Depression & Sleep - Flu & Bipolar - Aging Hypothalamus - Evolving Ears

[Marc Breedlove]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23530-genes-in-the-brain-keep-bad-time-when-we-are-depressed.html

Genes in the brain keep bad time when we are depressed

20:00 13 May 2013 by Douglas Heaven

Genes in cells throughout the body switch on and
off throughout the day in a coordinated way. Or
at least they should. In people with clinical
depression, genes in their brain tissues appear
to be significantly out of sync – a finding that
could lead to new treatments for the condition.

We know from previous studies that genes in cells
elsewhere, such as the skin, follow a 24-hour
cycle of activity. But identifying patterns of
genetic activity in a living brain isn't easy to do.

"We always assumed we would have a clock [in our
brain]," says Huda Akil at the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor. "But it had never been shown before."

Akil and her colleagues examined the brains of 55
people with a known time of death, looking at
around 12,000 genes in tissues from six brain
regions. By matching the time of death with
molecular signs of genetic activity – whether
each gene was actively expressing itself or not –
the team identified hundreds of genes that follow a daily cycle.
Sudden death

Akil says it was important to look at the brains
of individuals who had died suddenly – through a
heart attack or car accident, for example. Slower
deaths can cause dramatic changes in the brain
that would have obscured what they were looking
for, but sudden death freezes the genetic
activity. "We can capture an instant," she says.

© Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

--------------------


http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/05/13/all-i-really-want-to-do-is-sleep/

“All I Really Want to Do Is Sleep”

By Samyukta Mullangi

A recent article in NYTimes [1] declared that the
rising rate of suicides among our baby boomer
generation now made suicides, by raw numbers
alone, a bigger killer than motor vehicle
accidents! Researchers quoted within the article
pointed to complex reasons like the economic
downturn over the past decade, the widespread
availability of opioid drugs like oxycodone, and
changes in marriage, social isolation and family
roles. Then I scrolled down, as I always do, to
peruse some of the readers’ comments, and that’s when I paused.

I suppose in hindsight that I had expected
readers to exclaim at the shocking statistics
(suicide rates now stand at 27.3 per 100,000 for
middle aged men, 8.1 per 100,000 for women), or
lament over personal stories of relatives or
friends who took their own lives. While I
certainly saw a few such comments, I was amazed
to discover the number of readers who were sympathetic to the idea of suicide.

“Molly” wrote “Why is suicide usually looked upon
as a desperate and forbidden act? Can’t we accept
that in addition to poverty, loneliness,
alienation, ill health, life in world [sic] that
is sometimes personally pointless means that
death is a relief? I believe the right to die, in
a time and place (and wishfully peacefully
without violence) is a basic human right.”

This post was ‘recommended’ by 351 other readers
at the time of this essay being written.

© 2013 Scientific American
--------------------


http://www.nature.com/news/gut-microbe-may-fight-obesity-and-diabetes-1.12975

Gut microbe may fight obesity and diabetes

Brian Owens

The gut is home to innumerable different bacteria
­ a complex ecosystem that has an active role in
a variety of bodily functions. In a study
published this week in Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences1, a team of
researchers finds that in mice, just one of those
bacterial species plays a major part in
controlling obesity and metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes.

The bacterium, Akkermansia muciniphila, digests
mucus and makes up 3–5% of the microbes in a
healthy mammalian gut. But the intestines of
obese humans and mice, and those with type 2
diabetes, have much lower levels. A team led by
Patrice Cani, who studies the interaction between
gut bacteria and metabolism at the Catholic
University of Louvain in Belgium, decided to investigate the link.

Mice that were fed a high-fat diet, the
researchers found, had 100 times less A.
muciniphila in their guts than mice fed normal
diets. The researchers were able to restore
normal levels of the bacterium by feeding the
mice live A. muciniphila, as well as 'prebiotic'
foods that encourage the growth of gut microbes.

The effects of this treatment were dramatic.
Compared with untreated animals, the mice lost
weight and had a better ratio of fat to body
mass, as well as reduced insulin resistance and a
thicker layer of intestinal mucus. They also
showed improvements in a host of other indicators
related to obesity and metabolic disorders.

“We found one specific common factor between all
the different parameters that we have been
investigating over the past ten years,” says Cani.

© 2013 Nature Publishing Group
--------------------


http://www.today.com/health/rare-disorder-leaves-woman-lost-familiar-places-1C9874083

Rare disorder leaves woman lost in familiar places

Linda Carroll TODAY contributor

We all get lost or disoriented once in a while,
but for Sharon Roseman, being lost is a way of
life. A little quirk in her brain makes it
impossible to recognize landmarks and find her
way around neighborhoods that should have become familiar long ago.

