B4BRAIN

Air pollution might harm brain, study says

2012-02-14T09:20:00.000-08:00

It’s well established that dirty, sooty air is no good for your lungs and probably not great for your skin. But new research indicates it can damage your brain, too.

A study in the journal of the Archives of Internal Medicine shows that air pollution accelerates cognitive decline in women.

And with a new federal report showing Southern Californians are at the highest risk of death due to air pollution, this study adds to the growing body of grim evidence showing air pollution and healthy bodies don’t mix.

“We keep learning about more adverse effects (from pollution) than we thought possible,” said Jean Ospital, health effects officer with the South Coast Air Quality Management District, who was not involved with the current research.

“I’m not sure I find these results surprising,” he said, “but I’m also not sure I would have expected them if you’d asked me 10 years ago.”

The new research, conducted by a team of researchers from Chicago, Boston, Baltimore and Philadelphia, looked at the effect of coarse particulate matter in the air on the cognitive health of older women.

“We, as a society, are on the verge of dealing with an unprecedented number of people having dementia,” said Jennifer Weuve, lead author of the study and a researcher at Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center. “We know relatively little about how to prevent dementia, but we do know cognitive decline is related to dementia.”

Weuve pointed to research showing a link between air pollution and cardiovascular disease.

“It turns out that cardiovascular disease may play a role in cognitive decline," said Weuve, who is a researcher at Rush’s Institute for Healthy Aging. "So if we understand how to prevent or delay these cognitive increments, maybe we can prevent or delay dementia.”

And not just at an individual level, she said.

“What’s interesting about air pollution," Weuve said, is that “other factors that may cause dementia are generally found at the more individual level – diet, weight, smoking. And we can help to try to prevent them at that level. But in this case, we’re looking at something that we can do to intervene at a broad scale, with society at large."

"It's a whole new way to think about prevention for dementia and cognitive decline," she said.

Weuve and her team turned to one of the largest epidemiological datasets and cohorts in medical research, the Nurses' Health Study, to begin looking for links between pollution and cognitive health.

The Nurses' Health Study, which researchers began in 1976, is a dataset based on information collected over time from 121,700 female registered nurses between the ages of 30 and 55 living in 11 different states.

Between 1995 and 2001, Weuve and her colleagues invited participants of the Nurses' Health Study to participate in a study of cognition. The team was able to get data from nearly 20,000 women.

To establish pollutant exposure, the team collected air pollution exposure data from the Environmental Protection Agency, which they correlated with the location of each woman's home and place of employment. Then they called each woman six times on the phone, over six years, and tested their cognitive abilities.

They found that higher levels of long-term exposure to air pollution particles was associated with significantly faster cognitive decline.

She said more research needs to be done. For instance, is the cognitive decline they observed due to cardiovascular issues, or are pollutants having a direct effect on the brain?

She said more research also will be needed to confirm her work.

"The bottom line," said Sam Atwood, a spokesman for the South Coast Air Quality Management District, "is that in Southern California, we have some of the highest levels of particulate matter in the country, and we are working as quickly as possible at reducing those levels."

Falak undergoes procedure to reduce brain infection level

2012-02-14T09:18:00.002-08:00

New Delhi, Feb 14 (PTI) Doctors at AIIMS today conducted another surgery on battered two-year-old Falak to bring down the infection level in the brain even as she continued to be in a critical but stable state. According to doctors at the AIIMS Trauma Centre who are attending on baby Falak, the surgery was conducted as an "alternative attempt" to fight brain infection. "We did a bedside procedure wherein we put a tube in the brain that drains outside instead of the spine. This has been undertaken as an attempt to bring down the infection level in her brain. Because of this infection, she continues to remain critical but stable," neurosurgeon Deepak Agarwal, who has been treating her, said. With today's procedure, Falak has undergone a total of four surgeries since her admission in the hospital on January 18. Falak was brought to the hospital on January 18 with severe head injury, both her arms broken, bite marks all over her body and her cheeks branded with hot iron. Dr Agarwal said, "With the damage she has suffered in the brain, if she survives, there are high chances that she will be mentally retarded or have a low conscious level. At present, we are trying to do our level best to get her out of the ICU." Doctors also said that she still continues to remain on ventilatory support as she cannot breathe on her own. She underwent a life saving surgery of the brain immediately after her admission here. Later on, it was followed by two more surgeries.

How our brain recognizes expressions

2012-02-14T09:17:00.001-08:00

Researchers have identified two areas in the brain that are critical for either detecting or distinguishing emotions from facial expressions. People with damage to these areas cannot understand the wide variety of facial expressions that convey social signals, which are important foranyone trying to navigate their way in society.

Dr. Lesley Fellows, lead investigator, and her student Ami Tsuchida studied a large sample of patients with damage to various regions within the prefrontal cortex (PFC), testing to see where damage had the biggest impact on emotion recognition.

The result of their tests led to conclusions about two sub-regions of the PFC that until now had been little studied.

“Patients with damage to the ventromedial PFC had a hard time distinguishing a neutral facial expression from emotional ones,” said Dr. Fellows.

“Patients with left ventrolateral PFC damage recognized that an emotion was present in the expression, but had difficulty telling one emotion from another.

“The ability to cross-over research and clinical work enables crucial advances in science and medicine, a prime example of the benefits of The Neuro’s integrated model as a combined hospital and research institute,” Dr. Fellows added.

The research adds to our understanding of how our brains detect emotional expressions and interpret the meaning of those expressions.

The findings could help to understand some of the difficulties in social behaviour seen in neuropsychiatric illnesses including certain forms of dementia, autism, or after a traumatic brain injury.

The study has been published in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

Child abuse leaves a long-lasting mark on brain: Study

2012-02-14T09:15:00.003-08:00

Washington: Abuse and maltreatment during childhood can shrink important parts of the brain that could lead to psychiatric disorders like depression, drug addiction and other mental health problems later in life, according to Harvard scientists.

The link between childhood abuse and reduced brain volume in parts of the hippocampus could help find new, better ways to treat survivors of childhood abuse, the scientists said.

"These results may provide one explanation for why childhood abuse has been identified with an increased risk for drug abuse or psychosis," study researcher Martin Teicher of
Harvard University told LiveScience.

"Now that one can look at these sub-regions in the brain, we can get a better idea of what treatments are helping."

For their study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, Teicher and his team used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of 193 individuals between 18 and 25 years old, who had already undergone several rounds of testing to be qualified.

They then analysed the size of areas in the hippocampus and compared the results with the patient`s history.

It was found that those who had been abused, neglected or maltreated -- based on well-established questionnaires – as children had reduced volume in certain areas of hippocampus by about six per cent, compared with kids who hadn`t experienced child abuse.

They also had size reductions in a related brain area, called the subiculum, which relays the signals from the hippocampus to other areas of the brain, including the dopamine system, also known as the brain`s "reward center".

Volume reduction in the subiculum has been associated with drug abuse and schizophrenia, as well.

In animal experiments, including non-human primates, this hippocampus can shrink because of high exposure to the stress hormone cortisol during two developmental periods: between ages 3 and 5 and between ages 11 and 13, the researchers said.

These stress hormone levels stop the growth of neurons in the hippocampus, leading to smaller volume in the adult human brain. Changes in hippocampus volume have been linked to depression, schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.

High stress levels from childhood abuse and maltreatment during important brain development periods may be causing the decreased hippocampus volume that the researchers saw.

"This region has a lot of receptors for the stress hormone cortisol. It interacts with receptors in these neurons to effect the development and the branching of these neurons,"
Teicher said. "The neurons are responding by either shrinking or not going into neurogenesis [and making new neurons]."

These brain changes can cause mental illness, explaining why childhood abuse is highly correlated to diseases like depression and drug addiction, Teicher said.

"By damaging it to some degree you may cause the dopamine system to be disregulated, and disregulation of the dopamine system has been linked to drug abuse and psychological illnesses," he added.

Brain Scans Could Reveal If Your Relationship Will Last

2012-02-14T09:13:00.000-08:00

But new research suggests that neuroscientists can tell you much more than what you already know (that you're madly in love). Like fortune-tellers who read brains instead of palms, they have begun to figure out how to determine the fate of your relationship by studying your brain activity alone. And armed with the knowledge of the brain responses they're looking for, you too may be able to find clues in your own behavior as to whether you and your loved one will be happily married years from now, or bitterly separated and wondering why it all fell apart.

Not all in-love brains look alike. Several years ago, Xiaomeng Xu, now a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University School of Medicine, and her colleagues performed fMRI scans on 18 Chinese men and women who reported being in the early stages of romantic love. Though all the study participants showed clear signs of love — looking at the face of their beloved triggered a flurry of activity in the areas of their brains involved in reward and motivation — the researchers identified subtle differences between the individuals' brain scans. When the team followed up with the study participants 18 months later to learn how their budding relationships had turned out, they found a surprisingly strong correlation between certain characteristics in the original brain scans and the participants' relationship status a year and a half later. [13 Scientifically Proven Signs You're in Love]

The team detailed its results in the journal Human Brain Mapping in early 2010. Now, another two years have passed, and the researchers have contacted 12 of the original study participants. Half of the participants are still in the relationships they had just begun at the time of the brain scans three and a half years ago; the other six aren't. Among the admittedly small sample, there is a striking divide between the original brain activity of the people whose relationships lasted and those whose relationships fell apart.

Rose-tinted shades
"Even with this small number of people, the results are really interesting," said Lucy Brown, a leading expert on the neuroscience of love at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a member of the research team.
Two key aspects of the participants' brain activity correlated with their relationship longevity, Brown said. Among the people whose relationships became long-term, looking at a picture of their beloved "caused a decrease in activity in regions that we associate with making judgments, and also a decrease in activity in systems associated with a person's sense of self," she said. "Sense of self" can be thought of awareness of one’s own existence, interests and desires.
These two brain responses, and the associated behavioral traits, suggest that a promising relationship is one in which people refrain from judging their new partners, and instead, tend to overrate them, even finding the positive aspect of a patently negative trait. A promising new romance is also one in which people give great importance to their loved one’s interests and desires, even to the subjugation of their own. Both these tendencies seem to be "a huge help in the longevity of a relationship," Brown told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.
The researchers plan to conduct a larger-scale study to see if the correlation between relationship longevity and the two fMRI signatures — corresponding to the two behavioral traits — is as strong as their small data set implies. They also intend to investigate whether certain people more easily exhibit the traits in question, and are thus inherently more suited to long-term attachments, than others. "We would like to know, 'Does relationship longevity depend on the other person, the relationship or who you are?'" Brown said. "A lot of it may be who you are." [Why Do We Have Sex?]
Similarly, new work indicates that what might be fortuitous in a new relationship doesn't necessarily bode well later on.
Realism sets in
According to brand-new work by Bianca Acevedo, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University, the characteristics identified by Xu, Brown and their colleagues point only to a happy future when exhibited by brand-new couples. When it's time to get married, your brain needs to change its ways.
Acevedo did fMRI scans of newlyweds who had been with their partners for an average of four years. She looked for correlations between their brain responses and how happily married they said they were one year later. Many of the study participants reported feeling less in love with their new husbands or wives after a year of marriage, but some actually reported feeling more in love. She focused on the latter set. "The question was, is there any activation around the time of the wedding that's associated with an increase in love over the first year of the marriage," Acevedo said.
Unlike people in the early stages of a relationship, in the case of newlyweds, "it's a good sign to have heightened activity in the areas of the brain associated with the representation of ourselves and others," Acevedo said. "In particular, it was a good sign to see activity in areas that are part of the mirror neuron system. The way this works is, if you stretch your arm out, we see neurons firing in these areas, but if you see someone else stretching their arm out, the same neurons fire off. So this idea of including the other in the self — when looking at a picture of your partner causes activities in these areas — this predicts an increase in love over time."
Furthermore, unlike the study of brand-new relationships, in which a tendency to overrate your partner indicates that your relationship with them will last, Acevedo's study of newlyweds found that activation of the brain regions involved in judgment and decision-making correlated with an increase in love over the course of their first year of marriage. "It's true that when people show nonjudgment in the beginning of their relationships, that helps them get hooked on that person. That's OK in the beginning, but later, it's important to see things clearly when you're stepping into a lifelong commitment," she said.
Taken altogether, the new research suggests the following: Selflessness and idealizing your partner will carry you through the first few years of romance. Later, when things get serious, your sense of self must re-blossom, but it must now be intimately tied together with your sense of your partner. And at that point, assessing him or her accurately — accepting the good with the bad — bodes well for a happy marriage.

Mediterranean Diet May Be Good for the Brain

2012-02-14T09:08:00.002-08:00

A Mediterranean diet may reduce small-vessel damage to the brain, according to a new study published in the Archives of Neurology. In other words, a diet made up of fruits, vegetables, olive oil, legumes, whole grains, little red meat and a glass of red wine here and there may be good for your brain.

Researchers from University of Miami and Columbia University analyzed food frequency questionnaires filled out by 966 participants in the Northern Manhattan Study, a study designed to identify risk factors for stroke and coronary disease. Study participants then underwent brain MRI scans to analyze the white matter hyperintensity volume, which is a sign of small vessel disease. Researchers found that people who closely followed a Mediterranean diet had fewer brain lesions than those who had higher-fat and more red meat-based diets. People who exercised more were also more likely to consume foods associated with the Mediterranean diet.

“Normally, these lesions are associated with hypertension, high-cholesterol, diabetes and age,” said Dr. Clinton Wright, associate professor of neurology at Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami Medical Center and senior author of the study. “We saw that there was a relationship between diet and this marker of small vessel disease. Those who adhered to a more Mediterranean diet had less small vessel damage.”

Small vessel disease is a condition in which the small arteries in the heart become narrowed. The disease can cause signs of heart disease, including chest pain and artery blockages, and it is most common in women and diabetics, according to Mayo Clinic. The lesions are also linked to cognitive disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease.

“Of course, this was an association study, and we’d need randomized trials to prove this association,” said Wright.

The Mediterranean diet has already been associated with reducing the risk of heart disease and dementia.

As Wright explained, the brain is made up of grey matter and white matter. Grey matter is made up billions of cell bodies and neurons, while white is the connection between those neurons.

“They’re like wires that connect computers,” said Wright. “When small vessels get damaged due to hypertension or diabetes or smoking and the like, those little vessels get damaged in a way that they become thicker and blood doesn’t flow to the brains as well, or there is fluid from the vessel leaking out, and that’s what causes those white matter lesions.”

Dr. Ken Fujioka, director of nutrition and metabolic research at Scripps Health Clinic in San Diego, said the biggest single difference in the Mediterranean diet versus many other diets is the high amount of monounsaturated fats (found in vegetable oils, fish, nuts oils and avocadoes) that have been shown to have multiple health benefits.

Fujioka said he agreed with the findings, but said, “as we move forward we will get to a point for some people [where] this will be the best diet, but for others, a different diet might be better and the future is trying to find out which diet [is best] for which patient.”

Authors note that, because the study was observational, it’s difficult to decipher whether the results were due to overall healthy dietary patterns or to the foods themselves, but Wright said he hopes the observational research will be a jumping off point for clinical trials and experiments. While Dr. David Katz, director of the Yale Prevention Center, said this confirms past research that has positive health benefits in the Mediterranean diet, and it puts emphasis on brain health.

“The topic that the health of the brain and the health of the body are largely one and the same deserves more attention than it gets,” said Katz.

Study to understand how brain processes information in competitive settings

2012-02-08T00:39:00.000-08:00

Researchers have found a way to study how our brains assess the behavior - and likely future actions - of others during competitive social interactions. Their study, described in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to use a computational approach to tease out differing patterns of brain activity during these interactions, the researchers report.
"When players compete against each other in a game, they try to make a mental model of the other person's intentions, what they're going to do and how they're going to play, so they can play strategically against them," said University of Illinois postdoctoral researcher Kyle Mathewson, who conducted the study as a doctoral student in the Beckman Institute with graduate student Lusha Zhu and economics professor and Beckman affiliate Ming Hsu, who now is at the University of California, Berkeley. "We were interested in how this process happens in the brain."
Previous studies have tended to consider only how one learns from the consequences of one's own actions, called reinforcement learning, Mathewson said. These studies have found heightened activity in the basal ganglia, a set of brain structures known to be involved in the control of muscle movements, goals and learning. Many of these structures signal via the neurotransmitter dopamine.
"That's been pretty well studied and it's been figured out that dopamine seems to carry the signal for learning about the outcome of our own actions," Mathewson said. "But how we learn from the actions of other people wasn't very well characterized."
Researchers call this type of learning "belief learning."
To better understand how the brain processes information in a competitive setting, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track activity in the brains of participants while they played a competitive game, called a Patent Race, against other players. The goal of the game was to invest more than one's opponent in each round to win a prize (a patent worth considerably more than the amount wagered), while minimizing one's own losses (the amount wagered in each trial was lost). The fMRI tracked activity at the moment the player learned the outcome of the trial and how much his or her opponent had wagered.
A computational model evaluated the players' strategies and the outcomes of the trials to map the brain regions involved in each type of learning.
"Both types of learning were tracked by activity in the ventral striatum, which is part of the basal ganglia," Mathewson said. "That's traditionally known to be involved in reinforcement learning, so we were a little bit surprised to see that belief learning also was represented in that area."
Belief learning also spurred activity in the rostral anterior cingulate, a structure deep in the front of the brain. This region is known to be involved in error processing, regret and "learning with a more social and emotional flavor," Mathewson said.
The findings offer new insight into the workings of the brain as it is engaged in strategic thinking, Hsu said, and may aid the understanding of neuropsychiatric illnesses that undermine those processes.
"There are a number of mental disorders that affect the brain circuits implicated in our study," Hsu said. "These include schizophrenia, depression and Parkinson's disease. They all affect these dopaminergic regions in the frontal and striatal brain areas. So to the degree that we can better understand these ubiquitous social functions in strategic settings, it may help us understand how to characterize and, eventually, treat the social deficits that are symptoms of these diseases."

Scientists image working brain cell in real time

2012-02-08T00:37:00.001-08:00

LONDON: Scientists have, for the very first time, recorded live yet detailed images of the nerve cells in the brain of a mouse.

Stefan Hell's team at the Max Planck Institute in Gottingen, Germany, used STED microscopy to explore the most intricate cerebral structures to unravel how it functions.

Captured in the previously impossible resolution of less than 70 nanometres (a nanometre is a billionth of a metre), these images have made the ultra minute structures visible which allow nerve cells to communicate with one another.

This application of STED microscopy opens up numerous new possibilities for neuroscientists to decode fundamental processes in the brain, according to a Max Planck statement.

Every moment our brain processes an enormous amount of data, with each of its 100 billion nerve cells (neurons) chatting with thousands of neighbouring nerve cells.

The entire data exchange takes place via contact sites - the synapses. Only if neurons communicate via synapses and at the right place can the brain master its complex tasks -- playing a difficult piece of piano, learning to juggle, etc.

We can learn most about these important contact sites in the brain by observing them at work. When and where do new synapses form and why do they disappear elsewhere? This is not easy to determine, since details in living nerve cells can only be observed with optical microscopes.

Due to the peculiarities of light, however, structures located closer together than 200 nanometres appear as a single blurred spot. The STED microscopy developed by Stefan Hell and his team is a groundbreaking method devised to surpass this resolution limit.

They use a simple trick: Closely-positioned elements are kept dark under a special laser beam so that they emit fluorescence sequentially one after the other, rather than simultaneously, and can therefore be distinguished.

Using this technique, Hell's team has been able to increase the resolution by approximately tenfold compared to conventional optical microscopes.

Thanks to STED microscopy, the first real-time video clips from a neuron's interior have demonstrated how tiny transmitter vesicles (assembly of molecules) migrate within the long nerve cell endings.

Brain mechanisms link foods to rising obesity rates

2012-02-08T00:36:00.001-08:00

An editorial authored by University of Cincinnati (UC) diabetes researchers to be published in the Feb. 7, 2012, issue of the journal Cell Metabolism sheds light on the biological factors contributing to rising rates of obesity and discusses strategies to reduce body weight.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, about one-third of U.S. adults are obese, a number that continues to climb.
"While we don't usually think of it this way, body weight is regulated. How much we weigh is influenced by a number of biological systems, and this is part of what makes it so hard for people to lose weight and keep it off," says Randy Seeley, PhD, Donald C. Harrison Endowed Chair, director of the Cincinnati Diabetes and Obesity Center and author on the paper along with Karen Ryan, PhD, an assistant professor in endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism at UC.
"To understand the obesity epidemic, we must figure out how our environment alters these biological systems to encourage weight gain."
Seeley says a big part of the environment that encourages weight gain is the availability and consumption of calorically dense, high-fat foods—in particular, what we eat can alter the brain regions that regulate body weight.
"Leptin is a key hormone that is secreted from fat tissue, or adipose tissue, and its main function is to inhibit appetite," Seeley says. "Via a number of molecular mechanisms, eating a high-fat diet reduces the actions of leptin in the brain. This miscommunication can lead to increased food intake and weight gain."
"Evolutionary speaking, we are designed to want to eat foods that are high in fat and gain weight because it made it easier to survive times when food was not available," he continues. "However, that is no longer a real concern since food is almost always available, but we still have a biological desire to eat these calorically dense foods. So, how do we intervene and change this drive?"
Seeley says there are several key points in successful therapeutic interventions for the population facing social, financial and health consequences of obesity.
"The key issue is to find ways to take these biological systems that usually make it hard to lose weight and make them work for us to so that it is easier for obese individuals to lose weight," he says. "As we understand the molecular interaction between what we eat and these brain circuits that regulate our body weight, we can design interventions that reduce the body weight that our bodies defend. This will mean that people trying to lose weight would be able to work with their biology rather than trying to use will power to overcome their biology that pushes them back to their obese state. Such an endeavor will ultimately require a wide range of scientists from different fields to reduce both the human and monetary costs of the obesity epidemic."

Brain size could determine whether you are good at maintaining friendships

2012-02-08T00:35:00.000-08:00

Researchers are suggesting that there is a link between the number of friends you have and the size of the region of the brain - known as the orbital prefrontal cortex - that is found just above the eyes. A new study shows that this brain region is bigger in people who have a larger number of friendships. Their study is published on 1 February 2012 in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Image: National Institutes of Health, via Wikimedia Commons

The research was carried out as part of the British Academy Centenary 'Lucy to Language' project, led by Professor Robin Dunbar of the University of Oxford in a collaboration with Dr Joanne Powell and Dr Marta Garcia-Finana at Liverpool University, Dr Penny Lewis at Manchester University and Professor Neil Roberts at Edinburgh University.

The study suggests that we need to employ a set of cognitive skills to maintain a number of friends (and the keyword is 'friends' as opposed to just the total number of people we know). These skills are described by social scientists as 'mentalising' or 'mind-reading' - a capacity to understand what another person is thinking, which is crucial to our ability to handle our complex social world, including the ability to hold conversations with one another. This study, for the first time, suggests that our competency in these skills is determined by the size of key regions of our brains (in particular, the frontal lobe).

Professor Dunbar, from the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, explained: "'Mentalising' is where one individual is able to follow a natural hierarchy involving other individuals' mind states. For example, in the play 'Othello', Shakespeare manages to keep track of five separate mental states: he intended that his audience believes that Iago wants Othello to suppose that Desdemona loves Cassio [the italics signify the different mind states]. Being able to maintain five separate individuals' mental states is the natural upper limit for most adults."

The researchers took anatomical MR images of the brains of 40 volunteers at the Magnetic Resonance and Image Analysis Research Centre at the University of Liverpool to measure the size of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain used in high-level thinking. Participants were asked to make a list of everyone they had had social, as opposed to professional, contact with over the previous seven days. They also took a test to determine their competency in mentalising.

Professor Robin Dunbar, said: "We found that individuals who had more friends did better on mentalising tasks and had more neural volume in the orbital frontal cortex, the part of the forebrain immediately above the eyes. Understanding this link between an individual's brain size and the number of friends they have helps us understand the mechanisms that have led to humans developing bigger brains than other primate species. The frontal lobes of the brain, in particular, have enlarged dramatically in humans over the last half million years."

Dr Joanne Powell, from the Department of Psychology, University of Liverpool, said: "Perhaps the most important finding of our study is that we have been able to show that the relationship between brain size and social network size is mediated by mentalising skills. What this tells us is that the size of your brain determines your social skills, and it is these that allow you have many friends."

Professor Dunbar said: "All the volunteers in this sample were postgraduate students of broadly similar ages with potentially similar opportunities for social activities. Of course, the amount of spare time for socialising, geography, personality and gender all influence friendship size, but we also know that at least some of these factors, notably gender, also correlate with mentalising skills. Our study finds there is a link between the ability to read how other people think and social network size."

Professor Dunbar's research was funded by the British Academy Centenary Research Project and by the British Academy Research Professorship. His research has already examined the different brain sizes of different species, but this study looks at the differences within species. Professor Dunbar published a paper last year, which found that people living near to the Poles needed larger brains for visual processing because of the dimmer light conditions.

MIT crowdsources and gamifies brain analysis

2012-02-08T00:34:00.000-08:00

There are around 100 billion neurons in a human brain, forming up to 100 trillion synaptic interconnections. Neuroscientists believe that these synapses are the key to almost every one of your unique, identifiable features: Memories, mental disorders, and even your personality are encoded in the wiring of your brain.
Understandably, neuroscientists really want to investigate these neurons and synapses to work out how they play such a vital role in our human makeup. Unfortunately, these 100 trillion connections are crammed into a two-pound bag of soggy flesh, making analysis rather hard. At the moment we know that neurons trigger an electrical signal, and that hormones affect the speed at which signals cross between synapses, and that somehow this results in a mental image of a naked Kristen Bell from her Veronica Mars period, but that’s about it.
MIT wants to change all that by tasking thousands of people with analyzing a 0.3-millimeter slice of mouse retinal tissue. Using a new site called Eyewire, MIT will ask users to track a neuron’s path by coloring in each axon (tendril). In the future, MIT will roll out another “game” which challenges users to find the synapses. The end result will be the connectome (a tome of connections) of the mouse’s retina.
To perform this kind of analysis, MIT must slice this three-dimensional 0.3-millimeter piece of brain tissue into incredibly thin, “2D” slices using a diamond blade and a process called serial electron microscopy. The slices are so thin that a terabyte of images are created from a piece of brain that’s much smaller than the head of a pin. You now have some idea of how hard it will be to investigate and understand the human brain; we’re talking about hundreds of exabytes of imagery that would need to be analyzed.
Ultimately, though, if we could get our hands on the connectome of the human brain… Well, we would experience an enlightenment of unprecedented scale. We would understand exactly why we are the way that we are. There would be no stones left to turn.

Spanking harms kids, smoking harms brains

2012-02-07T23:42:00.000-08:00

Spanking and kids: There's no upside to spanking kids, says a research review that backs up what pediatricians and other experts have been saying for years. Kids who are spanked are more likely to become depressed, anxious and aggressive in childhood and adulthood.
Smoking and men's brain health: Cigarettes aren't just bad for your heart and lungs -- they are bad for your brain. Middle-aged men who smoke show signs of c
ognitive decline that would be expected in men who are ten years older, a new study finds. One possible explanation: Smokers' brains may get less vital blood, oxygen and nutrients.
Defining dementia: Most people now diagnosed with early stages of Alzheimer's disease would not get that label under new diagnostic criteria, a new study suggests. Instead, most would be told they have "mild cognitive impairment" -- a change that some experts worry will cause confusion for patients and families.
Labeling foods: Wal-Mart stores will start labeling certain store-brand foods and bins of produce as "Great for You" choices with a new green and white seal. The company is applying its own nutrition standards to decide which foods qualify.

