BrainBlog

From The New York Times : Oliver Sacks Joins Columbia Faculty By MOTOKO RICH September 1, 2007 Attracted by his breadth of interests, ranging from schizophrenia to music, Columbia University has appointed Oliver Sacks , the neurologist and writer, as its first Columbia artist, a newly created designation. Beginning next week, Dr. Sacks, who has been a clinical professor of neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx for the past 42 years, is leaving to become a professor of clinical neurology and clinical psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, a post he will occupy in addition to the new artist position. The new appointment will allow Dr. Sacks , the author of 10 books and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker , to range freely across Columbia’s departments, teaching, giving public lectures, conducting seminars, seeing patients and collaborating with other faculty members. Many of the details of his appointment have yet to be work...

Zack Lynch has posted a message on his Brain Waves blog about his NIO's new job-postings page. Please read the posting for an introduction and take a look at the cool new board: Brain Waves posting Neurotech Job Board

From the Associated Press, a report of curious cooperative behavior ... or merely a fluke: Spiders Create Giant Web By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS August 30, 2007 Filed at 7:02 a.m. ET WILLS POINT, Texas (AP) -- Entomologists are debating the origin and rarity of a sprawling spider web that blankets several trees, shrubs and the ground along a 200-yard stretch of trail in a North Texas park. Officials at Lake Tawakoni State Park say the massive mosquito trap is a big attraction for some visitors, while others won't go anywhere near it. ''At first, it was so white it looked like fairyland,'' said Donna Garde, superintendent of the park about 45 miles east of Dallas. ''Now it's filled with so many mosquitoes that it's turned a little brown. There are times you can literally hear the screech of millions of mosquitoes caught in those webs.'' Spider experts say the web may have been constructed by social cobweb spiders, which work together, or could be t...

Belleville S, Chertkow H, & Gauthier S. Working memory and control of attention in persons with Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment. Neuropsychology. 2007 Jul; 21(4): 458-469. Research CenterInstitut Universitaire de Geriatrie de Montreal, Montreal, PQ, Canada The goal of the present study was to assess 3 attentional control processes--divided attention, manipulation capacities, and inhibition--in persons with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and with mild Alzheimer's disease (AD). Manipulation capacities were tested by comparing immediate serial recall with alphabetical-order recall of words. Divided attention was tested with the Brown-Peterson procedure, in which participants divide their attention between simple addition tasks and consonant trigrams over delays. Inhibition was tested with the Hayling procedure, in which participants complete sentences with words irrelevant to their context. Persons with AD showed severe impairment on the 3 attentional cont...

While travelling on neuropsych business over the past week, I've been totally enjoying the new collaboration between Dana Press and Dr. Floyd Bloom - an edited book of feature articles from Scientific American . The book contains 21 articles of the many that have appeared in the magazine from 1999 onward. My favorite is the last one, "The Quest for a Smart Pill," by Stephen Hall. I may be mistaken, but I believe Hall has also written on this topic for the journal, Science . It deals with memory- and other cognitive-function- enhancing drugs currently under development by a number of biotech companies and some of the ethical issues involved in this domain. Good reads on the neurobiology of psychiatric disorders and computer-brain interfaces also are included. Articles by Antonio Damasio, Eric Kandel, and Fred Gage are representative of some of the neuroscientific leaders found in the book. Science journalist Carl Zimmer is represented, as well. List price of $25.00, The Be...

From today's New York Times : Mind Over Matter, With a Machine’s Help By JASON PONTIN Published: August 26, 2007 [snip] Omneuron is one of a number of new companies that are commercializing a brain-scanning technology called real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. Using large scanners to measure blood flow to different parts of the brain, the technology makes the brain’s activity visible by revealing which of its parts are busiest when we perform different tasks. While fMRI dates back to the early 1990s, hitherto it has been used mainly by doctors in hospitals to make diagnoses. The commercialization of brain scanning is a recent development, spurred by the refinement of the technology. Omneuron , which Dr. deCharms founded in 2001 and whose research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, uses fMRI to teach people how to play with their own heads. Other entrepreneurs are working on ways to deploy fMRI as a lie detector, a tool for conducting market...

