Preschoolers who are diagnosed with ADHD are not likely to respond to treatment with the stimulant methylphenidate, regardless of dosage, if they also have three or more coexisting disorders, according to a recent analysis of data from the Preschoolers with ADHD Treatment Study (PATS). PATS was funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Previously reported PATS results showed that overall, low doses of methylphenidate were safe and effective in treating 3-5-year-olds diagnosed with ADHD. This most recent study, one of seven new PATS articles published November 5, 2007, in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology, sought to identify individual characteristics that may affect how a child would respond to treatment. The other articles examine topics such as the effectiveness of methylphenidate over a follow-up phase, the effects of the medication on functional outcomes for the preschoolers, and others. "This new data is an important step forward in bridging the gap between research results and clinical practice, bringing potentially valuable information to clinicians about ways to better customize treatments for their patients," said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D. "It also identifies a group of young children who have significant and multiple problems, and for whom more research is needed to identify effective treatments."

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 10930 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Candidates are out there every day, shaking hands, giving speeches, meeting people and debating the issues. Positions on the issues are painstakingly laid out, and enormous sums of money are spent by candidates to get voters to select their names on Election Day. But, research now suggests that a factor in our decision making about people, including candidates for office, happens in just one-tenth of a second. Alexander Todorov, assistant professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, has studied how people react to the faces of candidates. In a study published in the journal Science in 2005, he asked people to view similar side-by-side photos of candidates for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. They asked the volunteers to use the photos to judge who was more competent. Todorov says, "If you ask people what is the most important attribute for a politician, they say competence. And, in fact judgment of competence based on facial appearance predicts election outcomes." In that study, the volunteers' decisions on who was more competent matched up about 70% of the time with the outcome of the races. Todorov argued that these decisions happened very quickly, but the 2005 research didn't measure that. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he explained how they repeated the study, giving the volunteers only a brief glimpse of the faces. In one experiment they saw the candidates' faces for only one-tenth of a second. A second series of experiments extended the glimpse to a quarter of a second while a third series gave them two seconds to view the candidates' photos. If the volunteers recognized someone, those results were excluded. The results showed that, on average, the volunteers correctly predicted 64 percent of the races. © ScienCentral, 2000-2007.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 10929 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Matt Kaplan Does breast-feeding a child boost its brain development and raise its intelligence? Only if the child carries a version of a gene that can harness the goodness of breast-milk, say researchers. The results add to the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate over intelligence, by showing how the two effects can interact. The question of whether people are born intelligent or made intelligent by their environment has been debated for decades. Research with identical twins separated at birth has shown that both genetics and rearing conditions are important in determining intelligence. One of the important environmental effects seems to be breast-feeding. Children who are breast-fed generally perform better in IQ tests than do those fed on other types of milk. Researchers think that this might be because specific fatty acids found in human milk, but not in cow’s milk or infant formulas, improve brain development. Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt, psychologists at King’s College, London, and their colleagues looked at the relationship between breast-feeding and intelligence to explore the possibility that in this case nature and nurture might be intimately linked. © 2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10928 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Our brains can turn down our ability to see to help them listen even harder to music and complex sounds, say experts. A US study of 20 non-musicians and 20 musical conductors found both groups diverted brain activity away from visual areas during listening tasks. Scans showed activity fell in these areas as it rose in auditory ones. But during harder tasks the changes were less marked for conductors than for non-musicians, researchers told a Society for Neuroscience conference. The researchers, from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and the University of North Carolina, used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, which can measure real-time changes in brain activity based on the blood flow to different areas of the brain. Previous research has identified various parts of the brain involved in vision and hearing. The experiment involved 20 professional orchestral conductors or band leaders and 20 musically untrained students, all aged between 28 and 40. While lying in the scanner, they were asked to listen to two different musical tones played a few thousandths of a second apart and identify which was played first. The task was made harder for the professional musicians than for the non-musicians, to allow for the differences in their background. What the scientists found was that while activity rose, as expected, in the auditory part of the brain, it correspondingly fell in the visual part. As the task was made harder and harder, the non-musicians carried on diverting more and more activity away from the visual parts of the brain to the auditory side, as they struggled to concentrate. However, after a certain point, the conductors did not suppress their brains, suggesting that their years of training had provided a distinct advantage in the way their brains were organised. (C)BBC