“I can literally see my house out the car window,
but I have no clue that it’s my house,” Roseman told NBC’s Kristen Dahlgren.

Roseman, 64, suffers from developmental
topographical disorientation, or DTD, a disorder
that had flown under brain researchers’ radar
until very recently. DTD was first described as a
single case study in a paper published online in
2008 in the journal Neuropsychologia.

At the time, it was thought to be extremely rare,
says the study’s lead author, Giuseppe Iaria,
professor of cognitive neuroscience at the
University of Calgary. But since then, Iaria has
discovered nearly 1,000 other people with DTD and
he thinks there may be a lot more. He currently
estimates that about 2 percent of the population
may be constantly coping with orientation and
navigation problems caused by the disorder.

DTD is a profound and disabling deficit. Nothing,
not even the layout of a house you’ve lived in
for decades, ever becomes familiar. And for
Roseman that has made life very trying.

When her kids would cry in the night, she would
struggle to find her way to them.
--------------------


http://www.nih.gov/news/health/may2013/nimh-13.htm

Flu in pregnancy may quadruple child’s risk for bipolar disorder

Pregnant mothers’ exposure to the flu was
associated with a nearly fourfold increased risk
that their child would develop bipolar disorder
in adulthood, in a study funded by the National
Institutes of Health. The findings add to
mounting evidence of possible shared underlying
causes and illness processes with schizophrenia,
which some studies have also linked to prenatal exposure to influenza.

“Prospective mothers should take common sense
preventive measures, such as getting flu shots
prior to and in the early stages of pregnancy and
avoiding contact with people who are
symptomatic,” said Alan Brown, M.D., M.P.H, of
Columbia University and New York State
Psychiatric Institute, a grantee of the NIH’s
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). “In
spite of public health recommendations, only a
relatively small fraction of such women get
immunized. The weight of evidence now suggests
that benefits of the vaccine likely outweigh any
possible risk to the mother or newborn.”

Brown and colleagues reported their findings
online May 8, 2013 in JAMA Psychiatry.

Although there have been hints of a maternal
influenza/bipolar disorder connection, the new
study is the first to prospectively follow
families in the same HMO, using physician-based
diagnoses and structured standardized psychiatric
measures. Access to unique Kaiser-Permanente,
county and Child Health and Development Study
External Web Site Policy databases made it
possible to include more cases with detailed
maternal flu exposure information than in previous studies.

--------------------


http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/hard-cases-the-traps-of-treating-pain/?ref=health

Hard Cases: The Traps of Treating Pain

By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D.

I hadn’t seen Larry in a dozen years when he
reappeared in my office a few months ago,
grinning. We were both grinning. I always liked
Larry, even though he was a bit of a hustler, a
little erratic in his appointments, a persistent
dabbler in a variety of illegal substances. But
he was always careful to avoid the hard stuff; he
said he had a bad problem as a teenager and was going to stay out of trouble.

It was to stay out of trouble that he left town
all those years ago, and now he was back, grayer
and thinner but still smiling. Then he pulled out
a list of the medications he needed, and we both stopped smiling.

According to Larry’s list, he was now taking
giant quantities of one of the most addictive
painkillers around, an immensely popular
black-market drug most doctors automatically
avoid prescribing except under the most exceptional circumstances.

“I got a bad back now, Doc,” Larry said.

Doctors hate pain. Let me count the ways. We hate
it because we are (mostly) kindhearted and hate
to see people suffer. We hate it because it is
invisible, cannot be measured or monitored, and
varies wildly and unpredictably from person to
person. We hate it because it can drag us closer
to the perilous zones of illegal practice than any other complaint.

And we hate it most of all because unless we
specifically seek out training in how to manage
pain, we get virtually none at all, and wind up
flying over all kinds of scary territory
absolutely solo, without a map or a net.

Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company
--------------------


http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/2013/05/13/growing-old-with-nf-kb/

Growing old with NF-kB

By Scicurious

Aging happens. As you get older, your body slows
down, eventually your brain slows down, too. Some
things go gradually, and some go suddenly.

To many people, this might seem like a pretty
random process. We used to think of aging this
way, as just…well cells get old, which means we
get old, too. DNA replication after a while
starts making errors in repair, the errors build
up, and on the whole body scale the whole thing
just kind of goes downhill. It seems random.

