About half of Americans with major depression do not receive treatment for the condition, and in many cases the therapies are not consistent with the standard of care, according to a new study. The study also showed that ethnicity and race were important factors in determining who received treatment, with Mexican Americans and African Americans the least likely to have depression care. While many people can feel sad from time to time, a depressive disorder occurs when these feelings start to interfere with everyday life, preventing someone from functioning normally, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The condition can be debilitating, hindering a person's ability to work, sleep and eat. A combination of factors likely contributes to the disorder, including imbalances in brain chemicals, genetics, and stressful situations, the NIH says. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here Previous research has indicated that many Americans with depression go untreated, but the current study was the first to break down large ethnic and racial groups into subgroups to look at disparities in treatment. The researchers used information from the National Institute of Mental Health's Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys — a combination of three surveys conducted between 2001 and 2003 with a total of 15,762 participants. © 2010 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 13636 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY That most alarming New Year’s morning question — “Uh-oh, what did I do last night?” — can seem benign compared with those that may come later, like “Uh, what exactly did I do with the last year?” Or, “Hold on — did a decade just go by?” It did. Somewhere between trigonometry and colonoscopy, someone must have hit the fast-forward button. Time may march, or ebb, or sift, or creep, but in early January it feels as if it has bolted like an angry dinner guest, leaving conversations unfinished, relationships still stuck, bad habits unbroken, goals unachieved. “I think for many people, we think about our goals, and if nothing much has happened with those then suddenly it seems like it was just yesterday that we set them,” said Gal Zauberman, an associate professor of marketing at the Wharton School of Business. Yet the sensation of passing time can be very different, Dr. Zauberman said, “depending on what you think about, and how.” In fact, scientists are not sure how the brain tracks time. One theory holds that it has a cluster of cells specialized to count off intervals of time; another that a wide array of neural processes act as an internal clock. Either way, studies find, this biological pacemaker has a poor grasp of longer intervals. Time does seem to slow to a trickle during an empty afternoon and race when the brain is engrossed in challenging work. Stimulants, including caffeine, tend to make people feel as if time is passing faster; complex jobs, like doing taxes, can seem to drag on longer than they actually do. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13635 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rachel Saslow Scientists may have created a vaccine against cocaine addiction: a series of shots that changes the body's chemistry so that the drug can't enter the brain and provide a high. The vaccine, called TA-CD, shows promise but could also be dangerous; some of the addicts participating in a study of the vaccine started doing massive amounts of cocaine in hopes of overcoming its effects, according to Thomas R. Kosten, the lead researcher on the study, which was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry in October. "After the vaccine, doing cocaine was a very disappointing experience for them," said Kosten, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Nobody overdosed, but some of them had 10 times more cocaine coursing through their systems than researchers had encountered before, according to Kosten. He said some of the addicts reported to researchers that they had gone broke buying cocaine from multiple drug dealers, hoping to find a variety that would get them high. Of the 115 addicts in the study, 58 were given the vaccine, administered in a series of five shots over 12 weeks, while 57 received placebo injections. Six people dropped out before the end of the study. The researchers recruited the participants from a methadone-treatment program in West Haven, Conn., which made it possible to track them for the full 24 weeks of the study. The patients were addicted to cocaine and heroin; TA-CD is designed to work only on cocaine, including the crack form of the drug. © 2010 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13634 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By HENRY FOUNTAIN Subjective tinnitus, the ringing or other noise that often accompanies noise-related hearing loss, is a tough problem to treat. But researchers in Germany have come up with a novel approach, a kind of music therapy in which