By David Brown Two European research teams have identified three genes that affect a person's risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, the most common cause of dementia in the elderly. The new genes appear to have at least as big a role as four others discovered in the last 15 years that are known to play a role in Alzheimer's. "The message here is that genes are important in Alzheimer's disease . . . and there may be multiple ways of reducing the risk that the genes produce," said Julie Williams, a neuroscientist at Cardiff University in Wales who helped lead one of the teams. All so-called Alzheimer genes have normal roles in brain physiology; they don't exist solely to cause dementia. Instead, small variations in their DNA alter their function and, through processes only now being uncovered, increase or reduce a person's risk of developing the disease. Two of the genes described in the new research may be involved in determining the brain's capacity to clear itself of toxic "amyloid" proteins that collect outside neurons, eventually poisoning them. The most important previously known Alzheimer gene promoted overproduction of amyloid. The new findings suggest that at least two processes -- production of amyloid and its removal -- are involved in the disease. At least 5 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease. By one estimate, one in seven people age 72 and older has dementia, with Alzheimer's the most common form. © 2009 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13247 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Sanjida O'Connell Not just a window to the soul, the eye has a few tricks of its own. Newly discovered eye cells can warn us that an object is coming nearer, and do so without the brain's help. This ability may have evolved to speed escape from predators. Neurons that fire in response to horizontal and vertical movements had already been found in the retinas of mammals, but the only cells known to be sensitive to approaching objects were in the brain. While investigating mouse eye cells, Botond Roska and his team at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland, noticed that one type behaved unusually in response to movement. Further analysis of this one kind of retinal cell revealed that it fired only when an object approached. The researchers suspect that people have similar cells, which alert us to approaching objects faster than our brain cells can. "It's an alarm system that's as close to the front end of the organism as possible," says Roska. "If you left it to the brain to respond, it might be too late." Next, Roska plans to discover how the approach-sensitive cells evoke a reaction in the brain. "This is exciting work," says Russell Foster, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford. "How the nerve cells of the visual system work out that an object is approaching represents a very old question in neuroscience." Journal reference: Nature Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1038/nn.2389 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 13246 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Laura Sanders Sinking blocks and clearing lines in Tetris may pay off with more than just a high score. Playing the classic shape-fitting computer game, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, for just three months may boost the size and efficiency of parts of the brain, a study published September 1 in BMC Research Notes finds. “This is a fascinating result,” comments Pascale Michelon of Washington University in St. Louis. “It confirms how plastic the brain is.” Brain scans revealed that certain regions of gray matter — an information-processing mix of brain cells and capillaries — grew thicker in 15 adolescent girls who had played Tetris for three months. On average, these participants played for just 1.5 hours per week. “Brain structure is much more dynamic than had been appreciated,” says Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine, who coauthored the report with collaborators from McGill University in Montreal and the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque. Brains of 11 girls who had not played the game showed no such increase. (Girls were chosen because they were less likely than boys to have extensive video game–playing experience, which might have thrown off the results, Haier says.) In another test, the researchers used functional MRI to monitor brain activity during Tetris play. For the girls who had played Tetris, researchers found that some parts of the brain showed less activity than three months earlier, when the girls were Tetris novices. Brain activity of girls who had not played Tetris stayed the same over the three months. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13245 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By John Cloud Teenagers are a famously reckless species. They floor the gas and experiment with drugs and play with guns; according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures, more than 16,000 young people die each year from unintentional injuries. The most common-sense explanation for teens' carelessness is that their brains just aren't developed enough to know better. But new research suggests that in the case of some teens, the culprit is just the opposite: the brain matures not too slowly but, perhaps, too quickly. In a paper just published in PLoS ONE — a journal of the Public Library of Science — a team led by psychiatrist Gregory Berns of Emory University in Atlanta shows that adolescents who engage in more dangerous activities have white-matter pathways that appear more mature than those of risk-averse youths. White matter is essentially the brain's wiring — the neural strands that connect the various gray-matter regions, where the actual nerve cells reside, that are otherwise independent of one another. Maturation of white matter is important because it increases the brain's processing speed; nerve impulses travel faster in mature white matter. Berns and his colleagues recruited 91 kids ages 12 to 18 and asked them to fill out a questionnaire about their tendency to engage in behaviors such as driving without a license, having unprotected sex and using drugs. Then they had the kids undergo a relatively new kind of brain scan called diffusion tensor imaging, a type of magnetic resonance imaging that is used to look at dense tissues like white matter. After analyzing the scans, the authors found a strong correlation between how risky the students described their behavior to be and how sophisticated their white matter was. The more mature the look of the brain, the more risk-taking the teenager tended to report. © 2009 Time Inc.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13244 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey Mice with a mutation in an immune gene don’t get fat, they burn it. A gene that helps regulate inflammation also stops fat cells from wasting energy. When the gene, called I kappa B kinase epsilon or IKKε, is missing, mice turn a high-fat diet into heat instead of body fat, a new study in the Sept. 4 Cell shows. If the gene works the same way in humans as in mice, it could be a new target for antiobesity drugs. Scientists previously learned that low-level inflammation produced by obesity could trigger type 2 diabetes. But the details of the connection are still unclear, says Alan Saltiel, a cell biologist and endocrinologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In the new study, Saltiel and his colleagues fed mice a high-fat diet and discovered that levels of IKKε were elevated in the liver and fat tissue of the mice, compared with mice on a regular chow diet. IKKε is known to be involved in regulating inflammation, and the researchers thought the molecule might be the link between diet and diabetes that they were looking for. “What I expected was that if we knocked out this gene we’d get rid of the link between obesity and diabetes,” by eliminating inflammation, Saltiel says. He didn’t suspect that the connection would be severed further up the chain — preventing mice from getting obese in the first place. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13243 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway WITH "hormone-free", "cage-free" and "antibiotic-free" becoming common labels on our supermarket shelves, might "pain-free" be the next sticker slapped onto a rump roast? As unlikely as that may seem, progress in neuroscience and genetics in recent years makes it a very real possibility. In fact, according to one philosopher, we have an ethical duty to consider the option. "If we can't do away with factory farming, we should at least take steps to minimise the amount of suffering that is caused," says Adam Shriver, a philosopher at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. In a provocative paper published this month, Shriver contends that genetically engineered pain-free animals are the most acceptable alternative (Neuroethics, DOI: 10.1007/s12152-009-9048-6). "I'm offering a solution where you could still eat meat but avoid animal suffering." I'm offering a solution where you could still eat meat but avoid animal suffering Humans consume nearly 300 million tonnes of meat each year. Our appetite for flesh has risen by 50 per cent since the 1960s, and the trend looks set to continue. Most of this will likely come from factory farms, notorious for cramped quarters and ill treatment of animals. Battery farm chickens, for instance, routinely have part of their beaks removed without anaesthetic or pain relief to prevent them from pecking their neighbours. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Animal Rights; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 13242 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Liz Else AT THE bottom of Pandora's box was hope - a thought worth hanging onto when reading about psychiatry. But read we should, since up to a third of us may at some time sport a label from the psychiatrists' bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM). And the World Health Organization reckons that by 2020 depression will be the second largest contributor to the global burden of disease. Treatment and its failures are the burden of Irving Kirsch's The Emperor's New Drugs and Richard Bentall's Doctoring the Mind. The books' subtitles signal intent: Kirsch's is a ballistic "Exploding the antidepressant myth". Bentall's, interestingly, differs between US and UK editions: "Why psychiatric treatments fail" for the UK, and "Is our current treatment of mental illness really any good?" for the US. The latter's tentative tone may be a wise move since the US psychiatric community seems to be in even more serious meltdown than its British counterpart. Big Pharma faces legal action over the effects of antidepressants, Congress is demanding financial transparency from psychiatrists working on the DSM V due out in 2011, individuals scour the net for help, and activists struggle to find viable alternatives to drugs. Bentall's book is a shorter, more accessible version of his Madness Explained (Penguin, 2004) and is full of stories about his patients. As a therapist, Bentall is a gentle, non-judging voice; as a polemicist, though, he is deeply unimpressed with psychiatry's progress. We are, he says, still attached to the "myth" of mental illnesses as brain disease, and despite claims of dramatic advances, patients are doing no better than they did 100 years ago. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 13241 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Sam Kean When we eat may be just as important as what we eat. A new study shows that mice that eat when they should be sleeping gain more weight than mice that eat at normal hours. Another study sheds light on why we pack on the pounds in the first place. Whether these studies translate into therapies that help humans beat obesity remains to be seen, but they give scientists clues about the myriad factors that they must take into account. Observations of overnight workers have shown that eating at night disrupts metabolism and the hormones that signal we're sated. But no one had done controlled studies on this connection until now. Biologist Fred Turek of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and graduate student Deanna Arble examined the link between a high-fat diet and what time of day mice eat. A control group of six nocturnal mice ate their pellets (60% fat by calories, mostly lard) during the night. Another group of six ate the same meal during the day, Turek says, which disrupts their circadian rhythm--the body's normal 24-hour cycle. After 6 weeks, the off-schedule mice weighed almost 20% more than the controls, Turek and Arble report today in Obesity, supporting the idea that consuming calories when you should be sleeping is harmful. Turek and Arble acknowledge that the disrupted mice ate a tad more and were a tad more sluggish, but the differences could not account for all of the weight gain. © 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Obesity; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 13240 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By John Cloud Why is it so uncomfortable to stand really close to a stranger? Sure, there are the potentially icky things. Sometimes an elevator car is so crowded that you can smell a fellow rider's shampoo or chewing gum (or worse). But even when a stranger is perfectly groomed, it's usually a bit revolting to be pressed against him in public. Evolution seems to have programmed this discomfort via a brain structure called the amygdalae, a pair of almond-shaped brain regions deep within each temporal lobe that control fear and the processing of emotion. It's your amygdalae that keep you from getting so close to another person that he could easily reach out, gouge an eye, and then drag your woman off by her hair. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2008.) So what happens if you disable the amygdalae? This is not something you could (ethically) do to a research subject, but scientists have been studying a 42-year-old woman who has such severe damage to her amygdalae — due to a rare genetic condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease, which causes calcification in the temporal lobes — that they have stopped functioning. The patient's identity isn't public, but neuroscientists call her SM, and a new paper in the journal Nature Neuroscience reports the results of experiments judging her conception of personal space. A team of scientists from Caltech put SM through a series of tests in which they asked her to indicate the position at which she became uncomfortable as another woman, a researcher, approached her. SM's preferred personal distance was 1.1 ft. (0.34 m), about half the preferred distance (2 ft., or 0.64 m) of a group of comparison subjects. © 2009 Time Inc.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 13239 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS MANY of the nearly 30 million Americans who suffer from migraines end up feeling like guinea pigs. Chronic patients — those who are laid low 15 or more days a month — often cycle through drug after drug in search of relief. They also contend with side effects like mental sluggishness and stomach upset. Treatment involves guesswork because doctors have not pinpointed what causes migraines, nor do they know which drugs will best help which patients. “It can be a merry-go-round going from medication to medication in pursuit of control,” said Dr. Roger K. Cady, the vice president of the board for the National Headache Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to patient education. No wonder that earlier this month, news of a surgical “cure” that touts a high success rate ricocheted worldwide. The double-blind study, published in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, found that more than 80 percent of patients who underwent surgery in one of three “trigger sites” significantly reduced their number of headaches compared with more than 55 percent of the group who had sham surgery. More than half of the patients with the real surgery reported a “complete elimination” of headaches compared with about 4 percent of the placebo group. Forehead lifts are cosmetic procedures that plastic surgeons typically perform to smooth furrowed brows. But a decade ago, after some of his patients reported that their migraines improved post-operation, Dr. Bahman Guyuron, a plastic surgeon and the lead author of the study, began to search for a surgical solution that could address migraine trigger points — which he defines as where the headache begins and settles — in the forehead, temples and the back of the head. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 13238 - Posted: 06.24.2010

