By John Russell At first blush, Chuck Clauson seems to have as much energy as the next guy. He works full time as a bank loan officer, is raising two teenagers as a single dad, does plenty of housework and enjoys short walks. But the 40-year-old Pendleton man, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis nine years ago, admits he gets tired quickly, especially in hot weather. He takes five medications every day to treat an array of symptoms, from fatigue to nerve pain. Like many people who suffer from multiple sclerosis, Clauson wishes there were a single treatment, or even a cure, for the disease that affects 21/2 million people worldwide, including about 400,000 Americans. Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co. is pushing to find a new treatment. Better known for developing medicine for diabetes, depression and schizophrenia, Lilly recently signed a deal with a Canadian biotechnology company, BioMS Medical Corp., to help it complete development of an experimental drug called MBP9289. The two companies say MBP9289 has shown promise in delaying progression and worsening of multiple sclerosis. The drug is in two Phase 3 clinical trials and one Phase 2 trial, and is still years away from the market.

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 11304 - Posted: 02.11.2008

Nigel Hawkes Consuming low-calorie drinks may increase the risk of putting on weight, according to scientists in the United States. They have suggested that people who choose diet drinks containing artificial sweeteners tend to overcompensate and consume more calories than those who do not. Although the rise in obesity has corresponded with a growth in low-calorie soft drinks, designed to make keeping weight down easy by replacing sugar with saccharine or other sweeteners, scientists who conducted experiments using rats at Purdue University, in Indiana, have suggested that the opposite may be happening. They found that rats fed on yoghurt sweetened with saccharine ate more calories, gained more weight and put on more body fat than rats that were given yoghurt sweetened with glucose. Susan Swithers and Terry Davidson, who conducted the experiments, have suggested that, by breaking the connection between a sweet sensation and high-calorie food, the use of saccharine changes the body’s ability to regulate how many calories it consumes. “The data clearly indicate that consuming a food sweetened with no-calorie saccharine can lead to greater body-weight gain and adiposity than would consuming the same food sweetened with a higher-calorie sugar,” they conclude in their report, which is published in the journal Behavioural Neuroscience. © Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 11303 - Posted: 06.24.2010

BOSTON - If you’re sad and shopping, watch your wallet: A new study shows people’s spending judgment goes out the window when they’re down, especially if they’re a bit self-absorbed. Study participants who watched a sadness-inducing video clip offered to pay nearly four times as much money to buy a water bottle than a group that watched an emotionally neutral clip. The so-called “misery is not miserly” phenomenon is well-known to psychologists, advertisers and personal shoppers alike, and has been documented in a similar study in 2004. The new study released Friday by researchers from four universities goes further, trying to answer whether temporary sadness alone can trigger spendthrift tendencies. The study found a willingness to spend freely by sad people occurs mainly when their sadness triggers greater “self-focus.” That response was measured by counting how frequently study participants used references to “I,” “me,” “my” and “myself” in writing an essay about how a sad situation such as the one portrayed in the video would affect them personally. The brief video was about the death of a boy’s mentor. Another group watched an emotionally neutral clip about the Great Barrier Reef, the vast coral reef system off Australia’s coast. © 2008 The Associated Press

Keyword: Emotions; Depression
Link ID: 11302 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Doctors are increasingly prescribing exercise for people with depression, mental health campaigners have found. In a survey of 200 English GPs, the Mental Health Foundation found 22% suggest exercise to help people with milder forms of the condition. This compares with just 5% in a similar survey three years ago. The foundation said it was important that doctors did not just prescribe antidepressants for patients, and looked for other options. Research has shown that exercise can help people with mild forms of depression by improving self-esteem - through better body image or achieving goals, and by relieving feelings of isolation which can fuel their depression. It also releases feel-good brain chemicals such as endorphins. Celia Richardson, campaigns director for the Mental Health Foundation, said: "It can help people physically, socially and biologically. They often meet others who have been in the same situation as them, but are now further down the line and feeling better." The survey found there is now a wider belief by GPs that exercise therapy can be beneficial. (C)BBC

