NEW YORK - An extended-release version of the anti-addiction medicine naltrexone reduces drinking in alcohol-dependent patients within two days of being injected, according to a new study. Naltrexone blocks opioid receptors and is approved for use in alcohol-dependent patients. To improve adherence, "an intramuscular, injectable, extended-release formulation of naltrexone has been developed," Dr. Domenic A. Ciraulo, of Boston University School of Medicine, and colleagues explain in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. The researchers tested injectable naltrexone XR in some 600 actively drinking, alcohol-dependent men and women who were given one of two doses of the drug or an inactive placebo every 4 weeks for 24 weeks. The participants also received 12 sessions of standardized, low-intensity psychosocial therapy. Compared with the placebo patients, those given the higher dose of naltrexone had a significant reduction in the average daily number of drinks consumed by the second day. By the third day, fewer naltrexone patients reported heavy drinking compared with those on placebo (20 percent versus 35 percent, respectively). This reduction was maintained throughout the study. While patients treated with the lower dose of naltrexone XR experienced reductions in these measures, the differences compared with placebo were not statistically significant. Copyright 2008 Reuters.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11451 - Posted: 03.21.2008

By DOUGLAS MARTIN Dr. Frank J. Ayd Jr., a psychiatrist who by studying his patients’ responses to early antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs helped give birth to and nurture the field of psychopharmacology, died Monday in Baltimore. He was 87. Dr. Ayd’s clinical results were usually influential and sometimes stunning. In May 1955, he reported at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association on his use of two antipsychotic drugs, chlorpromazine, best known by the trade name Thorazine, and reserpine. Dr. Ayd, who received the first permit from the Food and Drug Administration to use Thorazine to treat schizophrenia, found that many of the 300 patients he treated with the drugs no longer needed hospitalization in a specialized setting and could be treated in a general hospital or nursing home. He said 80 percent were usefully employed. The New York Times reported that his finding had “profound economic implications,” because it offered a way to cut the $1 billion the nation was then spending on mental illness. It said many patients could receive immediate treatment and avoid long-term hospitalization. Dr. Ayd never doubted he was treating brain diseases. He tested his patients’ psychological, neurological and behavioral responses to new drugs, then quantified the results. This placed him at odds with the more impressionistic traditions of psychiatry, and more in tune with the biological approach favored by many European researchers. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 11450 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Brendan Borrell Here's a riddle: You're miserable without it, but once you get it, you'll be happier if you give it away. What is it? The answer, according to a study in this week's Science 1, is money. The more cash people dole out to charity and to friends, the happier they tend to be. “We’ve understood that happiness and money go together,” says Robert Biswas-Diener, a psychologist at the Center for Applied Positive Psychology in Coventry, who was not involved in the research. It is known, for example, that the more people make, the happier on average they are (although this effect is actually remarkably small, particularly among people who have enough money to meet their basic needs). “The next level is to ask: how much happiness does it buy? How might it buy happiness?” To tackle these lofty questions, Elizabeth Dunn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and two colleagues asked people how much money they made, how they spent their money and how happy they were. In their sample of 632 Americans, the researchers found that an average of nearly 10% of the monthly budget was spent on what Dunn terms “prosocial spending” — that is, gifts for others and donations to charity. Overall spending levels were not related to happiness, but prosocial spending was. The effect of spending a dollar on other people was similar in magnitude to earning an extra dollar in income. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11449 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Steve Mitchell When it comes to versatile vision, the mantis shrimp reigns supreme. Its specialized eyes can pick up several types of light, including infrared and ultraviolet, and its color vision tops ours. Now scientists report that this reef-dwelling crustacean has done itself one better: It can see a type of polarized light that no other animal is known to be able to detect. The function of this new form of vision is still a mystery, but researchers speculate that the crustacean may use it in mating displays or as a secret form of communication. The key to the mantis shrimp's (Odontodactylus scyllarus) extraordinary vision is in the structure of its eyes, which consist of six rows of numerous smaller eyes called ommatidia. Justin Marshall first suspected that the shrimp could see a new type of light based on the way light-sensing cells in some ommatidia are arranged. They sit at just the angle to convert circularly polarized light (CPL)--a type of light wave that travels in a spiral--to a form that other cells underneath can detect, says Marshall, a sensory neurobiologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Certain beetles have shells that change color when various types of CPL are shone on them, but no animal is known to have the ability to see this type of light. (To humans using special goggles, CPL appears as a bright light.) © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 11448 - Posted: 06.24.2010