the music is custom-tailored to the person with tinnitus. The technique, by Hidehiko Okamoto, Henning Stracke and Christo Pantev of Westfalian Wilhelms-University and Wolfgang Stoll of Muenster University Hospital, makes use of recent findings about a possible cause of tinnitus: reorganization of the auditory cortex, the part of the brain responsible for perceiving sound, in response to noise exposure. Other research has shown that behavioral training may reverse faulty cortical reorganization. The researchers allowed patients to choose their favorite music, which was then “notched” — a one-octave frequency band, centered on the frequency of the ringing experienced by the subject, was filtered out. The subjects listened to the music on average about 12 hours a week. After a year, the researchers report in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, those who listened to this custom-notched music reported a significant improvement in their tinnitus — the ringing was not as loud — compared with others who listened to music that was notched at frequencies not corresponding to their ringing frequency. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 13633 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower She’s the ultimate evolutionary party crasher. Dubbed Ardi, her partial skeleton was unearthed in Ethiopia near the scattered remains of at least 36 of her comrades. Physical anthropologists had known about the discovery of this long-gone gal for around 15 years, but few expected to see the 4.4-million-year-old hell-raiser that was unveiled in 11 scientific papers in October. Like a biker chick strutting into a debutante ball, Ardi brazenly flaunts her nonconformity among more-demure members of the human evolutionary family, known as hominids. She boasts a weird pastiche of anatomical adornments, even without tattoos or nose studs. In her prime, she moved slowly, a cool customer whether upright or on all fours. Today, she’s the standard bearer for her ancient species, Ardipithecus ramidus. And in true biker-chick fashion, Ardi chews up and spits out conventional thinking about hominid origins, according to a team — led by anthropologist Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley — that unearthed and analyzed her fragile bones (SN: 10/24/09, p. 9). First, White and his colleagues assert, Ardi’s unusual mix of apelike and monkeylike traits demolishes the long-standing assumption that today’s chimpanzees provide a reasonable model of either early hominids or the last common ancestor of people and chimps — an ancestor which some scientists suspect could even have been Ardi, if genetics-based estimates of when the split occurred are borne out. Second, the team concludes, Ardi trashes the idea that knuckle-walking or tree-hanging human ancestors evolved an upright gait to help them motor across wide ancient savannas. Her kind lived in wooded areas and split time between lumbering around on two legs hominid-style and cruising carefully along tree branches on grasping feet and the palms of the hands. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 13632 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Carla K. Johnson , Associated Press An expert panel says there's no rigorous evidence that digestive problems are more common in children with autism compared to other children, or that special diets work, contrary to claims by celebrities and vaccine naysayers. Painful digestive problems can trigger problem behavior in children with autism and should be treated medically, according to the panel's report published in the January issue of Pediatrics and released Monday. "There are a lot of barriers to medical care to children with autism," said the report's lead author, Dr. Timothy Buie of Harvard Medical School. "They can be destructive and unruly in the office, or they can't sit still. The nature of their condition often prevents them from getting standard medical care." Some pediatricians' offices "can't handle those kids," Buie said, especially if children are in pain or discomfort because of bloating or stomach cramps. Pain can set off problem behavior, further complicating diagnosis, especially if the child has trouble communicating -- as is the case for children with autism. Autism is a spectrum of disorders affecting a person's ability to communicate and interact with others. Children with autism may make poor eye contact or exhibit repetitive movements such as rocking or hand-flapping. About 1 in 110 U.S. children have autism, according to a recent government estimate. © 2009 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 13631 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists have developed biological cells that can give insight into the chemistry of the brain. The cells, which change colour when exposed to specific chemicals, have been used to show how a class of schizophrenia drug works. The researchers hope they will also help shed light on how many other drugs work on the brain. The