Doctors hope to use the body's own nerves to bridge the gap in the spinal cord left by paralysing injuries. Marie Filbin, from the City University of New York, took a nerve leaving the spine just above an injury, and reattached it below. New Scientist magazine reports that rats used in the experiment showed some signs of renewed movement. A UK expert said the injury location could govern whether a suitable nerve was available for surgery. An injury that breaks or severely damages the spinal cord can cause permanent disability, with the extent set by exactly how far down the spine the damage has happened. Scientists are hunting for ways to repair that damage, including using growth-promoting chemicals to encourage healing across the 'gap', and grafts of nerve fibres from elsewhere in the body. The New York approach is slightly different - it takes one of the nerves that naturally leaves the spinal column, disconnects it from its destination, then plugs it back into the spinal cord using a protein "glue". In the case of the rats, this was a nerve heading for the abdominal muscles, which was taken just above a break in the spinal cord, and reattached below. After just two weeks, it became clear that the new arrangement was working, with the nerve growing and starting to form connections with its new neighbour. Sending electrical impulses down the spinal cord caused twitching in the lower limbs, again indicating that connections had been made. There were no ill-effects in the abdominal muscle, as other nerves connected to it compensated for the loss of one connection. (C)BBC

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 11291 - Posted: 02.07.2008

By Roni Caryn Rabin When Benjamin Kidd was in pre-K last year, his teachers marveled at how bright, attentive and well-behaved he was — in the morning. Later in the day, Ben was a different child. He was fidgety and he couldn’t focus. He couldn’t sit still for a story. And he burst into tears and temper tantrums at the slightest provocation. After taking him to one specialist after another, his mother, Michelle Kidd, who lives in Hillsborough N.J., finally figured out what the problem was: 5-year-old Ben was exhausted. Doctors who ran an overnight sleep study on him last fall said he was suffering from obstructive sleep apnea, a sleep disorder associated with middle age but not uncommon in preschoolers, where it can lead to behavior easily mistaken for hyperactivity — even though it’s actually caused by fatigue. “You know how it is when you let your kid stay up too late, and they’re bouncing off the walls and don’t listen?” says Kidd, who had consulted physicians at the Somerset Medical Center’s Sleep for Life Center in Hillsborough. “It was a lot of that.” © 2008 Microsoft

Keyword: ADHD; Sleep
Link ID: 11290 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jim Giles AN INAPPROPRIATE analysis of clinical trial data by researchers at GlaxoSmithKline obscured suicide risks associated with paroxetine, a profitable antidepressant, for 15 years, suggest court documents (897kb, requires Acrobat Reader) released last month. Not until 2006 did GSK alert people to raised suicide risks associated with the drug, marketed as Paxil and Seroxat. “Not until 2006 did GlaxoSmithKline alert people to raised suicide risks associated with Paxil/Seroxat”An analysis of internal GSK memos and reports, which were released to US lawyers seeking damages, suggests that the company had trial data demonstrating an eightfold increase in suicide risk as early as 1989. Harvard University psychiatrist Joseph Glenmullen, who studied the papers for the lawyers, says it's "virtually impossible" that GSK simply misunderstood the data - a claim the company describes as "absolutely false". Glenmullen's report rests on documents obtained by lawyers in Los Angeles, who are bringing around 30 cases against GSK linking suicides and suicide attempts to the use of Paxil. The report was under seal at a district court in Sacramento, California, until 18 January, when the judge agreed to make parts of it public. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 11289 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Heidi Ledford The brain protein plaques characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease can form extraordinarily fast, and seem to be the starting point of further degeneration in the brain — at least in mice. The results, published today in Nature1, help to settle a long-standing debate about whether such plaques are a primary cause or a symptom of Alzheimer's, and may have implications for how the disease is treated. "It’s a very exciting story," says Dennis Selkoe of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, who has worked in the past with the research team involved. The chicken-and-egg question about which comes first — protein plaques or damaged brain cells — has been "argued about for decades", he says. The argument has centred on clumps of a protein called amyloid-â that accumulate in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. These protein plaques are surrounded by abnormal neurons and immune cells called microglia. Previous work in mice has suggested that amyloid plaques were critical to development of Alzheimer's disease, but researchers debated whether the plaques were a primary cause of the disease. It wasn’t clear whether the plaques recruited microglia, or if the microglia caused the plaques, says Selkoe. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 11288 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Mobile phone use does not raise the risk of brain tumours, a Japanese study suggests. The research is the first to look at the effects of hand set radiation levels on different parts of the brain. Tokyo Women's Medical University found no increased risk of the three main types of brain cancer among regular mobile phone users. The study, comparing 322 brain cancer patients and 683 healthy people, appears in British Journal of Cancer. The cancer patients had one of the three most common types of brain tumour - glioma, meningioma or pituitary adenoma. The researchers rated each subject according to how many years they had been using a mobile phone, and how long they spent talking on it each day. They studied the radiation emitted from various types of mobile phone, and placed them into one of four categories relating to radiation strength. And they also analysied how each phone was likely to affect different areas of the brain. Lead researcher Professor Naohito Yamaguchi said: "Using our newly developed and more accurate techniques, we found no association between mobile phone use and cancer, providing more evidence to suggest they don't cause brain cancer." (C)BBC

