by Andy Coghlan THE first trial of a drug intended to rebalance the brain chemistry of people with autism has helped symptoms in most of the 25 volunteers who tested it - with reductions in irritability and tantrums, and improvements in social skills. The announcement coincides with news that the US federal government has finalised its financial package for Hannah Poling. In 2008 the government concluded that vaccinations may have resulted in her autism-like symptoms. The family will receive $1.5 million, plus $500,000 annually to cover the costs of caring for her. Her case, however, is likely to be unique - she has a rare underlying genetic condition affecting her mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cell. This was judged to account for the symptoms she developed after vaccination. As the debate over vaccination and autism rumbles on in the US, the results from the drug trial of arbaclofen are encouraging. Although doctors sometimes prescribe drugs for autism, they are usually antidepressants and anti-psychotics and aimed at specific symptoms. Arbaclofen, by contrast, is intended to rebalance brain chemistry, said to be awry in people with autism spectrum disorders. "We are trying to normalise signalling functions within the brain," says Randall Carpenter of Seaside Therapeutics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The firm is developing arbaclofen as a generic under the name STX209. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 14456 - Posted: 09.16.2010

Oliver Sacks As a physician, I am concerned with people who have neurological damage or disease or who are, in general, trying to improve their neurological function. Something that has intrigued me recently is how, after one has lost one’s eyesight, the mind’s eye—the brain’s ability to create visual images—not only persists but can be heightened and harnessed. A lot of people who lose their sight are still visual people. As they read braille with their fingertips, they may experience it visually. This is not just a metaphor or a manner of speaking; functional imagery of their visual cortex shows that it is activated as they read braille. It’s a cross-modal transfer, so that touch is converted into visual experience in the brain. The term for this is sensory substitution, a concept originally introduced by an extraordinary man, the neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita. He wondered whether, by using a video camera and connecting it up pixel for pixel to an area on the skin, one could form a mental picture based on tactile impulses felt by the skin. He tried the tongue, which has the finest sensory discrimination in the body. With such a device, a blind person can form a picture of the environment sufficiently detailed, for example, to catch a ball that is rolled toward him. But this is by no means the limit. One could have much higher discrimination, giving one a sense comparable to not-bad vision. What is extraordinary is that even though it’s the tongue that is stimulated, people using such devices maintain they are getting a visual picture of the world. Sensory substitution can take other forms, and one has to wonder, in terms of future technology, whether this ability to use other senses could be refined.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 14455 - Posted: 09.16.2010

By TARA PARKER-POPE During basketball practice last year, 12-year-old Nicole Dehart was shooting the ball when a defender tried aggressively to block her shot. The two players made contact, and Nicole hit the floor headfirst. “The way she was hit took her whole body out from under her, and she landed directly on her head,” said her mother, Christine White, of Pataskala, Ohio. “We immediately knew this was serious. She was very confused and looking at people like she didn’t know who they were.” At the hospital, doctors diagnosed a concussion —an increasingly common injury in youth basketball, particularly among girls, yet one that has yet to gain widespread attention. In fact, Ms. White said, she knew enough to worry about concussions — but when Nicole played soccer, not basketball. “I worried more about broken bones, being that it is a hard floor,” she said. “But the physical contact of basketball is a lot like football inside.” On Monday, the medical journal Pediatrics reported that about 375,000 children and teenagers are treated in hospital emergency rooms each year for basketball-related injuries. Notably, the proportion related to head trauma is on the rise. In 2007, the last year of the study, about 4 percent of youth basketball injuries were to the head, about double the number of such injuries reported by emergency rooms in 1997. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 14454 - Posted: 09.14.2010