study, by the University of California - San Diego, is published in Nature Neuroscience. Schizophrenia is most commonly associated with symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations. But people with the illness also struggle to sustain attention or recall information. A class of drugs called atypical neuroleptics has become commonly prescribed, in part because they seem to improve these problems. However, the way they altered brain chemistry was uncertain. It was known that the drugs trigger the release of a large amount of a chemical called acetylcholine, which enables brain cells to communicate with each other. However, the drugs have also been shown to hobble a receptor on the surface of the receiving cell, which would effectively block the message. The San Diego team designed biological cells - called CNiFERs - which changed colour when acetylcholine latched onto this particular class of receptors - an event scientists have not previously been able to detect in a living brain. They implanted the cells into rat brains, then stimulated a deeper part of the brain in a way known to release acetylcholine nearby. In response, CNiFERs changed colour - proving that they were working. (C)BBC

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 13630 - Posted: 01.04.2010

By Carolyn Y. Johnson Dogs have been an integral part of human life for centuries. It is precisely because of that intertwined history that dogs are a potentially powerful tool for researchers seeking the genetic roots of everything from psychiatric disorders to cancer - just two of the ailments that are similar in both humans and dogs. Last month, scientists studying Doberman pinschers with a compulsive behavior disorder similar to human obsessive-compulsive disorder found a gene associated with the condition. The genetic hit is now being followed by other researchers, who are studying the same gene in human patients with OCD, in hopes the clue from man’s best friend may help explain the disease in people. “This is exactly where we were hoping to get to,’’ said Elinor Karlsson, a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute, a genetics research center in Cambridge, and coauthor of a paper on the subject. “This is taking a disease that people have had a lot of trouble working with in humans, that seems to be a multigenic and complex psychiatric disease, and using a dog breed to look at something completely new about that disease - something we wouldn’t be able to find in any other species.’’ In dogs, compulsive behavior includes tail chasing, licking their legs until they develop infections, and pacing and circling - versions of normal behaviors such as predatory behavior, grooming, or locomotion taken to extremes. Those kinds of behaviors parallel the way that normal human behaviors, such as hand washing or checking objects, can become repetitive in the estimated 2.2 million American adults affected by OCD. © 2010 NY Times Co

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13629 - Posted: 06.24.2010

What if you wanted to get to know your brain by building one from the bottom up? All you need is this guide, a lot of patience, and some really tiny tweezers.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13628 - Posted: 01.04.2010

In Huntington's disease, a mutated protein in the body becomes toxic to brain cells. Recent studies have demonstrated that a small region adjacent to the mutated segment plays a major role in the toxicity. Two new studies supported by the National Institutes of Health show that very slight changes to this region can eliminate signs of Huntington's disease in mice. Researchers do not fully understand why the protein (called mutant huntingtin) is toxic, but one clue is that it accumulates in ordered clumps of fibrils, perhaps clogging up the cells' internal machinery. "These studies shed light on the structure and biochemistry of the mutant huntingtin protein and on potentially modifiable factors that affect its toxicity," said Margaret Sutherland, Ph.D., a program director at NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). "They reveal sites within the huntingtin protein and within broader disease pathways that could serve as targets for drug therapy." Both studies were published online this week. One study, published in the Journal of Cell Biology, was led by Leslie Thompson, Ph.D., and Joan Steffan, Ph.D., of the University of California, Irvine. The other study, in Neuron, was led by X. William Yang, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of California, Los Angeles in collaboration with Ron Wetzel, Ph.D., of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. The normal huntingtin protein consists of about 3,150 amino acids (which are the building blocks for all proteins). In individuals with Huntington’s disease, the mutated protein contains an abnormally long string of a single amino acid repeat; lengthier chains are associated with worse symptoms and earlier onset of the disease.

