| NEUROSCIENCE RESEARCH AUSTRALIA |
New Australian research is challenging the widely-held view that emotions and feelings are the domain of the right side of the brain only.
Image: chrysh/iStockphoto
Ever been stuck in traffic when a feel-good song comes on the radio and suddenly your mood lightens?
Our emotions and feelings are typically associated with the right side of the brain. For example, processing the emotion in human facial expressions is done in the right hemisphere. However, new Australian research is challenging the widely-held view that emotions and feelings are the domain of the right hemisphere only. Dr Sharpley Hsieh and colleagues from Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA) found that people with semantic dementia, a disease where parts of the left hemisphere are severely affected, have difficulty recognising emotion in music. These findings have exciting implications for our understanding of how music, language and emotions are handled by the brain. “It’s known that processing whether a face is happy or sad is impaired in people who lose key regions of the right hemisphere, as happens in people with Alzheimer’s and semantic dementia”, says Dr Hsieh. “What we have now learnt from looking at people with semantic dementia is that understanding emotions in music involves key parts of the other side of the brain as well”, she says. “Ours is the first study from patients with dementia to show that language-based areas of the brain, primarily on the left, are important for extracting emotional meaning from music. Our findings suggest that the brain considers melodies and speech to be similar and that overlapping parts of the brain are required for both”, says Hsieh. This paper is published in the journal Neuropsychologia.
How was this study done?
Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.
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Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Left brain may also be emotional
New auto-immune treatment hope
| THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES |
Australian researchers have uncovered a potential new way to regulate the body’s natural immune response, offering hope of a simple and effective treatment for auto-immune diseases.
Auto-immune diseases result from an overactive immune response that causes the body to attack itself. The new approach involves increasing good regulating cells in the body, unlike most current research focusing on stopping “bad” or “effector” cells, says lead researcher Dr Suzanne Hodgkinson from UNSW’s Faculty of Medicine and Liverpool Hospital. The researchers induced the body’s T-cell front-line defences by injecting cell-signalling proteins called cytokines, particularly Interleukin-5 (II-5 cytokine). When T-regulatory cells are grown in a way that makes them specific to a particular protein, they develop receptors for the Il-5 cytokine. The Il-5 cytokine boost allows the body’s immune system to better regulate its response to disease without going into overdrive. The team cloned II-5 cytokine and injected it into rats with the neurological condition Guillain–Barré syndrome. These rats recovered much quicker and did not fall ill if treated as a precaution. The method has also shown promise in animals with multiple sclerosis, kidney disease, nephritis and trying to overcome organ transplantation rejection. “One of the nice things about this discovery is that it is one of the few treatments in the auto-immune world and in the transplantation world that works not by attacking the effector cells but by increasing the good regulating cells. So it works very differently from almost every other treatment we’ve got available,” Dr Hodgkinson says. The researchers say that il-5 injections could be more palatable than inoculation by parasitic worms – another approach in regulating auto-immune conditions. International research shows swallowing helminth parasites can regulate the immune system and boost T-cell production to combat illnesses such as celiac disease and multiple sclerosis. The absence of worms in guts in the developed world has been cited as a possible cause for the sharp rise in auto-immune diseases in Western nations. “The process we’ve developed may be the same process that the helminths kick off. When you get a helminths infestation, one of the changes in your immune response is an increase in cells called eosinophils and these cells make the cytokine Interleukin-5,” Dr Hodgkinson says. “In this new treatment, it’s a matter of injecting the interleukin-5 and the body does the rest. It’s both safe and effective and we think inducing the immune response by injection may be more attractive to people than swallowing parasitic worms.” The next step is to take the treatment to human trials, which could be underway within two to five years, says Dr Hodgkinson, whose paper outlining the study has been published in the journalBlood. The research was supported by grants from Bob and Jack Ingham, Liverpool Australia; Multiple Sclerosis Research Australia; the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council; the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation; Novatis; and funds from UNSW. Lead researcher was UNSW research fellow Dr Giang Tran. Dr Hodgkinson and co-author Professor Bruce Hall hold US patents related to the treatment.
Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.
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Magnets to direct cancer drugs
| THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY |
The new drug could greatly reduce or even eliminate the side effects of treatments such as chemotherapy, according to the researchers.
Image: klenger/iStockphoto
For more than three decades scientists have been investigating magnetic nanoparticles as a method of drug delivery. Now by combining three metals - iron, gold and platinum - pharmacists at the University of Sydney believe they have discovered a method for magnetically directing drugs through the body.
