BrainBlog

From tomorrow's New York Times : A Journey Through Concussion's Foggy Terrain By DIANE ACKERMAN The New York Times Published: March 1, 2005 On a sparkling hot Florida day, I walked from an elevator into a small dark lobby and strode out the open door at speed. Except that the door wasn't open. It was an unmarked sheet of clean clear glass that clobbered me on the forehead two inches above my right eye. I didn't pass out, see double, grow confused or feel nauseated. I did feel shaken, though, drove straight home, iced the area and rested. For several days, I felt subdued, with low-level headaches. The world shone brighter than usual, which I attributed to the howling Florida sun. I tired easily and wasn't up to higher thought. My mind didn't feel it could do stairs. It took three days before I admitted that I had a concussion. I went to the hospital for a CT scan, which showed no bleeding in the brain, thank heavens, and afterward I asked if I might have a look ...

Moving Stem Cells Front and Center By ANDREW POLLACK The New York Times Published: February 23, 2005 IRVINE, Calif. - Hans S. Keirstead might be the Pied Piper of stem cells - and not just because he makes rats walk. He also helped lure Californians to the polls last fall to approve spending $3 billion of the state's money on embryonic stem cell research over the next decade. But he has critics who worry that he may be leading their new field too far, too soon into uncharted territory. [ ... Read the full article ... ] (free registration required.)

Been thinking over the past few days about the possible relevance of transactive memory in understanding the impact of certain neuropsychological deficits and, also, how one might assess the influence of such an impact on understanding caregiver issues. This social or interpersonal aspect is more commonly considered in personality and in industrial-organizational psychology, but curious nonetheless. Wegner DM, Erber R, Raymond P. Transactive memory in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology . 1991 Dec; 61(6): 923-9. Memory performance of 118 individuals who had been in close dating relationships for at least 3 months was studied. For a memory task ostensibly to be performed by pairs, some Ss were paired with their partners and some were paired with an opposite-sex partner from another couple. For some pairs a memory structure was assigned (e.g., 1 partner should remember food items, another should remember history items, etc.), whereas for others no structure...

From today's Globe and Mail : Yanking ADHD drug angers clinicians Health Canada's interpretation of safety data behind its abrupt decision to halt the sale of Adderall is being questioned By ANDRÉ PICARD Friday, February 11, 2005 Updated at 7:50 AM EST The Globe and Mail Health Canada has stripped a pharmaceutical company of the right to sell a popular drug used for the treatment of hyperactive children in Canada after talks about withdrawing the medication voluntarily broke down. The highly unusual move -- market authorization has not been withdrawn from any of the 5,000 prescription drugs on the Canadian market since 1999 -- came after Shire Biochem Inc. revealed that at least 20 people taking Adderall XR had died suddenly, and 12 others suffered debilitating strokes. All the deaths and strokes were in the United States. Most involved children who died of stroke, which occurs when a blood vessel to the brain is blocked by a blood clot or bursts, cutting off oxygen to the b...

Looking for a nice and simple animation of the sodium-potassium transporter? Here's a good one: Ion Pump Animation .

This week's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association includes a clinical review of drug treatment for neuropsychiatric symptoms that may be present over the course of neurodegenerative diseases: Kaycee M. Sink, Karen F. Holden, & Kristine Yaffe. Pharmacological Treatment of Neuropsychiatric Symptoms of Dementia: A Review of the Evidence. Journal of the American Medical Association 2005; 293: 596-608.

From The Globe and Mail : Stroke drug grossly underused, experts say The Globe and Mail 07 February 2005 [snip] TPA remains the sole drug approved for strokes. Yet only about 3 per cent of victims get it. Usually that's because they don't seek help until it's too late for the drug to do any good — three hours after symptoms start. However, fresh research documents disturbing problems that keep this lifesaving treatment from reaching the roughly one in five stroke victims who do seek help in time. Studies presented at an American Stroke Association conference last week found that: — Operators answering phones at hospitals often don't recognize stroke symptoms and discourage callers from coming in for help. — Ambulances routinely take people to the nearest hospital instead of one with the necessary equipment and expertise to give TPA. — Emergency room doctors are afraid of the drug's potentially serious side effects, and are unwilling to...

