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By Bruce Bower Autism seems to play a genetically inspired hide-and-seek game in some families. Undiagnosed siblings in families that include two or more children with autism often grapple with language delays, social difficulties and other mild symptoms of the disorder, a new study suggests. Genes prompt autism symptoms of varying intensity among members of these families, including in some kids who don’t qualify as having an autism spectrum disorder, say psychiatrist John Constantino of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and his colleagues. Researchers have generally limited their search for DNA peculiarities to children diagnosed with autism or related disorders (SN: 7/3/10, p.12), a strategy that overlooks those with mild autism signs, Constantino’s group asserts in a paper published online October 1 in the American Journal of Psychiatry. “Subtle aspects of the autistic syndrome have not been accounted for in most studies of its intergenerational transmission,” Constantino says. By including individuals with mild autism symptoms in DNA studies, researchers could enlarge their sample sizes and amplify the statistical power of studies to find genetic effects, remarks psychiatrist Joseph Piven of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Given Constantino’s data, it is clearly wrong to label all nonautistic individuals as unaffected by an underlying genetic liability for the condition,” Piven says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010
Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14536 - Posted: 10.09.2010
By Rebecca Dube It seems like pain would be the great equalizer: Whether you’re black or white, we all hurt the same way. Except, it turns out, how we're treated for it varies greatly. Blacks and Hispanics are more likely than whites to deal with untreated pain and less likely to get adequate care for it, studies show. And minority patients who don't get proper pain treatment early on are likely to suffer depression and post-traumatic stress disorder down the road, says Dr. Carmen Green, a pain specialist and professor of anesthesiology at the University of Michigan. Researchers don’t know whether the pain imbalance is due to caregiver bias, cultural differences, physiological variances, or a combination of factors, but they do know one thing: Pain is not colorblind. “There is an unequal burden of pain,” Green said. A recent study by Green of 200 chronic pain patients in the University of Michigan health system found that black patients were prescribed fewer pain medications than whites and that women were given weaker pain medications than men were given. The research published in the Journal of Pain showed that, on average, a minority pain patient would be prescribed 1.8 pain medications compared to 2.6 drugs for non-minority sufferers. © 2010 msnbc.com.
Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 14535 - Posted: 10.07.2010
Adam Mann Researchers have produced a full wiring diagram of a macaque monkey retina, showing how thousands of nerve cells connect up to each other. The findings, published in this week's Nature1, provide insight into how primates including humans see colours, and could help to assess therapies for certain types of blindness. "For the first time we can really see all the signals feeding into the retina that convert visual images from the outside world into electrical output," says physicist Alan Litke of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, a co-author of the study. Colour is mainly perceived by the retina, where photoreceptors called cone cells — a special type of neuron responsible for seeing colour — relay information to the brain through neurons known as ganglion cells. To make the cell-by-cell circuit map, the team of scientists bathed a small section of retina from macaque monkeys (Macaca fascicularis and Macaca mulatta) in saline solution, and then stimulated the cone cells with a movie on a computer screen. Using two previously described arrays of either 512 or 519 micro-electrodes2 situated beneath the tissue, the researchers recorded the impulses that the thousands of photoreceptors sent to hundreds of retinal ganglion cells. measurement techniques (Field et al, 2010, Nature, doi:10.1038/nature09424) have revealed a complete functional map of how ganglion cells in the retina sample from the mosaics of (L)ong, (M)iddle and (S)hort wavelength sensitive cone photoreceptorsThe map shows how cone cells relay signals to ganglion cells.Field et al. © 2010 Nature Publishing Group
Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 14534 - Posted: 10.07.2010
By Karen Weintraub Are you feeling sleepy right now? Too sleepy to work effectively or drive safely? How do you know? We may not have anything like a “sleepalyzer’’ machine to measure precisely how deprived a person is, but there are sleepiness warning signs to be aware of. According to Dr. Robert Stickgold, of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, you are probably too sleepy to drive safely if: ■ It is between 2 and 5 a.m., unless you are habitually up at this time. ■ You have been awake much more than 18 consecutive hours. (Somewhere before 24 consecutive hours without sleep, you have definitely become too sleepy to drive.) ■ You have had alcohol — even a little — and you are sleep-deprived. (The effects of sleepiness and alcohol compound.) ■ You are using coffee, caffeine, open windows, or the radio to help keep you alert. ■ You even suspect just a little bit that you might be too sleepy. Judging and measuring sleepiness is tricky business. It’s totally subjective and personal — you may feel sleepy and perform poorly with the same hours of shut-eye that leave someone else completely refreshed. So, how little sleep is too little when you’re behind the wheel of a car? An 18-wheeler? A military jet? There are no standards, though people have been convicted of reckless driving for car accidents they caused after pulling an all-nighter. © 2010 NY Times Co.
Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 14533 - Posted: 10.07.2010
By PAULA SPAN The woman who came to see Dr. Ronald Petersen, an Alzheimer’s specialist at the Mayo Clinic, was only in her 60s but complained that she was having trouble concentrating. “Her attention was waning,” Dr. Petersen recalled. “She couldn’t follow a television program or stay focused during a conversation.” A C.P.A.P. machine at the home of a sleep apnea patient in Pottstown, Pa.Ryan Collerd for The New York Times A C.P.A.P. machine at the home of a sleep apnea patient in Pottstown, Pa. She was probably developing dementia, Dr. Petersen thought as he took her history. But along the way he asked, as he usually does, how she was sleeping. The woman, who lived alone, hadn’t noticed any problems. Her son, however, had stayed with her the previous night to drive her to the appointment. “She was snoring like a freight train,” he reported. Aha. Overnight sleep testing determined that the woman had obstructive sleep apnea — nightlong interruptions in breathing that reduce oxygen flow to the brain and prevent deep sleep. The interruptions can happen 10 or more times an hour and are quite common in older adults, exacerbating — or sometimes mimicking — dementia symptoms. Treated with a C.P.A.P. machine — the acronym stands for continuous positive airway pressure, a therapy that involves wearing a mask over the nose and/or mouth during sleep — the woman rapidly improved. Her scores on neuropsychological tests eventually climbed back into the normal range. A year later, Dr. Petersen said, “I can’t find any abnormalities.” Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
Keyword: Sleep; Alzheimers
Link ID: 14532 - Posted: 10.07.2010
By NOAH SNYDER-MACKLER In baboons, a new mother will rarely find herself alone. She will be hounded constantly by other, higher-ranking females who want to look, touch and sometimes steal the infant. But female geladas do not usually show much interest in others’ babies. A newborn gelada never leaves its mother’s chest in the first month, and it spends a majority of its time attached to her until it is about six months old. Mama geladas are extremely protective of their infants, and with good reason. Infanticide appears to be prevalent, especially following a change in dominant male (known as a “takeover”). Male infanticide — the killing of infants by males — is the most common form of infanticide in primates. It has been argued that this is beneficial for newly dominant males because the females will come into estrus sooner, meaning they can produce the new dominant male’s offspring sooner, rather than wait until the former dominant male’s offspring are weaned. There are only a few observed cases of male infanticide in geladas, but our project has found plenty of evidence suggesting that it is common in our study population. I have observed the protectiveness of new gelada mothers. Even though I am not a newly dominant male, nor do I pose a threat, if a curious infant gets too close to me while I am doing behavioral observations, the mother will sprint over, grab her infant and threaten me by flashing her bright pink eyelids. This is when I need to back away. It’s the same response a female will give to another gelada if she perceives that her child is unsafe. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 14531 - Posted: 10.07.2010
By Ferris Jabr In the past researchers have observed an association between poor mitochondrial function and Parkinson's disease, a neurodegenerative disorder of the central nervous system that impairs speech and motor functions and affects five million people worldwide. A new meta-analysis suggests that low expression levels of 10 related gene sets responsible for mitochondrial machinery play an important role in this disorder—all previously unlinked to Parkinson's. The study, published online today in Science Translational Medicine, further points to a master switch for these gene sets as a potential target of future therapies. Mitochondria, specialized organelles found in nearly every cell of the body, use cellular respiration to generate one of the most important sources of chemical energy—adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a