The discovery has been published online today in the international journal Inorganica Chimica Acta. Led by Dr Nial Wheate, a team of scientists from the Faculty of Pharmacy, along with collaborators in Scotland, have developed a new anticancer drug that has an iron oxide core as small as 5 nanometres in size (1/1000th the width of a human hair). "We coated this iron oxide core in a protective layer of gold before cisplatin, a platinum drug that revolutionised the treatment of testicular cancer, was attached to the gold coating using spaghetti-like strings of polymer." The important thing about this new drug, says Dr Wheate, is the ability of its iron core to move under the influence of a magnet; similar to the iron filing experiments many people have performed in science classes. "When we take regular medication it is difficult to manage where it goes. But this discovery means we can potentially direct exactly where in the human body a drug goes. We can move it to the desired cancer tumour site using powerful magnetic fields. Otherwise, a strong magnet could be implanted into a tumour, and draw the drug into the cancer cells that way." The technology was demonstrated when the team grew cancer cells in plates in the lab. When they placed a magnet under the plates, the drug affected and killed only those cells growing near the magnet, leaving the others unharmed, says Dr Wheate. "Many of the side-effects associated with chemotherapy occur because the drugs spread throughout the body, killing healthy organs as well as cancers. "Ultimately, this technology could greatly reduce or even eliminate the severe side-effects that people associate with chemotherapy such as hair loss, nausea, vomiting, low red blood cells and an increased risk of infection." This new drug technology could also be used to treat a range of cancers that have not been treatable with conventional platinum drugs, like prostate cancer. Platinum drugs are one of the most regularly used family of agents in chemotherapy and include cisplatin, carboplatin and oxaliplatin.
Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.
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A different drummer: Neural rhythms drive physical movement
The 19th century mathematician Joseph Fourier showed that two rhythms could be summed to produce a third rhythm. Researchers at Stanford have shown that this principle is behind the brain activity that produces arm movements. Credit: Mark Churchland, Stanford School of Engineering
Unlike their visual cousins, the neurons that control movement are not a predictable bunch. Scientists working to decode how such neurons convey information to muscles have been stymied when trying to establish a one-to-one relationship between a neuron's behavior and external factors such as muscle activity or movement velocity.
In an article published online June 3rd by the journal Nature, a team of electrical engineers and neuroscientists working at Stanford University propose a new theory of the brain activity behind arm movements. Their theory is a significant departure from existing understanding and helps to explain, in relatively simple and elegant terms, some of the more perplexing aspects of the activity of neurons in motor cortex.
In their paper, electrical engineering Associate Professor Krishna Shenoy and post-doctoral researchers Mark Churchland, now a professor at Columbia, and John Cunningham of Cambridge University, now a professor at Washington University in Saint Louis, have shown that the brain activity controlling arm movement does not encode external spatial information—such as direction, distance and speed—but is instead rhythmic in nature.
Understanding the brain
Neuroscientists have long known that the neurons responsible for vision encode specific, external-world information—the parameters of sight. It had been theorized and widely suggested that motor cortex neurons function similarly, conveying specifics of movement such as direction, distance and speed, in the same way the visual cortex records color, intensity and form.
"Visual neurons encode things in the world. They are a map, a representation," said Churchland, who is first author of the paper. "It's not a leap to imagine that neurons in the motor cortex should behave like neurons in the visual cortex, relating in a faithful way to external parameters, but things aren't so concrete for movement."
Scientists have disagreed about which movement parameters are being represented by individual neurons. They could not look at a particular neuron firing in the motor cortex and determine with confidence what information it was encoding.
"Many experiments have sought such lawfulness and yet none have found it. Our findings indicate an alternative principle is at play," said co-first author Cunningham.
"Our main finding is that the motor cortex is a flexible pattern generator, and sends rhythmic signals down the spinal cord," said Churchland.
Engine of movement
To employ an automotive analogy, the motor cortex is not the steering wheel, odometer or speedometer representing real-world information. It is more like an engine, comprised of parts whose activities appear complicated in isolation, but which cooperate in a lawful way as a whole to generate motion.
"If you saw a piston or a spark plug by itself, would you be able to explain how it makes a car move?" asked Cunningham rhetorically. "Motor-cortex neurons are like that, too, understandable only in the context of the whole."
In a series of striking graphs, the Stanford team plotted the signals from individual neurons in the motor-cortex as monkeys completed a series of reaches. The reaching motions are shown by the starburst patterns at the top left of each graph. The neuronal patterns are then plotted atop one another for the entire series of reaches, clearly establishing the rhythmic nature of the brain activity. Credit: Mark Churchland, Stanford School of Engineering
The electrical signal that drives a given movement is therefore an amalgam – a summation – of the rhythms of all the motor neurons firing at a given moment.