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 11301 - Posted: 02.09.2008

By Yvonne Raley and Robert Talisse In 2003 nearly half of all Americans falsely assumed that the U.S. government had found solid evidence for a link between Iraq and al Qaeda. What is more, almost a quarter of us believed that investigators had all but confirmed the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to a 2003 report by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes and Knowledge Networks, a polling and market research firm. How did the true situation in Iraq become so grossly distorted in American minds? Many people have attributed such misconceptions to a politically motivated disinformation campaign to engender support for the armed struggle in Iraq. We do not think the deceptions were premeditated, however. Instead they are most likely the result of common types of reasoning errors, which appear frequently in discussions in the news media and which can easily fool an unsuspecting public. News shows often have an implicit bias that may motivate the portrayal of facts and opinions in misleading ways, even if the information presented is largely accurate. Nevertheless, by becoming familiar with how spokespeople can create false impressions, media consumers can learn to ignore certain claims and thereby avoid getting duped. We have detected two general types of fallacies—one of them well known and the other newly identified—that have permeated discussion of the Iraq War and that are generally ubiquitous in political debates and other discourse. (C)1996-2007 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11300 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By David A. Fahrenthold and Steven Mufson A federal appeals court yesterday threw out the Environmental Protection Agency's approach to limiting mercury emitted from power-plant smokestacks, saying the agency ignored laws and twisted logic when it imposed new standards that were favorable to plant owners. The ruling, issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, was another judicial rejection of the Bush administration's pollution policies. It comes less than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court rebuked the administration and the EPA for refusing to regulate greenhouse gases. This court's critique -- which undid a controversial program to "trade" emissions of mercury, a potent neurotoxin -- was especially sharp. It compared the EPA to the capricious Queen of Hearts in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," saying the agency had followed its own desires and ignored the "plain text" of the law. "What the administration did when they came in was to essentially try to torpedo environmental regulations," said James Pew, a lawyer with the activist group Earthjustice who worked on the case. "This really is a repudiation of the Bush administration's environmental legacy." Coal-fired power plants are responsible for about a third of the country's total mercury emissions. In the Washington area, mercury pollution in waterways has triggered advisories against consuming too much fish from the Chesapeake Bay, the Potomac River and other bodies of water. © Copyright 1996-2008 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 11299 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By M. P. DUNLEAVEY WHEN I invited a friend to dinner one day last summer, she mentioned that she would bring some Blue Nun white wine, in a box. If you’re not accustomed to hearing the words “box” and “wine” in the same sentence, the idea might sound unappealing. Perhaps even déclassé. Not that I wanted to admit these thoughts to my friend, but my exclamation — “Blue Nun? In a box?” — did make my skepticism rather clear. Fortunately she just laughed at my snobbery, and said that boxed wine today was far from the old Chablis with a spigot, which some of us may recall from college bars and family picnics. She even used the word “tasty” — which although not top of the oenophile vocabulary, sounded promising. And she was right. Blue Nun in a box was surprisingly tasty, all things considered, and the embarrassing experience of having my cheap wine prejudice exposed has forced me to examine how far this financial bias goes. I feared that the wine incident was evidence that somehow I actually believed that paying more for things means they’re better, even though I know it isn’t true. There is research suggesting that the bias toward higher-priced goods may have something to do with the way the brain links price with pleasure — and thus leads people to make assumptions about quality. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11298 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Tina Hesman Saey Peter Pan won't be pleased to hear the latest theory about how Prozac works. A new study shows that the antidepressant stimulates growth of neurons in the hippocampus and speeds the young brain cells toward maturity. The maturation process could be the mechanism by which the drug relieves depression. Fluoxetine, the drug commonly known as Prozac, has been used to treat depression since the 1980s. Prozac and other SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) block the ability of the neurons to take up serotonin, thereby raising levels of the active neurotransmitter in the brain. When people with depression begin taking such drugs, serotonin levels in the brain increase rapidly, but it often takes 2 to 4 weeks before they begin to feel better. The new study, published Feb. 6 in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggests that the lag is due to the time it takes for serotonin to stimulate new neurons to grow, mature, and integrate into brain circuits. René Hen, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, and his colleagues tested the long-term effects of Prozac treatment on a specially bred strain of nervous mice. Inside the brains of mice treated with Prozac, the researchers found many more newborn neurons in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in learning and memory. ©2008 Society for Science & the Public.

Keyword: Depression; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 11297 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Robynne Boyd The human brain is complex. It enables concertos to be composed, manifestos made, and equations solved elegantly. It's also the wellspring of feelings, behaviors, experiences and the repository of memory. So it's no surprise that the brain remains a mystery. Adding to that mystery is the contention that humans "only" employ 10 percent of their brain. If only regular folk could tap that other 90 percent they too could become savants who remember pi to the 20,000th decimal place or perhaps even a psychic. Though an alluring idea, the "ten percent myth" is so wrong it is almost laughable, says neurologist Barry Gordon at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. While there’s no definitive culprit to the beginning of this legend, the notion has been linked to the American psychologist and author William James, who argued in The Energies of Men that “We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.” It's also been linked to Albert Einstein, who supposedly used it to explain his cosmic intellect. The myth's durability, Gordon says, stems from people's conceptions about their own brains: their own shortcomings demonstrate the existence of untapped gray matter. This is false. What is correct however, is that at certain moments in anyone's life, such as when we are simply sitting and thinking, we may be using only 10 percent of our brain. © 1996-2007 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 11296 - Posted: 06.24.2010

