By Bruce Bower As St. Patrick’s Day approaches, it may pay to keep in mind that there is a kernel of truth to the stereotype that large men are especially prone to being DWI — dangerous while intoxicated. When they were drunk, bigger men became especially aggressive when given the opportunity to administer electric shocks to a fictitious opponent in a laboratory contest, say psychologist Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky in Lexington and his colleagues. Yet larger men showed no aggression increases after downing a nonalcoholic placebo drink. Intoxicated women showed little taste for shocking another person in the same experimental contest regardless of their weight, DeWall’s team reports in a paper published online February 25 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Big men under the influence don’t always behave badly, DeWall emphasizes. “There will inevitably be scrawny, intoxicated brawlers and big, nice boozed-up imbibers,” he says. But the new findings suggest that, in general, the bigger the guy, the greater the chances of alcohol-related mayhem. His findings fit with a theory proposed by psychologist Aaron Sell of the University of California, Santa Barbara, that physically imposing individuals — usually men — can get their way in interpersonal disputes through force, making them prone to anger and to feeling entitled to special treatment. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Aggression
Link ID: 13846 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A technique that "washes out" the brains of severely ill premature babies may aid survival, a study suggests. Bleeding in the brain is one of the most feared complications for the most premature babies as it can lead to brain damage or death. The Bristol University study of 77 babies found the technique - involving draining the brain while introducing new fluid - could reduce the risk. It is thought the technique could benefit about 100 babies a year. The technique is carried out over a couple of days and requires close monitoring to ensure the pressure in the baby's brain does not rise too high, researchers say. Experts have described the findings as encouraging. It would be used only on the most premature babies with large haemorrhages, which cause the brain and head to expand excessively - a condition called hydrocephalus. Standard treatment currently involves repeatedly inserting needles into the head or spine to remove the build up of fluid over a number of months before a shunt is inserted to drain fluid into the abdomen. But the study, published in the Pediatrics journal, found the new treatment called Drift was more effective. Of the 39 babies to receive the treatment, by the age of two 54% had died or were severely disabled, compared with 71% who were given the standard treatment. Paediatric neurosurgeon Ian Pople, one of the lead researchers, said he hoped the technique would soon be used in the NHS. "This is the first time that any treatment anywhere in the world has been shown to benefit these very vulnerable babies." One of the first babies to be given the treatment before the study took place was nine-year-old Isaac Walker-Cox, from South Gloucestershire. He was given a 1% chance of survival when he was born 13 weeks early. (C)BBC

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13845 - Posted: 03.08.2010

By Clare Kingston Cooking is something we all take for granted but a new theory suggests that if we had not learned to cook food, not only would we still look like chimps but, like them, we would also be compelled to spend most of the day chewing. Without cooking, an average person would have to eat around five kilos of raw food to get enough calories to survive. The daily mountain of fruit and vegetables would mean a six-hour chewing marathon. It is already accepted that the introduction of meat into our ancestors' diet caused their brains to grow and their intelligence to increase. Meat - a more concentrated form of energy - not only meant bigger brains for our ancestors, but also an end to the need to devote nearly all their time to foraging to maintain energy levels. As a consequence, more time was available for social structure to develop. Harvard Professor Richard Wrangham believes there is more to it than simply discovering meat. He thinks that it is not so much a change in the ingredients of our diet, but the way in which we prepare them that has caused the radical evolution of our species. "I think cooking is arguably the biggest increase in the quality of the diet in the whole of the history of life," he says. "Our ancestors most probably dropped food in fire accidently. They would have found it was delicious and that set us off on a whole new direction." To understand how and when our bodies changed, we need to take a closer look at what our ancestors ate by studying the fossil records. Our earliest ancestor was the ape-like Australopithecus. Australopithecus had a large belly containing a big large-intestine, essential to digest the robust plant matter, and had large, flat teeth which it used for grinding and crushing tough vegetation. (C)BBC