By RONI CARYN RABIN Men develop mild cognitive impairment, often a precursor to Alzheimer’s disease, earlier and at higher rates than women, according to a new study of almost 2,000 people in their 70s and 80s. The difference is surprising, since dementia and Alzheimer’s are thought to affect more women than men, said the paper’s lead author, Dr. Ronald C. Petersen, director of the Mayo Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. People with mild cognitive impairment appear to be functioning normally, but their forgetfulness is beyond what occurs in normal aging. To determine the condition’s prevalence, Mayo researchers conducted extensive neurological examinations of 1,969 randomly selected 70-to-89-year-olds in residents of Olmsted County, Minn. Nineteen percent of the men had mild cognitive impairment, compared with 14 percent of the women. (The percentages do not include those with full-blown dementia, which afflicts roughly 10 percent in this age group.) The study, financed by the National Institute on Aging, was published in the journal Neurology. Besides men in general, subjects found to be at higher risk for mild cognitive impairment included those who had never been married, those with less than nine years of schooling and those carrying the ApoE4 gene, which is a risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14453 - Posted: 09.14.2010

By NICHOLAS WADE Under Mendel’s laws of inheritance, you could thank mom and dad equally for all the outstanding qualities you inherited. But there’s long been some fine print suggesting that a mother’s and father’s genes do not play exactly equal roles. Research published last month now suggests the asymmetry could be far more substantial than supposed. The asymmetry, based on a genetic mechanism called imprinting, could account for some of the differences between male and female brains and for differences in a mother’s and father’s contributions to social behavior. A person gets one set of genes from each parent. Apart from the sex chromosomes, the two sets are equivalent, and in principle it should not matter if a gene comes from mother or father. The first sign that this is not always true came from experiments in which mouse embryos were engineered to carry two male genomes, or two female genomes. The double male and double female mice all died in the womb. Nature evidently requires one genome from each parent. Biologists then made the embryos viable by mixing in some normal cells. The surprising outcome was that mice with two male genomes had large bodies and small brains. With the double female genome mice, it was the other way around. Evidently the maternal and paternal genomes have opposite effects on the size of the brain. The root of the asymmetry is a procedure called imprinting in which either the mother’s or the father’s copy of a particular gene is inactivated. The best worked out example concerns a gene called insulinlike growth factor-2, which promotes the growth of the fetus. The IGF-2 gene is active in the paternal genome but imprinted or inactivated in the genome the fetus receives from its mother. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14452 - Posted: 09.14.2010

By Emily Sohn Sugar is the enemy, according to a growing body of research, and not just because it rots our teeth and adds padding to our thighs. The real danger is fructose -- a main ingredient in table sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and fruit -- that actually gets into our cells and alters metabolism. The findings may help to explain how our nation's excessive consumption of sweetened foods is contributing to growing rates of obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and more -- in a way that has nothing to do with sugar's rich source of empty calories. What's more, there may be deep evolutionary roots that explain sugar's power over our bodies. Many millions of years ago, according to new research, our ape ancestors developed mutations that made it easy for them to get fat from eating fructose. At the time, the mutation was a good thing. It allowed our ancestors to survive seasonal periods of famine when the fruit trees went bare. Today, the mutation makes a year-round, fructose-filled diet dangerous to our health, said Richard Johnson, chief of the division of Renal Diseases and Hypertension at the University of Colorado, Denver, and author of "The Sugar Fix: The High-Fructose Fallout That Is Making You Fat and Sick." Both sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are equally bad, he said, because both contain about the same amount of fructose. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Obesity; Evolution
Link ID: 14451 - Posted: 09.14.2010

by Ann Gibbons The faster a baby boy gains weight in the first 6 months of life, the more sex he'll probably have as a young adult. That's one of the startling new findings of a long-term study of more than 700 men from birth to early adulthood in the Philippines. The fastest-growing baby boys reached puberty earlier than babies who gained weight more slowly. By their early 20s, they were stronger, taller, and had more testosterone (and sex partners). "Your characteristics as an adult male—body size, lean mass, and sexual maturation—are programmed by your early experiences," says lead author Christopher Kuzawa, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. Researchers have long known that babies adapt to their world even before they're born—and that those adaptations affect their physiology and metabolism as adults, including their risk for chronic disease. Infants born to malnourished mothers, for example, are more likely to be born small and have efficient metabolisms that require less fuel to survive. Conversely, infants whose mothers were well-fed are often born larger and are more likely to grow bigger more rapidly, requiring more calories to maintain their larger bodies that can make them more attractive mates. Problems arise, however, when low-birth-weight babies are fed diets rich in sugars or fat, which stress their smaller organs, such as pancreases, for example, leading to diabetes—or when fast-growing children face famine. Scientists have debated whether these responses to good or bad times early in development are adaptive adjustments to their environment—reflecting that infants have a window of time early in life when they can fine-tune their developmental trajectories—or whether early deficiencies in nutrition and stress simply predispose these infants to more disease as adults. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14450 - Posted: 09.14.2010

