Researchers Develop Technique to Visualize ‘Your Brain on Drugs’
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Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed an imaging protocol that allows them to visualize the activity of the brain’s reward circuitry in both normal individuals and those addicted to drugs. The technique could lead to better insight into why people take recreational drugs as well as help determine which treatment strategies might be most effective.
Drug addiction is a complex process that involves numerous biological and environmental factors, but a central element is how the drugs affect the activity of dopamine, the chemical that regulates pleasure and reward in the brain.
To get a real-time sense of dopamine activity, Joanna Fowler and her colleague Gene-Jack Wang at Brookhaven, along with Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, combined positron emission tomography (PET), a medical imaging technology useful for identifying brain diseases, with special radioactive tracers that bind to dopamine receptors.
An underlying cause for psychopathic behavior?
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Psychopaths are known to be characterized by callousness, diminished capacity for remorse, and lack of empathy. However, the exact cause of these personality traits is an area of scientific debate. The results of a new study, reported in the May 2010 issue of Elsevier’s Cortex (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/cortex), show striking similarities between the mental impairments observed in psychopaths and those seen in patients with frontal lobe damage.
One previous explanation for psychopathic tendencies has been a reduced capacity to make inferences about the mental states of other people, an ability known as Theory of Mind (ToM). On the other hand, psychopaths are also known to be extremely good manipulators and deceivers, which would imply that they have good skills in inferring the knowledge, needs, intentions, and beliefs of other people. Therefore, it has been suggested recently that ToM is made up of different aspects: a cognitive part, which requires inferences about knowledge and beliefs, and another part which requires the understanding of emotions.
Dr Simone Shamay-Tsoory, from the University of Haifa in Israel, along with colleagues from The Shalvata Mental Health Care Center and the Rambam Medical Center, tested the hypothesis that impairment in the emotional aspects of these abilities may account for psychopathic behaviour.
Few Chinese lung diseased workers get redress: report
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Over 10,000 workers in China are diagnosed with a deadly lung disease each year from breathing in dust from cutting gemstones and drilling rocks, but only a few manage to get compensation, said a rights organisation.
The China Labour Bulletin (CLB) said some pneumoconiosis victims receive small sums that cover their medical costs for a few years, but many get nothing at all for the incurable disease.
“Pneumoconiosis is the number-one occupational disease in China, accounting for around 90 percent of all cases,” CLB said, adding that many victims cannot even manage to get an official diagnosis.
Clinical study supports benefit of breastfeeding support for obese women
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Breastfeeding is best, but what happens when something goes wrong? And why do so many women struggle with this “natural” process even after carefully following all the well-meaning advice they’ve gotten from their health care providers? Not surprisingly, some women have more difficulty than others and there are many factors associated with experiencing breastfeeding problems – especially in the first week after birth. For example, being African-American, having less than a high school education, and being poor are all associated with suboptimal breastfeeding outcomes. Recent studies also consistently show that being overweight or obese increases the chance that a woman will suffer breastfeeding problems. With burgeoning rates of obesity and a continued public health effort to promote breastfeeding, researchers are scrambling to figure out why overweight women have trouble breastfeeding and what can be done to circumvent this predicament.
On April 25, two talks concerning the potential benefits of intensive breastfeeding support for obese women will be presented at the Experimental Biology 2010 meeting in Anaheim. These presentations are part of the scientific program of the American Society for Nutrition, the nation’s leading nutrition research society. Scientists from the University of Connecticut, Hartford’s Hispanic Health Council, the Hartford Hospital, and Yale University will speak. Their findings provide compelling evidence that peer counseling and support can substantially improve breastfeeding success among these at-risk ladies.
These studies, which were prompted by a sincere desire to “really understand whether obese women could be more successful at breastfeeding if they have help,” were spearheaded by Dr. Donna Chapman, Assistant Director of the Center for Eliminating Health Disparities among Latinos (CEHDL) in Hartford, CT and graduate student Katie Morel.
Pain free treatment of children and adolescents
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Properly performed analgesia protects children from pain and traumatization. In the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2010; 107(14): 241-7), Christoph Neuhäuser and his colleagues show how analgesia for children and adolescents should be carried out.
Medical interventions can be very unpleasant. However, we know that they are necessary and that they will help us, so we grit our teeth until the grueling procedure has been got through. On the other hand, children are often incapable of grasping the situation in which they find themselves and the possible consequences. They tend to regard painful treatment as a threat and suffer enormous psychological stress.
Children’s special needs are all too often neglected in pain therapy. This can have dire consequences and traumatize the child. If properly used, analgesia and analgesic sedation can prevent this.
Potentially deadly fungus spreading in US, Canada
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A potentially deadly strain of fungus is spreading among animals and people in the northwestern United States and the Canadian province of British Columbia, researchers reported yesterday.
The airborne fungus, called Cryptococcus gattii, usually only infects immunocompromised patients, but the new strain is genetically different, the researchers said.
“This novel fungus is worrisome because it appears to be a threat to otherwise healthy people,” said Dr. Edmond Byrnes of Duke University in North Carolina, who led the study.
Bret Michaels’ speech slurred after brain hemorrhage
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Rock singer and TV reality star Bret Michaels remained in critical condition, but was conscious and talking with slurred speech after suffering a brain hemorrhage, his publicist said on Sunday.
The front man of glam rock band Poison was rushed to an undisclosed hospital on Friday with a severe headache. Doctors diagnosed a massive subarachnoid hemorrhage, or bleeding at the base of his brain stem.
A statement issued on Sunday by publicists for the 47-year-old singer said he was still under 24-hour supervision and in critical condition and that doctors were trying to locate the source of the bleeding.
Childhood obesity: Healthy eating is key to combating weight
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When Danielle Puckett was 4, her mother tried to put a lock on the refrigerator door.
