© StockphotoResearch in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease points to a possible new treatment that actually removes amyloid plaques from patients' brains.
A breakthrough discovery by scientists from the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, FL, may lead to a new treatment for Alzheimer's Disease that actually removes amyloid plaques - considered a hallmark of the disease - from patients' brains.
This discovery, published online in
The FASEB Journal, is based on the unexpected finding that when the brain's immune cells (microglia) are activated by the interleukin-6 protein (IL-6), they actually remove plaques instead of causing them or making them worse. The research was performed in a model of Alzheimer's disease established in mice.
The younger the child, the more likely the pain, says research led by an 11-year-old
Kids who play video games for more than an hour a day increase their chances of having wrist and finger pain, a new study has found.
The lead author of the study knows this all too well. Deniz Ince, who's 11 years old, got the idea to study joint pain among his classmates at Rossman Elementary in St. Louis, Mo., after noticing that his fingers ached while squeezing oranges. Deniz, an avid Wii player, wondered if his video game habit was the culprit.
With the help of his rheumatologist dad and researchers from New York University, the fifth-grader handed out questionnaires to 171 of his schoolmates who were 7 to 12 years old.
About 80 percent of them reported playing with game consoles (Xbox, PlayStation, Wii and the like) or hand-held devices (including iTouch, iPhone and PlayStation Portable). Roughly half of them said they used them less than an hour a day, about a third said they played one to two hours daily, 7 percent reported playing two to three hours a day and 6 percent reported playing more than three hours daily.
Epileptic seizures are the most dramatic and prominent aspect of the "alcohol withdrawal syndrome" that occurs when a person abruptly stops a long-term or chronic drinking habit.
Researchers have shown that the flow of calcium ions into brain cells via voltage-gated calcium channels plays an important role in the generation of alcohol withdrawal seizures, because blocking this flow suppresses these seizures. But do the changes in calcium currents contribute to alcohol withdrawal seizures or are they a consequence of the seizures?
Using a careful analysis of correlations between the course of alcohol withdrawal seizures and the expression of calcium currents, Georgetown University Medical Center researchers found that the enhancement of total calcium current density in pre-clinical animal studies occur prior to the onset of alcohol withdrawal seizures.
The research presented at 39th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience also shows that calcium currents remain enhanced during the period of seizure susceptibility, but return to control levels when the period of seizure susceptibility is over.
Claudia Wallis
FortuneFri, 16 Oct 2009 10:51 UTC
Research shows how genes and childhood experiences pave the road to substance abuse.
Why do some people get hooked on drugs and alcohol, while others can party hard and walk away? We tend to think it's a matter of willpower or moral fiber, but it has more to do with a roll of the genetic dice.
Large-scale studies of twins provide strong evidence that addiction ranks "among the most heritable of mental illnesses," says Dr. David Goldman, who heads the Laboratory of Neurogenetics at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
Of course, personal experience and social influences matter, too. Addiction researchers like Goldman have begun to pinpoint how specific experiences combine with genetic factors to slick the road to addiction.
Numerous genes have been linked to addiction, though fewer than a dozen have been strongly implicated.
© Mario Tama/Getty ImagesCurling up with a Kindle
Writing and reading - from newspapers to novels, academic reports to gossip magazines - are migrating ever faster to digital screens, like laptops, Kindles and cellphones. Traditional book publishers are putting out
"vooks," which place videos in electronic text that can be read online or on an iPhone. Others are republishing
old books in electronic form. And libraries, responding to demand, are
offering more e-books for download.
Is there a difference in the way the brain takes in or absorbs information when it is presented electronically versus on paper? Does the reading experience change, from retention to comprehension, depending on the medium?
A common gene that can cause abnormal heart rhythms can also trigger epileptic seizures in the brain and may explain the sudden, unexplained deaths that often occur in people with epilepsy, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.
Testing epileptics for a mutation in this gene could give doctors the information they need to prevent some of these deaths, said Dr. Jeffrey Noebels of Baylor College of Medicine, whose study appears in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Doctors have long known that patients with a mutation in the gene KvLQT1 -- which makes structures called ion channels that regulate electrical activity in the heart -- have a greater risk of sudden death from abnormal heart rhythms.
This gene also makes ion channels in brain cells, Noebels and colleagues found.
An area of the spine called the dorsal horn works with the brain to activate the so-called placebo effect, German scientists said.
"We've shown that psychological factors can influence pain at the earliest stage of the central nervous system, in a similar way to drugs like morphine," said researcher Falk Eippert, of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf.
The placebo effect involves people benefiting from remedies that contain no active pain-relief ingredients. When patients expect a remedy to be effective, the brain releases natural endorphins, which tell the spinal cord to suppress incoming pain signals, Eippert told The Times of London.
For decades, scientists have thought the faulty neural wiring that predisposes individuals to behavioral disorders like autism and psychiatric diseases like schizophrenia must occur during development. Even so, no one has ever shown that a risk gene for the disease actually disrupts brain development.
Now, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have found that the 22q11 gene deletion a mutation that confers the highest known genetic risk for schizophrenia is associated with changes in the development of the brain that ultimately affect how its circuit elements are assembled.
In studies conducted in mice, the researchers discovered that the genetic lesion alters the number of a critical subset of neurons that end up in the brain's cerebral cortex the region critical to reasoning and memory. The defect also causes another type of nerve cell called GABAergic neurons to be misplaced within the brain's cortical layers, resulting in a subtle miswiring of the organ.
There are some interesting parallels between what we ingest and the consistent transformation of the flu virus. With the latest dietary guidelines calling for three servings of low fat or non fat dairy a day, the average family with two kids now consumes more than 85 gallons of milk a year. What the government does not tell you, nor enforces the removal of, is that most milk is filled with carcinogens and antibodies.
Cows ingest dioxins, an industrial by-product and a known carcinogen, when they eat contaminated grass. Milk that is conventionally produced often comes from cows that are raised under disturbing farm conditions in that they may graze on pastures that have been treated with pesticides, herbicides and sewage sludge. When the cattle are not let outside, they feed on dried grass and hay, which may be genetically modified, and fish meal, which may contain PCB's and mercury. Cows in conventional farms are often given antibiotics, even when they are healthy, to prevent them from getting sick.
In some factory farms, thousands of cows are crammed inside barns to allow easy access for milking. Their milk production can be forced beyond normal capacity through Monsanto's synthetic growth hormone called rbST. Studies show that these cows are more susceptible to diseases because their natural life cycle is being distorted.
Is there food that you correlate with stress? A fast food, high calorie meal grabbed at a drive-in restaurant might fill the bill. But the color, smell, juicy sweetness and cool texture of a delicious melon -- whether a cantaloupe, watermelon, honeydew or another kind -- conjures up a relaxing scenario. Now scientists have found that a natural substance derived from melons may actually be an antidote to stress.
When most of us say we are experiencing too much stress, we mean we are overloaded with work, personal problems, and life in general. Of course, a certain amount of stress can be stimulating and even exciting. But when we have stressors without a break, a host of symptoms from irritability and an inability to concentrate to a fast heartbeat, headaches and a reduced resistance to infections can develop. So it's not hard to suspect a causal connection between feeling stressed out and showing physical symptoms.
In fact, recent studies have demonstrated a correlation between perceived stress and what scientists call oxidative stress -- a steady state level of oxidative damage in a cell, tissue, or organ caused by the reactive oxygen species (ROS). ROS, such as free radicals and peroxides, represent a class of molecules derived from the metabolism of oxygen that has been linked to several diseases, including metastatic breast cancer.