From The New York Times : F.D.A. May Approve an Implant as a Treatment for Depression By BARNABY J. FEDER The New York Times Published: February 4, 2005 The Food and Drug Administration said yesterday that it might permit an implantable electrical device for the treatment of epilepsy made by Cyberonics to also be marketed as a therapy for chronic depression that is resistant to other treatments. The agency set a number of conditions on the tentative approval, and Cyberonics said it hoped to meet them before the end of May. [ ... Read the full article ... ]

Faraneh Vargha-Khadem, David G. Gadian, Andrew Copp & Mortimer Mishkin (2005). FOXP2 AND THE NEUROANATOMY OF SPEECH AND LANGUAGE . Nature Reviews Neuroscience , 6, 131-138. [doi:10.1038/nrn1605] That speech and language are innate capacities of the human brain has long been widely accepted, but only recently has an entry point into the genetic basis of these remarkable faculties been found. The discovery of a mutation in FOXP2 in a family with a speech and language disorder has enabled neuroscientists to trace the neural expression of this gene during embryological development, track the effects of this gene mutation on brain structure and function, and so begin to decipher that part of our neural inheritance that culminates in articulate speech.

From tomorrow's New York Times : Minds of Their Own: Birds Gain Respect By SANDRA BLAKESLEE The New York Times Published: February 1, 2005 Birdbrain has long been a colloquial term of ridicule. The common notion is that birds' brains are simple, or so scientists thought and taught for many years. But that notion has increasingly been called into question as crows and parrots, among other birds, have shown what appears to be behavior as intelligent as that of chimpanzees. The clash of simple brain and complex behavior has led some neuroscientists to create a new map of the avian brain. Today, in the journal Nature Neuroscience Reviews , an international group of avian experts is issuing what amounts to a manifesto. Nearly everything written in anatomy textbooks about the brains of birds is wrong, they say. The avian brain is as complex, flexible and inventive as any mammalian brain, they argue, and it is time to adopt a more accurate nomenclature that reflec...

Nanomedicine's Promise Is Anything but Tiny By Rick Weiss The Washington Post Monday, January 31, 2005; Page A08 [ ... Read the full article ... ] Qdots and amphiphiles and other possibilities... [snip] Injured nerves do not regenerate easily, and the little healing that does occur is often inhibited by scar tissue formation. Samuel Stupp and John Kessler at Northwestern University in Chicago are using nanotechnology to overcome those hurdles. They made tiny rod-like molecules called amphiphiles, each of which is capped by a cluster of amino acids known to spur the growth of neurons and prevent scar tissue formation. The molecules are designed to remain suspended in a few drops of liquid until they come in contact with living cells. At that point they spontaneously arrange themselves like spokes in a wheel, and then further assemble into spaghetti-like nanofibers a few thousandths the thickness of a human hair. The nerve-healing amino acids end up arranged ni...

"Reid Lab Movies" of cat and rat visual cortex during visual stimulation, at: http://neuro.med.harvard.edu/site/reidweb/movies.html

From the BBC: Doctors Make Eye Cells See Light Scientists have found how to make eye cells sensitive to light, opening new ways to treat some forms of blindness. Experts at Imperial College London teamed up with colleagues at the University of Manchester to study a protein, melanopsin. Activating melanopsin in cells that do not normally use it made them sensitive to light, they told [the scientific journal] Nature. [snip] But experiments on mice which have had their rods and cones destroyed, reveals that other cells in the retina also have some form of light response. Scientists have suspected that melanopsin is important to all of these 'light sensitive' cells. The London-Manchester team set out to study melanopsin in more detail. In mice, they found turning on a gene for melanopsin caused nerve cells to work like photoreceptors. Although making cells in the eye responsive to light is not a cure for blindness, the researchers are working wit...