“She just started going in the refrigerator and getting anything and everything,” said Danielle’s mother, Dawn Keller. It was then that she began to notice her daughter was becoming overweight. “She was drinking a lot of whole milk. We started cutting back on what we gave her.”
That didn’t really help, though — Danielle would just sneak the food she craved, and she put on weight steadily. She weighed 105 pounds by age 5, 150 pounds by age 10, and 250 pounds by age 15, her mother said.
Men from deprived areas less likely to be treated for prostate cancer
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Men living in deprived areas are far less likely to be treated with the most common types of radical treatment for prostate cancer than those in more affluent places, says a study published on bmj.com today.
A large scale study carried out by researchers from Cambridge found that patients from the most deprived areas are 26% less likely to have radiotherapy than men from the most affluent areas and 52% less likely to have radical surgery.
Prostate cancer is the most common malignancy in men and its incidence has been increasing, particularly since the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Useful stroke trials left unpublished
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An investigation into unpublished stroke research data has revealed that 19.6% of completed clinical trials, which could potentially influence patient care, are not published in full. Researchers writing in BioMed Central’s open access journal Trials describe how these unpublished studies included more than 16,000 participants and tested 89 different interventions.
Peter Sandercock and his colleague Lorna Gibson worked with a team of researchers from the University of Edinburgh, UK, to search the Cochrane Stroke Group’s Specialised Register of Trials for completed trials of pharmacological interventions for acute ischemic stroke, and to determine how many of these were ultimately published. He said, “Failure to publish trial data is to be deprecated as it sets aside the altruism of participants’ consent to be exposed to the risks of experimental interventions, potentially biases the assessment of the effects of therapies, and may lead to premature discontinuation of research into promising treatments”.
The researchers identified 940 trials, of which 125 were not published in full. The largest trial included 856 patients, while two unpublished trials included fewer than 10 patients each. According to Sandercock, “Several of the trials we identified may have been large enough to influence clinical practice and the findings of systematic reviews and meta-analyses”.
Study launched on health impact from mobile phones
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A new decades-long study examining the link between the use of mobile phones and long-term health problems such as cancer and neurological diseases launched on Thursday across five European countries.
Organisers said the Cohort Study on Mobile Communications (COSMOS) would be the largest of its kind, examining more than 250,000 people aged 18 to 69 in Britain, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark.
Professor Paul Elliott, the Principal Investigator at the Imperial College London on the British study, said previous research examining the health link had so far been reassuring but pointed out these had often only lasted around 10 years.
Body Mass Index gain throughout adulthood may increase risk of postmenopausal breast cancer
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Reported mid-life increase in body mass index (BMI) may lead to substantially higher risk of postmenopausal breast cancer, according to results of a prospective cohort study presented at the American Association for Cancer Research 101st Annual Meeting 2010, held here April 17-21.
In previous studies, excess weight has been linked with increased risk of postmenopausal breast cancer. Scientists have speculated that in postmenopausal women, estrogen produced in adipose tissue, or body fat, may promote breast cell proliferation. Relatively few studies have looked specifically at increase in BMI and its timing in relation to postmenopausal breast cancer risk, which this study investigated.
The researchers analyzed information from 72,007 women in the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial cohort, who were 55 to 74 years old at study entry. The analysis included 3,677 cases of postmenopausal breast cancer, which makes this one of the larger studies of its kind, according to the researchers.
Excessive alcohol consumption may lead to increased cancer risk
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Researchers have detected a link between alcohol consumption, cancer and aging that starts at the cellular level with telomere shortening.
Results of this cross-sectional study were presented at the American Association for Cancer Research 101st Annual Meeting 2010, held here, April 17-21, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.
Telomeres are found at the region of DNA sequences at the end of a chromosome, and are important for the genetic stability of cells. As people age, telomere length shortens progressively.
HSP-90 and vasoregulation in portal hypertension
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Neural vasoregulation represents a rapid and potent mode of altering vascular tone but has not been investigated thoroughly during portal hypertension. Heat shock protein-90 (HSP-90) is well-known to act as a molecular chaperone optimizing endothelial and neural NO-synthase (eNOS, nNOS) enzyme activity and thus, NO production. Although HSP-90 has been shown to mediate in large parts the enhanced eNOS-dependent NO overproduction in the splanchnic circulation during portal hypertension, it is not clear what role HSP-90 plays in nNOS-mediated vasorelaxation in this scenario.
A research article to be published on April 21, 2010 in the World Journal of Gastroenterology addresses this question. This research relates to the utilization of the McGregor preparation enabling physiological and pharmacological testing of the whole mesenteric vasculature in its original anatomy and innervations. In contrast to arterial strips, this ensures testing of neural vasoregulation at close to in vivo conditions.
The investigators for the first time demonstrate a critical role of HSP-90 for nNOS-mediated vasorelaxation and furthermore, can provide evidence for this interaction being responsible in large parts for the well-accepted pronounced nNOS-dependent vasodilatation in portal hypertension.
Obesity and weight gain near time of prostate cancer surgery doubles risk of recurrence
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Johns Hopkins epidemiologists say that prostate cancer patients who gain five or more pounds near the time of their prostate surgery are twice as likely to have a recurrence of their cancer compared with patients whose weight is stable.
“We surveyed men whose cancer was confined to the prostate, and surgery should have cured most of them, yet some cancers recurred. Obesity and weight gain may be factors that tip the scale to recurrence,” says Corinne Joshu, Ph.D., M.P.H., postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Joshu and her colleagues sent questionnaires to 1,337 men with prostate cancer who had undergone surgery to remove their prostate at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. The researchers asked each participant to recall their dietary, lifestyle and medical factors from five years before their surgery through one year after.
