ScienceDaily — In Alzheimer’s disease, the problem is beta-amyloid, a protein that accumulates in the brain and causes nerve cells to weaken and die. Drugs designed to eliminate plaques made of beta-amyloid have a fatal problem: they need to enter the brain and remove the plaques without attacking healthy brain cells. New research from the laboratory of Nobel Prize winner Paul Greengard, however, suggests that treatments modeled on the blockbuster cancer drug Gleevec could be the solution. Read article
Daily Telegraph – The research shows that mentally stimulating activities such as brain training games, crossword puzzles, reading and listening to the radio protect the brain from memory loss and slowing of thought. But later on, they exacerbate the speed at which conditions such as Alzheimer’s Disease take hold. Dr Robert Wilson, of Rush University Medical Centre in Chicago, said the benefits of an active mind may come at a cost later in life – although he did not know why. Read article
NY Times — At 18 months, Kyle Warren started taking a daily antipsychotic drug on the orders of a pediatrician trying to quell the boy’s severe temper tantrums. Thus began a troubled toddler’s journey from one doctor to another, from one diagnosis to another, involving even more drugs. Autism, bipolar disorder, hyperactivity, insomnia, oppositional defiant disorder. The boy’s daily pill regimen multiplied: the antipsychotic Risperdal, the antidepressant Prozac, two sleeping medicines and one for attention-deficit disorder. All by the time he was 3. Read article
Press TV – The US Army leadership needs to establish a new suicide prevention office to curb the record number of self-inflicted deaths among troops, a new report says. Officials failed to recognize disturbing trends and are often too distracted by planning the next military mission, the findings of an independent task force report ordered by Congress said.
The report found that more than 1,100 members of the armed forces killed themselves from 2005 to 2009. Experts studying the effects of prolonged war on the human psyche say repeated tours without sufficient time between deployments may be part of the problem. Read article
Daily Telegraph – Patients who undergo major hospital operations could be at greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, scientists believe. Tests carried out on mice have revealed changes in their brains, similar to those observed in humans with dementia, when the animals are operated on. The researchers suspect the same effect could occur in humans after surgical procedures and are now to start a new study to further explore the theory. Many doctors already suspect there may be a link between surgery and the onset of Alzheimer’s. Read article
Daily Telegraph – Doctors are trying to treat Alzheimer’s disease when its too late and the damage has already been done, an editorial in The Lancet has said. Efforts to identify patients earlier before memory starts to fade and damage to the brain become irreparable, might be a better approach to tackling the disease, the article author suggests. A series of drugs in development to treat the disease have failed along with others for multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease. Read article
ScienceDaily — Human umbilical cord blood cells (HUCB) used to treat cultured rat brain cells (astrocytes) deprived of oxygen appear to protect astrocytes from cell death after stroke-like damage, reports a team of researchers from the University of South Florida (USF) Department of Neurosurgery and Brain Repair. Read article
LA Times – By taking yearly tests and giving their brains to science after they die, members of religious orders help doctors understand more about the disease. Read article
BBC – A protein produced in cases of rheumatoid arthritis appears to protect against the development of Alzheimer’s disease, US scientists have said. In the Journal of Alzheimer’s Research study, mice with memory loss given the protein fared better in tests. A synthetic version of GM-CSF protein is already used as a cancer treatment. Read article
Wealth Daily – Eli Lilly is one of numerous drug companies, including Pfizer, Elan, Bristol-Myers Squibb and others, who are betting that stopping production of amyloid clumps in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients will slow the disease. … Others say the Alzheimer’s field has it backwards. Far from being harmful, amyloid is “actually a response to injury that the brain secretes to protect itself, like a scar,” argues Mark Smith, a neuroscientist at Case Western Reserve University. … If you recognize the name Mark Smith, that’s because Dr. Smith joined Anavex’s scientific advisory board in February 2009.