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 11287 - Posted: 02.06.2008

By JEFF BELL FOR some of us the trouble starts before we even step into a restaurant. Some might find themselves separating the salt and pepper shakers or worrying whether the cutlery is clean enough. If Carole Johnson, a retired school administrator who lives near Sacramento, Calif., happens to have a distressing thought while passing through a doorway, she needs to “clear” the thought by passing through the door twice more, doing it precisely three times. My own challenge is fighting the urge to return to my parked car and check yet again that the parking brake is secure. If I don’t, how can I be sure my car won’t roll into something — or worse, someone? Ms. Johnson and I are but two of the estimated five to seven million Americans battling obsessive-compulsive disorder, an anxiety disorder characterized by intrusive distressing thoughts and repetitive rituals aimed at dislodging those thoughts. We are an eclectic bunch spanning every imaginable cross-section of society, and we battle an equally eclectic mix of obsessions and compulsions. Some of us obsess about contamination, others about hurting people, and still others about symmetry. Almost all of us can find something to obsess about at a restaurant. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 11286 - Posted: 06.24.2010

CHICAGO - Brain scans of people in chronic pain show a state of constant activity in areas that should be at rest, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday, a finding that could help explain why pain patients have higher rates of depression, anxiety and other disorders. They said chronic pain seems to alter the way people process information that is unrelated to pain. “It seems that enduring pain for a long time affects brain function in response to even minimally demanding attention tasks completely unrelated to pain,” the researchers wrote in the Journal of Neuroscience. Dante Chialvo, a researcher at Northwestern University in Chicago who worked on the study, said: “People with chronic pain — meaning pain that lasts more than six months after their injury — have many other issues that affect their quality of life as much as pain. It is not known where they come from.” Recent studies have shown that in healthy people, certain regions of the brain take over during a resting state, something known as a default mode network. “It takes care of your brain when your brain is at rest,” Chialvo said in a telephone interview. Copyright 2008 Reuters.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11285 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Men are more rewarded by video games than women on a neural level, which explains why they're more likely to become addicted to them, researchers at Stanford University claim. In a brain-imaging study by Stanford's school of medicine, researchers discovered that, when playing video games, the part of the brain that generates feelings of reward is more stimulated in men than in women. That helps explain why they're more likely to get hooked, the study's authors say. Men have more activity in their mesocorticolimbic centre, the region of the brain researchers say is associated with reward and addiction, than women. (Associated Press/Jim Mone) The researchers, whose work was recently published online in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, created a video game where a vertical line, or a "wall," divided the middle of the screen. Ten balls would appear at the right of the screen and move toward the wall, and test participants would have to click on them before they hit. If the balls were clicked on before they hit the wall, the player would gain territory; if the player missed, space would be lost. The test subjects — 11 men and 11 women — were told to click on as many balls as possible but were not told that they would win or lose territory. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11284 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NEW YORK - Giving infants a small dose of a sugar solution just before they get injections seems to make the pain more tolerable, a study shows. Researchers gave babies ages 2 and 4 months the solution two minutes before getting routine immunizations and noted that it seemed to help them recover from the pain of the injection more quickly, the medical journal Pediatrics reported. Dr. Linda A. Hatfield, at the Pennsylvania State University School of Nursing in University Park, and her associates gave the sugar solution to 38 infants and plain water to 45 infants before they were to get a series of injections. The first, second and third injections were administered at 2 minutes, 5 minutes, and 7 minutes after the solutions were given. To assess the babies’ experience of pain, the investigators used a validated composite pain scale that measures crying, facial expression, behavior, body movement, and sleep. The scale goes from 0 to 5, with higher scores representing greater pain. Pain was assessed immediately after each injection, and at 9 minutes. Copyright 2008 Reuters.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 11283 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Women who endure severe stress early in pregnancy may be more likely to have children that go on to develop schizophrenia, research suggests. A University of Manchester team looked at data from 1.38 million Danish births occurring between 1973 and 1995. The risk of schizophrenia and related disorders was around 67% greater among the offspring of women who lost a relative during their first trimester. The study appears in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry. The findings appear to confirm the theory that a mother's psychological state can have a profound influence on her unborn baby. Previous research has linked stress in pregnancy to a raised risk of low birth weight and prematurity. And some studies have also suggested that the abnormalities in brain structure and function that are associated with schizophrenia may begin to form in the earliest stages of development. However, the researchers found no evidence that a loss of a relative at any other time during the pregnancy, or in the six months leading up to a pregnancy, had any effect on the unborn baby. In addition, the association between bereavement and schizophrenia risk only appeared significant for people without a family history of mental illness. The researchers suggest that chemicals released by the mother's brain in response to stress may have a direct impact on the foetus's developing brain. These effects may be strongest in early pregnancy, when protective barriers between the mother and foetus are not fully constructed. They add that the risk of schizophrenia is likely to be influenced by other factors, such as genes. (C)BBC

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Stress
Link ID: 11282 - Posted: 02.05.2008

Dementia is three times more common in people whose blood is low in folates, a form of vitamin B particularly found in green vegetables, a study suggests. The Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry study followed 518 South Korean pensioners for two years. There is growing evidence linking levels of folates - or folic acid - and Alzheimer's disease, though deficiency could be a symptom of dementia. The UK is currently considering adding the vitamin to bread and flour. This is primarily for the benefit of pregnant women and their unborn children, as folic acid has been proven to prevent spinal problems in the growing foetus, but research increasingly suggests it could also ward off dementia. However, the exact relationship between folate deficiency and dementia remains unclear, as it could well be a symptom as much as a cause. The team led by the Chonnam National University Medical School in Gwangju acknowledged this in their study, noting that "changes in micronutrients could be linked with the other typical signs that precede dementia, including weight loss and low blood pressure. While weight loss is unlikely to alter micronutrients in the blood, it may indicate dietary changes in the quality of food intake." They found that 3.5% of their study group were folate deficient to start with. These people were 3.5 times more likely to have developed dementia by the end of the study. The disease was more common in those who were older, relatively poorly educated and inactive, the researchers found. (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 11281 - Posted: 02.05.2008