James Owen Those who struggle to get out of bed in the morning may be able to hold their genes responsible, new research suggests. Scientists have discovered that a person's waking habits are mirrored by body cells that are equipped with their own daily alarm clocks. The work represents the first internal look at the biological clocks of those suffering from sleeping disorders, said study leader Steven A. Brown of the Institute for Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. "One of the big surprises was that so much of our daily behavior was genetically encoded," Brown said. "The idea that skin cells are telling us anything about our behavior was, for me, quite fascinating," he added. The study investigated the circadian rhythm—the brain-controlled phenomenon that governs various body functions over a 24-hour period—of extreme late and early risers. Suitable volunteers were recruited by the study team using TV advertisements shown between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. "We got both our early types and our late types that way," Brown said. "Some had not yet gone to bed, while others were already up." Skin cells taken from the volunteers were cultured in the lab and injected with a bioluminescence gene found in fireflies. © 1996-2008 National Geographic Society

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11295 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Patients with a certain gene variant drank less and experienced better overall clinical outcomes than patients without the variant while taking the medication naltrexone, according to an analysis of participants in the National Institutes of Health's 2001-2004 COMBINE (Combined Pharmacotherapies and Behavioral Interventions for Alcohol Dependence) Study. About 87 percent of patients with the variant who received naltrexone experienced good outcomes, compared with about 49 percent of those who received a placebo. About 55 percent of patients without the variant experienced a good outcome regardless of whether they received naltrexone or placebo. Good outcome was defined as abstinence or moderate drinking without related problems, according to an article in the Feb. 4 issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry (http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/65/2/135). Drinking alcohol increases the release of endogenous opioids, compounds that originate in the body and promote a sense of pleasure or well-being. An opioid antagonist, naltrexone blocks brain receptors for endogenous opioids, making it easier for patients to remain abstinent or stop quickly in the event of a slip. In clinical studies, naltrexone has been shown to reduce relapse and craving for alcohol in some but not all treated patients. Earlier studies had suggested that a specific DNA variant of the opioid receptor gene (OPRM1) might have role in patients' response to naltrexone. "Analysis of the large COMBINE patient population increases confidence that the OPRM1 variant is in part responsible for positive responses to naltrexone." said National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) director Ting-Kai Li, M.D.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11294 - Posted: 02.08.2008

By Elizabeth Quill Johann Sebastian Bach, Edgar Allan Poe, and Albert Einstein all married cousins. Maybe these creative geniuses were on to something. A new study suggests that mating with relatives has reproductive advantages. Many societies regard inbreeding as taboo. Research seems to back this up, showing that children of related couples are more likely to inherit two copies of disease-causing recessive genes. Other work, however, has shown a positive outcome--namely, that married cousins have more children. But those studies--carried out in India and Pakistan--have not been conclusive because the data are hard to disentangle from social and economic factors. For example, poorer women tend not only to marry relatives but also to marry at a younger age, leaving more time to have children. Geneticist Kári Stefánsson and colleagues at deCODE Genetics, a biopharmaceutical company based in Reykjavik, Iceland, decided to look at couples in their own country. Social and economic factors are more uniform in Iceland because the income gap is not wide and there is little variation in family size, use of contraceptives, or marriage practices. In addition, because deCODE already had a genealogical database for all of Iceland going back 1000 years, Stefánsson says, the team just needed to do some calculations. After determining the relationships between all known Icelandic couples born between 1800 and 1965, they compared the number of children and grandchildren descended from these couples. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11293 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Becoming overweight as a child is more likely to be the result of your genes than your lifestyle, claims a study. University College London researchers examined more than 5,000 pairs of identical and non-identical twins. Their American Journal of Clinical Nutrition study found that differences in body mass index and waist size were 77% governed by genes. An anti-obesity group said regardless of genes, a balanced diet and exercise were vital to good health. Children who are overweight are likely to be overweight or obese in adulthood, raising the risk of certain cancers, heart disease, stroke and diabetes later in life. However, despite the emergence of some possible genes that contribute to obesity, there is still debate as to the extent to which we are pre-programmed to be overweight by our genetic makeup. The study, from the Cancer Research UK Health Behaviour Research Centre at UCL, goes some way to answering that question. Twin studies are a good way to test how far our genes or our environment influence our development. Identical twins have exactly the same genes, while non-identical twins are genetically different, like brother and sister. However, because they were born at the same time, and raised in the same household, they can be assumed to have roughly similar upbringing in terms of food. (C)BBC

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11292 - Posted: 02.07.2008

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