And that brings us to the good news… Read article
Scientific American – Two clinical trials of a potential Alzheimer’s drug were halted this week, highlighting circulating skepticism about the hypothesis that amyloid beta plaque is a major factor in the disease’s genesis. Read article
Reuters – Mind-altering drugs like LSD, ketamine or magic mushrooms could be combined with psychotherapy to treat people suffering from depression, compulsive disorders or chronic pain, Swiss scientists suggested on Wednesday. Research into the effects of psychedelics, used in the past in psychiatry, has been restricted in recent decades because of the negative connotations of drugs, but the scientists said more studies into their clinical potential were now justified. Read article
Nature – Those without siblings may not lack social skills after all. It is a widely held stereotype that children who grow up without brothers or sisters may be ‘oddballs’ or ‘misfits’. But new research undermines that notion — suggesting that any deficiency that does exist in only children’s social skills when they are young has disappeared by their teens. Read article
The Australian – BOYS are being segregated from the mainstream school system for behavioural and emotional disorders at about six times the rate of girls. A study by Macquarie University researchers has found a disturbing pattern suggesting specialist behaviour schools may act as a “school-to-prison pipeline”, in which students do not return to mainstream classes but enter juvenile justice centres. Read article
PhysOrg.com – Nearly 1 million children with fall birthdays may have been misdiagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, not because they have real behavior problems, but because they’re the youngest kids in their kindergarten class, researchers say. Read article
New Scientist – Why have the numbers of autism diagnoses ballooned in recent decades? Researchers have long claimed that changes to the way the condition is diagnosed are the main cause. But now a series of a studies have shown that diagnostic changes alone cannot account for the increase. They suggest that other causes, perhaps environmental factors, are also contributing to the rise in cases. Read article
NY Times – In 2003, a group of scientists and executives from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the drug and medical-imaging industries, universities and nonprofit groups joined in a project that experts say had no precedent: a collaborative effort to find the biological markers that show the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in the human brain. Now, the effort is bearing fruit with a wealth of recent scientific papers on the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s using methods like PET scans and tests of spinal fluid. More than 100 studies are under way to test drugs that might slow or stop the disease. Read article
LA Times – A Maryland medical group has started treating autistic children in South Florida with shots of a drug used for chemical castration, a therapy widely panned by mainstream experts. The group gives children the cancer drug Lupron to stop their bodies from making testosterone, saying the drug helps expel toxic mercury and quells aggressive or sexually explicit behavior by kids with excessive levels of the male hormone. Read article
ScienceDaily — There isn’t a lot of research that links early childhood test scores to earnings as an adult. But new research reveals a surprising finding: Students who learn more in kindergarten earn more as adults. They are also more successful overall. Read Article
New Scientist – Ten minutes in a brain scanner could be all it takes to diagnose autism. So says Christine Ecker at the Institute of Psychiatry, UK, who has developed software that identifies the anatomical signatures of the condition. Read article
Nature – Networks of human minds are taking citizen science to a new level, reports Eric Hand. The whole thing began by accident, says David Baker, a biochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle. It was 2005, and he and his colleagues had just unveiled Rosetta@home — one of those distributed-computing projects in which volunteers download a small piece of software and let their home computers do some extracurricular work when the machines would otherwise be idle. The downloaded program was devoted to the notoriously difficult problem of protein folding… Read article
NY Times – Researchers report that a spinal fluid test can be 100 percent accurate in identifying patients with significant memory loss who are on their way to developing Alzheimer’s disease. Although there has been increasing evidence of the value of this and other tests in finding signs of Alzheimer’s, the study, which will appear Tuesday in the Archives of Neurology, shows how accurate they can be. The new result is one of a number of remarkable recent findings about Alzheimer’s. Read article
Huffington Post – Four to five percent of the population is born without a capacity for empathy. It is a neurological lack. A psychopath may be a genius and become a multimillionaire, but he will never be able to understand empathetic values. In fact, because of the grandiosity of these personalities and consequent intense denial they have toward their shortcomings, they are arguably less capable of understanding empathy than a congenitally deaf person is of understanding music. Their minds are closed. Read article
New Scientist – IN A classic Monty Python moment, a chirpy, long-haired man on a crucifix urges others around him in a similar predicament to cheer up. Now neurologists have discovered what might be described as a “Life of Brian” brain mechanism that encourages us to look on the bright side of life – even when confronted by thoughts of mortality. Read article
Ynetnews – First national research of its kind reveals most common disorder among youth is depression, followed by attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Girls suffer more than boys; Jews more depressed than Arabs. One in eight Israeli teenagers suffer from a mental disorder requiring professional help, a new Health Ministry study reveals. The main risk factors for the development of such a disorder are living with a single parent and economic distress requiring welfare. Read article
