Erin Allday Stanford researchers are participating in a national study to test a new weight-loss therapy that blocks the nerves that tell people when they're hungry and control how the body stores fat. The treatment is considered a less invasive alternative to bariatric surgeries, which typically involve shrinking the stomach by wrapping a tight band around it or bypassing large sections of it and going straight to the rest of the digestive tract. In the new treatment, which has been tested overseas, a device inserted just beneath the skin emits electronic impulses that confuse signals sent on the vagal nerves from the brain to the stomach. In early studies, the impulses made people feel full and satisfied when they'd otherwise be hungry. "It starts in the brain, and works down to the stomach. We're not cutting or sewing or rerouting the anatomy here," said Dr. John Morton, a bariatric surgeon leading the study at Stanford. "It has a lot of potential to help patients lose weight." The treatment is called VBLOC therapy, for vagal blocking. Stanford is one of 13 sites around the country participating in the study, being funded by medical device company EnteroMedics. Researchers hope to sign up 250 to 300 volunteers, about 50 of them in the Bay Area, and study them for five years. © 2008 Hearst Communications Inc

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 11532 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The French National Assembly has passed a groundbreaking bill which seeks to criminalise the promotion in the media of extreme thinness. The bill targets pro-anorexia websites and publications that encourage girls and young women to starve themselves. It will affect websites, fashion houses, magazines and advertisers. If approved by France's upper house, those found to have encouraged severe weight loss could be fined up to 45,000 euros and face three years in prison. French Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot said the proposed law would help stop advice on how to become ultra-thin being spread through pro-anorexia sites on the internet. "Encouraging young girls to lie to their doctors, advising them on foods that are easier to regurgitate and inciting them to beat themselves up each time they eat is not freedom of expression," Ms Bachelot told the assembly. "These messages are death messages. Our country must be able to prosecute those who are hiding behind these websites," she said. Jacques Domergue, a lawmaker supporting the bill, said that the intention was to send a strong message to society. (C)BBC

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 11531 - Posted: 04.16.2008

By temporarily severing the brain's blood supply and damaging the body's vital control centers, a stroke can change every aspect of the sufferer's life. Here, in their own words, are the stories of people coping with the aftermath of stroke. Video: Crucial Facts About Stroke Audio Slide Show: Retraining the Brain Interactive Graphic: Stroke, an Animation Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 11530 - Posted: 04.16.2008

