Protein Linked to Learning also Induces Cocaine Addiction: Researchers

The study describes how the learning-related protein works with other proteins to forge new pathways in the brain in response to a drug-induced rush of the "pleasure" molecule dopamine.

By adding important detail to the process of addiction, the researchers, led by a group at Johns Hopkins, said that the work may point the way to new treatments.

"The broad question was why and how cocaine strengthened certain circuits in the brain long term, effectively re-wiring the brain for addiction," Paul Worley, M.D., a professor in the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said.

"What we found in this study was how two very different types of systems in the brain work together to make that happen," he said.

The study is published in the journal Cell.

Source-ANI

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Rise in US Military Suicides Linked to Mental Health Problems, Not Combat

by Thilaka Ravi on? August 07, 2013 at 2:09 PM Mental Health News Researchers attributed the rise in US military suicides in recent years to pre-existing mental health problems among soldiers and not to combat or deployment.
The study in the Journal of the American Medical Association included over 150,000 current and former military personnel from all service branches.

An analysis of questionnaire data for 83 who killed themselves between 2001 and 2008 found that factors associated with increased risk of suicide included being male, having depression or manic-depressive disorder, engaging in heavy or binge drinking, and having alcohol-related problems.

However, they could find no link between increased suicide risk and combat experience, cumulative days deployed, or number of deployments.

The increased rate of suicide in the military "may largely be a product of an increased prevalence of mental disorders in this population," said the study led by Cynthia LeardMann of the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego, California.

The US military has noted an increase in suicides since 2005 that coincides with the deployment of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the exact cause has been unclear.

The Pentagon's latest report on the matter said 301 service members died by suicide in 2011 -- up from 268 in 2008 -- and said that 64 percent of those who attempted suicide had a known history of a behavioral health disorder.

According to an accompanying JAMA editorial by Charles Engel, a doctor with the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, the new research offers hope for reducing the military suicide rate.

"These findings offer some potentially reassuring ways forward: the major modifiable mental health antecedents of military suicide - mood disorders and alcohol misuse - are mental disorders for which effective treatments exist," he wrote.

Source-AFP

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Rising Temperatures Linked to Hot Temper

While making predictions about the future is always iffy, lead author Solomon Hsiang said the current trend is clear: hotter weather makes people more violent.

Hsiang and his fellow researchers conducted a meta-analysis of 60 studies across a range of disciplines, including archeology, climatology, political science and economics.

One study, for instance, showed that, during the hotter and drier periods of the El Nino southern oscillation, "the probability of any country in the tropics starting a new civil war doubles."

Other studies showed the incidence of interpersonal conflicts -- from murder to rape to domestic violence and other types of assault -- goes up when it gets hot.

"We were surprised by both the consistency and the strength" of the link, Hsiang said, explaining it was evident no matter what timeframe was being examined, whether a short heat wave, a years-long drought, or a cycle over centuries.

"We do think the overall size of the effects is sufficiently large that we want to take them seriously and seriously consider whether or not our actions today are going to influence the level of violence in our children's world tomorrow," he added.

In order to rule out other factors for the rise in violence, the authors used a statistical analysis that compared single geographic locations to themselves over time -- so that the political, cultural and geographic histories were internally consistent.

They also tried to compare levels of violence where the climatic factors were very localized, to see how violence levels compared nearby where the weather stayed cooler.

In all cases, "the collected evidence shows that humans across the globe have proven poorly equipped to deal with exposure to hotter temperatures," co-lead author Marshall Burke said in a statement.

What was less clear was why, with researchers citing several theories and noting that more than one could play a role.

In times of drought or when harvests fail, economic factors might push groups to take up arms.

High unemployment tends to leave a large pool of frustrated, bored young people in cities -- fertile recruiting ground for an army.

And the heat also seems to have a physiological effect that drives people to violent impulses, one that can be observed after just a few hours of exposure.

Hsiang compared the trend to the increase of car accidents on a rainy day -- it doesn't mean any one accident happened solely because it rained. Nor does it mean accidents only happen when it rains.

"Driver error ultimately causes accidents, but rain can make it much more likely," he said in the statement.

"Similarly, violent conflicts might occur for a variety of reasons that simply become more likely when climatic conditions deteriorate."

Source-AFP

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Study Identifies Genetic Regions Linked With Migraine

The team identified 12 genetic regions associated with migraine susceptibility. Eight of these regions were found in or near genes known to play a role in controlling brain circuitries and two of the regions were associated with genes that are responsible for maintaining healthy brain tissue. The regulation of these pathways may be important to the genetic susceptibility of migraines.

Migraine is a debilitating disorder that affects approximately 14% of adults. Migraine has recently been recognized as the seventh disabler in the Global Burden of Disease Survey 2010 and has been estimated to be the most costly neurological disorder. It is an extremely difficult disorder to study because no biomarkers between or during attacks have been identified so far.

"This study has greatly advanced our biological insight about the cause of migraine," says Dr Aarno Palotie, from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. "Migraine and epilepsy are particularly difficult neural conditions to study; between episodes the patient is basically healthy so it's extremely difficult to uncover biochemical clues.

"We have proven that this is the most effective approach to study this type of neurological disorder and understand the biology that lies at the heart of it."

The team uncovered the underlying susceptibilities by comparing the results from 29 different genomic studies, including over 100,000 samples from both migraine patients and control samples.

They found that some of the regions of susceptibility lay close to a network of genes that are sensitive to oxidative stress, a biochemical process that results in the dysfunction of cells.

