By LAURAN NEERGAARD WASHINGTON -- More than 5 million Americans are living with Alzheimer's disease, a 10 percent increase since the last Alzheimer's Association estimate five years ago _ and a count that supports the long-forecast dementia epidemic as the population grays. Age is the biggest risk factor, and the report to be released Tuesday shows the nation is on track for skyrocketing Alzheimer's once the baby boomers start turning 65 in 2011. Already, one in eight people 65 and older have the mind-destroying illness, and nearly one in two people over 85. Unless scientists discover a way to delay Alzheimer's brain attack, some 7.7 million people are expected to have the disease by 2030, the report says. By 2050, that toll could reach 16 million. Why? Ironically, in fighting heart disease, cancer and other diseases, "we're keeping people alive so they can live long enough to get Alzheimer's disease," explains association vice president Steve McConnell. Indeed, government figures released last year that show small drops in deaths from most of the nation's leading killers between 2000 and 2004 _ even as deaths attributed to Alzheimer's disease increased 33 percent. © 2007 The Associated Press

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 10111 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Mary Carmichael, Newsweek - The stereotype of the "dumb jock" has never sounded right to Charles Hillman. A jock himself, he plays hockey four times a week, but when he isn't body-checking his opponents on the ice, he's giving his mind a comparable workout in his neuroscience and kinesiology lab at the University of Illinois. Nearly every semester in his classroom, he says, students on the women's cross-country team set the curve on his exams. So recently he started wondering if there was a vital and overlooked link between brawn and brains—if long hours at the gym could somehow build up not just muscles, but minds. With colleagues, he rounded up 259 Illinois third and fifth graders, measured their body-mass index and put them through classic PE routines: the "sit-and-reach," a brisk run and timed push-ups and sit-ups. Then he checked their physical abilities against their math and reading scores on a statewide standardized test. Sure enough, on the whole, the kids with the fittest bodies were the ones with the fittest brains, even when factors such as socioeconomic status were taken into account. Sports, Hillman concluded, might indeed be boosting the students' intellect—and also, as long as he didn't "take a puck to the head," his own. Hillman's study, which will be published later this year, isn't definitive enough to stand alone. But it doesn't have to: it's part of a recent and rapidly growing movement in science showing that exercise can make people smarter. Last week, in a landmark paper, researchers announced that they had coaxed the human brain into growing new nerve cells, a process that for decades had been thought impossible, simply by putting subjects on a three-month aerobic-workout regimen. Other scientists have found that vigorous exercise can cause older nerve cells to form dense, interconnected webs that make the brain run faster and more efficiently. And there are clues that physical activity can stave off the beginnings of Alzheimer's disease, ADHD and other cognitive disorders. No matter your age, it seems, a strong, active body is crucial for building a strong, active mind. © 2007 MSNBC.com

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 10110 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but would the placebo effect work even better if it weren't being defamed by the slur that doubles as its name? This is a column that asks you to give the placebo effect a more pleasing moniker, but before you can do that you have to understand the various contexts for my plea. One is quite personal. I described in my last column how my elbow recently became painful. What followed was a visit to the doctor's office and a blissful injection of cortisone. But as I was starting to feel better I had a doubt: Was the relief due to real medicine or was I feeling merely the placebo effect? And what difference would that make? And what if painlessness were 20-per-cent placebo effect, 80-per-cent cortisone's healing power? And why did it come to be called the placebo effect in the first place? The last question is the easiest to answer. While there are ancient — think back to Socrates — references to the curative power of belief in a fictitious cure, placebo itself is derived from a translation into Latin of verse 9, Psalm 116 of the Bible. It says in English: "I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living." That becomes in Latin Placebo Domino in regione vivorum and the words were sung at funerals in the 13th century, not just by genuine mourners but by a coterie of fake mourners hoping to get some payment for their efforts. © CBC 2007

