By Nick Triggle Needless use of anti-psychotic drugs is widespread in dementia care and contributes to the death of many patients, an official review suggests. About 180,000 patients a year are given the drugs in care homes, hospitals and their own homes to manage aggression. But the expert review - commissioned by ministers - said the treatment was unnecessary in nearly 150,000 cases and was linked to 1,800 deaths. The government in England has agreed to take steps to reduce use of the drugs. The review - and the government pledge to take action - comes after long-running concerns about the use of anti-psychotic drugs. Over the past 30 years, the NHS has increasingly turned to the treatment, which was originally aimed at people with schizophrenia, as it has struggled to cope with the rise in people with dementia. There are currently 700,000 people in the UK with the condition, but this is expected to rise to one million in the next 10 years because of the ageing population. The review, led by King's College London expert Professor Sube Banerjee, accepted that for some people anti-psychotic drugs would be necessary. But it said they should be used only for a maximum of three months and when the person represented a risk to themselves or others. Professor Banerjee estimated that of the 180,000 people given the drugs each year, only 36,000 benefited. He said health and social care services needed to develop a "different mindset". (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 13467 - Posted: 11.14.2009

Patients complaining of grinding their teeth in their sleep are being given mild electric shock treatment. A chain of private dental practices in Hull is trialling a device which delivers a tiny electrical impulse when it detects grinding is about to begin. Teeth grinding - or bruxism - is a common and usually harmless habit induced by stress. It can, however, cause headaches and stiff necks, as well as irritating a sleeping partner. Traditional treatments involve wearing a plastic device at night which prevents the top and bottom teeth from meeting. With this new device, Grindcare , developed in Denmark, a small electrode is placed on the temple which then monitors the movement of facial muscles. When it detects tension mounting, it delivers a tiny electrical impulse - or biofeedback. This is not consciously detected by the sleeping patient but still serves to relax the muscles. The device is said to reduce grinding by as much as 80% within two months. Other ways of tackling bruxism include counselling and relaxation therapies to resolve the initial source of stress and tension. But Dr David Vivian, the dentist trialling the device, said that grinding could worsen existing anxieties. "The broken sleep pattern caused by grinding can exacerbate any stresses or worries already being felt by the patient, and add an extra layer of anxiety to their lives. They may also be resorting to over-the-counter painkillers to treat side effects, such as headaches, and finding that they are having to increase the dosage all the time. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 13466 - Posted: 11.14.2009

By RONI CARYN RABIN There are probably better ways to start the day, but a new study suggests that early morning is an ideal time to schedule a colonoscopy. Physicians detected 20 percent more polyps during the first procedures of the day than they did during procedures performed later in the morning and the early afternoon, the study found. “Hour by hour, there were fewer polyps found as the day progressed,” said Dr. Brennan M. R. Spiegel, an assistant professor of medicine at U.C.L.A. and an author of the study, which appears in the November issue of the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology. “It’s a small effect, very small, but very measurable and definitely there.” A study done at the Cleveland Clinic and published this year found similar results, noting that 29.3 percent of morning procedures resulted in detection of at least one polyp, compared with 25.3 percent of the afternoon procedures. The new study looked at the results from colonoscopies performed on 477 patients at the West Los Angeles Veterans Medical Center in 2006 and 2007. Most of the procedures were performed by a physician training in gastroenterology who was supervised by a faculty member. Procedures were performed between 7:45 a.m. and 1 p.m., and though they were done only in the early hours of the day, the analysis found that 20 percent more polyps were detected during the earliest colonoscopies. The researchers tried to control for other factors that might have affected the results, including the fact that patients usually came in with better bowel preparation for morning procedures. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Attention
Link ID: 13465 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Charles Q. Choi Evolution in humans is commonly thought to have essentially stopped in recent times. But there are plenty of examples that the human race is still evolving, including our brains, and there are even signs that our evolution may be accelerating. Comprehensive scans of the human genome reveal that hundreds of our genes show evidence of changes during the past 10,000 years of human evolution. "We know the brain has been evolving in human populations quite recently," said paleoanthropologist John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Surprisingly, based on skull measurements, the human brain appears to have been shrinking over the last 5,000 or so years. "When it comes to recent evolutionary changes, we currently maybe have the least specific details with regard the brain, but we do know from archaeological data that pretty much everywhere we can measure — Europe, China, South Africa, Australia — that brains have shrunk about 150 cubic centimeters, off a mean of about 1,350. That's roughly 10 percent," Hawks said. "As to why is it shrinking, perhaps in big societies, as opposed to hunter-gatherer lifestyles, we can rely on other people for more things, can specialize our behavior to a greater extent, and maybe not need our brains as