"Under this new way of looking at things, the inscrutable becomes predictable," said Churchland. "Each neuron behaves like a player in a band. When the rhythms of all the players are summed over the whole band, a cascade of fluid and accurate motion results."
Dr. Daofen Chen, Program Director, Systems and Cognitive Neuroscience at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health, said Shenoy and team are working at the cutting edge of the field. "In trying to find the basic response properties of the motor cortex, Dr. Shenoy and his colleagues are searching for the holy grail of neuroscience," said Dr. Chen. "His team has been consistent in tackling important but tough questions, often in thought-provoking ways and in ambitious proposals. NIH is proud to support this kind of pioneering and transformative research."
Precedents in nature
In the new model, a few relatively simple rhythms explain neural features that had confounded science earlier.
"Many of the most-baffling aspects of motor-cortex neurons seem natural and straightforward in light of this model," said Cunnigham.
The team studied non-rhythmic reaching movements, which made the presence of rhythmic neural activity a surprise even though, the team notes, rhythmic neural activity has a long precedence in nature. Such rhythms are present in the swimming motion of leeches and the gait of a walking monkey, for instance.
"The brain has had an evolutionary goal to drive movements that help us survive. The primary motor cortex is key to these functions. The patterns of activity it displays presumably derive from evolutionarily older rhythmic motions such as swimming and walking. Rhythm is a basic building block of movement," explained Churchland.
Reaching for the grail
To test their hypothesis, the engineers studied the brain activity of monkeys reaching to touch a target. According to the researchers, experiments show this 'underlying rhythm' strategy works very well to explain both brain and muscle activity. In their reaching studies, the pattern of shoulder-muscle behavior could always be described by the sum of two underlying rhythms.
"Say you're throwing a ball. Beneath it all is a pattern. Maybe your shoulder muscle contracts, relaxes slightly, contracts again, and then relaxes completely, all in short order," explained Churchland. "That activity may not be exactly rhythmic, but it can be created by adding together two or three other rhythms. Our data argue that this may be how the brain solves the problem of creating the pattern of movement."
"Finding these brain rhythms surprised us a bit, as the reaches themselves were not rhythmic. In fact, they were decidedly arrhythmic, and yet underlying it all were these unmistakable patterns," said Churchland.
"This research builds on a strong theoretical framework and adds to growing evidence that rhythmic activity is important for many fundamental brain functions," said Yuan Liu of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, NIH. "Further research in this area may help us devise more effective technology for controlling prosthetic limbs." Liu is the co-lead of the NIH-NSF Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience program.
"In this model, the seemingly complex system that is the motor cortex can now be at least partially understood in more straightforward terms. The motor cortex is an engine of movement that obeys lawful dynamics," said Shenoy.
Stanford post-doctoral fellow Matthew Kaufman, bioengineering PhD student and medical science training program student Paul Nuyujukian, electrical engineering graduate student Justin Foster, and electrical engineering consulting assistant professor and Palo Alto Medical Foundation neurosurgeon Stephen Ryu were also authors on this paper.
Provided by Stanford University
"A different drummer: Neural rhythms drive physical movement." June 3rd, 2012.http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-drummer-neural-rhythms-physical-movement.html
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Robert Karl Stonjek
Robert Karl Stonjek
Brain scans prove Freud right: Guilt plays key role in depression
Scientists have shown that the brains of people with depression respond differently to feelings of guilt – even after their symptoms have subsided.
University of Manchester researchers found that the brain scans of people with a history of depression differed in the regions associated with guilt and knowledge of socially acceptable behaviour from individuals who never get depressed.
The study – published in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry – provides the first evidence of brain mechanisms to explain Freud's classical observation that exaggerated guilt and self-blame are key to understanding depression.
Lead researcher Dr Roland Zahn, from the University's School of Psychological Sciences, said: "Our research provides the first brain mechanism that could explain the classical observation by Freud that depression is distinguished from normal sadness by proneness to exaggerated feelings of guilt or self-blame.
"For the first time, we chart the regions of the brain that interact to link detailed knowledge about socially appropriate behaviour – the anterior temporal lobe – with feelings of guilt – the subgenual region of the brain – in people who are prone to depression."
The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of a group of people after remission from major depression for more than a year, and a control group who have never had depression. Both groups were asked to imagine acting badly, for example being 'stingy' or 'bossy' towards their best friends. They then reported their feelings to the research team.
"The scans revealed that the people with a history of depression did not 'couple' the brain regions associated with guilt and knowledge of appropriate behaviour together as strongly as the never depressed control group do," said Dr Zahn, a MRC Clinician Scientist Fellow.
