a morning in which Noah didn’t nap and drank only a couple of ounces of formula, Rueda says she prepared a bottle for him while he lay on a mat. In her native Peru, Rueda, who is 46, ran a travel agency and taught college courses for prospective tour guides. Her husband was trained as a lawyer. After they moved to the United States in 2001, the couple had a second child, and three years later Rueda converted her basement into a home day care center so she could work while spending time with her two kids. When Rueda sat down to feed Noah, her 13-year-old daughter was at school, her 5-year-old was upstairs watching TV and the four other children in her care were taking naps. Rueda’s sister-in-law, who spent the morning with the children while Rueda was at a doctor’s appointment, had just left the house. “Everything was calm and quiet,” Rueda, who has soft features and dark hair, told me in Spanish while her lawyer translated. There are two irreconcilable versions of how that calm shattered. Rueda says that Noah was crying, and she picked him up, sat on the couch and gave him the bottle to help put him to sleep. While she was feeding him, she felt Noah’s arm go limp, and when she moved to take the bottle out of his mouth, he made a sound that she didn’t recognize. “I could tell something was happening,” she says. She stood up and put Noah on her shoulder, patting him on the back. “As I did this, his body tensed up in a ball. It was as if he was looking for air, and he couldn’t breathe.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14964 - Posted: 02.07.2011

A tiny, translucent water flea that can reproduce without sex and lives in ponds and lakes has more genes than any other creature, said scientists who have sequenced the crustacean's genome. Daphnia pulex, named after the nymph in Greek mythology who transforms into a tree in order to escape the lovestruck Apollo, has 31,000 genes compared to humans who have about 23,000, said the research in the journal Science. Often studied by scientists who want to learn about the effects of pollution and environmental changes on water creatures, the almost-microscopic freshwater Daphnia is the first crustacean to have its genome sequenced. But just because this creature -- viewed as the canary in the gold mine of the world's waters -- has more genes doesn't necessarily mean they are all unique, explained project leader John Colbourne. "Daphnia's high gene number is largely because its genes are multiplying, by creating copies at a higher rate than other species," said Colbourne, genomics director at the Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics. Daphnia has a large number of never-before seen genes, as well as a big chunk of the same genes found in humans, the most of any insects or crustacean so far known to scientists. "More than one-third of Daphnia's genes are undocumented in any other organism -- in other words, they are completely new to science," said Don Gilbert, coauthor and Department of Biology scientist at IU Bloomington. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14963 - Posted: 02.07.2011

MICHAEL POSNER Among the great enigmas of human existence, few have proven so intractable as the human brain. Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran says our current understanding of the body’s most complex organ approximates what we knew about chemistry in the 19th century: in short, not much. On a scale of 100, estimates Toronto psychiatrist Colin Shapiro, our comprehension of how the brain actually functions ranks at a lowly 2. Now, two Toronto doctors, a general practitioner and a medical biophysicist, are laying claim to a research innovation that could expand our knowledge exponentially. Using one of the earliest imaging technologies, the electroencephalograph (EEG), Mark Doidge and Joseph Mocanu have written software that creates dynamic, real-time, three-dimensional colour movies of the brain. If their research is validated, it could revolutionize neuroscience – and, not incidentally, make them a fortune. But while the software is proven, its application to medical treatment has yet to be clinically tested in traditional, double-blind studies. “We usually think of cameras as looking out at the world,” Dr. Doidge said. “This is a new kind of camera. It gives you a window on your mind.” It’s not a camera in the conventional sense. Instead, adapting an algorithm known as eLORETA, the software amplifies EEG signals from 32 electrodes attached to the cerebral cortex, and converts them into colour-coded movies of neuronal activity. In a brain divided in more than 6,200 voxels (3D pixels), the algorithm infers and maps where electrical events are occurring. The movie can then be watched in real time, recorded and played back on computer screens. © Copyright 2011 The Globe and Mail Inc.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 14962 - Posted: 02.07.2011

By James Gallagher Health reporter, BBC News An international team of researchers have found a clue to one of the leading causes of blindness, which they hope could eventually lead to a cure. Age-related macular degeneration affects 500,000 people in the UK and is incurable. The study in the journal Nature found an enzyme known as DICER1 that stops functioning, resulting in the illness. UK experts said it had the potential to be an important breakthrough. The macula is a part of the eye which sits in the centre of the retina and is responsible for the fine detail at the centre of the field of vision. As the disease progresses that central vision declines, making reading, driving and recognising people difficult. It affects one in 50 people over 50 and one in five people over 85. The exact cause is unknown, but risk factors include smoking, high blood pressure and having relatives with the condition. BBC © MMXI

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 14961 - Posted: 02.07.2011

Joseph Milton Fly brains have never looked so good. Spectacular images of the insects' complex neural circuitry have now been produced using a pair of techniques that allow individual nerve-cell lineages to be visualized using a range of colours. Both methods are adaptations of the 'Brainbow' techniques devised at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to visualize mouse neurons, and reported in Nature in 20071. "We were inspired by the elegance of the Brainbow approach," says Iris Salecker, a neuroscientist at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, who worked on one of the fruitfly methods. The new techniques, reported in two papers published online today in Nature Methods23, involve inserting strings of genes into the neurons of Drosophila melanogaster embryos. Each gene produces a different fluorescent colour, lighting up individual neurons, or even all of the cells descended from an embryonic neuron - because they will carry the same gene and therefore be the same colour. Both techniques result in colourful visualizations that allow all the nerve cells in any one lineage to be distinguished and their development traced, illuminating how neural circuits develop and interact. The string includes a selection of colour-producing genes, but only one gene is active in each modified nerve cell — the one closest to a region of DNA called a promoter. As the strings are identical, all the modified neurons would be the same colour, and would be impossible to separate visually. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Brain imaging; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14960 - Posted: 02.07.2011

