Saturday, September 15, 2012

Teen brain affected by metabolic syndrome

Metabolic syndrome, the combination of disorders that increases the risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes, is known to be associated with brain changes and cognitive deficiencies in adults. Now a new study, published online in Pediatrics, has found a similar effect in teenagers with the disorder.

Researchers compared 49 nondiabetic teenagers who had metabolic syndrome — high blood levels of glucose, low levels of high-density lipoprotein, high triglycerides, abdominal obesity and high blood pressure — with 64 young people who had fewer than three of those symptoms. Participants were given magnetic resonance brain scans and standard tests of memory, learning, attention and psychomotor ability.

The researchers found that the teenagers with metabolic syndrome had lower scores on tests of mental ability and significantly lower academic performance in reading and arithmetic. The scientists were surprised to discover that the MRI scans showed brain changes in children with metabolic syndrome, .

“The important thing here is the degree of insulin resistance — how much more insulin you need to keep your glucose normal,” said the senior author, Dr. Antonio Convit, a professor of psychiatry and medicine at New York University. “You can improve your kid’s brain health by having the kid eat better and exercise more.”

Click here to find out more! $5M donation boosts treatment of brain ailments at children’s hospital

Amy Seely, centre, and her son Austin joined Stanley and Margaret Owerko at the Alberta Children’s Hospital on Friday, after the Owerko’s announced a $5-million donation in support of pediatric brain health at the hospital. Seely, who son suffers from epilepsy, said the donation “makes a real difference to families like ours.” Amy Seely, centre, and her son Austin joined Stanley and Margaret Owerko at the Alberta Children’s Hospital on Friday, after the Owerko’s announced a $5-million donation in support of pediatric brain health at the hospital. Seely, who son suffers from epilepsy, said the donation “makes a real difference to families like ours.”

A $5-million gift to the Alberta Children’s Hospital Foundation will benefit thousands of children affected by brain-related health conditions, including attention and developmental disorders, sleep disorders, head trauma, stroke and epilepsy.

Stan and Marge Owerko are the generous Calgarians behind the donation, which is the largest individual gift for brain health the Alberta Children’s Hospital has ever received.

“This donation is serving as a catalyst to doing great things for children suffering from illness and injury of the brain,” said Saifa Koonar, president and CEO of the Alberta Children’s Hospital Foundation.

Koonar said pediatric brain health is a priority for the Alberta Children’s Hospital.

“We know that who we become is rooted in the brain, and so it’s an area that we absolutely need to do more with and find cures and better treatments to help these thousands of children that suffer from injury and illness of the brain,” she said.

The “incredible gift” was celebrated at the hospital Friday morning by more than 100 people, including the Owerko’s friends, family and colleagues from Petrogas Energy Corp.

During a speech, Stan told the audience the couple was proud to help further the vision of the hospital’s brain-health centre, while Marge reflected on her work as a registered nurse in hospitals throughout Alberta.
“Caring for sick children and understanding the pain that they and their families have experienced has a lasting memory,” she told the audience.

Following Friday morning’s celebration, Stan said he and his wife were grateful to be able to support a cause close to their family.

“We have a grandson who has ADHD and that resonates with us,” he said. “We have a lot of friends whose children have ADHD and have other challenges as well.”

Amy Seely spoke at Friday’s event about her nine-year-old son Austin’s experience living with epilepsy and the impact the hospital has had on his health.

“I’m sure many people drive by this colourful building up on the hill and don’t think twice,” she said to the audience. “To us, it truly stands as a beacon of hope.”

Seely thanked the Owerkos for supporting children like Austin through their donation in support of brain health.

“Mr. and Mrs. Owerko, we are so grateful for your generous gift,” she said. “It makes a real difference to families like ours.”

What the brain draws from: Art and neuroscience

In Spain's Tito Bustillo Cave, scientists found these horse paintings overlaying older red paintings, which could be 29,000 years or older. In Spain's Tito Bustillo Cave, scientists found these horse paintings overlaying older red paintings, which could be 29,000 years or older.
This Egyptian wall painting, from 1350 BC, is an example of how artists have long been drawing outlines around figures of people and animals. This Egyptian wall painting, from 1350 BC, is an example of how artists have long been drawing outlines around figures of people and animals.
Leonardo da Vinci took advantage of the differences in the human central and peripheral visual systems to create a dynamic smile in the "Mona Lisa." Leonardo da Vinci took advantage of the differences in the human central and peripheral visual systems to create a dynamic smile in the "Mona Lisa."
This is a simulation by Margaret Livingstone of what you perceive when you view the "Mona Lisa" in your peripheral vision, on the left and middle, and straight-on. Note how the smile changes. This is a simulation by Margaret Livingstone of what you perceive when you view the "Mona Lisa" in your peripheral vision, on the left and middle, and straight-on. Note how the smile changes.
Pablo Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" from 1907 may be especially pleasing to the eye because it exaggerates human forms, showing influences of the cubism movement. Pablo Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" from 1907 may be especially pleasing to the eye because it exaggerates human forms, showing influences of the cubism movement
Semir Zeki, professor of neuroesthetics at University College London, created this sculpture "Squaring the Circle." Projecting colored lights on the hanging object creates the illusion of depth. Semir Zeki, professor of neuroesthetics at University College London, created this sculpture "Squaring the Circle." Projecting colored lights on the hanging object creates the illusion of depth.