From tomorrow's New York Times , a book review of two new nonfiction books about the brain: The Brain: False Assumptions and Cruel Operations By WILLIAM GRIMES The New York Times Published: January 26, 2005 Reviews of these two books: POSTCARDS FROM THE BRAIN MUSEUM The Improbable Search for Meaning in the Matter of Famous Minds By Brian Burrell Illustrated. 356 pages. Broadway Books. $24.95. THE LOBOTOMIST A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness By Jack El-Hai Illustrated. 362 pages. John Wiley & Sons. $27.95 Read the book review (free registration required)

The following study (see press release below and obtain the free full-text content of the research paper at full text ) has received a good deal of media attention over the past couple of days. Date: January 23, 2005 Contact: Public Affairs Office American Psychological Association (202) 336-5700 OLDER PEOPLE WITH THE “ALZHEIMER’S GENE” FIND IT HARDER TO “REMEMBER TO REMEMBER” EVEN IF THEY’RE HEALTHY New Mexico study finds surprisingly strong impact of genetic variation Washington — Carrying the higher-risk genotype for Alzheimer’s disease appears to render even healthy older people subject to major problems with prospective memory, the ability to remember what to do in the future. For the group studied, this could affect important behaviors such as remembering to take medicine at a certain time or getting to a doctor’s appointment. The research appears in the January issue of Neuropsychology , which is published by the American Psychological Asso...

The January 2005 newsletter of the American Psychological Association's Division 40 (Clinical Neuropsychology) is devoted to several papers exploring functional neuroimaging. The newsletter is available in .pdf format at http://www.div40.org/newsletter.html .

Safety Concerns Reported on J.& J. Alzheimer's Drug By ANDREW POLLACK New York Times Published: January 22, 2005 Regulators are reviewing the safety of the Alzheimer's disease drug Reminyl after data from two clinical trials indicated that people taking the drug had a much higher death rate than those taking a placebo. The review was announced yesterday by Johnson & Johnson, which said it was in discussions with the Food and Drug Administration and regulators in Europe and Canada. The trials, which involved about 2,000 patients in 16 countries, were looking at whether Reminyl could be used to treat mild cognitive impairment, a form of memory loss that is often a precursor to Alzheimer's disease. Reminyl is approved in 69 countries as a treatment for mild to moderate Alzheimer's but not for mild cognitive impairment. In the trials, which lasted two years, 15 patients taking Reminyl died compared with 5 taking the placebo. There were various ...

The Sunday Book Review in tomorrow's New York Times includes a review of a recently translated graphic memoir about a family of a person with epilepsy in the 1960s: 'Epileptic': Disorder in the House by David B. (pseudonym Pierre-Francois Beauchard) By RICK MOODY New York Times 23 January 2005 [snip] Historians of the graphic form will observe that Spiegelman, Sacco and others (one stunning example is the recent prose/graphic hybrid ''Diary of a Teenage Girl'' by Phoebe Gloeckner) have all experimented with autobiography in their work, but in the case of ''Epileptic'' the autobiographical impulse has, in my view, more to do with what's happening in French writing these days, namely l'autofiction. If, against the advice of conservatives, you should travel to the Paris of 2005, you would find that the traditional roman a clef of French literature has lately given way to a cottage industry of remorselessly literary accoun...

From the New York Times : Johnson & Johnson Reports Reminyl Deaths By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: January 21, 2005 Filed at 5:08 p.m. ET RARITAN, N.J. (AP) -- Patients taking Alzheimer's drug Reminyl in a test for another use had higher death rates than those taking a placebo, Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development LLC announced Friday. The patients had mild cognitive impairment, and the J&J company is no longer pursuing Reminyl as a treatment for the condition and has not submitted any applications for such use, spokeswoman Carol Goodrich said. Reminyl was approved in 2001 as a treatment for mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease. The higher death rate was not observed in Alzheimer's trials, Goodrich said. [ ... Read the full article ...] (free registration required)

The 33rd Annual Meeting of the International Neuropsychological Society (INS) will be held from the 2nd of February 2005 through the 5th at the Adam's Mark Hotel, located in downtown St. Louis, Missouri. Information about the conference can be found on the meeting's homepage .