Today's talker: Online dating is a popular and surefire way to identify lots of potential mates -- though not necessarily the love of your life. That's the conclusion of a report from psychologists who question the success claims of sites such as eHarmony, PerfectMatch and Chemistry. The scientists looked at matching systems similar to those used by the sites and concluded, as one co-author said, "there is no reason to believe that online dating improves romantic outcomes."

Cutting-edge MRI techniques for studying communication within the brain

2012-02-07T23:40:00.000-08:00

IMAGE: Brain Connectivity is published bimonthly in print and online. For more information and to read a sample issue, visit www.liebertpub.com/brain....

New Rochelle, NY, February 7, 2012—Innovative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques that can measure changes in the microstructure of the white matter likely to affect brain function and the ability of different regions of the brain to communicate are presented in an article in the groundbreaking new neuroscience journal Brain Connectivity, a bimonthly peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.. The article is available free online at www.liebertpub.com/brain
Brain function depends on the ability of different brain regions to communicate through signaling networks that travel along white matter tracts. Using different types and amounts of tissue staining to measure how water molecules interact with the surrounding brain tissue, researchers can quantify changes in the density, orientation, and organization of white matter. They can then use this information to generate image maps of these signaling networks, a method called tractography.
Andrew Alexander and colleagues from University of Wisconsin, Madison, describe three quantitative MRI (qMRI) techniques that are enabling the characterization of the microstructural properties of white matter: diffusion MRI, magnetization transfer imaging, and relaxometry. This approach can be used to study and compare the properties of brain tissue across populations and to shed light on mechanisms underlying aging, disease, and gender differences in brain function, for example. The authors present their findings in the article "Characterization of Cerebral White Matter Properties Using Quantitative Magnetic Resonance Imaging Stains."
"White matter is the material that provides for the wiring and connectivity between brain regions. This exciting paper describes three new methodologies to measure the integrity of white matter in normal and diseased brain. These methods show promise in multiple sclerosis, depression, aging,and human development," says Bharat Biswal, PhD, Co-Editor-in-Chief of Brain Connectivity and Associate Professor, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

Brain Connectivity is the journal of record for researchers and clinicians interested in all aspects of brain connectivity. The Journal is under the leadership of founding and Co-Editors-in-Chief Christopher Pawela, PhD, assistant professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and Bharat Biswal, PhD. The Journal publishes original peer-reviewed papers, review articles, point-counterpoint discussions on controversies in the field, and a product/technology review section. To ensure that scientific findings are rapidly disseminated, articles are published Instant Online within 72 hours of acceptance, with fully typeset, fast-track publication within 4 weeks. Complete tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed online at www.liebertpub.com/brain
Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative medical and biomedical peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Neurotrauma and Therapeutic Hypothermia and Temperature Management. Its biotechnology trade magazine, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN), was the first in its field and is today the industry's most widely read publication worldwide. A complete list of the firm's 70 journals, newsmagazines, and books is available at our website.
Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. 140 Huguenot Street, New Rochelle, NY 10801-5215 www.liebertpub.com
Phone (914) 740-2100 (800) M-LIEBERT Fax (914) 740-2101

Neuroscientists link brain-wave pattern to energy consumption

2012-02-07T23:08:00.001-08:00

Emery Brown, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and health sciences and technology, left, and ShiNung Ching, a postdoc in Brown’s lab.

New model of neuro-electric activity could help scientists better understand quiescent brain states such as coma.

Different brain states produce different waves of electrical activity, with the alert brain, relaxed brain and sleeping brain producing easily distinguishable electroencephalogram (EEG) patterns. These patterns change even more dramatically when the brain goes into certain deeply quiescent states during general anesthesia or a coma.

MIT and Harvard University researchers have now figured out how one such quiescent state, known as burst suppression, arises. The finding, reported in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Feb. 6, could help researchers better monitor other states in which burst suppression occurs. For example, it is also seen in the brains of heart attack victims who are cooled to prevent brain damage due to oxygen deprivation, and in the brains of patients deliberately placed into a medical coma to treat a traumatic brain injury or intractable seizures.

During burst suppression, the brain is quiet for up to several seconds at a time, punctuated by short bursts of activity. Emery Brown, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and health sciences and technology and an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, set out to study burst suppression in the anesthetized brain and other brain states in hopes of discovering a fundamental mechanism for how the pattern arises. Such knowledge could help scientists figure out how much burst suppression is needed for optimal brain protection during induced hypothermia, when this state is created deliberately.

“You might be able to develop a much more principled way to guide therapy for using burst suppression in cases of medical coma,” says Brown, senior author of the PNAS paper. “The question is, how do you know that patients are sufficiently brain-protected? Should they have one burst every second? Or one every five seconds?”

Modeling electrical activity

ShiNung Ching, a postdoc in Brown’s lab and lead author of the PNAS paper, developed a model to describe how burst suppression arises, based on the behavior of neurons in the brain. Neuron firing is controlled by the activity of channels that allow ions such as potassium and sodium to flow in and out of the cell, altering its voltage.

For each neuron, “we’re able to mathematically model the flow of ions into and out of the cell body, through the membrane,” Ching says. In this study, the team combined many neurons to create a model of a large brain network. By showing how both cooling and certain anesthetic drugs reduce the brain’s use of ATP (the cell’s energy currency), the researchers were able to generate burst-suppression patterns consistent with those actually seen in human patients.

This is the first time that reductions in metabolic activity at the neuron level have been linked to burst suppression, and suggests that the brain likely uses burst suppression to conserve vital energy during times of trauma.

“What’s really exciting about this is the idea that the metabolic regulation of cell energy stores plays a role in the observed dynamics of EEG. That’s a different way to think about the determinants of EEG,” says Nicholas Schiff, a professor of neurology and neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medical College who was not involved in this research.

The developing brain

Burst suppression is also seen in babies born prematurely. As these babies get older, their brain patterns move into the normal continuous pattern. Brown speculates that in premature infants, the brain may be protecting itself by conserving energy.

“When you’re looking at these kids develop, we can easily start to suggest ways of tracking their improvement quantitatively. So the same algorithms we use to track burst suppression in the operating room could be used to track the disappearance of burst suppression in these kids,” Brown says.

Such tracking could help doctors determine whether premature infants are moving toward normal development or have an underlying brain disorder that might otherwise go undiagnosed, Ching says.

In future studies, the researchers plan to study premature infants as well as patients whose brains are cooled and those in induced comas. Such studies could reveal just how much burst suppression is enough to protect the brain in those vulnerable situations.

Brain does math when disaster looms: Study

2012-02-07T23:07:00.001-08:00

A team of Canadian and American researchers managed to figure out the calculations that specific neurons use to cause us to avoid approaching calamity..

You're just walking up the cereal aisle, looking for Fruit Loops, when you hear the clatter of impending disaster.
Some teenager has pushed his mom's grocery cart directly at you.
In the visual flash that takes place before it can crash into you legs, what goes through your mind?
It's math.
At least according to a team of Canadian and American researchers, who have mapped the visual processes the brain uses to figure out if Billy's cart of doom will leave you with a bruise.
The study, by scientists at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital -- known as The Neuro -- as well as the University of Maryland, managed to figure out the calculations that specific neurons use to cause us to avoid approaching calamity.
Igniting certain regions of the brain, the calculations work out needed information -- how far away the object is, is it harmlessly moving to the right or left or is it speeding up?
Specialized neurons in the brain's visual cortex, in an area known as MST, detect motion patterns, including expansion, rotation and deformation.
The computations used in the process were previously unknown, the researchers say.
They now know how individual MST neurons function.
But don't give yourself too much credit for those lightning fast math reflexes.
"Essentially, the underlining process is very similar to what a beetle, or fly or bird goes through," says Dr. Christopher Pack, of the high alert system that kicks in when danger rushes in.
A senior author of the research, and neuroscientist at The Neuro, Pack says he doubts the calculations used have changed much since the first big-fanged creature headed toward early man.
His team found a remarkably simple computation is at the core, and it comes down to multiplication problems.
Though in your mind, as you jump out of the way of the cart, you wish you could hold up just a single digit to that kid who pushed it.

Brain cells created from patients' skin cells

2012-02-07T23:03:00.001-08:00

Neural stem cells. Credit: Yichen Shi (Livesey Lab) University of Cambridge

(Medical Xpress) -- Cambridge scientists have, for the first time, created cerebral cortex cells – those that make up the brain’s grey matter – from a small sample of human skin. The researchers’ findings, which were funded by Alzheimer’s Research UK and the Wellcome Trust, were published today in Nature Neuroscience.

Diseases of the cerebral cortex range from developmental conditions, such as epilepsy and autism, to neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s. Today’s findings will enable scientists to study how the human cerebral cortex develops, how it ‘wires up’ and how that can go wrong (a common problem leading to learning disabilities).
It will also allow them to recreate brain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, in the lab. This will give them previously impossible insight, allowing them to both watch the diseases develop in real time and also develop and test new drugs to stop the diseases progressing.
Dr. Rick Livesey of the Gurdon Institute and Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, principal investigator of the research, said: “This approach gives us the ability to study human brain development and disease in ways that were unimaginable even five years ago.”
For their research, the scientists took skin biopsies from patients and then reprogrammed the cells from the skin samples back into stem cells. These stem cells as well as human embryonic stem cells were then used to generate cerebral cortex cells.
Dr. Livesey added: “We are using this system to recreate Alzheimer’s disease in the lab. Alzheimer’s disease is the commonest form of dementia in the world, and dementia currently affects over 800,000 people in the UK. It’s a disease that primarily affects the type of nerve cell we’ve made in the lab, so we’ve the perfect tool to create a full, human model of the disease in the lab.”
Dr. Simon Ridley, Head of Research at Alzheimer’s Research UK, the UK’s leading dementia research charity, said: “We are really pleased to have contributed funding for this work and the results are a positive step forward. Turning stem cells into networks of fully functional nerve cells in the lab holds great promise for unravelling complex brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
“Dementia is the greatest medical challenge of our time – we urgently need to understand more about the condition and how to stop it. We hope these findings can move us closer towards this goal.”

British scientists want… your brain: Appeal for donors to help battle against dementia

2012-02-07T23:00:00.000-08:00

Roy Mellor (who suffers from dementia) and his wife Susan, from Consett, County Durham, have jointly become the 200th donor at the brain bank
Researchers are calling for more people to donate their brain to science, to help in the battle against dementia.

The call comes from Newcastle University - which has just recruited its 200th brain donor - as the institution tries to drum up even more support.

The university's brain bank is part of a £2m initiative called Brains for Dementia Research, which collects tissue to help scientists defeat dementia.

Roy and Susan Mellor, from Consett, County Durham, have jointly become the 200th donor.

Mr Mellor, a retired engineer, has vascular dementia and has signed up as a dementia donor. His wife, a retired social worker, has signed up as a normal brain donor.

Mrs Mellor said: 'I think it is terrifically important that more people sign up.

Dementia is one of the most seriously underfunded diseases as far as research is concerned, and it is a massive problem.'The couple have been married for 48 years and have three children and seven grandchildren.

Mrs Mellor added: 'Roy was diagnosed with vascular dementia in May 2008. We live a very normal, ordinary life and he is aware of his condition.'

The couple were also recently involved in setting up a Memory Cafe, a cafe for people with dementia organised by the Alzheimer's Society.Brains for Dementia Research, jointly funded by the charities

Alzheimer's Research UK and Alzheimer's Society, was set up in 2007 to address a nationwide need for brain tissue.The brain tissue it collects will allow scientists to unravel the biology of dementia and will help in the search for vital new treatments.

Dr Chris Morris, scientific director of the Newcastle Brain Tissue Resource, said: 'It is brilliant news and we would like to say a big thank you to those who have already agreed to donate.

'We understand that brain donation is a very personal decision, which should be supported by friends and family, but we would urge more people in the region to find out about what it is and how they could get involved.

Male smokers lose brain function faster as they age

2012-02-07T22:49:00.000-08:00

In a large, long-term study, British researchers found that while there seems to be no link between cognitive decline and smoking in women, in men, the habit is linked to swifter decline, with early dementia-like cognitive difficulties showing up as early as the age of 45.

LONDON: Men who smoke suffer a more rapid decline in brain function as they age than their non-smoking counterparts, with their cognitive decline as rapid as someone 10 years older but who shuns tobacco, scientists said on Monday.
In a large, long-term study, British researchers found that while there seems to be no link between cognitive decline and smoking in women, in men, the habit is linked to swifter decline, with early dementia-like cognitive difficulties showing up as early as the age of 45.
The research adds to an already large body of evidence about the long-term dangers of smoking — a habit the World Health Organisation refers to as “one of the biggest public health threats the world has ever faced”.
Smoking causes lung cancer, which is often fatal, and other chronic respiratory diseases. It is also a major risk factor for cardiovascular diseases, the world’s number one killers.
“While we were aware that smoking is a risk factor for respiratory disease, cancer, and cardiovascular disease, this study shows it also has a detrimental effect on cognitive ageing and this is evident as early as 45 years,” said Severine Sabia of University College London, who led the study and published it in the Archives of General Psychiatry journal.
In an interview she said one explanation for the gender difference found in this study might be the larger amount of tobacco smoked by men, or the fact that there was a significantly lower proportion of women than men among those involved in the research.
Sabia’s team looked for possible links between smoking history and cognitive decline in the transition from midlife to old age using data from 5,099 men and 2,137 women who are involved in a large research project called the Whitehall II study, which is based on employees of the British Civil Service.
The average age of those taking part was 56 when they had their first cognitive assessment.
The study used six assessments of smoking status over 25 years and three cognitive assessments over 10 years, and found that smokers showed a cognitive decline as fast as non-smokers 10 years older than them.
“A 50 year old male smoker shows a similar cognitive decline as a 60 year old male never smoker,” Sabia explained.
She also found that men who quit smoking in the 10 years before the first cognitive testing point were still at risk of greater cognitive decline, especially in executive function – which covers various complex cognitive processes involved in achieving a particular goal.
Long-term ex-smokers, however, did not show a faster decline in their brain functions or cognitive abilities.
Sabia said more research is now needed to find out why there was a difference between men and women in this study, and to look into possible mechanisms that might link declining brain function to smoking.

Bird flu leaves tracks in brain

2012-02-02T06:53:00.001-08:00

Virus might create vulnerability to neurological disorders, research in mice suggests

After surviving a bout of virulent bird flu, mice’s brains show short-term reductions of a key brain chemical and long-lasting signs of infection, a new study finds. The research suggests this type of flu might leave people more vulnerable to brain disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.
While most people think of influenza as a disorder of the body, certain kinds of flu also infect the brain. Recent studies have found that the bird flu virus known as H5N1, which kills about half the people it infects, can set up shop in the brain. But exactly what happens next has been a mystery.
In the new study, scientists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., examined the brains of mice that had survived an initial H5N1 infection. As in people, the virus kills about half of mice affected.
“The first goal with H5N1 was to characterize the neurological effects,” says study coauthor Richard Smeyne.
After being infected with H5N1 isolated from a Vietnamese boy who died from the flu, some mice initially got very sick, but then seemed to recover completely after about 21 days. Yet the story wasn’t so simple in the brain, the team reports in the Feb. 1 Journal of Neuroscience.
Nerve cells that make one of the brain’s key messengers — the neurotransmitter dopamine, which helps regulate movement — shut down production about 10 days after infection. These nerve cells, which are the same cells that degenerate in people with Parkinson’s disease, “basically take a time out,” Smeyne says. “All efforts are to survive.”
By day 60, the dopamine starts to reappear, and levels are back to normal 90 days later. Signs of inflammation in the brain remain, though.
Just three days into the infection, the brains of these mice showed evidence of a strong inflammatory response, and this response appeared to linger over time. Proteins that accompany inflammation, and cells that patrol the brain looking for threats, were still present and on duty in parts of the brain 90 days after the initial infection. Scientists don’t know whether the response ever goes away. “My guess is that it’s permanent,” Smeyne says.
He notes that it’s unlikely that an influenza infection could cause neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s, but an infection might be a contributing factor, perhaps even precipitating the disease in someone already at risk.
The results are intriguing because they offer a way to understand H5N1’s consequences in the brain, says neuroimmunologist Stephanie Bissel of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Future experiments on such survivor mice could reveal whether the mice show behavioral signs of neurological impairment, she says.
The research team has evidence that H5N1 breaks into the brain by traveling along the vagus nerve from nerve cells in the gut. The virus might also enter the brain from the nose by crawling along the olfactory nerve, Smeyne says.

Study Spots Where Humor Tickles Kids' Brains

2012-02-02T06:51:00.000-08:00

Kids may not giggle over the awkwardness on "The Office," and adults usually aren't all that tickled by Elmo. But new research shows that the same brain regions are active when both children and grown ups find something funny.
Researchers at Stanford University have shown that the brain's network for appreciating humor develops in childhood. They studied 15 children ages 6 to 12, showing them clips from "America's Funniest Home Videos," like people stumbling while skiing or running, animals doing tricks or a kid being catapulted off of an inflatable couch. (To be sure the videos would be funny to kids and not just scientists, the researchers first had children of the same ages rate videos as funny or not.)
While the kids were watching the videos, researchers were monitoring their brain activity using technology called functional magnetic resonance imaging.
The results, published today in the Journal of Neuroscience, showed that funny videos turned on kids' brains in two key areas – the temporo-occipito-parietal junction, or TOPJ, an area located just above the ear, and the midbrain, an area deep inside the brain near the bottom of the skull. The fact that these areas were more active during funny videos and not just positive ones shows that these areas are distinctly part of the brain's humor network.

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Dr. Allan Reiss, one of the study's authors, has researched how humor lights up adult brains, and he said the same areas that lit up when kids were laughing were also active when adults found something funny. One of the brain regions tickled by humor, the TOPJ, helps humans perceive and appreciate the unexpected things in life. Reiss said that could be one reason why humor is often cited as a major stress reliever.
"A lot of humor is setting up a joke or something funny and then giving the punch line, often going in an unexpected direction," Reiss said. "One of the reasons why a good sense of humor might serve as a means of stress reduction is that many times stress comes from incongruities in our daily lives."
The other brain region that lit up when kids viewed the funny videos, the midbrain, is the area of the brain that helps humans process rewarding feelings, which could explain why just the right joke can be a quick way to improve a bad day. The younger children in the study showed more activity in this rewarding area of the brain.
"That may well be because of the type of stimuli that we used," Reiss said. "The younger children probably found those videos funnier."
The study is the first to look at how kids' brains detect and appreciate humor. Dr. Rebecca Schrag, a child psychologist at the Healthy Steps Program at Montefiore Medical Center in Bronx, N.Y., said the fact that the brain is hard-wired for humor gives humans an important tool for coping with life.
"Humor isn't just a casual thing you do at a dinner party. It has been shown to be a factor that can contribute to resilience," she said. "Being able to see the humor in stressful situations, to see the upside of things, to be able to laugh at yourself or things that are difficult has been shown to contribute to positive development."
Reiss said he hopes to learn more about how children develop senses of humor, and how that impacts their experiences in life.
"Humor is a ubiquitous part of our social lives. Clearly, children who have well-developed senses of humor and can use them appropriately often are quite successful," Reiss said.

Scientists shift on brain speech center

2012-02-02T06:47:00.000-08:00

An analysis of the brain imaging coordinates in those studies pointed to the new location for Wernicke’s area, offering new insight for patients suffering from brain damage or stroke.

WASHINGTON: The part of the brain used for speech processing is in a different location than originally believed, according to a US study Monday that researchers said will require a rewrite of medical texts.
Wernicke’s area, named after the German neurologist who proposed it in the late 1800s, was long believed to be at the back of the brain’s cerebral cortex, behind the auditory cortex which receives sounds.
But a review by scientists at Georgetown University Medical Center of more than 100 imaging studies has shown it is actually three centimeters closer to the front of the brain, and is in front of the auditory cortex, not behind.
“Textbooks will now have to be rewritten,” said neuroscience professor Josef Rauschecker, lead author of the study which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“We gave old theories that have long hung a knockout punch.”Rauschecker and colleagues based their research on 115 previous peer-reviewed studies that investigated speech perception and used brain imaging scans — either MRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) or PET (positron emission tomography).
An analysis of the brain imaging coordinates in those studies pointed to the new location for Wernicke’s area, offering new insight for patients suffering from brain damage or stroke.
“If a patient can’t speak, or understand speech, we now have a good clue as to where damage has occurred,” said Rauschecker.
It also adds an intriguing wrinkle to the origins of language in humans and primates, who have also been shown to process audible speech in the same region of the brain.
“This finding suggests the architecture and processing between the two species is more similar than many people thought.” Lead author Iain DeWitt, a PhD candidate in Georgetown’s Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience, said the study confirms what others have found since brain imaging began in earnest in the 1990s, though some debate has persisted.
“The majority of imagers, however, were reluctant to overturn a century of prior understanding on account of what was then a relatively new methodology,”he said.
“The point of our paper is to force a reconciliation between the data and theory.”

Zoologger: The only males with more brain than females

2012-02-02T06:44:00.000-08:00

Zoologger is our weekly column highlighting extraordinary animals – and occasionally other organisms – from around the world

Species: an isolated population of Gasterosteus aculeatus
Habitat: Lake Mývatn, Iceland

In one of philosophy's greatest facepalm moments, the normally quite intelligent Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that "women are defective in the powers of reasoning and deliberation". If you find it hard to believe that a well-educated and original thinker could hold such a view, his essay Of Women leaves no doubt about it. Oddly enough, he never married.

However, Schopenhauer might have had a point, if only he had been a three-spined stickleback living in Lake Mývatn in Iceland. In this one population, the males have brains much larger than those of the females. They are the only species known where there is such a big disparity between the two sexes' brains.

What's surprising is that there aren't more animals like this. Species differ enormously in brain size, after all, and males and females often have different lifestyles that make different demands on their brains. Why do these few fish buck the trend?

Sticklers

Most three-spined sticklebacks live in the sea and only visit fresh water to breed, but others – like the Mývatn population – spend all their lives in fresh water. Behavioural scientists have studied them for decades because of their elaborate mating rituals.

At the start of the breeding season, the males' skin turns a bright orange-red, and their eyes go blue-green. Each male defends a patch of territory, where he builds a nest from debris like pebbles and vegetation. The males glue their building materials together with stuff called spiggin, which they make in their kidneys.

Once the nest is completed, the male installs himself in front of it and performs a zigzag dance to attract a female. When one approaches, the male leads her to the nest, and she takes a close look. If the nest is good, and the male a suitably bright red, she goes inside and lays her eggs, which the male promptly fertilises.

That done, the female clears off and leaves the male in sole charge of the eggs. They tend to get fungal infections, so he minimises the risk by waving his fins to keep water moving through the nest, and if any eggs become infected he picks them out.

Size isn't everything

Wondering if the male's complex lifestyles were reflected in their brains, Alexander Kotrschal of Uppsala University in Sweden and colleagues dissected 58 males and 61 females, and weighed their brains. On average, both sexes were 4.5 centimetres long, but the males had brains weighing 24.2 milligrams, whereas the females' weighed just 19.7 mg.

Kotrschal emphasises that the size of an animal's brain isn't everything. "It's generally assumed that larger is better," he says, because having more neurons for a given body mass should allow the brain to process more information. However, there could also be unseen differences in the numbers of connections between neurons. "The connectivity is also extremely important."

He hasn't put the males and females through intelligence tests to see whether the size difference actually translates into ability. "It's hard to infer cognitive abilities just from brain size," he says.

Nevertheless, he points out that species with larger brains in proportion to body size, like humans, do in general seem to be more intelligent than those with smaller ones. So it's possible that the male sticklebacks really are smarter than their females.

Why would that be? It could be that the males have a more challenging lifestyle: they have to build nests, perform courtship dances and then care for the eggs. The females don't help with any of this – but they do have to assess the males' dancing and nest-building, which takes quite some powers of discernment.

It could also be that the females devote a lot of energy to making eggs, leaving little to run a large brain. The female's gonads can make up 40 per cent of her body mass, and so consume lots of nutrients.

There's a precedent for that sort of effect. Similar trade-offs are seen in male bats, some of which have shrunk their brains to get bigger testes. One can only imagine what Schopenhauer would have made of that.

Human brain cells created using stem cells

2012-02-02T06:41:00.001-08:00

Dolly the Sheep.

It's been sixteen years since Edinburgh scientists cloned a sheep and named it Dolly, but their sophomore effort appears even better: they've gone back to the studio and created some new brain tissue. Human brain tissue, that is.
By using stem cells from people suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses, the scientists at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine were able to make brain cells to study the neurons, thus the neurological conditions.

Said director Professor Charles ffrench-Constant, "We can take a skin sample, make stem cells from it and then direct these stem cells to grow into brain cells. Essentially, we are turning a person's skin cells into brain. We are making cells that were previously inaccessible. And we could do that in future for the liver, the heart and other organs on which it is very difficult to carry out biopsies."

With the cells grown outside the body, scientists can study them in greater detail than ever before, hopefully unlocking previously unknown things about these conditions.

"We are making different types of brain cells out of skin samples from people with schizophrenia and bipolar depression," he said. "Once we have assembled these, we look at standard psychological medicines, such as lithium, to see how they affect these cells in the laboratory. After that, we can start to screen new medicines. Our lines of brain cells would become testing platforms for new drugs. We should be able to start that work in a couple of years."

Scientists also hope to work on multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease and motor neuron disease.
This is yet another usage of stem cells, which are being used in myriad amazing ways. In some ways, stem cells are the most awesome (in its original meaning) thing happening in a world that is changing at a rate too rapid to describe.
We just can't wait to see what happens next.

Sleep apnea may up risk of silent strokes, small lesions in brain

2012-02-02T06:40:00.001-08:00

Washington, Feb 2 (ANI): People with severe sleep apnea may have an increased risk of silent strokes and small lesions in the brain, researchers have revealed.
The researchers found that ninety-one percent (51 of 56) of the patients who had a stroke had sleep apnea and were more likely to have silent strokes and white matter lesions that increased risk of disability at hospital discharge.
Having more than five sleep apnea episodes per night was associated with silent strokes.
More than one-third of patients with white matter lesions had severe sleep apnea and more than 50 percent of silent stroke patients had sleep apnea.
“We found a surprisingly high frequency of sleep apnea in patients with stroke that underlines its clinical relevance as a stroke risk factor,” said Jessica Kepplinger, M.D., the study’s lead researcher and stroke fellow in the Dresden University Stroke Center’s Department of Neurology at the University of Technology in Dresden, Germany.
“Sleep apnea is widely unrecognized and still neglected. Patients who had severe sleep apnea were more likely to have silent strokes and the severity of sleep apnea increased the risk of being disabled at hospital discharge,” she stated.
Even though men were more likely to have silent infarcts, correlations between sleep apnea and silent infarcts remained the same after adjustment for such gender differences.
Researchers suggested that sleep apnea should be treated the same as other vascular risk factors such as high blood pressure.
“Demographic characteristics in our study are comparable to western European populations, but our findings may not be entirely generalizable to other populations with diverse ethnicities such as in the U.S.,” Kepplinger said.
The researchers plan more studies on sleep apnea, particularly in high-risk patients with silent strokes and white matter lesions, to determine the impact of non-invasive ventilation and on short-term clinical outcome, researchers said.

