By EMERSON MORAN Jr. Pat’s nursing home, Chatsworth, is a short walk through a neighborhood park, past a gazebo, across player-worn soccer fields. On good-weather days I bike, hauling her laundry in a backpack; folding her clothes helps me feel normal. Pat has lived here for more than two years, one of 18 residents of a locked-down dementia unit called Chelsea Meadows. Though she is 20 years younger than the others, Alzheimer’s has already done just about everything it will do to her. Except kill her. That will happen here. The hospice calls it “dying in place.” Enter through the double doors, and you are at one end of a bright and airy great room that is half a football field long and does not look it. The space is residence hall, living room, dining room, lounge and kitchen all in one. Columns, arches, recessed bedroom doorways, hanging baskets of silken ivy and planters of crafts-store bougainvillea bring the scale down to size. Walls washed with South Beach pastels are spotted with pictures of laughing children, sailboats, beach scenes, a three-foot-tall banana split. A wide hardwood walkway for the wanderers rings the space. Alzheimer’s closed in on Pat early, grindingly taking over more than half of our years together. Her memory went first, then reasoning, intuition, eventually every cognitive spark that lit her being. Her personality, once exquisitely compassionate, lost color and aspect — a fading work of art. Eventually unable to walk, talk or feed herself, incontinent, weakened by ministrokes, she could no longer remain at home. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 12052 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By RONALD PIES, M.D Let’s say a patient walks into my office and says he’s been feeling down for the past three weeks. A month ago, his fiancée left him for another man, and he feels there’s no point in going on. He has not been sleeping well, his appetite is poor and he has lost interest in nearly all of his usual activities. Should I give him a diagnosis of clinical depression? Or is my patient merely experiencing what the 14th-century monk Thomas à Kempis called “the proper sorrows of the soul”? The answer is more complicated than some critics of psychiatric diagnosis think. To these critics, psychiatry has medicalized normal sadness by failing to consider the social and emotional context in which people develop low mood — for example, after losing a job or experiencing the breakup of an important relationship. This diagnostic failure, the argument goes, has created a bogus epidemic of increasing depression. In their recent book “The Loss of Sadness” (Oxford, 2007), Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield assert that for thousands of years, symptoms of sadness that were “with cause” were separated from those that were “without cause.” Only the latter were viewed as mental disorders. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Emotions
Link ID: 12051 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By KATE MURPHY When people have a heart attack, a classic symptom is shooting pain down the left arm. That symptom, it turns out, has something in common with a far more benign kind of pain: the headache one can get from eating ice cream too fast. Both are examples of what doctors call referred pain, or pain in an area of the body other than where it originates. Such sensory red herrings include a toothache resulting from a strained upper back, foot soreness caused by a tumor in the uterus, and hip discomfort when the problem is really arthritis in the knee. Referred pain can make diagnoses difficult and can lead to off-target or wholly unnecessary cortisone injections, tooth extractions and operations. Now, in trying to discover the patterns and causes of the phenomenon, researchers say they are gaining a greater understanding of how the nervous system works and how its signals can go awry. “The body can really fool you in terms of determining pathology,” said Karen J. Berkley, a professor of neuroscience at Florida State University. Her research has focused on referred pain caused by endometriosis — pain that can be felt as far away as the jaw. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 12050 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS Dr. Nancy C. Andreasen concentrates on the big questions. A neuroscientist and psychiatrist at the University of Iowa, she uses M.R.I. to ask questions like: How do the nervous systems of extremely creative people differ from those of the rest of us? How is the brain physiology of the mentally ill different from that of normal people? For nearly two decades, she has been conducting a study that tracks long-term changes in the brain. We spoke this summer when she visited New York City. An edited version of a three-hour conversation follows: Q. HOW DID YOU BECOME A PSYCHIATRIST? A. I was an English professor in the early 1960s. I’d done a book on John Donne. Then, in 1964, I gave birth to my first child and nearly died from a postpartum infection — the very thing that had killed millions of birthing women in the centuries before antibiotics. As I recovered, I realized I had been given back my life, and that caused me to rethink everything in it. I decided to quit literature studies and go back to school to become a doctor. From the outset, I knew I wanted to do research and patient care. Because I relish complexity, I chose psychiatry — it’s more complicated than neurology. And I chose brain research because the brain is the most complicated organ in the body. I wanted to do something as important as the discovery of penicillin, the thing that had saved me. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 12049 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NATALIE ANGIER You are shopping in a busy supermarket and you’re ready to pay up and go home. You perform a quick visual sweep of the checkout options and immediately start ramming your cart through traffic toward an appealingly unpeopled line halfway across the store. As you wait in line and start reading nutrition labels, you can’t help but calculate that the 529 calories contained in a single slice of your Key lime cheesecake amounts to one-fourth of your recommended daily caloric allowance and will take you 90 minutes on the elliptical to burn off and you’d better just stick the thing behind this stack of Soap Opera Digests and hope a clerk finds it before it melts. One shopping spree, two distinct number systems in play. Whenever we choose a shorter grocery line over a longer one, or a bustling restaurant over an unpopular one, we rally our approximate number system, an ancient and intuitive sense that we are born with and that we share with many other animals. Rats, pigeons, monkeys, babies — all can tell more from fewer, abundant from stingy. An approximate number sense is essential to brute survival: how else can a bird find the best patch of berries, or two baboons know better than to pick a fight with a gang of six? When it comes to genuine computation, however, to seeing a self-important number like 529 and panicking when you divide it into 2,200, or realizing that, hey, it’s the square of 23! well, that calls for a very different number system, one that is specific, symbolic and highly abstract. By all evidence, scientists say, the capacity to do mathematics, to manipulate representations of numbers and explore the quantitative texture of our world is a uniquely human and very recent skill. People have been at it only for the last few millennia, it’s not universal to all cultures, and it takes years of education to master. Math-making seems the opposite of automatic, which is why scientists long thought it had nothing to do with our ancient, pre-verbal size-em-up ways. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 12048 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Laura Vanderkam What he's doing now: As Purdon was wandering around M.I.T. one spring day a few years ago, looking for an excuse not to work, a classmate mentioned that he planned to attend a talk by neuroscientist Christof Koch on consciousness. At the end, Koch mentioned that anesthesia was one of the big question marks in the field. Anesthesiologists "cause loss of consciousness every day and have no idea how it works," Purdon says. But they do know how to control it precisely—and because of that, Purdon thought that anesthesia might be a great tool for studying consciousness. He went back to the lab immediately afterward and made plans to study images of anesthetized people's brains. He's been working on this question for several years now, discovering that "there's a lot going on in the brain after you've lost consciousness under anesthesia." He was appointed an instructor in anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, and currently does research at Massachusetts General Hospital. "General anesthesia is one of the biggest mysteries of modern medicine," says Emery Brown, a professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and Purdon's faculty mentor. Purdon's work has "major significance," because it will help us understand how activity in different areas of the brain changes under anesthesia. "This new knowledge will help us design better, safer anesthesia drugs that can reduce morbidity and unwanted side effects by targeting only those areas that are needed to induce general anesthesia and leaving other areas untouched," he says. "These new insights will also help us design better monitoring devices to follow brain activity when patients are under general anesthesia."

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 12047 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rachel Zelkowitz Christmas morning: The kids throw on their clothes and wolf down breakfast so they can rip open their presents, while their grandparents loiter over their toast and coffee, seemingly more intent on finishing their meals than examining the holiday loot. It's not that Grandma and Grandpa hate Santa. Rather, new research shows, the same neurochemical that triggers excitement and rapid decision-making in the young just doesn't have the same effect for older folks. Presents and other rewards cause a release of dopamine in the brain. Animal research has shown too little or too much dopamine can throw off activity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), where most of our high-level decision-making takes place. Research in young adults suggests a similar relationship, but no one had examined dopamine's effect on PFC activity in the elderly. To fill this gap, Karen Berman, clinical neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues turned to the two workhorses of human neuroscience research: positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). PET tracks how much of a particular chemical the brain produces; fMRI tracks moment-to-moment blood flow, pointing researchers toward areas of increased neural firing. To examine the relationship between dopamine and the brain's response to rewards, the researchers recruited 20 individuals averaging 25 years of age and 13 individuals averaging 66 years of age. While inside an fMRI scanner, the subjects viewed a series of 16 slot machine games on a computer screen. The slot machine first showed the chance of winning a set amount of money. After a 15-second delay, the screen showed how much money the subjects actually received. The researchers repeated the test, this time using PET to measure overall dopamine production during the testing period. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 12046 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY AFTER inflicting months of sleep deprivation on their parents, young children often switch course and begin what could be called a thought-deprivation campaign. This is the stage, around age 2 or 3, when their brains seem to send multiple messages to the body at once — eat, scream, spill juice, throw crayons — and good luck to anyone trying to form a complete sentence or thought in their presence. Toddlers are interruption machines, all impulse and little control. One reason is that an area of the brain that is critical to inhibiting urges, the prefrontal cortex, is still a work in progress. The density of neural connections in the 2-year-old prefrontal cortex, for instance, is far higher than in adults, and levels of neurotransmitters, the mind’s chemical messengers, are lower. Some children’s brains adapt quickly, while others’ take time — and, as a result, classmates, friends and adults are interrupted for years along the way. But just as biology shapes behavior, so behavior can accelerate biology. And a small group of educational and cognitive scientists now say that mental exercises of a certain kind can teach children to become more self-possessed at earlier ages, reducing stress levels at home and improving their experience in school. Researchers can test this ability, which they call executive function, and they say it is more strongly associated with school success than I.Q. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 12045 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jordan Lite You're in pain, and ibuprofen just won't cut it. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs, don't agree with your stomach, and you're wary of stronger meds. Fortunately, you have alternatives — natural ones. From herbs that attack inflammation to techniques that leverage the brain's remarkable healing powers, nature offers many treatments for conditions such as arthritis, fibromyalgia, and even muscle strains. Here are eight natural remedies that may enhance or replace conventional antidotes, and leave you happier, healthier, and pain free. Capsaicin: For arthritis, shingles, or neuropathy What the science says: An active component of chile pepper, capsaicin temporarily desensitizes pain-prone skin nerve receptors called C-fibers; soreness is diminished for 3 to 5 weeks while they regain sensation. Nearly 40 percent of arthritis patients reduced their pain by half after using a topical capsaicin cream for a month, and 60 percent of neuropathy patients achieved the same after 2 months, according to a University of Oxford study. Patients at the New England Center for Headache decreased their migraine and cluster headache intensity after applying capsaicin cream inside their nostrils. © 2008 Microsoft

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 12044 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY A new government study published Monday has found that the medicines most often prescribed for schizophrenia in children and adolescents are no more effective than older, less expensive drugs and are more likely to cause some harmful side effects. The standards for treating the disorder should be changed to include some older medications that have fallen out of use, the study’s authors said. The results, being published online by The American Journal of Psychiatry, are likely to alter treatment for an estimated one million children and teenagers with schizophrenia and to intensify a broader controversy in child psychiatry over the newer medications, experts said. Prescription rates for the newer drugs, called atypical antipsychotics, have increased more than fivefold for children over the past decades and a half, and doctors now use them to settle outbursts and aggression in children with a wide variety of diagnoses, despite serious side effects. A consortium of state Medicaid directors is currently evaluating the use of these drugs in children on state Medicaid rolls, to ensure they are being prescribed properly. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 12043 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Ewen Callaway Anyone who's done a bad Elvis impression knows that contorting your mouth makes talking feel wrong – never mind how ridiculous you sound. People who have lost their hearing use the same sense to retain their speech, new research suggests. When five deaf volunteers were asked to talk while a robot nudged their jaws slightly, they quickly learned to compensate for the perturbation. "One of the real mysteries of human language is that people who become deaf as adults remain capable of producing intelligible speech for years in the complete absence of any auditory input," says David Ostry, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who led the new study along with colleague Sazzad Nasir. Most neuroscientists who study speech focus on how the brain learns from sounds to correct for errors. Yet just as a tennis player learns whether a forehand shot will land in or out just from the feel, people sense whether or not they are speaking correctly, Ostry says. To separate this ability from learning by hearing, he and Nasir enlisted the help of five deaf people with cochlear implants that allowed them to hear. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language; Hearing
Link ID: 12042 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Maggie Fox WASHINGTON - A rare genetic mutation may underlie some cases of mad cow disease in cattle and its discovery may help shed light on where the epidemic started, U.S. researchers reported on Friday. The mutation, in an Alabama cow that tested positive in 2006 for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, is identical to one that causes a related brain-wasting disease in humans and that suggests BSE may sometimes arise spontaneously in cattle. The finding also may lend credence to a 2005 theory that the BSE epidemic in cattle could be traced to feed contaminated with either cattle or human remains scavenged from India's Ganges River, the researchers report in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Pathogens. BSE or mad cow disease swept through British dairy herds in the 1980s, forcing the destruction of millions of animals. No one ever found where it came from but most experts thought it may have come from cattle feed that contained the remains of sheep infected with a similar disease called scrapie. Cattle were never known to develop BSE before the epidemic, but some experts had argued they may have. This report lends credence to that idea. BSE, scrapie and a human version called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD, are all brain-destroying illnesses called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. In some cases, animals or people that eat brain and nervous system material from victims of these disease can develop them, too. Copyright 2008 Reuters.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 12041 - Posted: 09.13.2008