Keyword: Hearing; Vision
Link ID: 10927 - Posted: 11.05.2007

Carrying two genes linked to epilepsy may actually make you less likely to have a seizure, say US researchers. People who have more than one gene defect might be expected to be more prone to illness - but experts found the reverse. The Baylor College of Medicine team, which carried out its research on mice, reported its findings in the Nature Neuroscience journal. More than 450,000 people in the UK suffer from some form of epilepsy. There are many different types of epilepsy and the degrees of severity vary widely from patient to patient. Scientists have long suspected that some cases are partly due to a genetic problem and are searching for the particular genes involved so that new treatments can be devised. The two defects highlighted by this research involve the Kcna1 gene, which is involved in the transport of the chemical potassium in and out of the body's cells, and the Cacna1a gene, which plays a role in calcium levels. The first of these has been linked to severe seizures in "temporal lobe" epilepsy, which affects the part of the brain involved in speech, sight, sound and memory. Mice with defective Kcna1 genes can die suddenly as a result. The second gene is linked to so-called "absence" epilepsy, in which patients do not jerk or move in the way most people associate with an epileptic fit but stare into space instead. When mice were bred with both gene defects, far from worsening their symptoms, they suffered dramatically reduced seizures and did not die suddenly. The researchers, led by Dr Jeffrey Noebels, said that this could help point towards new ways of treating certain types of epilepsy. (C)BBC

Keyword: Epilepsy; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10926 - Posted: 11.05.2007

By MIKE STOBBE ATLANTA - A few decades ago, people probably would have said kids like Ryan Massey and Eddie Scheuplein were just odd. Or difficult. Both boys are bright. But Ryan, 11, is hyper and prone to angry outbursts, sometimes trying to strangle another kid in his class who annoys him. Eddie, 7, has a strange habit of sticking his shirt in his mouth and sucking on it. Both were diagnosed with a form of autism. And it's partly because of children like them that autism appears to be skyrocketing: In the latest estimate, as many as one in 150 children have some form of this disorder. Groups advocating more research money call autism "the fastest-growing developmental disability in the United States." Indeed, doctors are concerned there are even more cases out there, unrecognized: The American Academy of Pediatrics last week stressed the importance of screening every kid — twice — for autism by age 2. But many experts believe these unsociable behaviors were just about as common 30 or 40 years ago. The recent explosion of cases appears to be mostly caused by a surge in special education services for autistic children, and by a corresponding shift in what doctors call autism. Autism has always been diagnosed by making judgments about a child's behavior; there are no blood or biologic tests. For decades, the diagnosis was given only to kids with severe language and social impairments and unusual, repetitious behaviors. © 2007 MSNBC.com © 2007 Microsoft

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 10925 - Posted: 06.24.2010

EAST LANSING, Mich. — A mouse created by Michigan State University scientists studying a disease thought to be a neurological disorder that weakens men has exposed two surprises: Testosterone appears to be the culprit and it’s attacking muscles, not nerves. The muscles of male mice genetically engineered in the laboratory of Cynthia Jordan, professor of neuroscience and psychology, have extra receptors that latch onto testosterone – a trick that left researchers anticipating mouse versions of bulked up body builders. Instead, these mice developed into shrunken weaklings. More significantly, their condition precisely imitated a rare human condition called Kennedy’s Disease. The results, reported in the Oct. 29 online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, not only directly contradict conventional wisdom about the root of Kennedy’s Disease, but also offer significant hope. Researchers say these new results make a strong case that Kennedy’s Disease is a muscular disease rather than a neurological disease, and put testosterone in the category of cause, not cure. “When we started studying this little wimp mouse, we were surprised to find that we inadvertently created a model for Kennedy’s Disease,” Jordan said. “Our story provides some hope, because it’s an easier problem to target muscles therapeutically than the motor neurons in the spinal cord. Our sick mice get well when we take testosterone away from them.”