Decaffeinated coffee curbs memory decline

2012-02-02T06:37:00.000-08:00

Decaffeinated coffee curbs memory decline

Decaffeinated coffee may help improve brain energy metabolism associated with type 2 diabetes, researchers suggest.

This brain dysfunction is a known risk factor for dementia and other neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's disease.

A research group led by Giulio Maria Pasinetti, MD, PhD, Professor of Neurology, and Psychiatry, at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, explored whether dietary supplementation with a standardized decaffeinated coffee preparation prior to diabetes onset might improve insulin resistance and glucose utilization in mice with diet-induced type 2 diabetes.

The researchers administered the supplement for five months, and evaluated the brain's genetic response in the mice. They found that the brain was able to more effectively metabolize glucose and use it for cellular energy in the brain.

Glucose utilization in the brain is reduced in people with type 2 diabetes, which can often result in neurocognitive problems.

"Impaired energy metabolism in the brain is known to be tightly correlated with cognitive decline during aging and in subjects at high risk for developing neurodegenerative disorders," said Dr. Pasinetti.

"This is the first evidence showing the potential benefits of decaffeinated coffee preparations for both preventing and treating cognitive decline caused by type 2 diabetes, aging, and/or neurodegenerative disorders," Dr. Pasinetti. Added.

Coffee intake is not recommended for everybody due to the fact that it is associated with cardiovascular health risks such as elevated blood cholesterol and blood pressure, both of which lead to an increased risk for heart disease, stroke, and premature death. These negative effects have primarily been attributed to the high caffeine content of coffee.

Nonetheless, these novel findings are evidence that some of the non-caffeine components in coffee provide health benefits in mice.

Dr. Pasinetti hopes to explore the preventive role of decaffeinated coffee delivered as a dietary supplement in humans.

"In light of recent evidence suggesting that cognitive impairment associated with Alzheimer's disease and other age-related neurodegenerative disorders may be traced back to neuropathological conditions initiated several decades before disease onset, developing preventive treatments for such disorders is critical," he said.

Stay at work for brain health

2012-02-02T06:33:00.000-08:00

OFF TO WORK WE GO: Today's active 70-year-olds have brain scans that look up to 15 years younger than those of their parents' generation
Whether it's sudoku or brain training games, there are plenty of options claiming to sharpen our brains as we get older.
But psychiatrist Ian Hickie, Executive Director of the University of Sydney's Brain and Mind Research Institute, has a better idea - keep working.
"Work is your own personal cognitive training program because it keeps you challenged and engaged," he says.
"Through the whole of the lifespan if you compare people who are employed with those who are unemployed, their mental and physical health is better.
"Although problems with physical health can be the reason that health takes you out of the workplace - it's also true that those who get back to work after an illness improve their health."
Hickie believes there's something health-preserving about work - probably a mix of factors, including new experiences that help drive the growth of brain cells, as well as interaction with other people.
"But it could also be that the routine that keeps you going to bed and getting up at the same time each day helps regulate our sleep wake cycles, and this is important for our physical and mental health," he points out. "On the other hand, when people are not working they often tend to sleep more - and eat more."
The really good news for anyone nudging retirement age is that, despite all the gloom about dementia, the brains of many modern 65 to 70 year olds are in pretty good shape compared to those of previous generations - and, says Hickie, often too young to be retired.
"Today's physically active 70-year-olds who don't smoke have scans showing brains that look 10 to 15 years younger than those of their parents' generation at the same age - more of whom were smokers. We should never retire simply because of age - the best professors at this university are over 70 years of age," he says, adding that the retirement age of 65 is out of date, an anachronism from the 19th century when life expectancy was shorter and people were often worn out by tougher working conditions.
"You find that around the world the age of retirement is going up," says Hickie who, at the 2008 National Public Health Reform Summit, was quoted as saying that raising the retirement age from 65 to 72 would help reduce mental illness.
Still, that doesn't mean you have to keep doing the same job until you drop - most of us will have to change our job in some way. But his advice is not to just quit altogether.
It's a similar message from another brain expert, Dr Michael Valenzuela, Senior Research Fellow at the School of Psychiatry at the University of NSW.
We're trained to plan our retirement from a financial perspective, but we should also be paying just as much attention to planning our retirement from a healthy brain perspective, he writes in his latest book, Maintain your Brain (ABC Books).
"We need to replace the social, physical and cognitive activity that was an inherent part of our jobs - and which normally fills up 50 per cent of our waking lives - with new activities that also have a social, physical and cognitive component," he says.
Continuing to work, even if only part time, can be one option, although his list of other activities that tick all three boxes includes getting involved in a community garden (as opposed to solitary gardening), dancing (it's mentally demanding) and orienteering.
"I think many people will either decide to keep on working or to keep on learning," says Valenzuela, pointing to the Tasmanian Healthy Brain Project, a world first study at the University of Tasmania to find out if taking up further education at an older age can buffer our brains against dementia.
Research already suggests that a tertiary education early in life seems to help protect against cognitive decline - could picking up textbooks in our 50s, 60s and 70s do the same?

Montreal's brain bank gets hefty donation

2012-02-02T06:31:00.000-08:00

Dr. Naguib Mechawar handles a human brain. (Feb. 1, 2012)

3,000 brains are kept at the Douglas Mental Health Institute (Feb. 1, 2012)

The Douglas Institute

MONTREAL — Every day in a Montreal laboratory scientists reach into freezers, make a careful selection, and pull a human brain out of cold storage.
What may be gruesome to the average person is routine for the researchers at the Douglas Mental Health Institute, where thousands of brains are kept on ice, waiting to become the subject of research into mental illness and neurological disorders.
That research is overseen by Dr. Naguib Mechawar. who is passionate about finding cures for mental illness.
"At the Douglas in the past 30 years there have been many breakthroughs that have been made because of brain donations," said Dr. Mechawar.

Three decades of research
The Brain Bank was created in 1980 and has close to 3,000 brains in storage, all donated by people with an interest in battling mental illness.
Researchers have used the brains to help discover a gene linked to Alzheimer's Disease, and do cutting edge work on depression and suicide prevention.
"Some samples we've had since the early '80s when the brain bank was created," said Dr. Mechawar.
Comparing healthy brains to diseased ones is painstaking work, and getting people to donate their brains isn't easy either, but that is exactly what Manon-Lucie Sirois has agreed to do after her death.
Two of her aunts had Alzheimer's so taking a few minutes to sign a consent form was an easy choice.
"It's the highway for the researcher to find maybe a solution," said Sirois.
The president of the Douglas Mental Health Institute says when someone donates their brain it comes with their medical history, which is precious information for researchers looking to identify the one in five Canadians at risk of mental illness.
"When you go to the doctor today you use markers in your blood to identify if you're at risk of heart disease and then you're given a course of medication. We'd like to do the same for mental illness," said Jane Lalonde.

Bell Canada donating $2 million
Mental health research receives a small portion of federal funding compared with other illnesses.
That's one reason that CTV's parent company, Bell Canada, is donating $2 million to the Douglas Mental Health Institute.
The funding will go toward a research fellowship, upgrading technology, and improving laboratories and storage facilities.
Improved technology to make unlocking the secrets of the human brain a little easier.

Mexican ‘brain bank’ furthers Alzheimer’s research

2012-02-02T06:24:00.000-08:00

MEXICO CITY – Mexican scientists are making inroads in Alzheimer’s research thanks to the creation of one of the primary “brain banks” in Latin America.

The brain bank, housed in a laboratory of the National Polytechnic Institute’s Center for Investigation and Advanced Studies (CINVESTAV), has given scientists here an opportunity contribute more fully to international research into Alzheimer’s and dementia.
A CINVESTAV team led by Dr. Raul Mena y Dr. José Luna-Muñoz has been studying the early stages of certain protein changes in neurons – with the goal of providing evidence of the changes, first, and, second, to eventually provide the basis for developing drugs that could stop insidious changes at the cellular level that lead to Alzheimer’s.
Mexico’s brain bank supplies the physical matter for research that is otherwise largely unavailable in Latin America. To study the inner working of brain cells, scientists need to study a brain that has been retrieved between two and six hours postmortem, otherwise proteins begin to break down and the research does not retain the same integrity, according to Dr. José Luna-Muñoz, CINVESTAV professor and researcher.
The concept of a brain bank in Mexico – or Latin America for that matter – was taboo until recently. The cultural belief that a body should be buried in tact prevented many families from considering donating the brain.
“That ideology has been changing,” said Luna-Muñoz. “People want to prove and know why their family members have died, whether it was Alzheimer’s or dementia. It’s been a cultural shift.”
Eighteen brains have been donated since a scientist named Dr. Raul Mena founded the bank in 1992. Previously, Mexican scientists had to request brain fragments from France, England, Canada or the United States in order to perform research. Now Mexico sends fragments abroad to labs in need, including recently to Chile.
The brain bank is also furthering research into the factors that may be environmental or specific to Mexicans. Right now the scientists are looking at the early stages of “tau” protein processing in Alzheimer’s disease. Among their contributions, the scientists have determined a morphological model and the underlying molecular mechanism involved in early stages of the abnormal processing of the tau protein. They have also suggested that the “neurofibrillary tangle formation,” as that abnormal processing of the tau protein is known, may be a protective mechanism of the neuron to prolong cell life.
“Between 5 percent and 10 percent (of Alzheimer’s cases) are associated with a genetic factor,” said Luna-Muñoz. “The rest are know as sporadic Alzheimer’s and the cause is unknown. Is there some environment that could be favoring the expression of this disease?”
That’s what the CINVESTAV researchers (and their counterparts around the world) are working to find out.
The image, taken from an Alzheimer’s affected brain, characterizes the initial stage of degeneration in the neuron known as the “pre-tangle” stage. Photo taken with a confocal microscope by Dr. José Luna-Muñoz.

Man survives piece of wood stuck in brain

2012-02-02T06:23:00.000-08:00

Mumbai: When 22-year-old Vinod Pal was wheeled into KEM hospital's emergency unit on Monday afternoon, he was not a sight for sore eyes. Nurses, ward boys, patients and even doctors did a double take at the sight of a bloody piece of wood jutting out of his skull.

Inspections revealed that the wooden piece had pierced Pal's head, entering the brain matter and compressing it.

On Monday afternoon, Pal -- a carpenter -- was working on the eighth floor of an under-construction building in Badlapur. He was trying to separate a cluster of bamboo sticks, when a thick piece of wood used to support the bamboos hit Pal's head, penetrating it.

A native of Uttar Pradesh, Pal's search for employment had brought him to the shores of Mumbai just six months ago. After the accident, he was put in an auto by his co-workers and taken to a local hospital.

"The doctors at the hospital took a CT scan and informed us that the splinter had entered his brain, and advised that we take him to KEM hospital. We did not suspect that it was such a serious matter. He seemed fine on his way to the hospital," said Govind Pal, who witnessed the accident.

By Monday evening, Vinod was conveyed to KEM hospital, where doctors immediately took him to the Operation Theatre, after evaluating the nature of his injuries.

"The big splinter had fractured his skull, piercing the dura mater covering the brain, and entering the brain substance, which can expose him to extensive infection, apart from the risk of paralysis. It could have been fatal if it had gone in any deeper," said Dr A K Gvalani, head of the surgery department of KEM hospital, adding that a team of neurosurgeons had operated on Pal.

Recollecting the incident, Pal said, "I was working as I do on any other day, when suddenly the piece of wood flew into the air and hit my head. Till the surgery was performed on me, I didn't know that the wooden piece had penetrated my brain. I am thankful to God and the doctors who saved me."

"A lot of wooden dust had spread in the brain matter, all of which was removed during the surgery to avoid further infection. We removed the wooden piece which had fractured the skull, and elevated the depression caused in the brain by it," said Ragvendra Ramdasi, resident doctor from the Neurosurgery department.

Meanwhile, Dr Nimisha Kantharia, lecturer of Surgery, said, "The patient had complained of right side weakness, and we have already put him on antibiotics to control infection, if any. We were all shocked to see the patient with this kind of injury. He is fortunate to have escaped death."

At present, Pal is admitted under Dr Sameer Rege, unit head of the Surgery department.

Changes to Neurons Hamper the Aging Brain

2012-02-02T06:20:00.001-08:00

The good news is that most people in the developed world are living longer; the not-so-good news is that the brain often does not stay sharp in our older age.
Currently, experts do not fully understood why the brain’s cognitive functions such as memory and speech decline as we age. This despite the realization that cognitive decline can be detected before an individual reaches age 50.
Neuroscientists Andy Randall, Ph.D. and Jon Brown, Ph.D. from the University of Bristol have identified a novel cellular mechanism that causes changes to the activity of neurons — an action which may contribute to cognitive decline during normal healthy aging.
The brain largely uses electrical signals to encode and convey information. Modifications to this electrical activity are likely to cause age-dependent changes to cognitive abilities.
The researchers examined the brain’s electrical activity by making recordings of electrical signals in single cells of the hippocampus, a structure with a crucial role in cognitive function. By doing this, they were able to assess “neuronal excitability” – the ease with which a neuron can produce brief, but very large, electrical signals called action potentials.
An action potential occurs in practically all nerve cells and is essential for transmission of a signal or communication within all the circuits of the nervous system.
Action potentials are triggered near the neuron’s cell body and once produced, travel rapidly through the massively branching structure of the nerve cell, along the way activating the synapses the nerve cell makes with the numerous other nerve cells to which it is connected.
Researchers discovered the hippocampal neurons within an aged brain have trouble generating action potentials.
Furthermore, they demonstrated that this relative reluctance to produce action potential arises from changes to the activation properties of membrane proteins called sodium channels. The sodium channels influence the rapid initiation of the action potential by allowing a flow of sodium ions into neurons.
Randall, a professor in applied neurophysiology, said: “Much of our work is about understanding dysfunctional electrical signaling in the diseased brain, in particular Alzheimer’s disease.
“We began to question, however, why even the healthy brain can slow down once you reach my age. Previous investigations elsewhere have described age-related changes in processes that are triggered by action potentials, but our findings are significant because they show that generating the action potential in the first place is harder work in aged brain cells.
“Also by identifying sodium channels as the likely culprit for this reluctance to produce action potentials, our work even points to ways in which we might be able modify age-related changes to neuronal excitability, and by inference cognitive ability.”

Scientists decode how the brain hears words

2012-02-02T06:19:00.000-08:00

Brains of healthy adults showing low (L) and high (R) levels of beta-amyloid protein (AFP/UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS)

WASHINGTON — US scientists said Wednesday they have found a way to decode how the brain hears words, in what researchers described as a major step toward one day helping people communicate after paralysis or stroke.
By placing electrodes on the brains of research subjects and then having them listen to conversations, scientists were able to analyze the sound frequencies registered and figure out which words they were hearing.
"We were focused on how the brain processes the sounds of speech," researcher Brian Pasley of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California Berkeley told AFP.
"Most of the information in speech is between one to 8,000 hertz. Essentially the brain analyzes those different sound frequencies in somewhat separate locations."
By tracking how and where the brain registered sounds in the temporal lobe -- the center of the auditory system -- scientists were able to map out the words and then recreate them as heard by the brain.
"When a particular brain site is being activated, we know that roughly corresponds to some sound frequency that the patient is actually listening to," Pasley said.
"So we could map that out to an extent that would allow us to use that brain activity to resynthesize the sound from the frequencies we were guessing."
One word the researchers mapped was "structure." The high-frequency "s" sound showed up as a certain pattern in the brain, while the lower harmonics of the "u" sound appeared as a different pattern.
"There is to some extent a correspondence between these features of sound and the brain activity that they cause," and putting together the physical registry in the brain helped rebuild the words, Pasley explained.
The work builds on previous research in ferrets, in which scientists read to the animals and recorded their brain activity.
They were able to decode which words the creatures heard even though the ferrets themselves didn't understand the words.
The next step for researchers is to figure out just how similar the process of hearing sounds may be to the process of imagining words and sounds.
That information could one day help scientists determine what people want to say when they cannot physically speak.
Some previous research has suggested there may be similarities, but much more work needs to be done, Pasley said.
"This is huge for patients who have damage to their speech mechanisms because of a stroke or Lou Gehrig's disease and can't speak," co-author Robert Knight, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience, said in a statement.
"If you could eventually reconstruct imagined conversations from brain activity, thousands of people could benefit."
Participating researchers came from the University of Maryland, UC Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

AstraZeneca Streamlining Brain R&D Activities, Closing Sites

2012-02-02T06:17:00.001-08:00

LONDON (Dow Jones)--AstraZeneca PLC (AZN) said Thursday its need to cut costs had driven the difficult decision to carry out further restructuring -- a move which will see the drug maker reduce its financial exposure to research into disorders of the brain.
"While the patient need for better medicines in neuroscience is huge and the science is promising, advances in treatments have proved elusive for the pharmaceutical industry in recent years, despite significant investment," the company said, adding: "AstraZeneca believes that it will have the best chance of success in future by combining the company's internal expertise with innovative external science."
The move, part of the company's latest restructuring to rein in costs and shrink operations, is aimed at making "a simpler and more innovative R&D organization with a lower and more flexible cost base. Excess capacity in certain R&D functions will be reduced, matching resources to AstraZeneca's more focused R&D portfolio."
As a result, AstraZeneca will create a new "virtual" neuroscience Innovative Medicines unit made up of a small team of around 40 to 50 AstraZeneca scientists conducting discovery and development externally, through a network of some of the most innovative partners in academia and industry globally.
The team will be based in major neuroscience hubs - Boston, Massachusetts and Cambridge, England - and work closely with innovative partners such as the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.
Drug companies have always had difficulty making money from neuroscience, because researching the brain is a riskier enterprise, with lower successful hit rates and higher risks of failure than some other therapeutic areas.
AstraZeneca's head of R&D Martin Mackay said: "We've made an active choice to stay in neuroscience though we will work very differently to share cost, risk and reward with partners in this especially challenging but important field of medical research. The creation of a virtual neuroscience iMed will make us more agile scientifically and financially - we will be able to collaborate flexibly with the best scientific expertise, wherever it exists in the world."
Implementation of the plan will lead to a significant reduction in employee numbers and the end of R&D activity at two sites that are focused on neuroscience: Soedertaelje in Sweden and Montreal in Canada.
As the location of the company's largest manufacturing site, and the base of the commercial business covering the Scandinavian markets, Soedertälje remains an important part of the AstraZeneca network. The company's Montreal facility will close.
AstraZeneca said the latest restructuring in R&D will lead to the loss of around 2,200 positions globally.
The U.K.'s second-biggest drug maker said its latest phase of cost cutting would see the loss of around 7,300 jobs throughout the company and deliver a further $1.6 billion in annual savings by the end of 2014.
At 0935 GMT, AstraZeneca shares were down 3.4% or 105.5 pence at 2984p in a broadly lower London market.

Path Is Found for the Spread of Alzheimer’s

2012-02-02T06:16:00.000-08:00

From left, Li Liu, Scott A. Small and Karen Duff examining a mouse brain. Dr. Small and Dr. Duff used mice to study Alzheimer's.

Alzheimer’s disease seems to spread like an infection from brain cell to brain cell, two new studies in mice have found. But instead of viruses or bacteria, what is being spread is a distorted protein known as tau.

The surprising finding answers a longstanding question and has immediate implications for developing treatments, researchers said. And they suspect that other degenerative brain diseases like Parkinson’s may spread in a similar way.

Alzheimer’s researchers have long known that dying, tau-filled cells first emerge in a small area of the brain where memories are made and stored. The disease then slowly moves outward to larger areas that involve remembering and reasoning.

But for more than a quarter-century, researchers have been unable to decide between two explanations. One is that the spread may mean that the disease is transmitted from neuron to neuron, perhaps along the paths that nerve cells use to communicate with one another. Or it could simply mean that some brain areas are more resilient than others and resist the disease longer.

The new studies provide an answer. And they indicate it may be possible to bring Alzheimer’s disease to an abrupt halt early on by preventing cell-to-cell transmission, perhaps with an antibody that blocks tau.

The studies, done independently by researchers at Columbia and Harvard, involved genetically engineered mice that could make abnormal human tau proteins, predominantly in the entorhinal (pronounced en-toh-RYE-nal) cortex, a sliver of tissue behind the ears, toward the middle of the brain, where cells first start dying in Alzheimer’s disease. As expected, tau showed up there. And, as also expected, entorhinal cortex cells in the mice started dying, filled with tangled, spaghettilike strands of tau.

Over the next two years, the cell death and destruction spread outward to other cells along the same network. Since those other cells could not make human tau, the only way they could get the protein was by transmission from nerve cell to nerve cell.

And that, said Dr. Samuel E. Gandy, associate director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, was “very unexpected, very intriguing.”

Although the studies were in mice, researchers say they expect that the same phenomenon occurs in humans because the mice had a human tau gene and the progressive wave of cell death matched what they see in people with Alzheimer’s disease.

One study, by Karen Duff and Dr. Scott A. Small and their colleagues at the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain at Columbia University Medical Center, was published on Wednesday in the journal PLoS One. The other, by Dr. Bradley T. Hyman, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, and his colleagues, is to be published in the journal Neuron.

Both groups of researchers were inspired by the many observations over the years that Alzheimer’s starts in the entorhinal cortex and spreads.

But, said Dr. Small, “what do we mean by ‘spreads?’ ”

Researchers knew that something set off Alzheimer’s disease. The most likely candidate is a protein known as beta amyloid, which accumulates in the brain of Alzheimer’s patients, forming hard, barnaclelike plaques. But beta amyloid is very different from tau. It is secreted and clumps outside cells. Although researchers have looked, they have never seen evidence that amyloid spreads from cell to cell in a network.

Still, amyloid creates what amounts to a bad neighborhood in memory regions of the brain. Then tau comes in — some researchers call it “the executioner” — piling up inside cells and killing them. If some cells take longer than others to succumb to the bad neighborhood, that would explain the spread of the disease in the brain, and there would be no need to blame something odd, like the spread of tau from cell to cell.

Studies in humans, though, could not determine whether that hypothesis was correct. They involved autopsy and brain imaging studies and were “indirect and inconclusive,” Dr. Small said.

Looking at the brains of people who have died of the disease, Dr. Duff said, is like looking at a wrecked car and trying to figure out the accident’s cause. Faulty brakes? Broken struts?

The question of which hypothesis was correct — tau spreading cell to cell, or a bad neighborhood in the brain and cells with different vulnerabilities to it — remained unanswerable. Dr. Hyman said he tried for 25 years to find a good way to address it. One of his ideas was to find a patient or two who had had a stroke or other injury that severed the entorhinal cortex from the rest of the brain. If the patient developed Alzheimer’s in the entorhinal cortex — and it remained contained there — he would have evidence that the disease spread like an infection. But he never found such patients.

The solution came when researchers were able to develop genetically engineered mice that expressed abnormal human tau, but only in their entorhinal cortexes. Those mice offered the cleanest way to get an answer, said John Hardy, an Alzheimer’s researcher at University College London who was not involved in either of the new studies.

There is another advantage, too, Dr. Hyman said. The mice give him a tool to test ways to block tau’s spread — and that, he added, “is one of the things we’re excited about.”

But if tau spreads from neuron to neuron, Dr. Hardy said, it may be necessary to block both beta amyloid production, which seems to get the disease going, and the spread of tau, which continues it, to bring Alzheimer’s to a halt.

He and others are also asking if other degenerative diseases spread through the brain because proteins pass from nerve cell to nerve cell.

Dr. Hardy thought he saw provocative human evidence that it might be happening in Parkinson’s disease. Two Parkinson’s patients being treated by a colleague had fetal brain cells implanted to replace dead and dying neurons. When the patients died, years later, autopsies showed they still had the fetal cells, but they had balls of a Parkinson’s disease protein, synuclein, inside. The most obvious way that could happen, the researchers reasoned, was if the toxic protein had spread from the patient’s diseased cells to the healthy fetal cells. But they could not rule out the bad-neighborhood hypothesis.

Now, Dr. Hardy said, with the mouse studies, the issue of a bad neighborhood is settled. The answer in Alzheimer’s disease, he said, “is that isn’t possible.”

“That is what is different between these papers and all the others,” Dr. Hardy said. “It isn’t a bad neighborhood. It is contagion from one neuron to another.”

Could brain size determine whether you are good at maintaining friendships?

2012-02-02T06:14:00.000-08:00

Being popular is linked to an ability to 'mind-read'

Researchers are suggesting that there is a link between the number of friends you have and the size of the region of the brain – known as the orbital prefrontal cortex – that is found just above the eyes.

A new study, published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows that this brain region is bigger in people who have a larger number of friendships.
The research was carried out as part of the British Academy Centenary ‘Lucy to Language’ project, led by Professor Robin Dunbar of the University of Oxford in a collaboration with Dr Penny Lewis at The University of Manchester, Dr Joanne Powell and Dr Marta Garcia-Finana at Liverpool University, and Professor Neil Roberts at Edinburgh University.
The study suggests that we need to employ a set of cognitive skills to maintain a number of friends (and the keyword is ‘friends’ as opposed to just the total number of people we know). These skills are described by social scientists as ‘mentalising’ or ‘mind-reading’– a capacity to understand what another person is thinking, which is crucial to our ability to handle our complex social world, including the ability to hold conversations with one another. This study, for the first time, suggests that our competency in these skills is determined by the size of key regions of our brains (in particular, the frontal lobe).
Professor Dunbar, from the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, explained: “’Mentalising’ is where one individual is able to follow a natural hierarchy involving other individuals’ mind states. For example, in the play ‘Othello’, Shakespeare manages to keep track of five separate mental states: he intended that his audience believes that Iago wants Othello to suppose that Desdemona loves Cassio [the italics signify the different mind states]. Being able to maintain five separate individuals’ mental states is the natural upper limit for most adults.”
The researchers took anatomical MR images of the brains of 40 volunteers at the Magnetic Resonance and Image Analysis Research Centre at the University of Liverpool to measure the size of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain used in high-level thinking. Participants were asked to make a list of everyone they had had social, as opposed to professional, contact with over the previous seven days. They also took a test to determine their competency in mentalising.

Professor Dunbar said: “We found that individuals who had more friends did better on mentalising tasks and had more neural volume in the orbital frontal cortex, the part of the forebrain immediately above the eyes. Understanding this link between an individual’s brain size and the number of friends they have helps us understand the mechanisms that have led to humans developing bigger brains than other primate species. The frontal lobes of the brain, in particular, have enlarged dramatically in humans over the last half million years.”
Dr Penny Lewis, from the School of Psychological Sciences at The University of Manchester, said: “Both the number of friends people had and their ability to think about other people’s feelings predicted the size of this same small brain area. This not only suggests that we’ve found a region which is critical for sociality, it also shows that the link between brain anatomy and social success is much more direct than previously believed.”
Dr Joanne Powell, from the Department of Psychology, University of Liverpool, said: “Perhaps the most important finding of our study is that we have been able to show that the relationship between brain size and social network size is mediated by mentalising skills. What this tells us is that the size of your brain determines your social skills, and it is these that allow you to have many friends.”
Dr Lewis added: “This research is particularly important because it provides the strongest support to date for the social brain hypothesis – that is, the idea that human brains evolved to accommodate the social demands of living in a big group. Cross-species comparisons between various monkey brains have already supported this, but our work is some of the first to show that people with larger social groups actually have more neural matter in this particular bit of cortex. It looks as though size really does matter when it comes to social success.”