much," he added. © 2009 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 13464 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower For chimpanzees living in a forest surrounding the village of Bossou in Guinea, cracking nuts is a serious task with important steps. They are: First, lug large rocks to a spot near a nut-bearing tree, such as an oil palm. Next, gather the nuts and place them on the rocks. Then, obtain a smaller, graspable rock. Finally, smash the armored treats and let the shells fly. As clutches of apes pound away with devastating precision, these nut bashers create an unholy din akin to a human rock band. In fact, these West African chimps rock out in a surprising way. In this corner of the jungle, chimps appear to think more carefully about implements and how to assemble them than many scientists had assumed. A team led by anthropologist Susana Carvalho set up a nut-cracking lab in the forest near Bossou by placing seven piles of nuts and several dozen stones of various sizes, shapes and types inside a clearing. Over five field seasons, 14 of 17 chimps that regularly visited the clearing consistently reused the same pairs of stones, the scientists report in a special October issue of Animal Cognition. Most chimps, Carvalho says, used the stones together as one tool, a nutcracker. Carvalho suspects that watching the Bossou chimps at work will provide clues to the origins of the Stone Age, the 2.6 million years during which members of the human evolutionary family are known to have used and made stone tools of increasing complexity. She is one researcher participating in a scientific movement to merge strains of archaeology, anthropology, primatology and psychology into a hybrid field dubbed primate archaeology: the study of current and past material culture among apes and perhaps other nonhuman animals. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Evolution; Intelligence
Link ID: 13463 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By RONI CARYN RABIN Many strokes cannot be explained by known risk factors like high blood pressure and smoking, and scientists have speculated that infection could play a role. Now a new study is linking cumulative exposure to five common pathogens with an increased risk for stroke. The infections in order of significance are Chlamydia pneumoniae, Helicobacter pylori, cytomegalovirus and herpes simplex viruses 1 and 2, according to the study, published online on Nov. 9 in The Archives of Neurology. The report will appear in the print edition of the journal in January. “Each of these common pathogens may persist after an acute infection and contribute to perpetuating a state of chronic low-level infection,” said the paper’s lead author, Dr. Mitchell S. V. Elkind, an associate professor of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center. Dr. Elkind said the low-level infection and inflammation in the vessel walls might be leading to disease. The researchers followed an ethnically diverse group of 1,625 residents from northern Manhattan whose average age was 68 and who had been stroke-free at the beginning of the study. After almost 8 years, 67 of the participants had suffered strokes. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 13462 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey Old memories may get the boot from new brain cells. A new rodent study shows that newborn neurons destabilize established connections among existing brain cells in the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in learning and memory. Clearing old memories from the hippocampus makes way for new learning, researchers from Japan suggest in the Nov. 13 Cell. Other researchers had proposed the idea that neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons, could disrupt existing memories, but the Cell paper is the first to show evidence supporting the idea, says Paul Frankland, a neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Scientists have known that memories first form in the hippocampus and are later transferred to long-term storage in other parts of the brain. For some amount of time the memory resides both in the hippocampus and elsewhere in the brain. What’s not been known is how, after a few months or years, the memory is gradually cleared from the hippocampus. Researchers have also debated the role of neurogenesis in learning and memory. The hippocampus is one of only two places in the adult brain where scientists know that new neurons form. On the basis of previous studies, many researchers think new neurons stabilize memory circuits or are somehow otherwise necessary to form new memories. The new study suggests the opposite: Newborn neurons weaken or disrupt connections that encode old memories in the hippocampus. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 13461 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jesse Bering My mother used to say, “there’s somebody out there for everybody.” It sounds sweet, I know, but when you realize she would say this only in jaw-dropping astonishment at seeing a loving couple out in public in which both partners were, shall we say, aesthetically shortchanged in some eye-catching way, my dearly departed mother somehow doesn’t sound like such a Polyanna anymore. But she got it basically right. When two people are in love, the world whittles away to them alone, and as new research findings suggest, a mere reminder of that other person can make everything seem a little more manageable—even, as it turns out, physical pain. In a study published this month in Psychological Science, psychology graduate student Sarah Master of the University of California, Los Angeles, and fellow researchers invited 25 couples into their laboratory for a study on pain perception. The females—in this study, anyway—got to be the recipients of the experimentally induced pain stimuli. While the male partner was away in another room having his photographs taken for later use in the study, the woman was instructed to place her arm through an opaque curtain. An experimenter on the other side of the curtain first assessed each woman’s “pain threshold” for thermal stimulation, which produces a sharp, acute, prickling pain sensation within about a tenth of a second. Once the investigators determined each woman’s subjective pain threshold for moderate discomfort—operationalized as a score of “10” on a pain-rating scale of 0 to 20—they proceeded to the experiment, in which the women were subjected to 84 further pain trials. Ouch! Unbeknownst to the female participants, half of these thermal stimulations were administered at the women’s individually predetermined pain threshold levels, and half were set at 1° C above these moderate discomfort levels. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc

