By Steve Connor, Science Editor Human nerve cells carrying a critical mutation linked with motor neurone disease have been created in the laboratory for the first time from the skin cells of affected patients. The breakthrough could lead to new treatments for the debilitating disease. Scientists hope that mutated nerve cells, grown from a patient's skin cells after first being transformed into stem cells, will allow them to perform new types of laboratory experiments that will lead to a better understanding and possibly a cure for a disease that affects around 5,000 people in Britain and kills about five people every day. Research into motor neurone disease, a paralysis of the nervous system leading to the wasting of the muscles controlling breathing and swallowing, has been severely hampered by the lack of a good laboratory "model" of the disease. Growing human motor nerves – the cells that conduct messages from the brain and spinal cord to the muscles – carrying a mutation known as TDP-43 could open the way to finding the precise cause of the disorder as well as possible therapies that could prevent or slow damage to the nervous system, scientists said. "Being pragmatic, slowing down the disease is the first aim, stopping the disease the second, and the home run is to restore function," said Professor Siddharthan Chandran of the University of Edinburgh, the principal investigator on a new £800,000 research project. The team also includes Sir Ian Wilmut, the scientist who cloned Dolly the sheep. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 14101 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Elizabeth Cooney Maybe you’ve seen the public service announcements on TV. Actress Glenn Close, her sister Jessie Close, and her nephew Calen Pick stand in Grand Central Station wearing white T-shirts. In blue letters, Glenn’s shirt says “sister,’’ Jessie’s says “bipolar,’’ and Calen’s says “schizophrenia.’’ People with other diagnoses on their chests enter and leave the frame, accompanied by their family members. “Our single goal is to get people talking openly and without shame about mental illness,’’ Glenn Close said earlier this month, when she and her family members talked about their experiences and accepted awards from McLean Hospital in Belmont for their work reducing the stigma that surrounds psychiatric disorders. “Say it loud, say it again and again until it has lost its power over us. Make the unspeakable speakable.’’ The TV ads, from a campaign called BringChange2Mind, are part of a new emphasis in the mental health community that sees families as crucial to the success of a patient’s treatment, and also recognizes that mental illness takes a toll on parents and siblings. It seeks to educate family members to correct any misperceptions they may have, and provide them support. “It’s not just an individual who lives with and suffers illness but a family that lives with and suffers illness, whether that illness is breast cancer or diabetes or mental illness,’’ said Joanne Nicholson, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who specializes in family mental health. “Families provide an incredible opportunity to promote recovery and well-being and functioning. Families who don’t understand about mental illness, or don’t talk about mental illness, can undermine a person’s treatment or access to treatment.’’ © 2010 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 14100 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rachael Rettner Anorexia and bulimia are probably the most familiar types of eating disorders, but they are not the most common. Some 50 to 60 percent of patients don't quite make the cut to be diagnosed with full-blown anorexia or bulimia, and are instead classified as having an eating disorder "not otherwise specified" (EDNOS). But this group is so vast, and the cases within it so diverse, that many in the field believe it creates more problems than it does solutions in terms of treating patients and understanding the syndromes. Patients lumped into this unspecified group can also have misperceptions about their condition, thinking it is not as serious as anorexia or bulimia. But in fact, recent studies have found that there really isn't a medical difference between the three recognized types of eating disorders. Now, physicians and psychiatrists are taking action to remedy the situation. They are proposing revisions to the psychiatric "bible," the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, for the newest version (DSM-5) to be published in 2013. The suggested changes include relaxing the strict criteria for anorexia and bulimia somewhat, and giving other conditions, such as binge eating, their own official labels. These more specific labels could be a boon to treatment and the mental health of the patient, who will finally know what he or she "has." In addition, experience has shown that when a disorder gets a name, more research and attention is paid to it. Even so, some experts aren't sold, saying these DSM changes won't make any real difference as far as treatment goes. © 2010 msnbc.com