Tim Kiladze A chief executive officer’s patience and co-operation can make or break a corporate merger or acquisition. That’s no secret. But researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business now offer a biological explanation for male CEOs’ willingness, or lack thereof, to negotiate: testosterone levels. The UBC team crunched the numbers for 350 corporate deals completed between 1997 and 2007 and determined that the aggression-causing hormone directly affects a male CEO’s tendency to bid for a company – and to walk away from an unfavourable deal. “Normally, assets should go to buyers that value [them] the most,” finance professor and lead researcher Maurice Levi said, “if decisions are based purely on the basis of rationality.” However, his team found that hormones intervene and make CEOs bid for things they don’t necessarily need, or turn down offers out-of-hand, without trying to negotiate better terms. “They might be pursuing things that give them the most dominance, but do not give them the most value,” Mr. Levi said. Notably, men with higher testosterone levels are 20 per cent more likely to walk away from a takeover offer. They are also 4 per cent more likely to make takeover bids, a small effect but still statistically significant. The Sauder study was based on a 2007 Harvard University experiment in which pairs of male participants tried to make a deal to split $40. Participants with above-average testosterone levels, tested in a laboratory, were more likely to reject a lowball offer, whereas those with below-average levels were less likely to drive a hard bargain. © Copyright 2010 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 14449 - Posted: 09.14.2010

Katharine Sanderson Artificial electronic skins that can detect the gentlest of touches have been developed by two independent US research groups. The skins could eventually be used in prosthetics, or in touch-sensitive robotic devices. Both systems detect pressure changes of less than a kilopascal, the same as everyday pressures felt by our fingers when typing or picking up a pen. This sensitivity is better than previous systems, which detected pressures of tens of kilopascals or more, or only detected static pressures so that once an object was sat on the skin, the device could not sense that it was still there. The devices, both reported in Nature Materials today, work in different ways1,2. Chemist Zhenan Bao at Stanford University, California, and her colleagues used the elastic polymer polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)1. Bao took a piece of PDMS measuring six centimetres square with pyramid-shaped chunks cut out of it at regular intervals. When the PDMS is squashed, the pyramid-shaped holes that were previously filled with air become filled with PDMS, changing the device's capacitance, or its ability to hold an electric charge. An optical image of a fully fabricated e-skin device with nanowire active matrix circuitry. each dark square represents a single pixel.The use of pressure-sensitive rubber makes this artifical skin flexible.Ali Javey and Kuniharu Takei To make it easier to detect the changes in capacitance, Bao stuck the PDMS capacitor onto an organic transistor, which can read out the differences as a change in current. The team used a grid of transistors to track pressure changes at different points across the material. © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Robotics; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 14448 - Posted: 09.13.2010

By Stephen Smith It’s a story that rings familiar: A couple tries and tries — frustration surging — to have a baby, finally deciding to adopt. Then, lo and behold, the woman receives the news that once proved elusive: You’re pregnant. Maybe, armchair psychiatrists have long opined, it has something to do with a cloud of stress dissipating. Or consider women who swear that the fatigue, bloat, and irritability that herald a menstrual period are magnified when life’s anxieties rage with particular ferocity. For generations, such anecdotes existed largely in the realm of accepted wisdom, evoking dismissive entreaties to women to “just relax.’’ And studies of reproductive health sometimes consisted of little more than asking infertile couples to jot down their levels of stress. “We thought there has to be something better than that,’’ said Germaine Buck Louis, a top scientist at the National Institute of Child Health & Human Development. Now, researchers at her agency are opening a wider window onto the fraught relationship between stress and women’s reproductive health — research that could one day lead to use of saliva tests for stress and better methods for muting it. Two studies released last month by federal scientists offer tantalizing clues. One suggests that elevated levels of a stress-related enzyme might predict whether a woman will have difficulty getting pregnant. The other shows that a wave of stress in the days before a woman’s period may act like an accelerant for premenstrual symptoms. © 2010 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Stress; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14447 - Posted: 09.13.2010