Positive reinforcement may boost kids' brains

2012-02-02T06:11:00.001-08:00

ST. LOUIS — If your child forgets his lunch or struggles with school work, a little more loving might turn things around.
Supportive mothers who practice positive reinforcement seem to help their kids’ brains grow, according to new research from Washington University.
Brain scans show that school-age children of nurturing mothers have a 10 percent larger hippocampus — the region of the brain that plays a role in memory, learning and stress response — compared to the brains of children whose mothers were deemed less supportive.
The take-home message for working and stay-at-home parents is to praise children more than you scold them, the researchers said.
“Parents might feel guilty because they’re working, and we work a lot as well,” said Dr. Kelly Botteron, a professor of child psychiatry and co-author of the study. “But when you’re home in the evening and you’re trying to rush through homework and trying to get dinner ready, if you remember to say a couple nice, really positive things … I think a lot of parents could do that and it’s a practical thing that has very little risk to it.”
It’s long been known that orphans and other neglected children who are placed in loving homes can improve their behavior and health. And while a link between nurturing mothers and their offspring’s brain growth has been established in rats, the study is the first to show the same anatomical process in humans.
As part of their ongoing research on childhood depression, staff members watched how two groups of 92 children ages 3 to 5 interacted with their caregivers (usually mothers) during a stressful task. One group of children had symptoms of depression and the others were assigned to a control group.
For the task, the mothers were told to fill out a questionnaire. The child was given a wrapped present but told not to open it right away. The eight-minute “waiting task,” as it’s known, has previously been used by researchers as a reliable indicator of parental nurturing skills. The task is thought to simulate situations at home, such as a parent distracted by cooking dinner while the child needs to focus on homework.
Researchers who reviewed the taped interactions rated the mothers’ responses to their children’s behavior. Mothers received points each time they praised the child’s patience or offered encouragement to not open the gift.
The researchers acknowledged they’re not getting a complete picture of family life, especially if Mom was having a bad day. But they are confident that the results of the MRI brain scans on the kids, performed four years after the “waiting task,” indicate that children who have more supportive mothers also have bigger brains.
Children with less supportive mothers had a hippocampus volume that was 9.2 percent smaller than the children of more nurturing mothers. In children with depression, the effects of nurturing were not as positive, and the researchers think the disease process has a greater impact on their brain development.
The researchers plan to run second and third MRI brain scans on the children, who are now pre-teens, to watch for brain development over time.
Although the study wasn’t designed to look at fathers, foster parents or grandparents, the researchers said the positive effects of nurturing can come from any caregivers, which can be reasonably stretched to include teachers.
“If you know your child is in a difficult situation, to reinforce to them that you know it’s a hard situation but they’re doing such a great job, that’s the kind of parenting we would try to encourage,” Botteron said.
The researchers were careful to point out they’re not opposed to disciplining children or giving them boundaries.
“You should be supportive and nurturing, which is not the same as spoiling, and not the same as smothering,” said the study’s lead author Dr. Joan Luby, a professor of child psychiatry.
One local mom said it was exciting to hear that something she already believes in could have an effect on her children’s intellectual, and not just emotional, development.
“For a nurturing parent it’s both beautiful and frightening because many of us who spend a lot of nights wondering whether we’re doing everything we possibly can for our children, this falls into the category of one more thing to worry about,” said Danielle Smith of O’Fallon, Mo., who has two young children and writes the blog www.extraordinarymommy.com. “It sounds like a bonus to me but I have to embrace the idea that what I’m doing is enough.

Sleep Helps Protect Your Brain

2012-01-11T06:40:00.001-08:00

I love the way I feel after a good night's sleep. My body is rested; my mind feels clear and alert; and I am happy to just linger in bed and relax. Of course, this delightful state is eventually interrupted by an alarm going off or the dog barking for me to feed him.
But I continue to feel good throughout the day if I slept well the night before. It's as if my entire system -- my body and my brain -- have been reset in a healthy way.
This good feeling may be a result of the anti-inflammatory effects of sleep. Chronic brain inflammation appears to contribute to cellular deterioration that can lead to Alzheimer's disease. Getting a good night's sleep has a positive impact on that inflammatory process and may explain why people who sleep well regularly often look younger and have more energy.

When scientists measure a volunteer's blood markers of inflammation, they find that after the volunteer has had a restful night of sleep, those measures improve significantly. These are the same measures that improve when we eat anti-inflammatory foods like omega-3 rich fish or olive oil. Dr. Wendy Troxel and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh have found that people with sleep problems such as difficulty falling asleep, fretful sleep, or loud snoring have a higher risk for metabolic syndrome, another condition linked to chronic inflammation that puts the brain at risk for neurodegeneration.
Scientific evidence tells us that actually sleeping on our problems is an efficient way to solve them. During sleep, our brain's memory centers are busy consolidating recall for more effective memory when we're awake. Sleeping well is an important way to improve your memory ability and may lower risk for cognitive decline.
About 30 percent of adults suffer from insomnia. The following are a few strategies to consider if you're having trouble falling or staying asleep through the night.

Stay up during the day. A daytime nap can be invigorating, but if you already suffer from sleeplessness at night, try not to nap so you'll feel more fatigued at bedtime.
Avoid evening liquids. After dinner, try not to drink large quantities of water or other drinks. A full bladder can awaken you during the night and you may have trouble getting back to sleep.
Stay mellow in the evening. Watching lively nighttime sports or an exciting movie thriller tends to hype some people up, making it harder for them to fall asleep.
Avoid caffeine at night. Whether it's from tea, coffee, soda or even a chocolate bar, caffeine can keep us awake, so avoid it in the evenings. Try to skip coffee entirely in the late afternoon and evening.
Maintain good sleep habits. It helps to get into bed at the same time each night. Try to skip watching TV, eating or even reading a book. Simply turn out the light and take a few moments to get settled. If you are not asleep after 20 minutes, get out of bed and do something else until you feel tired again. Once you go back to bed, get settled, and give it another 20 minutes. Every time you get into bed to sleep, try remaining still and focus on slow, steady breathing.

The Science Of Sex: 5 Must-Know Facts About Your Brain And Desire

2012-01-11T06:39:00.000-08:00

The science of sex: How do our brains really influence our hearts?

You'll be hard-pressed to open a magazine or go to a news site without seeing headlines like these. Human relationships, desire, love and sex have been written about and rationalized since time immemorial, it's no wonder that modern scientists continually try to dissect their mysteries. But what can our minds really tell us about matters of the heart?
That's exactly what author Kayt Sukel, who has a background in neuroscience, set out to find out. The result was her new book, "Dirty Minds: How Our Brains Influence Love, Sex and Relationships." Part of her exploratory journey even included being a lab rat for a study on female orgasms -- a study which produced a pretty incredible video of a woman's brain during climax. The experiment involved masturbating to orgasm ... while strapped into an fMRI machine. It may not have been her sexiest moment, but Sukel says she didn't let the circumstances affect her performance.

"My Type-A personality and refusal to accept failure probably helped me along," she said, laughing. "It was kind of a 'Little Engine That Could' moment."

It's hard not to admire that spirit of determination. We had a chance to pick Sukel's brain and find out what women really need to know when it comes to the science of sex.Inrecent years there has been a lot of talk about pheremones -- chemicalsthat have the ability to trigger a social (and potentially sexual) response from members of the same species. Some companies have even begun bottling these chemicals, urging consumers to use them as cologne and "enhance your sex life."According to Sukel, these bottled pheromones are little more than marketing. "As of now there's no good scientific study that shows that these sprays actually work," she said. "But there are plenty of people who use them and claim they're the best thing ever. The placebo effect really works.

" In recent years there has been a lot of talk about pheremones -- chemicals thaIn recent years there has been a lot of talk about pheremones -- chemicals that have the ability to trigger a social (and potentially sexual) response from members of the same species. Some companies have even begun bottling these chemicals, urging consumers to use them as cologne and "enhance your sex life."

According to Sukel, these bottled pheromones are little more than marketing. "As of now there's no good scientific study that shows that these sprays actually work," she said. "But there are plenty of people who use them and claim they're the best thing ever. The placebo effect really works."

Cosmetic chemical hinders brain development in tadpoles

2012-01-11T06:32:00.000-08:00

Even small concentrations -- 1.5 parts per million -- of a biocide used in cosmetics interrupted neurological development in tadpole brains. There is no evidence those concentrations are harmful to humans. Credit: Aizenman lab/Brown University

Scientists, health officials, and manufacturers already know that a chemical preservative found in some products, including cosmetics, is harmful to people and animals in high concentrations, but a new Brown University study in tadpoles reports that it can also interrupt neurological development even in very low concentrations.

In the cosmetics industry, the biocide methylisothiazolinone or MIT, is considered safe at concentrations of less than 100 parts per million. Lab studies, however, have found that lower concentrations affected the growth of animal neurons. Picking up from there, the Brown researchers performed a series of experiments to investigate how 10 days of exposure at concentrations as low as 1.5 ppm would affect whole, living tadpoles as they develop. Their results appear in advance online in the journal Neuroscience.
"The lower concentrations we studied didn't kill the animals or cause any big deformities or affect the behavior you'd see just by looking at them," said Carlos Aizenman, associate professor of neuroscience and the study's senior author. "But then we decided to do a series of functional tests and we found that exposure to this compound during a period of development that's critical for the fine wiring of the nervous system disrupted this period of fine tuning."
Aizenman emphasized that there is no evidence in the study that any products with MIT, such as shampoos or cosmetics, are harmful to consumers.
Neurotoxic effects
When Aizenman and lead author Ariana Spawn explored the consequences of exposing tadpoles to two nonlethal concentrations, 1.5 ppm and 7.6 ppm, they found some deficits both in behavior and in basic brain development.
In one experiment they shined moving patterns of light into one side of the tadpole tanks from below. As they expected, the unexposed tadpoles avoided the light patterns, swimming to the other side. Tadpoles that had been exposed to either concentration of MIT, however, were significantly less likely to avoid the signals.
In another experiment, Aizenman and Spawn, who was an undergraduate at the time and has since graduated, exposed the tadpoles to another chemical known to induce seizures. The tadpoles who were not exposed to MIT and those exposed to the lower concentration each had the same ability to hold off seizures, but the ones who had been exposed to the 7.6 ppm concentration succumbed to the seizures significantly more readily.

In these experiments, seizure susceptibility had nothing to do with epilepsy, Aizenman said, but was instead a measure of more general neural development.
After observing the two significant behavioral effects in the tadpoles, Aizenman and Spawn then sought the underlying physiological difference between exposed and unexposed tadpoles that might cause them. They performed an electrophysiological analysis of each tadpole's optic tectum, a part of the brain responsible for processing visual information. They found evidence that the chemical seems to have stunted the process by which tadpoles prune and refine neural connections, a key developmental step.
"The neural circuits act like the neural circuits of a much more immature tadpole," Aizenman said. "This is consistent with the previous findings in cell cultures."
Aizenman said consumers should know about the study's results and pay attention to the ingredients in the products they use, but should not become worried based on the basic science study.
Aizenman said one area where further studies may be warranted is in cases of repeated exposure in industrial or occupational settings, but the study's broader message may be that chemical manufacturers and independent labs should test more for neurodevelopmental effects of even low concentrations of products. In the specific case of MIT in tadpoles, he noted, "It's resulting in a non-obvious but real deficit in neural function."

Researchers Discover Ormosil Nanoparticles as Potential Drug Delivery Vehicle to Brain

2012-01-11T06:30:00.000-08:00

Shermali Gunawerdana, University of Buffalo researcher, discovered that ORMOSIL nanoparticles when injected into the brain of insects, which even after being exposed for a long time, did not affect the flies and cells in any way.

The bright red spots in this confocal microscopy image are clusters of ORMOSIL particles in axons of fruit fly neurons. Photo courtesy of Shermali Gunawardena and PLoS One.

These fluorescent particles just lit up all the neurons in the brain hence showing promise as a potential drug delivery vehicle. This meant that this new class of nanomaterials, ORMOSIL had penetrated the brains of insects.
Each of these nanoparticles is a vessel that has cavities, which scientists can fill with gene therapies or chemical compounds to be transmitted to different parts of the body, in this case, the brain especially to treat diseases like Alzheimer’s. The study on fruit flies indicates that even when the insects are exposed for a long time to ORMOSIL, through feeding and breathing, the animals are not harmed.
The ORMOSIL nanoparticles being studied are of an exclusive type designed by a research group headed by the UB institute’s Executive Director, Paras.N.Prasad.
Gunawardena is a specialist in axonal transport, which involves transmission of motor proteins along thread-like axon neurons. These molecular motors, known as dyneins and kinesins, carry drugs such as essential proteins back and forth from the synapse and cell body of the neurons. It is possible that an axonal obstruction occurs, which probably contributes to disorders like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s.
Gunawardena intends to use ORMOSIL in this context to break up the accumulation of neurons. Though her research is still in the evolutionary stage, the potential advantages will be significant. She is also trying to make ORMOSIL to attach itself to motor proteins.

Using weather forecasting to predict brain tumor growth

2012-01-11T06:28:00.000-08:00

The Arizona State approach to tumor forecasting in action.

Arizona State University researchers believe their research in improving weather forecasting could be applied to brain cancer. Their proof-of-concept study, published by Biology Direct, shows they might be correct.

Brain cancer is chaotic. The most common form, glioblastoma multiforme, is also the most aggressive, said surgeon research team member Mark Preul, the director of neurosurgery research at Phoenix’s Barrow Neurological Institute. Glioblastoma yields a life expectancy only around a year and a half. But it is also chaotic in the sense of chaos theory. Like the weather, the factors involved in the spread of brain cancer are extraordinarily complex and produce increasingly inaccurate as predictions are made for further and further into the future. A forecast of tomorrow’s weather, or tomorrow's spread of a brain tumor, is likely to be nearly accurate. A forecast for six months from now likely is not.

“The amazing thing is since first identified in the early 1900s, survival rates haven’t shown many improvements,” Preul said.

One of the problems with weather prediction is the exponential increases in error as the forecast bases new predictions on old predictions that were created using imperfect data. Mathematician Eric Kostelich, who headed this study, was on a team that developed a formula for combining a prior forecast and new measurements to get better initial data. They called it the Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter.

But the filter was not specific to weather. Mathew Hoffman, a graduate students of Kostelich, used it to determine oceanic conditions.

“I thought about applying the filter to cancer because I had a family member who was suffering from cancer,” Kostelich said.Using the existing models and the filter’s more accurate initial measurements, Kostelich was able to better predict the spread of Glioblastoma through the brain.

There is no way to fully remove the cancer, but Preul and Kostelich note that better data can lead to more accurate and more proactive treatments that can improve a patient’s quality of life“The main value would be for the radiation oncologist while they plan the treatment volume,” said Rush University Medical Center neurosurgeon Richard Byrne.

The ASU study was preliminary, based only on a handful of patients. The next step in testing the filter’s applications to brain cancer will be to test on mice, he said. Kostelich is confident their methods could be applied to other biological phenomena including other forms of cancer.

How the Brain Spots Faces

2012-01-11T06:23:00.000-08:00

Our brains are made to find faces. In fact, they’re so good at picking out human-like mugs we sometimes see them in a jumble of rocks, a bilious cloud of volcanic ash or some craters on the Moon.

But another amazing thing about our brain is that we’re never actually fooled into thinking it’s a real person looking back at us. We might do a second take, but most normal brains can tell the difference between a man and the Moon.
Neuroscientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wanted to investigate how the brain decides exactly what is and is not a face. Earlier studies have shown that the fusiform gyrus, located on the brain’s underside, responds to face-like shapes — but how does it sort flesh from rock?

Pawan Sinha, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, and students created a procession of images ranging from those that look nothing like faces to genuine faces. For the ones in the middle — structures, formations, smudges and shapes that give us a pareidolic reaction that causes us to see a face — they used photographs that machine vision systems had falsely tagged as faces.
By doing a series of one-to-one comparisons, the human observers rated how face-like each of the images were. And while the subjects sorted out the photographs, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to scan their brains and look for activity.
The neuroscientists found different activity patterns on each side of the brain. On the left, the activity patterns changed very gradually as images became more like faces and there was no clear distinction between faces and non-faces. The left side would flare if someone was looking at a human or an eerily face-like formation of rocks.
But on the right side, activation patterns in the fusiform gyrus were completely different between genuine human faces and face-like optical illusions. There was no fooling the right side of the brain, no matter how much they resembled a face.
The researchers could conclude that the left side of the brain ranks images on a scale of how face-like they are.The right side makes the categorical distinction whether or not it’s a human face.
The left side of the fusiform gyrus actually flared up before the right side supporting the hypothesis that the left side does its job first and then passes information on to the right side. (Though because of the sluggishness of fMRI signals, which rely on blood-flow changes, the timing does not yet constitute definitive evidence).
“The left does the initial heavy lifting,” Sinha says. “It tries to determine how face-like is a pattern, without making the final decision on whether I’m going to call it a face.” The right’s job is to make the final call.
This clear distribution of labour is one of the first known examples of the left and right sides of the brain taking on different roles in high-level visual-processing tasks.

Baptist working with post-traumatic stress syndrome

2012-01-11T06:19:00.000-08:00

Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center are collaborating with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on a one-year study to use imaging technology to better understand post-traumatic stress syndrome and traumatic brain injury. Wake Forest Baptist is one of 35 clinical sites across the nation using the equipment.

Researchers compare the images of brain activity from individuals with PTSD and/or mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) with the images from individuals without the condition to see whether particular parts of the brain function differently.
"If we can find biomarkers of PTSD, there's hope that we'll be able to improve diagnosis and treatment," said Dwayne Godwin, a neuroscientist at Wake Forest Baptist and co-principal investigator on the project.
Researchers are using a high-tech tool for brain activity imaging called magnetoencephalography (MEG) to conduct neurological tests on military veterans with and without a PTSD diagnosis, and with varying levels of impairment.
Participants perform tasks, similar to games, which engage parts of the brain involved in "executive function" — determining what to do, how to do it, and assessing the relative risk of a situation — while sitting in the scanner.
In a sign of the growing focus on the disorders, first lady Michelle Obama will announce today a new physician-training initiative with 105 U.S. academic medical centers in 42 states, including Wake Forest Baptist. It involves the White House's wounded warriors and veterans programs.
Among the goals are embedding PTSD and TBI training into medical-school curriculum, reaching out to physicians and specialists and sharing best practices among the academic medical centers. No new federal funding is associated with the initiative.
Wake Forest Baptist was mentioned specifically by officials involved in the Joining Forces initiative as "having great work going on" and "taking a leadership role with sophisticated lessons to share."
Brad Cooper, executive director of Joining Forces, said PTSD and TBI affects one in five veterans.
About 25 million Americans will deal with PTSD at some point in their lives, according to The National Center for PTSD.
Women are more likely to experience PTSD because of a sexual assault or sexual abuse as a child. Men are more likely to experience it through accidents, physical assault, combat, disaster or witnessing a death or injury.
"A trauma is something horrible and scary that you see or that happens to you," according to the PTSD center's website. "During this type of event, you think that your life or others' lives are in danger. You may feel afraid or think that you have no control over what is happening."
Cooper said the effort carries urgency since more veterans are seeking medical help outside veterans' facilities, with private physicians and public health centers.
"Overall, these doctors need to have better comprehension on the issues," Cooper said. "Some doctors already do, but many don't. It is a long-term issue for our country because many of the people suffering from these disorders are so young."
Although PTSD has been a recognized disorder for decades, traditionally most of the medical focus on military personnel has been on the visible, physical side of coming back from a war zone with debilitating injuries.
As a result, some veterans often don't get the mental-health assistance they need, leaving some to wander homeless or show up in hospital emergency departments.
The study draws participants served by the Salisbury Veteran's Administration hospital, Godwin said. The hospital specializes in post-deployment mental-health issues.
"PTSD and mild TBI are serious problems for our vets coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan," Godwin said. "This challenge provides a unique opportunity to learn more about this disorder from data that exists on a well-defined pool of patients who have been medically evaluated and tested."
In order to develop more effective treatments for PTSD and TBI, researchers need to understand the underlying neurobiology, said Dr. John Krystal, chairman of the psychiatry department at Yale University School of Medicine. Krystal collaborates with the Veteran's Administration on PTSD issues.
"MEG is a technology that enables scientists to study — non-invasively — electrical activity within the brain," Krystal said. "Applying this approach to PTSD may help to characterize dysfunction within brain circuits contributing to both conditions."
Laurie Coker, a local behavioral-health advocate and director of the N.C. Consumer Advocacy, Networking and Support Organization, said two levels of the research "could be exciting."
"If researchers find there are actually physiological changes in the brain after a person experiences trauma, then perhaps returning soldiers who are struggling with mood and other problems will be able to accept the concreteness of the fact that trauma injures the brain," Coker said.
"It would be easier for them to seek support and treatment if they realized that these symptoms reflect nothing about character or courage, but that trauma is simply dangerous.
"Second, we now know that many people who have a mental illness have had specific traumatic events which have triggered their mental reactions," Coker said. "This might help us look at various ways besides or along with medications that people can help themselves heal."
Godwin said having a strong support group often helps people suffering from PTSD to cope with the disorder.
"Many of those affected by PTSD possess a heightened awareness called hyper-vigilance," Godwin said. "These individuals may have a range of symptoms, including difficulty concentrating, exaggerated responses to normal things, irritability, experiencing anger-management issues, having more risky behaviors, disruptions or trouble sleeping."
In addition to assessing functional brain networks, researchers will examine brain pathways to see whether the connections between brain areas may differ between those with and without the disorder.
Another goal is to define biomarkers of PTSD and TBI so that doctors will have a way to very quickly identify patients with PTSD and get them treatment without delay.
"It's not mind reading, because we can't tell what the content of the thought may be," Godwin said. "But with the right kind of test, we can resolve patterns of activation that relate to executive function."

Results of St. Jude Medical's First Controlled Study of Deep Brain Stimulation Confirms Benefit of Constant Current System for Patients with Parkinson's Disease

2012-01-11T06:14:00.000-08:00

study on deep brain stimulation (DBS) for Parkinson's disease (PD) were published online today by The Lancet Neurology journal. The aim of the study was to evaluate the Libra(TM) and LibraXP(TM) DBS constant current systems to determine the devices' safety and effectiveness in managing the symptoms of PD.

Conducted at 15 medical centers in the U.S., the study enrolled 136 patients and was designed to compare patients implanted with DBS systems with and without stimulation. The primary endpoint was defined as an increase in the duration of "on time" without bothersome dyskinesia whemeasured after three months. "On time" refers to the amount of hours each day that a patient has good control of his or her symptoms and motor functions with non-bothersome dyskinesia. Dyskinesia is defined as the involuntary movements caused by medications used to manage the disease.

The results of the study were statistically significant, demonstrating that participants in the stimulation group averaged an increase of 4.27 hours of "on time," compared with an increase of 1.77 hours in the group without stimulation. Additionally, patients reported an overall improvement in their quality of life.

"These results are important as they represent the first large,randomized, controlled study of a constant current device for managing the symptoms of Parkinson's disease," said Michael S. Okun, MD, administrative director of the University Of Florida College Of Medicine's Center for Movement Disorders and Neuro restoration, National Medical Director for the National Parkinson Foundation and the primary author of the article. "The data from this study represents the evolution of the approach to deep brain stimulation treatment and provides new evidence supporting the positive benefits this therapy can provide patients."

Additional key findings at three months were as follows:

Patients receiving stimulation had a 73 percent response rate compared to a 38 percent response rate in the group without stimulation (response was defined as at least a two hour increase from baseline in good quality "on time").

Motor scores for those in the stimulation group improved 39 percent compared to the baseline as measured by the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS).

There was a statistically significant decrease in the amount of medications needed to control PD symptoms in the stimulation group compared to the group without stimulation.

"We are committed to furthering the science of neuromodulation in order to provide clinically relevant solutions for physicians and their patients," said Rohan Hoare, president of St. Jude Medical Neuromodulation Division. "These results confirm the benefit of our constant current deep brain stimulation device platform and lay thefoundation for future therapy innovation.

"The study enrolled patients who on average had suffered from PD for at least five years and who had six or more hours each day with diminished motor symptom control and with moderate to severe dyskinesia. All patients were treated with bilateral stimulation in the subthalamic nucleus area of the brain.

The adverse event and safety profile were similar to those in other recent randomized studies of DBS. Participants in the stimulation group saw an increase in the occurrence of slurred speech and fatigue. The most common serious adverse event following DBS implantation was infection, which occurred in five patients.

The Libra and LibraXP neurostimulators evaluated in the study are constant current devices that are currently approved for use in Europe, Latin America and Australia for managing the symptoms of PD. The systems consist of a neurostimulator -- a surgically implanted battery-operated device that generates mild electrical pulses -- and leads, which carry the pulses to a targeted area in the brain.

The National Parkinson Foundation ( www.Parkinson.org estimates that in the United States, more than one million people currently have the disease with 50,000-60,000 new cases diagnosed each year. Worldwide there are approximately six million people who suffer from this condition.

Three Decades of Leading-Edge Neurostimulation Technology

For more than 30 years, St. Jude Medical Neuromodulation Division has developed new technologies to treat chronic pain and other neurological disorders. Today more than 75,000 St. Jude Medical neurostimulation devices have been implanted in patients in 40 countries around the world. Focused on research, St. Jude Medical is currently conducting clinical studies for depression and essential tremor. For more information about these DBS studies, visit www.BROADENstudy.com and www.PowerOverET.com .

About St. Jude MedicalSt.

Jude Medical develops medical technology and services that focus on putting more control into the hands of those who treat cardiac, neurological and chronic pain patients worldwide. The company is dedicated to advancing the practice of medicine by reducing risk wherever possible and contributing to successful outcomes for every patient. St. Jude Medical is headquartered in St. Paul, Minn., and has four major focus areas that include cardiac rhythm management, atrial fibrillation, cardiovascular and neuromodulation. For more information, please visit sjm.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that involve risks and uncertainties. Such forward-looking statements include the expectations, plans and prospects for the Company, including potential clinical successes, anticipated regulatory approvals and future product launches, and projected revenues, margins, earnings and market share. The statements made by the Company are based upon management's current expectations and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include market conditions and other factors beyond the Company's control and the risk factors and other cautionary statements described in the Company's filings with the SEC, including those described in the Risk Factors and Cautionary Statements sections of the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 1, 2011 and Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended October 1, 2011. The Company does not intend to update these statements and undertakes no duty to any person to provide any such update under any circumstance.