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 10924 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas -- "Personality" would seem to be an exclusive attribute of humans, since the very word reflects back on us, but several recent studies examining a wide range of species, from squid to horses and even insects, suggest we share the planet with a lot of unique characters. Noted psychologist Lawrence Pervin has defined personality as "those characteristics of a person that account for consistent patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving." Non-humans are left out of the picture. Applied animal behaviorist Adele Lloyd of England's Bishop Burton College admits there are limits to applying such people-centric definitions to animals, especially since it's difficult to measure how animals think and feel. Lloyd and her colleagues, however, believe it is possible to assess observed behavior "in order to demonstrate individual differences" in animals. It could even be that humans are the limiting factor, given the way we process information and self-compare. Nevertheless, Lloyd told Discovery News that anthropomorphism -- the use of human terms to describe animal behavior -- is much easier for us to deal with than statistical data quantifying animal behaviors. The popular 1960s television show "Mister Ed," about a talking horse, took anthropomorphism to an improbable level, but Lloyd's recent work on horses indicates that at least particular types possess their own behavioral characteristics. © Discovery Communications

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 10923 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Wriggling worms are motivated by their sense of smell - lingering when they detect the tempting aroma of their favorite bacterial snack, or twisting and turning to explore new territory when that aroma fades. In new studies, Howard Hughes Medical Institute scientists have now shown how odor-sensing neurons in the worm can activate or inhibit other neurons that control crawling and turning. The studies have begun to explain how neurons are capable of carrying information over minutes or even hours - timescales that are much longer than the millisecond timeframes measured by many neuroscience experiments. The research team, led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Cornelia Bargmann, published its findings in the November 1, 2007, issue of the journal Nature. Bargmann is at The Rockefeller University, and other co-authors were from Stanford University. The scientists say their findings demonstrate that transient changes in sensory cues can trigger sustained behaviors like food-seeking and mating. The keen sense of smell in C. elegans has provided a unique opportunity for Bargmann to understand the interface between genetics and experience. On the one hand, many responses to odors are genetically determined, like the favorable response by human infants to the smell of vanilla. On the other hand, a bad experience, like getting sick after eating a particular food, can create a lifetime aversion to its smell. © 2007 Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 10922 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Evidence is building that the cold sore virus may be linked to Alzheimer's disease, an expert says. In lab tests, Manchester University found brains infected with the herpes simplex virus, HSV-1, saw a rise in a protein linked to Alzheimer's. Scientists believe the discovery could pave the way for a vaccine that may help prevent the brain disorder, New Scientist magazine reported. But such a breakthrough was a long-time off, experts said. The researchers infected cultures of human brain cells with the virus and found a "dramatic" increase in levels of the beta amyloid protein - the building blocks of deposits, or plaques, which form in the brains of people with Alzheimer's. A similar increase was seen in the brains of mice infected with HSV-1. In a separate experiment, the team stained brain slices taken from dead Alzheimer's patients and found DNA from HSV-1 attached to the plaques. Previous research has established that HSV-1 is found in the brains of up to 70% of people with Alzheimer's. And a team from the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York found that it was more likely to cause a problem in people who carry a mutant version of a specific gene called ApoE4, which is involved in the breakdown of fats by the body. They found the vast majority of Alzheimer's patients they examined carried the gene - and suspect that it works to make HSV-1 more active. Scientists have still to establish a direct link between the virus and the disease, but the Manchester team believe the findings offer hope for the future. (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 10921 - Posted: 11.02.2007