If plaques and tangles in the brain cause Alzheimer's Disease, why do some people with affected brains stay sharp into their nineties? Neurologist and researcher Deniz Erten-Lyons is sizing up why certain old folks have both brain plaques and intact memories. She says these special seniors have bigger brains. As she reported to the American Academy of Neurology, her team from Oregon Health and Science University and Portland's VA Medical Center did post-mortem autopsies on research volunteers involved in long-term aging studies. After grouping together the twelve research subjects who fit their main criteria — lots of brain plaques and clear thinking and good memory before death — the researchers tried to figure out what kept this special group mentally healthy during life. "These twelve people — even though they were in their nineties — were able to function, live independently… do their day-to-day functions without any assistance," says Erten-Lyons. When she compared these twelve people to people who did have Alzheimer's Disease and the associated brain lesions, she found a surprise. "The group that died with sharp minds had larger brains" compared to the Alzheimer's Disease group, she says. © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Intelligence
Link ID: 11529 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Matt Kaplan Humans don't have the monopoly on drunken behaviour. New research shows that under-the-influence bats are more likely than their sober counterparts to eat junk food. Knowing that fruit-eating bats frequently encounter fermenting fruits, Francisco Sánchez and his colleagues at the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, decided to investigate what effects, if any, consumption of ethanol from fermentation had on feeding behaviour. Fermented fruits get bats tipsy.GettyTo explore this, they studied Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus) . Twelve bats were placed in a cage and given feeding containers filled with a mixture of soy protein infant formula, sucrose, water and one of six concentrations of ethanol that ranged from 0% to 2%. Each day the bats were given a different concentration of ethanol in their food. Uneaten food was removed and measured. The results showed that bats actively avoided concentrations of ethanol above 1%, yet below that threshold level their behaviour was unchanged. Wondering how hunger might affect this, the researchers ran a similar experiment with hungry bats. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Obesity
Link ID: 11528 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By TARA PARKER-POPE Few products are hated as much as hearing aids. The devices can squeal with feedback and overamplify background noises like the click of a turn signal or whir of a ceiling fan. They must be removed for showering or sleeping, and their batteries die frequently. Many users, out of exasperation, decide they’d rather live with hearing loss. But now scientists have come up with a different kind of hearing aid. While the device, called the Lyric, is being used in only 500 patients, it appears to have overcome many of the problems associated with traditional hearing aids — without the expense and uncertainty of surgery and anesthesia. The Lyric, made by InSound Medical of Newark, Calif., is hidden deep inside the ear canal, just four millimeters (about one-sixth of an inch) from the ear drum. While doctors for years have been implanting hearing devices in the middle ear, the Lyric is not an implant: it can be removed with a small magnet. It is worn 24 hours a day, and its batteries last one to four months. Typically, anything that clogs the ear canal would trap moisture and pose an infection risk, but the Lyric is surrounded by a spongy material that allows moisture to escape. Because it sits so close to the ear drum, doctors say that it works more efficiently and that sounds are more natural because they don’t have to be amplified as much. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 11527 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR Already burdened with the minor mishaps that arise from living in a world designed for righties, their lot in life seemed to worsen considerably in the 1980s, when a study argued that southpaws had several times the risk of chronic headaches — and immune disorders — as their right-handed counterparts. The reason, it was theorized, had something to do with variations in fetal brain development, though no precise explanation was given. But a raft of evidence now suggests that the migraine finding, though intriguing, was less fact than statistical artifact. A more extensive study published in March by German scientists examined a group of 100 patients who had received a diagnosis of migraine based on standards set by the International Headache Society. After finding no evidence of a link between handedness and migraines, the scientists pooled data from five other studies and conducted a meta-analysis. Still, there was no evidence of a relationship — a conclusion echoed by many similar studies. Several studies have also examined whether there is any relationship between left-handedness and increased risk of immune disorders. The findings are inconclusive. Proponents argue that fetal exposure to high levels of testosterone could be responsible, and they point out that left-handedness is more common in men than women. Critics say more research is needed. THE BOTTOM LINE Most studies have found that being left-handed does not increase the risk of migraines. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Laterality; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11526 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D. “I’ve grown up on medication,” my patient Julie told me recently. “I don’t have a sense of who I really am without it.” At 31, she had been on one antidepressant or another nearly continuously since she was 14. There was little question that she had very serious depression and had survived several suicide attempts. In fact, she credited the medication with saving her life. But now she was raising an equally fundamental question: how the drugs might have affected her psychological development and core identity. It was not an issue I had seriously considered before. Most of my patients, who are adults, developed their psychiatric problems after they had a pretty clear idea of who they were as individuals. During treatment, most of them could tell me whether they were back to their normal baseline. Julie could certainly remember what depression felt like, but she could not recall feeling well except during her long treatment with antidepressant medications. And since she had not grown up before getting depressed, she could not gauge the hypothetical effects of antidepressants on her emotional and psychological development. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 11525 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Using a rodent model of epilepsy, researchers found one of the body’s own neurotransmitters released during seizures, glutamate, turns on a signaling pathway in the brain that increases production of a protein that could reduce medication entry into the brain. Researchers say this may explain why approximately 30 percent of patients with epilepsy do not respond to antiepileptic medications. The study, conducted by researchers at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health, and the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy and Medical School, in collaboration with Heidrun Potschka’s laboratory at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany, is available online and will appear in the May 2008, issue of Molecular Pharmacology. "Our work identifies the mechanism by which seizures increase production of a drug transport protein in the blood brain barrier, known as P-glycoprotein, and suggests new therapeutic targets that could reduce resistance," said David Miller, Ph.D., a principal investigator in the NIEHS Laboratory of Pharmacology and co-author on the paper. The blood-brain barrier (BBB), which resides in brain capillaries, is a limiting factor in treatment of many central nervous system disorders. It is altered in epilepsy so that it no longer permits free passage of administered antiepileptic drugs into the brain. Miller explained that P-glycoprotein forms a functional barrier in the BBB that protects the brain by limiting access of foreign chemicals.