Keyword: Evolution; Obesity
Link ID: 13844 - Posted: 03.06.2010

By Mary Carmichael Jack Shafer, the media columnist at Slate, is famous for pointing out "bogus trend stories," especially those involving drug use. Of them, he once said, "Whenever I fall into a funk over the press corps' abysmal coverage of illicit drugs, I console myself with the knowledge that, as awful as the coverage is, it's always been that way." He's even blasted drug coverage in sister publications The Washington Postand What would he make of all the recent stories about K2, or "fake marijuana," which is essentially a legal, smokable form of psychoactive potpourri? Breathless news reports about the substance have been popping up all over in the last few days. If you live in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Kansas, or Wisconsin, you've probably seen one. Maybe you even caught a Missouri detective's panicked prediction that K2 is "going to end up killing somebody." As far as we know, though, it hasn't. Why is it suddenly getting all this attention? There's a legitimate news hook for some of these stories: Kansas became the first state to ban K2 last week, and there are similar bills pending in Nebraska and North Dakota. But why the states are banning the stuff now is unclear. K2 isn't new. It's been around since the mid-'90s, when John Huffman, a Clemson University chemist, synthesized a substance he called JWH-018. The chemical was structurally similar to THC, the active ingredient in pot, and apparently quite a bit more potent. (There's a good explanation of the science here.) Like its illicit cousin, JWH-018 made users mellow and euphoric. Pot enthusiasts picked up on Huffman's work, mixed or bought batches of JWH-018 themselves, and started spraying it onto varying mixes of dried herbs, flowers, and tobacco leaves. The result was K2—a.k.a. "Spice," "Genie," or "Zohai"—which quickly caught on in head shops and on the Internet as a way to get high without breaking the law. Although the federal Drug Enforcement Agency has listed K2 as a "drug or chemical of concern," it isn't officially "scheduled," and that makes it legal (unless you're buying it in Kansas). © 2010 Newsweek, Inc.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13843 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By HENRY FOUNTAIN Lizards are not the most loquacious of animals. Aside from the geckos, which make chirping noises to communicate among themselves, they don’t vocalize. Yet most lizards have well-developed ears. So that raises the obvious question: if they don’t use sounds to communicate, what do they use the ears for? Ryo Ito and Akira Mori of Kyoto University in Japan supply one answer: to eavesdrop on other animals. Writing in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B, they describe how the Madagascan spiny-tailed iguana overhears the alarm calls of nearby birds to protect itself from predators. The researchers studied iguanas in a dry deciduous forest in northwestern Madagascar, an area teeming with vertebrate species, including the Madagascar paradise flycatcher. The iguana and the flycatcher live in proximity but have no real ecological interaction — one doesn’t feast on the other, and they don’t share parasites or compete for food. They are, however, hunted by the same predators, raptors like hawks and buzzards. Unlike the iguanas, the flycatchers are very vocal, particularly when a predator is nearby. They exhibit “mobbing” behavior, approaching and harassing the enemy bird and shifting from their normal songs to alarm calls that alert other birds of the danger. In a series of experiments, the researchers tested whether iguanas in the field responded to recorded flycatcher alarm calls. They found that an iguana becomes more vigilant — most often moving its head while keeping the rest of the body still. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 13842 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Christof Koch Each new generation of astronomers discovers that the universe is much bigger than their predecessors imagined. The same is also true of brain complexity. Every era’s most advanced technologies, when applied to the study of the brain, keep uncovering more layers of nested complexity, like a set of never ending Russian dolls. We now know that there are up to 1,000 different subtypes of nerve cells and supporting actors—the glia and astrocytes—within the nervous system. Each cell type is defined by its chemical constituents, neuronal morphology, synaptic architecture and input-output processing. Different cell types are wired up in specific ways. For example, a deep layer 5 pyramidal neuron might snake its gossamer-thin output wire, the axon, to a subcortical target area while also extending a connection to an inhibitory local neuron. Understanding how the brain’s corticothalamic complex creates any one conscious sensation necessitates delineating these underlying circuits for the 100 billion cells in the brain. Bulk tissue technologies such as functional brain imaging or electroencephalography identify specific brain regions related to vision, pain or memory. Yet they are unable to resolve details at the all-important circuit level. Brain imaging tracks the power consumption of a million neurons, irrespective of whether they are excitatory or inhibitory, project locally or globally, and so on. For progress on consciousness, something drastically more refined is needed. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 13841 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway If you want to live to a grand old age, then smile – and make sure you mean it. Pro baseball players in the 1950s who genuinely beamed in their official photographs tended to outlive more sullen-looking sportsmen and those who put on fake smiles. Players from the US major league with honest grins lived an average of seven years longer than players who didn't smile for the camera and five years longer than players who smiled unconvincingly, conclude Ernest Abel and Michael Kruger at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. It's known that happy people tend to be healthy too. Kruger and Abel wondered whether this relationship would be reflected in the smiles and longevity of baseball players. Genuine smiles are known as Duchenne smiles after the 19th-century neurologist who defined them in detail. They engage muscles both near the corners of the mouth and around the eyes – the zygomatic major and the orbicularis oculi respectively. Fake, "non-Duchenne" smiles exercise only mouth muscles. Smile survival With training, these muscles are easy to recognise in photographs. So Abel and four colleagues who were not aware of what the study was investigating, but were trained to analyse smiles, looked at vintage photographs of 230 major leaguers who played in the 1952 season. The researchers classified them as non-smilers, Duchenne smilers or non-Duchenne smilers. Then they looked up the lifespans of the 184 players who had already died. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 13840 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Greg Miller Diagnoses of mental disorders in children and adolescents rose dramatically during the past 2 decades. Juvenile cases of bipolar disorder, once thought to strike only in adulthood, jumped 40-fold between 1993 and 2004 in the United States, according to one widely cited study. Autism estimates leapt from 1 in 1500 to as high as 1 in 90 over a similar time period. Such figures have fueled an intense debate about whether the surge is real or reflects a trend toward overzealous diagnoses and a tendency to pathologize normal youthful behavior. Against this backdrop, the clinicians and researchers working on revisions to the psychiatrists' bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), have been wrestling with how to improve the diagnosis of mental disorders in these age groups. It's not clear how their suggestions, released last month (Science, 12 February, p. 770), would affect the prevalence of mental disorders if adopted, but they are already altering the discussion. The most substantial proposals include a reclassification of autism spectrum disorders, a new diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) tailored to preschool children, and a brand-new diagnosis called temper dys-regulation disorder with dysphoria (TDD) that members of the DSM work group hope will stem what they see as a false epidemic of juvenile bipolar disorder. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Autism; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 13839 - Posted: 06.24.2010

