The brains of people who commit suicide are chemically different to those who die from other causes, a Canadian study has suggested. Researchers analysed brain tissue from 20 dead people and, in those who killed themselves, they found a higher rate of a process that affects behaviour. Writing in Biological Psychology, they said it appeared environmental factors played a part in the changes. And they said the discovery opened up a new avenue of research. The researchers, from the University of Western Ontario, Carleton University and University of Ottawa, analysed tissue from 10 people who had a serious depressive disorder and had committed suicide and 10 who had died suddenly from other causes, such as a heart attack. They found that the DNA in the suicide group was being chemically modified by a process normally involved in regulating cell development, called methylation. It is methylation which shuts down the unwanted genes in a cell - so the necessary genes are expressed to make a cell a skin cell rather than, for example, a heart cell. The rate of methylation in the suicide brains was almost 10 times that of the other group, and the gene that was being shut down was a chemical message receptor that plays a major role in regulating behaviour. In the paper, the researchers suggest this reprogramming could contribute to the "protracted and recurrent nature of major depressive disorder". Previous research has suggested that changes to the methylation process can be caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors called epigenetics. Dr Michael Poulter, who led the research, said: "The whole idea that the genome is so malleable in the brain is surprising, because brain cells don't divide. You get dealt your neurons at the start of life, so the idea that there are still epigenetic mechanisms going on is pretty unusual." (C)BBC

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 12172 - Posted: 10.27.2008

By Claudia Kalb Paul Offit—salt-and-pepper hair, wire-rimmed glasses, Phillies fan—hardly seems like the kind of guy who'd receive a death threat. He's a father who likes to hang out with his teenage kids, a doctor who wears khakis until they're frayed. But Offit, chief of infectious diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the nation's most outspoken advocate for childhood immunizations, is at the center of a white-hot medical controversy. He believes passionately in the safety of vaccines; his enemies, many of them parents who blame these shots for their children's autism, do not. Offit says he's been harassed in public, and received threatening letters, e-mails and phone calls. One August morning, his wife, Bonnie, sent him a message before he spoke at a New York press conference promoting vaccination. Worried that protesters rallying outside the event might turn violent, she warned: "Be careful." Immunologists were hardly the target of such wrath when Offit, 57, entered the field almost 30 years ago. But today, frustrations and fears about a mysterious brain disorder that strikes up to one in 150 kids have given rise to the most angry and divisive debate in medicine: do vaccines trigger autism? Offit, a vaccine inventor, says "no." His critics, who vilify him routinely on autism Web sites, say the question is still very much open. They think he's arrogant and a mouthpiece for Big Pharma. One recent post: "Offit should be prosecuted for crimes against our children." After the death threat—a man wrote, "I will hang you by your neck until you are dead"—an armed guard followed Offit to lunch during meetings at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. © 2008 Newsweek, Inc.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 12171 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Dominic Koole People are well used to seeing performance enhancing drugs in the world of sport, but now chemical enhancement is spreading to the world of academia as students go to extreme lengths to get the right grades. EPO. Nandrolone. THG. Ephedrine. Anybody who follows sport will have heard of these performance enhancing drugs, usually accompanied by the word "cheat". Now students are taking the same route, using illicit drugs to gain an advantage over their peers in the exams that will shape their lives. Students have long used plentiful cups of coffee, as well as caffeine in pill form, to stay up revising late into the night. But now some are going a step further and taking "study drugs". At the top of the list of study drugs are Ritalin, a drug prescribed to children who suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD), and Modafinil, a narcolepsy drug. If not prescribed, Ritalin is a class B drug in the UK, meaning possession can lead to a five-year prison sentence and dealing could put you behind bars for 14 years. Modafinil is also not available over the counter. So why are students taking them? Modafinil and Ritalin are drugs that stimulate the brain. They make people feel more awake and alert, and help control the behaviour and concentration of children with ADHD. "It helps me stay awake and stimulates my mind," says Linda - not her real name - who graduated from Manchester University in June. The 22-year-old psychology graduate took Modafinil with a group of friends several times while working on her dissertation. She used the drug to help her "pull all-nighters" and said that it allowed her to focus on her work for hours at a time. (C)BBC