Keyword: Emotions; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 13460 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Linda Geddes, reporter A gene therapy that appears to bulk up muscle mass and strength in monkeys - reported today in Science Translational Medicine - will undoubtedly raise fresh concerns about the potential for gene doping in sport. We already know that some athletes use drugs like erythropoietin to increase the amount of oxygen their blood delivers, and steroids to bulk up muscle mass. The big advantage with gene doping is that it should be harder to detect. That's because it's difficult to test for a protein that the body already produces, especially when its levels naturally vary between individuals - which might explain why some people are inherently better at sports than others. In the new study, Janaiah Kota and colleagues at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, used gene therapy to add extra copies of the follistatin gene into the leg muscles of monkeys. Follistatin has been previously shown in mice to block myostatin, a protein that decreases muscle mass, resulting in bulked up "mighty mice". Monkeys injected with the gene also seemed to bulk up, and when Kota's team analyzed their leg muscles with a device that measures force, they found that the muscles injected with the follistatin gene were also stronger than normal muscles. They hope the approach could eventually be used to treat the severe muscle weakness associated with neuromuscular disorders like muscular dystrophy and multiple sclerosis. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Muscles; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13459 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Aria Pearson If you struggle to follow the conversation at noisy parties, music lessons might help. Nina Kraus and colleagues at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have previously shown that playing an instrument seems to enhance our ability to pick up emotional cues in conversationSpeaker. Now her team has found differences in brain activity that they say make musicians better at picking out speech from background noise. After establishing that musicians are better at repeating a sentence heard in the presence of background noise, the researchers asked 16 lifelong musicians and 15 non-musicians to listen to speech in a quiet or noisy environment while they were wearing scalp electrodes to monitor their brain activity. Slow reactions Background noise delayed the brain's response, but this delay was much shorter in the musicians. What's more, in the noisy environment, the musicians' brainwaves were more similar to the sound waves of the speech than in non-musicians. The difference could be partly genetic, but Kraus says training is likely to help. "Musicians spend a lot of time extracting particular sounds from a soundscape." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hearing; Attention
Link ID: 13458 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Anil Ananthaswamy A telltale signature of consciousness has been detected that takes us a step closer to disentangling the brain activity underlying conscious and unconscious brain processes. It turns out that there is a similar pattern of neural activity each time we become conscious of the same picture, but not if we process information from the image unconsciously. These contrasting patterns of activity can now be detected via brain scans, and could one day help determine if patients with brain damage are conscious. They might even be used to probe consciousness in animals. "It's very exciting work," says neuroscientist Raphaël Gaillard of the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the work. "The use of a reproducibility measure to disentangle conscious and non-conscious processes is genuinely new." Gaillard has previously shown that coordinated activity across the entire brain is one of the signatures of consciousness . Consistent signals So far, efforts to find a brain signature of consciousness have focused on the intensity of neural activity, how long it lasts, and whether signals tend to be synchronised across different regions of the brain. "We were looking for something other than the intensity and duration of the neural activity that characterises conscious neural processing," says Aaron Schurger of Princeton University in New Jersey, who led the new work. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention; Brain imaging
Link ID: 13457 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey Silver-tongued humans may owe their language prowess to a foxy friend. A new study provides more evidence that the human version of a protein known as FOXP2 may have aided the evolution of language. Chimpanzees and many other animals have FOXP2, but the human version differs at two links in the chain of amino acids that make up the protein. Scientists have suspected that those two amino acid changes were not merely cosmetic, but might alter the way FOXP2 functions, perhaps paving the way for the evolution of language. The new study finds that human FOXP2, compared with the chimp version, alters the activity of at least 116 genes in brain cells grown in laboratory dishes, neurogeneticist Daniel Geschwind of the University of California, Los Angeles and colleagues report in the Nov. 12 Nature. Of the affected genes, 61 showed higher activity with human FOXP2 than the chimp form. Many of those genes are involved in neural development and the production of collagen, cartilage and soft tissues. Those results suggest that the protein may play roles in shaping both the brain and the vocal apparatus that makes speech possible. The human version of the protein decreased activity of 55 genes. Together these findings are “consistent with these genes being part of a molecular circuit related to human cognition,” including circuits needed for language, Geschwind says. He thinks FOXP2 and the genes it regulates make the brain better able to integrate sensory information with movements, as in hearing sounds and then shaping the tongue, lips and vocal tract to reproduce those sounds. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Language; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13456 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Lori Cuthbert I've been under some stress lately. Not the minor kind that everyday life usually brings, like ferrying kids to and fro, working, or the usual frustrations of owning a house. I'm talking about the big stresses that can clobber us, whether good or bad. In my case, good, but still, immensely stressful. Over the past week, the stress has intensified. And so has my desire to consume sweet things. Candy (handy that Halloween just happened). Cake (even with candy on top). More candy. My reaction has been, What the...? I don't eat sweets. I don't even have a sweet tooth; I have a potato chip tooth. Don't care for chocolate, particularly, but there I am, nightly, squeezing chocolate syrup on top of my orange-iced ginger cake with ice cream and whipped cream. First, this has me alarmed and has to stop for obvious reasons involving my figure. But second, it's got me wondering whether there's a link between stress and cravings for sugar. Some poking around reveals that the answer is yes. A study in the open access journal BMC Biology in 2005 found that rats who were stressed wanted to wolf down lots of sugar cubes because of high brain levels of a chemical called corticotropin-releasing factor -- a stress hormone that humans also have. The scientists concluded that stressed people might be more likely to crave things that made them feel good - like eating sugar or taking drugs. © 2009 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Stress; Obesity
Link ID: 13455 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR THE FACTS For people with arthritis who seek an alternative to painkillers, magnetic straps and bracelets have become a popular option. The devices are said to work by stimulating the release of the body’s natural painkillers or by increasing blood flow to tissue. They are generally considered safe (if expensive), but in recent years a number of studies have found little evidence that they provide any real benefit. One that did find some benefit was published in 2004 in BMJ and involved 194 people with osteoarthritis of the hip and knee. The scientists found that subjects randomly assigned to wear a full-strength magnetic bracelet for 12 weeks had greater improvements than those wearing a dummy bracelet. But an analysis of several studies, also in 2004, found that the evidence swung against magnetic therapy for pain relief, and added that while it could not exclude “a clinically important benefit” in the treatment of osteoarthritis, more research was needed. Then, in a well-designed 16-week study published this year, British scientists compared the effects of a popular magnetic device, a weak magnetic wrist strap, a demagnetized device and a copper bracelet in people with osteoarthritis. Their findings were blunt. “Our results indicate that magnetic and copper bracelets are generally ineffective for managing pain, stiffness and physical function in osteoarthritis,” they concluded. THE BOTTOM LINE The evidence supporting magnetic therapy for arthritis pain is limited. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 13454 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By RONI CARYN RABIN Many middle-aged men who have sleep apnea either do not seek treatment or are inconsistent about using the airway pressure masks prescribed to them. But what if they thought treatment might improve their golf game? Dr. Marc L. Benton, a New Jersey pulmonologist who was convinced that patients would improve their golf game if they slept better, tested his hypothesis by recruiting a dozen avid golfers with untreated sleep apnea for a small, preliminary study. Dr. Benton assessed their daytime sleepiness at the beginning of the study and recorded their golf handicap index. The patients were then fitted with nasal positive airway pressure masks and told to wear them every night. Three to five months later, after they had completed 20 new rounds of golf, the players reported using the masks up to 95 percent of the time. Compliance was also tracked electronically. The participants were less sleepy during the daytime, and their handicap index improved to 11 from an average of 12.4 before treatment, said Dr. Benton, who presented his findings last week at an international conference of the American College of Chest Physicians in San Diego. The study has not been reviewed for publication. It was limited because it was not a randomized controlled trial, and neither the patients nor the researchers were blinded about the treatment and the expected outcomes. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 13453 - Posted: 11.10.2009