It seems simple. We get hungry and we eat. But eating is much more complex than that, and scientists are only starting to understand the many factors that regulate eating behavior. One of these factors is stomach expansion that sends signals to the brain resulting in feelings of fullness. Nuclear medicine physician Gene-Jack Wang and colleagues at Brookhaven National Laboratory wanted to find out why it takes different volumes of food to satisfy different people. This is where the water balloons come in. The researchers asked 18 healthy volunteers with body mass indices (BMI) ranging from 20 (low/normal weight) to 29 (extremely overweight/borderline obese) to swallow a balloon connected to a water tube. The balloon assembly is actually a plain-end, non-lubricated latex condom securely connected to a tube with unwaxed dental floss. In order to make it easier to swallow, volunteers were first asked to put small plastic mouthpieces coated with a numbing lidocaine gel in their mouths. The volunteers then rinsed the back of their tongues with more lidocaine. Then the subjects swallowed the balloon, which ended up in their stomachs. The tube was taped to their cheeks. Before asking any volunteers to try the procedure, each of the scientists themselves tried swallowing the balloons and having it filled with water. While the brain activity of volunteers was monitored using functional magnetic imaging (fMRI), the scientists filled the balloons first with about one cup (250 ml) of body-temperature water, and then with about two cups (500 ml). A normal adult stomach can hold about 750 ml. As Wang explains, scientists knew that people respond differently to different volumes of food. © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Obesity; Brain imaging
Link ID: 11447 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katja Gaschler Bouts of crying and irritability, along with concentration lapses and exhaustion, affect 80 percent of new mothers. But these baby blues disappear within a few hours or days of delivery. In contrast, 10 to 20 percent of women in the U.S. develop a more disabling and longer-lasting disorder called postpartum depression in the first year after childbirth that often impairs their ability to care for their babies. Dramatic hormonal fluctuations that occur after de­livery may contribute to postpartum depression in susceptible women, but causes of the disorder are not fully understood. Postpartum depression can weaken the developing bonds between a mother and her child and thereby make a toddler more passive, insecure and socially inhibited. As a result, therapy often focuses on repairing the mother-child bond by changing the negative behavior patterns that develop between mother and child during depression. The psychologist smiles at Manuela, a new mother in her late thirties. “Please play with your baby for two minutes,” the therapist instructs her and then leaves the room. Two video cameras film Manuela (which is not her real name) and her three-month-old daughter. In the next room, a split-screen monitor shows the mother’s profile on the left and her infant in a baby chair on the right. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 11446 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sufferers of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome may see significant relief from their symptoms when administered the stress hormone cortisol, finds a new study. A review of 50 published studies conducted by researchers in California has found that people who suffer from chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia have adrenal dysfunction, meaning their adrenal glands, which produce sex hormones and cortisol, don't work effectively. Chronic fatigue is a condition in which people have debilitating fatigue that may be get worse with activity and is not relieved by rest. Fibromyalgia is a syndrome characterized by multiple pain points in muscles throughout the body and fatigue. Chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia affect 0.5 to five per cent of the population, according to the study's authors. "My review of existing studies suggests that a treatment protocol of early administration of cortisol may help improve and reduce the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia," said Dr. Kent Holtorf, medical director of the Holtorf Medical Group Center for Endocrine, Neurological and Infection Related Illness in Torrance, Calif., in a release. Holtorf also conducted an observational study with 500 patients from his clinic, who received cortisol as part of their treatment. He found that by the fourth visit, 84 per cent reported improvement, with 75 per cent showing "significant improvement," and 62 per cent reporting substantial improvement. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Stress; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 11445 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NEW YORK - Although boys with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) appear to be more impulsive and troubled than their female counterparts, in adulthood the condition seems to have more impact in women than in men. “We found that adult women with ADHD frequently have high levels of emotional symptoms as well as the cognitive problems found in ADHD,” Dr. Frederick W. Reimherr told Reuters Health. In the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, Reimherr of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and his colleagues describe their analysis of data from two clinical trials of Strattera, known generically as atomoxetine, in adults with ADHD. In all, the researchers collected information on ADHD symptoms and treatment response in 515 individuals, about a third of whom were women. More women (75 percent) had combined-type ADHD than did men (62 percent). Women also had higher scores on measures of anxiety and depression and had more sleep problems. Poor temper control, mood volatility, and emotional over-reactivity were more common in women (37 percent) than in men (29 percent). Copyright 2008 Reuters

