First there was John A. Thain's $87,000 rug. Then there was Citigroup's planned $50 million corporate jet.
Then the world of politics got involved this week when the New York State inspector general released a report saying that Antonia C. Novello, the former state commissioner of health, had such an ingrained tendency for shopping that she had employees from her office squire her on buying expeditions to Macy's, Saks Fifth Avenue and three different Albany-area malls.
Ill-advised shopping has certainly turned up recently in the news, and yet the issue also forms the core of a much more contentious and continuing debate. As spenders spend while the economy plummets, the psychiatric world is trying to decide whether compulsive buying should actually be considered a disease.
Julie Steenhuysen
ReutersMon, 02 Feb 2009 13:47 UTC
CHICAGO - Insulin appears to shield the brain from toxic proteins associated with Alzheimer's disease, U.S. researchers said on Monday, supporting a theory that Alzheimer's may be a third form of diabetes.
And they said GlaxoSmithKline's (GSK.L: Quote, Profile, Research) diabetes drug Avandia, or rosiglitazone, which increases sensitivity to insulin, appeared to enhance this protective effect.
"Our results demonstrate that bolstering insulin signaling can protect neurons from harm," William Klein of Northwestern University, whose study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said in a statement.
Klein said the findings support a new idea that Alzheimer's is a type of diabetes of the brain.
Vitamin D is significantly associated with muscle power and force in adolescent girls, according to a new study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM).
Although vitamin D is naturally produced in the body through exposure to direct sunlight, vitamin D deficiency has become widely common in the United States. Vitamin D deficiency has been shown to have a significant negative impact on muscle and bone health, and can lead to conditions including osteoporosis and rickets.
"We know vitamin D deficiency can weaken the muscular and skeletal systems, but until now, little was known about the relationship of vitamin D with muscle power and force," said Dr. Kate Ward, Ph.D., of the University of Manchester in the U.K., and lead author of the study. "Our study found that vitamin D is positively related to muscle power, force, velocity and jump height in adolescent girls."
US researchers armed tiny hollow gold spheres with a highly targeted peptide so they could hunt down and get deep inside melanoma cells and then destroy them using heat converted from infra red light.
The research was the work of scientists from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and is published in the 1 February issue of Clinical Cancer Research.
Senior author Dr Chun Li, a professor in MD Anderson's Department of Experimental Diagnostic Imaging said:
"Active targeting of nanoparticles to tumors is the holy grail of therapeutic nanotechnology for cancer."
New research sheds light on a neural growth factor called proBDNF, finding that it is present and potentially active during the perinatal period when the brain's circuitry and memory-encoding regions are being refined. Led by Weill Cornell Medical College investigators with those at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), and reported in the Jan. 11 issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, the study could lead to a better understanding of brain development and the formation of memories.
ProBDNF is the precursor form of mature brain-derived neurotrophic growth factor (BDNF), and both are active in the hippocampus and cortex -- areas key to learning, memory and higher thinking. Intriguingly, proBDNF and BDNF encourage different actions; BDNF promotes the differentiation of new neurons and their constituent parts (axons, dendrites and synapses), and proBDNF the pruning of synapses -- a process that occurs particularly in the early stages of life.
"Our results suggest that the nervous system plays an active role in both potentiating and dampening its own activity as necessary," says senior author Dr. Barbara Hempstead, the O. Wayne Isom Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and a leader in the field of neurotrophin research.
© A. Kitaoka 2003It's not just your imagination: The brain perceives the concentric circles of the famous Rotating Snakes optical illusion as rotating, but the image is static.
Researchers in Japan, led by Akiyoshi Kitaoka of Kyoto's Ritsumeikan University, monitored brain activity as participants viewed the Rotating Snakes illusion, where concentric circles appear to rotate continuously. The resulting article, Functional brain imaging of the Rotating Snakes illusion by fMRI, was recently published in the Association of Research in Vision and Ophthalmology's
Journal of Vision as part of a collection of papers on neuroimaging in vision science.
Prior to the study, scientists believed illusions that simulated movement involved higher-level brain activity - the imagination. But
this study found the illusion sparked brain activity generated by a bottom-up process in the visual cortex.
Bipolar disorder appears to increase the risk of early death from medical illnesses, according to a literature review study published as the lead article this week in the journal Psychiatric Services.
The researchers comprehensively reviewed 17 studies involving more than 331,000 patients. Evidence suggested that people with bipolar disorder have a higher mortality from natural causes compared to people in the general population of similar age and gender but without mental illness. The various studies indicated that the risk was from 35 percent to 200 percent higher. The risk is the same for men and women. The most common conditions leading to premature death were heart disease, respiratory diseases, stroke, and endocrine problems such as diabetes.
Kate Rix
PhysOrgMon, 02 Feb 2009 21:27 UTC
Has it ever occurred to you, when faced with a big decision, to stay awake on it?
The faculty in Berkeley's Psychology Department who research the many functions of sleep are betting not. Plumbing the mysteries of why we spend a third of our lives asleep is a modern research area, as new as the 1950s, when it was discovered that the brain is not dormant in sleep, but in fact actively cycling through various states of unconsciousness.
Together, Matthew Walker, who directs Berkeley's Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory, and Allison Harvey, who leads the Sleep and Psychological Disorders Laboratory, have discovered that sleep does far more than refresh the body and mind. Enough sleep, or a deficit of it, are directly linked to our immune systems, metabolic control, memory, emotional functioning and learning.
Measuring a small protein in the blood and urine can predict which patients with non-advanced chronic kidney disease (CKD) will progress to a more serious form of the disease, according to a new study. The findings could be used to devise a new screening method for identifying which patients should receive aggressive therapies to prevent the progression of their disease.
The blood and urine of some individuals with impaired kidney function have increased levels of a small protein called Neutrophil Gelatinase-Associated Lipocalin (NGAL). NGAL is released from injured renal tubular cells, which are cells crucial for proper functioning of the kidneys. Preliminary research has also shown that individuals with high levels of NGAL experience worsening of their kidney function within one year, compared with individuals with lower levels of NGAL. However, no definitive study has demonstrated the potential of NGAL measurements for predicting how a patient's CKD will progress.
Federal officials have released a tidal wave of fresh recalls in the past 24 hours as they connect the dots in the supply chain of tainted peanut-related products.
The latest recalls by 25 companies listing dozens of items include Walgreen's chocolate candy with peanuts, Best Brands peanut butter cookie dough and Hain Celestial's frozen pad Thai dinners, including one made for Trader Joe's.
On Saturday, Harry and David of Medford joined the recall, pulling Olympia Delight Trail Mix products, and Berkeley, Ca.-based Clif Bar and Co. pulled eight more of its protein bars.
The recall has reached a fever pitch since it was expanded to include all products - from roasted peanuts to peanut butter -- from Peanut Corporation of America's plant at Blakely, Ga., where Food and Drug Administration investigators found two strains of salmonella and evidence that on 12 occasions in 2007 and 2008 the company sold food even after it had tested positive for salmonella.