By TARA PARKER-POPE Both mothers and fathers face an increased risk of depression after the birth of a child, and remain at some increased risk well into a child’s adolescence, a new British study shows. The research, which tracked nearly 87,000 families in the United Kingdom between 1993 and 2007, found the highest risk for depression occurred in the first year after a child’s birth. Over all, 39 percent of mothers and 21 percent of fathers had experienced an episode of depression during the first 12 years of their child’s life. After the first year of parenting, a mother’s risk for depression dropped by half, while experienced fathers faced only about a quarter of the depression risk compared with new fathers. Although depression risk for both parents dropped considerably in the second year, it remained steady through a child’s 12th year. (No data were collected from families with older children.) Parents who had an earlier history of depression, who had children at a relatively young age or who had lower incomes were at highest risk for a depressive episode during their parenting years, according to the study, published online in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. Although the study wasn’t designed to determine the causes of the higher depression rates among parents, researchers speculated that several potential triggers could occur because of the everyday demands of parenting. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Stress
Link ID: 14446 - Posted: 09.13.2010

Janelle Weaver Practice makes perfect when it comes to remembering things, but exactly how that works has long been a mystery. A study published in Science this week1 indicates that reactivating neural patterns over and over again may etch items into the memory. People find it easier to recall things if material is presented repeatedly at well-spaced intervals rather than all at once. For example, you're more likely to remember a face that you've seen on multiple occasions over a few days than one that you've seen once in one long period. One reason that a face linked to many different contexts — such as school, work and home — is easier to recognize than one that is associated with just one setting, such as a party, could be that there are multiple ways to access the memory. This idea, called the encoding variability hypothesis, was proposed by psychologists about 40 years ago2. Each different context or setting activates a distinct set of brain regions; the hypothesis suggests that it is these differing neural responses that improve the memory. But neuroimaging research led by Russell Poldrack, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Texas, Austin, now suggests that the opposite is true — items are better remembered when they activate the same neural patterns with each exposure. Poldrack's team measured brain activity in 24 people using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The subjects saw 120 unfamiliar faces, each one repeated four times at varying intervals during the fMRI scan. One hour later, they were shown the faces again, mixed with 120 new ones, and asked to rate the familiarity of each. © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 14445 - Posted: 09.11.2010

By Rachel Ehrenberg Cockroaches may be nasty bugs, but they could help fight even nastier ones. New research finds that the rudimentary brains of cockroaches and locusts teem with antimicrobial compounds that slay harmful E. coli and MRSA, the antibiotic-resistant staph bacterium. The work could lead to new compounds for fighting infectious diseases in humans. Extracts of ground-up brain and other nerve tissue from the American cockroach, Periplaneta americana, and desert locust, Schistocerca gregaria, killed more than 90 percent of a type of E. coli that causes meningitis, and also killed methicillin-resistant staph, microbiologist Simon Lee reported September 7 at the Society for General Microbiology meeting at the University of Nottingham in England. “Some of these insects live in the filthiest places ever known to man,” says Naveed Khan, coauthor of the new study. “These insects crawl on dead tissue, in sewage, in drainage areas. We thought, 'How do they cope with all the bacteria and parasites?’” Khan and his colleagues became intrigued by insect antimicrobials when they noticed that many soldiers were returning from the Middle East with unusual infections, yet locusts living in the same areas were unperturbed. So the researchers, all from the University of Nottingham, began investigating how the insects ward off disease. The team ground up various body parts from both cockroaches and locusts that had been reared in the lab and incubated them for two hours with different bacteria. Leaving these mixtures overnight on petri dishes revealed that the extracts from brains and from locust thorax nerve tissue killed nearly 100 percent of the bacteria. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Evolution
Link ID: 14444 - Posted: 09.11.2010