Impressionistic portraits such as this by Pierre-Auguste Renoir may be have particular emotional appeal because of the blurriness or patchiness of the face. Research has shown that blurry images may connect more directly with the emotional centers of the brain than normal ones. Impressionistic portraits such as this by Pierre-Auguste Renoir may be have particular emotional appeal because of the blurriness or patchiness of the face. Research has shown that blurry images may connect more directly with the emotional centers of the brain than normal ones.

In "Impression Sunrise" by Claude Monet, circa 1873, the artist makes the sun look unusually bright by choosing an orange with the same luminance as the background, says Margaret Livingstone of Harvard University.
In "Impression Sunrise" by Claude Monet, circa 1873, the artist makes the sun look unusually bright by choosing an orange with the same luminance as the background, says Margaret Livingstone of Harvard University

Pablo Picasso once said, "We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies."

If we didn't buy in to the "lie" of art, there would obviously be no galleries or exhibitions, no art history textbooks or curators; there would not have been cave paintings or Egyptian statues or Picasso himself. Yet, we seem to agree as a species that it's possible to recognize familiar things in art and that art can be pleasing.
To explain why, look no further than the brain.
The human brain is wired in such a way that we can make sense of lines, colors and patterns on a flat canvas. Artists throughout human history have figured out ways to create illusions such as depth and brightness that aren't actually there but make works of art seem somehow more real.
And while individual tastes are varied and have cultural influences, the brain also seems to respond especially strongly to certain artistic conventions that mimic what we see in nature.
What we recognize in art
It goes without saying that most paintings and drawings are, from an objective standpoint, two-dimensional. Yet our minds know immediately if there's a clear representation of familiar aspects of everyday life, such as people, animals, plants, food or places. And several elements of art that we take for granted trick our brains into interpreting meaning from the arbitrary.
Lines
For instance, when you look around the room in which you're sitting, there are no black lines outlining all of the objects in your view; yet, if someone were to present you with a line-drawing of your surroundings, you would probably be able to identify it.
This concept of line drawings probably dates back to a human ancestor tracing lines in the sand and realizing that they resembled an animal, said Patrick Cavanagh, professor at Universite Paris Descartes.
"For science, we're just fascinated by this process: Why things that are not real, like lines, would have that effect," Cavanagh said. "Artists do the discoveries, and we figure out why those tricks work."
That a line drawing of a face can be recognized as a face is not specific to any culture. Infants and monkeys can do it. Stone Age peoples did line drawings; the Egyptians outlined their figures, too.
It turns out that these outlines tap into the same neural processes as the edges of objects that we observe in the real world. The individual cells in the visual system that pick out light-dark edges also happen to respond to lines, Cavanagh said. We'll never know who was the first person to create the first "sketch," but he or she opened the avenue to our entire visual culture.
Faces
This brings us to modern-day emoticons; everyone can agree that this :-) is a sideways happy face, even though it doesn't look like any particular person and has only the bare minimum of facial features. Our brains have a special affinity for faces and for finding representations of them (some say they see the man in the moon, for instance). Even infants have been shown in several studies to prefer face-like patterns over patterns that don't resemble anything.

That makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: It benefits babies to establish a bond with their caregivers early on, notes Mark H. Johnson in a 2001 Nature Reviews Neuroscience article.
Our primitive human ancestors needed to be attuned to animals around them; those who were most aware of potential predators would have been more likely to survive and pass on their genes.