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 11524 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas -- Female Barbary macaques emit ear-piercing calls when mating, and now researchers have determined other males listen to these sounds with apparent interest. Since the female calls vary, depending on whether or not the male partner has successfully mated, it's believed the eavesdropping males use the sounds to figure out what's going on "in the bedroom" and may even rate the happenings. "The fact that copulation calls are loud and distinctive gives other males of the group the chance to listen in and 'judge' copulations," lead author Dana Pfefferle told Discovery News. Pfefferle, a primatologist at the German Primate Center in Gottingen, and her colleagues previously discovered that female Barbary macaques act a bit like cheerleaders when mating, using their vocalizations to cheer on and stimulate their mates, causing their partners to increase their thrusting rates. The scientists documented two basic types of female mating calls: those linked to partner ejaculation and those linked to no ejaculation. "The peak frequency is higher and the interval between the single units of the call is shorter in ejaculatory compared to non-ejaculatory calls," explained Pfefferle. © 2008 Discovery Communications,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 11523 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Greg Miller SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA--Imagine not being able to tell your son's voice from that of a complete stranger. Welcome to the life of a 60-year-old British woman known as KH. Although a handful of people have reportedly lost the ability to recognize voices after a stroke or other brain damage, researchers believe KH is the first documented case of someone who never developed this ability in the first place. The case came to light a few years ago when KH read an article in New Scientist magazine about people who can't recognize individuals by face. The article struck a chord, and she contacted the magazine, explaining that she had an analogous voice-recognition problem. For as long as she could remember, the voices of even her closest relatives were indistinguishable. New Scientist contacted Bradley Duchaine, a cognitive neuroscientist featured in the article, and Duchaine invited KH to visit his lab at University College London. A successful management consultant, KH scored average or above on a variety of memory and reasoning tests. Her hearing was normal and a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan of her brain revealed no obvious defects. She told the researchers her problem was limited to recognizing people's voices, explaining that she sometimes introduced herself to business clients by different names so that when they called she could identify them according to who they asked for. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Hearing; Language
Link ID: 11522 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Geoff Brumfiel Books and films often dramatize financial-market traders as macho gamblers. Now there may be scientific evidence to back up that pop-culture image: two researchers have linked testosterone levels to the success of traders in one London market. John Coates, a trader-turned-neuroscientist at Cambridge University, UK, started the study after what he saw during his time working the markets: floor traders became frenzied during big winnings, then deeply depressed during downturns. "It was sort of classic manic behaviour," he says. He says that he began to suspect that hormones, specifically testosterone, might be involved because the few female traders appeared to him to be "relatively unaffected". To find out, Coates and his Cambridge colleague Joe Herbert followed 17 male traders for 8 consecutive business days at a firm in London. The researchers took saliva samples from the group before and after the bulk of the day's trading. They analysed the levels of two hormones: testosterone and cortisol, a hormone that is produced in response to uncertainty. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 11521 - Posted: 06.24.2010