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 14099 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jerome Kagan Alice, a young scientist working in a biological laboratory, likes her work, and her supervisor values her conscientiousness and perfectionism. But when her colleagues take a coffee or lunch break she usually sits quietly on the periphery of the group, fingering her hair and blinking rapidly if someone asks her a question. Alice dreads the occasions during the year when it is her turn to tell the staff about the experiments she is working on and what she has learned. She usually doesn't sleep well on the nights before these performances, and her mouth becomes dry and her palms sweaty when she stands up to give her report. During the period between the two World Wars, when Sigmund Freud's ideas were dominant, most psychiatrists and psychologists would have attributed Alice's behaviour and moods to her childhood experiences. Perhaps Alice's mother had been hypercritical and she felt guilty over her anger towards the mother who had punished her occasional disobedience severely. I had accepted such experiential accounts as an obvious truth when I was a graduate student at Yale University from 1950 to 1954. But I began to question my inflexible commitment to the sole influence of early experience in 1962, when Howard Moss and I were reflecting on the evidence we had gathered on a group of normal adults, born in the 1930s, who were members of a longitudinal study conducted at the Fels Research Institute in Ohio. About 15 per cent of these adults, who had been timid, fearful, and shy during their first three years, resembled Alice: they told me that they were shy, often felt unsure, avoided risky activities, and were reluctant to take on difficult challenges. When Howard and I wrote the book Birth to Maturity summarising the project, we suggested that these children inherited a constitutional disposition. This was our way of saying that their temperament was relevant – where temperament refers to a set of biological properties affecting brain chemistry that are usually, but not always, due to the presence of specific genes. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Stress; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14098 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rachel Ehrenberg As any dating woman knows, men can be dogs — but a new study suggests antelopes might be a better fit. Male topi antelopes will resort to deception to keep a potential mate around, snorting as if there’s a lion nearby just when it seems she might wander off. The discovery is the first report of outright mate deception in an animal other than Homo sapiens, a research team reports in the July American Naturalist. Some mother birds will feign a broken wing to lure a predator away from their nest, and there are reports in animals such as monkeys and squirrels of males deceiving other males in the heat of competition. But the male antelope behavior “is the clearest example of tactical deception between mates in animals other than humans,” comments Cornell University’s H. Kern Reeve, an expert in the evolution of cooperation and conflict in animal societies. “This is quite interesting.” Study leader Jakob Bro-Jørgensen discovered the devious behavior while studying topi antelopes on the savannas of the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, where during the spring mating season males stake out territories rich in grass. The female antelopes are sexually receptive for one day only, and they spend that day visiting several males, munching grass and mating. Bro-Jørgensen noticed that when a female would start to wander away from a male’s territory, the male would look in the direction she was headed, prick his ears and snort loudly — the same snort the animals use when they’ve noticed a lion, leopard or other approaching predator. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14097 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jennifer Viegas Your family tree has a new and colorful member, Homo gautengensis, a toothy, plant-chomping, literal tree swinger that was just named the world's earliest recognized species of human. The new human, described in a paper accepted for publication in HOMO-Journal of Comparative Human Biology, emerged over 2 million years ago and died out approximately 600,000 years ago. The authors believe it arose earlier than Homo habilis, aka "Handy Man." Darren Curnoe, who led the project, told Discovery News that Homo gautengensis was "small-brained" and "large-toothed." Curnoe, an anthropologist at the University of New South Wales School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, said that it was "probably an ecological specialist, consuming more vegetable matter than Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, and probably even Homo habilis. It seems to have produced and used stone tools and may even have made fire," since there is evidence for burnt animal bones associated with this human's remains. Identification of the new human species was based on partial skulls, several jaws, teeth and other bones found at various times at South Africa's Sterkfontein Caves, near Johannesburg. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14096 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Fish are scared of their own reflection — a new finding that suggests their brains are more sophisticated than originally thought, say biologists. Stanford University researchers compared the brain activity of male African cichlid fish during and after encounters with either a mirror or other another male cichlid. The fish are territorial and usually react to another male by fighting with a series of alternating movements triggered by the other fish's tactics. While scientists have long known that the fish will fight with their own reflection, up till now they didn't know what was going on in their brains. Post-doctoral researcher Julie Desjardins suspects the fish fighting their own reflections got scared because their enemy in the mirror didn't act as they would expect. "In normal fights, they bite at each other, one after the other, and will do all kinds of movements and posturing, but it is always slightly off or even alternating in timing," Desjardins said in a release. "But when you are fighting with a mirror, your opponent is perfectly in time. So the subject fish really is not seeing any sort of reciprocal response from their opponent." She and biology professor Russell Fernald described in last week's Biology Letters how they arranged 20-minute sparring sessions for their fish and the brain analysis that followed. © CBC 2010