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 13627 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ALISON GOPNIK At this very moment, you are actually moving your eyes over a white page dotted with black marks. Yet you feel that you are simply lost in the universe of The New York Times Book Review, alert to the seductive perfume of a promising new novel and the acrid bite of a vicious critical attack. That transformation from arbitrary marks to vivid experience is one of the great mysteries of the human mind. It’s especially mysterious because reading is a relatively recent invention, dating to some 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. Our brains didn’t evolve to read. Stanislas Dehaene, a distinguished French cognitive scientist, has helped unravel that mystery. His gifts, on display in “Reading in the Brain,” include an aptitude for complex experiments and an appetite for detail. This makes for excellent science but not, paradoxically, easy reading. Still, his book will repay careful study, even if it doesn’t inspire blissful absorption. Dehaene begins by describing the remarkably complicated neural circuitry devoted to getting from marks to thoughts. He then explains how reading developed historically (from Sumerian inscriptions and Egyptian hieroglyphics to the Greek and Roman alphabets and Chinese characters), how we learn to read as children and why dyslexia makes reading so hard. Every time you complete a word recognition security test on a Web site, you are paying unconscious homage to the sophistication and subtlety of the reading brain. The most advanced spambots can’t even recognize letters as well as we can, let alone recover the meaning that lurks behind them. Cognitive science has shown that the simplest experiences — talking, seeing, remembering — are the result of fiendishly complex computations. Dehaene’s work, along with that of others, adds reading to the list. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 13626 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BARBARA STRAUCH I LOVE reading history, and the shelves in my living room are lined with fat, fact-filled books. There’s “The Hemingses of Monticello,” about the family of Thomas Jefferson’s slave mistress; there’s “House of Cards,” about the fall of Bear Stearns; there’s “Titan,” about John D. Rockefeller Sr. The problem is, as much as I’ve enjoyed these books, I don’t really remember reading any of them. Certainly I know the main points. But didn’t I, after underlining all those interesting parts, retain anything else? It’s maddening and, sorry to say, not all that unusual for a brain at middle age: I don’t just forget whole books, but movies I just saw, breakfasts I just ate, and the names, oh, the names are awful. Who are you? Brains in middle age, which, with increased life spans, now stretches from the 40s to late 60s, also get more easily distracted. Start boiling water for pasta, go answer the doorbell and — whoosh — all thoughts of boiling water disappear. Indeed, aging brains, even in the middle years, fall into what’s called the default mode, during which the mind wanders off and begin daydreaming. Given all this, the question arises, can an old brain learn, and then remember what it learns? Put another way, is this a brain that should be in school? As it happens, yes. While it’s tempting to focus on the flaws in older brains, that inducement overlooks how capable they’ve become. Over the past several years, scientists have looked deeper into how brains age and confirmed that they continue to develop through and beyond middle age. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 13625 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Geoffrey Miller PEOPLE have radically diverse responses to the very idea of conspicuous consumption. Some folks consider it blindingly obvious that most economic behaviour is driven by status seeking, social signalling and sexual solicitation. These include most Marxists, marketers, working-class fundamentalists and divorced women. Other folks consider this an outrageously cynical view, and argue that most consumption is for individual pleasure ("utility") and family prosperity ("security"). Those folks include most capitalists, economists, upper-class fundamentalists, and soon-to-be-divorced men. Such differences of opinion can rarely be resolved by trading examples or anecdotes, or arguing from first principles. It more often helps to apply some psychology. With this in mind, some colleagues and I devised a series of experiments inspired by "costly signalling theory" - the idea that animals, including humans, use costly, intricate and hard-to-fake signals to flaunt their biological fitness to potential mates and social partners. Our goal was to see how thinking about mating influences people's decisions about spending and giving (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 93, p 85). In the first experiment the team, led by Vladas Griskevicius from Arizona State University in Tempe and Josh Tybur from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, invited college students to the lab in small groups. Each was randomly assigned to one of two conditions: "mating" or "non-mating". The mating subjects looked at three photographs of people of the opposite-sex on a computer screen, picked which one they thought most desirable, and spent a few minutes writing about an ideal first date with that person. The non-mating subjects looked at a street scene photograph and spent the same amount of time writing about the ideal weather for walking around and looking at the buildings it featured. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 13624 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Mosquitoes can impress potential mates by harmonizing the high-pitched whine of their tiny wings. Now, scientists have discovered how this musical matchmaking helps the insects to pick their perfect partner. Research on one of the main malaria carriers in Africa, Anopheles gambiae, shows that the insects use subtle differences in tone to distinguish between forms of mosquito that appear to be physically identical. The preference for harmony is so strong that it seems to be causing two forms of mosquito living in the same region to become separate species. This strict mating policy may be a key factor in maintaining the genetic diversity that makes the insect so adaptable to different environments, and could point to other ways to disrupt mosquito reproduction in malaria-ridden countries. A. gambiae is actually a complex of seven species that are physically indistinguishable but with slightly different behavioural traits. In Burkina Faso, one of these species includes two forms — Mopti (M) and Savannah (S) — and additional forms exist in other parts of Africa. The sheer diversity of the mosquito has puzzled scientists. "People studying this mosquito have wondered how it manages to speciate so quickly," says sensory physiologist Gabriella Gibson at the University of Greenwich, UK. Also unclear is how two forms that swarm together can avoid mating with one another, thereby preventing their genetic diversity from being diluted. © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hearing
Link ID: 13623 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Earlier bedtimes may help protect teens from depression and suicidal thoughts, says a U.S. study published Friday. Researchers analyzed data from 15,659 U.S. students in Grades 7 to 12 and their parents. Participants were surveyed from 1994 to 1996 for the study by James Gangwisch, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, and his colleagues . On average, the teenagers said they got seven hours and 53 minutes of shut-eye a night, compared with the nine or more hours recommended for adolescents by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the team reported in the journal Sleep. Adolescents who reported that they usually slept five or fewer hours a night were 1.71 times more likely to suffer from depression and 1.48 times more likely to think about committing suicide than those who said they got eight hours of sleep a night. These calculations took into account demographic factors such as race and whether the family received public assistance, the study said. "Our findings suggest that later parental-set bedtimes contribute to shorter sleep durations and perceptions of not getting enough sleep, which in turn are associated with depression and [thoughts of suicide]," the study's authors concluded. By setting earlier bedtimes, parents could protect against depression and suicidal thoughts in their children, the authors said. Participants who reported that they "usually get enough sleep" were 0.35 times less likely to suffer from depression and 0.71 times less likely to think of committing suicide, the researchers found. © CBC 2010

Keyword: Depression; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 13622 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Carina Storrs When prions are transferred from one species to another—like from sheep and cows to mice in the laboratory or to humans in the case of the fatally neurodegenerative variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease—new forms of the infectious proteins can emerge over time that make them deadly to the new host. A new study examines the emergence and persistence of prion mutations, which allow prions to grow in infected cells in the presence of anti-prion compounds. In the classic sense, prions, which are misfolded versions of the brain protein PrP, cannot mutate because they do not contain DNA or RNA. They can, however, give rise to variants with different properties, possibly due to differences in the folding, or shape, of the proteins. In the study, published December 31 in Science Express, researchers estimated the rate at which prion mutants can appear in cultured human nerve cells. In addition, the study suggests that once variants appear, they persist at low levels, giving rise to a heterogeneous prion population. "On the face of it, you have exactly the same process of mutation and adaptive change in prions as you see in viruses," said Dr. Charles Weissmann in a prepared statement. Weissmann, who is the head of the Scripps Florida Department of Infectology in Jupiter, Fla., led the study. To track prion mutation, Weissmann's team mixed one prion-infected human nerve cell with 1,000 uninfected human nerve cells in each petri dish. The infected cell contained a single prion that was susceptible to a drug called swainsonine, or swa. © 1996-2010 Scientific American

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 13621 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey Scientists have discovered the true identity of a contagious form of cancer that is killing Tasmanian devils. The cancer, called devil facial tumor disease, stems from cells that normally insulate nerve fibers, a new study shows. Genetic analysis of tumors taken from infected devils in different parts of Tasmania reveals that these insulating cells, known as Schwann cells, became cancerous in a single Tasmanian devil and have since passed to other devils, an international group of researchers reports in the Jan. 1 Science. Previously, scientists had suspected that a virus might be the source of the infection, but the new study confirms that cancer cells themselves are transmitted from devil to devil. Knowing the origin of the contagious tumors could help conservationists diagnose the disease more accurately and may eventually lead to a vaccine that would target tumor proteins, says Katherine Belov, a geneticist at the University of Sydney who was not involved with the project. A vaccine against the facial tumor disease, “while now pie in the sky, in 10 years might not be,” says Gregory Hannon, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y. “Ten years might be enough time” to save the devils from extinction, he says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Glia