An injectable hydrogel could aid recovery from brain injury by helping stimulate tissue growth at the site of the wound, researchers say. Research on rats suggests the gel, made from synthetic and natural sources, may spur growth of stem cells in the brain. The gel has been developed by Dr Ning Zhang at Clemson University, South Carolina, who presented her work to a conference on military health research. She predicted the gel may be ready for human testing in about three years. Following a brain injury the tissues tend to swell up and this causes the loss of even more cells, compounding the damage caused by the original wound. The standard treatments attempt to minimise this secondary damage at the site of the injury, for instance by lowering the temperature or relieving the build up of pressure. However, their impact is often limited. Scientists believe that transplanting donor brain cells into the wound to repair tissue damage is potentially a more productive approach. But while this method has had some success in treating some central nervous system diseases, it has produced very limited results when used to treat brain injuries. The donor cells do not tend to thrive at the site of injury, or to stimulate repair. This could be due to inflammation and scarring at the injury site, and the lack of supportive tissue and blood supply to provide the necessary nutrients. Researchers say the advantage of the new gel, which is injected into the injury in liquid form, is that it can be loaded with different chemicals to stimulate various biological processes. (C)BBC

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 13237 - Posted: 09.03.2009

A British study has cast doubt on the supposed link between cannabis use and schizophrenia, but at least one Australian researcher says the study needs more evidence. Previous research has suggested cannabis use increases the risk of being diagnosed with either psychosis or schizophrenia. This latest study, led by Dr. Martin Frisher of Keele University, examined the records of 600,000 patients aged between 16 and 44, but failed to find a similar link. "An important limitation of many studies is that they have failed to distinguish the direction of association between cannabis use and psychosis," the authors write in the September edition of the journal Schizophrenia Research. They point out that "although using cannabis is associated with a greater risk of developing psychosis, there is also evidence of increased cannabis use following psychosis onset." Frisher and colleagues compared the trends of cannabis use with general practitioner records of schizophrenia and psychosis. They argue that if cannabis use does cause schizophrenia, an increase in cannabis use should be followed by an increase in the incidence of schizophrenia. © CBC 2009

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13236 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Constance Holden The two sides of the brain are responsible for different tasks in many animals. In people, for example, the left side is usually the language center, whereas the right side handles more visual and spatial chores. Now, research on parrots shows that this separation increases brainpower. For many years, researchers thought that the division of labor in the brain, known as cerebral lateralization, was unique to humans. But recent research has shown that such lateralization is actually pervasive in vertebrates. A leading theory suggests that the attribute leads to faster, more accurate problem-solving. The theory holds true for minnows--the ones whose brains are lateralized are better at catching shrimp while simultaneously keeping an eye out for predators--but many other species haven't been tested. Among birds, parrots and crows are renowned for their cleverness. So behavioral ecologist Culum Brown and biologist Maria Magat of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, tested 40 parrots from eight different Australian species. Just as right-handedness indicates left-brain dominance in most humans, brain laterality was determined in birds by observing which eye each bird used to fixate on a piece of food and which foot grabbed it. Each bird received a laterality score ranging from 0 (no preference) to 5 (strongly lateralized). The parrots were then given two tests. One involved picking out seeds from a background of similar-looking pebbles; their performance was evaluated by dividing the number of seeds consumed by the number of pecks. The more challenging task required birds to obtain food hanging below their perch on a 50-centimeter-long string. Hauling up the prize is a problem requiring a lot of beak, foot, and eye coordination. © 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Laterality