A new study finds that neural stem cells may be able to save dying brain cells without transforming into new brain tissue, at least in rodents. Researchers from the University of California, Irvine, report that stem cells rejuvenated the learning and memory abilities of mice engineered to lose neurons in a way that simulated the aftermath of Alzheimer's disease, stroke and other brain injuries. Researchers expect stem cells to transform into replacement tissue capable of replacing damaged cells. But in this case, the undifferentiated stem cells, harvested from 14-day-old mouse brains, did not simply replace neurons that had died off. Rather, the group speculates that the transplanted cells secreted protective neurotrophins, proteins that promote cell survival by keeping neurons from inducing apoptosis (programmed cell death). Instead, the once ill-fated neurons strengthened their interconnections and kept functioning. "The primary implication here is that stem cells can help rescue memory deficits that are due to cell loss," says Frank LaFerla, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at U.C. Irvine and the senior author on a new study published in The Journal of Neuroscience. If the therapeutic benefit was indeed solely due to a neurotrophic factor, the door could be opened to using that protein alone as a drug to restore learning ability. LaFerla's team genetically engineered mice to lose cells in their hippocampus, a region in the forebrain important for short-term memory formation. These mice were about twice as likely than unaltered rodents to fail a test of their ability to discern whether an object in a cage had been moved since their previous visit. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Neurogenesis; Alzheimers
Link ID: 10920 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By CLAUDIA WALLIS From the earliest months, a healthy baby engages in an astonishing range of social behaviors. Most will begin smiling back at a loved one in the first four months of life. Most will follow a parent's gaze with their own eyes by eight months. Most will also study a caregiver's facial expressions and mimic exhibits of fear, surprise or delight with their own tiny features. They will babble a conversation back and forth by nine months, respond to their names by 10 months, and begin to point to a desired toy or treat by around a year. But some babies won't do these things, and a pattern of such deficits can be an early sign of autism. Despite these and many other early tip-offs, autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are rarely diagnosed before age 3. More subtle forms, such as Asperger's Syndrome, may not be recognized until the child begins school. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) would like to change this. At its annual meeting, held in San Francisco on Monday, the AAP released two reports: one aimed at helping pediatricians recognize autism spectrum disorders — in all their varieties — by age 2 and the other at providing guidance for early intervention. At the same time the AAP formally recommended that all pediatricians routinely screen for autism at ages 18 months and 2 years and announced it was making a new "toolkit" of diagnostic information available to all its members — for about $70. © 2007 Time Inc.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 10919 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nicholas K. Geranios, -- Washoe, a female chimpanzee said to be the first non-human to acquire human language, has died of natural causes at the research institute where she was kept. Washoe, who first learned a bit of American Sign Language in a research project in Nevada, had been living on Central Washington University's Ellensburg campus since 1980. Her keepers said she had a vocabulary of about 250 words, although critics contended Washoe and some other primates learned to imitate sign language, but did not develop true language skills. She died Tuesday night, according to Roger and Deborah Fouts, co-founders of The Chimpanzee and Human Communications Institute on the campus. She was born in Africa about 1965. She was taken to the veterinary hospital at Washington State University on Wednesday for a necropsy. Her memorial will be Nov. 12. "Washoe was an emissary, bringing us a message of respect for nature," Dr. Mary Lee Jensvold, assistant director of the nonprofit institute, said Wednesday. The Fouts went to Central Washington from Oklahoma in 1980 to create a home for Washoe and other chimps. © Discovery Communications

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 10918 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi Football players know that following the position of teammates on the field is a tricky task. New research, however, suggests that people can actually track the position of twice as many moving objects as had been thought. The finding could have implications for everything from video game design to air traffic monitoring. To determine how many objects people can follow at once, scientists show volunteers a screen with many moving dots and indicate which ones the subjects should focus on. Earlier experiments had suggested participants can accurately track the position of up to four dots. "The magical number was thought to be four," explains Steven Franconeri at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, US. But Franconeri and his colleague George Alvarez at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, both suspected that people could do far better at this task, depending on the speed at which the dots moved. (View some examples of the task here.) The vision researchers recruited a dozen students and asked them to track a specific number of the 16 moving dots that appeared on the computer screen before them. Unlike in previous experiments, the dots came close to one another but did not touch. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 10917 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alison Abbott Dangle a mouse by its tail, and it will wriggle and strain to escape before eventually recognizing the hopelessness of its situation. Measure the time it takes to abandon thoughts of helping itself, and you have one of the classic animal tests for depression. Except it's not, says Laurence Tecott, a research psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco. “We can't say that that mouse is depressed, and we can't say you would be if you were strung up by your tail,” he says. The reason we have not seen a genuinely new class of drug in psychiatry for 50 years, he asserts, is largely because animal models are woefully inadequate representations of human-specific disorders. You'll hear the same story from many others. But things are not as hopeless for scientists as they may seem for the dangling mouse; some recent papers offer tantalizing hints of a way forward. “No one is going to create a mouse model of suicidality,” says Eric Nestler, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. “But sensible models of important aspects of the neurobiology underpinning psychiatric disorders are just around the corner.” Classical animal tests for psychiatric disorders are based on responses to clinically proven drugs. What the tests don't necessarily do, however, is reflect the cause or the biological basis of the disorder they are supposed to mimic. Most researchers agree that it's time to apply recent findings about the human brain to creating more useful mouse models — often by deleting, adding or mutating candidate susceptibility genes. © 2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 10916 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alison Abbott It's not often that research results look this good. An elegant new way to visualize individual brain cells not only provides a major boost to scientists trying to understand how the brain works, but has also won one of its developers a major prize in science photography. The method — described by neuroscientists at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in today’s Nature 1 — allows researchers to see more clearly how individual neurons connect with each other by colouring each one from a palette of about 90 shades. In this way they will be able to build up a detailed diagram of the brain's wiring, which will help to study how it computes. More than a century ago, neuroscientists developed the first method of staining individual neurons — with silver chromate. Work with this technique was the basis of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906. But this could only stain neurons with one colour. Only in the last decade have scientists improved on this technique, using genetic engineering to transfer genes for fluorescent proteins into mice such that they are expressed in neurons. But until now they could transfer no more than two florescent-protein genes at a time, lighting up the brain with two colours. “It was clear that two colours were not enough to map connections efficiently in the brain’s complex tangle of neurons,” says Joshua Sanes, one of the paper’s senior scientists. © 2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 10915 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A single gene may control why some people are sensitive to the slightest smell of sweat, while others appear oblivious to the odour. A team from Israel found people who carried at least one working version of a gene called OR11H7P were hypersensitive to the smell. The PLoS Biology study found women were slightly more sensitive to many smells than men. However, they found social factors, as well as genes, were important. Our sense of smell often takes a back seat to our other senses - but humans can perceive up to 10,000 different odours. Like mice, we have about 1,000 different genes for the smell-detecting receptors in our olfactory system. However, over half of these genes have become defunct in the last few million years. Some of these genes are "broken" in all people, while others still function in some of the population. Researchers from the Weizmann Institute asked volunteers to sniff varying concentrations of compounds that smelled like banana, eucalyptus, spearmint, or sweat. They compared their ability to detect each odour with their patterns of receptor gene loss. One gene - OR11H7P - appeared to be associated with the capacity of smelling sweat. (C)BBC