Keyword: ADHD; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11444 - Posted: 06.24.2010

LONDON - Birds start singing in the spring because of a biological response to longer days, researchers said on Wednesday. When birds are exposed to light for longer periods, certain brain cells trigger a series of hormonal reactions telling them to find a mating partner, which they do by singing, a team of Japanese and British researchers reported in the journal Nature. "While we knew what area of the brain was affected by seasonal change, until now we did not know the exact mechanism involved," said Peter Sharp, a researcher at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, who worked on the study. The researchers, led by Takashi Yoshimura of the Nagoya University in Japan, scanned 38,000 genes present in brain samples taken from Japanese quails to see which of the birds' genes were affected by varying degrees of light. Genes in cells on the surface of the brain switched on when the birds received more light and began releasing a thyroid-stimulating hormone. The genes activated 14 hours after dawn on the first day of sufficient length, the researchers said. "Such knowledge would have been impossible in the past, but advances in technology enabled us to scan thousands of genes so that we could work out which ones are affected by seasonal change," Sharp said in a telephone interview. Copyright 2008 Reuters

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Language
Link ID: 11443 - Posted: 03.20.2008

By David Biello Alexander Shulgin is the world's foremost "psychonaut." The 82-year-old chemist has not only created more of the 300 known consciousness-altering (or psychoactive) compounds than anyone living or dead, he has, by his own account, sampled somewhere between 200 and 250 of them himself—most of them cooked up in the musty lab behind his home in the hills east of Berkeley, Calif., where he has shared many a chemical voyage with his wife of 26 years, Ann. "I take them myself because I am interested in their activity in the human mind. How would you test that in a rat or mouse?" says Shulgin, known to friends as Sasha. He has paid the price for his avocation. Some of his creations have induced uncontrollable vomiting, paralysis and the feeling that his bones were melting, among other terrors. And though some believe Shulgin has opened the doors of perception to a new class of potentially therapeutic mind-altering compounds, others argue that he bears responsibility for the damage that ongoing abuse of such now-illicit substances can cause. As a student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1950s, Shulgin's gateway drug was mescaline, a naturally occurring psychedelic found in peyote and other groovy cacti. "It introduced me to new colors which I had never seen before," Shulgin says. "It allowed me to interpret whatever I was looking at with an entirely new vocabulary…. And yet, what a simple structure!" © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11442 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Helen Thomson Amputees who experience phantom limb pain could find relief in a surprisingly simple way - by paying more attention to the people around them. Phantom limbs occur when an amputee feels the often painful sensation of touch arising from a limb that is no longer present. Working with combat veterans, Vilayanur Ramachandran, of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, has now discovered a potential cure. His treatment makes use of the newly discovered properties of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons fire when a person performs an intentional action - such as waving - and also when they observe someone else performing the same action. They are thought to help us predict the intentions of others by creating a "virtual reality" simulation of the action in our minds. "You also find cells like this for touch," says Ramachandran. "They fire when you touch yourself and when you watch someone else being touched in the same location." This begs the question: if the same touch neurons fire when you rub your hand as when you watch somebody else rubbing their hand, why is it that we don't constantly go around "feeling" what we are watching? © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11441 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sleep deprivation raises the likelihood of sleepwalking, research suggests. The Université de Montréal monitored 40 suspected sleepwalkers during normal sleep, and then during rest which followed a long period of wakefulness. The Annals of Neurology study found the number of incidents of disturbed sleep, including sleepwalking, rose sharply during "recovery" sleep. It is estimated sleepwalking, which has been linked to aggressive and injurious behaviour, affects up to 4% people. Sleep deprivation has been linked to sleepwalking in previous research - but the findings have been inconclusive. The latest study focused on patients referred to a sleep disorder clinic for suspected sleepwalking between August 2003 and March 2007. Following examination, the patients slept for a night in the lab. The next day they went about their regular daytime activities, after which they returned to the lab in the evening, where they were constantly supervised to ensure they did not fall asleep. Recovery sleep took place the next morning, following 25 hours of wakefulness. All patients were videotaped during each sleep period and the researchers evaluated behavioural movements on a three-point scale of complexity, ranging from playing with the bed sheets to getting up from the bed. During normal sleep half of the patients showed signs of disturbance, but during "recovery" sleep the figure rose to 90%. The total number of episodes of "behavioural movement" recorded by the researchers rose from 32 in normal sleep to 92 in "recovery" sleep. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 11440 - Posted: 03.19.2008