"Interestingly, this 'decoupling' only occurs when people prone to depression feel guilty or blame themselves, but not when they feel angry or blame others. This could reflect a lack of access to details about what exactly was inappropriate about their behaviour when feeling guilty, thereby extending guilt to things they are not responsible for and feeling guilty for everything."
The research, part-funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), is important because it reveals brain mechanisms underlying specific symptoms of depression that may explain why some people react to stress with depression rather than aggression.
The team is now investigating whether the results from the study can be used to predict depression risk after remission of a previous episode. If successful, this could provide the first fMRI marker of risk of future depression.
More information: 'Guilt-Selective Functional Disconnection of Anterior Temporal and Subgenual Cortices in Major Depressive Disorder,' by Sophie Green et al., Archives of General Psychiatry, 2012.
Provided by University of Manchester
"Brain scans prove Freud right: Guilt plays key role in depression." June 4th, 2012.http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-brain-scans-freud-guilt-key.html
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Robert Karl Stonjek
Robert Karl Stonjek
Side effect: Crisis in Greece hits mental health
Greece is not feeling well. One in four men, and one in three women, has endured recent bouts of depression. As the grinding economic crisis continues to batter people's nerves, suicides and psychosomatic illness are both on the increase.
In April, a 77-year-old retiree, explaining in a note that he could no longer scrape by, went to a public square in the middle of Athens and put a bullet into his brain, a shot that echoed throughout the country.
While politicians and economists argue about how to pull Greece out of the quagmire of debt that has kneecapped its economy, there can be no doubt that the crisis -- once again threatening to eject the country from the eurozone towards an unknown fate -- is taking a devastating toil on the mental health of its people.
Compounding the emerging health care emergency is the fact that the state's ability to cope with it has been deeply eroded by the austerity measures and slashed budgets prescribed to cure the patient.
If you're going to have a nervous breakdown, in other words, Greece is not the best place to be.
"My patients are clearly much more on edge and stressed," said Dimitri, an osteopath in Athens with a varied clientele. "Their incomes are dropping. Their day-to-day relationships are fraying at the edges. Those who do have work are afraid of losing it, and show telltales signs of musculoskeletal tension."
Before the crisis really took hold, he added, half of his patients came for fine-tuning sessions, or for a minor realignment. "Now many arrive in a state of acute crisis. Their backs are blocked, or they can't even walk."
For Dimitri, there can be no doubt as to the culprit: the no-end-in-sight debt crisis that has plunged Greece deep into recession, ravaged its employment statistics and gutted social services.
The human body, he says, absorbs all these shocks like a spring.
"Often my patients don't know why they are in pain or unable to move, and tell me that they didn't lift anything heavy," he said. "Then, as we chat during the session, I find out that they're afraid of losing their jobs, or that a son's or daughter's salary has been cut in half, or that they can't pay the rent."
-- No way to keep a shred of dignity --
As officials vet new austerity measures and try to stave off further downgrades by credit agencies, the measureable impact of the crisis is getting inside the heads of Greeks.
Even if new elections later this month, called after a legislative vote on May 6 failed to produce a government, reverse course and reject the EU's austerity package, Greece is surely headed for more misery before things get any easier.
The numbers over the last year are sobering.
In the first half of 2011, more than a year after the economy began its dramatic slide, suicides in Greece shot up by 40 percent compared with the previous year. Almost daily, the media reports on someone who has put an end to it all because of financial burdens.
The old man who shot himself on April 4 in the middle of Syntagma Square -- site of many impassioned demonstrations against austerity measures -- clearly blamed his plight on the crisis.
"I can't see any other way to keep a shred of dignity and end my life without rummaging through garbage bins," the man wrote in a suicide note. Sick with cancer and living alone, he accused the state of depriving him of treatment after pensions were slashed, and compared the government in power to the one installed in 1941 by Nazi occupiers.
The man's fate seemed all the more shocking in a culture in which it is widely assumed that families can and will pick up the slack when the state falls short.
However, some of these numbers need to be put into perspective. Greece, like most other southern European countries, has a significantly lower suicide rate that northern nations. In 2009, before the crisis, the rate was three people for every 100,000 inhabitants, a third lower than the European average.
But there's no denying that Greece is in the doldrums.
According to health ministry statistics, a quarter of men and a third of women are depressed, double the European average for men, and nearly double for women. Calls to mental health hotlines also increased twofold in the first six months of 2011 compared with a year earlier.
"I don't sleep anymore," said 'Petros', who -- clearly embarrassed by his situation -- asked that his name be changed.
An importer/exporter of furniture with several stores in Athens, Petros said that over the last months he had been obliged to fire many staff, a first for his family-run enterprise. "And I'm going to have to cut the salaries of the ones that are left," he said, his voice brimming with emotion.