Brain's Ability To Self-Repair Boosted By Natural Protein

2012-01-11T05:52:00.000-08:00

Researchers from the Medical Research Council (MRC) in the UK have found a protein made by blood vessels in the brain that could be a good candidate for regenerative therapies that stimulate the brain to repair itself after injury or disease. They write about their findings in the 9 January online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Although most nerve cells or neurons in the adult brain are made in the womb and soon after birth, they are still produced later on in life, thanks to neural stem cells or NSCs.

NSCs have the potential to specialize into new brain cells, such as in the olfactory bulb, responsible for our sense of smell, and the hippocampus, which plays a key role in forming memories and learning.

NSCs inhabit specialized niches in the adult brain of mammals: these include the subventricular zone and the dentate gyrus, which also control how the stem cells behave.

These niches also contain other cell types, and along with NSCs they are often found next to blood vessels.

The niches generate a range of signals that control how fast the NSCs divide and the types of cell they turn into. Usually these cells become neurons or brain cells that communicate messages, but when the brain suffers an injury like a stroke, more often than not, the NSCs turn into glial cells which become scar tissue.

In this study, the MRC researchers studied the interaction between the cells that line the blood vessels (endothelial cells) and the NSCs, and found that a protein called betacellulin (BTC) boosted brain regeneration in mice by stimulating the NSCs to multiply and form new brain cells.

The researchers found that BTC, which is produced by cells within the blood vessels in the stem cell niches, signals to both the stem cells and to dividing cells called neuroblasts, triggering their proliferation.

When they gave mice more BTC, they noticed a significant increase in both stem cells and neuroblasts, leading to formation of many new neurons in their brains.

But when they gave the mice an antibody that blocks BTC, new neuron production stopped.

Dr Robin Lovell-Badge from the MRC's National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), led the study. He said in a statement that we don't fully understand the function of these stem cell niches in the brain, but it looks as if lots of things have to work together to control what happens to stem cells in the brain.

"We believe these factors are finely balanced to control precisely the numbers of new neurons that are made to match demand in a variety of normal circumstances," said Lovell-Badge.

"But in trauma or disease, the stem cells either can't cope with the increased demand, or they prioritise damage control at the expense of long-term repair," he explained.

Because BTC leads to the production of new neurons rather than glial cells, the researchers hope their findings could help future therapies that aim to regenerate damaged or diseased parts of the brain, such as following stroke, traumatic brain injury, and possibly even in the case of dementia.

However, the work still has a way to go before the learning in the lab translates to therapy in the clinic: more experiments are needed to explain the normal role of BTC, and to explore, with animal studies, what it does on damaged brains, either on its own or together with transplanted NSCs.

Written by Catharine Paddock PhD

New study reveals what you eat impacts your brain

2011-12-31T09:35:00.000-08:00

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Could what you eat keep you from getting Alzheimers?

The author of a new study at OHSU looked at elderly people, testing their blood, mental abilities and the size of their brains. The results may have you changing what you eat, too.

Dr. Gene Bowman's new study revealed the answers aren't definitive because more research needs to be done. However, if what the study indicates is correct, this may be one of the smartest ways for you to shop. You may want to feed your brain, as well as your stomach, starting with vitamins.

One of the first things on the list of good brain food are nuts. They have Vitamin B-1 and also Vitamin E. But the study also showed combining vitamins may be even better for your head by going for Vitamins B (items like broccoli and leafy greens), C (foods like citrus), D (foods like salmon) and E (foods like avocados and nuts).

Spinach might also be on your next shopping list. It counts for all kinds of things -- Vitamin B-2, Vitamin B-9 and Vitamin E.

Chris Blair was at a Northwest Portland Safeway recently and shared what was in his shopping cart. There were eggs, whole grains and salmon that could improve his memory and mind function. The salmon brings more than just vitamins, though. In the study, people who had Omega 3 fatty acids -- from fish like salmon -- had larger brains with less shrinkage.

There is a No. 1 bad brain food, though. According to the research, trans fats -- showing up as partially hydrogenated oils -- are the worst offenders. Trans fats show up in cookies and crackers, among other things. According to the study, people with even low levels of trans fats in their blood had more brain shrinkage.

Blair said he cares if his brain shrinks.

"Of course I care. That's why I stopped drinking," he said with a smile.

Other foods that may have trans fats are processed foods, convenience foods, fast foods and baked items. Be sure to check the ingredients for partially hydrogenated oils and ask questions at restaurants if you want to use the new research to your advantage.

Cell Phones, Driving, And Multitasking

2011-12-31T09:31:00.001-08:00

This December the National Transportation Safety Board of the U.S. recommended a nationwide ban on cell phone use while driving. According to NTSB member Robert Sumwalt, "This (distracted driving) is becoming the new DUI. It's becoming epidemic.” For some, the NTSB recommendation is a sign of the forces of light winning the day, and for others, proof of the impending apocalypse. Regardless of your emotional reaction to the issue, the subject cuts right to the heart of questions about the attention capacity of the human brain.
The essence of the NTSB’s problem with cell phones is that they are too distracting. Studies show that talking while using a hands-free headset is just as likely to cause accidents as talking without a headset. Human brains appear to be optimized to focus on one thing at a time. While it is, of course, possible to attend to two or more things simultaneously, we do neither task at the level of quality that is possible if it we were to do it on its own. fMRI scans show that learning while multitasking engages different areas of the brain than learning while single-tasking.

The human brain does not do as well under multitasking situations, and driving while talking on the cell phone involves a particularly difficult sort of multitasking: doing a visual task (like driving) and doing an auditory task (like talking on the phone) at the same time. This sort of multitasking requires the use of two separate brain regions simultaneously. And a 2001 study by Marcel Just at Carnegie Mellon showed that when volunteers did one task at a time, they used 37 voxels (small brain regions), but when they did both a visual and an auditory task simultaneously, they only used 42 voxels—far less than double. The brain has only so much processing capacity, and adding new tasks bogs all of them down. As Just commented, “You can't just keep piping new things through, and expect the brain to keep up. With practice, the brain can become more efficient at carrying out multiple tasks, but performance is never as good as when the tasks are carried out independently.”

But is talking on a cell phone fundamentally worse or different from talking to another passenger? At least a conversational passenger is also scanning the road and could help alert drivers to oncoming dangers—something a cell phone conversant can never do. There are plenty of other distractions to driving: children, radios, eating, even shaving or doing makeup. Though traffic fatalities are at their lowest point since 1949 (thanks to improved safety features, more seat belt usage, and safer roads), the threat of distracted driving still worries many policymakers in the wake of incidents like the Chatsworth Train Disaster, in which the engineer was texting while driving. And as more and more gadgets become available as possible sources of distraction, the level of distractedness across the board may be rising.

In his famous definition of attention, William James noted that it “...implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state" (1). It appears that today human attention is at an all-time premium, yet few of us seem to have enough to go around. The brain evolved under conditions that were almost certainly far less stimulating, and we’ve created an artificial environment where the intensity, duration, and variety of stimulation is beginning to tax the upper limits of normal attention. This may have some very interesting consequences in the near future, from bans on the use of some technologies (a la the NTSB stance or the cell phone ban in many schools), to the use of attention-boosting drugs such as Modafinil, to the proliferation of attention training techniques like mindfulness practice. Or we may just learn to turn the gadgets off when needed, just as we have learned as a culture that it’s not a good idea to drink and drive.

Childhood Abuse May Cause Brain Changes in Adolescence (Video)

2011-12-31T09:30:00.000-08:00

(December 30, 2011 - Insidermedicine) Maltreatment in childhood has been linked with brain changes in adolescence, according to research published in the December issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Maltreatment in childhood has been linked with the following health concerns in adulthood:
•    obesity
•    depression
•    smoking
Researchers from Yale University in New Haven asked 42 adolescents who had never been diagnosed with a psychiatric condition to complete questionnaires about their experiences with physical, emotional, and sexual abuse as well as physical and emotional neglect in childhood. The participants also underwent brain imaging, and the investigators looked at whether differences in brain structure were associated with a history of abuse or neglect. The participants were recruited from a sample of teens who were identified at birth as being at high risk for maltreatment in childhood as well as from the general local population.

Overall, the more trauma experienced in childhood, the greater the volume reduction in certain key areas of the brain involved in intellect, reasoning, memory, regulation of emotions, and impulse control. Certain kinds of abuse and neglect were associated with specific patterns of brain volume decrease. The effects were also influenced by gender. Among girls, abuse was more likely to affect areas of the brain involved in emotional regulation, while in boys similar experiences were more likely to affect areas of the brain believed to be involved in impulse control.

Today’s research demonstrates how childhood abuse and neglect can produce clear-cut brain changes that may make adolescents more likely to have behavior problems, even if they do not meet the formal criteria for a psychiatric condition.

Disorder focus of university course

2011-12-31T09:18:00.000-08:00

The University of Ulster has unveiled a new programme looking at the treatment of Sensory Processing Disorder

A pioneering new university programme hopes to help sufferers of a disorder that can affect how they relate to other people.
The University of Ulster has unveiled the initiative on the treatment of Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD).
SPD is a condition that prevents sensory messages in the brain from being organised into appropriate responses, and affects everyday activity such as behaviour, learning and movement.
The university's Dr Greg Kelly said: "Sensory Integration influences every aspect of our development, from the sense of touch required in early bonding to the development of play skills and the impact of the brain and movement systems on emotional security, balance, speed and timing skills."
The new degree aims to expand and enhance management of SPD by occupational therapists and other health practitioners.
The university said the new qualification is thought to be the only one of its kind in Europe and perhaps even worldwide.
Dr Kelly said: "We have already had enquiries from therapists in Russia, Iran and India who are excited about studying for a Masters in sensory integration at the University of Ulster."
The new degree is based on a series of modules conducted in partnership with the not-for-profit educational organisation Sensory Integration Network (UK and Ireland).
Sue Allen, chair of the Sensory Integration Network, said: "Recent advances in neuroscience support the application of the theory of sensory integration as a treatment approach with children, adolescents, adults and with older adults."

Connective cells in the brain responsible for learning and memory?

2011-12-31T09:16:00.000-08:00

Not many of us may be aware of glia cells in the brain that are responsible for meshing in neurons together, thereby shielding cells in the process. Throwing some light on the mechanism, scientists from the Tel Aviv University assert that glia cells are principal components governing brain plasticity, learning and adaptation processes.

However, professionals have not been very clear on the role played by these cells in regulating thought processes and memory. The team put forth that glia cells do not merely glue neurons together, but regulate many other prime processes involved in the brain.

De Pi Ph.D. student Maurizio De Pittà of TAU’s Schools of Physics and Astronomy and Electrical Engineering, commented, “Glia cells are like the brain’s supervisors. By regulating the synapses, they control the transfer of information between neurons, affecting how the brain processes information and learns.”

In this research, the investigators created a computerized model which integrated the effect of glia cells on data transferred by synapses. This prototype could also be incorporated into brain networks like microchips and computer software which may aid in the prognosis of diseases like Alzheimer’s and epilepsy.

Basically, the researchers revealed that glia cells do much more than just holding the neuron cells together, as they function as central instructors in the brain. Moreover, many experts are of the opinion that glia cells could help the neurons accomplish certain tasks that they may not be able to carry out singlehandedly.

The aforesaid model may lead to the formulation of better brain inspired algorithms and microchips that replicate neuronal networks. This research is published in the journal, PLoS Computational Biology.

Retrain your brain to achieve a healthier self-image

2011-12-31T09:14:00.000-08:00

Learning neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), its adherents say, is like discovering the user manual to your mind. It is meant to show you how what you think (neuro), say (linguistic) and do (behavioural patterns; ie, programming) directly impact the results you get in life, both the good and the bad. And when you understand how you're creating your life - at work, at home and socially - the reasoning goes, you're then in the best possible position to make a few changes so that you can consistently create more and more of what you want. Devotees says NLP puts you back in the driver's seat, offers you clarity of vision to pursue your goals and gives you the fuel to head in whatever direction is right for you.
"The images, beliefs and values you hold deep in your unconscious mind control your thoughts, actions and body," says Carol Talbot, an "empowerment" expert, founder of Matrix Training and the region's most internationally experienced and qualified NLP trainer. "Of all the options for personal development, what gives NLP such strong positioning is the way it offers you a tried and tested way to understand your own mind better and to direct your thoughts in far more productive ways. It's a systematic road map to break out of any mental and spiritual ruts to kick-start a lifetime of happiness and contentment."
NLP, of course, is one of a raft of techniques that work to address thought processes as a way of healing or self-improvement. Other well-known practices include timeline therapy, hypnotherapy and mind coaching; plus, one could always choose to be one's own life coach with the multitude of self-help books available on the market.
Shivani Adalja is a New Age well-being consultant and founder of the Alignment Institute in Abu Dhabi. She believes that converts to practices such as NLP are on the rise.
"The awareness about these techniques has spread in the last few years," Adalja says. "People are looking for more holistic solutions rather than quick fixes. The connection between mind and body has become even more evident and people are keen to try different types of therapies."
Adalja believes the results of such programmes speak for themselves and that these mind therapies can be a quick healing process.
"Depending on how deep-rooted a problem is, the client can feel different immediately after the first session," she says. "If the client is having issues with weight, self-confidence or has been through extended emotional trauma, then it might take six to 10 sessions to see results.

Though a devotee of this type of therapy, Adalja also notes that mainstream medicine and practices have their place.
"When I sit with a client in the first preliminary sessions," she says, "I am normally able to tell if the problem is physical or psychosomatic. I have diverted many clients to go visit their doctor or another medical practitioner before they start sessions with me if I feel they need another type of 'help'."
So can these mind techniques actually help everyone or assist in changing people's lives or the way they think? Enthusiasts of NLP say the programme's sheer scope makes it relevant to pretty much anyone, from housewives to entrepreneurs, students to CEOs and everyone in between. The only conditions, goes the warning, are a willingness to address the issues holding one back, a determination to take one's life to the next level and an acceptance that responsibility for success ultimately lies with the individual and the amount of effort he or she is prepared to plough into getting results.
Furthermore, according to Adalja, finding a good practitioner is key.
"People need to do their research to find a good practitioner," she says. "That's half the battle won. Always ask around and gather some information before making an appointment."

The vital years when brains spring to life

2011-12-31T09:12:00.001-08:00

VIEWED superficially, the part of youth that the psychologist Jean Piaget called middle childhood looks tame and uneventful, a quiet patch of road on the otherwise hairpin highway to adulthood.
Said to begin around five or six, when toddlerhood has ended, and concluding when the teen years begin, middle childhood lacks the physical flamboyance of the epochs fore and aft: no gotcha cuteness of babydom, no secondary sexual billboards of pubescence.
Yet as new findings from neuroscience, evolutionary biology, paleontology and anthropology make clear, middle childhood is anything but a bland placeholder. To the contrary, it is a time of great cognitive creativity and ambition, when the brain has pretty much reached its adult size and can focus on threading together its private intranet service - on forging, organising, amplifying and annotating the tens of billions of synaptic connections that allow brain cells and brain domains to communicate.
Subsidising the deft frenzy of brain maturation is a distinctive endocrinological event called adrenarche, when the adrenal glands begin pumping out powerful hormones. Researchers have only begun to understand adrenarche in any detail, but they see it as a signature feature of middle childhood.
Middle childhood is when the parts of the brain most closely associated with being human finally come online: our ability to control our impulses, to reason, to focus, to plan for the future. Young children may know something about death and see monsters lurking under every bed, but only in middle childhood is the brain capable of practising so-called terror management, of accepting one's inevitable mortality or at least pushing thoughts of it aside.
Other researchers studying the fossil record suggest that a prolonged middle childhood is a fairly recent development in human evolution, a luxury of unfolding that our cousins the Neanderthals did not seem to share. Still others have analysed attitudes towards middle childhood historically and cross-culturally. The researchers have found that virtually every group examined recognises middle childhood as a developmental watershed, when children emerge from the shadows of dependency.
The anatomy of middle childhood can be subtle. Adult teeth start growing in, allowing children to diversify their diet beyond the mashed potatoes and parentally dissected Salisbury steak stage. The growth of the skeleton, by contrast, slows from the vertiginous pace of early childhood - much of the remaining growth awaits the super-spurt of puberty. ''Adulthood is defined by being skeletally as well as sexually mature,'' says Jennifer Thompson of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. ''A girl may have her first period at 11 or 12, but her pelvis doesn't finish growing until about the age of 18.''
With her colleague Andrew Nelson of the University of Western Ontario, Thompson analysed fossil specimens from Neanderthals, Homo erectus and other early hominids, and concluded that their growth pattern was more like that of a chimpanzee than a modern human: By age 12 or 14, they had reached adult size.
Life for Neanderthals was nasty and short, Thompson says, and children had to get big fast, which is why they hurtled through adolescence. Our extreme form of dilated childhood did not appear until the advent of modern Homo sapiens, roughly 150,000 years ago, Thompson says, when adults began living long enough to ease pressure on the young to hurry up and breed.
In middle childhood, the brain is at its peak for learning, organised enough to attempt mastery yet still fluid, elastic, neuronally gymnastic. Children have lost the clumsiness of toddlerhood and can become physically gymnastic, too, and start practising their fine motor skills.
Middle childhood is the time to make sense and make friends. ''This is the period when kids move out of the family context and into the neighbourhood context,'' Benjamin Campbell, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, says.
The all-important theory of mind arises: the awareness that other people have minds, plans and desires of their own. Children become obsessed with social groups and divide along gender lines. They have an avid appetite for learning local social rules, whether of games, slang, style or behaviour. They are keenly attuned to questions of fairness and justice and instantly notice those grabbing more than their share.
The mental and kinesthetic pliancy of middle childhood can be traced in part to adrenarche, researchers say, when signals from the pea-size pituitary at the base of the brain prod the adrenal glands to unleash their hormonal largesse.
Evidence also suggests that the adrenal hormones divert glucose in the brain to foster the maturation of brain regions vital to interpreting social and emotional cues.
In middle childhood, the brain is open for suggestions. What do I need to know? What do I want to know? Well, you could take up piano, chess or juggling, learn another language or how to ski. Or you could go outside and play with your friends. If you learn to play fair, friends will always be there.

Diabetes-related Alzheimer's set to increase

2011-12-31T09:11:00.000-08:00

The rising tides of Alzheimer’s disease and obesity could join in the next 40 years to create a flood of dementia associated with type 2 diabetes.
The outlook may be dire, researchers said at the International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease. If the trends in child and adolescent obesity continue unabated, by 2040 one-third of the 81 million expected Alzheimer’s cases worldwide maybe a direct result of obesity-driven diabetes.
We need to identify the contributions to this increase in dementia and figure out how to decrease this burden. In the setting of diabetes and Alzheimer’s, this means we need to think about intervening earlier in the process and treating across the life span. Our focus should be prevention, which is probably more effective when begun at younger ages.
The primary investigator on the Sacramento Area Latino Study on Aging (SALSA), a prospective cohort study that has been ongoing since 1997, SALSA consists entirely of Mexican Americans, whose high rates of type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and hypertension create an ideal population in which to study the impact of these disorders on cognition.
At the meeting of the University of California, San Francisco were presented 9 years of follow-up data on this group of 1,789 men and women (mean baseline age 72 years). At the study entrance, 33 percent of the group had type 2 diabetes and 40 percent had a body mass index of more than 25kg/m2. More than half had metabolic syndrome.
Over 9 years, 158 incident cases of dementia or non- dementia cognitive impairment developed. After controlling for age, gender, girth, diabetes treatment, fasting insulin, and C-reactive protein, it was said that the presence of diabetes at baseline more than doubled the risk of dementia or cognitive impairment. This translates into a population attributable risk of 19 percent of all these dementia cases were the direct result of type 2 diabetes.
When carried forward in accordance with projected increases in obesity, the 19 percent figure means that by 2040, 24 million cases of dementia could be directly tied to type 2 diabetes. However, there are no randomized controlled trials that support the notion that we should be treating (cognitive impairment) with an antidiabetic drug. Instead, the most effective method is probably to prevent obesity and insulin resistance — the two factors that most strongly influence the development of diabetes.
“The concern is this current epidemic of diabetes associated with insulin resistance, in conjunction with a rapidly aging population, foreshadows an epidemic of Alzheimer’s,” and although it make sense to investigate the impact that diabetes treatment might have on cognition, an incredibly effective intervention already exist.
Exercise is the most potent insulin-sensitizing agent we have, said a geriatrician and Alzheimer’s researcher at the Veterans Administration Puget Sound Health Care System, Seattle. “A single bout of aerobic exercise improves insulin sensitivity for 24 hours, It’s much more potent than any medication. Caloric restriction also lowers hyperinsulinemia and improves insulin sensitivity.
A large body of work now suggests that insulin resistance increases the risk of Alzheimer’s by multiple mechanism. Far from being active only on the periphery, insulin readily crosses the blood brain barrier and binds to receptors located throughout the brain. Once in the brain, insulin interacts with amyloid beta in several ways, increasing its intracellular clearance through insulin degrading enzyme and apparently even protecting neuros from the protein’s toxic effects.
“This has been known for some time, but recent research has shown that amyloid beta may have its own independent effects in insulin signaling..”
A series of experiments concluded that soluble oligomers of amyloid beta can remove insulin receptors from the dendritic plasma membranes of hippocampal neutrons. The study concluded that insulin receptor signaling downregulated the oligomeric binding sites. The addition of rosiglitazone potentiated this effect, suggesting that insulin-sensitizing agents may have some role in cognitive protection. “Insulin appears to mitigate many of the negative effects of amyloid and regulates it clearance, while beta amyloid appears to reduce insulin signaling. So high levels of insulin in the brain can induce a brain insulin-resistance by removing the insulin receptors from the nerve cell membranes.”
Recently investigated insulin’s effect on memory in a group of 33 patients with Alzheimer’s or mild impairment and 59 elderly controls. The patients received placebo or five escalating doses of intranasal insulin, which travels directly into the central nervous system along the olfactory and trigeminal vasculature. Cognition was tested 15 minutes after each treatment. “We saw a 50 percent improvement in memory compared to baseline with the highest dose,”
Insulin also affects vascular function in the brain. “It’s very well known that insulin resistance is accompanied by peripheral vascular dysfunction, but the understanding that this may also manifest in the brain is very new and potentially important.”
In insulin resistance, there is a down-regulation of the phosphoinositide-3 (PI3) kinase pathway, which mediates vascular relaxation. But the mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase pathway, which mediates vasoconstriction.” “This imbalance is thought to underlie many of the vascular dysfunctions associated with insulin resistance.”
This is in a recent study of 196 brains (71 with dementia). The brains were divided into four groups: normal, diabetic without dementia, diabetic with dementia and dementia without diabetes.
“Saw a surprising pattern when looked at plaques and tangles: The brains of the patients with dementia but no diabetes had a high load, as anticipated, but the brains of diabetic patient with dementia had a plaque load that was similar to the normal controls.”
The patients with both dementia and diabetes did, however, show high levels of microvascular lesions, which were absent in the other groups.” The volume of the lesions is small, so they are almost certainly not directly responsible for the cognitive impairment, but this finding may point to some broader based vascular dysfunction.”

ADHD: Your Brain On Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

2011-12-31T09:09:00.001-08:00

Hey everybody, Cara Santa Maria here. Nearly 10% of kids in this country have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Some estimates say it's closer to 16%, and the numbers appear to be rising.
But does this mean that more and more kids are showing symptoms of ADHD? Or have they always had the disorder, but now more and more kids are being appropriately diagnosed? Unfortunately, the answer seems to be: who knows?
What we do know is that ADHD is a developmental disorder characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsiveness to the extent that it causes significantly impaired functioning at school and home. The cause of ADHD is still up for debate. A handful of researchers think it shouldn’t even qualify as a disorder.

However, evidence indicates that the brains of children with ADHD are different than those of kids who’ve never been diagnosed. In particular, the left prefrontal cortex of the brain is smaller and quieter in children with ADHD, which may explain why focused attention is such a task for them. Also, the motor cortex appears to develop more quickly, which is probably linked to their hyperactivity.
ADHD medications work by targeting cells in the prefrontal cortex and boosting levels of two neurotransmitters there: norepinephrine (the brain's adrenaline) and dopamine. Kids with ADHD are thought to have low levels of these chemicals, and stimulant medications work to bring them up to normal. Nearly 3 million children take drugs like Ritalin (a methylphenidate drug) or Adderall (an amphetamine). These drugs improve focus, concentration, and attention, but their use is highly controversial. There’s evidence linking them to stunted growth, reduction in appetite, and children taking them are more often depressed than those who don't. What’s more, the long-term effects of ADHD meds on a child's heart and brain are unknown.
On another note, a study published last month in the Journal of Pharmacy Practice showed that, surprise surprise, 40% of college students who were prescribed stimulant medication for ADHD abused it. And this is self-report data! Who knows how much higher the number may actually be, given the tendency for survey subjects to lie about socially irresponsible behaviors. One study found that over the course of 8 years, calls to a poison control center about teenage abuse of ADHD medication rose 76%.
And, contrary to what clinicians used to think, ADHD doesn’t just effect kids. Nearly 4% of the adult population in the US currently carry an ADHD diagnosis, and around 8% have been diagnosed at some point in their lives. Studies show that adults with ADHD deal with higher than average rates of divorce, substance abuse, unemployment, and disability. But there is hope on the horizon. Along with drug treatment, cognitive behavioral therapies seem to work. And although alternative treatments like neurofeedback have been met with skepticism, new data appears to support their efficacy.

New Year, New You - Resolve to be Good to your Brain This Year

2011-12-31T09:05:00.000-08:00

Marcia Douglas is the Owner and Executive Director of LearningRx Warren, located at 34 Mountain Boulevard, Building C in Warren, NJ. Ms. Douglas graduated from Georgetown University and went on to earn a law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law. She was inspired to put her psychology background and education law experience to work by opening a LearningRx Center after the brain training program produced incredible results for one of her own children. To learn more about LearningRx brain training, stop by the Center, call 908-22-BRAIN, or visit the LearningRx Warren website www.learningrx.com/warren.

An estimated 40 to 45% of Americans make New Year’s resolutions. Most of us resolve to become physically fit, fiscally fit, re-organized, re-energized and overall healthier, but in that quest we often forget one of the most important aspects of complete health – mental fitness and strength.