There’s no question that the case of 9-year-old Hannah Poling of Athens, Ga., has fueled the controversy about childhood vaccines. But what’s less clear is whether it will help unlock the mysteries of autism. Hannah was 19 months old and developing normally until 2000, when she received five shots against nine infectious diseases. She became sick and later was given a diagnosis of autism. Late last year government lawyers agreed to compensate the Poling family on the theory that vaccines may have aggravated an underlying disorder affecting her mitochondria, the energy centers of cells. (To read more about the decision, click here.) Vaccine critics say the Hannah Poling settlement shows the government has finally conceded that vaccines cause autism. But government officials say Hannah’s case involved a rare medical condition, and there is still no evidence of a link between vaccines and autism. Hannah’s father, Dr. Jon S. Poling, a practicing neurologist in Athens and clinical assistant professor at the Medical College of Georgia, says the case has shifted the autism debate forever and points to a promising new area of research. Writing in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Friday, Dr. Poling says there is compelling evidence that mitochondrial disorders, like the one his daughter has, are strongly associated with autism. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 11520 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Low doses of a commonly-used anaesthetic could prevent the formation of painful memories, say researchers. The University of California scientists found that sevoflurane gas stopped patients remembering "emotive" images, New Scientist magazine reported. Scans showed it interfered with signals between two key areas of the brain. It is hoped the work could eventually help eradicate rare instances of anaesthetised patients remembering the full horrors of their surgery. While anaesthetic drugs are mainly used to make patients fall unconscious before operations, their effects on the body are frequently far more complex. The Californian researchers, writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were investigating the outcome of much lower doses of the gas than those used prior to surgery. They treated their volunteers either with the anaesthetic, or a placebo gas, and then showed them a series of photographs. Some of these had everyday content, such as a cup of coffee, while others had images designed to provoke a far more powerful emotional response, such as a bloody severed human hand. One week later, the volunteers were asked to recall as many of the images as they could. (C)BBC

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11519 - Posted: 04.14.2008

CHICAGO - U.S. researchers have found a genetic link between autism and a muscle-weakening disorder known as mitochondrial disease, they said on Sunday, in a finding that may open new avenues of research into the causes of autism. “Recent studies have suggested that as many 20 percent of patients with autism have markers for mitochondrial disease,” said Dr. John Shoffner, a neurologist and geneticist at Medical Neurogenetics in Atlanta, who presented his findings at the American Academy of Neurology meeting in Chicago. “There has really not been much work done so far to push that issue,” Shoffner said in a telephone interview. Mitochondrial diseases are a set of genetic disorders in which energy-producing structures in cells are impaired. The disease is often triggered by an illness, such as a high fever, which can result in severe muscle weakening. Shoffner wanted to see if he could identify the underlying genetic mechanisms that might explain this link. He evaluated genetic samples and clinical information gathered on 37 children diagnosed with autism who had been evaluated at his clinic for mitochondrial disease. Copyright 2008 Reuters.

