By Laura Sanders In 1985, Monday Night Football fans looked on as Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann was sacked. The collision was so forceful that it snapped Theismann’s leg, breaking like, as one fan put it, a “stale chopstick.” Most audience members likely empathized with Theismann’s pain, including people afflicted with a rare disorder that prevents them from feeling pain themselves, a new study suggests. Instead of using past experiences of feeling pain to commiserate, such people likely rely on the ability to imagine the pain of others, suggests the brain-imaging study, published online January 28 in Neuron. “This fascinating and well-conducted study” gives new insights into the relationship between pain and empathy, comments Marco Loggia of the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging in Charlestown, Mass. The study suggests that multiple brain regions, including regions involved in emotions, can be recruited to feel empathy for others’ pain. In future studies, Loggia says, it would be interesting to examine other cases when people are exposed to someone else’s feelings without ever having felt such feelings firsthand. “How can humans empathize with a dog that hurt its tail? How can a man understand menstrual pain?” Loggia asks. The answers, he proposes, may lie in the same regions of the brain that allow pain-insensitive people to empathize with others’ pain. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Emotions
Link ID: 12492 - Posted: 06.24.2010

(CNN) -- For years after his NFL career ended, Ted Johnson could barely muster the energy to leave his house. "I'd [leave to] go see my kids for maybe 15 minutes," said Johnson. "Then I would go back home and close the curtains, turn the lights off and I'd stay in bed. That was my routine for two years. "Those were bad days." These days, the former linebacker is less likely to recount the hundreds of tackles, scores of quarterback sacks or the three Super Bowl rings he earned as a linebacker for the New England Patriots. He is more likely to talk about suffering more than 100 concussions. "I can definitely point to 2002 when I got back-to-back concussions. That's where the problems started," said Johnson, who retired after those two concussions. "The depression, the sleep disorders and the mental fatigue." Until recently, the best medical definition for concussion was a jarring blow to the head that temporarily stunned the senses, occasionally leading to unconsciousness. It has been considered an invisible injury, impossible to test -- no MRI, no CT scan can detect it. © 2009 Cable News Network.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 12491 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Reducing what you eat by nearly a third may improve memory, according to German researchers. They introduced the diet to 50 elderly volunteers, then gave them a memory test three months later. The study, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, found significant improvements. However, a dietician said the reduction could harm health unless care was taken. There is growing interest in the potential benefits of calorie restricted diets, after research in animals suggested they might be able to improve lifespan and delay the onset of age-related disease. However, it is still not certain whether this would be the case in humans - and the the levels of "caloric restriction" involved are severe. The precise mechanism which may deliver these benefits is still being investigated, with theories ranging from a reduction in the production of "free radical" chemicals which can cause damage, to a fall in inflammation which can have the same result. The researchers from the University of Munster carried out the human study after results in rats suggested that memory could be boosted by a diet containing 30% fewer calories than normal. The study volunteers, who had an average age of 60, were split into three groups - the first had a balanced diet containing the normal number of calories, the second had a similar diet but with a higher proportion of unsaturated fatty acids, such as those found in olive oil and fish. The final group were given the calorie restricted diet. After three months, there was no difference in memory scores in the first two groups, but the 50 in the third group performed better. They also showed other signs of physical improvement, with decreased levels of insulin and fewer signs of inflammation. The researchers said that these changes could explain the better memory scores, by keeping brain cells in better health. (C)BBC

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Obesity
Link ID: 12490 - Posted: 01.27.2009

Reaching for a cigarette to cope with a flashback is all too common among sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but scientists say that although the nicotine hit may feel good, its brain action probably makes PTSD worse in the long run. Here's the rub: At least half of PTSD sufferers smoke, and others wind up dependent on alcohol, anti-anxiety pills, sometimes even illegal drugs. Yet, too few clinics treat both PTSD and addictions at the same time, despite evidence they should. Now studies are recruiting PTSD patients — from New England drug-treatment centres to veterans clinics in North Carolina and Washington — to determine what type of combination care works best. "It's kind of a clinical myth that you can only do one at a time or should only do one at a time," says Duke University PTSD specialist Dr. Jean Beckham, a psychologist at the Durham, N.C., Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center. "Everybody's afraid to have their patients quit smoking because they're afraid they're going to get worse. There's not a lot of empirical data about that." Beckham's research on how to break the nicotine-and-PTSD cycle raises a provocative question for a tobacco-prone military: Are people at higher risk of developing PTSD if they smoke before they experience the violent event or episode? © CBC 2009

