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

NEW YORK - How well people get around and keep their balance in old age is linked to the severity of changes in their brains, new research suggests. Age-related white matter brain changes, also called leukoaraiosis, are frequently seen in older people and differ in severity, and the new study suggests that they are associated with gait and balance disturbances. Neurologists, geriatricians and family doctors often send older patients for brain scans to rule out severe brain atrophy (wasting), a tumor, stroke or brain infection because of mild mental difficulties, unsteadiness or depressed mood, and get back white matter changes as the main finding, Dr. Hansjoerg Baezner told Reuters Health. Baezner, from University of Heidelberg in Mannheim, Germany, and colleagues studied the impact of age-related white matter changes on functional decline in 639 men and women between the ages of 65 and 84 who underwent brain scans as well as walking and balance tests. Of the group, 284 had mild age-related white matter changes, 197 moderate changes, and 158 severe changes. They found that people with severe white matter changes were twice as likely to score poorly on tests of walking and balance as those with mild white matter changes. They further found that people with severe changes were twice as likely as the mild group to have a history of falls. The moderate group was one-and-a-half times as likely as the mild group to have a history of falls. Copyright 2008 Reuters.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Alzheimers
Link ID: 11431 - Posted: 03.18.2008

By C. CLAIBORNE RAY Q. Does oversleeping make one feel more tired than sleeping a normal seven to eight hours? A. That depends on what is meant by oversleeping, said Dr. Charles P. Pollak, director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. A long period of sleep may be just what the doctor ordered. “People do not necessarily sleep a long time arbitrarily,” Dr. Pollak said. “Sometimes it is in response to insufficient sleep. People make up for lost sleep on the weekend, and the sleep may be very long. But that is not the same as oversleeping. It does not contribute to feeling groggy and tired, but helps make up for sleep you should have been getting during the week.” Dr. Pollak explains that most people cannot sleep more than the amount they need, which varies a great deal from person to person and from age to age. “Extending sleep beyond what is normally required might sometimes make you feel groggy,” he said, “but it is not easy to do.” “There is such a thing as being sleep-deprived,” he continued. “But as far as we know, there is no such thing as being wake-deprived. If you awake feeling refreshed, that is how much sleep you actually require.” Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 11430 - Posted: 06.24.2010