National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists investigating how prion diseases destroy the brain have observed a new form of the disease in mice that does not cause the sponge-like brain deterioration typically seen in prion diseases. Instead, it resembles a form of human Alzheimer's disease, cerebral amyloid angiopathy, that damages brain arteries. The study results, reported by NIH scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), are similar to findings from two newly reported human cases of the prion disease Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker syndrome (GSS). This finding represents a new mechanism of prion disease brain damage, according to study author Bruce Chesebro, M.D., chief of the Laboratory of Persistent Viral Diseases at NIAID’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories. Prion diseases, also known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, primarily damage the brain. Prion diseases include mad cow disease or bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle; scrapie in sheep; sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), variant CJD and GSS in humans; and chronic wasting disease in deer, elk and moose. The role of a specific cell anchor for prion protein is at the crux of the NIAID study. Normal prion protein uses a specific molecule, glycophosphoinositol (GPI), to fasten to host cells in the brain and other organs. In their study, the NIAID scientists genetically removed the GPI anchor from study mice, preventing the prion protein from fastening to cells and thereby enabling it to diffuse freely in the fluid outside the cells.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 13838 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jennifer Viegas Male mice drive females wild with ultrasonic love songs, suggests a new study. Since song quality varies, the mice world has its Justin Timberlake-like stars that impress females with their talents more than other willing, but not so able, males do. While no one is yet certain what makes a "hit love song" in the mice world, lead author Kerstin Musolf told Discovery News that "it could be a question of different syllable types or endurance in singing or a combination of both -- all together it could help the female to choose the best mate." Musolf is a researcher in the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Ethology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She and her team believe their study, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Animal Behavior, is the first to examine the ultrasonic vocalizations of wild-derived house mice. These calls have frequencies above those of sounds audible to humans and many other animals. Using special equipment, the researchers recorded and observed offspring of house mice caught at three locations in Ganserndorf, Austria. When males got a whiff of scent from available, non-related, adult females, they sang their hearts out at varying degrees. Females were more attracted to songs crooned by unfamiliar males that weren't related to them. Women sometimes flirt by pushing back their hair. Female mice do something similar by cleaning themselves vigorously all over. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hearing
Link ID: 13837 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A new hand-held device that delivers a magnetic pulse to the back of the head could become an alternative to drug treatment for people with migraines. A trial found that 40% of patients were pain free two hours after using the device. Research showed there were no serious side-effects and patients found the device easy to use at home. However, doctors say more research is needed to work out the timing of the doses. Experts from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York carried out the trial to assess the safety and effectiveness of the device. Previous trials have only involved large, expensive devices which have to be used in a clinic. The hand-held device emits a single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (sTMS), thought to disrupt the electrical events in the brain which cause the preliminary symptoms of migraines with aura. Auras are sensory or visual disturbances that occur before a migraine headache sets in. These include visual symptoms such as spots of light and zigzag lines. Other symptoms include tingling, numbness and difficulties with speaking. Two hundred patients were asked to use the device to treat migraines with aura over three months. Half of those patients were given placebo treatment. The findings, to be published in The Lancet Neurology, showed that the real magnetic pulse from the device was significantly more effective than placebo treatment. More patients were pain free two, 24 and 48 hours afterwards. (C)BBC

