Haptic Prosthesis - Ultra-ultrasound - Flu & Bipolar - Anxiolytic Tylenol?

[Marc Breedlove]

http://www.nature.com/news/neuroprosthetics-once-more-with-feeling-1.12938

Neuroprosthetics: Once more, with feeling

Roberta Kwok

Sitting motionless in her wheelchair, paralysed
from the neck down by a stroke, Cathy Hutchinson
seems to take no notice of the cable rising from
the top of her head through her curly dark hair.
Instead, she stares intently at a bottle sitting
on the table in front of her, a straw protruding
from the top. Her gaze never wavers as she
mentally guides a robot arm beside her to reach
across the table, close its grippers around the
bottle, then slowly lift the vessel towards her
mouth. Only when she finally manages to take a
sip does her face relax into a luminous smile.

This video of 58-year-old Hutchinson illustrates
the strides being taken in brain-controlled
prosthetics1. Over the past 15 years, researchers
have shown that a rat can make a robotic arm push
a lever2, a monkey can play a video game3 and a
person with quadriplegia ­ Hutchinson ­ can sip
from a bottle of coffee1, all by simply thinking
about the action. Improvements in prosthetic
limbs have been equally dramatic, with devices
now able to move individual fingers and bend at more than two dozen joints.

But Hutchinson's focused stare in that video also
illustrates the one crucial feature still missing
from prosthetics. Her eyes could tell her where
the arm was, but she could not feel what it was
doing. Nor could she sense when the grippers
touched the bottle, or whether it was slipping
out of their grasp. Without this type of sensory
feedback, even the simplest actions can be slow
and clumsy, as Igor Spetic of Madison, Ohio,
knows well. Fitted with a prosthetic after his
right hand was crushed in an industrial accident
in 2010, Spetic describes breaking dishes,
grabbing fruit too hard and bruising it and
dropping a can when trying to pick it up at the
local shop. Having a sense of touch would be
“tremendous”, he says. “It'd be one step closer to having the hand back.”

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


http://www.nature.com/news/moth-smashes-ultrasound-hearing-records-1.12941

Moth smashes ultrasound hearing records

Ed Yong

Many moths have evolved sensitive hearing that
can pick up the ultrasonic probes of bats that
want to eat them. But one species comes
pre-adapted for anything that bats might bring to
this evolutionary arms race. Even though its ears
are extremely simple ­ a pair of eardrums on its
flanks that each vibrate four receptor cells ­ it
can sense frequencies up to 300 kilohertz, well
beyond the range of any other animal and higher than any bat can squeak.

“A lot of previous work has suggested that some
bats have evolved calls that are out of the
hearing range of the moths they are hunting. But
this moth can hear the calls of any bat,” says
James Windmill, an acoustical engineer at the
University of Strathclyde, UK, who discovered the
ability in the greater wax moth (Galleria
mellonella). His study is published in Biology Letters1.

Windmill's collaborator Hannah Moir, a
bioacoustician now at the University of Leeds,
UK, played sounds of varying frequencies to
immobilized wax moths. As the insects “listened”,
Moir used a laser to measure the vibrations of
their eardrums, and electrodes to record the activity of their auditory nerves.

The moths were most sensitive to frequencies of
around 80 kilohertz, the average frequency of
their courtship calls. But when exposed to 300
kilohertz, the highest level that the team
tested, the insects' eardrums still vibrated and their neurons still fired.

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


http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/depression-may-raise-risk-of-gut-infection/?ref=health

Depression May Raise Risk of Gut Infection

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Two studies have found that depression and the
use of certain antidepressants are both
associated with increased risk for Clostridium
difficile infection, an increasingly common cause
of diarrhea that in the worst cases can be fatal.

Researchers studied 16,781 men and women, average
age 68, using hospital records and interviews to
record cases of the infection, often called C.
diff, and diagnoses of depression. The interviews
were conducted biennially from 1991 to 2007 to
gather self-reports of feelings of sadness and
other emotional problems. There were 404 cases of C. difficile infection.