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stress
Link ID: 12489 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SUSAN OKIE BALTIMORE — One sister is 14; the other is 9. They are a vibrant pair: the older girl is high-spirited but responsible, a solid student and a devoted helper at home; her sister loves to read and watch cooking shows, and she recently scored well above average on citywide standardized tests. There would be nothing remarkable about these two happy, normal girls if it were not for their mother’s history. Yvette H., now 38, admits that she used cocaine (along with heroin and alcohol) while she was pregnant with each girl. “A drug addict,” she now says ruefully, “isn’t really concerned about the baby she’s carrying.” When the use of crack cocaine became a nationwide epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s, there were widespread fears that prenatal exposure to the drug would produce a generation of severely damaged children. Newspapers carried headlines like “Cocaine: A Vicious Assault on a Child,” “Crack’s Toll Among Babies: A Joyless View” and “Studies: Future Bleak for Crack Babies.” But now researchers are systematically following children who were exposed to cocaine before birth, and their findings suggest that the encouraging stories of Ms. H.’s daughters are anything but unusual. So far, these scientists say, the long-term effects of such exposure on children’s brain development and behavior appear relatively small. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 12488 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas -- Music appreciation begins in the womb, suggests new research that found newborns can feel the beat, even in their sleep. The findings indicate beat perception, and possibly other aspects of music appreciation, are innate, which in turn may mean musicality could carry some evolutionary advantage for all humans. "Our results suggest that beat detection does not require voluntary attention," said lead author Istvan Winkler. "We did not test infants when they were awake," added Winkler, a researcher at the Institute for Psychology at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. "This is because newborns are usually restless when they are awake, often hungry and crying." Winkler and his team presented 14 healthy newborn infants, between 37 and 40 weeks old, with an R&B-style music snippet composed of snare, bass and hi-hat. Every so often they would break the rhythm by removing a downbeat. The infants were outfitted with non-invasive scalp electrodes that measured their brain activity while the music played. According to a paper published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers found that omitting the downbeat elicited brain activity in the newborns associated with a violation of sensory expectations. Instead of hearing something like, "boom chicka boom chicka boom..." the infants heard something akin to, "boom chicka boom chicka chicka...," which the auditory and frontal cortex parts of their brains registered. © 2009 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Hearing; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 12487 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Janet Raloff To stay healthy, the body needs its zzz’s. But independent of slumber, human health also appears to require plenty of darkness — especially at night. Or so suggests a pair of new cancer studies. One found that among postmenopausal women, the lower the overnight production of melatonin — a brain hormone secreted at night, especially during darkness — the higher the incidence of breast cancer. The second study correlated elevated prostate cancer incidence around the world with places that have the brightest signatures of light in satellite imagery. Trends seen in both studies bolster animal data indicating that natural nighttime peaks in blood concentrations of melatonin, which tend to occur during sleep, depress the growth of the hormonally sensitive cancers. Light will depress the body’s natural secretion of that hormone, whether someone is awake or asleep. In 2001, Eva S. Schernhammer of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and her colleagues found an elevated risk of breast cancer among women who worked night shifts. The data, gleaned from participants in the long-running Nurses’ Health Study, fit with the idea that the light encountered while working nocturnal hours would have suppressed the women’s melatonin production. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 12486 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Brian Alexander Weight gain is not always just a matter of lacking willpower, but has more to do with how your brain reacts to what it sees, according to a new study by neuroscientists. For some people, just looking at tasty images of food is enough to make them want to eat. Individuals who are more susceptible to cravings after smelling or seeing food — even if they aren’t hungry — have what researchers call “external food sensitivity,” or EFS. In the new study, conducted by scientists at the British Medical Research Council, brain scans revealed how this food sensitivity influences people's eating habits. A recent U.S. government study found that the number of obese American adults now outweighs the number of those who are merely overweight. While many factors contribute to excessive weight gain — from diet and cultural changes to decreased physical activity — there's still a prevalent attitude that obesity is the fat person's fault. The researchers Andrew Calder, Luca Passamonti and James Rowe were trying to determine why some people are more likely to overeat. What they found was, “people who appear to be more sensitive to food signals have different wiring in their brains,” said obesity expert Marc-Andre Cornier, M.D., a University of Colorado endocrinologist who was not associated with the trial. © 2009 msnbc.com.

