Canine Benefits - Epigenetics - Stroke Poet - Training Critique

[Marc Breedlove]

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/heart-association-weighs-in-on-pets/?ref=health

Owning a Dog Is Linked to Reduced Heart Risk

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR

The nation’s largest cardiovascular health
organization has a new message for Americans:
Owning a dog may protect you from heart disease.

The unusual message was contained in a scientific
statement published on Thursday by the American
Heart Association, which convened a panel of
experts to review years of data on the
cardiovascular benefits of owning a pet. The
group concluded that owning a dog, in particular,
was “probably associated” with a reduced risk of heart disease.

People who own dogs certainly have more reason to
get outside and take walks, and studies show that
most owners form such close bonds with their pets
that being in their presence blunts the owners’
reactions to stress and lowers their heart rate,
said Dr. Glenn N. Levine, the head of the committee that wrote the statement.

But most of the evidence is observational, which
makes it impossible to rule out the prospect that
people who are healthier and more active in the
first place are simply more likely to bring a dog or cat into their home.

“We didn’t want to make this too strong of a
statement,” said Dr. Levine, a professor at the
Baylor College of Medicine. “But there are
plausible psychological, sociological and
physiological reasons to believe that pet
ownership might actually have a causal role in decreasing cardiovascular risk.”

Nationwide, Americans keep roughly 70 million dogs and 74 million cats as pets.

Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company
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http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/350316/description/Exploration_forges_differences_in_identical_twins

Exploration forges differences in identical twins

By Puneet Kollipara

Identical twin mice sharing the same mazelike
environment develop distinct personalities based
on how much they explore their surroundings,
researchers report in the May 10 Science. After
death, those differences were reflected in the animals’ brains.

The study “highlights something for which we had
some intuition before, but actually quantifies
it,” says Fred Gage, a neuroscientist at the Salk
Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif.

Some character and biological differences between
identical twins may originate as early as
pregnancy. But twins become more and more
different as life goes on, even when they grow up
together. Scientists have recognized that having
distinct experiences within the same environment
might boost such personality differences, but
that’s difficult to test in humans.

Studying it in animals has multiple benefits.
“You can keep the genes constant and also keep
the environment constant,” says Gerd Kempermann
of the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden
in Germany. “It’s much more controlled than in a human situation.”

Researchers led by Kempermann put 40 genetically
identical female mice in an elaborate cage and
observed their behavior. The cage had multiple
levels linked together by tubes and contained
toys and other features that the animals could
explore. The researchers equipped each mouse with
a microchip that tracked its location, using the
animals’ movements as a measure of exploratory
behavior. Initially, the mice differed only
slightly in their tendency to roam. As they grew
older, all tended to explore more often, but the
differences among the mice grew more pronounced.

© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013
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http://www.nature.com/news/psychiatry-framework-seeks-to-reform-diagnostic-doctrine-1.12972

Psychiatry framework seeks to reform diagnostic doctrine

Heidi Ledford

Nassir Ghaemi, director of the Mood Disorders
Program at Tufts Medical Center in Boston,
Massachusetts, has felt shackled by the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM), often called the bible of
psychiatry. Some of his depressed patients
occasionally show manic behaviour but do not
fulfil the DSM’s criteria for a diagnosis of
bipolar disorder. Ghaemi is interested in whether
such patients might respond better to drugs for
bipolar disorder than for depression. But his
colleagues warned him against straying from the
DSM when he applied for funding at the US
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH),
because peer reviewers tended to insist on
research that hewed to DSM categories. Ghaemi held off from applying.

If NIMH director Thomas Insel has his way, Ghaemi
and other mental-health researchers will no
longer feel the weight of the DSM. “NIMH will be
re-orienting its research away from DSM
categories,” Insel wrote in a blog entry on 29
April. The latest edition, the DSM-5, will be
unveiled on 22 May at the annual meeting of the
American Psychiatric Association in San
Francisco, California. Like many psychiatrists,
Insel questions whether the DSM’s categories
accurately reflect the way the brain works. He is
pushing a project that aims to create a new
framework that classifies mental-health disorders
according to their biological roots. “Going
forward, we will be supporting research projects
that look across current categories ­ or
sub-divide current categories ­ to begin to
develop a better system,” Insel wrote.

The blog post made waves in the media and rattled
some psychiatric clinicians and researchers. But
Insel says that he has been talking about the
issue since 2008. “The word was just still not
out there,” he says. Insel says that he has
increasingly received complaints from grant
applicants who have tried to follow his guidance,
only to be shot down by peer reviewers for eschewing DSM scripture.

© 2013 Nature Publishing Group
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http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/health/childinmind/2013/05/dsm_and_nimh_on_mental_illness.html

DSM, NIMH on mental illness: both miss
relational, historical context of being human

by Claudia M Gold

It seems that the National Institute of Mental
Health (NIMH) may have dealt a death blow to the
recently published Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5) when the
organization declared they would no longer fund
research based on the DSM system of diagnosis.
The views of NIMH director Thomas Insel were
referenced in the recent New York Times article on the subject.

His goal was to reshape the direction of
psychiatric research to focus on biology,
genetics and neuroscience so that scientists can
define disorders by their causes, rather than their symptoms.

I am no fan of the DSM system, which reduces
complex experience to lists of symptoms; focusing
on the "what" rather than the "why." However,
the NIMH model has limits as well. There seems to
be a wish to study mental illness in the same way
we study cancer or diabetes. While I certainly
have great respect for the complexity of the
pancreas, or the process of malignant
transformation of cells, trying to understand the
brain/mind in an analogous way seems to be an
unnecessary and even undesirable reduction of human experience.