By Laura Sanders Researchers have created a growth curve for the brain, similar to the height and weight charts pediatricians use to monitor their patients’ development. Scientists came up with the new developmental milestones by aggregating the results of brain scans that reveal active connections throughout the organ. Published September 10 in Science, the study reveals how a typical brain’s connections evolve with age, information that could help doctors detect a variety of disorders — many of which are marked by disordered neural connections — earlier. “It’s really remarkable how much information can be gleaned with just a five-minute resting-state scan,” says neuroscientist Olaf Sporns of Indiana University in Bloomington. “The techniques they’ve developed here may be very powerful in making predictions for individual patients.” Researchers led by Nico Dosenbach and Bradley Schlaggar, both of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, constructed the brain maturity curve using data from 238 volunteers of ages 7 to 30. Each subject spent about five minutes quietly resting while an MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging, machine recorded patterns of blood movement in over a hundred different brain regions. Because no tasks are required of the patient, the quick scan can be used on infants or patients who are unable to respond to directions. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14443 - Posted: 09.11.2010

By Alyssa Danigelis The thoughts are there, but there is no way to express them. For "locked in" patients, many with Lou Gehrig's disease, the only way to communicate tends to be through blinking in code. But now, words can be read directly from patients' minds by attaching microelectrode grids to the surface of the brain and learning which signals mean which words, a development that will ultimately help such patients talk again. "They're perfectly aware. They just can't get signals out of their brain to control their facial expressions. "They're the patients we'd like to help first," said University of Utah's Bradley Greger, an assistant professor of bioengineering who, with neurosurgery professor Paul House, M.D., published the study in the October issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering. Some severely-epileptic patients have the seizure-stricken parts of the brain removed. This standard procedure requires cutting the skull open and putting large, button-sized electrodes on the brain to determine just what needs removal. The electrodes are then taken off the brain. The University of Utah team worked with an epileptic patient who let them crowd together much smaller devices, called micro-electrocorticography, onto his brain prior to surgery. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Robotics; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14442 - Posted: 09.11.2010

By Jennifer Viegas Great bowerbirds are known for their dramatic mating displays and elaborate constructions. Now researchers have determined males of this crafty species build staged scenes that make themselves look larger or smaller than they actually are. As a result, the scientists believe great bowerbirds are the first known non-human animals that create scenes with altered visual perspectives for viewing by other individuals. In this case, those other individuals are female great bowerbirds seeking mates. Architects, set designers and artists frequently employ the technique when creating certain paintings, gardens, amusement parks and other constructions that feature optical illusions. But we're relatively new at this. "Bowerbirds have been doing it longer than we have," lead author John Endler told Discovery News. "Good human perspective didn't get started until the 15th century." Endler, a professor of sensory ecology and evolution at Deakin University, and colleagues Lorna Endler and Natalie Doerr studied great bowerbird bowers in Queensland, Australia. Each male-made bower consists of an avenue -- two rows of tightly packed sticks with a stick floor -- that opens onto a court. The court functions as a stage where the male displays for females. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Vision
Link ID: 14441 - Posted: 09.11.2010

Jessica Hamzelou, reporter Can cheap vitamin supplements really defend you from Alzheimer's? In a paper published today, David Smith and colleagues at the University of Oxford have claimed that dosing up on B vitamins can protect an ageing brain from shrinking. The team instructed a group of 168 people over the age of 70 with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to take a 2 year course of either daily vitamin B supplements or placebo pills. The vitamins included folic acid, B6 and B12. Each person had an fMRI brain scan at the start and end of the study, in order to compare how their brains had atrophied or shrunk over the period. While the brains of the placebo group shrunk by an average of 1.08 per cent per year, those taking vitamin B supplements experienced an average atrophy of "only" 0.76 per cent per year. Smith's team only looked at brain scans, and didn't carry out cognitive tests on the study participants, but the authors reckon that B vitamins might slow the onset of Alzheimer's disease. The results certainly sound dramatic when you consider that vitamin B supplements reduced the rate of atrophy by 30 per cent. But in absolute terms this was only an average difference of 0.32 per cent. On top of this, the sample was small - only 85 people received the treatment. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 14440 - Posted: 09.11.2010