Keyword: ADHD; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 12170 - Posted: 10.27.2008

The European drugs watchdog is recommending doctors do not prescribe the anti-obesity drug rimonabant, also known as Acomplia. The European Medicines Agency has said the risk of serious psychiatric problems and even suicide are too high. The EMEA says since at-risk patients cannot be identified, marketing of the drug should be suspended. Patients taking the drug should consult their doctor, but do not need to immediately stop taking the medication. Around 97,000 people in the UK who are obese or overweight have been prescribed rimonabant, which is used in conjunction with diet and exercise. And approximately 20,000 are currently taking the drug. It was approved for use by the NHS watchdog in England and Wales in June this year. There have always been concerns over the risks of depression and suicide associated with the drug, and in July last year, the EMEA warned it may be unsafe for patients also taking anti-depressants. Doctors were also told not to give it to patients with a history of major depression, and to be alert for new symptoms of depression in patients taking the drug. But data from more recent studies, and from Sanofi-Aventis itself, has shown there is around double the risk of psychiatric disorders in obese or overweight patients taking rimonabant compared to those taking dummy pills. And between June and August 2008, there were five suicides among patients taking part in a trial who were on the drug, compared with one among those taking the dummy version. (C)BBC

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 12169 - Posted: 10.25.2008

By GARDINER HARRIS Half of all American doctors responding to a nationwide survey say they regularly prescribe placebos to patients. The results trouble medical ethicists, who say more research is needed to determine whether doctors must deceive patients in order for placebos to work. The study involved 679 internists and rheumatologists chosen randomly from a national list of such doctors. In response to three questions included as part of the larger survey, about half reported recommending placebos regularly. Surveys in Denmark, Israel, Britain, Sweden and New Zealand have found similar results. The most common placebos the American doctors reported using were headache pills and vitamins, but a significant number also reported prescribing antibiotics and sedatives. Although these drugs, contrary to the usual definition of placebos, are not inert, doctors reported using them for their effect on patients’ psyches, not their bodies. In most cases, doctors who recommended placebos described them to patients as “a medicine not typically used for your condition but might benefit you,” the survey found. Only 5 percent described the treatment to patients as “a placebo.” The study is being published in BMJ, formerly The British Medical Journal. One of the authors, Franklin G. Miller, was among the medical ethicists who said they were troubled by the results. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 12168 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Carl Zimmer In Robert Plomin’s line of work, patience is essential. Plomin, a behavioral geneticist at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, wants to understand the nature of intelligence. As part of his research, he has been watching thousands of children grow up. Plomin asks the children questions such as “What do water and milk have in common?” and “In what direction does the sun set?” At first he and his colleagues quizzed the children in person or over the telephone. Today many of those children are in their early teens, and they take their tests on the Internet. In one sense, the research has been a rousing success. The children who take the tests are all twins, and throughout the study identical twins have tended to get scores closer to each other than those of nonidentical twins, who in turn have closer scores than unrelated children. These results—along with similar ones from other studies—make clear to the scientists that genes have an important influence on how children score on intelligence tests. But Plomin wants to know more. He wants to find the specific genes that are doing the influencing. And now he has a tool for pinpointing genes that he could not have even dreamed of when he began quizzing children. Plomin and his colleagues have been scanning the genes of his subjects with a device called a microarray, a small chip that can recognize half a million distinctive snippets of DNA. The combination of this powerful tool with a huge number of children to study meant that he could detect genes that had only a tiny effect on the variation in scores. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Intelligence; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 12167 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Sandy Fritz Anyone with normal hearing can distinguish between the musical tones in a scale: do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do. We take this ability for granted, but among most mammals the feat is unparalleled. This finding is one of many insights into the remarkable acuity of human hearing garnered by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, reported in January in the journal Nature. Izhak Fried of U.C.L.A. and his colleagues worked with epileptic patients who had electrodes implanted in their brain to pinpoint the source of their seizures. Some of the probes linked to the auditory cortex, providing the researchers with a detailed window into sound processing. The study revealed that groups of exquisitely sensitive neurons exist along the auditory nerve on its way from the ear to the auditory cortex. In these neurons natural sounds, such as the human voice, elicit a completely different and far more complex set of responses than do artificial noises such as pure tones. In this mixed environ­ment humans can easily detect frequencies as fine as one twelfth of an octave—a half step in musical terminology. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Hearing; Language