Keyword: Autism; Muscles
Link ID: 11518 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Pascal Belin The use of vocalizations, such as grunts, songs or barks, is extremely common throughout the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, humans are the only species in which these vocalizations have attained the sophistication and communicative effectiveness of speech. How did our ancestors become the only speaking animals, some tens of thousand years ago? Did this change happen abruptly, involving the sudden appearance of a new cerebral region or pattern of cerebral connections? Or did it happen through a more gradual evolutionary process, in which brain structures already present to some extent in other animals were put to a different and more complex use in the human brain? A recent study yields critical new information, uncovering what could constitute the "missing link" between the brain of vocalizing, non-human species and the human brain: evidence that a cerebral region specialized for processing voice, known to exist in the human brain, has a counterpart in the brain of macaques. Neuroscientist Chris Petkov of the Max Planck Institute and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore the macaque brain. They measured cerebral activity of awake macaque monkeys who were listening to different categories of natural sounds, including macaque vocalizations. They found evidence for a "voice area" in the auditory cortex of these macaques: a discrete region of the anterior temporal lobe in which brain activity was greater for macaque vocalizations than for other sound categories such as natural sounds. This region was observed in several different individuals, even under condition of total anaesthesia. Even more remarkably, the region showed repetition-induced reduction of activity--or neuronal adaptation--in response to different calls coming from a same individual. This finding suggests that this brain region is processing information about the identity of the speaker, a phenomenon that is also observed in the human voice area. © 1995-2007 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 11517 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By GARY MARCUS How much would you pay to have a small memory chip implanted in your brain if that chip would double the capacity of your short-term memory? Or guarantee that you would never again forget a face or a name? There’s good reason to consider such offers. Although our memories are sometimes spectacular — we are very good at recognizing photos, for example — our memory capacities are often disappointing. Faulty memories have been known to lead to erroneous eyewitness testimony (and false imprisonment), to marital friction (in the form of overlooked anniversaries) and even death (sky divers have been known to forget to pull their ripcords — accounting, by one estimate, for approximately 6 percent of sky-diving fatalities). The dubious dynamics of memory leave us vulnerable to the predations of spin doctors (because a phrase like “death tax” automatically brings to mind a different set of associations than “estate tax”), the pitfalls of stereotyping (in which easily accessible memories wash out less common counterexamples) and what the psychologist Timothy Wilson calls “mental contamination.” To the extent that we frequently can’t separate relevant information from irrelevant information, memory is often the culprit. All this becomes even more poignant when you compare our memories to those of the average laptop. Whereas it takes the average human child weeks or even months or years to memorize something as simple as a multiplication table, any modern computer can memorize any table in an instant — and never forget it. Why can’t we do the same? Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11516 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Ewen Callaway Long before you decided to read this story, your brain may have already said "click that link". By scanning the brains of test subjects as they pressed one button or another – though not a computer mouse – researchers pinpointed a signal that divulged the decision about seven seconds before people ever realised their choice. The discovery has implications for mind-reading, and the nature of free will. "Our decisions are predetermined unconsciously a long time before our consciousness kicks in," says John-Dylan Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who led the study. It definitely throws our concept of free will into doubt, he adds. This is by no means the first time scientists have cast doubt on conscious free will. In the early 1980s, the late neuroscientist Benjamin Libet uncovered a spark of brain activity three tenths of a second before subjects opted to lift a finger. The activity flickered in a region of the brain involved in planning body movement. But this region might perform only the final mental calculations to move, not the initial decision to lift a finger, Haynes says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 11515 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Brandon Keim You may think you decided to read this story -- but in fact, your brain made the decision long before you knew about it. In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people's decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them. The decision studied -- whether to hit a button with one's left or right hand -- may not be representative of complicated choices that are more integrally tied to our sense of self-direction. Regardless, the findings raise profound questions about the nature of self and autonomy: How free is our will? Is conscious choice just an illusion? "Your decisions are strongly prepared by brain activity. By the time consciousness kicks in, most of the work has already been done," said study co-author John-Dylan Haynes, a Max Planck Institute neuroscientist. Haynes updated a classic experiment by the late Benjamin Libet, who showed that a brain region involved in coordinating motor activity fired a fraction of a second before test subjects chose to push a button. Later studies supported Libet's theory that subconscious activity preceded and determined conscious choice -- but none found such a vast gap between a decision and the experience of making it as Haynes' study has. © 2008 CondéNet, Inc.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 11514 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Carla K. Johnson A new Harvard study finds that babies and toddlers who sleep fewer than 12 hours daily are at greater risk for being overweight in preschool, startling evidence that the link between sleep and obesity may affect even very young children. TV viewing heightened the effect. The children who slept the least and watched the most television had the greatest chance of becoming obese. "The two (behaviors) are acting independently. In combination, they are particularly risky," said the study's lead author, Dr. Elsie Taveras of Harvard Medical School. The findings, published in April's Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, are based on mothers' reports of their babies' sleep habits and TV viewing, and direct measures of the children's height, weight and skin-fold thickness. Starting when the babies were 6 months old, mothers were asked how long their children napped during the day and how long they slept at night. Moms were asked again when the children were 1 and 2 years old. They were asked about TV time when the children reached age 2. The researchers combined the sleep answers to find an average pattern for each child during the first two years of life. They found 586 of the children slept an average of 12 or more hours a day, and 329 of the children slept less than that. © 2008 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sleep; Obesity
Link ID: 11513 - Posted: 06.24.2010