After adjusting for other variables, the
researchers found that the risk of C. diff
infection among people with a history of
depression or depressive symptoms was 36 to 47
percent greater than among people without depression.

A second study, involving 4,047 hospitalized
patients, average age 58, found a similar
association of infection with depression. In
addition, it found an association of some
antidepressants ­ Remeron, Prozac and trazodone ­
with C. diff infection. There was no association with other antidepressants.

“We have known for a long time that depression is
associated with changes in the gastrointestinal
system,” said the lead author, Mary A.M. Rogers,
a research assistant professor at the University
of Michigan, “and this interaction between the
brain and the gut deserves more study.”

Both reports appeared in the journal BMC Medicine.

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


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22447160

Flu in pregnancy 'may raise bipolar risk for baby'

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News

Flu during pregnancy may increase the risk of the
unborn child developing bipolar disorder later in life, research suggests.

A study of 814 expectant women, published in JAMA
Psychiatry, showed that infection made bipolar four times more likely.

The overall risk remained low, but it echoes
similar findings linking flu and schizophrenia.

Experts said the risks were small and women should not worry.

Bipolar leads to intense mood swings, which can
last months, ranging from depression and despair
to manic feelings of joy, overactivity and loss of inhibitions.

Researchers at the Columbia University Medical
Center identified a link between the condition,
often diagnosed during late teens and twenties, and experiences in the womb.

In their study looking at people born in the
early 1960s, bipolar disorder was nearly four
times as common in people whose mothers caught flu during pregnancy.

The condition affects about one in 100 people.
The lead researcher, Prof Alan Brown, estimated
that influenza infection during pregnancy could
lead to a 3-4% chance of bipolar disorder in the resulting children.

However, in the vast majority of cases of bipolar
disorder there would no history of flu.

BBC © 2013
--------------------


http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/2013/05/08/tomorrows-anti-anxiety-drug-is-tylenol/

Tomorrow’s Anti-Anxiety Drug Is… Tylenol?

By Ben Thomas

Horror isn’t the only film genre that specializes
in dread. War movies like Apocalypse Now, sci-fi
mysteries like Brazil and Blade Runner, and
dramas like Melancholia and Requiem for a Dream
all masterfully evoke a less violent, more subtle
and pervasive sense that something is unwell with
the world – that somewhere along the line,
something went deeply wrong and now normality
itself is unraveling before our eyes.

The director David Lynch has arguably built his
entire career on directing these kinds of films.
In Lynch’s universe, even the most banal moments
are still somehow suffused with unnerving
suspense. In films like Blue Velvet and
Mulholland Drive, disturbing surprises erupt into
scene after scene of buried tension, until every
ordinary conversation feels like a trap waiting
to spring. And then there’s the infamous
Eraserhead, where family life itself is
transformed into an onslaught of surreal and
nauseating images. It’s hard to come away from
these movies without feeling that a little of
Lynch’s unease has rubbed off on you.

So when a team of researchers at the University
of British Columbia set out to describe and treat
an ancient biological alarm system buried deep
within the human brain, they turned to Lynch’s
films as an analogy for – and a set of examples
of – the feeling of omnipresent yet maddeningly
vague “wrongness” that seems to underlie many anxiety disorders.

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


http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/350271/description/Black_women_may_have_highest_multiple_sclerosis_rates

Black women may have highest multiple sclerosis rates

By Nathan Seppa

Multiple sclerosis, long considered a disease of
white females, has affected more black women in
recent years, a new study finds. Hispanic and
Asian women, who have previously seemed to be at
less risk of MS, remain so, researchers report
May 7 in Neurology. The findings bolster a theory
that vitamin D deficiency, which is common in
people with dark skin in northern latitudes, contributes to MS.

MS is a debilitating condition in which the
protective coatings on nerves in the central
nervous system get damaged, resulting in a loss
of motor control, muscle weakness, vision
complications and other problems. The National
Multiple Sclerosis Society estimates that 2.1
million people worldwide have the condition.