By LAURAN NEERGAARD WASHINGTON (AP) -- It's a tiny vacuum cleaner for the brain: A new treatment for stroke victims promises to suction out clogged arteries in hopes of stopping the brain attack before it does permanent harm. Called Penumbra, the newly approved device is the latest in a series of inside-the-artery attempts to boost recovery from stroke, the nation's No. 3 killer. Now the question is how to determine which patients are good candidates - because, illogical as it may sound, unclogging isn't always the best option. "Is the patient at a stage of stroke where you're going to hurt them by pulling a clot out, or show benefit?" asks Dr. Walter Koroshetz of the National Institutes of Health. "It's good we have devices. Now we have to learn how to use them." More than 700,000 Americans suffer a stroke each year, and more than 150,000 of them die. Survivors often face serious disability. Most strokes occur when blood vessels feeding the brain become blocked, starving delicate brain cells of oxygen until they die. For those, the clot-busting drug TPA can mean the difference between permanent brain injury or recovery - but only if patients receive intravenous TPA within three hours of the first symptoms. © 2008 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 11280 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Ann Gibbons In the past 100,000 years, modern humans have colonized the far corners of the globe, adapting to new environments as they migrated. Researchers have long assumed that these dramatic transitions resulted in a sort of accelerated evolution in which genes for traits such as skin color and stature changed rapidly to allow humans to survive in their new habitats. Now, a team of French and Spanish researchers has found powerful new evidence to support this idea, identifying 582 genes that have evolved differently in different populations in the past 60,000 years, including a dozen that protect people from obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and other diseases. The team, led by population geneticist Lluis Quintana-Murci of the Pasteur Institute and Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique in Paris, analyzed DNA of 210 individuals from the database of Phase II of the International HapMap Project, an effort to identify variations in human genes that cause disease. The researchers analyzed 2.8 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)--mutations in a single nucleotide in a genome that varies between individuals or populations--from Europeans, Africans, and Asians. Then they sorted the mutations by type, focusing on 15,259 nonsynonymous mutations, which alter amino acids and thus a gene's function. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 11279 - Posted: 06.24.2010

John Whitfield Hanging out with dad brings benefits for the kids.Susan C. AlbertsIt's not just humans who benefit from having a father figure around; the longer a yellow baboon’s dad sticks around, the better it does, new research shows. The discovery shows that there’s more to male baboon life than sex and fighting, says Jeanne Altmann of Princeton University in New Jersey. “We haven’t given males due credit for the subtlety and complexity of their behaviour,” she says. Altmann and her colleagues studied yellow baboons (Papio cynocephalus ) living in Amboseli National Park in Kenya, near the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. They report their results in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 1. The animals live in groups averaging 40 individuals. Females are generally loyal to the group they were born in, but males disperse. Some move regularly from group to group, others stay in the same group for several years. The researchers looked at 118 baboons born between 1982 and 2002, of which 40 were male. Testing DNA from faeces revealed the identity of each youngster’s father. The team had previously shown that adult males intercede in fights on their offsprings' behalf2. But the consequences of this weren’t clear. It has been suggested that males help out their young to show off their own qualities as a mate, rather than to specifically protect the juveniles. The new results, however, suggest that there is something in it for the kids, too. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11278 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Certain variations in a gene that helps regulate response to stress tend to protect adults who were abused in childhood from developing depression, according to new research funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health. Adults who had been abused but didn't have the variations in the gene had twice the symptoms of moderate to severe depression, compared to those with the protective variations. "People's biological variations set the stage for how they respond to different environmental factors, like stress, that can lead to depression," said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D. "Knowing what those variations are eventually could help clinicians individualize care for their patients by predicting who may be at risk or suggesting more precise avenues for treatment." Almost 15 million U.S. adults have major depression. The new report adds to evidence that a combination of gene variations and life experiences promote the disorder or protect people from it. Variations in many genes are thought to be involved, but few of them have been identified. The study also supports previous evidence that a stress hormone, corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), plays a role in depression. The variations are in a gene that makes a receptor for the hormone. Receptors are proteins that act as binding sites, in or on cells, for chemical messengers that affect cell function. The receptor for CRH is called CRHR1.