If you don’t think you need a brain boost because you’re feeling young and fit and mentally strong, think again. A University of Virginia study shows that the average person's brain peaks at age 22! Even so, the brain has the ability to grow and change at any age, and there are proven ways to get your brain in tip-top shape, and in some cases, make it better than ever. The key is quality – quality nutrition, sleep, socialization, and exercise, both physical and mental.
When it comes to brain-boosting foods, it seems research uncovers a new super food every other day. Over time it’s become clear that many different types of foods are necessary for optimum mental functioning, including fluids, complex carbohydrates, proteins, beneficial fats, and various vitamins, minerals and antioxidants.
Some of the more important trace elements include Vitamin B-1 which enables the metabolism of glucose. Potassium, sodium and calcium are used for nerve cell signaling and metabolic reactions, and zinc is important for concentration and memory. Iron is essential for supplying oxygen to the brain. In one study women with sufficient iron in their blood performed cognitive exercises better and faster than women who were iron deficient. After iron supplementation, the formerly anemic women did five to seven times better on their cognitive performance.
Unsaturated fats also protect the brain and buttress brain function, especially the polyunsaturated omega-3 fatty acids found in fish and plant based sources like Mila, a proprietary blend of the chia seed. Protein heightens attention and produces structural materials and transporters for the brain. Water, of course, is vital for brain function as well. Studies show that even slight dehydration slows the rate nutrients can enter the brain, producing short-term memory deficits, reasoning difficulties and other cognitive problems.
Keeping our brains optimally powered is also dependent on when we eat. The brain can’t store carbohydrates like muscles can so it requires a constant supply of glucose. Eating regularly ensures blood glucose levels don’t dip or surge causing concentration issues and other mental lapses. Eating breakfast is critically important. Results from 22 studies of school-age children show that breakfast eaters have better memories, test scores and school attendance rates.
Healthy friendships also prove healthy for your brain. Research from Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center shows having close friends and staying in contact with family provides protection against Alzheimer's disease. Other studies show people with extensive social networks are at reduced risk of cognitive impairment.
Sleep supports your cognitive abilities and brain function by buttressing your brains ability to quickly process new information and concepts and to organize, store and recall memories.
Physical exercise is extremely beneficial to mental function. The immediate effects are obvious – it gets the oxygen flowing to the brain. The long-term effects are impressive. Several studies show that people who exercise are less likely to suffer memory problems, and some animal studies even suggest that physical exercise can prompt the growth of new stem cells.
Perhaps the most important aspect of resolving to have the best brain ever this year, is vowing to exercise it often. Puzzles, riddles, games and other mental exercises that keep the mind active and challenged can prevent cognitive decline, and the right type of intense brain training exercises can actually make you smarter.
LearningRx Warren is one of over 70 centers across the nation specializing in this type of intense brain training. Personal trainers use fast-paced, game-like exercises to quickly improve cognitive skills like attention, memory, logic and reasoning, auditory and visual processing and processing speed. A recent study showed adults who went through LearningRx brain training improved brain function and gained an average of 11.4 IQ points. While at-home mental exercise programs are generally not intense enough to produce that type of gain, if you push your brain with tough mental challenges, it can make a difference.
So as you ponder your New Year’s Resolutions, remember your brain, and resolve to treat it well. The brain’s amazing ability to grow and change throughout life means instead of growing old, the brain can simply grow – if we continue to challenge it through training and exercise, and nurture it with quality nutrition, sleep, exercise and friendships.
If you would like more information about brain training or would like to subscribe to a free monthly e-Newsletter full of more brain research, brain-boosting recipes and fun games, contact us at 908-22-BRAIN or visit our website at www.learningx.com/warren.

Diet affects brain health, study finds Oregon researchers say those who eat a lot of fruits and vegetables fare better as they age

2011-12-31T09:03:00.001-08:00

A new study by Oregon researchers suggests that all those holiday treats, backed up by year-round junk food, might be going to your head, and not in a good way.

Research by scientists at Oregon State University and Oregon Health & Science University has found that older people whose diets are big on unhealthy, fatty foods do worse on mental acuity tests and have more brain shrinkage than those with healthy diets. Older people who eat lots of fruits and vegetables and the healthy oils found in fish were sharper and had less brain shrinkage.

The study is getting attention because it’s the first to measure the effect of diet on brain size and function by directly measuring nutrient levels in the blood and by imaging brains using an MRI. Previous studies relied on people filling out food questionnaires that are subject to memory lapse and inaccuracies.

“This is the first time that we’ve actually been able to show that the brain is protected by a good diet,” said Maret Traber, a nutritionist at OSU’s Linus Pauling Institute and a co-author of the study. “I think that’s outstanding.”

A paper describing the research was published this week in the journal Neurology, published by the American Academy of Neurology. The lead author is OHSU’s Gene Bowman, a naturopathic doctor, neurology professor and brain researcher.

The human brain normally shrinks with age as mental agility also drops. But the new study suggests that what you eat could either accelerate or slow that process.

What the researchers found is that people with high levels of vitamins B, C, D and E and the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish had better cognitive ability than others, especially those with high levels of transfats.

Transfats are often found in baked and fried foods, margarine and fast foods, although many snack food manufacturers have recently begun to eliminate transfat from their products.

Traber said one of the findings that was most disturbing was that older people with high levels of transfats in their blood actually had measurably smaller brains than those with healthy diets.

“That’s the scary part,” she said. “What you eat actually does matter.”

The study looked at a group of 104 Oregonians with an average age of 87 with no special risk factors for problems with memory or mental acuity. They were tested for 30 different nutrient biomarkers in their blood, and 42 of the participants also had MRI brain scans.

The participants were taken from a larger group of almost 300 people participating in the Oregon Brain Aging Study, which was begun in 1989 using men and women age 65 and older at that time.

In some ways the results aren’t surprising, given that the same kind of diet that seems to protect the brain has long been known to benefit the heart and prevent other diseases.

But knowing that a good diet also helps the brain is important as more people in developed countries are living longer.

“There a phenomenal number of epidemiological studies that say people who eat a diet rich in fruits and vegetables have less chronic disease,” Traber said. “I like to say it’s exactly what your mother told you to do.”

But even people who get their vitamins and fish oil in pill form will benefit, Traber said. The study just looked at what was in people’s blood, not how it got there, and Traber said taking vitamins orally has the advantage of telling you just how much you are getting.

In a commentary published in the same issue of the journal, two other researchers said the use of blood assays to determine dietary effect on the brain holds promise. If results are confirmed in a larger and more ethnically diverse group of older adults, the value of other nutrients could be investigated, said Christy Tangney of Rush University Medical Center and Nikolaos Scarmeas of Columbia University.

“Moreover, additional biomarkers for food group and food subgroups might be explored,” they said, including beneficial nutrients found in red wine, olive oil and citrus fruits.

The study is being published just as many people are looking back at a holiday season where they might not have seen the healthiest food on their plates.

For those folks, Traber said the results provide yet another incentive to turning over a new leaf, especially if that leaf is attached to a vegetable.

“It comes out at such a good time,” she said. “Right now is when everybody is worrying about the sweets and treats they ate during the holidays, and here’s what they can do to get healthier.”

Nuts improve mood, brain function, prevent cognitive decline

2011-12-31T09:02:00.001-08:00

ISLAMABAD: Nuts, especially walnuts, almonds and hazelnuts, combined with the potent polyphenol resveratrol team, together improve mood and protect the aging brain, thus helping to maintain memory and cognition. Researchers reporting in the New England Journal of Medicine have found that nuts consumed over a period of years not only help with weight management issues, but also can reduce systemic inflammation to improve spirits and prevent cognitive decline.
Resveratrol has long been associated with brain health. The Journal of Pineal Research reports that resveratrol demonstrates anti-aging properties in the brain necessary for energy production and optimal brain function. Combining these two natural agents together as part of your healthy diet can improve mood, help retain memories and preserve youthful thought patterns.
Researchers determined to validate the health-promoting capacity of nuts provided test participants with a diet of walnuts, almonds and hazelnuts for a period of 12 weeks. The volunteers for this study were sex and age-matched individuals given a control diet, and were compared to a group not receiving the nut mixture. All participants exhibited symptoms of metabolic syndrome, increasing risk for developing diabetes, heart disease, mood disorders and loss of cognition.
Individuals receiving the nuts had increased levels of serotonin, which will help a person feel better and potentially more satisfied and less likely to suffer from depression and poor mood. Additionally, the nut control group demonstrated reduced inflammatory markers from the high polyphenol content of the nuts. This is an important finding, as individuals exhibiting the signs of metabolic syndrome experience the effects of systemic inflammation leading to accelerated brain aging and cognitive decline.
Mitochondria are the tiny metabolic engines that are responsible for powering each of our trillion or so cells throughout the body. Over time, mitochondria begin to experience loss of function, and cellular decline and aging of the cell begin. Mitochondrial regulation is controlled in large part by the ’longevity’ gene known as Sirt1. Calorie restriction and potent natural nutrients such as resveratrol are known to alter expression of the Sirt1 gene. Researchers have demonstrated that resveratrol is able to restore neural mitochondria function by reviving Sirt1 gene expression; resveratrol provides "a potent anti-aging effect within the brain."
The human brain is a highly metabolic organ, demanding 20% of the total oxygen supply for the body. As such, it is also susceptible to the effects of oxidative stress and free radical damage that cause brain inflammation and advanced signs of aging. Natural nutrients such as resveratrol (25 - 50 mg per day) that cross the blood-brain barrier and foundation monounsaturated fats supplied by most nuts (1 to 2 ounces each day) and seeds protect the brain from damage and dramatically lower the risk of memory loss and cognitive decline.

Obesity-Induced Brain Changes May Be Reason Weight Control Is So Hard

2011-12-31T08:58:00.000-08:00

The biggest obstacle to the successful treatment of obesity is the tendency to regain weight lost through diet and exercise, and evidence is increasing that this could be due to physiological causes. Recently, an Australian study reported that after large weight loss, appetite-regulating hormones appear to reset to levels that increase appetite.

Now a new study reported online on 27 December in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, offers further evidence. Senior author Dr. Michael W. Schwartz, professor of medicine at the University of Washington, and colleagues, report how rodents and humans with diet-induced obesity have structural changes in an area of the brain that regulates weight control.

The hypothalamus is a small, pearl-sized area of the brain that controls a large number of body functions, including body weight, which is regulated by a complex set of interactions between hormones and neurons or brain cells. There is a growing belief among scientists that these interactions, in most obese people, "conspire" to prevent permanent weight loss, and the underlying mechanisms are increasingly becoming the object of intense investigation by neuroendocrinologists.

Schwartz told the press:

"To explain a biologically elevated body weight 'set-point', investigators in the field have speculated about the existence of fundamental changes to brain neurocircuits that control energy balance. Our findings are the first to offer direct evidence of such a structural change, and they include evidence in humans as well as in mice and rats."

Schwartz and colleagues looked at what high-fat diets did to the brains of mice and rats engineered to become obese on such diets.

They found that quite early in their lives, the rodents developed lasting brain injuries in a specific part of the hypothalamus (the hypothalamic arcuate nucleus). Using brain scans, they found similar injuries in the same area of the brain of obese humans:

"Consistent with these data in rodents, we found evidence of increased gliosis in the mediobasal hypothalamus of obese humans, as assessed by MRI," they write.

Schwartz, who holds the Robert H. Williams Endowed Chair in Medicine in the Division of Metabolism, Endocrinology and Nutrition, pointed out that these findings do not prove a cause and effect: that is they can't say for sure that the brain injury is the reason the body appears to defend a higher body weight, that has yet to be proved, but:

"... this amounts to solid evidence of a change affecting the key hypothalamic area for body weight control with the potential to explain the problem," he added.

In another study in the same issue of the journal, a second team of researchers, led by senior author Dr Jeffrey Flier, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, reports finding that turnover of nerve cells in the hypothalamus of mice is inhibited by obesity, adding further weight to the argument that physiology, rather than lapsing back to old eating habits, could be the reason for weight regain following a period of successful weight loss in obese people.

Decades after ending in ‘disappointment,’ Guatemalan study of infant brains inspires Canadian follow up

2011-12-31T08:57:00.000-08:00

In the 1970s, researchers tried to boost the brain power of hundreds of poor children in Guatemala with a porridge-like drink called atole. They were disappointed to discover that, after taking the daily dose of protein, some for up to eight years, there was only a modest impact.
It was a very different story 25 years later, when one of those scientists, Reynaldo Martorell, and a new team tracked down many of the adults who had participated as children. The atole, they found, had made a dramatic difference after all, but only for the volunteers who had been toddlers and babies when they began drinking it every day.
That follow-up study is now a model for a new, federally-funded Canadian program called Saving Brains that will direct $10-million to researchers who want to assess the long-term impact of interventions in early childhood. The aim is to find effective ways to encourage healthy brain development, because smarter kids have a better chance of breaking the cycle of poverty.
More than 200 million children in developing countries have their cognitive development limited by disease, malnutrition, birth complications and a lack of nurturing and stimulation, says Karlee Silver, who leads Grand Challenges Canada’s Saving Brains initiative.
Grand Challenges Canada is an independent not-for-profit organization launched earlier this year using federal funds. It works in a consortium with Canada’s International Development Research Centre and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Two dozen research proposals for the Saving Brains program have made the short list and of those, 10 or 12 will likely get funded.
The initial study in Guatemala was done by the Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama. The original hypothesis was that protein supplementation would improve mental development.
“There was quite a bit of disappointment that by the end of the study, in 1977. The effects were modest at best,” says Dr. Martorell.
But the extra protein had made a difference in the children’s growth, especially in the head circumference of the youngsters who were under two. That’s why Dr. Martorell suspected it might have had a long-term impact on their brains.
“I began to wonder what happened to those kids.”
When he and his colleagues went back to Guatemala to find out, they discovered that the children who were under the age of 3 when they started drinking the atole every day had benefitted after all. They had stayed in school longer and, once they entered the work force, earned on average 46 per cent more in wages than the children who were older than 3 when they started consuming the warm gruel every day. This suggested there was a window during the first three years of life during which extra dietary protein can encourage healthy brain development, says Dr. Martorell.
Now at Emory University in Atlanta, Dr. Martorell has acted as adviser to the Saving Brains initiative and was in Ottawa recently to talk to the researchers who are applying for funding.
He described how to track down adults who took part in research programs as children. In Guatemala, the scientists hired the same local supervisors who had helped in the original study. They were able to obtain economic data from 60 per cent of the 2,392 children who had been enrolled in the initial study. They published their findings in 2008 in the medical journal Lancet.
There is already compelling evidence that the best time for interventions to encourage healthy brain development is when a baby is in the womb, or during the first few years of life.
But the follow-up studies to be funded by the Saving Brains initiative may identify narrow windows during these early years in which particular interventions are most effective, says Dr. Martorell.
Researchers have proposed looking at whether treating infections has an impact on brain development, and if programs that encourage mothers to nurture and stimulate their babies and young children can lead to significant long-term gains.
Dr. Martorell says he is glad he followed up on his original hunch about the long-term benefits of atole.
“Without the follow-up, that study would been largely forgotten,” he says.

Singing for the brain to help with dementia

2011-12-31T08:54:00.000-08:00

appeal: Amanda Marriott , left and and Beverley Page-Banks Alzheimers Society who are appealing for volunteers ahead of the launch of Singing for the Brain which will start next year

A charity is appealing for volunteers to help at singing sessions which helps people with Alzheimer’s Disease.
The Alzheimer’s Society has secured money from Lancashire County Council to fund the pilot project in Preston.
It will be the first time ‘Singing for the Brain’ sessions have been held in the county but the scheme has proved to be successful elsewhere in the country.
Singing can provide a way for people with dementia, along with their carers, to express themselves and socialise with others in a fun and supportive group.
And the charity said, whereas memories are hard to retrieve, music is especially easy to recall and the activities build on the well-known preserved memory for song and music in the brain.
Beverley Page-Banks, Alzheimer’s Society branch manager, said: “Volunteers are vital in all aspects of our support to people with dementia and their families.
“Singing for the Brain is a unique opportunity to really make a difference.”
The pilot will run for 10 weeks from January 23 and will be held in the Fulwood area.
The sessions will be held in the afternoons and the charity is looking for volunteers who can commit to helping at all 10 sessions.
Roles include helping with refreshments, meeting and greeting the participants, helping with activities, chatting to people, setting up and clearing up after the session.
If the pilot is a success, the charity is hoping to roll out more groups across Lancashire in 2012.
Sam McKenna, Alzheimer’s Society’s Lancashire Volunteering Officer, said: “There are a variety of opportunities for volunteers to get involved in the new Singing for the Brain group and we’d urge anyone thinking about their New Year’s resolution to consider volunteering, and get in touch.”
There is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease or any other type of dementia.
There are 750,000 people with dementia in the UK with numbers set to rise to more than 1 million by 2021. This will soar to 1.7 million by 2050.
To volunteer or for more information, contact Sam McKenna on 01772 718 177 or e mail samantha.mckenna@alzheimers.org.uk.

Shrinking brains and 'silent strokes' studied

2011-12-31T08:51:00.000-08:00

New findings in Alzheimer's disease support longstanding notions of what doctors have preached for years. The studies look at associations, not causes, but they further scientists' pursuit of preventing the fatal brain disease.

It's no secret that healthy diet high in omega-3 fatty acids and rich in vitamins found in fruits and vegetables is good for your overall health and longevity.
In a study released this week in the journal Neurology, scientists associate these fish-rich diets and foods with high levels of vitamins B, C, D, and E nutrients with increased cognitive performance and decreased risk of Alzheimer’s disease, or "brain shrinkage."
People who consume diets high in trans fats, primarily found in fast foods, fried and frozen foods, were more likely to have brain shrinkage and lower scores on the thinking and memory tests than people with diets low in trans fats, the study found.
This is the first study using nutrient biomarkers in the blood to look at the effect of diet on memory, thinking skills and brain volume, researchers said. Similar diet studies in the past primarily depended on participants' memory recall and questionnaires.
“These results need to be confirmed, but obviously it is very exciting to think that people could potentially stop their brains from shrinking and keep them sharp by adjusting their diet,” said study author Gene Bowman, assistant professor of neurology at the Oregon Health and Science University, in a news release from the American Academy of Neurology.
Researchers say diet is just one of many factors that must be taken into consideration when talking about memory loss. People have different genetic tendencies for disease risk, therefore more multigenerational and multicultural studies need to be conducted.
“The assumption is that when you lead a healthy lifestyle, which includes proper nutrition, exercise, and social engagement, you’re maximizing your chance of reduced cardiovascular risk factors, which then maximize your opportunities for delaying Alzheimer’s or dementia,” said Maria Carrillo, senior director of medical and scientific relations at the Alzheimer’s Association.
“Whether that translates into delaying Alzheimer’s, we actually don’t know,” added Carrillo.
In a different study, supported by the National Institutes of Health, new research links "silent strokes," or small spots of dead brain cells, to memory loss in the elderly.
The study found silent strokes in roughly one out of four older adults. The affected adults scored somewhat worse on memory tests than those without silent strokes.
Researchers found this was true whether or not people had a small hippocampus, which is the main memory center of the brain.
"Given that conditions like Alzheimer’s disease are defined mainly by memory problems, our results may lead to further insight into what causes symptoms and the development of new interventions for prevention," study author Adam M. Brickman said in a statement. Brickman works for the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain at Columbia University Medical Center in New York.
Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. It is the only cause of death in the top 10 in America without a way to prevent, cure, or even slow its progression.
"Since silent strokes and the volume of the hippocampus appeared to be associated with memory loss separately in our study, our results also support stroke prevention as a means for staving off memory problems,” said Brickman.

Trans Fats-Brain Damage Link Suggested By New Study On Nutrient Levels

2011-12-31T08:49:00.000-08:00

It seems like there's a new study relating nutrition and brain development every week. Sometimes, health experts tell us to eat grilled tuna, high in omega-3s, to ward off Alzheimer's disease -- and then, a new report on mercury levels reveals just how risky tuna can be for brain health. Clinical studies that have tried to administer certain nutrients to promote better neurological health have almost always failed. The haziness of all this data makes it hard to place your faith in any one diet.
Oregon Health & Science University's Dr. Gene Bowman has a theory about the source of the confusion. He thinks that the reason past studies have failed to produce satisfactory results is that they're getting their information from the wrong place. Most studies on long-term nutrition and health rely on dietary surveys, which ask studies' participants to remember everything they've eaten over the past few weeks. That's a tall order when you’re talking to people at risk for -- or even in the early stages of -- dementia.
"People with advanced age have more problems remembering what they've eaten," Bowman told The Huffington Post.
But Bowman thinks he has a better way to do things. Instead of asking people what they've eaten over the past few weeks, he looks at nutrient levels in their blood and finds out for himself.
It's not 100 percent foolproof, and it works better for some nutrients than others, but Bowman has published several studies that have demonstrated that blood levels of many nutrients are well correlated with a subject's diet over a period of about a year.
He said the model could be adapted to suit studies of any number of nutrition-related diseases, which all currently rely on dietary studies. But in his own neurological research, he's focused on nutrients that are known to be found at relatively high levels in spinal fluid and brain tissue.
"If the nutrients don't get into the brain, then it's a harder case to prove," he explained. "Maybe if some nutrients are damaging or improving the blood-brain barrier, without actually getting into the brain, that could have an impact on brain development ... but basically, we focus on nutrients that we've found at high levels in the brain itself, like vitamin C."
And this past week, for the first time, he released the first big findings produced by this new method. His latest study, "Nutrient biomarker patterns, cognitive function, and MRI measures of brain aging," published in the Dec. 28 issue of Neurology, found some striking patterns relating what people eat to how their brains function.
Two of his positive findings have already attracted substantial notice. Bowman found that people with high plasma levels of B vitamins and vitamins D, E and C had more total brain volume and better overall cognitive functioning. Additionally, people with higher levels of marine Omega-3 fatty acids running through their bloodstreams were found to have better executive function.
Bowman was quick to note that the study was conducted using data from just 100 people, all elderly, all living in Oregon, and all Caucasian. And he stated these positive trends were relatively minor.
Another trend isolated in the study, though, was not minor. Bowman said that the most striking correlation found in the study was that people with high levels of trans fats in their blood had significantly worse cognitive performance and less total brain volume. In other words, the study indicated that eating foods high in trans fats -- mostly junk food, like processed pastries and fatty red meats –- may cause brain damage.
The pattern was so striking that Bowman said it was worth taking seriously despite the size of the study.
"It's clear that trans fats are bad -- both for your heart and now, we see, for your brain," Bowman said. "So I would recommend that people stay away from all trans fats. If you aren't sure whether something has them, just look at the ingredients; if there's vegetable shortening, partially hydrogenated anything... just put it down. That’s the big message here."
It's a good thing, then, that the tide has turned against trans fats in recent years. Places as far flung as New York and Switzerland have banned restaurants from featuring menu items with high levels of trans fats, and many major companies have tried to remove them from products. Though, as a HuffPost Healthy Living post from earlier this month demonstrated, there are still a lot of foods out there that contain trans fats.
The other patterns were also solid enough that scientists have said they warrant further study.
The eventual hope is that this sort of research will allow neurologists to develop individualized dietary therapies for better brain functioning. But the next step will be to find out whether or not blood nutrient levels today can predict brain development down the line. If they can –- if say, Bowman and his colleagues can determine that ingesting more vitamin E can help support the structural integrity of the hippocampus, the seat of memory -– then someday, a visit to a neurologist may be a lot like a visit to a dietician.

Brain Detox Formula Helps Eliminate Years of Built-Up Neurotoxins that Dull Memory, and Slow the Mind

2011-12-31T08:43:00.000-08:00

Brain Research Labs has created a clinically tested brain pill called Procera AVH® that helps boost brainpower, and help fight and neutralize free radicals and toxins in the brain.

Brain Research Labs has created a clinically tested brain pill called Procera AVH® that helps boost brainpower, and help fight and neutralize free radicals and toxins in the brain.
People often blame forgetfulness and mental sluggishness on getting old, when, it actually may be due to a toxic brain overload.
There's no denying that we live in a toxic stew. We share the planet with more than 82,000 chemicals, and the list grows longer every year. More than 1,000 new chemicals, many unregulated, are added to the toxic broth every year.
They are in the food we eat, the water we drink and bathe in, and in the air we breathe. They are found in plastic and canned food containers, home and garden pesticides, dry-cleaned clothes, detergents, gasoline, and countless other products.
They're also found in our bodies.
Health experts estimate that the average human being is hosting more than 700 chemical contaminants. Scientists use the term, body burden to quantify the total amount of chemicals present in the body. And the news is not good.
In Bill Moyers' PBS series Chemical Body Burden: Trade Secret, Michael McCally, MD, PhD, of Mount Sinai School of Medicine warned, "Current 'normal' body burdens of dioxins and several other well-studied organochlorines in humans are at or near the range at which toxic effects occur in laboratory animals."
While research shows that sauna sweating, exercise, and select diets can diminish some fat-stored contaminants, health experts have long wondered, how does one effectively clean a "dirty" brain?
What's in Your Brain?
The brain experts at Brain Research Labs in Laguna Beach, California think they have the answer. The same people credited with measuring the information-processing speed of the brain have also created a clinically tested brain pill called Procera AVH® that helps boost brainpower, and help fight and neutralize free radicals and toxins in the brain.
The formula was also shown to help improve mental clarity, sweep away brain fog and mental sluggishness, improve memory, concentration, and even put users in a better mood.
Lead formulator, Joshua Reynolds, author, researcher, and preeminent brain expert, along with his fellow scientists at Brain Research, have created Procera AVH®, a unique formula that helps fight free radicals and unhealthy inflammatory conditions by boosting the brain's antioxidant defenses, while increasing the circulation of blood in the brain helping to flush out the toxic residues.
"Procera AVH also helps oxygenate tired sluggish brain cells that have been "depressed" by the heavy burden of neurotoxins. Users report a noticeable change in mental alertness, energy and focus," says Reynolds.
Spring Cleaning for Aging Brains
"It's more than just bouts of brain fog, forgetfulness and mental fatigue," says Reynolds.
"Toxic brain overload could be behind a seemingly unrelated spate of conditions like unintended weight gain, poor sleep, constant fatigue, low energy, general aches and pains, hormone, blood sugar and mood swings, irritability, even a weakened immune system."
"Can you imagine not cleaning your home for 50 years? Imagine how much filth and dirt would build up?," says Reynolds.
"Now, imagine what your brain - that three pound glob of ganglionic fat and nerve tissue looks like after 50 years of life?"
Procera's well-studied ingredients, acetyl-l-carnitine, vinpocetine and huperzine provide a broad-spectrum antioxidant defense to help protect your brain against these four highly toxic free radicals.

2011-12-29T10:36:00.000-08:00

It has been lodged in his brain for more than eighty years- even longer than his teeth.
A bullet has remained in the head of a Russian man, who was accidentally shot in the head as a three year old, for 82 years, with apparently no ill effects.
The shooting victim went on to become an award winning engineer, even winning the Soviet State Prize for his accomplishments.

Metalhead: A bullet has remained in the head of a Russian man, who was accidentally shot in the head as a three year old, for 82 years, with apparently no ill effects

Fittingly the man spent much of his career overseeing the construction of ballistic missiles.

When the boy was shot with a pistol by his brother the bullet entered beneath his nose and never left. It eventually came to rest in his foramen magnum, the opening at the base of the skull through which the spinal cord passes.

Doctors did not take the bullet out at the time for fear of causing more damage, according to a case report published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The three-year-old blacked out for hours, but incredibly, made a complete recovery.

Dr. Richard O'Brien, a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians told msnbc: 'The body has an amazing ability to 'get used to' things.'

'Also, children have a great ability to overcome hardship and rebuild themselves when injured.'

Stowaway: The bullet entered beneath his nose and never left. It eventually came to rest in his foramen magnum, the opening at the base of the skull through which the spinal cord passes

Eighty-two years later, doctors treating the man for coronary heart disease at a Russian cardiology center spotted the renegade bullet on his records and carried out a cat scan.
They were astonished to see it had left no sign of neural damage. The octogenarian did have a scar under his nose, but his curve- shaped, Roman nose prevents it from being seen, msnbc reported.