The researchers scanned medical information from
3.5 million people who were members of the health
maintenance organization Kaiser Permanente
Southern California and found that 496 people
received diagnoses of MS from 2008 through 2010.
Of these patients, women comprised 70 percent,
not an unusual fraction for people with MS.
Surprisingly, the patients included 84 black
women. That means the annual incidence of MS in
black women was 10.2 cases per 100,000 people.
That’s not a great risk for an individual, but it
was higher than the annual rates for white,
Hispanic and Asian women, which were 6.9, 2.9 and
1.4 per 100,000 people, respectively.

Among blacks, women had three times the incidence
as men; in the other racial and ethnic groups,
the MS rate in women was roughly double that of men.

© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013
--------------------


http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/streams-of-consciousness/2013/05/07/can-doctors-diagnose-ms-from-blood/

Can Doctors Diagnose MS from Blood?

By Ingrid Wickelgren

I have seen the invisible arms of multiple
sclerosis, a potentially devastating disease of
the nervous system, touch friends, relatives and
acquaintances. They perturbed the personality of
a father of a close friend and left him unable to
keep a job and support the family. They forced a
young woman I met years ago to walk tentatively,
watching her step. They put one beloved member of
my extended family with two small children in a
wheelchair and took away his voice.

Nowadays, many people with MS find that new
medications can mitigate the progression of their
disease (see “New Treatments Tackle Multiple
Sclerosis,” by James D. Bowen, Scientific
American Mind, July/August 2013). But many
mysteries remain about the cause of the disorder
and no one knows how to prevent or cure it. About
a decade ago, a technology entrepreneur named Art
Mellor, who was diagnosed with MS in 2000,
founded an organization called Accelerated Cure
Project based in Waltham, Massachusetts to help
speed progress on solving these mysteries, in
part through greater collaboration among
scientists. In one of its efforts, it maintains a
repository of thousands of blood samples from
patients who visited any of 10 U.S. clinics. The
samples are made available to anyone willing to
share their data with the Project. Scientists
have used these samples in more than 70 different
studies into the causes of MS and how to diagnose and treat it.

A number of these experiments involve trying to
identify molecular signs of the disease in the
blood, in hopes of developing a simple blood test
for the disorder. Such a test might reduce the
time and cost of an MS diagnosis. The primary
tool for spotting MS today is magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI), which can reveal inflammation in
the brain characteristic of the disorder.

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


http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/health/2013/05/07/baxter-drug-fails-slow-alzheimer-big-study/gMM4nPIixG1XMUjz2Vqp6O/story.html

Baxter drug fails to slow Alzheimer's in big study

By MARILYNN MARCHIONE

DEERFIELD, Ill. (AP) ­ Baxter International Inc.
says that a blood product it was testing failed
to slow mental decline or to preserve physical
function in a major study of 390 patients with
mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease.

The company says that people who received 18
months of infusions with its drug, Gammagard,
fared no better than others given infusions of a dummy solution.

Gammagard is immune globulin, natural antibodies
culled from donated blood. Researchers thought
these antibodies might help remove amyloid, the
sticky plaque that clogs patients’ brains, sapping memory and ability to think.

Patients with moderate disease and those with a
gene that raises risk of Alzheimer’s who were
taking the higher of two doses in the study
seemed to benefit, although the study was not big enough to say for sure.

‘‘The study missed its primary endpoints, however
we remain interested by the prespecified
sub-group analyses’’ in groups that seemed to
benefit, Ludwig Hantson, president of Baxter’s
BioScience business, said in a statement.

Gammagard is already sold to treat some blood
disorders, and the results of the Alzheimer’s
study do not affect those uses. About 35 million
people worldwide have dementia, and Alzheimer’s
is the most common type. In the U.S., about 5
million have Alzheimer's. Current medicines such
as Aricept and Namenda just temporarily ease symptoms. There is no known cure.

© 2013 NY Times Co.
--------------------