Keyword: Aggression; Intelligence
Link ID: 14095 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katherine Harmon NEW YORK—One-size-fits-all treatments are particularly rare in the mental health world, where each patient's ailments can seem unique. But a team of researchers seems to have found a therapeutic model to treat anxiety disorders as wide-ranging as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), social phobia and panic disorder. Lead study author Dr. Peter Roy-Byrne, of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine, presented the findings May 18 at a press briefing in New York convened by JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association. When taken together, anxiety disorders affect about 18 percent of the population (which is more than twice the rate of depression). Some three fourths of people with mental disorders are managed in primary care (which Roy-Byrne called "the de facto mental health system"), but getting those patients—especially those with anxiety disorders—to see mental health specialists is much harder than getting them to see a radiologist, Roy-Byrne noted. He and his team devised a flexible, collaborative care system that lightened loads for both doctors and psychiatrists (or psychologists) while making it easier for patients to get the help they needed. By enlisting the skills of nurses or masters-level clinicians with some training in anxiety management and an online patient progress tracking system, the treatment plan could adapt to patients without sending them to an expensive psychiatrist or psychologist, which has been shown to be especially difficult in anxiety patients (and could also allow specialists more time to address patients who most need their care). And a controlled trial, published May 19 in JAMA, showed promising results. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Stress; Emotions
Link ID: 14094 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Richard Maddock "My heart starts to race, I can't breathe, I get all sweaty, and I feel very scared - like I am about to die." This is how one of my patients recently described her panic attacks. Her diagnosis is panic disorder. The cause of this condition is still not understood, but we have long known that the vulnerability to panic disorder is strongly genetic. Now, a recent study from the laboratory of John Wemmie at the University of Iowa may have revealed an important new clue to the underlying cause of recurring panic attacks: It may, in effect, be a problem of pH -- of acidity at key junctures in the brain. The amygdala, an almond-shaped structure deep in the brain, has a critical role in the circuits that control the experience of fear, both instinctive fear (like being afraid of snakes or large carnivores) and fear that is learned from life experiences. The Iowa study shows that a very basic metabolic factor, pH -- acidity -- also has an essential role in fear. In general, the pH of our brain is carefully regulated. A large increase or decrease in brain acidity can seriously disrupt brain functioning. This new study indicates that pH can sometimes rise and fall in synapses, the points of communication between individual neurons in the brain. Some synapses include specialized proteins that "sense" acidity. These proteins (called "'acid-sensing ion channels", or ASICs) stimulate neurons when increased acid is detected. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 14093 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Susan Gaidos The glow of pregnancy is no shield against depression. Millions of expectant mothers rely on antidepressant medication for help. But treating mom with drugs at this time in her life may have long-term consequences for baby. Around 10 percent of women suffer bouts of despair during the hormonal chaos of pregnancy or in the months after delivery. Some women are already being treated with antidepressants such as Prozac and Zoloft, while others get new prescriptions. For many adults these drugs, known collectively as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs, work as advertised: lifting mood by temporarily boosting the availability of the brain chemical serotonin. But SSRIs may have a different, more long-lasting effect on a developing baby’s brain. Over the past few years, a handful of studies have found that mice and rats exposed to antidepressants shortly before birth or just afterward grow up anxious and depressed. Other animal studies link early exposure to SSRIs to improved decision-making and spatial-learning abilities. Though many of the documented reactions fall within the normal range of behavior, the drugs can influence how an animal experiences and relates to its surroundings, says Judith Homberg of Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. No one knows for sure if people experience the same risks or benefits over the long haul, but a new study shows that children exposed to antidepressants in the womb are more likely to appear sad or withdrawn at age 3 than those whose moms didn’t take the drugs. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14092 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower There’s nothing fair about getting bullied at school. To add insult to injury, a new study finds that bullied kids who happen to have inherited one form of a stress-related gene develop the most emotional problems. Symptoms of anxiety, depression and social withdrawal appeared most often in regularly bullied kids who possessed two copies of a short version of the 5-HTT gene, says a team led by psychologist Karen Sugden of Duke University in Durham, N.C. One-third of bullied children who had two shorter copies of the gene displayed emotional problems severe enough to merit mental health treatment, the researchers say. That figure fell to 29 percent for regularly bullied kids carrying one short copy of the gene and 15 percent for those with two long copies. By tracking pairs of twins, Sugden and her colleagues ruled out the possibility that pre-existing emotional problems led genetically vulnerable children to be victimized by bullies. In cases where each twin carried two short copies of the 5-HTT gene but only one got repeatedly bullied, emotional difficulties were observed only in the bullied twin, the researchers report in a paper scheduled to appear in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. The experiment can’t directly pin the kids’ emotional problems on the gene-bullying combo, “but it is about as close as it is possible to get, given that it’s not ethical to bully a child deliberately for research purposes,” says Duke psychologist and study coauthor Terrie Moffitt. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14091 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Jeff Wise Copyright © 2009 by the author In the throes of intense fear, we suddenly find ourselves operating in a different and unexpected way. The psychological tools that we normally use to navigate the world—reasoning and planning before we act—get progressively shut down. In the grip of the brain’s subconscious fear centers, we behave in ways that to our rational mind seem nonsensical or worse. We might respond automatically, with preprogrammed motor routines, or simply melt down. We lose control. In this unfamiliar realm, it can seem like we’re in the grip of utter chaos. But although the preconscious fear centers of the brain are not capable of deliberation and reason, they do have their own logic, a simplified suite of responses keyed to the nature of the threat at hand. There is a structure to panic. When the danger is far away, or at least not immediately imminent, the instinct is to freeze. When danger is approaching, the impulse is to run away. When escape is impossible, the response is to fight back. And when struggling is futile, the animal will become immobilized in the grip of fright. Although it doesn’t slide quite as smoothly off the tongue, a more accurate description than “fight or flight” would be “fight, freeze, flight, or fright”—or, for short, “the four fs.” On a winter morning a few years back, a young woman named Sue Yellowtail went through them all in about 10 minutes.

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 14090 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nathan Seppa An intensive course of behavioral therapy can limit the verbal and physical tics that plague some children with Tourette disorder, a new study finds. This form of therapy, in which a child learns simple ways to derail tics, led to improvement in more than half of children treated, scientists report in the May 19 Journal of the American Medical Association. “I think this is groundbreaking,” says clinical psychologist Martin Franklin of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who didn’t participate in the trial. “Clinically, we now have pretty powerful evidence of the efficacy of a behavioral treatment in this disorder.” Tourette disorder is characterized by short, rapid physical or vocal tics that can take the form of jerking motions, blinking, grimacing, blurting out words or throat clearing. These tics are brought on by urges. And much as a cigarette satisfies a smoker’s need for nicotine, the tics seem to resolve these urges, but at a cost. People with Tourette disorder, which starts in childhood and affects about six in 1,000, can face isolation and social stigmatization. “The urge-tic-relief cycle becomes automatic over time” in Tourette disorder, says study coauthor John Piacentini, a clinical psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We want to slow it down and make it less automatic.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Tourettes
Link ID: 14089 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katherine Harmon Strange tales of lactating men or male pregnancy pains crop up in the news from time to time, despite the fact that men cannot get pregnant. Does that mean men are also susceptible to bouts with prenatal and postpartum depression? Previous research has found rates of depression in new dads that range from 1 percent to 25 percent, but a new meta-analysis, published May 19 in JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association, assessed 43 studies of a total of more than 28,000 fathers and found that an average of 10.4 percent suffered from depression sometime between the first trimester of their partner's pregnancy and the child's first birthday. Rates of paternal depression were highest three to six months after birth (25.6 percent) and in the U.S. (14.1 percent versus the international rate of 8.2 percent). All of these numbers are considerably higher than the annual rate for adult male depression, which is 4.8 percent (but lower than the rate for maternal prenatal and postpartum depression, which is estimated to be 23.8 percent). "This suggests that paternal prenatal and postpartum depression represents a significant public health concern," concluded the authors of the new paper. Many moms get what is known as the baby blues, a passing sadness in the first few days after the birth of their child. But postpartum depression in both mothers and fathers is a condition that lasts longer, and "it may be very problematic for families and child outcomes," says James Paulson of the Department of Pediatrics at Eastern Virginia Medical School, the lead author of the meta-analysis. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 14088 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alison Abbott. Anne Churchland had little time for rats. In the course of 13 years' work on decision-making in monkeys, she had never questioned that primate studies were the only way to understand the neurobiology of human cognition. Her work in the lab of Michael Shadlen at the University of Washington, Seattle, had monkeys watch moving dots flitting about on a screen until the animals indicated, with a flick of their eyes, the direction in which most of the dots were going. She recorded from single brain neurons as the monkeys slowly made sense of this 'fuzzy' information — the sort of sophisticated experiment that she did not think was possible in rodents. "I didn't think rats would have the right sorts of brains to contemplate accumulating evidence," says Churchland. And with poor eyesight, and heads that bob around, "I didn't imagine they would be able to convey to us any decision they might be silently making". All that changed a year ago, when Churchland visited Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Working with scientists there, she saw that rats could also learn to gather 'fuzzy' sensory information — in this case to decide whether the frequency of a rapid sequence of tones was mostly high or low. And they could convey their decision with a poke of the nose. Churchland was not alone in her earlier scepticism. Neurophysiological research into higher cognitive functions such as decision-making, attention, working memory — even risk-taking — have traditionally been carried out on non-human primates. That seemed an obvious choice, given the closeness of their brain anatomy to that of humans, the sophistication and breadth of their behaviour and their ability to reliably report to experimenters much of what is going on in their minds through eye, hand or other movements. But primate work comes with major downsides: the animals are so expensive, and their use so highly regulated, that a research paper typically relies on data from just a couple of precious animals, which have been used for multiple experiments over their lifetime. This raises concerns that observations could be unique to those animals, rather than a general property of the primate brain. © 2010 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Attention; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 14087 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Diane Mapes Being a “supertaster” may sound like a foodie’s dream come true, but in reality, it’s no picnic. Coffee and alcohol are unpalatable – along with tomatoes, Parmesan cheese, strawberries, condiments and most sweets. “I can’t stand cake,” says Michelle Triplett, a 31-year-old stay-at-home mom and supertaster from Olympia, Wash., who spoke, coincidentally, on her birthday. “It’s too sweet for me. And when I drink beer, I gag. It’s like drinking urine.” Supertasters detect components – like salt or bitterness -- in food that others can’t, says Dr. Alan Hirsch, founder and neurological director of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago. “[Supertasters] have densities of taste buds that are 10 to 100 times greater than the normal population,” he says. “As a result, supertasters are much more sensitive to spicy foods and they can taste … very mild flavors.” Triplett, whose favorite meals are turkey sandwiches and macaroni and cheese, says the blander the better, since most everything else is, as They Might Be Giants put it in their song “John Lee Supertaster,” simply “too much.” The condition is genetic, tends to affect women more than men and affects 25 percent of the U.S. population; non-tasters (people with a reduced ability to taste) make up another 25 percent with the rest of the population described as medium or normal tasters. © 2010 Microsoft

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 14086 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katherine Harmon Despite weighty concerns, such as aging, planning for retirement or caring for older friends and family, people in the U.S. seem to get happier with age. A new study reports that these changes are consistent regardless of whether individuals were employed, had young children at home or lived with a partner. General wellbeing (characterized by how people currently felt about their life) fell sharply through the age of 25 and tapered more gradually overall until the ages of 50 to 53. And by the early 70s, that wellbeing was back up to late-teen levels. "As people age, they are less troubled by stress and anger," the researchers noted in their study, which was led by Arthur Stone, of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Stony Brook University and published online May 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "And although worry persists, without increasing, until middle age, " they continued, "it too fades after the age of 50." The data come from a 2008 phone survey performed by the Gallup Organization of 340,847 randomly selected adults aged 18 to 85. The respondents represented a fairly average slice of the U.S. population, with about 29 percent holding a college degree and a median monthly average household income between $3,000 and $3,999. During the call, participants were asked to rate how they currently felt their life stood on a scale of 0 ("the worst possible life for you") to 10 ("the best possible life for you"). They were then asked if they had felt different affective states (happiness, enjoyment, stress, sadness, anger and worry) "a lot of the day yesterday." Keeping questions to relatively current periods in time by asking about yesterday as opposed to the previous week, month or year helped the researchers avoid some of the retrospective bias that might have played a role in similar past studies. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Emotions; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14085 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Sandrine Ceurstemont A simple animation has been found to offer our brains many possible interpretations. Jan Kremláček from Charles University in Hradec Králové, Czech Republic, discovered six different ways of perceiving a moving sine graph drawn with dots. The curves often seem to undulate like two ribbons, but the animation can also seem to have depth, with one curve seeming to be further back than the other. The dotted arcs can also look like a spindle shape that revolves and snakes along. If you keep staring, the curves can seem to revolve vertically around a static rod, first in one direction, then the other. The animation can also look like a series of bouncing dots, but this is very hard to perceive without overlaying vertical bars on top of it. "Our brain is able to reconstruct different learned interpretations, but only one can be perceived at a time," says Kremláček. He came across the illusion by chance while preparing graphs for a lecture in signal processing. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 14084 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Carl Zimmer Your nose is a paradox. In some ways the human sense of smell is astonishingly precise. For example, natural gas companies add a smelly molecule called n-butyl mercaptan to natural gas, which is odorless by itself, so that people can sniff gas leaks. All it takes is one n-butyl mercaptan molecule for every 10 billion molecules of methane to do the trick. To put this precision in perspective, imagine you are standing in front of two Olympic-size swimming pools. One of them contains a grand total of three drops of n-butyl mercaptan, and the other has none. Your nose could tell the difference. But don’t get too smug, because in other ways your sense of smell is practically useless. To judge for yourself, find someone to help you run a simple experiment. Close your eyes while your partner raids your refrigerator and then holds different foods under your nose. Try to name each scent. If you’re like most people, you’ll bomb. In a number of studies, scientists have found that people tested on items in their own kitchens and garages give the wrong answer at least half the time. And as bad as we normally are at identifying smells, we can easily be fooled into doing worse. If orange food coloring is added to cherry-flavored soda, for example, people are more likely to say that it smells like oranges. Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and his colleagues have been puzzling over this paradox for the past several years. What has been missing in the science of smell, they argue, is a meaningful way to measure it—an olfactory yardstick. Now they have built one.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 14083 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nathan Seppa Elderly people who care for a spouse who has dementia are at increased risk of developing dementia themselves, a study finds. The stress of attending to a mentally incapacitated spouse may somehow contribute to the added risk, scientists report in the May Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. Previous studies have shown that chronic stress leads to increased levels of the hormone cortisol in the body, which can suppress immunity, says study coauthor Peter Rabins, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore who teamed with researchers at Utah State University in Logan to do this study. “It’s long been thought that this might have adverse outcomes psychologically and physiologically.” Taking care of a spouse with dementia takes a toll in other ways as well, Rabins says. “Caregivers often complain that they lose their friends,” he says, because they don’t have time to socialize. But the biological mechanisms that might link these challenges to heightened dementia risk remain unclear. In the new study, the researchers assessed the mental status of 1,221 Utah couples who had agreed to be part of a community-wide health study that started in 1995. The men averaged age 76 and the women 73 at that point, and 95 percent had been married for more than 20 years. Researchers tracked these couples’ mental status with up to four exams over the next decade with a median follow-up of 3.3 years. No participants in this analysis had dementia at the start. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Alzheimers; Stress
Link ID: 14082 - Posted: 06.24.2010