But in fact, it’s not. There are specific
proteins which can help control this process. And
one of these, NF-kB, in one particular brain
region, may have a very important role indeed.

NF-kB (which stands for nuclear factor
kappa-light-chain-enhancer of activated B cells,
which is why we use NF-kB) is a protein complex
that has a lot of roles to play. It’s an
important starting player in the immune system,
where it helps to stimulate antibodies. It’s
important in memory and stress responses. NF-kB
is something called a transcription factor, which
helps to control what DNA is transcribed to RNA,
and therefore what proteins will eventually be
produced. Transcription factors, as you can see,
can have a very large number of functions.

But in the hypothalamus, NF-kB may have the added
function of helping to control aging. The
hypothalamus is an area of many small nuclei
(further sub areas of neurons) located at the
base of the brain. It’s been coming more and more
into vogue lately among neuroscientists. In the
past, we were interested in the hypothalamus
mostly for its role in controlling hormone
release from the dangling pituitary gland before
it, but now we are learning that the hypothalamus
can play roles in fear, mood, food intake, reproduction, and now…aging.

© 2013 Scientific American
--------------------


http://www.nature.com/news/hearing-changes-could-be-ancient-in-the-human-line-1.12976

Hearing changes could be ancient in the human line

Zoe Cormier

A study of two ancient hominins from South Africa
suggests that changes in the shape and size of
the middle ear occurred early in our evolution.
Such alterations could have profoundly changed
what our ancestors could hear ­ and perhaps how they could communicate.

Palaeoanthropologist Rolf Quam of Binghamton
University in New York state and his colleagues
recovered and analysed a complete set of the
three tiny middle-ear bones, or ossicles, from a
1.8-million-year-old specimen of Paranthropus
robustus and an incomplete set of ossicles from
Australopithecus africanus, which lived from
about 3.3 million to around 2.1 million years
ago. The ossicles are the smallest bones in the
human body, and are rarely preserved intact in hominin fossils, Quam says.

In both specimens, the team found that the
malleus (the first in the chain of the three
middle-ear bones) was human-like ­ smaller in
proportion compared to the ones in our ape
relatives. Its size would also imply a smaller
eardrum. The similarity between the two species
points to a “deep and ancient origin” of this
feature, Quam says. “This could be like
bipedalism: a defining characteristic of hominins.”

It is hard to draw conclusions about hearing just
from the shape of the middle-ear bones because
the process involves so many different ear
structures, as well as the brain itself. However,
some studies have shown that the relative sizes
of the middle-ear bones do affect what primates
can hear2. Genomic comparisons with gorillas have
indicated that changes in the genes that code for
these structures might also demarcate humans from apes3.

© 2013 Nature Publishing Group
--------------------


http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/05/scienceshot-earliest-ear-bones-s.html?ref=hp

ScienceShot: Earliest Ear Bones Sound Off on Human Hearing

by Michael Balter

Researchers debate when language first evolved,
but one thing is sure: Language requires us not
only to talk but also to listen. A team of
scientists now reports recovering the earliest
known complete set of the three tiny middle ear
bones­the malleus ("hammer"), incus ("anvil"),
and stapes ("stirrup")­in a 2.0-million-year-old
skull of Paranthropus robustus, a distant human
relative found in South Africa (see photo).
Reporting online today in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, the researchers
found that the malleus of P. robustus, as well
one found earlier in the early human relative
Australopithecus africanus, is similar to that of
modern humans, whereas the two other ear bones
most closely resemble existing African and Asian
great apes. The team is not entirely sure what
this precocious appearance of a human-like
malleus means. But since the malleus is attached
directly to the eardrum, the researchers suggest
that it might be an early sign of the high human
sensitivity to middle-range acoustic frequencies
between 2 and 4 kilohertz­frequencies critical to
spoken language, but which apes and other primates are much less sensitive to.

© 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science
--------------------


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/science/the-autistic-brain-review-temple-grandin-traces-roots-of-a-disorder.html?ref=science&_r=0

A Trudge to the Roots of Autism

By DAVID DOBBS

In the autistic person, it seems, hums a vital
and distinctive essence ­ but one whose nature is
obscured by thick layers of behavior and
perception. Or, as Temple Grandin puts it, “two panes of glass.”

For a quarter century, Dr. Grandin ­ the brainy,
straight-speaking, cowboy-shirt-wearing animal
scientist and slaughterhouse designer who at 62
is perhaps the world’s most famous autistic
person ­ has been helping people break through
the barriers separating autistic from nonautistic experience.