Rex Dalton Silently slipping to 1,000 metres below the ocean surface, an undersea glider equipped with a recording device is cruising off Hawaii to capture unprecedented detail on the sounds made by whales. The experiment represents the first time that an acoustic-equipped glider has been deployed to this depth in the open ocean to record data from a specific marine mammal. Whales make distinctive clicking sounds or vocalizations both for communication and for echolocation, allowing them to navigate and forage for food, but traditional acoustic devices on the ocean surface typically can't record whale sounds emitted at lower depths. The glider is designed to collect acoustic data from beaked whales (Ziphiidae), which can dive down to 2,000 metres. These whales seem to be particularly sensitive to man-made noise, and there have been a number of beaked whale strandings associated with the use of military sonar equipment1. The data will help to improve our understanding of whale biology, researchers say, but the glider is also being considered as a more effective way of monitoring marine mammals when airguns are deployed for seismic studies of the seafloor (see 'Airgun ban halts seismic tests'). Such tests have been linked to whale strandings or deaths, but when observers try to monitor whales by sight during the studies, "they miss about 85% of the whales present," says whale-acoustics expert Dave Mellinger of Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Oregon, who works on the glider project. © 2009 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Animal Communication; Hearing
Link ID: 13452 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Patricia Wen Pity the Boston car salesman who negotiated across the table from Charles A. Nelson III, a Harvard neuroscience professor who runs the nation’s top laboratory studying how people learn to decode facial expressions. As the two men faced off in the showroom last month, the salesman insisted to Nelson that he had just offered the absolute lowest price for the German car in question, declaring, “This is it.’’ Then the salesman’s eyes darted to a vacant corner, his nose and mouth taking on a configuration that shouted “Bluff.’’ The professor ultimately left the dealership smiling, holding a contract to buy the car at a far lower price, a bargain in his estimation. Such is one ancillary benefit of Nelson’s exhaustive research, which unfolds every day in his $1.5 million cognitive neuroscience laboratory at Children’s Hospital Boston, where he studies just when and how humans learn to read faces. To that end, his lab recruits hundreds of babies and preschoolers from the Boston area, with staff members making pitches at day care centers and children’s fairs. Using high-tech equipment to monitor the children’s eye movements and brain activity, researchers seek to discover how people identify one face from another and how they decipher the emotions behind particular expressions. © 2009 NY Times Co

Keyword: Emotions; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13451 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY It’s snowing heavily, and everyone in the backyard is in a swimsuit, at some kind of party: Mom, Dad, the high school principal, there’s even an ex-girlfriend. And is that Elvis, over by the piñata? Dreams are so rich and have such an authentic feeling that scientists have long assumed they must have a crucial psychological purpose. To Freud, dreaming provided a playground for the unconscious mind; to Jung, it was a stage where the psyche’s archetypes acted out primal themes. Newer theories hold that dreams help the brain to consolidate emotional memories or to work though current problems, like divorce and work frustrations. Yet what if the primary purpose of dreaming isn’t psychological at all? In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking. Drawing on work of his own and others, Dr. Hobson argues that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking. The idea is a prominent example of how neuroscience is altering assumptions about everyday (or every-night) brain functions. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 13450 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NATALIE ANGIER We’ve all heard the story of the third Little Pig, who foiled the hyperventilating wolf by building his house out of bricks, rather than with straw or sticks as his brothers had done. Less commonly known is that the pig later improved his home’s safety profile by installing convex security mirrors at key points along the driveway. Well, why not? In the current issue of Animal Behaviour, researchers present evidence that domestic pigs can quickly learn how mirrors work and will use their understanding of reflected images to scope out their surroundings and find their food. The researchers cannot yet say whether the animals realize that the eyes in the mirror are their own, or whether pigs might rank with apes, dolphins and other species that have passed the famed “mirror self-recognition test” thought to be a marker of self-awareness and advanced intelligence. To which I say, big squeal. Why should the pigs waste precious mirror time inspecting their teeth or straightening the hairs on their chinny-chin-chins, when they could be using the mirror as a tool to find a far prettier sight, the pig heaven that comes in a bowl? The finding is just one in a series of recent discoveries from the nascent study of pig cognition. Other researchers have found that pigs are brilliant at remembering where food stores are cached and how big each stash is relative to the rest. They’ve shown that Pig A can almost instantly learn to follow Pig B when the second pig shows signs of knowing where good food is stored, and that Pig B will try to deceive the pursuing pig and throw it off the trail so that Pig B can hog its food in peace. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 13449 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A small microscope that can be mounted on an animal's head should offer a front-row view of how its brain processes visual and other stimuli on the move. A laser inside the device scans the activity of neurons through a tiny hole in the skull, made prior to the experiment under anaesthetic. When the microscope was attached to freely moving rats looking at screens, it produced images of brain cells that had been labelled with a fluorescent dye. Compared with previous methods – which require restraining animals and inserting electrodes – this technique is much less invasive, revealing brain activity in animals that are moving and interacting with their environment in a more natural way. It was developed at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0903680106 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 13448 - Posted: 06.24.2010