Link ID: 12166 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Greg Miller By tweaking genes and administering drugs, scientists have devised a way to selectively erase memories in mice. In the distant future, such work might lead to treatments for soldiers plagued by recurring flashbacks of wartime trauma, the researchers say. But in the meantime, the findings offer insight into the molecular mechanisms of memory storage in the brain. Several studies in recent years have raised the possibility that even relatively long-lasting memories can be weakened or eliminated with drugs (Science, 2 April 2004, p. 34). Some researchers hypothesize that memories become vulnerable whenever they are recalled and have identified drugs that erode memories when given during recall (ScienceNOW, 25 October 2004). Others have demonstrated memory-erasing effects by blocking an enzyme called PKM-ζ that appears to be necessary for sustaining memories (Science, 17 August 2007, p. 883). The new study adds a third approach to the mix. Neuroscientist Joe Tsien of the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta and his colleagues used genetic engineering and a drug to manipulate levels of an enzyme called αCaMKII in mice. They created a strain of mice with an extra copy of the gene for αCaMKII, one of a family of enzymes with important roles in neural signaling. Left alone, these engineered mice produced an overabundance of αCaMKII, but the researchers could eliminate the excess with a specially designed inhibitor drug that could be injected or delivered in the mice's drinking water. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 12165 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Matt Kaplan Birds that come from the earlier eggs in a brood are more likely to be better singers, scientists have found. In most bird species, song is used by males to demonstrate their fitness to potential mates, and many studies have shown that the healthiest males tend to sing the longest, loudest and most complex songs. Masayo Soma — who researches biolinguistics at the Riken Brain Science Institute, in Wako, Japan — and her colleagues wanted to find out if the order in which birds hatch affects their song. "I expected to detect age hierarchy in song, because older siblings are stressed less and obtain more resources growing up," says Soma. To test the idea, her team cross-fostered Bengalese finches (Lonchura striata domestica) so that the age hierarchies formed in fostered broods were independent of the order in which the eggs were laid. Nine pairs of finches raised a total of 16 clutches of four chicks. Nine more adult males were also introduced to breeding cages at time of fledging so the young heard more than one bird's song. When the fostered finches had matured, the researchers recorded their songs. As they report in Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology1, their initial hypothesis was wrong: hatching order and nest hierarchy had no noticeable impact on the songs. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 12164 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Laura Beil First, let’s clear the air: Nicotine invites addiction, and it employs a delivery device that’s been killing people for centuries. But let’s also be honest: Nicotine has some attractive qualities. Smokers use it to calm jitters or perk themselves up. It’s a common (if ill-advised) tool for weight control. Nicotine lowers the risk and eases the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Patients with mental illness have high rates of tobacco use, partly because nicotine helps quiet the mind. Because of these talents—along with nicotine’s intense grip on the brain—scientists have sought compounds that can deliver the good without the harm. Now, almost 20 years after the quest began, the research has come a long way, baby. A number of experimental drugs—molecules reduced to mere shadows of nicotine—show signs of being able to exploit nicotine’s power to compensate for the defects in an ailing brain. Such drugs may offer new therapies for diseases that now have few treatment options—boosting cognition in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, calming hyperactivity, relieving pain or treating mental illness. Similar drugs are also in early testing for Parkinson’s disease, inflammation and even obesity. “We’re very blessed that nature gave us nicotine,” says Donald deBethizy, chief executive officer of North Carolina–based Targacept Inc., which broke off from tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds in 2000. Few other compounds, deBethizy says, affect the brain at such a basic neurological level, with so much power to control chemicals that ferry signals from one brain cell to another. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Alzheimers; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 12163 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Richard Warry A drug developed to treat leukaemia may be a powerful new weapon against multiple sclerosis, researchers say. Alemtuzumab appears to stop progression of the disease in patients with early stage active relapsing-remitting MS - the most common form of the condition. The University of Cambridge study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, also suggests the drug may enable repair of previous damage. However, it can produce potentially serious side-effects, they warn. And the researchers stress their work is still at an early stage. Alemtuzumab - a type of drug known as a monoclonal antibody - was created at Cambridge in the late 1970s, and has long been used to treat leukaemia by killing off the cancerous white cells of the immune system. The latest three-year study, of 334 patients with relapsing-remitting MS which had yet to be treated, found that the drug cut the number of attacks of disease by 74% more than the reduction achieved by conventional interferon-beta therapy. Alemtuzumab also reduced the risk of sustained accumulation of disability by 71% compared to beta-interferon. People on the trial who received the drug also recovered some function that had been thought to be permanently lost, and as a result were less disabled after three years than at the beginning of the study. In contrast, people given beta-interferon showed signs of progressively worsening disability. This was confirmed by brain scans in which alemtuzumab patients showed signs that their brains had actually increased in size, while the beta-interferon patients' brains shrank over time. The researchers said the findings suggested that alemtuzumab may allow damaged brain tissue to repair itself. (C)BBC