What is missing from both paradigms is
recognition of the relational and historical
context of being human. Fortunately there seems
to be awareness that neither paradigm is
complete. The Times article goes on to say:

Dr. Insel is one of a growing number of
scientists who think that the field needs an
entirely new paradigm for understanding mental
disorders, though neither he nor anyone else
knows exactly what it will look like.

© 2013 NY Times Co.
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http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23523-mindscapes-stroke-turned-excon-into-rhyming-painter.html

Mindscapes: Stroke turned ex-con into rhyming painter

by Helen Thomson

"I was sitting on the toilet. I suddenly felt an
explosion in the left side of my head and ended
up on the floor. I think the only thing that kept
me conscious was that I didn't want to be found
with my pants down. Then the other side of my
head went bang! I woke up in hospital and looked
out of the window to see the tree was sprouting
numbers. 3, 6, 9. Then I started talking in rhyme…"

Ten days after having a subarachnoid haemorrhage
– a stroke caused by bleeding in and around the
brain – Tommy McHugh, an ex-con who'd been in his
fair share of scraps, became a new man, with a
personality that nobody recognised.

When he was a young man, Tommy did time in
prison. But after his stroke at age 51,
everything changed. "I could taste the femininity
inside of myself," he said. "My head was full of
rhymes and images and pictures."

Not only did he feel a sudden urge to write
poetry, but he also began to paint and draw
obsessively for up to 19 hours a day. He was
never artistic before – in fact, he joked that
he'd never even been in an art gallery "except to maybe steal something".

Desperate to find out what was going on, Tommy
wrote to several neuroscientists and end up
working closely with Alice Flaherty at Harvard
Medical School and Mark Lythgoe at University College London.

© Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.
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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=could-neural-implant-correct-errant-thoughts

Could a Neural Implant Correct Errant Thoughts?

By Ian Chant

Most people make good decisions most of the time.
But when drug addiction, disease or brain injury
enters the picture, rational thinking can go
awry. What if the damaged brain just needed a
little reminder of how it feels to choose wisely?

Enter the MIMO neural prosthesis, an array of
electrodes implanted in the brain that make
contact with eight neuron circuits in the
prefrontal cor-tex, the brain's command center
for decision making. The device can both record
the brain activity associated with good choices
and stimulate the relevant neurons to get the
brain back on track. Although the implant can
listen in only on a tiny subset of the neurons in
this region, the scientists who developed it,
based at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, were
surprised to discover that they could still pick
up signature patterns associated with correct
choices, at least in the context of a simple task.

The researchers tested the neural prosthesis on
monkeys that were trained to move a cursor over a
picture on a computer screen to get a food
reward. The implant first recorded the brain
activity associated with choosing the correct
picture. Then the monkeys were given cocaine, and
their performance plummeted. But when the implant
was switched on to send electric current to the
neurons that had earlier been associated with the
correct answers, the monkeys immediately started
selecting the right pictures again. Some of them
did an even better job than they had before receiving cocaine.

© 2013 Scientific American,
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http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/350299/description/Brain_training_technique_gets_a_critique

Brain training technique gets a critique

By Bruce Bower

Provocative evidence that certain memory
exercises make people smarter has sparked the
rise of online brain-training programs such as
Lumosity. But at least one type of brain training
may not work as advertised, a new study finds.

As expected, practicing improved volunteers’
performance on tests of memory and the ability to
locate items quickly in busy scenes, say
psychologist Thomas Redick of Indiana University
Purdue University Columbus and his colleagues.
That improvement did not, however, translate into
higher scores on tests of intelligence and
multitasking, the researchers report in the May
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Redick’s investigation is part of a growing
scientific debate about brain training, which is
promoted by some companies as having a variety of
mental benefits. Some researchers say that
extensive instruction and training on memory
tasks can indeed fortify reasoning and problem
solving. Others are skeptical that vigorous
memory sessions produce such wide-ranging
effects. The dispute feeds into a longstanding
scientific controversy about whether enriched
environments can increase intelligence, as measured on IQ tests.

What’s not up for debate is that many people feel
smarter after brain training. In the new study,
10 of 23 individuals who completed memory
sessions said that the program helped them to
think, multitask and focus better in daily life.

But the scientists say that even if some
participants performed daily tasks better after
memory training, they may simply have tried
harder or felt better about their efforts due to
a belief that training had strengthened their minds.

© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013
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http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/2013/05/09/human-brain-cells-alive-in-mouse-brains/

Human Brain Cells Alive in Mouse Brains

By John McCarthy

Into brains of newborn mice, researchers
implanted human “progenitor cells.” These mature
into a type of brain cell called astrocytes (see
below). They grew into human astrocytes, crowding
out mouse astrocytes. The mouse brains became
chimeras of human and mouse, with the workhorse
mouse brain cells – neurons – nurtured by billions of human astrocytes.

Neuroscience is only beginning to discover what
astrocytes do in brains. One job that is known is
that they help neurons build connections
(synapses) with other neurons. (Firing
neurotransmitter molecules across synapses is how
neurons communicate.) Human astrocytes are larger
and more complex than those of other mammals.
Humans’ unique brain capabilities may depend on this complexity.

Human astrocytes certainly inspired the mice.
Their neurons did indeed build stronger synapses.
(Perhaps this was because human astrocytes signal
three times faster than mouse astrocytes do.)
Mouse learning sharpened, too. On the first try,
for instance, altered mice perceived the
connection between a noise and an electric shock
(a standard learning test in mouse research).
Normal mice need a few repetitions to get the
idea. Memories of the doctored mice were better
too: they remembered mazes, object locations, and the shock lessons longer.

The reciprocal pulsing of billions of human and
mouse brain cells inside a mouse skull is a
little creepy. Imagine one of these hybrid mice
exploring your living room. Would you feel like a
Stone Age tribesman observing a toy robot? Does the thing think?

© 2013 Scientific American
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