"I really wonder how people are going to get by after this summer, when most companies will have done the same," he added with creased brow.
-- State of war --
The crisis is not only making Greeks sick, it is making it harder for them to get treatment. Austerity measures have cut the national health budget by a devastating 25 percent since 2009.
"It's a state of war," said Yorgos Kalliabetsos, head of the pathology clinic at Volos Hospital in central Greece.
Doctors' salaries have been slashed by a quarter. Security staff are no longer paid at all. Nurses have become scarce, and shortages of medical supplies frequent. "My service has to take on 45 patients with 35 beds," Kalliabetsos lamented.
Since the uninsured have been left to their own devices, many now resort to desperate strategies.
"We have more and more patients who are inventing emergencies so they can be examined because they don't have any money for a regular consultation," explained Meropi Manteou, a lung specialist at Athens' enormous Sotiria Hospital. "We somehow manage to help the poorest patients that slip through the safety net, but for how much longer?"
An increase in poverty has brought in its wake an increase in diseases of the poor, notably tuberculosis.
The mental health picture is no less catastrophic. Several major psychiatric facilities have simply been shuttered. A third of the programmes to help addicts have also been shut down, which has led to a new wave of HIV infections.
Alexis, a 46-year-old journalist, has been treated since 2006 by Okana, an association that depends on the health ministry for street drug substitutes. He waited four years to get in the programme and feels lucky. "Most people who apply are dead by the time Okana calls them," he said.
The crisis has also encouraged the spread of a new street scourge called "sisa". Made from methamphetamines, the drug is ten times cheaper than heroin, but its effects are worse: blackened skin, sores all over the body, ultra-violent behaviour.
"One user stabbed another of my patients," recalled Emilios Katsoulakos, a psychiatrist. "There's no substitute we can prescribe for sisa."
Oddly, the economic downturn does seem to have had one salubrious impact: a decline in alcoholism. But that's probably only because new taxes on liquor -- another consequence of austerity -- make drowning one's sorrows too expensive.
(c) 2012 AFP
"Side effect: Crisis in Greece hits mental health." June 4th, 2012.http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-side-effect-crisis-greece-mental.html
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Robert Karl Stonjek
Robert Karl Stonjek
Richest and poorest people in Toronto hospitalized for different reasons
Researchers who examined the income levels of patients at central Toronto hospitals found that people in the highest and lowest income brackets are being hospitalized for different reasons and that different hospitals serve different income groups.
More wealthy patients received same-day surgeries than low-income patients. In contrast, more low-income patients were hospitalized for mental health issues, visited emergency departments for non-urgent issues and remained in acute care hospital beds while waiting to be transferred to more appropriate levels of care in the community such as nursing homes.
This report will enable many Toronto hospitals and health care stakeholders to see the socioeconomic profile of patients for the first time, said Dr. Rick Glazier, one of the lead authors of the study.
Once they have that information, they can see whether patient outcomes are linked to incomes, he said. This also gives them the opportunity to tailor care to the needs of their current patient population and to work with others to plan health services appropriate for the community.
"We want a universal health care system that helps everyone be healthy, regardless of how much money they earn," said Dr. Glazier, a researcher at the Centre for Research on Inner City Health at St. Michael's Hospital and a senior scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences. "But until we actually look at social differences among patients, it's impossible to say if hospital care is equitable or if hospitals have the proper resources to respond to the patients they serve."
Dr. Glazier said the statistics point to the social causes of disease and strains on the health system.
"Very low-income people are using the parts of the health care system that are in greatest crisis," he said. "It's all the more reason to think broadly about what keeps people healthy in the first place. What health supports do wealthy groups enjoy that those with lower incomes lack? Access to primary health care, the ability to pay for healthy foods and medicines and to live in a healthy place where you can receive home care if you need it? We think that addressing upstream areas like these will likely make an impact on hospital use."
The researchers examined data on all patients admitted between 2008 and 2010 to 20 hospitals in the Toronto Central Local Health Integration Network.
They found hospitals fell into three categories: those, including St. Michael's, who treat high-income and low-income patients in the same numbers; those who treat mainly low-income patients; and those who treat mainly high-income patients. In all of the hospitals surveyed, middle-income patients were served the least.
Among their other findings:
- In almost every hospital, surgical patients had higher incomes than medical patients
- More wealthy patients than poor patients had day surgery.