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11277 - Posted: 02.05.2008

Fitting in at school can be tough for children with attention problems.(Phil Marino for The New York Times)What does it feel like to have attention deficit disorder? The answer to that question can be found in a fascinating new report from the Journal of Pediatric Nursing called “I Have Always Felt Different.'’ The article gives a glimpse into the experience of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D., from a child’s perspective. Assistant professors Robin Bartlett and Mona M. Shattell, from the School of Nursing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, interviewed 16 college students who had been diagnosed with A.D.H.D. as children. The investigators talked to them about how the disorder affected life at home, school and friendships. Like most kids, the students described a life of both conflict with and support from their parents. But in their case, fighting with parents was often triggered by attention-related problems like failing to complete laundry chores or cleaning their rooms. Doing things for my parents and being aware of what needs to be done around the house, that’s the only time it really gets to me or hurts me. Despite the conflict, many students viewed their parents as supportive. One student noted that support from parents often felt like “nagging,'’ but they had little choice. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 11276 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A short afternoon nap can boost a person's ability to perform memory-based tasks, but only if they've learned the task well beforehand, says a U.S. study. Harvard Medical School researchers showed that subjects who took a 45-minute nap between memory tests were more likely to improve their scores the second time than those who remained awake. The catch is that only those who scored well on the tests before their nap — that is, those who learned the tasks well — showed real improvement in their repeat performances. Those who did well on the initial test but were not allowed to sleep did not see the same improvement in the second round. Those who did not do well in the first memory tests were not helped by taking a nap. Their re-test results were similar to those who likewise did poorly on the first tests and then stayed awake. The study, published Friday in the peer-reviewed journal SLEEP, followed 11 men and 22 women with an average age of 23. The participants were trained in various memory tasks, including learning their way through a maze and pairing words. Shortly afterward, 16 subjects took a 45-minute afternoon nap while 17 remained awake in the lab. After the nap, all subjects remained in the lab until the retest about two hours later. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11275 - Posted: 06.24.2010

WASHINGTON - Government regulators said Friday the connection between Pfizer's anti-smoking drug Chantix and serious psychiatric problems is "increasingly likely." The Food and Drug Administration began in November investigating reports of depression, agitation and suicidal behavior in patients taking the popular twice-daily pill. The agency's announcement comes two weeks after Pfizer added stronger warnings to the drug. In doing so, the company stressed that a direct link between Chantix and the reported psychiatric problems has not been established, but could not be ruled out. In a public advisory released Friday, FDA said patients taking Chantix should tell their doctor about any history of mental illness. "Chantix may cause worsening of current psychiatric illness even if it is currently under control," reads the statement. "It may also cause an old psychiatric illness to reoccur." Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11274 - Posted: 02.04.2008

By David Brown Fittingly, the first person to detect a faint signal in all the noise was the interpreter. The 33-year-old woman who worked for eight years working with Spanish-speaking patients at a medical clinic in southern Minnesota noticed something familiar as she translated the story of a young meatpacker last September. Earlier last summer, she had heard a version of it from two other workers at the same slaughterhouse, and had told it to their doctors, who were different from her current patient's. When the consultation was over, she pointed this out. The interpreter's insight set in motion a story, still unfolding, that may be making envious the ghost of Berton Roueche, the legendary chronicler of medical mysteries at the New Yorker magazine. A new disease has surfaced in 12 people among the 1,300 employees at the factory run by Quality Pork Processors about 100 miles south of Minneapolis. The ailment is characterized by sensations of burning, numbness and weakness in the arms and legs. For most, this is unpleasant but not disabling. For a few, however, the ailment has made walking difficult and work impossible. The symptoms have slowly lessened in severity, but in none of the sufferers has it disappeared completely. © 2008 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11273 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Joan Raymond Are men smarter than women? No. But they sure think they are. An analysis of some 30 studies by British researcher Adrian Furnham, a professor of psychology at University College London, shows that men and women are fairly equal overall in terms of IQ. But women, it seems, underestimate their own candlepower (and that of women in general), while men overestimate theirs. Furnham talks to NEWSWEEK's Joan Raymond about his findings and why perceived IQ matters. Excerpts: NEWSWEEK: Many studies show that men score slightly higher in IQ tests. Is this significant? Adrian Furnham: Universally, men tend to score higher on certain specialized skills, such as spatial awareness. In the real world, that means they might be better at reading maps or navigating. Women score higher in terms of language development and emotional intelligence. But most experts agree there is no real, important overall difference when it comes to gender and intelligence. But women think they aren't as smart as men? That's the conundrum. What I study is "perceived intelligence," essentially how smart people think they are. I analyzed 30 international studies, and what I found was that women, across the world, tend to underplay their intelligence, while men overstate it. © 2008 Newsweek, Inc.

Keyword: Intelligence; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11272 - Posted: 06.24.2010