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 12162 - Posted: 10.23.2008

By JULIE CONNELLY HEARING aids provide many benefits, but they do not restore hearing to normal, and that is a tough lesson to learn for many people who use them. “Regardless of how good they are, they never match the quality of your hearing at its best,” said William McKenna, a lawyer and former deputy district attorney in Westchester County, N.Y., who has been wearing hearing aids in both ears for nearly 20 years. “Recently my audiologist asked me how good my hearing was on a scale of 1 to 10. I said, 8 ˝.” People who use hearing aids, on average, live with hearing loss for seven years before resigning themselves, usually around age 70, to using a device, according to the Hearing Loss Association of America. “You are in a position where you’ve been struggling, and you get tired of asking people to repeat themselves,” Mr. McKenna said. Most people with hearing loss eventually acknowledge that “the standard becomes hearing better than you heard before,” said Eduardo Bravo, an audiologist with Audio Help Associates in Manhattan. Today, baby boomers account for 10 million of the 31.5 million Americans with hearing loss, according to the Better Hearing Institute, a nonprofit educational organization, and many hearing experts attribute this to listening to overly loud rock music. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 12161 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Steve Mirsky Why am I so hungry after writing one of these columns? I have often wondered. Now comes an answer. A study in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine contends that intellectual work—that’s right, I’m calling writing this stuff, ya know, intellectual—induces a big increase in caloric intake. The research had 14 Canadian students do three things at different times: sit and relax; complete a series of memory and attention tests; and read and summarize a text. (It was that last activity that disqualified rodents and U.S. students as study subjects.) After 45 minutes at each task, the kids were treated to an all-you-can-eat buffet lunch. Because Canada has a truly advanced code of human-subject research ethics. Each session of intellectual work required the burning of only three more calories than relaxing did. But when the students hit the buffet table after the text summation, they took in an additional 203 calories. And after the memory and attention tests, the subjects consumed another 253 calories. Blood samples taken before, during and after the activities found that all that thinking causes big fluctuations in glucose and insulin levels. And because glucose fuels the neurons, a transitory low level in the brain may signal the stomach to get the hands to fill up the mouth, even though the energy actually spent has gone up just a hair. The researchers note that such “caloric overcompensation following intellectual work, combined with the fact that we are less physically active when doing intellectual tasks, could contribute to the obesity epidemic.” Think about that—unless you’re on a diet. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 12160 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Joyce Gramza With the obesity epidemic in full force, researchers have been puzzled and concerned at the sheer pace of its spread. "This is puzzling because a lot of people have focused on genetics for so many years," says Rob Waterland, assistant professor of pediatrics at the USDA Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine. "But obviously, the genetic background hasn’t changed dramatically enough in such a short period of time to explain this increase in the prevalence of obesity." So Waterland and others have looked for another explanation of how obesity is inherited. They’ve suggested that obesity isn’t merely genetic — it is somehow triggered in the womb during development. Now Waterland and his team’s latest study in mice shows that mom’s obesity not only generates obesity in her offspring but also magnifies it. “They were actually fatter than their mothers, so we saw a population shift in the distribution of body weight,” Waterland explains. “We saw a shift in this distribution toward heavier and heavier body weight with each generation.” The researchers were able to show that these inherited changes are not due to genetic changes. Instead, they attributed to them to epigenetic changes, which control the way genes are expressed during development. If human obesity through the generations is triggered by epigenetics, it’s possible that a mother’s obesity before and during her pregnancy can permanently affect the development of her baby’s weight regulatory mechanisms. “So-called epigenetic mechanisms could be playing an important role in determining your body weight regulation throughout your life," Waterland says. ©2008 ScienCentral