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 10109 - Posted: 06.24.2010

When Craig Fox is offered an extended warranty for his consumer electronics, he tends to turn it down. He also turns down additional insurance coverage when he picks up a rental car. He's not being risky; he says he's simply taking a "risk-neutral" approach at life. Fox's research looks at how we handle risk, and he finds that many people are risk-averse, a theory that losses psychologically have more of an impact than gains when people make decisions. "I realize that if we're even a little risk-averse for every decision we make in our lives, in the grand scheme of things, we're extraordinarily risk-averse," Fox says, a behavioral decision theorist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "So for example, if I give you a 50-50 chance of gaining or losing money, most people will reject those gambles unless the gain side is much larger than the loss side," he says. Risk-aversion is a key part of prospect theory, a behavioral model that won Fox's mentor, Daniel Kahneman, the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics. Prospect theory explains behavior in the lab and real world, Fox says. In one experiment, people ascribed a higher value to a mug once they perceived that it was theirs. The theory also helps to explain some of the economic forces that drive safer investments in the stock market. © ScienCentral, 2000-2007.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Emotions
Link ID: 10108 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi Mice with a gene mutation that disrupts their sleep cycles show signs of hyperactivity and addictive tendencies, a new study reveals. Researchers say that such "manic" behaviour displayed by the animals bolsters the theory that glitches in the body's internal clock can cause psychiatric illnesses such as bipolar disorder. Mice that received injections of DNA to compensate for the mutated gene regained regular sleep cycles and showed normal behaviour. This type of gene therapy will not work to treat people with bipolar disorder anytime soon, researchers stress, but they believe genetic experiments in rodents will reveal the potential targets for psychiatric drug treatments. Colleen McClung at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, US, and colleagues conducted experiments on mice with a mutation in their Clock gene. This gene normally activates other genes in the cell – with a certain regularity and on a daily basis. The human version is thought to be responsible for many of our circadian rhythms, including our wake/sleep cycle. Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0609625104) © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 10107 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers at the University of Illinois have found that adolescence is a time of remodeling in the prefrontal cortex, a brain structure dedicated to higher functions such as planning and social behaviors. The study of rats found that both males and females lose neurons in the ventral prefrontal cortex between adolescence and adulthood, with females losing about 13 percent more neurons in this brain region than males. This is the first study to demonstrate that the number of neurons in the prefrontal cortex decreases during adolescence. It is also the first to document sex differences in the number of neurons in the PFC. The study appears in the Feb. 9 issue of the journal Neuroscience. Earlier studies in humans have found gradual reductions in the volume of the prefrontal cortex from adolescence to adulthood, said psychology professor and principal investigator Janice M. Juraska. "But the finding that neurons are actually dying is completely new. This indicates that the brain reorganizes in a very fundamental way in adolescence." Juraska, graduate student Julie Markham and undergraduate student John Morris found that the number of neurons decreased in the ventral, but not dorsal, prefrontal cortex during adolescence. The number of glial cells, which surround and support the neurons, remained stable in the ventral PFC and increased in the dorsal PFC. These findings challenge current models of brain development by showing that some parts of the brain are still being organized well after puberty.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Apoptosis
Link ID: 10106 - Posted: 03.21.2007