WASHINGTON - College kids are so frazzled they can't sleep or eat. Or study. Good grief, they're even anxious about spring break. Most students in U.S. colleges are just plain stressed out, from everyday worries about grades and relationships to darker thoughts of suicide, according to a poll of undergraduates from coast to coast. The survey was conducted for The Associated Press and mtvU, a television network available at many colleges and universities. Four in 10 students say they endure stress often. Nearly one if five say they feel it all or most of the time. But most are bearing it. Nearly two-thirds in the survey say they enjoy life. Too worried to work Majorities cite classic stress symptoms including trouble concentrating, sleeping and finding motivation. Most say they have also been agitated, worried, too tired to work. "Everything is being piled on at once," said Chris Curran, a junior at the Albany College of Pharmacy in Albany, N.Y. He said he has learned to cope better since starting school. "You just get really agitated and anxious. Then you start procrastinating, and it all piles up." Many cite eating problems and say they have felt lonely, depressed, like they are failures. Substantial numbers are even concerned about spring break, chiefly not having enough money or being in good physical shape. Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 11439 - Posted: 03.19.2008

By JR Minkel Most adolescents' fond remembrances of childhood would not include lying motionless for spans of five to 10 minutes in the narrow confines of a giant, clanging machine. For Alexandra Giedd, known in her family as Sasha, it was an eagerly anticipated ritual. Once every three months from the age of four, she and her father would set out for his lab at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Md. There, child psychiatrist Jay Giedd would give his daughter blankets and earplugs before sliding her into the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine for the latest installment of what they called "brain pictures." The scientific justification wasn't entirely clear to her at first. Mostly, she says, "I got to spend time with my dad." But for him, it was all part of his project to trace the growth and development of the human brain from infancy to adolescence. "It's always been puzzling," Giedd says, "that so many things happen during adolescence." Rates of suicide and fatal car crashes peak during the teenage years. Adolescence is also when many psychological problems may first strike, particularly anxiety, attention deficit / hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and substance abuse. Giedd, 47, hopes to link such behaviors to changes in the developing brain. "No one had just mapped out the typical path, and without that it was very hard to know about illnesses," he says. In his ongoing work at the NIMH, he has collected some 6,000 scans from 2,214 children, teens and adults, most between the ages of three and 30. Half are healthy individuals and twins; the rest suffer from schizophrenia or other psychological disorders. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Brain imaging
Link ID: 11438 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Constance Holden Not everyone is vulnerable to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)--the extreme anxiety, depression, and nightmares that can follow a harrowing event. Although some people develop symptoms after seemingly minor traumas, others can handle wars, hurricanes, or various forms of physical abuse without losing their emotional balance. Now, researchers have shown that mutations in a stress-related gene may help determine whether someone who suffered from abuse as a child is susceptible to PTSD later in life. Teasing out the genetics of PTSD has been difficult. Children who are abused are more susceptible to PTSD as adults, and researchers estimate that up to 40% of this susceptibility is inherited. But just what genes are responsible is not known. One promising lead is FKBP5, a gene that helps regulate binding between stress hormones and their receptors. Research has shown that childhood abuse can lead to overreactivity in the body's stress response system, so a team at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, decided to see if there was a link between PTSD and mutations in FKBP5. The researchers collected data on 762 people, most of them from poor black neighborhoods, who came to the clinic over a 2-year period for nonpsychiatric reasons. Through interviews and questionnaires, the subjects reported experiences with childhood abuse as well as other types of trauma in later life. Clinicians determined whether such traumas had triggered PTSD in adulthood. Subjects also gave saliva samples so their DNA could be tested. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Stress; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11437 - Posted: 06.24.2010