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 12485 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Just one brain cell is capable of holding fleeting memories vital for our everyday life, according to US scientists. A study of mouse brain cells revealed how they could keep information stored for as long as a minute. A UK specialist said that understanding these short-term memories might help unlock the secrets of Alzheimer's Disease. The finding was reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The difference between the brain's long-term and short-term memory has been likened to the RAM of a computer and the hard-drive. To perform normal functions, we need the ability to store, quickly and reliably, large amounts of data, but only a small amount of this needs to be retained in the longer term. Scientists have spent decades working out which parts of the brain are responsible for these functions, and how cells manage this feat. Original theories suggested the memories were retained by multiple cells forming "circuits" around which electrical impulses were fired for the necessary period. More recent ideas have centred around the concept that even an individual cell could somehow hold on to information. Researchers from the University of Texas Southwestern looked at brain cells taken from mice using tiny electrodes to measure their function. They found that a particular component of the cells in question, a chemical receptor, which, when switched on, tells the cell to start an internal signal system that holds the "memory" in place. The next step, they say, is to find out more about this internal system so that it could be targeted by drugs with the aim of improving memory. Dr Don Cooper, the lead researcher, said: "If we can identify and manipulate the molecular components of memory, we can develop drugs that boost the ability to maintain this memory trace to hopefully allow a person to complete tasks without being distracted." (C)BBC

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 12484 - Posted: 01.26.2009

by Laura Spinney JILL, 19, from Michigan, wants to go to university to read political science. There is just one problem: she keeps failing the mathematics requirement. "I am an exceptional student in all other subjects, so my consistent failure at math made me feel very stupid," she says. In fact, she stopped going to her college mathematics class after a while because, she says, "I couldn't take the daily reminder of what an idiot I was." Last November, Jill got herself screened for learning disabilities. She found that while her IQ is above average, her numerical ability is equivalent to that of an 11-year-old because she has something called dyscalculia. The diagnosis came partly as a relief, because it explained a lot of difficulties she had in her day-to-day life. She can't easily read a traditional, analogue clock, for example, and always arrives 20 minutes early for fear of being late. When it comes to paying in shops or restaurants, she hands her wallet to a friend and asks them to do the calculation, knowing that she is likely to get it wrong. Welcome to the stressful world of dyscalculia, where numbers rule because inhabitants are continually trying to avoid situations in which they have to perform even basic calculations. Despite affecting about 5 per cent of people - roughly the same proportion as are dyslexic - dyscalculia has long been neglected by science, and people with it incorrectly labelled as stupid. Now, though, researchers are starting to get to the root of the problem, bringing hope that dyscalculic children will start to get specialist help just as youngsters with dyslexia do. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Intelligence
Link ID: 12483 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tony Dokoupil America's all-time favorite pill isn't for birth control, according to historian Andrea Tone. It's a potent little tranquilizer called Miltown, after Milltown, the New Jersey hamlet where it was manufactured in 1955. Despite virtually zero advertising, the release of the original "mother's little helper" set off a consumer stampede. By 1957, Americans had filled 36 million prescriptions for Miltown, more than a billion pills had been manufactured and these so-called "peace pills" accounted for one third of all prescriptions. The drug's popularity has fallen off a cliff since the 1960s, when studies found that it caused psychological dependence. But it nonetheless launched the age of psychiatric cure-alls. Dozens of "lifestyle drugs" (like Xanax and Paxil, which also treat anxiety) have followed in its wake, raising a perennial question: do we actually need these medications, or does Big Pharma push them on us? Critics argue that the push is more like an aggressive shove. Drug companies spent more than $4 billion on syrupy and suggestive consumer