- More low-income patients than high-income patients were admitted for mental health services at almost every hospital
- Patients designated as waiting for "alternate level of care," meaning they occupy an acute hospital bed but do not require the intensity of resources or services provided in that setting, were more likely to have low incomes than high incomes. In most of the hospitals, ALC patients had lower incomes than the hospital's overall patient population
- Overall, more low-income patients visited emergency departments than high-income patients for non-urgent reasons
Provided by St. Michael's Hospital
"Richest and poorest people in Toronto hospitalized for different reasons." June 4th, 2012.http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-richest-poorest-people-toronto-hospitalized.html
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Robert Karl Stonjek
Robert Karl Stonjek
Genetics, rapid childhood growth and the development of obesity
A 38-year longitudinal study of New Zealanders suggests that individuals with higher genetic risk scores were more likely to be chronically obese in adulthood, according to a report published in the June issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, a JAMA Network publication.
Obesity is capable of being inherited and genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have started to uncover the molecular roots of heritability by identifying multiple single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with higher adult body mass index (BMI), the authors write in their study background.
"In this study, we asked how SNPs with replicated GWAS evidence for association with adult BMI relate to growth across the first four decades of life and to adult obesity in a birth cohort followed up prospectively from birth through 38 years of age," Daniel W. Belsky, Ph.D., of Duke University, Durham, N.C., and colleagues write in the study background.
Study participants were members of the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, an investigation of health and behavior in a complete birth cohort. The 1,037 study members (52 percent were male) were born between April 1972 and March 1973 in Dunedin, New Zealand. Assessments were performed every few years starting at birth until 38 years.
Children with higher genetic risk scores (GRSs) had higher BMIs at every age assessed from age 3 through 38 years. Children at high genetic risk were 1.61 to 2.41 times more likely to be obese in their second, third and fourth decades of life and were 1.90 times more likely to be chronically obese across more than three assessments compared with children at low genetic risk, according to study results.
Adiposity rebound, when children begin to gain body fat after losing it during early childhood, occurred earlier in development and at higher BMI for children at higher genetic risk, the results indicate.
Higher genetic risk also predicted faster growth and increased obesity risk in children with normal-weight and overweight parents, the study results note. The authors comment that the GRS contributed "independent and additive information" to the prediction of children's growth and their risk for obesity in adulthood beyond the family history information.
"Thus, the results present compelling evidence that SNPs identified in GWASs of adult BMI and other obesity-related phenotypes predispose to more rapid growth in childhood, leading to increased risk for obesity in adulthood, and provide information not forthcoming from a simple analysis of family history," the authors conclude.
In an editorial, Jose R. Fernandez, Ph.D., of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, writes: "This study provides clear evidence regarding the role of biological risk attributed to the development of obesity and suggests that genetic risk for obesity affects fat accumulation through accelerated growth in early childhood."
Fernandez continues: "Further insights and implications of the study, however, cause concern as much as they fascinate. Given that the associations identified were independent of parental body mass index, the findings from Belsky et al may imply a degree of genetic determinism that challenges overall public health recommendations worldwide in a simple question: What about the role of the environment across the life span?"
"Attempting to translate the findings from Belsky and colleagues to clinical practice would be naïve at this point when more research is clearly needed to fully understand the genetic basis of many complex traits. ... Until we know more, and perhaps after we know more, preventive behaviors should be each individual's priority so that we all achieve the best health possible regardless of genetic profiles. Without taking this approach, we might risk the mistake of allowing genetic predisposition to become genetic determinism," Fernandez concludes.
More information: Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2012;166[6]:515-521.
Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2012;166[6]:576-577.
Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2012;166[6]:576-577.
Provided by JAMA and Archives Journals
"Genetics, rapid childhood growth and the development of obesity." June 4th, 2012.http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-genetics-rapid-childhood-growth-obesity.html
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Robert Karl Stonjek
Robert Karl Stonjek
Japan 'diet glasses' fool wearers into eating less
Goggles that trick the wearer into thinking the plain snack in their hand is a chocolate cookie, or make biscuits appear larger have been unveiled in Japan, offering hope to weak-willed dieters everywhere.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed devices that use computer wizardry and augmented reality to fool the senses and make users feel more satisfied with smaller -- or less appealing -- treats.
On one device goggle-mounted cameras send images to a computer, which magnifies the apparent size of the cookie in the image it displays to the wearer while keeping his hand the same size, making the snack appear larger than it actually is.
In experiments, volunteers consumed nearly 10 percent less when the biscuits they were eating appeared 50 percent bigger.
They ate 15 percent more when cookies were manipulated to look two-thirds of their real size.
Professor Michitaka Hirose at the university's graduate school of information science and technology said he was interested in how computers can be used to trick the human mind.
"How to fool various senses or how to build on them using computers is very important in the study of virtual reality," he told AFP.
Hirose said standard virtual reality equipment that attempts to cater to complex senses like touch often results in bulky equipment.
But he said using one or more senses to fool the others was a way around this problem.