Reimer B, D'Ambrosio LA, Coughlin JF, Fried R, & Biederman J. Task-induced fatigue and collisions in adult drivers with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Traffic Inj Prev. 2007 Sep; 8(3): 290-299. AgeLab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Objective. This study compares collision involvement between adult drivers with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and control participants in a simulation experiment designed to enhance the effects of fatigue. Because the effects of ADHD include difficulties in maintaining attention, drivers with ADHD were hypothesized to be more susceptible to the effects of fatigue while driving. Methods. Data are drawn from a validated driving simulation study, portions of which were focused on enhancing the effects of fatigue. The simulator data are supplemented with written questionnaire data. Drivers with ADHD were compared with controls. Results. The self-report data indicated that drivers with...

An FDA press release from yesterday: FDA Approves Risperdal for Two Psychiatric Conditions in Children and Adolescents The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved Risperdal (risperidone) for the treatment of schizophrenia in adolescents, ages 13 to 17, and for the short-term treatment of manic or mixed episodes of bipolar I disorder in children and adolescents ages 10 to 17. This is the first FDA approval of an atypical antipsychotic drug to treat either disorder in these age groups. Until now, there has been no FDA-approved drug for the treatment of schizophrenia for pediatric use and only lithium is approved for the treatment of bipolar disorder in adolescents ages 12 and up. “The pediatric studies of Risperdal provided an opportunity to assess the effectiveness, proper dose, and safety of using this product in the pediatric population,” said Dianne Murphy, M.D., director of FDA’s Office of Pediatric Therapeutics. “These data have permitted the identification of the effectiv...

The archive from a conference held at MIT in May of what sounds and looks like an exceptional event: Access here .

From today's New York Times : Sleights of Mind By GEORGE JOHNSON Published: August 21, 2007 [ ... Read the article ... ]

From the BBC's website: HIV's double hit on brain cells HIV can trigger learning and memory deficits by launching a double attack on the brain, research shows. It was already known that a protein on the surface of the virus could kill off mature brain cells. But the latest study shows it also prevents the production of replacements by crippling cells with the potential to step in and take their place. The University of California at San Diego study appears in the journal Cell Stem Cell. The researchers hope their work, which was carried out on mice, will aid efforts to find new ways to combat HIV-associated dementia. Researcher Dr Marcus Kaul said: "It's a double hit to the brain. "The HIV protein both causes brain injury and prevents its repair." The success of antiretroviral therapies in keeping "viral load" down has helped to reduce the severity of HIV-associated dementia in recent years. However, the condition is becoming more common as people w...

From today's New York Times : Sniff Test May Signal Disorders’ Early Stages By ELIZABETH SVOBODA Published: August 14, 2007 [snip] The Sniff Magnitude Test, developed with the aid of a $1.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, consists of a nasal tube called a cannula attached to a plastic container about the size and shape of a coffee thermos. Chemical vapors inside the canister are released through the tube, exposing subjects to a series of smells, some more objectionable than others. “People describe some of the smells as skunky or sewerlike,” said Jason Bailie, a University of Cincinnati graduate student working on the test. “There’s also one that smells like banana.” As patients take whiffs of each new fragrance, sensors in the thermos unit measure the negative pressure the inhalations produce. The size and intensity of these sniffs turn out to be important gauges of olfactory ability. After detecting a strong or disagreeable odor, people with a normal sense o...

From tomorrow's New York Times : The Beam of Light That Flips a Switch That Turns on the Brain By INGFEI CHEN Published: August 14, 2007 [snip] One of the newest, fastest strategies co-opts a photosensitive protein called channelrhodopsin-2 from pond scum to allow precise laser control of the altered cells on a millisecond timescale. That speed mimics the natural electrical chatterings of the brain, said Dr. Karl Deisseroth, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford. “We can start to sort of speak the language of the brain using optical excitation,” Dr. Deisseroth said. The brain’s functions “arise from the orchestrated participation of all the different cell types, like in a symphony,” he said. Laser stimulation can serve as a musical conductor, manipulating the various kinds of neurons in the brain to reveal which important roles they play. This light-switch technology promises to accelerate scientists’ efforts in mapping which clusters of the brain’s 100 billion neuro...