By ERIC NAGOURNEY Anyone who has tried to learn Chinese can attest to how hard it is to master the tones required to speak and understand it. And anyone who has tried to learn to play the violin or other instruments can report similar challenges. Now researchers have found that people with musical training have an easier time learning Chinese. Writing in the online edition of Nature Neuroscience, researchers from Northwestern University say that both skills draw on parts of the brain that help people detect changes in pitch. One of the study’s authors, Nina Kraus, said the findings suggested that studying music “actually tunes our sensory system.” This means that schools that want children to do well in languages should hesitate before cutting music programs, Dr. Kraus said. She said music training might also help children with language problems. Mandarin speakers have been shown to have a more complex encoding of pitch patterns in their brains than English speakers do. This is presumably because in Mandarin and other Asian languages, pitch plays a central role. A single-syllable word can have several meanings depending on how it is intoned. For this study, the researchers looked at 20 non-Chinese speaking volunteers, half with no musical background and half who had studied an instrument for at least six years. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Hearing
Link ID: 10105 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS WADE Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days. Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are. Moral philosophers do not take very seriously the biologists’ bid to annex their subject, but they find much of interest in what the biologists say and have started an academic conversation with them. The original call to battle was sounded by the biologist Edward O. Wilson more than 30 years ago, when he suggested in his 1975 book “Sociobiology” that “the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.” He may have jumped the gun about the time having come, but in the intervening decades biologists have made considerable progress. Last year Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, proposed in his book “Moral Minds” that the brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules, a universal moral grammar similar to the neural machinery for learning language. In another recent book, “Primates and Philosophers,” the primatologist Frans de Waal defends against philosopher critics his view that the roots of morality can be seen in the social behavior of monkeys and apes. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Emotions
Link ID: 10104 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JANE E. BRODY With some trepidation, my husband, Richard, who is 73 and otherwise healthy, finally decided it was time to have the cataract removed from his left eye, which had a visual acuity rating of worse than 20/200 (being able to read 20/20 on the eye chart is “normal”). Poor vision affected nearly everything Richard did. In anything less than perfect light, he needed a magnifying glass to read, despite prescription glasses. He could no longer drive at night — the glare was blinding and not being able to see the road clearly was terrifying. During the day on unfamiliar roads, he relied on me to read road signs, because he didn’t see them soon enough to follow them. So with encouragement from me and his 89-year-old bridge partner — who had already had cataracts removed from both eyes and was able to abandon the thick glasses he had used for distance vision and now only needs reading lenses — he decided to go ahead with the surgery. After a preoperative health checkup and eye exam by the ophthalmologic surgeon, he entered a freestanding eye clinic at 8 one morning and walked out an hour and a half later with a “new” eye, able to walk the streets, drive and even read without glasses. The morning after surgery, the acuity in his left eye was already 20/25, and further improvement was expected as it healed. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 10103 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Malcolm Ritter, Associated Press — Mainstream psychology hasn't paid much attention to distractability. But a spate of new studies is chipping away at its mysteries and scientists say the topic is beginning to gain visibility. Someday, such research may turn up ways to help students keep their focus on textbooks and lectures, and drivers to keep their minds on the road. It may reveal ways to reap payoffs from the habit. And it might shed light on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which can include an unusually severe inability to focus that causes trouble in multiple areas of life. More generally, scientists say, mind-wandering is worth studying because it's just too common to ignore. Michael Kane, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, sampled the thoughts of students at eight random times a day for a week. He found that on average, they were not thinking about what they were doing 30 percent of the time. For some students it was between 80 and 90 percent of the time. Out of the 126 participants, only one denied any mind-wandering at the sampled moments. © 2007 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: ADHD; Attention
Link ID: 10102 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Andy Coghlan Like human code-breakers intercepting secret messages, red-breasted nuthatches have evolved ways to extract hidden information about threats from predators from the seemingly indistinguishable alarm calls of other species. It is the first time such subtle eavesdropping has been observed in nature. The nuthatches, common in Canada and the northern US, tune into alarm calls made by black-capped chickadees when the latter are threatened by owls. Chickadee signals evidently carry a great deal of meaning within the species (see Chirpy chickadees signal deadliness of predators), but to the human ear all chickadee alerts sound very similar. Nuthatches, however, have developed ways of telling whether the chickadees are threatened by pygmy owls, which pose a serious threat to small birds, or by much larger great horned owls, which attack small birds less often. Christopher Templeton and Erick Greene at the University of Washington at Seattle, US, made the discovery after placing speakers at the base of trees in areas frequented by nuthatches and playing recordings of chickadee responses to both types of owls. Listen to the chickadee call warning of a pygmy owl (0.3MB .wav format) and the call warning of a great horned owl (0.3MB). Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0605183104) © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 10101 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Heidi Ledford A model of how dolphins may use their teeth to receive sound could provide clues for improving man-made sonar systems, according to a study published in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics1. The results, says study author Peter Dobbins of the engineering firm SEA Group Ltd in Bristol, UK, could be particularly useful for improving sonar in shallow water, making it better at tasks such as searching for naval mines. Dolphins use sonar for navigation and to echolocate prey by bouncing sound waves emitted as high-frequency clicks off objects in their environment. "Dolphins obtain a similar mental 'image' of the surface of a complex object whether they use sonar or vision to look at it," says Elizabeth Taylor, a marine biologist at the National University of Singapore. Dolphin sonar outperforms any man-made system, particularly in shallow water, where reverberation, water turbulence and suspended sediment make sonar particularly challenging. To discover why dolphins are so adept at echolocating in shallow water, Dobbins devised models based on the theory that the animals receive some sounds using their teeth. According to that theory, dolphin teeth act as an array of receivers that vibrate in response to pressure from sound waves. The notion helps explain two peculiarities in dolphin dentistry — dolphin teeth are all the same type, rather than being split into incisors for cutting and molars for chewing, and the distance between the teeth is remarkably precise. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 10100 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A part of the brain associated with emotional learning and fear shrinks in people with autism, research suggests. Teenagers and young men with autism in the study who had the most severe social impairment were found to have smaller than normal amygdalae. The researchers from the University of Wisconsin suggested the amygdalae may shrink due to chronic stress caused by social fear in childhood. The study was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Of 54 male participants aged eight to 25 years who took part in the study, 23 had autism and five had Asperger syndrome. The size of the amygdalae, two almond-shaped groups of neurons located deep within the brain, was measured by MRI scans. Individuals were also asked to complete tasks associated with social interaction such as eye tracking and recognising emotional facial expressions. Men with autism who had small amygdalae were slowest to distinguish emotional from neutral expressions and showed the least fixation of eye regions. The same individuals were the most socially impaired in early childhood. The researchers also found a link with age suggesting that amygdala volume decreases from childhood into early adulthood in autistic people with the most severe social impairment. Study leader Dr Richard Davidson said the findings pointed towards a model of autism where the brain first reacts to stress brought on by fear of people by becoming hyperactive, which eventually leads to cell death and shrinkage. Children with autism who have the least difficulty with social interaction would have slower amygdala shrinkage than those who struggled the most. He said the findings could account for more than half the differences in social impairment in people with autism. (C)BBC