Lizzie Buchen After dropping a pair of male and female adult rats into a rectangular Plexiglas container, Frances Champagne can expect one of a few scenarios to ensue. The male will definitely try to mate with the female — but the female is less predictable. She might approach him, appraise his scents and arch her back to allow him to mount her. Should a second male enter the cage after she's mated with the first, she may be similarly hospitable. Some females play it coy, however, evading the male, requiring more courtship and, if mating does occur, avoiding another go. A number of factors can influence what the female does, but to Champagne, a behavioural scientist at Columbia University in New York, one is particularly beguiling: how often the female rat's mother licked and groomed her during her first week of life1. Doting mothers have prudish daughters, whereas the daughters of inattentive rats cavort around like mini Mae Wests. At the heart of these differences lies the sex hormone oestrogen, which drives female sexual behaviour. Champagne says that neglected rats might respond to it more strongly than those raised by attentive mums. The phenomenon is just one example of how experiences early in life can shape behaviour, and it may apply to humans. It is known, for example, that children who grow up in poverty are at greater risk as adults for problems such as drug addiction and depression than those with more comfortable upbringings, regardless of their socioeconomic situation later in life. But what is it about early experiences that has such a lasting effect? For Champagne and many of her colleagues, the answer has been apparent for nearly a decade. Life experiences alter DNA; not necessarily its sequence but rather its form and structure, including the chemicals that decorate it and how tightly it winds and packs around proteins inside the cell. These changes, often referred to as epigenetic modifications, make genes easier or more difficult for the cell's protein-making machinery to read (see 'The marking of a genome'). © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14439 - Posted: 09.09.2010

Can powerful noises affect whales? There's circumstantial evidence to suggest that they might. Now a team of researchers is attempting to find out for sure. The notion that at least some species of whales might be adversely affected by loud noises rests on two pillars. First, the cetacean world is one of sound, rather than vision; toothed whales use echolocation to find their way around and locate prey, and several species of baleen whales in particular emit deep vocalizations that can travel hundreds, possibly thousands, of miles across the ocean. Secondly, there have been more than a few occasions on which whales have beached or been found dead in close proximity to a powerful noise source. In particular, accusatory fingers have frequently been pointed at military use of powerful active sonar, which has been linked to numerous cases of strandings and death, particularly in various beaked whale species. While few if any of the individual cases can be linked unequivocally to a specific use of sonar, the accumulation of incidents is making a powerful case for the prosecution. Some have theorized that the sound panics the whales, forcing them to flee to the surface too quickly, causing them to suffer from rapid decompression. But there is still surprisingly little clarity on the precise mechanisms by which sound could impact a cetacean, or even how an external source would propagate inside a cetacean's head — a hole in the knowledge base that a joint US-Swedish team is attempting to fill. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Hearing; Animal Migration
Link ID: 14438 - Posted: 09.09.2010

By David Biello Can the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms" help those with terminal cancer cope with their fate? That was the question asked by researchers, who published the results of their investigation September 6 in Archives of General Psychiatry. After all, impending death wreaks havoc on the psyche of not only the terminally ill patient but also their family and friends. More broadly, our society spends so much time avoiding death that it can be well nigh impossible to cope with its reality. To try and address this, UCLA psychiatrist Charles Grob and his colleagues enlisted 12 cancer patients—11 of them women—between June 2004 and May 2008. All suffered from fatal cancers, ranging from breast cancer to multiple myeloma, as well as "acute stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, anxiety disorder due to cancer, or adjustment disorder with anxiety." All agreed to take a "moderate dose" (0.2 milligrams per kilogram of body weight) of psilocybin (and niacin on another occasion) to see if the psychedelic drug might offer some relief from their fear of death and disease. The unusual decision to have each patient serve as both a subjects and then as a control—rather than having two separate groups, one treated with psilocybin and one with niacin—was taken because the researchers believed "that to be the ethical course to take, given the life circumstances subjects were encountering," (i.e. imminent demise). In other words, Grob and his colleagues felt that all the terminally ill patients should be allowed to experience any potential benefit from the psilocybin treatment. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 14437 - Posted: 09.09.2010