ads last year, up from less than $1 billion in 1997. And more than three quarters of that cash went for television ads, which critics have blamed for trivializing the serious decision to take prescription drugs. Last year House Democrats tried (and failed) to pass a bill banning TV ads during a drug's first three years on the market. . But historian Tone differs with those who blame our pop-a-pill mentality on marketing hype and harried doctors too eager to write prescriptions. In "The Age of Anxiety" (Basic Books), her smart and crisp history of American tranquilizer use, the McGill University professor finds that demand for Miltown—the first lifestyle drug—was surprisingly patient driven. Tone spoke with NEWSWEEK's Tony Dokoupil. © 2009 Newsweek, Inc.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 12482 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given the green light to human clinical trials of an embryonic stem-cell-based therapy for spinal cord injuries, a biotechnology firm said Friday. The regulator has given permission to Geron Corp. of Menlo Park, Calif., to inject embryonic stem cells into eight to 10 people recently paralyzed due to spinal cord injuries. The research aims to regrow nerve tissue. President Barack Obama, who took office on Tuesday, was expected to reverse former president George W. Bush's executive order that restricted federal funding on research involving human embryonic stem cells. Advocates of embryonic stem cell research say it could lead to potential treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and cancer by restoring organ and tissue function. Scientists say embryonic stem cells are the most useful type because they have the potential to become any type of cell within the body. But the research is controversial since embryos are destroyed to obtain the stem cells. Dr. Thomas Okarma, president and CEO of Geron, said the injections will be made in the spine. Several medical centres around the U.S. will participate in the research, which he said has not received U.S. government funding. © CBC 2009

Keyword: Regeneration; Stem Cells
Link ID: 12481 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Andy Coghlan Seven of the UK's most active animal rights extremists were jailed on Wednesday, receiving sentences of up to 11 years. "These sentences signal the end of the long dark era of animal rights extremism," said Simon Festing of the pro-research organisation, Understanding Animal Research. Globally, however, the situation is far from resolved. In the US, attacks are intensifying and researchers are expecting the new administration to clamp down on offenders. In the UK, the activists were tried for their parts in a six-year campaign to close Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), a company based near Cambridge that undertakes animal research for pharmaceutical companies. The activists' campaign of terror and blackmail, orchestrated by an organisation called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), went well beyond HLS itself, targeting any companies, contractors, shareholders, or individuals with connections to the company. According to Alastair Nisbet of the UK Crown Prosecution Service's Wessex Complex Casework Unit, the conspirators threatened to continue subjecting their victims to blackmail and intimidation unless they agreed to stop working with HLS. The harassment included noisy protests outside business premises; abusive telephone calls, emails and letters; threats of damage to property and physical assault; as well as false allegations of child abuse, hoax bombs, demonstrations and damage to the homes of targets through so-called "home visits". They also sent victims used tampons said to be soaked in HIV-infected blood. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 12480 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway Every parent thinks their baby is adorable but if you want to know the truth, ask a new mother. Young women are apparently much better at assessing cuteness than older women and men of all ages. By manipulating facial features such as the size of the eyes and foreheads and cheek plumpness, researchers created super-cute baby faces, looks that only a mother could love, as well as faces in between. Baby faces Reiner Sprengelmeyer of the University of St Andrews in the UK, and his colleagues then presented dozens of volunteers with sets of two baby faces, one made artificially cuter than the other. In 200 trials two dozen women aged 19 to 26 always performed well above chance in determining which face was cutest even when the "cuteness" difference between the faces was small. Older women and men and young men performed far worse on the trials, especially when faces differed little. Interestingly, women aged 45 to 51 nearly equalled younger women in accuracy. Since many of these women are on the cusp of menopause, Sprengelmeyer's team suggest that female reproductive hormones play a role. Of course, oestrogen and progesterone levels plummet after menopause. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 12479 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Sunita Reed In 2000, Columbia University psychiatrist Eric Kandel won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his contributions to the understanding of the neurobiology of memory. But he feels that not enough progress has been made to help those with mental illness. “We’re desperately in need of drugs for the mentally ill,” Kandel says. “One way to do this is to find new drug targets.” Kandel and his colleague Daniela Pollak’s recent findings may have opened the door for such targets. They used mice as models to study depression and ways to treat it. Mice are reluctant but good swimmers. When they are placed in a pool of water they immediately paddle about. “So it swims and it swims and it swims and after a while it sees this is hopeless,” Kandel explains. “I’m not getting anywhere. I can’t get out of this thing, and it gives up and just floats.” This despondent behavior is a mouse model of depression. Then Pollak gave one group of mice the drug fluoxetine, the generic version of the commonly used antidepressant Prozac, and tested their behavior compared to the mice that did not get the drug. She found that the medicated mice continued to swim and showed reduced signs of depression. Previous studies had found that the same antidepressant also causes newborn cells to grow in certain areas of the brain. ©2009 ScienCentral

Keyword: Depression; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 12478 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Simon Baron Cohen Your front-page article on 12 January was given the headline "New research brings autism screening closer to reality" and the strapline "Call for ethics debate as tests in the womb could allow termination of pregnancies". It showed a photo of a foetus, which was given the caption, "The discovery of a high level of testosterone in prenatal tests is an indicator of autism." And inside the paper a double-page spread was devoted to the details of the study, and given the headline "Disorder linked to high levels of testosterone in the womb". All four of these statements are inaccurate. The new research was not about autism screening; the new research has not discovered that a high level of testosterone in prenatal tests is an indicator of autism; autism spectrum disorder has not been linked to high levels of testosterone in the womb; and tests (of autism) in the womb do not allow termination of pregnancies. To be fair to the reporter, Sarah Boseley, the content of her articles was mostly correct. But the headlines and photo captions have led to emails from hundreds of worried parents of children with autism erroneously believing that our research is being conducted with a view to wanting to terminate children with autism in the womb - a nasty and sinister example of eugenics that my co-authors and I oppose. The Guardian was reporting on our new study in the British Journal of Psychology that found a correlation between levels of foetal testosterone (FT) and the number of autistic traits a child shows at the age of eight. The study was not about prenatal screening for autism, and indeed did not even test children with autism. © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 12477 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Joel Garreau You used to need hubris, millions of dollars and the support of a great research university to imagine building a replacement for the human eye. Now it's become dream and quest material for artists and tinkerers. Tanya Vlach, 35, of San Francisco, wants a new computer eye to replace the natural one she lost in a car accident. So, being the product of her age, she put a request for help out on the Web. Sure enough, hundreds of young techies quickly responded. Might they fit a cellphone camera, some inquired, into Vlach's beautiful but merely decorative blue acrylic orb? Here we find the intersection of two great American myths. One involves filling a void by searching for the future inside ourselves -- out on some new frontier. The other connects to the inventor as hero -- from Edison and his light bulb to the young creators of the computer revolution in their California garages -- the lone rangers who changed the world. This union occurs now because enhancing the human body has evolved to the point where it can be an art project, an amazing hack and a search for identity -- a way to define your life. This is where it gets interesting. © 2009 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 12476 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Ian Sample, science correspondent Acupuncture can help people who suffer from headaches