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 13836 - Posted: 03.04.2010

Women need to be treated for stroke as soon as possible.Women need to be treated for stroke as soon as possible. (CBC) Women who don't get a clot-busting drug after a stroke might fare worse than men who don't receive the drug, a University of Calgary study suggests. Both sexes fared equally well when given the drug known as tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA, which breaks up the blood clots that cause a stroke. "It's exactly analogous to you [having] a blocked kitchen sink," study author Dr. Michael Hill said in an interview. "You put some Drano in there, it churns up the clot and your sink works again." The researchers' findings were reported in this week's issue of the journal Neurology. The study looked at data on 2,113 stroke sufferers collected by the Canadian Stroke Network. Of these, 232 were treated with tPA within three hours of their stroke and 44 per cent of them were women. The three hours is the maximum window recommended under the guidelines for administering tPA. "Women need to be treated for stroke as soon as possible," Hill said in news release. "We found that women who weren't treated had a worse quality of life after stroke than men. However, the good news is that women who were treated responded just as well as men to the treatment." © CBC 2010

Keyword: Stroke; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 13835 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Jessica Hamzelou PAIN intensity, the most personal of experiences, can now be measured from the outside, say researchers who scanned the brains of young men who were fresh out of the operating theatre. Their claim reopens the debate over whether pain can be measured objectively. It might even be possible to gauge the pain felt by newborn babies, fetuses, "locked-in" patients, who can't communicate with the outside world, and animals. "The definition of pain is that it is subjective, and until now an objective measurement has remained elusive," says Morten Kringelbach of the University of Oxford, who has previously worked on a method of objective pain measurement and was not involved in the most recent work. Functional MRI scans have been used before to identify brain areas that "light up" when someone is in pain. Because oxygenated and deoxygenated blood have different levels of magnetisation they look different under MRI. A technique for analysing fMRI scans called BOLD, for blood-oxygen-level dependent, exploits this difference to determine which areas are most active: high oxygen is a sign that a brain region is particularly active. While BOLD can reveal if the amount of oxygen flowing to a particular region has increased or decreased, it doesn't measure by how much. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Brain imaging
Link ID: 13834 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Susan Milius In females of the beetle Onthophagus sagittarius, competition for dung to wrap eggs and feed young favors the evolution of exaggerated horns. Sean Stankowski So many moms, so little fresh excrement. Though male animals are usually the ones to sport horns and other weapons, in one species of beetle battle armor comes in handy for the ladies, who use their oversized horns in fights over dung. Females of the species Onthophagus sagittarius who had heftier horns won control of more available dung and thus laid more eggs, evolutionary biologists Nicola Watson and Leigh Simmons of the University of Western Australia in Crawley found in lab tests. Competition for quality dung is the evolutionary force selecting for feminine weaponry in this species, the researchers conclude in a paper to be published online the week of March 2 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. “It’s a rare example of this type of evolutionary event for sure,” says biologist Ted Stankowich of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Horns on bulls, antlers on stags and other guy weapons have preoccupied scientists who study evolution, Stankowich says. Darwin proposed that male weaponry arose from the struggle between rivals for access to females, and later work has found plenty of examples that fit that scenario. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 13833 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Greg Miller Alzheimer's researchers have faced a series of frustrations in recent years as one promising compound after another has flopped in late-stage clinical trials. Unfortunately, the string continues with the announcement today that another closely watched trial—for a drug called dimebon—has failed. Dimebon was something of a dark horse. An antihistamine introduced in Russia in 1983, it turned up in a screen for potential Alzheimer's drugs and led to a clinical trial that yielded remarkably encouraging results: In 2008, researchers reported in The Lancet that 78 people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease who took dimebon showed significant improvements in memory and cognition, as well as the ability to carry out the activities of daily life. The new study was led by Medivation, a San Francisco, Californai-based biopharmaceutical company, and Pfizer (which reportedly paid $225 million to license the drug). It enrolled 598 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's. This time, there were no significant differences between the dimebon and placebo groups. "The results ... are unexpected, and we are disappointed for the Alzheimer's community," Medivation's president and CEO, David Hung, said in a statement. Some researchers who study the mechanisms of Alzheimer's aren't surprised, however. "I think a lot of us have been saying the same thing ... that it looks too good to be true, but let's hope not for the sake of patients," says Harvard University's Rudolph Tanzi. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 13832 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katie Moisse Our bodies are wired to move, and damaged wiring is often impossible to repair. Strokes and spinal cord injuries can quickly disconnect parts of the brain that initiate movement with the nerves and muscles that execute it, and neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) draw the process out to the same effect. Scientists have been looking for a way to bypass damaged nerves by directly connecting the brain to an assistive device—like a robotic limb—through brain-computer interface (BCI) technology. Now, researchers have demonstrated the ability to nonintrusively record neural signals outside the skull and decode them into information that could be used to move a prosthetic. Past efforts at a BCI to animate an artificial limb involved electrodes inserted directly into the brain. The surgery required to implant the probes and the possibility that implants might not stay in place made this approach risky. The alternative—recording neural signals from outside the brain—has its own set of challenges. "It has been thought for quite some time that it wasn't possible to extract information about human movement using electroencephalography," or EEG, says neuroscientist and electrical engineer Jose Contreras-Vidal. In trying to record the brain's electrical activity off the scalp, he adds, "people assumed that the signal-to-noise ratio and the information content of these signals were limited." Evidently, that is not the case. In the March issue of The Journal of Neuroscience, Contreras-Vidal and his team from the bioengineering and kinesiology departments at the University of Maryland, College Park, show that the noisy brain waves recorded using noninvasive EEG can be mathematically decoded into meaningful information about complex human movements. © 2010 Scientific American

Keyword: Robotics; ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 13831 - Posted: 06.24.2010