-- Researchers say they have shown for the first time that humpback whale calves make sounds. The nonprofit Cetos Research Organization, which studied humpbacks off Maui and Kauai, say the grunts and squeals emitted by the young whales are messages for their mothers. Ann Zoidis, director of the research project, said the sounds may be expressions of curiosity or warnings of potential danger. The sounds are not as complex as the continuous, repetitive and highly structured phrases and themes of older males, the researchers found. The calves instead produced a limited number of sounds that were short and simple in structure, according to the study. The noises included repetitive grunts that increased in strength and were sometimes accompanied by bubble streams and seemed to function as an alarm call to the mother, the researchers found. They say the sounds were produced more frequently during calmer periods when the mother was resting or during slow travel. "This tells us that calves do in fact communicate, and it tells us they are communicating to their mothers," Zoidis said. © 2008 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 11436 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Colin Barras Mick Jagger, Rupert Murdoch and Michael Douglas all have the right idea, evolutionarily speaking. Statistics show that monogamous men have the most children if they marry women younger than themselves. How much younger is the key question. Last year, a study of Swedish census information suggested a 4 to 6-year age gap is best, but new research has found that in some circumstances a surprisingly large gap – 15 years – is the optimum. Martin Fieder at the University of Vienna and Susanne Huber of the University of Veterinary Medicine, also in Vienna, Austria, studied the Swedish data and found that a simple equation related the age difference of the parents to the number of offspring. For people who had maintained monogamous relationships throughout adulthood, the most children were found in couples where the man was 4.0 to 5.9 years older than the woman. The probable reasons behind this state of affairs are not controversial: "Men want women younger than themselves because they are physically attractive," says Fieder, while women tend to prioritise a partner who can provide security and stability, and so tend to opt for older men. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 11435 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Most patients recovering from severe injuries are still in pain a year later, researchers have found. Scientists analysed data from more than 3,000 patients, and concluded that 62% continued to suffer 12 months after their injury. In the Archives of Surgery journal, the University of Washington team called for more intervention to control pain as swiftly as possible. UK patients face the same problems, said one specialist physiotherapist. In the UK, once a trauma patient has left hospital, the responsibility for helping them usually falls to their GP and local pain management services. A report published in 2004 suggested that the quality of chronic pain management in primary care, and the amount offered to patients, was "highly variable". Only one in 25 of those primary care trusts which replied said that they were even trying to record how many patients they had suffering from chronic pain. The US finding clearly sets out the burden of long-term pain on those suffering traumatic injuries. The patients in their survey were aged between 18 and 84, who had all survived at least one year after their accident. After 12 months, they were asked to rate their pain on a 10-point scale, and almost two-thirds said they were still in pain, often in more than one part of the body. The average level of pain was not excruciating, but still severe - a rating of 5.5 on the scale. Three or more painful areas were reported by 59% of those with injury-related pain. (C)BBC

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11434 - Posted: 03.18.2008

Teen girls who have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder may have a much higher risk of developing eating disorders than girls without ADHD, a new U.S. study suggests. Symptoms of ADHD can include a short attention span, a low level of organization, excessive talking, aggressive gestures and irritability. It affects five per cent of school-age children, according to the study's authors. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Virginia, found that girls with ADHD were more likely to develop eating disorders such as bulimia nervosa, in which a person first binges on food and then vomits to prevent weight gain. "Girls with ADHD may be more at risk of developing eating problems as adolescents because they already have impulsive behaviours that can set them apart from their peers," Amori Yee Mikami, the lead author, said in a release issued on March 13. "As they get older, their impulsivity may make it difficult for them to maintain healthy eating and a healthy weight, resulting in self-consciousness about their body image and the binging and purging symptoms." The study involved 228 girls in San Francisco, 140 who had been diagnosed with ADHD and 88 girls without the condition. They were first assessed when they were between the ages of six and 12 and then five years after. © CBC 2008

Keyword: ADHD; Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 11433 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ERIC NAGOURNEY How do you know how someone is feeling? For people in Western societies, it is usually easy: look at the person’s face. But for people from Japan and other Eastern societies, a new study finds, it may be more complex — having to do not only with evaluating the other person’s face but also with gauging the mood of others who might be around. The differences may speak to deeply ingrained cultural traits, the authors write, suggesting that Westerners may “see emotions as individual feelings, while Japanese see them as inseparable from the feelings of the group.” The findings are based on a study of about three dozen students in two groups — one Japanese, one Western — who were shown a series of drawings of five children. The volunteers were told that the drawings were going to be used in an educational television program and that the researchers wanted to see how realistic they were. Sometimes the expressions of all the children in an image were the same, but more often they varied. The participants were asked to look at the face of the person at the center of the picture and rate it on a 10-point scale for happiness, sadness and anger. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11432 - Posted: 06.24.2010