and migraines, even when the needles are put in the "wrong" place, according to a major review of medical studies. Volunteers who were treated with the traditional Chinese technique, in which thin needles are pushed into the skin at specific points, had fewer headaches and migraines, and experienced less pain if a headache came on, researchers found. Scientists working for the Cochrane Collaboration, which publishes gold standard reviews on the effectiveness of medical treatments, confirmed the beneficial effect of acupuncture after analysing 33 separate studies involving nearly 7,000 patients in total. Researchers led by Klaus Linde at the centre for complementary medicine research at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, reviewed published evidence for acupuncture as a treatment for tension headaches, which usually affect both sides of the head, and migraines, which tend to affect only one side. Eleven trials involving 2,317 patients found many experienced fewer headaches after having acupuncture, though a similar improvement was seen in those who had "fake" acupuncture, where the needles were either inserted at incorrect points or did not puncture the skin. © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 12475 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nathan Seppa People who don’t typically get distressed by routine events that might unnerve others seem to have a reduced likelihood of developing dementia in old age, concludes a study of elderly Swedish people published in the Jan. 20 Neurology. Physician Laura Fratiglioni of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and her colleagues studied 506 people in their 80s who didn’t have dementia upon enrolling in a long-term medical study. All participants agreed to take personality tests, filling out a questionnaire that assessed what scientists call neuroticism, a state of being easily distressed. The questions also revealed how extroverted a person is. Interviews of the participants determined whether a person was likely to be socially active or to live a more isolated life. Over the six-year study, 144 of the participants developed dementia. An analysis of the personality and lifestyle data suggested that people with low levels of neuroticism and high scores on extrovert traits were the least likely to develop dementia. When addressed in the context of an individual’s lifestyle — ranging from social butterfly to shut-in — the findings suggested that having a socially integrated lifestyle may provide a buffer against the pro-dementia risk of being easily distressed. But in people leading more isolated lives, having low neuroticism scores still seemed to offer some protection against dementia. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Alzheimers; Stress
Link ID: 12474 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Greg Miller When studying the neurological basis for everything from how we deal with the loss of a loved one to why we crave certain foods, scientists have increasingly turned to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). As it's most often used, the technique measures blood oxygenation in the brain--and the assumption has always been that areas with more oxygenated blood are areas where neurons are busily firing away. But a new study suggests that's not always true, adding an unexpected wrinkle to this burgeoning field of research. The surprising findings come from experiments with two monkeys. Neuroscientists Yevgeniy Sirotin and Aniruddha Das at Columbia University trained each monkey to monitor a tiny light in an otherwise dark room. When the light turned red, as it did at regular, predictable intervals, a monkey could earn a juice reward by fixing its gaze on the light for a few seconds. Microelectrodes placed in the primary visual cortex, the first way station for visual information in the cerebral cortex, picked up only a steady, quiet chatter of neural activity while the monkeys performed the task. (The small light provided very little visual stimulation, Das says, akin to a single star in an otherwise black sky.) But optical measurements of blood volume and oxygenation told a different story, the researchers report in tomorrow's issue of Nature. These two hemodynamic measures rose and fell in the visual cortex throughout the experiment, repeatedly peaking a few seconds before the monkey had to fix its gaze on the light. The findings indicate that the flow of oxygenated blood to a particular brain region doesn't just increase in response to neural activity but can actually anticipate an expected task, even when nearby neurons are relatively quiet, Das says. That suggests that the association between neural firing and hemodynamics isn't as close as many researchers had assumed. © 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Brain imaging; Glia
Link ID: 12473 - Posted: 06.24.2010