"Reality is in your mind," he said.
In another project, Hirose's team developed a "meta cookie", where the headgear uses scent bottles and visual trickery to fool the wearer into thinking the snack they are eating is anything but a plain biscuit.
Users can set the device to their favourite taste so they think they are eating a chocolate or strawberry-flavoured cookie.
Hirose says experiments so far have shown 80 percent of subjects are fooled.
The team has no plans as yet to commercialise their invention, but would like to investigate whether people wanting to lose weight can use the device.
(c) 2012 AFP
"Japan 'diet glasses' fool wearers into eating less." June 4th, 2012.http://phys.org/news/2012-06-japan-diet-glasses-wearers.html
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Robert Karl Stonjek
Robert Karl Stonjek
Thursday, May 31, 2012
மூளையின் செயல்திறன் மற்றும் நினைவாற்றலை அதிகரிக்க எளிய வழி!
மூளையின் செல்களில் குளுகோஸ் சக்தியாக மாற ஆக்சிஜன் மிக மிக அவசியம். காரணம் மூளை தனது எரிபொருளாக குளுகோஸையே பயன்படுத்திக் கொள்கிறது. இவை நவீன விஞ்ஞானம் கூறும் உண்மைகள். பல நூறு ஆண்டுகளுக்கு முன்னரே மூளைக்கும் பிராண சக்திக்கும் இடையிலான தொடர்பு குறித்து நமது தந்திர யோகிகள் அறிந்திருந்தனர். மூளையின் இயக்கத்திற்கு பிராண வாயு (ஆக்சிஜன் ) மட்டுமின்றி, பிராண சக்தி எனப்படும் பிராணனும் தேவை என தந்திர யோக நூல்கள் கூறுகின்றன.
இந்த பிராண சக்தியை உடலில் அதிகரிக்கச் செய்து, மூளையின் செயல்திறனைப் பலமடங்கு அதிகரிக்கச் செய்யும் எளிய தந்திர யோக முறையே பிராண முத்திரையாகும்.
செய்முறை: சிறுவிரல், மோதிர விரல் ஆகியவற்றின் நுனிப் பகுதியால் பெருவிரலின் நுனிப்பாகத்தைத் தொடவும், அதிக அழுத்தம் வேண்டாம் சற்றே தொட்டுக் கொண்டிருந்தால் போதும், பிற இரு விரல்களும் (சுட்டுவிரல், நடுவிரல்) வளைவின்றி நேராக இருக்கட்டும்.
அமரும் முறை: ஆசனங்களில் பரிச்சயம் உள்ளவர்கள் பத்மாசனம் அல்லது அர்த்த பத்மாசனத்தில் அமர்ந்து செய்யலாம், மற்றவர்கள் கால்களை மடக்கி அமர்ந்து செய்யவும், மாணவர்கள் படிக்கத் துவங்கும்முன் நாற்காலியில் அமர்ந்தபடியே இந்த முத்திரையைச் செய்யலாம், தலை, கழுத்து, முதுகு ஆகியவை வளைவின்றி நேராக இருக்க வேண்டும். இரு கைகளிலும், ஒரே நேரத்தில் செய்யவும், சுவாசம் இயல்பான நடையில் இருக்கட்டும். சீராகவும் ஆழமாகவும் இருப்பது அவசியம், மூச்சை அடக்குதல் கூடாது.
குறைந்த பட்சம் 8 நிமிடங்கள், அதிக பட்சமாக 48 நிமிடங்கள் வரையில் செய்யலாம். சராசரியாக பள்ளி மாணவர்கள் காலையில் 16 நிமிடங்கள், மாலையில் 16 நிமிடங்கள் செய்யப் பழகிக்கொள்வது நல்லது.
பலன்கள்: மூளையின் செயல்களுக்கு பிராண சக்தியும், பிராண வாயுவும் அதிக அளவில் கிடைப்பதால், மூளை சுறுசுறுப்பாகிறது. மூளையின் செல்களிலுள்ள சோர்வு மறைந்து, புத்துணர்ச்சியுடன் மூளை செயல்படத் துவங்கும். உடலிலுள்ள அனைத்து செயல்களுக்குமே பிராண சக்தி அதிக அளவில் பாய்வதால் உடலில் உள்ள அசதி, சோர்வு, சோம்பேறித்தனம் ஆகியவை மறைந்து, உடலிலும் ஒரு புத்துணர்வு உருவாகும். உடல் , மூளை இரண்டின் செயல்திறணும் பல மடங்கு அதிகரிக்கும். உடலில் பிராண சக்தி அதிக அளவில் பாயும்போது, நாடிகளில் உள்ள சக்தித் தடைகள் அதிகரிக்கும். இவை தவிர பிராண வாயுவுக்கு வேறு ஒரு மிக முக்கியமான பணியும் உண்டு.