With its generalized symptoms of pain, fatigue and digestive issues, fibromyalgia can often hide as something else for many years. Worse, some professionals doubt the existence of this condition, which can also cause chest pains, brain fog and depression. Here, six men and women speak about living with fibromyalgia. What is it like to live with a chronic disease, mental illness or confusing condition? In Patient Voices, we feature first person accounts of the challenges patients face as they cope with various health issues. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Emotions
Link ID: 13830 - Posted: 03.04.2010

by Ewen Callaway A chemical produced during sex and linked to addiction has been visualised in a scanner as it washes across rats' brains. The feat means that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a workhorse of neuroscience, can now be used to observe the flow of brain chemicals, not just oxygen-rich blood. By pinpointing increases in blood oxygenation in the brain in response to different events – a sign that specific groups of neurons are active – fMRI is responsible for some of the hottest findings about the brain. Now Alan Jasanoff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues have extended its power. His team repeatedly mutated a magnetic, iron-containing enzyme that "lights up" in fMRI readings. With each mutation, the researchers tested its tendency to bind to dopamine, a learning and reward chemical in the brain involved in sex and addictive behaviours. Mutations that increased this tendency were combined, resulting in a molecule that was both magnetic and strongly attracted to dopamine. The team injected the molecule into the brains of rats, in a region laden with dopamine-producing cells. When given a chemical that triggers dopamine release, that area "lit up" under fMRI. Because the molecule must be injected into the brain, this kind of chemical-based fMRI won't be applied to humans anytime soon, says Jasanoff, but it could be used to probe addiction and disease using animals. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 13829 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Azadeh Ansari, CNN (CNN) -- Atrazine, a weed killer widely used in the Midwestern United States and other agricultural areas of the world, can chemically "castrate" male frogs and turn some into females, according to a new study. New research suggests the herbicide may be a cause of amphibian declines around the globe, said biologists at the University of California-Berkeley, who conducted the study. The findings are being published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers found that long-term exposure to low levels of atrazine -- 2.5 parts per billion of water -- emasculated three-quarters of laboratory frogs and turned one in 10 into females. Scientists believe the pesticide interferes with endocrine hormones, such as estrogen and testosterone. "The effects of atrazine in the long term have been shown to demasculinize or chemically castrate [frogs], combined with complete feminization of some animals," said lead researcher Tyrone B. Hayes, a biologist and herpetologist at the University of Berkeley. "We need to reconfigure how we evaluate chemicals in the environment and the impact on environmental health and public health," he said. Hayes found that 10 percent of the exposed genetic male frogs developed into functional females who copulated with unexposed males and produced viable eggs. The other 90 percent of the exposed male frogs expressed decreased libido, reduced sperm count and decreased fertility, among other findings. © 2010 Cable News Network.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 13828 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LISA SANDERS, M.D. The middle-aged woman perched on the edge of a plastic chair as the doctor explained his thoughts on why her son was having persistent headaches. Suddenly, she toppled forward, collapsing onto the linoleum floor. Dr. Philip Ledereich hurried over to the woman. “Call 911,” he shouted to his nurse. “The patient’s mother has fainted.” Was the fainting brought on simply by stress? Or could there be an underlying neurological problem? Ledereich, an ear, nose and throat specialist in Clifton, N.J., first met the mother a couple of weeks before, when she herself came in as a patient. She was fainting several times a day, and no one knew why. Ledereich hadn’t been able to figure it out, either. Despite that, she took her son to see him for the treatment of a chronic sinus infection. Ledereich was describing various treatment alternatives when the woman pitched to the floor. She had been having these spells almost daily for the past several months, she told him at their first appointment. She was 49, a nurse, and she considered herself pretty healthy until one Saturday nearly three months earlier. That day she had just put on her shoes to go to a bar mitzvah, and as she straightened up she felt a fluttering sensation in her stomach. The next minute she was on the floor. Her husband rushed to her side. She could hear him calling her name, but she couldn’t answer him; she couldn’t even open her eyes. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Narcolepsy; Sleep
Link ID: 13827 - Posted: 06.24.2010