For identical twins, the equation always has been simple: same egg + same sperm = same DNA. But new research from the American Journal of Human Genetics says this formula is not quite right. According to geneticist Jan Dumanski and his colleagues, identical twins don't have matching DNA. "In medical textbooks or in popular science books, it's very often written that identical twins are identical also in the DNA," says Dumanski. "And that's not true. We are challenging this dogma by finding these small subtle but clearly detectable differences in the DNA of identical twins." Although researchers previously have documented a few, rare genetic differences between identical twins, Dumanski says such cases were considered exceptions. "It was, in the field, considered rather as a curiosity that they really differ. What we show is that these differences are actually very, very frequent," he explains. "We basically see those differences in every twin pair we looked at so far." For their study, Dumanski and colleagues compared the genomes of 19 twin pairs using DNA chip technology. For some of their volunteer pairs, one twin had Parkinson's disease while the other was healthy. Until now, scientists would attribute such a difference to environment rather than genetics. But Dumanski's research shows genetics might play a role. © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11429 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NATALIE ANGIER You can accuse the disgraced ex-governor Eliot Spitzer of many things in his decision to flout the law by soliciting the services of a pricey prostitute: hypocrisy, egomania, sophomoric impulsiveness and self-indulgence, delusional ineptitude and boneheadedness. But one trait decidedly not on display in Mr. Spitzer’s splashy act of whole-life catabolism was originality. It’s all been done before, every snickering bit of it, and not just by powerful “risk-taking” alpha men who may or may not be enriched for the hormone testosterone. It’s been done by many other creatures, tens of thousands of other species, by male and female representatives of every taxonomic twig on the great tree of life. Sexual promiscuity is rampant throughout nature, and true faithfulness a fond fantasy. Oh, there are plenty of animals in which males and females team up to raise young, as we do, that form “pair bonds” of impressive endurance and apparent mutual affection, spending hours reaffirming their partnership by snuggling together like prairie voles or singing hooty, doo-wop love songs like gibbons, or dancing goofily like blue-footed boobies. Yet as biologists have discovered through the application of DNA paternity tests to the offspring of these bonded pairs, social monogamy is very rarely accompanied by sexual, or genetic, monogamy. Assay the kids in a given brood, whether of birds, voles, lesser apes, foxes or any other pair-bonding species, and anywhere from 10 to 70 percent will prove to have been sired by somebody other than the resident male. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11428 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Hopkin How do we know what another person is thinking? New research suggests we use the same brain region that we do when thinking about ourselves — but only as long as we judge the person to be similar to us. When second-guessing the opinions and feelings of those unlike ourselves, this brain region does get involved, the new research shows. This may mean we are more likely to fall back on stereotyping — potentially helping to explain the causes of social tensions such as racism or religious disputes. Neuroscientists led by Adrianna Jenkins of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, made the discovery when trying to deduce how the brain weighs up the thoughts of others. As Jenkins explains, judging how others are feeling is a valuable social skill, because we have no way of seeing inside another person's head. "How do we go about bridging the gap between our minds and others' minds?" Jenkins asks. The answer seems to be that it depends on whether we feel we identify with that person or not, Jenkins says. In other words, how our brain handles the question of someone's attitude to anything, from traffic jams to impressionist art, depends entirely on how we feel we relate to them as a person. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Emotions; Autism
Link ID: 11427 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A drug to tackle two of the leading causes of blindness is a step closer after successful experiments in mice. Activating a specific protein in the eyes prevented blood vessel damage which can cause sight loss. The research has implications for macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy - two common conditions associated with blood vessel problems. The University of Utah study, published in Nature Medicine, could also provide clues for treating other diseases. Both of the types of eye problems are common in older people, and involve both leakage of blood vessels within the eye, and the formation of abnormal new blood vessels. Researchers had already identified a protein called Robo4, which appeared to play an important role in the development of stable, working blood vessels. The proteins were activated in mice bred to mimic the effects of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and diabetic retinopathy. The scientists saw that the blood vessel damage was prevented, or in some cases, reversed. While this does not prove that the same principle works in humans, or that a drug could be developed to harness this without side-effects, the researchers described the work as a "major breakthrough". Professor Randall Olson, director of Utah's John A Moran Eye Center, said: "We are excited about taking this opening and moving the frontier forward with real hope for patients who have but few, often disappointing options." The scientists believe that it will still take some years before a working drug can be provided for patients. Dr Hemin Chin, from the US National Eye Institute, said: "Given that vascular eye diseases, such as age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy, are the number one cause of vision loss in the US, the identification of new signalling pathways that prevent abnormal vessel growth and leakage in the eye represents a major scientific advancement." (C)BBC

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 11426 - Posted: 03.17.2008

CHICAGO - Ballet teacher Gayle Parseghian thought she might never dance again after a back injury while moving heavy furniture left her with unrelenting pain. But an intensive, four-week “boot camp” got the 55-year-old dancer from Toledo, Ohio, back to the barre. The program at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago taught her to manage the chronic pain that had tormented her for more than a year. “It affects your relationship with your spouse, your family, your friends, your boss,” she said. “It’s like you’re trapped in your body and you can’t get out. It’s a feeling of being completely out of control.” New research suggests chronic pain affects the brain’s ability to rest, disrupting a system that normally charges up some brain regions and powers down others when a person relaxes. “I ask a patient who has had chronic pain for 10 years to put the mind blank, don’t think about anything,” says Dr. Dante Chialvo, a researcher at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine who is not involved with the boot camp. MRI images show the pain sufferer’s brain lighting up, but not as a normal brain at rest would, he said. “There is an objective biological difference in the brain.” The early findings could explain the sleep disturbances, decision-making problems and mood changes that often accompany chronic pain, he said. © 2008 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11425 - Posted: 06.24.2010