Keyword: Autism; Emotions
Link ID: 10099 - Posted: 03.19.2007

By AMY HARMON Katharine Moser inhaled sharply. She thought she was as ready as anyone could be to face her genetic destiny. She had attended a genetic counseling session and visited a psychiatrist, as required by the clinic. She had undergone the recommended neurological exam. And yet, she realized in that moment, she had never expected to hear those words. “What do I do now?” Ms. Moser asked. “What do you want to do?” the counselor replied. “Cry,” she said quietly. Her best friend, Colleen Elio, seated next to her, had already begun. Ms. Moser was 23. It had taken her months to convince the clinic at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center in Manhattan that she wanted, at such a young age, to find out whether she carried the gene for Huntington’s disease. Huntington’s, the incurable brain disorder that possessed her grandfather’s body and ravaged his mind for three decades, typically strikes in middle age. But most young adults who know the disease runs in their family have avoided the DNA test that can tell whether they will get it, preferring the torture — and hope — of not knowing. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 10098 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By John I. Nurnberger, Jr., and Laura Jean Bierut The tendency to become dependent on alcohol has long been known to run in families, which for some only added to the social stigma attached to this complicated condition. But to scientists, that apparent heritability suggested that some genetic component underlying vulnerability to alcohol problems was being transmitted from generation to generation. With rapid advances over the past 10 years in technologies for discovering and analyzing the functions of genes, researchers are now increasingly able to get at the biological roots of complex disorders such as substance abuse and addiction. The power to examine patterns of inheritance in large populations, and to survey hundreds of thousands of tiny variations in the genomes of each of those individuals, enables investigators to pinpoint specific genes that exert strong or subtle influences on a person's physiology and his or her resulting risk for disease. As is true of many other human disorders, alcoholism does not have a single cause, nor is its origin entirely genetic. Genes can play an important role, however, by affecting processes in the body and brain that interact with one another and with an individual's life experiences to produce protection or susceptibility. Teasing these effects apart is challenging, and to date fewer than a dozen genes that influence one's risk for alcoholism have been identified, although more surely exist. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10097 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Doug Johnstone reviews The Eye: A Natural History by Simon Ings TO READ THIS BOOK HAS an odd and unsettling side effect. This is not through any fault of Simon Ings, who is a fine science writer, his prose precise and clear, his research meticulous and comprehensive. Nor is there any problem with the subject matter – the eye is a truly fascinating organ, its complex development, myriad forms and idiosyncratic workings across the animal kingdom making for a truly absorbing read. Furthermore, Ings argues convincingly that the eye has had a profound effect on our language, perception, philosophy and even consciousness. No, the strange side-effect is brought about because – after reading 300 pages on how the eye works, its little quirks and foibles, its often counter-intuitive processes and processing – you become almost compulsively aware of what your own eyes are doing all the time, which is a bit off-putting. Try reading this sentence without your eyes jolting from position to position across the page. You can’t, can you? That’s because every third of a second your eye “saccades”, or snaps from location to location, a restless activity brought about by the need to detect motion. “The eye exists to detect movement,” Ings writes. “Any image, perfectly stabilised on the retina, vanishes. Our eyes cannot see stationary objects, and must tremble constantly to bring them into view.” © Copyright Times Newspapers Ltd