So our brains readily find faces in art, including in Impressionist paintings where faces are constructed from colored lines or discrete patches of color. This "coarse information" can trigger emotional responses, even without you bearing aware of it, Cavanagh and David Melcher write in the essay "Pictorial Cues in Art and in Visual Perception."
Patrik Vuilleumier at the University of Geneva and colleagues figured out that the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in emotions and the "flight or fight response," responds more to blurry photos of faces depicting fear than unaltered or sharply detailed images. At the same time, the part of our brain that recognizes faces is less engaged when the face is blurry.
Cavanagh explains that this may mean we are more emotionally engaged when the detail-oriented part of our visual system is distracted, such as in Impressionist works where faces are unrealistically colorful or patchy.
Color vs. luminance 
Artists also play with the difference between color and luminance.
Most people have three kinds of cones in the eye's retina: red, blue and green. You know what color you're looking at because your brain compares the activities in two or three cones. A different phenomenon, called luminance, adds the activities from the cones together as a measure of how much light appears to be passing through a given area.
Usually when there is color contrast, there is also luminance contrast, but not always. In the research of Margaret Livingstone, professor of neurobiology at Harvard University, she explored the painting "Impression Sunrise" by Claude Monet, which features a shimmering sun over water. Although the orange sun appears bright, it objectively has the same luminance as the background, Livingstone found.
So why does it look so bright to the human eye?
Livingstone explained in a 2009 lecture at the University of Michigan that there are two major processing streams for our visual system, which Livingstone calls the "what" and "where" streams. The "what" allows us to see in color and recognize faces and objects. The "where" is a faster and less detail-oriented but helps us navigate our environment but is insensitive to color.
When our brains recognize a color contrast but no light contrast, that's called "equal luminance," and it creates a sort of shimmering quality, Livingstone said. And that's what's going on in a Monet painting.
Artists often play with luminance in order to give the illusion of three dimensions, since the range of luminance in real life is far greater than what can be portrayed in a painting, Livingstone said. By placing shadows and lights that wouldn't be present in real life, paintings are able to trick the eye into perceiving depth.

For instance, medieval paintings portrayed the Virgin Mary in a dark blue dress, which makes her look flat. Leonardo da Vinci, however, revolutionized her appearance by adding extra lights to contrast with darks.
The bottom line: To trick the brain into thinking something looks three-dimensional and lifelike, artists add elements -- lightness and shadows -- that wouldn't be present in real life but that tap into our hard-wired visual sensibilities.
Mona Lisa's smile 
The Mona Lisa is undoubtedly one of the world's most famous paintings; the face of the woman in the painting is iconic.
Da Vinci gave her facial expression a dynamic quality by playing with a discrepancy that exists in our peripheral and central vision systems, Livingstone says.
The human visual system is organized such that the center of gaze is specialized for small, detailed things, and the peripheral vision has a lower resolution -- it's better at big, blurry things.
That's why, as your eyes move around the Mona Lisa's face, her expression appears to change, Livingstone says. The woman was painted such that, looking directly at the mouth, she appears to smile less than when you're staring into her eyes. When you look away from the mouth, your peripheral visual system picks up shadows from her cheeks that appear to extend the smile.
Photomosaics also take advantage of this difference between visual systems: With your peripheral visual system you might see a picture of a cat that's composed of individual photos of cats that are completely different.
Shadows and mirrors
From a scientific standpoint, it's possible to determine exactly how shadows are supposed to look based on the placements of light and how mirror reflections appear at given angles. But the brain doesn't perform such calculations naturally.
It turns out that we don't really notice when shadows in paintings are unrealistically placed, unless glaringly so, or when mirrors don't work exactly the way they do in real life, Cavanagh explained in a 2005 article in "Nature."
Shadows are colored more darkly than what's around them; it's not readily apparent if the lighting direction is inconsistent. They can even be the wrong shape; as long as they don't look opaque, they help convince us of a three-dimensional figure.
Studies have shown that people don't generally have a good working knowledge of how reflections should appear, or where, in relation to the original object, Cavanagh said. Paintings with people looking into mirrors or birds reflected in ponds have been fooling us for centuries.
Why we like art
There are certain aspects of art that seem universally appealing, regardless of the environment or culture in which you grew up, argues V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego. He discusses these ideas in his recent book "The Tell Tale Brain."
Symmetry, for instance, is widely considered to be beautiful. There's an evolutionary reason for that, he says: In the natural world, anything symmetrical is usually alive. Animals, for instance, have symmetrical shapes.
That we find symmetry artistically appealing is probably based on a hard-wired system meant to alert us to the possibility of a living thing, he said.