Like Dr. Sacks, who made her famous as the title
figure in his 1995 collection “An Anthropologist
on Mars,” Dr. Grandin has helped us understand
autism not just as a phenomenon, but as a
different but coherent mode of existence that
otherwise confounds us. In her own books and
public appearances, she excels at finding
concrete examples that reveal the perceptual and
social limitations of autistic and “neurotypical” people alike.

In “The Autistic Brain,” her latest book, written
with the science author Richard Panek, she shows
this talent most vividly in a middle chapter that
looks at the sensory world of autism.

It is a world filled with anomalies, in which
everyday sensations can be overwhelming: A school
bell can feel like a dentist’s drill, a scratchy
shirt like a swarm of fire ants. In other cases
the autistic person may feel so little sensation
that she’ll try to fill the vacuum and create
some sort of order ­ hence the rocking, twirling,
hand-flapping, noisemaking behaviors that can discomfit and alienate onlookers.

© 2013 The New York Times Company
--------------------


http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psysociety/2013/05/12/mothers-day-2013/

The Incredible Importance of Mom

By Melanie Tannenbaum

Imagine that you’re an infant monkey, and you’ve
just been thrown into a cage after several hours
in isolation. You’ve been deprived of food, so
you’re starving. Facing you are two adult-looking
(fake) monkeys, designed to look like each one
could potentially be your mother. On the left is
a “wire mother,” equipped with a bottle and
feeding tube so you can cling to her and fill
your belly with milk. On the right is a “cloth
mother,” with no bottle, but with a fuzzy
terrycloth exterior that will allow for hours of soft, warm snuggles.

You can only run to one of the monkeys. Which one will you choose?

Six or seven decades ago, many psychologists
would have claimed that any affection that we
experience towards our parental figures is a
purely behaviorist response. After many instances
of conditioning a sense of “positive affect”
after receiving life-sustaining food from
mothers, children associate that positive emotion
with these caregivers, an association that serves
as the sole explanation for why people “love” their mothers.

But that’s not what Harry Harlow thought. Harlow,
a psychologist working at the University of
Wisconsin – Madison during the 1960s, believed
that there was something more important
underlying our affection for Mom and Dad than our
primal need to eat and survive. He believed that
there was an additional factor: Comfort.

What Harlow did to test this hypothesis was
arguably ingenious, though inarguably cruel.1
Harlow deprived monkeys of food, making them
desperately hungry, and then stuck them into a
cage where they had a choice of two “mother
figures” to run towards. On the left was a wire
mother – cold and uncomfortable, yet equipped
with a bottle that would feed the baby with
life-sustaining nutrients. On the right was a
cloth mother – warm, soft, and comfortable, yet
unable to provide the infant with any food. If
the only reason why we “love” our mothers (and
fathers) is based on a conditioned response to
our need for food, then the infant monkeys should
run to the wire mothers who can feed them every time.

© 2013 Scientific American
--------------------


http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/my-stroke-of-luck/?ref=science

My Stroke of Luck

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Twenty-two months ago, I interrupted my nonstop
reporting about paths toward a sustainable future
for our species to focus on sustaining myself.
The hiatus was not by choice, but was mandated by
a stroke ­ the out-of-the-blue variant, the rare
kind of “brain attack” (the term preferred by
some neurologists) that is most often seen in
otherwise healthy, youngish middle-aged people.

It’s Fourth of July weekend, 2011 ­ a beautiful,
if hot, morning for a run in the Hudson Valley
woods with my son Daniel, back from brief service
in the Israeli army. I’m eager to be pushed hard.
I’m not even a lapsed middle-aged athlete; I’m
truly negligent when it comes to exercise.

We’re jogging up a steep path, and my breathing
gets deeper and faster. At a particularly tough turn, I pause, hands on knees.

“Come on, keep it up, Dad.”

I’m panting but don’t want to disappoint. We
press on. But I stop again, this time insisting
that Daniel run ahead. I rest in the mottled
shade and sunlight of the woods until he returns.
Then I realize that through my left eye, the
world appears paisley ­ as if I were looking
through a patterned curtain. Something is really wrong.

We make it back to the car. Daniel takes the
wheel. Back home, I take a shower, thinking that cooling off will help.

For the first time, a thought flickers. Could
this be a stroke? Almost unconsciously, I take
half a dozen baby aspirin. I know enough about
aspirin’s blood-thinning properties to think this can’t hurt.

Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company
--------------------