Link ID: 13620 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alzheimer's disease is associated with a reduced risk of cancer and vice versa, a study suggests. US researchers followed 3,020 people aged 65 and above for the study, published in the journal Neurology. Those who had Alzheimer's at the start of the study were 69% less likely to be admitted to hospital with cancer than those free of the disease at the start. And those with cancer at the study's start were 43% less likely to develop Alzheimer's than the cancer free. The researchers followed the subjects for an average of five years to see whether they developed Alzheimer's, and an average of eight years to see whether they developed cancer. At the start of the study, 164 people (5.4%) already had Alzheimer's disease and 522 people (17.3%) already had a cancer diagnosis. During the study, 478 people developed dementia and 376 people developed invasive cancer. The researchers stressed that more work was needed before any firm conclusions could be drawn, and said the findings only seemed fully to apply to white people. They found no association between cancer and another type of dementia, known as vascular dementia, which is thought to be caused by a lack of blood supply to the brain. However, patients with this condition died earlier than people with Alzheimer's. Lead researcher Dr Catherine Roe, of Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, said this suggested the association between Alzheimer's and cancer was not simply due to people with those conditions dying before they could contract the other ailment. "Discovering the links between these two conditions may help us better understand both diseases and open up avenues for possible treatments," she said. "Alzheimer's disease and cancer are both characterised by abnormal, but opposing, cellular behaviour. (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 13619 - Posted: 12.31.2009

By Katherine Harmon Having trouble remembering to take your Ginkgo supplement? The pills themselves might not help with that forgetfulness—or any other age-related cognitive decline, according to a new study published online Tuesday in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association. "Compared with placebo, the use of G. biloba, 120 milligrams twice daily, did not result in less cognitive decline in older adults," the authors of the study concluded. The randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study is the largest of its kind, having followed 3,069 older adults (72 to 96 years old) who started the trial with no or only mild cognitive impairment. After following the individuals for six years, administering regular testing and interviewing people close to them, the researchers found that those who had been given gingko pills performed the same in memory, language, attention, visuo-spatial judgment and executive function tests as those in the placebo group. The authors, whose research was supported by the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine among other government groups, expected to see at least minor benefits in the ginkgo cohort. "We're a bit surprised [ginkgo is] as ineffective as it turned out to be," says Steven DeKosky, vice president and dean of the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville and study co-author. Laboratory tests of the substance have shown "biological effects that give you a pretty good rationale" for expecting it to help shield neural cells, he says. And given the herb's antioxidant properties, many researchers have anticipated positive findings in human subjects. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 13618 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jennifer LaRue Huget A few months ago I received a book called "The Two Martini Diet" (Authorhouse, 2008), in which Jerry Sorlucco documents his success at losing more than 100 pounds without forgoing his daily cocktails. He doesn't break new diet-book ground: Sorlucco follows well-established practices such as controlling portion sizes, eating plenty of fruits and vegetables, and managing his calorie intake and expenditure to accommodate those drinks. I've kept the book on my desk because I'm intrigued by the interplay between healthful eating and alcohol consumption. Is it really possible, I've wondered, to incorporate alcoholic beverages into a healthful diet and lifestyle, or are those of us who hope it is possible just fooling ourselves? New Year's Eve seems a perfect time to explore this topic: Tonight we may enjoy a midnight toast; come morning, we might resolve to cut back or quit drinking altogether. Drinking is often considered a vice. But unlike smoking or using recreational drugs, behaviors for which it's hard to claim any health benefits, evidence is mounting that partaking of alcohol can promote not only health but also longevity. I'm aware that my own affection for martinis may skew my opinion about the merits of including cocktails in one's diet. So I turned to some experts -- Walter Willett, chair of the department of nutrition and a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, and Donald Hensrud, a specialist in preventive and internal medicine at the Mayo Clinic and medical editor in chief of "The Mayo Clinic Diet" book, to be released Friday -- to help me put alcohol in its proper place. I hope you'll join me in reviewing their comments and deciding for yourself whether drinking belongs in your life. © 2009 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13617 - Posted: 06.24.2010