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 12159 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Amanda Gefter "YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about... how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it... I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality." His enthusiasm was met with much applause from the audience gathered at the UN's east Manhattan conference hall on 11 September for an international symposium called Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness. Earlier Mario Beauregard, a researcher in neuroscience at the University of Montreal, Canada, and co-author of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul, told the audience that the "battle" between "maverick" scientists like himself and those who "believe the mind is what the brain does" is a "cultural war". Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing "non-material neuroscience" movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism - the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial - in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul. The two have signed the "Scientific dissent from Darwinism" petition, spearheaded by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, headquarters of the intelligent design movement. ID argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 12158 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Brandon Keim What if people are biologically unsuited for the American dream? The man posing that troubling question isn't just another lefty activist. It's Peter Whybrow, head of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Behavior at UCLA. "We've been taught, especially in America, that happiness will be at the end of some sort of material road, where we have lots and lots of things that we want," said Whybrow, a 2008 PopTech Fellow and author of American Mania: When More Is Not Enough. "We've set up all sorts of tricks to delude ourselves into thinking that it's fine to get what you want immediately." He paints a disturbing picture of 21st century American life, where behavioral tendencies produced by millions of years of scarcity-driven evolution don't fit the social and economic world we've constructed. Our built-in dopamine-reward system makes instant gratification highly desirable, and the future difficult to balance with the present. This worked fine on the savanna, said Whybrow, but not the suburbs: We gorge on fatty foods and use credit cards to buy luxuries we can't actually afford. And then, overworked, underslept and overdrawn, we find ourselves anxious and depressed. That individual weakness is reflected at the social level, in markets that have outgrown their agrarian roots and no longer constrain our excesses — resulting in the current economic crisis, in which America's unpaid bills came due with shocking speed. © 2008 CondéNet, Inc.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 12157 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Going to university, then choosing a mentally demanding job may help protect the brain from the devastating effects of Alzheimer's disease. Scientists compared people with the same degree of memory loss, and found those with this background had significantly more brain damage. Mentally tough work, or genes which help people achieve such careers, may help the brain compensate for disease. The Italian research was published in the journal Neurology. While there are a number of studies which, based on age and symptoms, suggest that mental stimulation can ward off Alzheimer's, there are fewer which look directly at the damage wreaked by the illness on the brain. The team from the San Raffaele University in Milan used brain scanners to look for the distinctive "tangles" and protein deposits characteristic of Alzheimer's in 242 older people, 72 who had mild cognitive impairment, and 144 with no memory problems. Over a 14-month period, 21 of the people with mild impairment went on to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's. However, when the MRI scans of people with the same level of memory problems were compared, the damage was significantly more extensive in those who had been university educated, then progressed to mentally-tough careers. According to the researchers, this meant that, somehow, the brain was managing to cope better with the disease, perhaps by creating a "cognitive reserve" which buffered against its effects. Dr Valentina Garibotta, who led the research, said: "The brains are able to compensate for the damage and allow them to maintain functioning in spite of damage. There are two possible explanations - the brain could be made stronger through education and occupational challenges, or, genetic factors that enabled people to achieve higher education and occupational achievement might determine the amount of brain reserve." (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 12156 - Posted: 10.21.2008