versatile nucleotide that powers everything from cell division to cell signaling to transportation of large molecules across the cell membrane. Because mitochondria are so vital to a cell's normal functions, damaged and dysfunctional mitochondria have been implicated in a wide array of diseases and disorders, such as diabetes and schizophrenia. Brain tissue is particularly susceptible to mitochondrial deficits because neurons generally have high-energy requirements. Charleen Chu, a neuropathologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who has studied the link between mitochondrial function and Parkinson's, but was not involved in the new study, called it " a very interesting paper," adding that the massive study "indicates that mitochondrial dysfunction occurs early and for whatever reason mitochondrial biogenesis is either impaired or not stepping up to the demand of the neurons." © 2010 Scientific American
Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 14530 - Posted: 10.07.2010
by Jessica Hamzelou Choose wisely when considering a partner, whether to attend church and how you look after your body. These decisions could have a significant effect on your overall life satisfaction. That's according to a study that challenges the theory that life happiness is largely predetermined by your genes. The widely accepted "set-point" theory of happiness says that an individual's long-term happiness tends to be stable because it depends mainly on genetic factors. The idea is based in part on studies that show identical twins to have more similar levels of life satisfaction than non-identical twins, and suggests that although your level of happiness may occasionally be thrown off by major life events, it will always return to a set level within two years. To find out whether people really are destined for a certain level of happiness, Bruce Headey at the University of Melbourne in Australia and his team questioned people in Germany about their jobs, lifestyles and social and religious activities. The survey was initially completed by 3000 people annually, but that rose to 60,000 per year by the end of the 25-year study period. They found that certain changes in lifestyle led to significant long-term changes in reported life satisfaction, rather than causing the temporary deflections in happiness that set-point theory would suggest. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.
Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 14529 - Posted: 10.07.2010
by David Cohen Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who brought us Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, tells David Cohen about his "lost years" in California, his subsequent life as an alien and how cancer gave him the opportunity to experiment on himself for his latest book FOR his 76th birthday, Oliver Sacks received an ounce of osmium, the densest natural element in the periodic table. "I like density, and it's the only really blue metal, it's rather beautiful," he says. The year before he got a "nice rod of rhenium" and the year before that it was a piece of tungsten. You may have worked out that the gifts were chosen because the place they occupy in the periodic table corresponded to his age. Sacks's office in downtown Manhattan, New York, is littered with samples of elements. "I like to have some of my metals around me all the time," he says. It is an impressive collection, though perhaps a little unexpected for a man who is famous for his amazing collection of case histories in neurology. Sacks, a physician-turned-author, shot to fame in 1973 with the publication of Awakenings, a book that describes how he treated a group of patients suffering from encephalitis lethargica, otherwise known as sleepy sickness. The story was later turned into a film starring Robin Williams. His next famous book, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, created a template for his non-fiction books about neurology: collections of case histories that Sacks picked for the intriguing ways in which his patients cope with baffling neurological disorders, together with his own scientific, poetic and philosophical reflections. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.
Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14528 - Posted: 10.07.2010
Rebecca Adler, a freelance writer in Sacramento, has lived with Harlequin Syndrome for 29 years. Rebecca Adler writes: My game face has been known to cause genuine panic on the field -- mostly among race officials and umpires worried they've got some kind of medical emergency on their hands. Either they think I've somehow been severely sunburned on just one side of my face or they worry that I'm on my way to having heat stroke. I have a condition called Harlequin Syndrome, which causes me to sweat and flush red on only on the left side of my body. I got it the day after I was born, in the same way that anyone gets it -- by sustaining an injury to the sympathetic nervous system (the part of the nervous system that reacts to stress and flight-or-fight circumstances), according to Peter Drummond, a professor at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. (FYI, it was Drummond who first researched the condition and coined the catchy term "Harlequin Syndrome" in 1988 after researching others who have it.) But it isn't just general trauma to the sympathetic nervous system. It occurs at a very specific area of that system: the space right between the shoulder blades where the sympathetic nerves leave the spinal cord. © 2010 msnbc.com
Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 14527 - Posted: 10.05.2010
There's a male-female gap in perceptions of orgasm in the U.S., with 85 per cent of the men saying their latest sexual partner had an orgasm, compared with 64 per cent of women saying they had one, a new study suggests. The 130-page report in a special issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine, published Monday, also: * Examined the sex lives of 14-year-olds. * Broke down condom usage rates by age and ethnicity, with teens emerging as more safe-sex-conscious than boomers. * Found about seven per cent of women and eight per cent of men surveyed said they are gay, lesbian or bisexual, but the number of people who have had same-gender sex is higher. In all, 5,865 people, ranging in age from 14 to 94, participated in the survey. The U.S. survey, published Monday in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, broke down condom usage rates by age and ethnicity, with teens emerging as more conscious of safe-sex than boomers.The U.S. survey, published Monday in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, broke down condom usage rates by age and ethnicity, with teens emerging as more conscious of safe-sex than boomers. (Frank Franklin II/Associated Press) The lead researchers were from Indiana University's Center for Sexual Health Promotion in Bloomington. They said the study fills a void that has grown since the last comparable endeavour — the National Health and Social Life Survey — was published 16 years ago. © CBC 2010
Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14526 - Posted: 10.05.2010
By RONI CARYN RABIN It may sound counterintuitive, but a study that randomly assigned dieters to different sleep regimens found that participants allowed only five and a half hours in bed at night lost less flab than those who spent eight and a half hours in bed and got more sleep. The total amount of weight loss did not differ — both groups lost about six and a half pounds over two weeks — but the optimal outcome of a diet is to lose fat, not muscle, researchers said. The sleep-deprived participants felt hungrier than the others, and had higher levels of ghrelin, a hormone that drives appetite, the study found. “The bottom line is that if people are trying to diet and lose weight for health reasons, it makes sense to get a sufficient amount of sleep,” said Dr. Plamen D. Penev, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago and the senior author of the study, which is being published Tuesday in Annals of Internal Medicine. “If they’re not getting enough sleep as they diet, they may have higher levels of hunger and be struggling to adhere to the regimen.” The study was small, including only 10 adults; they lived in a clinical research center for weeks at a time so their exercise, food intake and sleep schedules could be tightly controlled and monitored. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
By KATHERINE ELLISON You sit in a chair, facing a computer screen, while a clinician sticks electrodes to your scalp with a viscous goop that takes days to wash out of your hair. Wires from the sensors connect to a computer programmed to respond to your brain’s activity. Try to relax and focus. If your brain behaves as desired, you’ll be encouraged with soothing sounds and visual treats, like images of exploding stars or a flowering field. If not, you’ll get silence, a darkening screen and wilting flora. This is neurofeedback, a kind of biofeedback for the brain, which practitioners say can address a host of neurological ills — among them attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, depression and anxiety — by allowing patients to alter their own brain waves through practice and repetition. The procedure is controversial, expensive and time-consuming. An average course of treatment, with at least 30 sessions, can cost $3,000 or more, and few health insurers will pay for it. Still, it appears to be growing in popularity. Cynthia Kerson, executive director of the International Society for Neurofeedback and Research, an advocacy group for practitioners, estimates that 7,500 mental health professionals in the United States now offer neurofeedback and that more than 100,000 Americans have tried it over the past decade. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
by Amber Angelle For nearly 30 years, researchers have gathered evidence that a group of bizarre, fatal brain diseases—including mad cow and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease—are caused not by a virus or bacterium but by an abnormal form of a protein, called a prion. New studies lend the strongest support yet to this once-controversial idea and are also starting to reveal the beneficial natural functions these proteins perform before they go bad. Molecular biochemist Jiyan Ma at Ohio State University and colleagues were able to transform a normal protein produced by E. coli bacteria into a prion whose properties match those of the infectious version: It forms clumps, resists being cut by enzymes, and converts other normal proteins into the aberrant form. When the prion was injected into the brains of mice, the brains became spongy and riddled with holes, the telltale signs of prion disease. “Next we plan to take a closer look at the system we used to create infectious prions to identify the molecular mechanisms behind the change,” Ma says. In a separate experiment, researchers in the United States and Austria used a prion protein generated by E. coli to infect hamsters with a transmissible brain disease. The disease progressed very gradually, just as it does in humans, suggesting that the hamsters could provide a useful animal model system. Copyright © 2010, Kalmbach Publishing Co.
Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 14523 - Posted: 10.05.2010
By JEROME GROOPMAN After the birth of each of our three children, my wife and I breathed a deep sigh of relief. We had been meticulous in following our obstetrician’s advice: we had been screened for the Tay-Sachs trait, and had an amniocentesis to check for chromosomal changes associated with Down syndrome, and ultrasound to assess the fetus’s growth. Everything looked normal. But with the acute awareness of two physicians, we knew that these tests did not reveal all the problems that can occur during gestation. So when we heard the piercing cry of our newborn and were told the baby had a high Apgar score, we believed we had successfully skirted the perils of pregnancy. But in the decades since our children’s birth, results from research studies have suggested that we do not put fetal life so readily behind us. Rather, as Annie Murphy Paul writes in her informative and wise new book, “fetal origins research suggests that the lifestyle that influences the development of disease is often not only the one we follow as adults, but the one our mothers practiced when they were pregnant with us as well.” This hypothesis was initially put forth by David Barker, a British physician who in 1989 published data indicating that poor maternal nutrition put offspring at risk for heart disease decades later. Barker’s hypothesis was initially dismissed by the medical establishment as an artifact of looking in hindsight at birth-weight and the later development of disease, without detailed knowledge of what happened in the interim. Of necessity, research on fetal development involves observing pregnant women in their daily lives; no one would purposefully have one group eat in a possibly risky way or be exposed to a potentially dangerous substance, and compare outcomes with an unperturbed control group. We have, at best, only correlations between a mother’s lifestyle and her child’s future health, not clear causation. Nonetheless, a growing number of observational studies conducted in different parts of the world since Barker’s initial report bolster the notion that in the nature-nurture dynamic, nurture begins at the time of conception. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
Keyword: Development of the Brain; Obesity
Link ID: 14522 - Posted: 10.04.2010
By Emily Singer A massive new project to scan the brains of 1,200 volunteers could finally give scientists a picture of the neural architecture of the human brain and help them understand the causes of certain neurological and psychological diseases. The National Institutes of Health announced $40 million in funding this month for the five-year effort, dubbed the Human Connectome Project. Scientists will use new imaging technologies, some still under development, to create both structural and functional maps of the human brain. The project is novel in its size; most brain-imaging studies have looked at tens to hundreds of brains. Scanning so many people will shed light on the normal variability within the brain structure of healthy adults, which will in turn provide a basis for examining how neural "wiring" differs in such disorders as autism and schizophrenia. The researchers also plan to collect genetic and behavioral data, testing participants' sensory and motor skills, memory, and other cognitive functions, and deposit this information along with brain scans in a public database (although the patients' personal information will be stripped out). Scientists around the world can then use the database to search for the genetic and environmental factors that influence the structure of the brain. © 2010 Technology Review.