Link ID: 13235 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Lynne Peeples Music is known to induce terror and tears, as well as inspire dance. Even basic human speech itself is laced with emotional direction: a musical pattern of long drawn out sounds versus short brief ones can be the difference between calming and exciting a child. Might it then be possible for a composer to manipulate an audience's emotions with some carefully chosen notes? That was the question posed by David Teie, a composer and cellist in the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C.. Little did he know that the query would lead him to write shrilly monkey music, and open a new door into animal communication and the evolutionary roots of human speech. Teie did know that seeking an answer from human subjects wouldn't work—children form emotional associations with music early on, which leads to biased responses throughout life. He needed a species that didn't necessarily listen to music, but still had a rich vocal repertoire. The obvious choice: monkeys. But a problem arose there, too. Monkeys not only don't listen to our music, they seemed to despise it. In fact, prior research had found that cotton-top tamarins, a South American monkey, preferred silence over both German technopop and Mozart. It was still possible that monkeys did like music, but perhaps just didn't share human tastes. So the musician teamed up with Charles Snowdon, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, to compose some monkey music and watch to see how tamarins would respond. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 13234 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nathan Seppa Children born to women who have achieved drastic weight loss through stomach surgery are healthier than children born to severely obese moms, a new study shows. The findings suggest that obesity creates an unhealthy environment for a fetus that has ramifications later on, scientists report in the November Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. “This is very important work,” says Dana Dabelea, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Colorado–Denver and the Colorado School of Public Health in Aurora. “This is the first proof that exposure to obesity in utero is associated with long-term effects,” she says. Severely obese women should be encouraged to lose weight before becoming pregnant, asserts study coauthor John Kral, a surgeon at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. Obese women who are interested in having kids and getting weight-loss surgery at some point in their lives should get the surgery first, he says. Kral collaborated with researchers at University of Laval in Quebec City in contacting 49 women who had given birth and had also undergone a specific type of obesity surgery. About half of the women had one child before surgery and another child after. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Obesity; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13233 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Claire Ainsworth AT 43 years old, New York chef Thomas Pallozzi-Haynes was morbidly obese and close to despair. While his initial weight gain had been triggered by type 2 diabetes, he now found himself in an endless cycle of failed diets and weight gain that ultimately caused him to balloon to 124 kilograms. The chef's long commute to work was a misery thanks to backache and gut cramps from his diabetes medication. Like many overweight people, he ran a daily gauntlet of judgemental comments from other people, and eventually struggled to walk, sleep and even breathe properly. "My biggest fear was that something would happen to me medically," he recalls. "How would I take care of my wife and child?" Pallozzi-Haynes's life turned a corner when he watched a TV documentary about gastric bypass surgery, designed to physically limit the amount of food that the stomach can hold and restrict the gut's absorption of nutrients. On 17 April Pallozzi-Haynes signed up for the operation. The surgery closes off most of the stomach, leaving only a sac about the size of a walnut to receive food. Then the stomach's exit is replumbed so that it connects to the gut further down (see diagram). Clearly these drastic procedures will cut your calorie intake, but here's the strange thing: the operation is much more successful than anyone could have expected. Even though they can't eat as much, people who have undergone surgery are not constantly ravenous, in stark contrast to those dieting through will power alone. It seems the gut normally secretes hormones that make us feel hungry or full, and bypass surgery ramps up production of the ones that make us feel full. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 13232 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Teenagers who have minor depression are at a higher risk of mental health problems later in life, a study says. Psychiatrists at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute spoke to 750 people. Anxiety, severe depression and eating disorders were all far more common in 20 and 30-year-olds who had had minor depression as adolescents, they found. The British Journal of Psychiatry report said further research was needed to unpick the reasons for the link. UK charities said specialist services for young people were vital. The study was based on interviews with 750 14 to 16-year-olds who were then assessed again as adults. It found that 8% of participants had minor depression as teenagers. By the time they got to their 20s and 30s, the risk of them having major depression was four times higher than those who did not have signs of minor depression at the first interview. There was a two-and-a-half times increased risk of agoraphobia, anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder and a threefold risk of anorexia or bulimia. The researchers defined minor depression as milder than clinical depression but lasting at least two weeks and including symptoms such as feeling down, losing interest in activities, sleeping problems and poor concentration. Study leader Dr Jeffrey Johnson said more research was needed to see if depression problems in teenagers were an early phase of major depressive disorder or if minor depression earlier in life contributed to the development of more serious problems later on. (C)BBC