A Devon man suffering from Tourette's Syndrome is to undergo a pioneering form of brain surgery. Mike Sullivan, 32, from Exeter, will have deep brain stimulation to help reduce his involuntary tics. It sends electrical impulses to control brain activity and has proved effective in treating Parkinson's disease, cluster headaches and depression. Tourette's is a neurological disorder thought to occur if there is a problem with nerves communicating in the brain. People suffering from Tourette's usually have both motor and vocal tics. Mr Sullivan, who was diagnosed with the condition at the age of 12, became the victim of bullying and teasing at school. He opted for deep brain stimulation after his condition worsened and symptoms became more frequent. Mr Sullivan said he has to work hard to suppress the almost continual tics while working with the public at Exeter Register Office. He describes this experience as exhausting and mentally draining. "I can, up to a point, control it... but I'm always looking for a way out if people are staring," he told BBC News. BBC © MMXI

Keyword: Tourettes
Link ID: 14959 - Posted: 02.07.2011

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - More than a quarter of Americans taking antidepressants have never been diagnosed with any of the conditions the drugs are typically used to treat, according to new research. That means millions could be exposed to side effects from the medicines without proven health benefits, researchers say. "We cannot be sure that the risks and side effects of antidepressants are worth the benefit of taking them for people who do not meet criteria for major depression," said Jina Pagura, a psychologist and currently a medical student at the University of Manitoba in Canada, who worked on the study. "These individuals are likely approaching their physicians with concerns that may be related to depression, and could include symptoms like trouble sleeping, poor mood, difficulties in relationships, etc.," she added in an e-mail to Reuters Health. "Although an antidepressant might help with these issues, the problems may also go away on their own with time, or might be more amenable to counseling or psychotherapy." The researchers tapped into data from the Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiologic Surveys, which include a nationally representative sample of more than 20,000 U.S. adults interviewed between 2001 and 2003. Roughly one in ten people told interviewers they had been taking antidepressants during the past year. Yet a quarter of those people had never been diagnosed with any of the conditions that doctors usually treat with the medication, such as major depression and anxiety disorder. SOURCE: http://bit.ly/eXPVSL Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, online January 25, 2011. Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 14958 - Posted: 02.05.2011

By BINA VENKATARAMAN BOSTON — Tracking the inexorable advance of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the deadly neuromuscular ailment better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease or A.L.S., has long been an inexact science — a matter of monitoring weakness and fatigue, making crude measurements of the strength of various muscles. This imprecision has hindered the search for drugs that could slow or block the disease’s progress. But now a neurologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center here has won a $1 million prize — reportedly the largest ever for meeting a specific challenge in medical research — for developing a reliable way to quantify the small muscular changes that signal progressive deterioration. The winner, Dr. Seward Rutkove, showed that his method could cut in half the cost of clinical trials to screen potential drugs for the disease, said Melanie Leitner, chief scientific officer of Prize4Life, the nonprofit group that created the competition. The method does not provide a target in the body at which to aim drugs, nor will it help doctors better diagnose the disease. But Dr. Merit Cudkowicz, a professor of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and a chairwoman of the Northeast A.L.S. Consortium, compared Dr. Rutkove’s discovery to the way magnetic resonance imaging expedited the development of drugs for multiple sclerosis. “You can use this as a tool to screen drugs to see if they will affect survival,” she said, but added, “The ultimate prize is finding a drug that works for A.L.S.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 14957 - Posted: 02.05.2011

by Valerie Ross Jesse Rissman cannot read your mind—but he’s working on it. A postdoctoral memory researcher at Stanford University, Rissman is studying how much fMRI scans (which measure activity in the brain) can reveal about what a person is thinking. Along the way, he is raising a big red flag to those who want to use brain scans to peer into the heads of suspected criminals. What got you interested in brain scans in the courtroom? In India, a woman was convicted of murder using a technology that recorded electrical activity from the scalp while she was viewing or listening to materials related to the crime. When I learned more about the tests and how widely they were being used in the Indian legal system, I realized these techniques need to be evaluated in a more rigorous way. How do you look for memories? We had people study photographs of faces. Then, while they were in an fMRI scanner, we showed them those faces again, interspersed with new ones, and they had to judge whether they recognized each face. Then we used a computer algorithm to identify neural signatures associated with recognition and those associated with the experience of something new. Can you identify a person’s memories from such scans? We could tell quite reliably whether people thought each face was familiar or new, but we couldn’t tell the true status of the memory. When we tried to distinguish faces the person had seen from those he hadn’t, we were correct less than 60 percent of the time. There are many reasons memories may not properly form. The person may not be paying attention, may be under the influence of a substance, may be drowsy—and memories are forgotten over time. The idea that our brain contains a veridical record of our experiences is, I think, fanciful. Copyright © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 14956 - Posted: 02.05.2011

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