NY Times – Scientists who have studied a degenerative brain disease in athletes have found the same condition in combat veterans exposed to roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, concluding that such explosions injure the brain in ways strikingly similar to tackles and punches. The researchers also discovered what they believe is the mechanism by which explosions damage brain tissue and trigger the wasting disease, called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., by studying simulated explosions on mice. The animals developed evidence of the disease just two weeks after exposure to a single simulated blast, researchers found. Read article
Nature – European researchers have identified a gene that is linked to improved memory, but also to increased risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Dominique de Quervain of the University of Basel in Switzerland and his colleagues recruited around 700 healthy young volunteers, obtaining DNA samples from them to analyse the sequence of their PRKCA gene. This gene is one of many known to be involved in the formation of emotional memories, and encodes an enzyme called protein kinase C-?. The researchers then showed the participants a series of emotionally affecting photographs and shortly afterwards asked them to write down short descriptions of the images. Read article
NY Times – One day last summer, Anne and her husband, Miguel, took their 9-year-old son, Michael, to a Florida elementary school for the first day of what the family chose to call “summer camp.” For years, Anne and Miguel have struggled to understand their eldest son, an elegant boy with high-planed cheeks, wide eyes and curly light brown hair, whose periodic rages alternate with moments of chilly detachment. Michael’s eight-week program was, in reality, a highly structured psychological study — less summer camp than camp of last resort. Read article
AP — A deadly lead poisoning outbreak that began two years ago in northern Nigeria continues to claim young victims even today, an aid agency official said Thursday, while calling on the government to do more to protect those at risk. Ivan Gayton of Doctors Without Borders also criticized the government of oil-rich Nigeria for not taking the threat seriously, despite 4,000 children already being sickened by the outbreak linked to gold mining. Foreign aid groups have done much of the work to clean the villages affected in rural Zamfara state and provide care to the children, who likely will suffer long-term brain damage from their exposure to the lead. Read article
Reuters – Scientists who scanned the brains of men convicted of murder, rape and violent assaults have found the strongest evidence yet that psychopaths have structural abnormalities in their brains. The researchers, based at King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, said the differences in psychopaths’ brains mark them out even from other violent criminals with anti-social personality disorders (ASPD), and from healthy non-offenders. Read article
The Guardian – Prescriptions of Ritalin for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder have quadrupled in a decade, prompting fears it is being pushed on children at the expense of alternative treatments and without appreciation of long-term effects. Figures released by the NHS business services authority to the Liberal Democrat MP Tessa Munt reveal the number of prescriptions of methylphenidate hydrochloride, the generic name for Ritalin, rose in England from 158,000 in 1999 to 661,463 in 2010. Read article
Live Science – A prevalent understanding, particularly in the 1980s, was that boys and girls are born cognitively the same. It was the way parents and society treated them that made them different. Since then, a preponderance of research has called this belief into question. The majority of today’s psychologists agree that some of the differences exhibited by male and female brains are innate. Read article
ScienceDaily — While chlorpyrifos is no longer registered for household use in the US, it continues to be widely used around the world, as well as on many food and agricultural products throughout the US. Even low to moderate levels of exposure to the insecticide chlorpyrifos during pregnancy may lead to long-term, potentially irreversible changes in the brain structure of the child, according to a new brain imaging study … The changes in brain structure are consistent with cognitive deficits found in children exposed to this chemical. Read article
Daily Mail – Common anti-depressants could be doing patients more harm than good, according to researchers examined the impact of the medications on the whole body.
A team from McMaster University examined previous patient studies into the effects of anti-depressants and determined that the benefits of most anti-depressants compare poorly to the risks, which include premature death in elderly patients. Read article
Medical News Today – Findings released Friday showed that infant monkeys given vaccines officially recommended by the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) exhibited autism-like symptoms. Lead investigator Laura Hewitson of the University of Pittsburgh and colleagues presented study results at the International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR) in London. Safety studies of medicines are typically conducted in monkeys prior to use in humans, yet such basic research on the current childhood vaccination regimen has never before been done. The vaccines given were those recommended for U.S. infants in the 1990s, including several with the mercury preservative thimerosal and the Measles-Mumps-Rubella vaccine. Rates of autism spectrum disorder among children born in the 1990s surged dramatically, from about 1 in 5,000 to 1 in 150 children. Read article
The Independent – They already guide blind and disabled people; now dogs are to be trained to help people with dementia. The duties of these “guide dogs for the mind” will include reminding their owners to take medication, as well as encouraging them to eat, drink and sleep at regular intervals. The dementia dogs will be trained to respond to sound triggers in the home that prompt them to perform tasks. These could include delivering a bite-proof bag of medicine with a note inside reminding the patient to take it, or waking them up in the morning. Read article
A macroepigenetic approach to identify factors responsible for the autism epidemic in the United States
Clinical Epigenetics 2012, 4:6 doi:10.1186/1868-7083-4-6
Published: 10 April 2012
Authors: Renee Dufault, Walter J Lukiw, Raquel Crider, Roseanne Schnoll, David Wallinga and Richard Deth
Abstract:
The number of children ages 6 to 21 in the United States receiving special education services under the autism disability category increased 91 % between 2005 to 2010 while the number of children receiving special education services overall declined by 5 %. The demand for special education services continues to rise in disability categories associated with pervasive developmental disorders. Neurodevelopment can be adversely impacted when gene expression is altered by dietary transcription factors, such as zinc insufficiency or deficiency, or by exposure to toxic substances found in our environment, such as mercury or organophosphate pesticides. Read article
Yahoo! – A study’s found that alcohol can sharpen the mind. Daily Mail UK reports the American study has found that men who enjoy a relaxing drink are actually better at solving brain teasers than those who are stone cold sober. Read article
WSJ – Scientists are increasingly finding that depression and other psychological disorders can be as much diseases of the body as of the mind. People with long-term psychological stress, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder tend to develop earlier and more serious forms of physical illnesses that usually hit people in older age, such as stroke, dementia, heart disease and diabetes. Recent research points to what might be happening on the cellular level that could account for this. Read article
BBC – Baboons can recognise four-letter words on a computer screen, according to scientists in France. Researchers found the monkeys could tell the difference between actual words and nonsense letter combinations. After being trained, the baboons were able to make this distinction, despite not being capable of reading.