By Elizabeth Mitchell Scientists have uncovered evidence for an inbuilt "sat-nav" system in the brains of London taxi drivers. They used magnetic scanners to explore the brain activity of taxi drivers as they navigated their way through a virtual simulation of London's streets. Different brain regions were activated as they considered route options, spotted familiar landmarks or thought about their customers. The research was presented at this week's BA Science Festival. Earlier studies had shown that taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus - a region of the brain that plays an important role in navigation. Their brains even "grow on the job" as they build up detailed information needed to find their way around London's labyrinth of streets - information famously referred to as "The Knowledge". "We were keen to go beyond brain structure - and see what activity is going on inside the brains of taxi drivers while they are doing their job," said Dr Hugo Spiers from University College London. The scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to obtain "minute by minute" brain images from 20 taxi drivers as they delivered customers to destinations on "virtual jobs". The scientists adapted the Playstation2 game "Getaway" to bring the streets of London into the scanner. After the scan - and without prior warning - the drivers watched a replay of their performance and reported what they had been thinking at each stage. (C)BBC

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 12040 - Posted: 09.13.2008

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO - Scientists who tricked monkeys by swapping images of sailboats for teacups have figured out how the brain learns to recognize objects, a finding that could lead to robots that "see." "One of the central questions of how the brain recognizes objects and faces is that you never essentially see the same image twice," said James DiCarlo, an associate professor of neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He said humans have no trouble recognizing a dog, regardless of whether it is running, lying down, wagging its tail or begging for food. "The pattern of light in your eyes is never the same when you view your wife or your dog, yet you can still recognize that as the person or creature that you love," said DiCarlo, whose research appears on Thursday in the journal Science. Scientists think people do it by gathering a host of different snapshots of the same object over a short period of time. "Even though we don't see the same images twice, nearby images in time tend to be images of the same object," DiCarlo said in a telephone interview. To test this idea, DiCarlo set up an experiment on two monkeys in which the scientists tried to trick them into unlearning their assumptions about an object. Copyright 2008 Reuters

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 12039 - Posted: 09.13.2008

By JENNIFER EGAN When Claire, a pixie-faced 6-year-old in a school uniform, heard her older brother, James, enter the family’s Manhattan apartment, she shut her bedroom door and began barricading it so swiftly and methodically that at first I didn’t understand what she was doing. She slid a basket of toys in front of the closed door, then added a wagon and a stroller laden with dolls. She hugged a small stuffed Pegasus to her chest. “Pega always protects me,” she said softly. “Pega, guard the door.” James, then 10, had been given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder two years earlier. He was attending a therapeutic day school in another borough and riding more than an hour each way on a school bus, so he came home after Claire. Until James’s arrival that April afternoon, Claire was showing me sketches she had drawn of her Uglydolls and chatting about the Web site JibJab, where she likes to watch goofy videos. At the sound of James’s footsteps outside her bedroom door, she flattened herself behind the barricade. There was a sharp knock. After a few seconds, James’s angry, wounded voice barked, “Forget it,” and the steps retreated. “If it’s my brother, I don’t open it,” Claire said. “I don’t care if I’m being mean. . . . I never trust him. James always jumps out and scares me. He surprises me in a bad way.” Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 12038 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By David Biello More than 15 million Americans drink too much, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. New research on rats may help them curb that addiction. At present, there are three approved drugs for battling alcoholism, none of which work very well. Among them: naltrexone, which is effective for some alcoholics (as well as opiate addicts) because it blocks a pain pathway in the brain associated with the pleasures of drinking. In an effort to boost its effectiveness, neuroscientist Selena Bartlett of the Ernest Gallo Clinic & Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues chemically manipulated naltrexone so that it cut off a related pleasure pathway in the brain. Their findings, published in the journal Biological Psychiatry: rats (trained to crave alcohol) given the new compound, dubbed SoRI-9409, consumed half as much hooch. In addition, there were fewer side effects. Researchers say that unlike naltrexone, this