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10914 - Posted: 10.31.2007

NEW YORK - It was one of the worst killing rampages in U.S. history. In August 1966, Charles Whitman murdered his wife and his mother, then climbed a tower at the University of Texas and used a high-powered rifle to fatally shoot 14 more people before being killed by police. He left a note that said, "I cannot rationally pinpoint any specific reason for doing this." An autopsy later revealed he had a brain tumor, which some experts said may have affected his actions. At the time, there was no way to detect such a tumor without surgery. But today, scientists have developed noninvasive brain scans that may reveal whether a person has a brain abnormality that could affect decision-making or trigger violence, with huge implications for the law. Neuroscientists use functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques — in which a person's head is put in a machine like a giant magnet — to gaze deep within the brain to view neural regions that monitor behavior and regulate emotions. It is a young field, but one that ultimately could have as dramatic an impact on the legal system as DNA testing, said Michael Gazzaniga, the director of a new project to study the implications of neuroscience for the U.S. judicial system. Copyright 2007 Reuters.

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 10913 - Posted: 06.24.2010

WASHINGTON - Science is getting a grip on people’s fears. As Americans revel in all things scary on Halloween, scientists say they now know better what’s going on inside our brains when a spook jumps out and scares us. Knowing how fear rules the brain should lead to treatments for a major medical problem: When irrational fears go haywire. “We’re making a lot of progress,” said University of Michigan psychology professor Stephen Maren. “We’re taking all of what we learned from the basic studies of animals and bringing that into the clinical practices that help people. Things are starting to come together in a very important way.” About 40 million Americans suffer from anxiety disorders, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. A Harvard Medical School study estimated the annual cost to the U.S. economy in 1999 at roughly $42 billion. Balance is key Fear is a basic primal emotion that is key to evolutionary survival. It’s one we share with animals. Genetics plays a big role in the development of overwhelming — and needless — fear, psychologists say. But so do traumatic events. “Fear is a funny thing,” said Ted Abel, a fear researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “One needs enough of it, but not too much of it.” © 2007 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 10912 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR People who suffer from chronic headaches have been known to try all sorts of pills and home remedies. But cayenne peppers? Behind the folk wisdom is capsaicin, the active ingredient in cayenne. It is said to bring relief by depleting Substance P, a neurotransmitter that helps transmit pain impulses. Sounds unlikely, but a number of studies have tested the claim, and most have found evidence to support it. One prominent study was published in 1998 in The Clinical Journal of Pain by researchers in the department of anesthesia and critical care at the University of Chicago. In it, the researchers analyzed data from 33 prior studies and found that capsaicin seemed to work better than placebos for headaches occurring in clusters. But simply eating hot sauce isn’t going to help. Most studies suggest that capsaicin works just when applied topically. A study by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital recruited sufferers of chronic headaches and randomly split them. One group had small amounts of diluted capsaicin applied inside the nose for a week. The other received placebo. The study found “a significant decrease in headache severity in the capsaicin group,” but not the placebo group. Other studies, including one this year, published similar results. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 10911 - Posted: 06.24.2010