From the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's website, a report from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation : Virtual skull could lead to better crash helmets Last Updated: Thursday, August 9, 2007 | 8:57 AM ET Australian Broadcasting Corporation A sophisticated new computer-generated virtual skull could help researchers study evolution and design better crash helmets, says an Australian scientist. The virtual chimp skull was designed by Dr. Stephen Wroe of the University of New South Wales and colleagues from the University of Newcastle. "It's the most sophisticated model of a chimp skull ever made," said Wroe, a paleontologist with an interest in skull mechanics. [ ... Read the full article ... ]

Chaudhuri KR, Martinez-Martin P, Brown RG, Sethi K, Stocchi F, Odin P, Ondo W, Abe K, Macphee G, Macmahon D, Barone P, Rabey M, Forbes A, Breen K, Tluk S, Naidu Y, Olanow W, Williams AJ, Thomas S, Rye D, Tsuboi Y, Hand A, & Schapira AH. The metric properties of a novel non-motor symptoms scale for Parkinson's disease: Results from an international pilot study. Movement Disorders. 2007 Aug 2; [Epub ahead of print]. National Parkinson Foundation Centre of Excellence, Kings College Hospital, London, United Kingdom. Non-motor symptoms (NMS) in Parkinson's disease (PD) are common, significantly reduce quality of life and at present there is no validated clinical tool to assess the progress or potential response to treatment of NMS. A new 30-item scale for the assessment of NMS in PD (NMSS) was developed. NMSS contains nine dimensions: cardiovascular, sleep/fatigue, mood/cognition, perceptual problems, attention/memory, gastrointestinal, urinary, sexual function, and miscellany...

A big thank you to Zack Lynch of Brain Waves for posting about the availability online of a comprehensive neuropsychopharmacology textbook. Here is the link to Brain Waves , which links to the text: link . The text is a publication by and is available on the website of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP), a professional society. Additionally, the ACNP is noted for the exceptional quality of its conferences.

The latest installment in a compelling feature series in The Seattle Times : Losing Betsy — A move nobody wanted By Marsha King The Seattle Times 05 August 2007 [snip] "I've always said I want to keep her as long as I can," Jeff said several weeks ago. "But I'm kind of reaching the end of my ability to do this stuff." Sooner than expected, that day arrived. Seven years ago, when she was 46, Betsy got a shocking diagnosis — early onset dementia — probably Alzheimer's disease. Since then, she's gone from forgetting how to fold laundry to forgetting who she is. On the morning of July 13, Jeff moved his wife to a state-licensed adult family home in Renton. Now 53, Betsy would be the youngest resident by 24 years. [snip] [ ... Read the full article ... ] Includes links to earlier reports in the series.

Mahlberg R, Walther S, Eichmann U, Tracik F, & Kunz D. Effects of rivastigmine on actigraphically monitored motor activity in severe agitation related to Alzheimer's disease: A placebo-controlled pilot study. Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics. 2007 Jul-Aug; 45(1): 19-26. Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité Campus Mitte, Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Turmstr. 21, D-10559 Berlin, Germany. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEIs) are effective in the treatment of cognitive symptoms in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Because the behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) have also been attributed to central cholinergic deficits, we examined whether the AChEI rivastigmine can reduce motor activity as measured in a rater-independent manner by wrist actigraphy in agitated AD patients. A total of 20 consecutive AD inpatients (13 females, 7 males, 80.4+/-9.1 years, S.D.) were included from our geriatric psychiatry unit, all of whom were exhibitin...

From the current issue of Time : When Worry Hijacks The Brain Thursday, Aug. 02, 2007 By JEFFREY KLUGER [ ... To read the article, click here ... ]

A curious case report discussed in today's New York Times : Man Regains Speech After Brain Stimulation By BENEDICT CAREY Published: August 1, 2007 A 38-year-old man who spent more than five years in a mute, barely conscious state as a result of a severe head injury is now communicating regularly with family members and recovering his ability to move after having his brain stimulated with pulses of electric current, neuroscientists are reporting. [snip] The new report, which appears in the journal Nature , provides the first rigorous evidence that any procedure can initiate and sustain recovery in such a severely disabled person, years after the injury occurred. An estimated 100,000 to 300,000 Americans subsist in states of partial consciousness, and most are written off as beyond help. Doctors said it was not clear how many such patients would benefit from the treatment, in which two wire electrodes are implanted deep in the brain. The procedure also raises sticky ethical questions...