drug did not diminish the animals' desire for water and other nonalcoholic beverages, such as sugar water. "It is much more selective in its effect on drinking," Bartlett says. Rats given the drug for 28 days refrained from heavy drinking for another four weeks after they were taken off the drug. "That is currently the biggest challenge in alcoholism treatment," which relies primarily on rehabilitation centers, Bartlett notes. When people return home, they typically also return to drinking. "Drinking stays down without the drug in place. It's done something to permanently change and reduce the drinking." © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 12037 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower Depressed moms can raise their children’s risk for depression via nurture alone Some youngsters get depressed in the absence of any genetic legacy of the mood disorder, a new investigation finds. Researchers report that having a depressed mother substantially ups a teenager’s likelihood of becoming depressed, even if he or she was adopted and shares no genes with the mother. This finding provides the first direct evidence that purely environmental factors can promote depression in the children of depressed women, says a team led by psychologist Erin Tully of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Having a depressed father does not increase depression susceptibility in either adopted or non-adopted teens, Tully and her colleagues report in the September American Journal of Psychiatry. Two other investigations, both published in the same journal, further emphasize nurture’s role in depression. They show that successful treatment of depressed mothers — either with medication or psychotherapy — spurs emotional gains in their depressed children. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 12036 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Christopher Bergendorff Everybody knows that it feels good to do good. Giving someone a gift can be just as rewarding as getting one yourself. In fact, studies using MRI scans have shown that the part of our brain that stimulates pleasure when receiving a gift also reacts when giving one. Until now, scientists believed that such emotional responses were distinctly human traits, but new research indicates monkeys have them too. Primatologist Frans de Waal, at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, gave a group of capuchin monkeys a task that involved taking one of two tokens while in the presence of another monkey. "One token would give them a reward, and the other token would give them and their partner a reward. So the first token we call a selfish token, because you only work for yourself. This second token we call a pro-social token, because we reward both monkeys at the same time," says de Waal. The selfish token was colored purple, while the pro-social was green. Once the monkey had chosen, their reward would be a piece of fruit, given to them by the same researcher presenting the tokens. ©2008 ScienCentral

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 12035 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Ewen Callaway When picking a husband or wife, American couples seek out new immune genes, while Africans stick to the ones they've got. New research shows that American couples of European ancestry go for mates with versions of immune genes that recognise pathogens dissimilar from those their own genes recognise. These genes are part of the major histocompatibility complex, and the more MHC genes a person has, the greater variety of pathogens his or her immune system recognises. Previous work in fish, lizards and birds has suggested that animals seek out mates with different MHC genes than their own. Yet studies in humans have painted a far blurrier picture of MHC-driven mating preferences. One study concluded that Hutterites, who live communally, wed people with different versions of the genes, while another found that women prefer the scent of sweaty T-shirts worn by men with similar MHC genes. However, an additional sweaty T-shirt experiment using slightly different methods showed just the opposite trend. “It seems that body odours can reveal someone’s immune genetics, and so through the smell we could be able to distinguish the MHC genes from different potential mates,” says Raphaëlle Chaix, a human population geneticist at the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris, France. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 12034 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Ashley Yeager Men are dense — in the temporal neocortex anyway. An investigation of brain tissue recovered from epilepsy patients during surgery showed men had a higher density of brain cell connectors, called synapses, than their female counterparts, researchers report September 8 online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The find might explain why men have better spatial perception, while women better remember what they hear and can talk faster, the researchers suggest. “Or, it could mean men’s brains are just more redundant,” says Edward Jones, director of the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study. Right now, it’s hard to know exactly what the difference means, he says. For many years, scientists have searched for structural variations between men’s and women’s brains to explain psychological studies showing that, overall, the sexes think and act differently. Past studies found differences in brain mass and neuron density, but “they were hyped and untrustworthy,” Jones says. This study is meticulously detailed, he notes. It is the first to show gender differences on such a fine scale — at the synapse, which is the juncture where an electrical signal passes from one brain cell to another. “The level of detail and meticulousness are why I have confidence in the results,” he says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 12033 - Posted: 06.24.2010