ஆக்சிஜன் அதிகம் கிடைப்பதால் மூளையின் செயல்கள் சுறுசுறுப்படைந்தாலும் இடது மூளையின் செயல்பாடுகளே அதிகரிக்கும். பிராண சக்தி அதிக அளவில் செல்லும்போதுதான் வலது மூளையின் பணிகளான, பேச்சுத்திறன், எழுத்துத்திறன், கற்பனைத்திறன் ஆகியவையும் அதிகரிக்கும்.நினைவாற்றலை அதிகரிக்கும் சக்தியும் பிராண முத்திரைக்கு உண்டு. பிராண முத்திரையைத் தொடர்ந்து செய்து நினைவாற்றலைப் பல மடங்கு அதிகரிக்கச் செய்யலாம்.
Mermaid
A mermaid is a mythical sea creature with the head and torso of a human woman and the tail of a fish. The male version is known as a merman, and the generic term is merfolk. The mermaid appears in folklore from all over the world, including Europe, the Middle East, the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, and Japan. As would be expected of any mythical figure with such a wide geographical range, the mermaid has many variations in appearance. The EuropeanMelusine, for example, often has a serpent's tail or two tails, sometimes in addition to wings.
Mermaids also vary in their reported behavior. Some are dangerous, such as the Greek Sirenwho sings enchanting songs from the shore in order to bewitch sailors or lure them to their death. Others are benevolent and may grant the wishes of those who see them. In Japan, eating the flesh of a mermaid is said to confer immortality. In the earliest known mermaid lore, heralding from first century BCE Assyria, the mermaid is a goddess who jumped into the sea in grief over the lover whom she accidentally killed.
The mermaid features extensively in the literature and art of many cultures and eras. She is the subject of one of Hans Christian Andersen's most well known fairy tales, The Little Mermaid, and the 1989 Disney movie based on it. Numerous films, cartoons, and television shows have also had the mermaid as their theme.
Engineer Details Plans to Build a Real, Burj-Dubai-Sized Starship Enterprise in 20 Years
By Rebecca Boyle
Real Starship Enterprise BuildTheEnterprise.org
The year 2245 is just too distant — we should build and commission a real USS Enterprise right now, cracking the champagne across her hull within 20 years, according to an enterprising engineer. The gigantic ship would use ion propulsion, powered by a 1.5-GW nuclear reactor, and could reach Mars in three months and the moon in three days. Its 0.3-mile-diameter, magnetically suspended gravity wheel spinning at 2 RPM would provide 1G of gravity, and the thing looks just like the "Star Trek" ship of lore.
This project is the brainchild of an engineer who calls himself BTE Dan. As in “Build The Enterprise,” which is also the name of his brand-new website.
“We have the technological reach to build the first generation of the spaceship known as the USS Enterprise – so let’s do it,” BTE Dan writes. He even sifts through the federal budget and proposes tax hikes and spending cuts to cover the $1 trillion cost.
Though the "Star Trek" connection lends the project an air of sci-fi fun, BTE Dan is hardly the only engineer dreaming up a next-generation spaceship to the stars. DARPA's 100-Year Starshipproject is designed partly to foster ideas just like this one, from a project planning roadmap to a real ship.
The Starship Enterprise Is Big: The ship would be the largest thing built by humanity. BuildTheEnterprise.org
The so-called Gen1 Enterprise would be built in space and would serve a triple function, as a space station, spaceport and traveling spaceship “all in one!” BTE Dan says. It won’t cruise the galaxy at light speed, unfortunately, but it could explore new worlds right in our own neighborhood, providing a constant acceleration to reach distant targets much more quickly. Its first missions would be to the moon, Venus, Mars and maybe Europa. Universe Today notes the ship’s onboard laser would be used to sear through the moon’s ice crust to allow a ship to drop into its oceans. Three additional nuclear reactors would provide electricity for this laser and other ship needs.
BTE Dan also crunched some numbers to prove he’s really serious. He proposes a matrix of tax increases and budget cuts in defense, health and human services, housing and urban development, education, energy and more. But he promises they will be small cuts and small tax increases, Universe Today notes. “These changes to spending and taxes will not sink the republic,” BuildTheEnterprise.org reads.
BTE Dan identifies himself as a “systems engineer and electrical engineer who has worked at a Fortune 500 company for the past 30 years,” Universe Today says. He is on Twitter as @BTEDan and he says he’s setting up a Facebook page where you can all go and like his project. His website keeps crashing, but we’ll let you know if we hear back from him.
[via Universe Today]
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