Dr. David Ross, an emergency physician at Penrose Hospital in Colorado Springs, Colorado told the New England Journal of Medicine: 'High-speed missiles, like a bullet, can cause great damage and usually do.
'However, because they are high-speed, they generate a lot of heat. That heat usually means the missile is sterile -- meaning it is unlikely to serve as a basis for infection if it stays in one place for many years. So if it did not cause much damage, which it apparently didn't, it was unlikely to cause him ongoing troubles.'

Doctors at the Russian cardiology center decided there was no point taking the bullet out.

Older people’s brain does not always slow down with age

2011-12-29T10:29:00.000-08:00

Both children and the elderly have slower response times when they have to make quick decisions. (Reuters)

Contrary to what many people think the brain functioning of elderly people does not always slow down with age and in certain situations they show similar response times as younger adults, researchers say.
Both children and the elderly have slower response times when they have to make quick decisions in some settings.
But recent research suggests that much of that slower response is a conscious choice to emphasize accuracy over speed.
In fact, healthy older people can be trained to respond faster in some decision-making tasks without hurting their accuracy – meaning their cognitive skills in this area are not so different from younger adults.
“Many people think that it is just natural for older people’s brains to slow down as they age, but we’re finding that isn’t always true,” said Roger Ratcliff, professor of psychology at Ohio State University and co-author of the study.

Brain's Connective Cells Are Much More Than Glue

2011-12-29T10:26:00.000-08:00

Glia cells also regulate learning and memory, new TAU research finds

Glia cells, named for the Greek word for "glue," hold the brain's neurons together and protect the cells that determine our thoughts and behaviors, but scientists have long puzzled over their prominence in the activities of the brain dedicated to learning and memory. Now Tel Aviv University researchers say that glia cells are central to the brain's plasticity — how the brain adapts, learns, and stores information.

According to Ph.D. student Maurizio De Pittà of TAU's Schools of Physics and Astronomy and Electrical Engineering, glia cells do much more than hold the brain together. A mechanism within the glia cells also sorts information for learning purposes, De Pittà says. "Glia cells are like the brain's supervisors. By regulating the synapses, they control the transfer of information between neurons, affecting how the brain processes information and learns."

De Pittà's research, led by his TAU supervisor Prof. Eshel Ben-Jacob, along with Vladislav Volman of The Salk Institute and the University of California at San Diego and Hugues Berry of the Université de Lyon in France, has developed the first computer model that incorporates the influence of glia cells on synaptic information transfer. Detailed in the journal PLoS Computational Biology, the model can also be implemented in technologies based on brain networks such as microchips and computer software, Prof. Ben-Jacob says, and aid in research on brain disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and epilepsy.

Regulating the brain's "social network"

The brain is constituted of two main types of cells: neurons and glia. Neurons fire off signals that dictate how we think and behave, using synapses to pass along the message from one neuron to another, explains De Pittà. Scientists theorize that memory and learning are dictated by synaptic activity because they are "plastic," with the ability to adapt to different stimuli.

But Ben-Jacob and colleagues suspected that glia cells were even more central to how the brain works. Glia cells are abundant in the brain's hippocampus and the cortex, the two parts of the brain that have the most control over the brain's ability to process information, learn and memorize. In fact, for every neuron cell, there are two to five glia cells. Taking into account previous experimental data, the researchers were able to build a model that could resolve the puzzle.

The brain is like a social network, says Prof. Ben-Jacob. Messages may originate with the neurons, which use the synapses as their delivery system, but the glia serve as an overall moderator, regulating which messages are sent on and when. These cells can either prompt the transfer of information, or slow activity if the synapses are becoming overactive. This makes the glia cells the guardians of our learning and memory processes, he notes, orchestrating the transmission of information for optimal brain function.

New brain-inspired technologies and therapies

The team's findings could have important implications for a number of brain disorders. Almost all neurodegenerative diseases are glia-related pathologies, Prof. Ben-Jacob notes. In epileptic seizures, for example, the neurons' activity at one brain location propagates and overtakes the normal activity at other locations. This can happen when the glia cells fail to properly regulate synaptic transmission. Alternatively, when brain activity is low, glia cells boost transmissions of information, keeping the connections between neurons "alive."

The model provides a "new view" of how the brain functions. While the study was in press, two experimental works appeared that supported the model's predictions. "A growing number of scientists are starting to recognize the fact that you need the glia to perform tasks that neurons alone can't accomplish in an efficient way," says De Pittà. The model will provide a new tool to begin revising the theories of computational neuroscience and lead to more realistic brain-inspired algorithms and microchips, which are designed to mimic neuronal networks.

This is your brain behind the wheel

2011-12-29T10:24:00.000-08:00

It feels weird driving while lying flat on your back.That’s why Toronto neuroscientist Tom Schweizer offers practice sessions to the volunteers in his brain-imaging study. Each person gets time to become accustomed to the driving simulator, which has been engineered to fit inside a brain scanner. The small steering wheel is at the participants’ waist, the accelerator and brake pedals at their feet, and their visual field is filled with the images of driving down a road and turning left at a busy intersection.
Dr. Schweizer wants to know what parts of the brain we use when we perform complex driving manoeuvres and whether this changes as we age. His goal is to develop an objective test to help assess whether older drivers, as well as people who have had a stroke or another brain injury, can still safely operate a car or truck. The idea isn’t to install functional magnetic resonance imagers at the motor-vehicle-licence offices, says Dr. Schweizer, who works at St. Michael’s Hospital. He wants to develop a series of short, cognitive tests to assess whether someone’s brain is up to the job of driving.
“Once we have figured out the brain structures involved in different aspects of driving, we can go in with cognitive testing that targets those areas,” he says.
As people age, they have a greater chance of developing vision problems or other health conditions that might compromise driving safely. The brain also changes. The frontal cortex, which makes up about 60 per cent of the brain, atrophies, or shrinks, Dr. Schweizer says. Reaction times can slow, and it can become more difficult to multitask.
His imaging study is part of a growing scientific effort to learn how to accommodate and perhaps even retrain older drivers, and to find a better way to determine when it is time for them to give up their keys.
There are now more than 3.25 million licensed drivers aged 65 or older in Canada, about 14 per cent of the total driving population. The proportion of seniors behind the wheel is expected to grow as baby boomers get older.
There is no consensus on how to best test older drivers. Once drivers in Ontario turn 80 they have to complete a vision and knowledge test and do a group education session every two years. But the protocol is different in other provinces and there is little agreement on how to identify and regulate people who may be a risk to themselves or others on the road, says Brenda Vrkljan, an occupational therapist and associate professor in the school of rehabilitation science at McMaster University in Hamilton. She is also part of Candrive, a national initiative to improve the safety of older drivers and to develop an effective method, involving a combination of approaches, for assessing their abilities.
It is a difficult issue. Being able to drive is key to the independence and quality of life of many seniors. It would be exciting, Dr. Vrkljan says, if neuroscience could offer some insight.
Dr. Schweizer does the brain imaging at Sunnybrook Hospital, where he collaborates with Dr. Simon Graham. University of Toronto graduate student Karen Kan worked for two years on a driving simulator that would function in a brain scanner.
So far, Dr. Schweizer has scanned the brains of 16 drivers under the age of 30 while they used the simulator. It’s not perfect imitation of the driving experience, but it is as good as it gets, he says.
In one simulation, they drive down a straight road, which is pretty easy on the brain.
But in another, they have to turn left at a busy intersection, which requires looking at the traffic lights, oncoming cars and pedestrians – and timing the turn.
“We are seeing it requires a pretty large network to do the more complicated manoeuvre. That seems intuitive, but the exact areas that are coming online have not been shown before,” Dr. Schweizer says.
The next step is to see whether the pattern of activity is different in the brains of drivers who are 70 or older. It may be that more of the brain is activated, or that different areas are recruited. Understanding how the aging brain adapts to the demands of driving will help in the development of new cognitive tests, which would supplement existing assessment tools, such as vision tests or on-road driving tests.
Other researchers are also using driving simulators to better understand older drivers. At Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., Michel Bédard, wants to see whether their performance on various cognitive tests is linked to how they well they avoid virtual collisions. His study could lead to new approaches to help older drivers improve their skills.
“There may be quite a bit of potential for retraining,” he says.

Nutrient Patterns Tied to Brain Volume, Cognitive Function

2011-12-29T10:22:00.000-08:00

December 29, 2011 — A study of relatively healthy elderly adults found that those with diets rich in several vitamins or omega-3 fatty acids had better cognitive function and less brain atrophy associated with Alzheimer's disease than their peers with diets less abundant in these nutrients.
The study identified 3 distinct nutrient biomarker patterns (NBPs) in blood that are related to cognitive performance and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measures of brain aging.
Two NBPs were associated with more favorable cognitive scores and more total brain volume on MRI. One was high in plasma B vitamins (B1, B2, B6, folate, and B12), as well as vitamins C, D, and E, and the other was high in plasma marine omega-3 fatty acids.
A third NBP characterized by a high trans fat pattern was consistently associated with less favorable cognitive function and less total cerebral brain volume.
The study was published online December 28 in Neurology.
The Oregon Brain Aging Study
First author Gene Bowman, ND, MPH, from the Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, and colleagues studied a cross-sectional sample of 104 elderly adults (62% women; mean age, 87 years) participating in the Oregon Brain Aging Study.
Comorbidities and vascular risk factors for cognitive decline were low in the cohort, with the exception of hypertension, which was present in 44% of the participants. The mean Mini-Mental State Examination was 27, and no patient had a Clinical Dementia Rating higher than 0.5.
All of the participants completed a battery of neuropsychological tests of memory and thinking skills. A subset of 42 patients underwent MRI scans to measure brain volume. Fasting plasma samples were used to determine the levels of various nutrients present in blood. "To our knowledge, this is the first study to apply principal component analysis to biological markers of diet," the researchers note.
Overall, the participants had good nutritional status, although 7% were deficient in vitamin B12 (<200 pg/mL) and 25% were deficient in vitamin D (<20 ng/mL).
The investigators looked at 30 different nutrient biomarkers. They report that the NBP characterized by higher vitamin BCDE levels was associated with better global cognitive function, particularly in domains of executive, attention, and visuospatial function.
Conversely, the NBP characterized by higher plasma trans fat scores was associated with worse cognitive function overall (memory, attention, language, processing speed, and global).
The researchers report that each standard deviation (SD) increase in the vitamin BCDE score was associated with a 0.28 SD increase in global cognitive score, and each 1 SD increase in the trans fat score was associated with a 0.30 SD decrease in global cognitive score.
Patients with an NBP characterized by higher marine omega-3 fatty acid levels had better executive function.
Adjustment for age, sex, education, apolipoprotein E4, hypertension, and depression did not attenuate these relationships, the authors write.
Blood Nutrient Patterns Affect MRI Patterns
On brain MRI, the researchers found that patients with higher plasma BCDE scores had more total cerebral brain volume, and those with higher trans fat scores had less total cerebral brain volume.
Those with higher omega-3 scores had less white matter hyperintensities, but this relationship was attenuated after adjusting for depression and hypertension.
In an exploratory analysis, the researchers found that NBPs accounted for a significant amount of variation in both brain volume and cognitive scores. Age, sex, education years, APOE4 carrier status, depression, and hypertension together explained 46% of the variation in the global cognitive z score, and adding the NBPs explained an additional 17%.
In regard to total brain volume on MRI, the covariates explained 40% of the total variation, and the NBPs explained an additional 37% of the variation. The covariates explained 52% of the variation in white matter hyperintensities, and the NBPs explained an additional 9%.
Dr. Bowman and colleagues say additional studies in different populations are needed to confirm these findings.
Patterns Predictive of Cognitive Change
The coauthors of a linked commentary say, "If the relationships between cognitive scores and MRI measures with [NBPs] are confirmed in a larger, more ethnically diverse sample of older adults, this approach should be exploited to extract [NBPs] predictive of cognitive change.
"Moreover, additional biomarkers for food group and food subgroups might be explored — i.e., reservatrol for wine, hydroxytyrosol for olive oil and nuts, or proline betaine for citrus fruits," suggest commentators Christy C. Tangney, PhD, from Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, Illinois, and Nikolaos Scarmeas, MD, from Columbia University, New York City.
A strength of the study, they say, is the investigators' use of plasma nutrient levels, rather than self-reported dietary patterns, which gets around recall errors and biases that can occur when individuals report their usual diets, particularly in elders who may be cognitively challenged.
Potential limitations of this bioassay strategy for estimating diet is cost and a higher patient burden, they add, such as time and fasting, if necessary.

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute on Aging, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs, Portland VA Medical Center. A complete list of author disclosures can be found with the original articles.

Tightly Wound DNA in Brain Tied to Schizophrenia

2011-12-29T10:20:00.000-08:00

New research has discovered that people with schizophrenia have certain brain cells where their DNA stays too tightly wound. When DNA is too tightly wound, it can stop other genes from expressing themselves in their normal pattern.
The new findings suggest that drugs already in development for other diseases might eventually offer hope as a treatment for schizophrenia and related conditions in the elderly.
The research shows the deficit is especially pronounced in younger people. This suggests that treatment might be most effective early on at minimizing or even reversing symptoms of schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a usually-serious mental disorder characterized by hallucinations, delusions, and emotional difficulties, among other problems.
“We’re excited by the findings,” said Scripps Research Associate Professor Elizabeth Thomas, a neuroscientist who led the study, “and there’s a tie to other drug development work, which could mean a faster track to clinical trials to exploit what we’ve found.”
Working with lead author Bin Tang, a postdoctoral fellow in her lab, and Brian Dean, an Australian colleague at the University of Melbourne, Thomas obtained post-mortem brain samples from schizophrenic and healthy brains held at medical ”Brain Banks” in the United States and Australia. The brains come from either patients who themselves agreed to donate some or all of their bodies for scientific research after death, or from patients whose families agreed to such donations.
Compared to healthy brains, the brain samples from subjects with schizophrenia showed lower levels of a vital chemical in certain DNA portions that would block normal gene expression.
Another critical finding was that in younger subjects with schizophrenia, the problem was much more pronounced.
Thomas sees great potential in her new findings.
Based on the more pronounced results in younger brains, she believes that treatment with certain types of medications called histone deacetylase inhibitors might well prove helpful in reversing or preventing the progression of the condition, especially in younger patients.

The Details of the Research

Over the past few years, researchers have increasingly recognized that cellular-level changes not tied to genetic defects play important roles in causing disease. There is a range of such so-called epigenetic effects that change the way DNA functions without changing a person’s DNA code.
One critical area of epigenetic research is tied to histones. These are the structural proteins that DNA has to wrap around. “There’s so much DNA in each cell of your body that it could never fit in your cells unless it was tightly and efficiently packed,” said Thomas. Histone “tails” regularly undergo chemical modifications to either relax the DNA or repack it. When histones are acetylated, portions of DNA are exposed so that the genes can be used.
The histone-DNA complexes, known as chromatin, are constantly relaxing and condensing to expose different genes, so there is no single right or wrong configuration. But the balance can shift in ways that can cause or exacerbate disease.
DNA is the guide that cellular machinery uses to construct the countless proteins essential to life. If portions of that guide remain closed when they shouldn’t because histones are not acetylated properly, then genes can be effectively turned off when they shouldn’t be with any number of detrimental effects. Numerous research groups have found that altered acetylation may be a key factor in other conditions, from neurodegenerative disorders such as Huntington’s disease and Parkinson’s disease to drug addiction.
Thomas had been studying the roles of histone acetylation in Huntington’s disease and began to wonder whether similar mechanisms of gene regulation might also be important in schizophrenia. In both diseases, past research in the Thomas lab had shown that certain genes in sufferers were much less active than in healthy people. “It occurred to me that we see the same gene alterations, so I thought, ‘Hey, let’s just try it,’” she said.
It turns out she was right, according to this initial research study.
Interestingly, some of the cognitive deficits that plague elderly people look quite similar biologically to schizophrenia, and the two conditions share at least some brain abnormalities. So deacetylase inhibitors might also work as a treatment for age-related problems, and might even prove an effective preventive measure for people at high risk of cognitive decline based on family history or other indicators.

Scientists link obesity to brain damage

2011-12-29T10:18:00.001-08:00

Scientists are linking obesity with inflammation and scarring in the key brain area that controls body weight - a finding that could explain why it's so hard to lose weight and keep it off.
When researchers switched mice and rats genetically bred to become obese from regular low-fat chow to high-fat and highly palatable chow, the rodents began showing signs of inflammation in the hypothalamus within 24 hours of the diet switch.
The hypothalamus takes signals from body fat and other tissues that tell the brain that we need food or that we've had enough. It also regulates how much energy or fat we burn.
"We saw direct evidence of neuron injury and, ultimately, after months on the diet, a loss of neurons in this hypothalamic area that's vital for body weight control," said lead researcher Dr. Michael Schwartz, professor of medicine and director of the Diabetes and Obesity Center of Excellence at the University of Washington, Seattle.
The switch to the high-fat diet "is actually injuring the neurons that are supposed to protect them from obesity," he said.
When the team next compared MRI scans of the brains of 34 otherwise healthy people, obese people had more gliosis - scarring in the brain from injured neurons - in the hypothalamus than those of normal weight.
The more obese the person, the higher their gliosis score.
Gliosis is normally seen after a stroke.
"We don't know that this is a cause of obesity, or a consequence of obesity," Schwartz said. But it fits with what they observed in the animal experiments. "It suggests that what we have seen in the mouse and rats is also occurring in the human."
The work was based on the hypothesis that changes in the brain conspire to keep weight on once it's gained.
"Our paper provides direct evidence to support that hypothesis," Schwartz said, "because we do find evidence of fixed structural change in the brain area most important for bodyweight control in obese individuals and animals."
"This may help to explain why it's so hard for obese people - they can lose weight but they can't keep it off because their hypothalamus is reading them as basically weighing the right amount."
Inflammation disrupts the action of insulin as well as leptin - a hormone produced by fat cells that tells the brain how much fat and energy is stored.
If the brain can't read the leptin signals properly, it takes more leptin to get the message to the hypothalamus to stop eating.
"And the only way to have more leptin is to have more body fat," Schwartz said.

Vitamins, Omega-3s may keep brain from shrinking

2011-12-29T10:17:00.000-08:00

Older adults with high levels of omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins B, C, D and E in their blood performed better on certain measures of thinking abilities, and also tended to have larger brain volume, a new study finds.

Seniors with high levels of trans fats in their blood fared worse on certain thinking tests than those with lower levels of the unhealthy fats, and also had more brain shrinkage.

Researchers said the findings suggest that nutrients work "in synergy" with one another to be protective of brain health.

"For people with a vitamin profile high in B, C, D, E, those particular nutrients seem to be working together on some level," said lead study author Gene Bowman, an assistant professor in the department of neurology at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. "Having high scores for those vitamins was associated with better cognitive function and larger brain volume."

The study is published in the Dec. 28 online edition and the Jan. 24 print issue of the journal Neurology.

In the study, researchers measured levels of more than 30 nutrients in the blood of 104 people with an average age of 87. Overall, participants were well-educated, healthy nonsmokers who had relatively few chronic diseases and were free of memory and thinking problems. Researchers also did MRI scans of 42 participants to measure their brain volume.

Some amount of brain atrophy, or shrinkage, occurs with aging. More significant shrinkage is associated with mental decline and Alzheimer's disease.

The investigators found that the various nutrients seemed to affect different aspects of thinking, suggesting that they work on different pathways in the brain.

People with high levels of vitamins B, C, D and E performed better on tests of executive function and attention, and had better visuospatial skills and global cognitive function. They also had bigger brains, the study authors noted.

Omega-3 fatty acids, which are found in foods such as salmon, were associated with better executive function and with fewer changes to the white matter of the brain, but there was no association between omega-3s and any of the other measures of mental abilities.

"Executive function" is a term used to describe higher level thinking involving planning, attention and problem solving. In this case, seniors were asked to do an exercise that involved matching the number 1 with the letter A, the number 2 with B, and so on, which shows flexibility in thought, Bowman explained.

White matter changes can be indicative of damage to the small blood vessels of the brain, he said.

The people with high levels of trans fats performed worse on tests of mental abilities and had smaller brains, according to the report.

Marc Gordon, chief of neurology at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N.Y., said the study is "intriguing." While most studies ask people to recall what they ate, in this one, researchers actually measured what participants had absorbed by using blood biomarkers.

"Two issues make this approach more valid," said Gordon, also an Alzheimer's researcher at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, N.Y. "One could be the unreliability of people's recollections about what they ate, and the other is that just because someone ate something doesn't mean they absorbed it."

However, he said, the group studied was unique in that they were unusually healthy for their age. The results might be different in a less healthy group of seniors. Prior research, for example, looked at giving people with Alzheimer's omega-3 fatty acid supplements and found it didn't help.

The researchers noted that because their study was observational, meaning they found an association between certain nutrients and brain characteristics rather than showing cause-and-effect, it's too soon to tell everyone to start taking a vitamin containing B, C, D and E.

In addition, another variable is that older people who eat lots of foods containing those nutrients may have difficulty absorbing them.

Even so, the study suggests it makes good sense to limit trans fats, which are often found in fried foods, doughnuts, pastries, pizza dough, cookies, crackers and stick margarines and shortenings, and to eat lots of fruits, vegetables and fatty fish.

"The question is: Do people need to eat healthier foods, or do they need to stay away from unhealthy foods? It looks like you need to do both. Eat more healthy foods and stay away from unhealthy foods," Bowman said.

Now, a prosthetic device to help the blind see

2011-12-26T07:46:00.000-08:00

London: Scientists have developed a new prosthetic device that sends images directly to the brain, a technology they say could be used to help blind humans in less than a decade.

The device, which was developed by a team at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University and tested on animals, takes information from the outside world and decodes it into a pattern that the brain can "read" as an image.

Neuroscientist Sheila Nirenberg, who led the research, explained that the key was converting the data into patterns of electrical activity for the brain to process.

What's more, Nirenberg said, it could be used to help blind humans in less than a decade, the Daily Mail reported.

She said: "I study how the brain uses patterns of electrical activity to see, to hear, to reach for an object.

"I've been starting to use what we've learned about these patterns of electricity to develop prosthetic devices."

Prof Nirenberg explained that if a person has a retinal disease, there's very little that can be done for them, with drug treatments only effective on a small number of sufferers.

There are prosthetic devices, but they only allow patients to see simple images, mainly just outlines.

But the new device is something "that could make a difference", Prof Nirenberg explained at a seminar in San Diego recently.

She told the audience that the retina contains circuits that process images, but that these circuits can die from disease.

The device she's pioneered "mimics the action of the front end circuitry of the retina", enabling images to be fired to the brain once more.

So far it's only been tested on mice, but when asked if it could be adapted for humans in 10 years, she replied: "I'm hoping less."

Understanding the Brain: Research Could Help Paralyzed Patients

2011-12-26T07:42:00.000-08:00

Neuroscience has come a long way since the days of Aristotle, who thought that the main function of the brain was to cool the blood. In the 18th century we learned that externally applied electricity could propagate within neurons; in the 19th century we found out that the cerebral hemispheres of rabbits and monkeys had underlying electrical activity; in the early 20th century the first human electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded; and less than a decade into the 21st century we already had consumer-based EEG products. Scientists have developed sophisticated methods to read, amplify, and understand neuronal activity in the brain, but complex technical challenges remain. Each cubic millimeter of brain tissue can contain up to 100,000 neurons, so even the most sensitive and miniscule of electrode sensors is still "listening" to hundreds or thousands of often distinct signals.
The field may have just become more precise because scientists at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences have developed "detailed mathematical models revealing the connection between nerve cell activity and the electrical signal recorded by an electrode." Reported this month in Neuron, the research focused on the spatial distribution of a specific type of low frequency signal called the low field potential (LFP) and the results are summarized here:

The size of the generating region depends on the neuron morphology, the synapse distribution, and the correlation in synaptic activity. For uncorrelated activity, the LFP represents cells in a small region (within a radius of a few hundred micrometers). If the LFP contributions from different cells are correlated, the size of the generating region is determined by the spatial extent of the correlated activity.

In terms of applications, the press release discusses diseases and disorders for which this enhanced model may prove useful:

Better understanding of the electrical brain signals may directly influence diagnosing and treatment of illnesses such as epilepsy.

"Electrodes are already being used to measure brain cell activity related to seizures in epilepsy patients, as well as planning surgical procedures. In the future, LFP signals measured by implanted electrodes could detect an impending epilepsy seizure and stop it by injecting a suitable electrical current," Einevoll says.

"A similar technique is being used on many Parkinson's patients, who have had electrodes surgically implanted to prevent trembling," researcher Klas Pettersen at UMB adds.
Einevoll and Pettersen also outline treatment of patients paralysed by spinal cord fracture as another potential area where the method can be used.

"When a patient is paralysed, nerve cells in the cerebral cortex continue to send out signals, but the signals do not reach the muscles, and the patient is thus unable to move arms or legs. By monitoring the right nerve cells and forwarding these signals to for example a robot arm, the patient may be able to steer by his or her thoughts alone," Einevoll says.

'Rare' Brain Disorder May Be More Common Than Thought, Say Mayo Clinic Scientists

2011-12-26T07:40:00.001-08:00

JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Dec 25, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) --A global team of neuroscientists, led by researchers at Mayo Clinic in Florida, have found the gene responsible for a brain disorder that may be much more common than once believed. In the Dec. 25 online issue of Nature Genetics, the researchers say they identified 14 different mutations in the gene CSF1R that lead to development of hereditary diffuse leukoencephalopathy with spheroids (HDLS). This is a devastating disorder of the brain's white matter that leads to death between ages 40 and 50. People who inherit the abnormal gene always develop HDLS.

The finding is important because the researchers suspect that HDLS is more common than once thought. According to the study's senior investigator, neurologist Zbigniew Wszolek, M.D., a significant number of people who tested positive for the abnormal gene in this study had been diagnosed with a wide range of other conditions. These individuals were related to a patient known to have HDLS, and so their genes were also examined.

"Because the symptoms of HDLS vary so widely -- everything from behavior and personality changes to seizures and movement problems -- these patients were misdiagnosed as having either schizophrenia, epilepsy, frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, stroke, or other disorders," says Dr. Wszolek. "Many of these patients were therefore treated with drugs that offered only toxic side effects.

"Given this finding, we may soon have a blood test that can help doctors diagnose HDLS, and I predict we will find it is much more common than anyone could have imagined," he says.

Dr. Wszolek is internationally known for his long-term effort to bring together researchers from around the world to help find cases of rare brain disorders and discover their genetic roots.

Dr. Wszolek's interest in HDLS began when a severely disabled patient came to see him in 1995 and mentioned that other members of his family were affected. He was able to definitively diagnose the disease upon autopsy of the patient because of changes in the white matter. Until then, only one family in Sweden had been diagnosed with HDLS.

Dr. Wszolek began to search for other cases, and his Mayo Clinic colleague, Dennis Dickson, M.D., a pathologist, recalled seeing such changes in a brain while he was in training. Dr. Dickson located two more cases in Florida and Michigan, and Dr. Wszolek began to talk about HDLS at every research presentation he made throughout the world. He soon had brain samples from Norway, the United Kingdom, and Canada, and from different areas in the U.S. He and his team of investigators and collaborators have since published numerous studies describing the disorder and have held five international meetings on HDLS.