Keyword: Brain imaging; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 14521 - Posted: 10.04.2010
By David Biello Name: Greg Graffin Title: Lead singer for the punk rock band Bad Religion; Lecturer in life sciences and paleontology at U.C.L.A. How are evolution and punk rock related? The idea with both is that you challenge authority, you challenge the dogma. It's a process of collective discovery. It's debate, it's experimentation, and it's verification of claims that might be false. In your new book Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science and Bad Religion in a World without God you talk about the "anarchic exuberance of life." What do you mean by that? The trick is: how do you talk about natural selection without implying the rigidity of law? We use it as almost an active participant, almost like a god. In fact, you could substitute the word "god" for "natural selection" in a lot of evolutionary writings and you'd think you were listening to a theologian. It's a routine we know doesn't exist but we teach it anyway: Genetic mutation and some active force chooses the most favorable one. That simply isn't a complete explanation of what's going on. We need to stop thinking about lawlike behaviors and embrace the surprises. Was Darwin a punk? He was very straight-laced because of English Victorian culture, but he sure did like to hobnob with the radicals. There are punk fans who kind of stand in the back and never in their lives go slam dancing but love the music and what it represents. Darwin may have been that kind of contemplative and pensive anti-authoritarian. © 2010 Scientific American,
Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14520 - Posted: 10.04.2010
By Roger Dobson Falling in love is not as simple as it seems, but it is very quick. Those intense over-powering feelings of being truly, madly, deeply in love are the result of complex and rapid brain activity. Being in love – or more precisely being in an emotional state of intense longing for union with another, involving chemical, cognitive, and goal-directed behavioural components – is a pretty complicated affair. According to new research, it's not a basic emotion, as some thought, but a highly complex and businesslike process involving 12 areas of the brain working together to produce and sustain that magic moment. And researchers have discovered that the first brain activity specific to love starts within one fifth of a second of being smitten. According to a new study, The Neuroimaging of Love, brain regions with decidedly unromantic names, like the dorsolateral middle frontal gyrus and the anterior cingulate, as well chemicals like nerve growth factor, dopamine and oxytocin, are all involved in orchestrating these feelings of love. Some of these areas are those that are also active when people are under the influence of euphoria-inducing drugs – suggesting that falling in love may have a similar effect on the brain as using cocaine. ©independent.co.uk
Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 14519 - Posted: 10.04.2010
REWARD pathways in the brains of overweight people become less responsive as they gain weight. This causes them to eat more to get the same pleasure from their food, which in turn reduces the reward response still further. Eric Stice, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, and colleagues used fMRI brain scans to monitor 26 obese or overweight volunteers as they sipped either a tasty milkshake or a flavourless liquid resembling saliva. They compared the effect of both drinks on brain activity in the dorsal striatum, a key part of the brain's reward circuitry. Six months later, they retested the volunteers. Those who had gained weight since the first test also showed reduced activity in the dorsal striatum in response to the milkshake. In contrast, no change was seen in people who had lost or maintained weight (Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.2105-10.2010). The result suggests that overeating may push people onto a slippery slope akin to a drug addict's craving for ever-larger doses. "People are having to eat more and more to chase the high," says Stice. It remains to be seen whether losing weight can reverse the cycle and restore normal functioning of the reward pathway. Issue 2780 of New Scientist magazine © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.
Keyword: Obesity; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 14518 - Posted: 10.04.2010
By Matt Walker When two dolphin species come together, they attempt to find a common language, preliminary research suggests. Bottlenose and Guyana dolphins, two distantly related species, often come together to socialise in waters off the coast of Costa Rica. Both species make unique sounds, but when they gather, they change the way they communicate, and begin using an intermediate language. That raises the possibility the two species are communicating in some way. Details are published in the journal Ethology. It is not yet clear exactly what is taking place between the two dolphin species, but it is the first evidence that the animals modify their communications in the presence of other species, not just other dolphins of their own kind. Biologist Dr Laura May-Collado of the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan made the discovery studying dolphins swimming in the Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge of the southern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) are larger, measuring up to 3.8m long, with a long dorsal fin. Guyana dolphins (Sotalia guianensis) are much smaller, measuring 2.1m long, and have a smaller dorsal fin and longer snout, known as a rostrum. BBC © MMX
Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 14517 - Posted: 10.02.2010