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13231 - Posted: 09.01.2009

By BENEDICT CAREY If there is a society of expert sleepers out there, a cult of smug snoozers satisfied that they’re getting just the right number of restful hours a night, it must be a secretive one. Most people seem insecure about their sleep and willing to say so: they would like to get a little more; maybe they wish they could get by on less; they wonder if it’s deep enough. And they are pretty sure that being up at 2 a.m., pacing the TV room like a caged animal, cannot be good. Can it? In fact, no one really knows. Scientists aren’t sure why sleep exists at all, which has made it hard to explain the great diversity of sleeping habits and quirks in birds, fish and mammals of all kinds, including humans. Why should lions get 15 hours a night and giraffes just 5 — when it is the giraffes who will be running for their lives come hunting time? How on earth do migrating birds, in flight for days on end, sleep? Why is it that some people are early birds as young adults and night owls when they’re older? The answer may boil down to time management, according to a new paper in the August issue of the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience. In the paper, Jerome Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, argues that sleep evolved to optimize animals’ use of time, keeping them safe and hidden when the hunting, fishing or scavenging was scarce and perhaps risky. In that view, differences in sleep quality, up to and including periods of insomnia, need not be seen as problems but as adaptations to the demands of the environment. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Evolution
Link ID: 13230 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Carol and Dave Ochs What Carol remembers: I didn't think much of it when, one Thursday a few months ago, my husband asked me where he kept his vitamins. I thought he was joking when he asked me where he worked. What sort of annoying game was this, when I was scrambling to make breakfasts, pack lunches, feed the dog and get the kids to school? I didn't have time for 20 Questions. But then Dave asked again. And again. There was panic in his voice. "Where do I work?" It wasn't a joke. My husband was losing bits of his memory. * * * What Dave remembers: My day had started like any other in our house. I got dressed to work out, headed downstairs, rode the stationary bike for a half-hour or so, and then did some weight and resistance work. I remember doing abdominal crunches, and for some reason they were unusually hard that morning. I'd been an athlete, trained to fight through when the body struggled to find its rhythms, but this was tough and I was straining. That's the last memory my brain would make for the next six hours. I don't remember the end of my workout. I don't remember returning upstairs to ask for my vitamins. I don't remember panicking. I don't remember. Not then, not today. © 2009 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13229 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By DAN BARRY Within the chemotherapy alumni corps there exists a mutual respect not unlike the bond shared by veterans of war. Sometimes that respect is silently conveyed; not everyone wants to talk about it. And sometimes it is shared in the shorthand of the battle-hardened. Where? Esophagus. Who? Sloan-Kettering. What kind? Cisplatin, fluorouracil, Drano, Borax ... . Side effects? The usual: nausea, vomiting, hair loss. And the toes are still numb. Yeah. At this point the two chemo alums may begin to sense a phantom metallic taste at the back of their throat, a taste sometimes prompted by the intravenous infusion of the corrosive chemicals intended to save their lives. A strong drink might be in order; maybe two. With that first, taste-altering sip, the two might begin to discuss another side effect that has received attention lately, the one rudely called “chemo brain”: the cognitive fogginess that some patients experience after completing their regimen. That fogginess does not always completely lift, and oncologists are now taking seriously what they might once have dismissed as a complaint rooted in advanced age or cancer fatigue. For me, reading about chemo brain has resurrected that faint taste of metal. I underwent chemotherapy in 1999 and again in 2004, thanks to a profoundly unwelcome recurrence. Depending on one’s perspective, I was both unfortunate and fortunate. Unfortunate in that I endured all the concomitant fears and indignities, twice. Fortunate in that I had the option of chemotherapy, twice. Not all cancers respond; not everyone is so lucky. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 13228 - Posted: 06.24.2010