In this study, which included 38 researchers from 12 institutions in five countries, the study's first author, Rosa Rademakers, Ph.D., led the effort to find the gene responsible for HDLS. Her laboratory studied DNA samples from 14 families in which at least one member was diagnosed with HDLS and compared these with samples from more than 2,000 disease-free participants. The gene was ultimately found using a combination of traditional genetic linkage studies and recently developed state-of-the art sequencing methods. Most family members studied -- who were found to have HDLS gene mutations -- were not diagnosed with the disease, but with something else, thus emphasizing the notion that HDLS is an underdiagnosed disorder.

The CSF1R protein is an important receptor in the brain that is primarily present in microglia, a type of immune cells. "We identified a different CSF1R mutation in every HDLS family that we studied," says Dr. Rademakers. "All mutations are located in the kinase domain of CSF1R which is critical for its activity, suggesting that these mutations may lead to deficient microglia activity. How this leads to the loss of brain cells in HDLS patients is not yet understood, but we now have an important lead to study."

"With no other disease have we found so many affected families so quickly," says Dr. Wszolek. "That tells me this disease is not rare, but quite common."

He adds, "It is fantastic that you can start an investigation with a single case and end up, with the help of many hands, in what we believe to be a world-class gene discovery."

The study was funded by a Mayo benefactor and the Mayo Foundation. Additionally, Mayo Clinic in Florida is a Morris K. Udall Parkinson's Disease Research Center of Excellence supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

About Mayo Clinic

Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit worldwide leader in medical care, research, and education for people from all walks of life. For more information, visit www.mayoclinic.org/about/ and www.mayoclinic.org/news .

SOURCE: Mayo Clinic

  
        Mayo Clinic 
        Emily Hiatt 
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Less meal may save brain from aging

2011-12-26T07:37:00.001-08:00

Rome: Eating less may keep the mind young, according to Italian scientists who say they have discovered the molecular process by which a strict diet may save the brain from the ravages of age.
The research, published in the US journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, is based on a study of mice that were fed a diet of about 70 per cent of the food they normally consumed. Scientists found the calorie-restricted diet triggered a protein molecule, CREB1 that activates a host of genes linked to longevity and good brain function.
“Our hope is to find a way to activate CREB1, for example through new drugs, so to keep the brain young without the need of a strict diet”, said lead author Giovambattista Pani, researcher at the Institute of General Pathology, Faculty of Medicine at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Rome.
Researchers have previously discovered that mice on diets showed better cognitive abilities and memory, were less aggressive, and tended to avoid or delay Alzheimer’s disease. But they have not known exactly why. CREB1 is known to regulate important brain functions such as memory, learning and anxiety control, and its activity is reduced or physiologically compromised by ageing, said the study.
Mice that were genetically altered to lack CREB1 showed none of the same memory benefits if they were on a low-calorie diet as mice that had the molecule, and showed the same brain disabilities as mice that were overfed. Thus, our findings identify for the first time an important mediator of the effects of diet on the brain, Pani said. This discovery has important implications to develop future therapies to keep our brain young and prevent brain degeneration and the ageing process.
According to Marc Gordon, chief of neurology at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, New York, the findings could shed new light on why some people who are obese in middle age encounter cognitive problems later in life. Mid-life obesity has been associated with late-life dementia. However, the physiological basis for this association remains unclear,’ said Gordon, who was not part of the study.
These investigators have studied the effects of limiting caloric intake in mice, and have identified a biochemical pathway that may mediate at least some of the brain’s responses to dietary restriction

Organ donation to immortalise brain-dead college student

2011-12-26T07:34:00.000-08:00

Swarna suffered brain injury after fall from college terrace
Swarna Jaswant, 22, will continue to live even after her death. This second year student of Vogue Institute of Technology, Doddaballapur, was declared brain-dead on December 23 at Columbia Asia Hospital, after a fall from the college terrace.

Swarna’s parents have decided to donate her organs after doctors at the hospital found that she failed to respond to brain stem reflexes.

Swarna had a fatal fall on December 14, while walking on the college terrace. She slipped and fell on the glass roof, landing on her head. The girl suffered a brain stem injury and a deep cut on her left thigh. Doctors at the hospital said since Swarna had landed on her head, her chances of recovery were very minimal.

“Following her brain scan, we found that there was severe bleeding in her brain stem, which had a direct link to her heart and lungs and she was put on a ventilator.

On December 22, she did not respond to light reflexes, which is one of the conditions to declare her brain-dead,” said Dr R Chinnadurai, intensivist at the hospital.

The doctor said they counselled Swarna’s parents, who readily agreed for organ donation.

Her mother said she was happy that her daughter would live through someone else. Swarna’s two corneas, two kidneys, liver and heart valves will be transplanted to six recipients.
Following Swarna’s comatose state after the fall, her classmates and parents had staged a protest in the college, but the college authorities did not respond.

“I owe her a doughnut,” is what Meghana Reddy had to say about her best friend.

“Swarna was fond of sugar doughnuts and she had asked me to bring them from my mother’s bakery. This was the last conversation I had with her. She wanted to be a designer and travel the world, she never ever fought with anyone,”said a tearful Meghana.
Swarna’s classmates have stopped attending classes ever since the incident and are helping her parents raise funds for her treatment.

Anand Reddy, the parent of one of the students, said the college authorities were least bothered about the incident.

“The chairman is absconding and we even tried to file an FIR in the police station. If Swarna’s family wants to pursue the case, we will be with them,” he said.

Swarna is survived by her father Jaswant, mother Hemalatha and elder brother Swaroop, who are natives of Mangalore.

Better Memory Associated With Larger Posterior Brain Hippocampus

2011-12-25T07:25:00.000-08:00

Scientists have revealed that the sizes of the posterior and anterior segments of the hippocampus could predict individual's ability to remember past events. Hippocampus is an important brain structure associated with recollection memory.

They found that a larger posterior hippocampus and a smaller anterior hippocampus were associated with better recollection.

Although research has generally linked smaller hippocampi with worse recollection in neuropsychological patients and during aging, this relationship has not held up among healthy young adults.

"There is some evidence that extensive spatial memory acquisition leads to enlargement of the posterior hippocampus and a decrease in the anterior hippocampus," explained lead study author, Dr. Jordan Poppenk who conducted the study at Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute.

"This suggested to us that the crucial predictor of individual differences in recollection ability might not be the overall size of the hippocampus but the separate contributions of the posterior and anterior segments of the hippocampus," he said.

Dr. Poppenk and co-author Dr. Morris Moscovitch analysed high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging brain scans of healthy adults who had participated in recollection memory tests.

The result showed that better recollection was linked with a larger posterior hippocampus and a smaller anterior hippocampus.

The overall size of the hippocampus did not predict recollection, as larger posterior hippocampi were offset by smaller anterior hippocampi.

The researchers went on to show that the link between the posterior hippocampus and recollection depended on interactions with other parts of the brain between the times that memories were learned and retrieved, particularly regions involved in perception which form the basis of recollected experience.
"Our results show for the first time that the size of the posterior hippocampus, especially when expressed as a ratio to the size of the anterior hippocampus, reliably predicts recollection in healthy adults," Dr. Poppenk stated.

"This finding explains the longstanding failure to correlate the overall size of the hippocampus with memory.

"We also provide evidence that it is the functional connections, possibly related to memory consolidation, between the posterior hippocampus and other parts of the brain that may underlie enhanced memory recollection," he added.

Habit Formation Linked to 'Gateway' to Brain Cells

2011-12-25T07:16:00.001-08:00

A new study has revealed that key receptors on brain cells that function like 'gateways' are essential to enable habit formation.

Research showed that NMDA receptors on dopamine neurons in the brain's basal ganglia function like gateways to the brain cells, letting in electrically charged ions to increase the activity and communication of neurons.

Their pivotal role reminded neuroscientist Dr. Lei Phillip Wang of a computer's central processing unit.

"The NMDA receptor is a commander, which is why it's called a master switch for brain cell connectivity," said Wang, the study's first author.

To determine their role in habit formation, GHSU researchers used a genetic trick to selectively disable the NMDA receptors on dopamine neurons and found, for example, mice could be trained to push a lever for food without it becoming an automatic response.

Dopamine is a chemical that helps brain cells in communication.

If they were full, they would not push the lever. But just as humans cannot refrain from flipping a light switch during a power outage, satiated mice with receptors could not pass up the lever.

When they compared the firing of the dopamine neurons in regular versus the mutant mouse, they found a dramatic spike in response to a cue that signals food in the normal mouse and a significantly dampened one in the mutant, Wang said.

"We think this reduced response is probably sufficient for other types of learning, but not for habit learning," he said.

The finding that the receptors are critical to turning learned behaviour into a habit provides new direction for therapy to better treat diseases such as Parkinson's, which in addition to the hallmark shaking, causes the loss of some old habits and impedes the ability to make new ones.

It also opens the door to speeding up the process of forming good habits and, possibly, selectively removing bad ones such as drug addiction or smoking since the same circuits are seemingly involved in both.

"Dopamine neurons regulate circuits all over the brain but they need to be regulated too," said Dr. Joe Z. Tsien, Co-Director of the Brain and Behavior Discovery Institute at Georgia Health Sciences University.

"The questions become how and whether regulation of dopamine neurons is important. Our study shows it's important and it's through the NMDA receptors," Tsien added.

Tumor removed, life embraced: SCSU instructor's survival strengthens outlook

2011-12-25T07:12:00.001-08:00

When he was diagnosed with Marfan syndrome at age 15, Kristian Twombly knew he’d eventually need heart surgery.
The genetic defect that causes him to have elongated fingers and limbs also caused his heart valves to flap loosely rather than close properly. He put off surgery until his mid-30s, and in August 2009 the St. Cloud State University music professor had mechanical valves installed during open heart surgery.
That fixed one problem that Twombly had carried with him from his youth. But he continued to have migraine headaches that he remembered first experiencing in his 10th-grade English class.
Admittedly not a fan of visiting the doctor, Twombly suffered through the headaches with ibuprofen and aspirin. Then it wasn’t just the headaches and the blurred vision that came with each episode.
“Since heart surgery, I noticed that I would have a migraine headache, and while this visual thing was happening, my right foot would go numb,” he said. “Not like pins-and-needles numb. I could move it, but I just couldn’t feel it.”
He first thought it was one of the many odd side effects he had been experiencing after coming off the heart/lung machine. His heart condition prevented him from taking the drug routinely prescribed for migraines, so his physician decided to rule out other causes of the headaches before turning to a different medication.
That led to an MRI in February — “Just a routine brain MRI,” he recalls.
Afterward, he was waiting in the lobby at the Center for Diagnostic Imaging, waiting for the packet of pictures that he would take back to his physician. After an unusually long wait, a nurse asked him to come back and see the doctor. He recalls clearly what happened next and what the doctor said.
“Well, it’s been there for about 20 years we think, and it’s sitting right on top of your head. And we’ve taken the liberty of calling a neurosurgeon and setting an appointment with a neurosurgeon. We’ll just take you up right now. Have you eaten anything today?”
Just 18 months after open heart surgery, Twombly again was facing a potentially life-altering procedure. He had a baseball-sized brain tumor that had been growing in his head since his grade-school days. St. Cloud neurosurgeon Dr. Gregory Sherr removed the tumor in March, and Twombly has emerged with little, if any, lasting effects of the surgery.
The heart surgery caused him to reassess what was important in life, he said. He had been reluctant to take out a loan to buy a car or a house because he thought the Marfan syndrome would kill him before he could pay off those loans. The heart surgery made him grow up a bit, he confesses. The brain surgery 18 months later only confirmed those feelings.
“In many ways, it was similarly life-changing. My girlfriend has three kids. We went through Thanksgiving and Christmas last year together. But it was very important to me that we, that WE, cook Thanksgiving and that WE have Christmas together,” he said. “My commitment to family and to life in general and to improving myself and to being a positive influence on the world is, if not redoubled, certainly is a huge priority to me.”
Critical stage
Sherr got the call from a radiologist he knows who works downstairs in the building where Sherr works.
You won’t believe it, Sherr was told. This guy is walking around with a baseball-sized tumor in his head. Can I send him right up?
“My initial impression once I saw the pictures was that this was a slow-growing lesion, 20 years maybe,” Sherr said in an email interview.
Twombly’s brain had dealt with the lesion long enough and now the growth was “pissing his brain off,” Sherr said. It had reached a critical stage.
“I have seen and operated on bigger, so it didn’t surprise me,” Sherr said of the tumor. “But it was located right within and pressing on the area of the left brain that controls his right side, arm and leg, a dangerous location for surgery.”
On the midline of the brain is one of its most essential veins, and the tumor likely began along that wall, Sherr said. That presented another challenge: how to take it out without injuring that critical vein. If that vein is injured, a person can die within minutes.
What’s next?
Heidi Perreault was studying at her Zimmerman home when she received a text message from her boyfriend.
It was bad news. That’s all Twombly’s message said.
I think I have a brain tumor, he replied.
“It was good that we now had an idea what it was,” Perreault said during a recent interview, “but it was scary having something in his brain.”
Still, questions remained. How do we get it out? What are the possible negative outcomes of operating on the brain? Will he be the same Kristian Twombly after the surgery that he is now?
Because the tumor was entwined with the tissues that control his right-side movement, Sherr needed to find a path to the tumor and a path to getting it out.
“We knew we would have to use functional and diffusion tensor imaging MRI sequences to accurately discover the areas around the tumor that were functional and find a path into the tumor,” Sherr said.
Those new types of MRIs “are just being adopted,” he said, and both St. Cloud Hospital and CDI have recently acquired the expensive technologies. They allow the surgeon to see the brain in 3-D, to identify where the tumor is and where the vital brain tissues are that control movement.
Twombly’s confidence in Sherr, whom he jokingly calls Dr. Sure Of Himself, made it easier for him to decide that he could have his brain surgery in St. Cloud rather than at the Mayo Clinic where he had his heart surgery.
“It was really sort of affirming in that regard,” Twombly said. “There was no question that he was going to be able to do it and that, yeah, I could have gone to the Mayo where I had my heart surgery. I had no worries about doing it in St. Cloud, and I’m glad that I did.”
Friend feels concern
Mark Springer taught the History of Rock ’n’ Roll class at St. Cloud State before Twombly was hired about six years ago. Twombly took over teaching that class and became close friends with Springer, who is interim dean of the university’s College of Liberal Arts.
Springer and Twombly crossed a few items off Twombly’s “bucket list” before the 2009 heart surgery. Later, Springer was one of a handful of people in a tight-knit circle of music friends who would learn about the brain tumor.
Springer’s thoughts immediately turned to a teacher he once had who was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died soon after.
“My first reaction honestly was that I was concerned that he was a dead man walking,” Springer said. “That’s just from my own experience. It heightened my concern dramatically. And then I wanted to know where it was and could they operate?”
Twombly scheduled the surgery for the Friday before spring break, partly because he wanted to limit the number of days of work he would miss.
“There was more tumor than cyst,” Sherr said. “It was a meticulous and difficult tumor to remove.”
The surgery took several hours, during which doctors used a microscope to guide their moves.
Springer was in South Africa on a study-abroad trip during his friend’s surgery.
“That was tough,” he said. “It was hard to be at a distance knowing that our friend was going through this.”
The postsurgery concerns soon would turn to the quality of life that Twombly would have once he recovered.
New perspective
“Every day I am amazed that he is exactly what I knew before the surgery,” Perreault said. “It is humbling that humans have the ability to remove from his brain what was inside there and return him to me as he was before, joking around with us and loving us. It’s truly amazing.”
About the only lasting effect of the surgery is that Twombly has a void, or space, in his brain where the tumor used to be. The brain doesn’t grow or expand to fill that space, and Twombly and his friends had some fun with that.
There was a contest to decide what best to put in the void where the tumor once resided.
Suggestions ranged from a golf ball to some new electronic musical component to a Wi-Fi hot spot.
Sherr told him the void actually would fill with a fluid mixture of sugars and some proteins.
“I was drinking a lot of apple juice at the time,” Twombly said, “so I joked that it was going to be filled with apple juice.”
Reality is that he’ll have to have regular brain scans to see if the tumor, which wasn’t cancerous, grows back. Twombly believes his heart condition and Marfan syndrome pose bigger threats down the road than his brain.
Trained as a composer, he writes music but also loves to perform. He admits that he could probably have made due with some loss of motor control without it having a severe impact on his research or his teaching.
Springer also is amazed at the fact that Twombly came out of brain surgery the same person.
“I was surprised. I figured there would be some lasting effect,” Springer said. “Even if it was that they couldn’t take care of the migraines. But Kristian is certainly no different than he was before he went in. He may be harboring this inside, but it hasn’t changed his spirit.”
But Twombly has changed. His initial Marfan’s diagnosis came with a life expectancy of about 40 years. That’s why he had such a nonchalant attitude about the future and how much there was going to be for himself.
Medical advances have extended that life expectancy for those with Marfan’s. And Perreault and her three children also have given Twombly greater perspective on life and what’s important.
“I might have been a little bit more living in the instant before the surgeries,” he said. “It’s a tough thing to grapple with. But the sort of double whammy of these things coming together and the potential severity, it’s a lot to consider. But I can say this. At no point have I sat down and said, ‘Why me?’ ”
“I think he’s done a better job putting importance on the things that matter to him and less time sweating the smaller things,” Perreault said.
And to his friends, he’s a unique example of the resilience of the human spirit.
“To see friend go through this once, and then to see it twice? It’s really hard,” Springer said. “But I’m just amazed at modern medicine and the ability that these amazing doctors have. And also the power of the human spirit, not only to see it in Kristian and his recovery, but in his friends and family. Just to see that on display is amazing. You read about it. You know, people will read your paper and say, ‘That’s nice.’ But until you live it and see it ...”
Editor’s note: Twombly is a member of the Opinion Pages’ Times Writers Group.

Why eating less helps brain to stay young

2011-12-25T07:07:00.002-08:00

Eating less activates a molecule for ‘brain longevity’ and thus helps the brain stay young, a new study has revealed.

Many studies suggest that obesity is bad for our brain, slows it down, causes early brain aging, making it susceptible to diseases typical of older people as the Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. In contrast, caloric restriction keeps the brain young.

A team of Italian researchers at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Rome have discovered that this molecule, called CREB1, is triggered by ‘caloric restriction’ (low caloric diet) in the brain of mice. They found that CREB1 activates many genes linked to longevity and to the proper functioning of the brain.

CREB1 mediates the beneficial effects of the diet on the brain by turning on another group of molecules linked to longevity, the ‘sirtuins’.

This finding is consistent with the fact that CREB1 is known to regulate important brain functions as memory, learning and anxiety control, and its activity is reduced or physiologically compromised by aging.

Moreover, Italian researchers have discovered that the action of CREB1 can be dramatically increased by simply reducing caloric intake, and have shown that CREB is absolutely essential to make caloric restriction work on the brain. In fact, if mice lack CREB1 the benefits of caloric restriction on the brain (improving memory, etc.) disappear.

So the animals without CREB1 show the same brain disabilities typical of overfed and/or old animals.

“Thus, our findings identify for the first time an important mediator of the effects of diet on the brain,” Dr Giovambattista Pani, lead researcher.

“This discovery has important implications to develop future therapies to keep our brain young and prevent brain degeneration and the aging process. In addition, our study shed light on the correlation among metabolic diseases as diabetes and obesity and the decline in cognitive activities.”

“Our hope is to find a way to activate CREB1, for example through new drugs, so to keep the brain young without the need of a strict diet,” Dr Pani added.

Caloric restriction means the animals can only eat up to 70 percent of the food they consume normally, and is a known experimental way to extend life, as seen in many experimental models.

Advances in 'Brain Reading'

2011-12-25T07:07:00.000-08:00

Researchers are using functional MRI brain scans to observe brain signal changes that take place during mental activity at UCLA's Laboratory of Integrative Neuroimaging Technology.

They then employ computerized machine learning (ML) methods to study these patterns and identify the cognitive state — or sometimes the thought process — of human subjects. The technique is called "brain reading" or "brain decoding."

In a new study, the UCLA research team describes several crucial advances in this field, using fMRI and machine learning methods to perform "brain reading" on smokers experiencing nicotine cravings.

The research, presented last week at the Neural Information Processing Systems' Machine Learning and Interpretation in Neuroimaging workshop in Spain, was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which is interested in using these method to help people control drug cravings.

In this study on addiction and cravings, the team classified data taken from cigarette smokers who were scanned while watching videos meant to induce nicotine cravings. The aim was to understand in detail which regions of the brain and which neural networks are responsible for resisting nicotine addiction specifically, and cravings in general, said Dr. Ariana Anderson, a postdoctoral fellow in the Integrative Neuroimaging Technology lab and the study's lead author.

"We are interested in exploring the relationships between structure and function in the human brain, particularly as related to higher-level cognition, such as mental imagery," Anderson said. "The lab is engaged in the active exploration of modern data-analysis approaches, such as machine learning, with special attention to methods that reveal systems-level neural organization."

For the study, smokers sometimes watched videos meant to induce cravings, sometimes watched "neutral" videos and at sometimes watched no video at all. They were instructed to attempt to fight nicotine cravings when they arose.

The data from fMRI scans taken of the study participants was then analyzed. Traditional machine learning methods were augmented by Markov processes, which use past history to predict future states. By measuring the brain networks active over time during the scans, the resulting machine learning algorithms were able to anticipate changes in subjects' underlying neurocognitive structure, predicting with a high degree of accuracy (90 percent for some of the models tested) what they were watching and, as far as cravings were concerned, how they were reacting to what they viewed.

"We detected whether people were watching and resisting cravings, indulging in them, or watching videos that were unrelated to smoking or cravings," said Anderson, who completed her Ph.D. in statistics at UCLA. "Essentially, we were predicting and detecting what kind of videos people were watching and whether they were resisting their cravings."

In essence, the algorithm was able to complete or "predict" the subjects' mental states and thought processes in much the same way that Internet search engines or texting programs on cell phones anticipate and complete a sentence or request before the user is finished typing. And this machine learning method based on Markov processes demonstrated a large improvement in accuracy over traditional approaches, the researchers said.

Machine learning methods, in general, create a "decision layer" — essentially a boundary separating the different classes one needs to distinguish. For example, values on one side of the boundary might indicate that a subject believes various test statements and, on the other, that a subject disbelieves these statements. Researchers have found they can detect these believe–disbelieve differences with high accuracy, in effect creating a lie detector. An innovation described in the new study is a means of making these boundaries interpretable by neuroscientists, rather than an often obscure boundary created by more traditional methods, like support vector machine learning.

"In our study, these boundaries are designed to reflect the contributed activity of a variety of brain sub-systems or networks whose functions are identifiable — for example, a visual network, an emotional-regulation network or a conflict-monitoring network," said study co-author Mark S. Cohen, a professor of neurology, psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA's Staglin Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and a researcher at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.

"By projecting our problem of isolating specific networks associated with cravings into the domain of neurology, the technique does more than classify brain states — it actually helps us to better understand the way the brain resists cravings," added Cohen, who also directs UCLA's Neuroengineering Training Program.

Remarkably, by placing this problem into neurological terms, the decoding process becomes significantly more reliable and accurate, the researchers said. This is especially significant, they said, because it is unusual to use prior outcomes and states in order to inform the machine learning algorithms, and it is particularly challenging in the brain because so much is unknown about how the brain works.

Machine learning typically involves two steps: a "training phase" in which the computer evaluates a set of known outcomes — say, a bunch of trials in which a subject indicated belief or disbelief — and a second, "prediction" phase in which the computer builds a boundary based on that knowledge.

In future research, the neuroscientists said, they will be using these machine learning methods in a biofeedback context, showing subjects real-time brain readouts to let them know when they are experiencing cravings and how intense those cravings are, in the hopes of training them to control and suppress those cravings.

But since this clearly changes the process and cognitive state for the subject, the researchers said, they may face special challenges in trying to decode a "moving target" and in separating the "training" phase from the "prediction" phase.

Woman is cured of Tourette's by electrodes in the brain

2011-12-25T07:04:00.001-08:00

A woman suffering from Tourette's syndrome has said she is cured after having electrodes implanted in her brain as part of a trial.

Jayne Bargent said the treatment worked within an hour of the electrodes being switched on, six weeks after she underwent surgery to have them implanted and a pacemaker placed in her chest to provide the power. Until the experimental technique was tried this week, Ms Bargent couldn't read, drive or walk properly because of the constant convulsive twitches caused by the condition.

"It is absolutely amazing," she said. "This is going to give me my life back. I've had three years of gradually getting worse and they press a few little buttons and everything improves dramatically." She said the condition had been so debilitating that food would fall out of her mouth as she tried to eat.

The trial is being conducted by the UCL National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery where doctors believe the impulses from the electrodes dampen down disorganised and mistaken messages passing through the brain that cause the convulsions. The technique is already used for conditions such as Parkinson's.
Tom Foltynie, a consultant neurologist, said the speed of response to the treatment experienced by Ms Bargent was unusual: "We generally see effects over days rather than minutes."

Scientists find a gene that controls memory formation

2011-12-25T07:03:00.000-08:00

Washington: A team led by an Indian-origin neuroscientist has found a gene that "turns on" when memories are stored in the brain, a discovery they believe could help pinpoint the exact locations of memories in the brain.

It`s known that when one witnesses a new event, the brain encodes a memory of it by altering the connections between neurons. This needs turning on many genes in those neurons.

Now, neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have identified a gene, called Npas4, which is very active in the hippocampus -- a brain structure known to be critical in forming long-term memories.

The findings, described in the journal Science, would be a breakthrough in pinpointing the exact locations of memories in the brain and might open up new avenues for altering or even creating memory, the researchers said.

"We think of Npas4 as the initial trigger that comes on, and then in turn, in the right spot in the brain, it activates all these other downstream targets," Kartik Ramamoorthi, a MIT graduate student who led the study, said in a statement.

"Eventually they are going to modify synapses in a way that`s likely changing synaptic inhibition or some other process that we are trying to figure out," Ramamoorthi said.

The scientists, who carried out their research on mice, found that Npas4 turns on a series of other genes that modify the brain`s internal wiring by adjusting the strength of synapses, or connections between neurons.

"This is a gene that can connect from experience to the eventual changing of the circuit," said Yingxi Lin, a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT where the study was carried out.

The researchers gave mice mild electric shock when they enter a specific chamber. Within minutes, the mice learn to fear the chamber and the next time they enter it, they freeze.
The researchers found that Npas4 is turned on very early during this conditioning. "This sets Npas4 apart from many other activity-regulated genes. A lot of them are ubiquitously induced by all these different kinds of stimulations; they are not really learning-specific," Lin said.

So far, the researchers have identified only a few of the genes regulated by Npas4, but they suspect there could be hundreds more. The experiments showed that Npas4 binds to the activation sites of specific genes and directs an enzyme called RNA polymerase II to start copying them.

When the researchers knocked out the gene for Npas4, they found that mice could not remember their fearful conditioning.

They also found that this effect could be produced by knocking out the gene in the CA3 region of the hippocampus. Knocking it out in other parts of the hippocampus, however, had no effect.

Though they focused on contextual fear conditioning, the researchers believe that Npas4 will also prove critical for other types of learning.

"We`re hunting for the memory, and we think we can use Npas4 to mark where it is," Ramamoorthi said.

"That`s because it`s turned on specifically and now we can label the cells and maybe fish out where in the brain the memory is sitting."