– Six Guinea baboons (Papio papio) at a research facility in France use touch screens to indicate whether they recognize a string of four letters as a word, in which case they press an oval on the screen, or a non-word, pressing a plus sign. Dr. Jonathan Grainger narrates. Rough Cut (no reporter narration).
BBC – People with Huntington’s disease, a debilitating brain condition, appear have a “protection” from cancer, according to a study in Sweden. Nearly 40 years of medical records showed patients with Huntington’s had half the normal expected risk of developing tumours. Researchers, writing in The Lancet Oncology, said the reason was unclear. Read article
Herald Sun – Dementia rates are set to double within the next 20 years while more Australians are expected to get cancer in 2010, a report says. The number of elderly dementia sufferers will jump to more than 450,000 by 2031, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimates. Read article
ScienceDaily — The ranking of a monkey within her social environment and the stress accompanying that status dramatically alters the expression of nearly 1,000 genes, a new scientific study reports. The research is the first to demonstrate a link between social status and genetic regulation in primates on a genome-wide scale, revealing a strong, plastic link between social environment and biology. Read article
LA Times – U.S. Air Force pilot Patrick Burke’s day started in the cockpit of a B-1 bomber near the Persian Gulf and proceeded across nine time zones as he ferried the aircraft home to South Dakota. Every four hours during the 19-hour flight, Burke swallowed a tablet of Dexedrine, the prescribed amphetamine known as “go pills.” After landing, he went out for dinner and drinks with a fellow crewman. They were driving back to Ellsworth Air Force Base when Burke began striking his friend in the head. Read article
The Atlantic – It’s conventional wisdom in business circles today that corporate directors should “maximize shareholder value.” Corporations supposedly exist to serve shareholders’ interests, and not (or at least, not directly) those of executives, employees, customers, or the community. However, this shareholder-value dogma begs a fundamental question. What, exactly, do shareholders value? Read Article
HealthDay News – Really, really liking yourself may give you the edge in your next job interview, a new study suggests. That’s because narcissists, known to be obnoxiously high on self-esteem, are better able to talk about and promote themselves, which projects confidence and expertise to interviewers, University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers explained. In their two-part study, narcissists scored much higher in a simulated job interview than equally qualified non-narcissists. Read Article
NewScientist – WHY US soldier Robert Bales killed 16 Afghan civilians last month remains a mystery, but his actions have revived a dispute over the use by US forces of an antimalarial drug that can cause psychiatric side effects. On 20 March – three days after the massacre – the army expedited a review of whether mefloquine was being prescribed properly. Mefloquine, sold under the trade name Lariam, was developed by the army to prevent malaria resistant to the previous treatment, chloroquine. In tests the drug caused psychiatric symptoms in nearly a third of cases, sometimes including depression and psychosis. Read Article
ScienceDaily — Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have shown in animal models that the loss of memory that comes with aging is not necessarily a permanent thing. n a new study published this week in an advance, online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Ron Davis, chair of the Department of Neuroscience at Scripps Florida, and Ayako Tonoki-Yamaguchi, a research associate in Davis’s lab, took a close look at memory and memory traces in the brains of both young and old fruit flies. Read article
Daily Mail – We know it has long been bad for your waistline. But fast food can also be bad for your mental health, according to a new study. Eating junk such as as hamburgers, hotdogs and pizza heightens your chance of developing depression. Read article
Daily Mail – David Beckham and Paul Gascoigne are just two of the 1.2 million British people who suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) which leaves those afflicted neurotically obsessed about things such as tidiness or cleanliness. A mental health organisation is now expanding research to see if a strain of bacteria may cause children to develop a particular condition with OCD-type symptoms. Read article
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