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 10096 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Debora MacKenzie THE discovery that a rare brain disease in cows can mutate into BSE has given new life to the theory that mad cow disease started out in cattle, rather than crossing over from sheep. When BSE emerged in British cattle in the mid-1980s, the leading theory was that they had initially contracted the disease by eating feed containing the remains of sheep infected with scrapie. Both BSE and scrapie are caused by infectious prions, misshapen forms of a normal brain protein. Having made this species jump, BSE would have spread as cattle carcasses were processed into animal fodder and fed back to cows. Yet attempts to duplicate BSE by deliberately giving scrapie to cows have failed, and many countries included sheep remains in cattle feed without creating BSE. This has led some scientists to speculate that BSE arose as a rare spontaneous condition in cattle, which spread to other cows when they ate these animals' remains. The new twist to the story comes from studies of a disease called bovine amyloidotic spongiform encephalopathy, or BASE. It was discovered in 2003, when two Italian cows, out of tens of thousands of European cattle screened for BSE at slaughter, were found to have a prion disease that seemed different from BSE. The BASE prion had a lower molecular weight and one, rather than two, sugars bound to it. The brains of cows with BASE were also damaged in different places from those with BSE, and had dense protein deposits called amyloid that are not seen in BSE. Similar prions have also turned up in France, Germany and Japan. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 10095 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sniffing the air does more than just vacuum odors into your nose. It also ramps up electrical signals from the snout to the brain, helping the schnoz detect even faint scents. "Sniffing helps us to smell better," Minghong Ma, a University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist, told LiveScience. Ma and her colleagues learned the secret to sniffing by investigating mice noses. The scientists puffed a mix of odors past the rodent sniffers, such as those in almond-like and banana-like fragrances. As expected, this generated a response in the olfactory neurons, the primary nose cells behind perception of scents. The researchers also puffed an odorless mist into the noses. They found a similar but smaller reaction in the olfactory neurons. As they decreased the pressure of such odorless puffs, they found the response from the olfactory neurons scaled down as well. "This is quite astonishing," said neuroscientist Jeffry Isaacson at the University of California at San Diego, who did not participate in this study. "Most sensory neurons in the body are designed to detect a single kind of sensory input, like light or smell or taste," Isaacson explained. "Here's a case where a single type of sensory neuron, one we thought was just responsible for smell, also responds to mechanical stresses like pressure or airflow." © 2007 MSNBC.com

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 10094 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Over the past several decades, researchers have developed screening tools that have reduced the occurence of Tay-Sachs disease in certain populations. Continued research has helped identify some mechanisms of the disease. Now, animal studies indicate that combining treatments can multiply therapeutic benefits. Some scientists think this approach will help the most difficult cases. Children with Tay-Sachs, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that attacks nerve cells, usually die before age 5. More gradual and less severe forms can also affect young children, teens, and people in their 20s and 30s. The most severe form of Tay-Sachs disease begins to affect babies when they are only a few months old. Initially, their development is delayed. They begin to lose vision and react abnormally when startled. Paralysis gradually sets in. They may go deaf, have seizures, and, ultimately, become unable to swallow or breathe. Currently there is no cure or effective way to delay the progression of the disease. Scientists around the world are investigating a range of treatment options for a number of diseases, including Tay-Sachs, that stem from excess cell products building up in nerve cells or other cell types. Research has revealed commonalities among these diseases, increasing the likelihood that advances in one area will increase our understanding of them all. Already the crossover effect of this research has led to a broader understanding of how cells work normally and could contribute to treatments across this range of diseases. © 2007 Society for Neuroscience

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10093 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A growing number of studies suggest that the nighttime breathing disorder, sleep apnea, can contribute to a range of cardiovascular diseases, according to researchers from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Writing in the journal Sleep, they detail the evidence linking sleep apnea to high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, stroke, heart failure and heart-rhythm disorders. The connection between the sleep disorder and heart health is increasingly being recognized, the authors say -- both because of recent research, and possibly because sleep apnea is becoming more common. People with sleep apnea have repeated stops and starts in their breathing as they sleep, sometimes hundreds of times per night. Of the two forms of sleep apnea, obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is by far the more common; it occurs when the soft tissues at the back of the throat repeatedly collapse during sleep, temporarily cutting off breathing. When this happens, the brain briefly rouses the person from deep sleep to re-open the airways. Sleep apnea sufferers often don't remember these awakenings, but some tell-tale signs of the disorder include chronic, loud snoring and daytime drowsiness. SOURCE: Sleep, March 1, 2007. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 10092 - Posted: 06.24.2010