And then there's what Ramachandran calls the "peak shift principle." The basic idea is that animals attracted to a particular shape will be even more attracted to an exaggerated version of that form.
This was shown in an experiment by Niko Tinbergen involving Herring seagull chicks. In a natural environment, the chick recognizes its mother by her beak. Mommy seagull beaks are yellow with a red spot at the end. So if you wave an isolated beak in front of a chick, it believes the disembodied beak is the mother and taps it as a way of asking to be fed.
But even more striking, if you have a long yellow stick with a red stripe on it, the chick still begs for food. The red spot is the trigger that tells the chick this is the mother who will feed it. Now here's the crazy part: the chick is even more excited if the stick has multiple red stripes.
The point of the seagull experiment is that although the actual mother's beak is attractive to the chick, a "super beak" that exaggerates the original beak hyperactivates a neural system.
"I think you're seeing the same thing with all kinds of abstract art," Ramachandran said. "It looks distorted to the eye, but pleasing to the emotional center to the brain."
In other words, the distorted faces of famous artists such as Pablo Picasso and Gustav Klimt may be hyperactivating our neurons and drawing us in, so to speak. Impressionism, with its soft brushstrokes, is another form of distortion of familiar human and natural forms.
Further research: Can we know what is art?
There's now a whole field called neuroesthetics devoted to the neural basis of why and how people appreciate art and music and what is beauty.
Semir Zeki at University College London is credited with establishing this discipline, and says it's mushrooming. Many scientists who study emotion are collaborating in this area. Zeki is studying why people tend prefer certain patterns of moving dots to others.
Stanford Journal of Neuroscience: The Neuroscience of Art
There have been several criticisms about neuroesthetics as a field. Philosopher Alva Noe wrote in The New York Times last year that this branch of science has not produced any interesting or surprising insights, and that perhaps it won't because of the very nature of art itself -- how can anyone ever say definitively what it is?
Zeki said many challenges against his field are based on the false assumption that he and colleagues are trying to explain works of art.
"We're not trying to explain any work of art," he said. "We're trying to use works of art to understand the brain."
Neuroscientists can make art, too.
Zeki had works in an exhibit that opened last year in Italy called "White on White: Beyond Malevich." The series included white painted sculptures on white walls, illuminated by white light and color projections. With red and white light, the shadow of the object appears in the complimentary color -- green -- and the shadows change as your angle of vision changes.
The biological basis for this complimentary color effect is not well understood, nor is the depth of shadow, which is also an illusion.
So was Picasso right -- is art a lie? The description of Zeki's exhibition in Italy may highlight the truth:
"Our purpose is to show how the brain reality even overrides the objective reality."

Annual symposia on brain stroke, "Strike out stroke"

CHANDIGARH: Department of Neurology , PGI is initiating a series of Annual symposia on brain stroke - "Strike out stroke" , from September this year as PGI celebrates its Golden Jubilee. The first symposium of the series is scheduled to be held on Sunday.

The symposium is aimed to highlight the need of prompt and optimum use of resources and manpower in the management of stroke . Developing countries like ours , is still contributing to about 85 % of global deaths due to stroke . Each year 1.5 million people suffer from stroke in India . World wide about 5 million people die of stroke and another 5 million get disabled . Surprisingly , unlike its cardiac counterpart i.e heart attacks, brain strokes still lag behind in the provision of adequate and early management.

There have been drastic changes in the treatment modalities for stroke which have reduced the mortality and morbidity related to brain stroke in the developed countries . We, in India however , are still way behind not because of lack of the availability of the therapeutic agents , but because of lack of awareness in physicians as well as public of stroke related screening and treatment modalities.

Given the evidence of effectiveness of thrombolysis (Clot busting) for acute stroke and of stroke units, stroke should be treated as a medical emergency . Many patients are seen too late to benefit from early treatment, often because of a lack of knowledge or awareness of stroke symptoms or from the lack of emergency response to them ,both in public and in health personnel.

Prompt recognition of symptoms and early referral for thrombolysis to the nearest hospital with available infrastructure is hence needed.

The conference will bring together all levels of health care providers who are generally the first points of care, enabling them to understand story basic level and most importantly learn to recognize the signs and symptoms of stroke . Physicians from Sector 16 government multispeciality hospital and sector 32 government medical college Chandigarh have been invited to attend the symposium to facilitate the early intervention in the stroke patients and establish a network with the PGI Stroke Program.

The conference will provide an interesting learning experience through intellectually stimulating talks, discussions and a platform to share experiences and propose reforms in the methods to handle an acute stroke emergency. This year's special focus will be on acute stroke management in the emergency , which is one of the most challenging areas in the management of stroke . The role of stroke nurses would also be elaborated at the symposium. The importance of the combined efforts of nurses , internists , neurologists , radiologists, interventionists and the neurosurgeons is, but obvious .

The symposium is aimed to bring together all these domains. Stroke experts from from PGI and AIIMS , New Delhi will be delivering lectures on various aspects of brain stroke including recognizing early symptoms and neuroimaging by eminent doctors. We will also be sharing few of our interesting experiences while thrombolyising such patients .The scientific programme has been designed in an instructional manner which to enhance the understanding regarding stroke and its proper management .