Steampunk fMRI - Early Weaning - Schizophrenia Gene? - Fat Truth

[Marc Breedlove]

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/?p=3967&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DiscoverBlogs+%28Discover+Blogs%29#.UZyVh5yjKtN

A Machine to Weigh the Soul

By Neuroskeptic

Newly discovered papers have shed light on a
fascinating episode in the history of
neuroscience: Weighing brain activity with the balance

The story of the early Italian neuroscientist Dr
Angelo Mosso and his ‘human circulation balance’
is an old one – I remember reading about it as a
student, in the introductory bit of a textbook on
fMRI – but until now, the exact details were murky.

In the new paper, Italian neuroscientists
Sandrone and colleagues report that they’ve
unearthed Mosso’s original manuscripts from an archive in Milan.

Mosso worked in the late 19th century, an era
that was – in retrospect – right at the dawn of
modern neuroscience. A major question at that
time was the relationship between brain function and blood flow.

His early work included studies of the blood
pressure in the brains of individuals with skull
defects. His most ambitious project, however, was
his balance – or as he sometimes called it,
according to his daughter, his ‘metal cradle’ or ‘machine to weigh the soul’.

It was in essence just a large balance. A
volunteer lay on a table, their head on one side
of the scale’s pivot and their feet on the other.
It was carefully adjusted so that the two sides were perfectly balanced.

The theory was that if mental activity caused
increased brain blood flow, it ought to increase
the weight of the head relative to the rest of
the body, so that side of the balance would fall.
--------------------


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/science/from-neanderthal-molar-scientists-infer-early-weaning.html?ref=science&_r=0

A Modern Stone Age Family? A Neanderthal’s Molar Suggests Early Weaning

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Modern mothers love to debate how long to
breast-feed, a topic that stirs both guilt and
pride. Now ­ in a very preliminary finding ­ the Neanderthals are weighing in.

By looking at barium levels in the fossilized
molar of a Neanderthal child, researchers
concluded that the child had been breast-fed
exclusively for the first seven months, followed
by seven months of mother’s milk supplemented by
other food. Then the barium pattern in the tooth
enamel “returned to baseline prenatal levels,
indicating an abrupt cessation of breast-feeding
at 1.2 years of age,” the scientists reported on
Wednesday in the journal Nature.

While that timetable conforms with the current
recommendations of the American Academy of
Pediatrics ­ which suggests that mothers
exclusively breast-feed babies for six months and
continue for 12 months if possible ­ it
represents a much shorter span of breast-feeding
than practiced by apes or a vast majority of
modern humans. The average age of weaning in
nonindustrial populations is about 2.5 years; in
chimpanzees in the wild, it is about 5.3 years.
Of course, living conditions were much different
for our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals,
extinct for the last 30,000 years.

The findings, which drew strong skepticism from
some scientists, were meant to highlight a method
of linking barium levels in teeth to dietary
changes. In the Nature report, researchers from
the United States and Australia described tests
among human infants and captive macaques showing
that traces of the element barium in tooth enamel
appeared to accurately reflect transitions from
mother’s milk through weaning. The barium levels
rose during breast-feeding and fell off sharply on weaning.

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


http://www.nih.gov/news/health/may2013/nimh-22.htm

Taming suspect gene reverses schizophrenia-like abnormalities in mice

Scientists have reversed behavioral and brain
abnormalities in adult mice that resemble some
features of schizophrenia by restoring normal
expression to a suspect gene that is
over-expressed in humans with the illness.
Targeting expression of the gene Neuregulin1,
which makes a protein important for brain
development, may hold promise for treating at
least some patients with the brain disorder, say
researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Like patients with schizophrenia, adult mice
biogenetically-engineered to have higher
Neuregulin 1 levels showed reduced activity of
the brain messenger chemicals glutamate and GABA.
The mice also showed behaviors related to aspects
of the human illness. For example, they
interacted less with other animals and faltered on thinking tasks.

“The deficits reversed when we normalized
Neuregulin 1 expression in animals that had been
symptomatic, suggesting that damage which
occurred during development is recoverable in
adulthood,” explained Lin Mei, M.D.,
Ph.D.External Web Site Policy , of the Medical
College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University,
a grantee of NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

“While mouse models can’t really do full justice
to a complex brain disorder that impairs our most
uniquely human characteristics, this study
demonstrates the potential of dissecting the
workings of intermediate components of disorders
in animals to discover underlying mechanisms and
new treatment targets,” said NIMH Director Thomas
R. Insel, M.D. “Hopeful news about how an illness
process that originates early in development
might be reversible in adulthood illustrates the
promise of such translational research.”

Schizophrenia is thought to stem from early
damage to the developing fetal brain, traceable
to a complex mix of genetic and environmental
causes. Although genes identified to date account
for only a small fraction of cases, evidence has
implicated variation in the Neuregulin 1 gene.
For example, postmortem studies have found that
it is overexpressed in the brain's thinking hub,
or prefrontal cortex, of some people who had
schizophrenia. It codes for a chemical messenger
that plays a pivotal role in communication
between brain cells, as well as in brain development.
--------------------


http://www.nature.com/news/the-big-fat-truth-1.13039

The big fat truth

Virginia Hughes

Late in the morning on 20 February, more than 200
people packed an auditorium at the Harvard School
of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. The
purpose of the event, according to its
organizers, was to explain why a new study about
weight and death was absolutely wrong.

The report, a meta-analysis of 97 studies
including 2.88 million people, had been released
on 2 January in the Journal of the American
Medical Association (JAMA)1. A team led by
Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist at the
National Center for Health Statistics in
Hyattsville, Maryland, reported that people
deemed 'overweight' by international standards
were 6% less likely to die than were those of
'normal' weight over the same time period.

The result seemed to counter decades of advice to
avoid even modest weight gain, provoking coverage
in most major news outlets ­ and a hostile
backlash from some public-health experts. “This
study is really a pile of rubbish, and no one
should waste their time reading it,” said Walter
Willett, a leading nutrition and epidemiology
researcher at the Harvard school, in a radio
interview. Willett later organized the Harvard
symposium ­ where speakers lined up to critique
Flegal's study ­ to counteract that coverage and
highlight what he and his colleagues saw as
problems with the paper. “The Flegal paper was so
flawed, so misleading and so confusing to so many
people, we thought it really would be important
to dig down more deeply,” Willett says.

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