PHILADELPHIA — Antonio Vasquez was just 60 when Alzheimer’s disease derailed him. He lost his job at a Queens bakery because he kept burning chocolate chip cookies, forgetting he had put them in the oven. Then he got lost going to job interviews, walking his neighborhood in circles. Teresa Mojica of Philadelphia was 59 when she got Alzheimer’s, making her so argumentative and delusional that she sometimes hits her husband. And Ida J. Lawrence was 57 when she started misplacing things and making mistakes in her Boston dental school job. Besides being young Alzheimer’s patients — most Americans who develop it are at least 65, and it becomes more common among people in their 70s or 80s — the three are Hispanic, a group that Alzheimer’s doctors are increasingly concerned about, and not just because it is the country’s largest, fastest-growing minority. Studies suggest that many Hispanics may have more risk factors for developing dementia than other groups, and a significant number appear to be getting Alzheimer’s earlier. And surveys indicate that Latinos, less likely to see doctors because of financial and language barriers, more often mistake dementia symptoms for normal aging, delaying diagnosis. “This is the tip of the iceberg of a huge public health challenge,” said Yanira L. Cruz, president of the National Hispanic Council on Aging. “We really need to do more research in this population to really understand why is it that we’re developing these conditions much earlier.”

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 12155 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NATALIE ANGIER With his soft voice and friar’s manner, Louis Sorkin hardly seems the type to flout the sensible advice of a nursery rhyme. Yet on a recent afternoon at the American Museum of Natural History, Mr. Sorkin, a renowned entomologist, did precisely, luridly that. He took a glass jar swarming with thousands of hungry specimens of Cimex lectularius, better known as bedbugs. The small, roachy-looking bloodsuckers have been spreading through the nation’s homes and hotels at such a hyperventilated pace that by next year they are expected to displace cockroaches and termites as America’s leading domestic pest insect. To better understand their habits, Mr. Sorkin has cultivated a personal bedbug colony — very personal. “You see this mesh here?” he said, pointing to a circlet of wiry material taped over the top of his little jam jar of horrors. The weave is dense enough to keep even newborns from escaping, he explained, but porous enough to allow the bedbugs’ stylets, their piercing mouthparts, to poke through. Mr. Sorkin pushed up his shirt sleeve and pressed the mesh end of the jar against the inside of his right arm. Roused to a frenzy by the twin cues of heat and carbon dioxide that “in evolution equal host,” said Mr. Sorkin, the insects scrambled toward the lid, thrust out their stylets and began to feed. For a good 10 minutes, Mr. Sorkin sat there with the proud placidity of a donor at a blood bank. He did not budge. He held the jar. He let the bedbugs bite. “I can hardly feel it,” he said matter-of-factly, “and they do need to eat.” Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Evolution
Link ID: 12154 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By DENISE GRADY On a recent Wednesday, Karleen Perez lay unconscious on an operating table in Upper Manhattan while her surgeons and two consultants from a medical device company peered at an overhead monitor that displayed images from inside her digestive tract. The surgeons, Dr. Marc Bessler and Dr. Daniel Davis, had just stapled her stomach to form a thumb-sized tube that would hold only a small amount of food. The operation resembled others done for weight loss, with one huge difference. In Ms. Perez’s case, there was no cutting. Instead, the surgeons had passed the stapler down her throat and stapled her stomach from the inside. Inspecting their handiwork, Dr. Bessler said, “I don’t think you’ll get much better than that.” The operation, meant to make people feel full after eating very little, is strictly experimental. Only a few patients have tried it in this country, as part of a study paid for by Satiety Inc., which makes the staplers and hopes the Food and Drug Administration will approve them. Ms. Perez, a 25-year-old graduate student in social work, was the second patient at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia to enter the study. Satiety employees advised her surgeons throughout the operation.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 12153 - Posted: 06.24.2010