The team expects many of the genes at genetic regions associated with migraine are interconnected and could potentially be disrupting the internal regulation of tissue and cells in the brain, resulting in some of the symptoms of migraine.

"We would not have made discoveries by studying smaller groups of individuals," says Dr Gisela Terwindt, co-author from Leiden University Medical Centre. "This large scale method of studying over 100,000 samples of healthy and affected people means we can tease out the genes that are important suspects and follow them up in the lab."

The team identified an additional 134 genetic regions that are possibly associated to migraine susceptibility with weaker statistical evidence. Whether these regions underlie migraine susceptibility or not still needs to be elucidated. Other similar studies show that these statistically weaker culprits can play an equal part in the underlying biology of a disease or disorder.

"The molecular mechanisms of migraine are poorly understood. The sequence variants uncovered through this meta-analysis could become a foothold for further studies to better understanding the pathophysiology of migraine" says Dr K?ri Stef?nsson, President of deCODE genetics.

"This approach is the most efficient way of revealing the underlying biology of these neural disorders," says Dr Mark Daly, from the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. "Effective studies that give us biological or biochemical results and insights are essential if we are to fully get to grips with this debilitating condition.

"Pursuing these studies in even larger samples and with denser maps of biological markers will increase our power to determine the roots and triggers of this disabling disorder."

Source-Eurekalert

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Regular Physical Exercise Linked to Healthy Sleep Patterns

The researchers conducted their study on a group of mice by adjusting the light and dark exposure in order to advance their body clocks by eight hours and later on returned them to a natural cycle.

The researchers found that while the older mice took longer to adapt to changes to their daily routine, their synchronization was faster if they regularly exercised on a running wheel.

"Our study demonstrates that voluntary exercise has an impact on circadian rhythms and this has implications for the health of older people living with environmentally induced circadian disruption. It is also indicates another health benefit to regular exercise", Institute of Neuroscience & Psychology's Professor Stephany Biello said.

Source-Medindia

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Low Levels of Toxic Proteins Linked to Brain Diseases: Research

Scientists studying thread-like chains of protein - called amyloid fibres - have found that low levels of these proteins may cause more harm to health than high levels.

These rarely formed protein chains, which have been linked with dozens of diseases, are produced as a result of a genetic flaw or changes in body chemistry brought about by ageing.

When this happens, short fibres are formed which become sticky and attract copies of themselves, forming an endless chain. These chains spontaneously break, creating more filament ends to which more proteins attach.

In the context of neurodegenerative diseases, it is these short, broken pieces that seem to be most harmful, scientists say.

Researchers have found that when protein levels are low, lots of short protein threads are formed. But when protein levels are high, this spontaneous breakage stops and most protein filaments remain long.

Compared with harmful short protein fibres, long fibres do not appear to be damaging in the case of neurodegenerative diseases. Researchers therefore believe that high levels of the protein - which lead to these longer chains - may actually be protective.

In addition to shedding light on disease, this insight into the protein chains may help scientists develop useful biomaterials, such as cell scaffolds, which are used for tissue engineering or to make artificial silk.

Cait MacPhee, Professor of Biological Physics at the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics and Astronomy, said; "We would expect that the higher the level of toxins, the worse the disease. However, in this study we found that the lower the level of the protein, the more of these damaging short fibres we see. Understanding how these protein chains form offers us insight not only into how diseases progress, but how we can produce controlled biomaterials for tissue engineering."

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Self-consciousness of Teens Linked With Physiological Responses

by Bidita Debnath on? July 06, 2013 at 2:06 PM Research News Teenagers are famously concerned, acutely aware and self-conscious about what their peers think of them.

A new study reveals that this self-consciousness is linked with specific physiological and brain responses that seem to emerge and peak in adolescence.

"Our study identifies adolescence as a unique period of the lifespan in which self-conscious emotion, physiological reactivity, and activity in specific brain areas converge and peak in response to being evaluated by others," says psychological scientist and lead researcher Leah Somerville of Harvard University.

The findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that teens' sensitivity to social evaluation might be explained by shifts in physiological and brain function during adolescence, in addition to the numerous sociocultural changes that take place during the teen years.

Somerville and colleagues wanted to investigate whether just being looked at ? a minimal social-evaluation situation ? might register with greater importance, arousal, and intensity for adolescents than for either children or adults. The researchers hypothesized that late-developing regions of the brain, such as the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), could play a unique role in the way teens monitor these types of social evaluative contexts.

The researchers had 69 participants, ranging in age from 8 to almost 23 years old, come to the lab and complete measures that gauged emotional, physiological, and neural responses to social evaluation.

They told the participants that they would be testing a new video camera embedded in the head coil of a functional MRI scanner. The participants watched a screen indicating whether the camera was "off," "warming up," or "on", and were told that a same-sex peer of about the same age would be watching the video feed and would be able to see them when the camera was on. In reality, there was no camera in the MRI machine.

The consistency and strength of the resulting data took the researchers by surprise:

"We were concerned about whether simply being looked at was a strong enough 'social evaluation' to evoke emotional, physiological and neural responses," says Somerville. "Our findings suggest that being watched, and to some extent anticipating being watched, were sufficient to elicit self-conscious emotional responses at each level of measurement."

Specifically, participants' self-reported embarrassment, physiological arousal, and MPFC activation showed reactivity to social evaluation that seemed to converge and peak during adolescence.

Adolescent participants also showed increased functional connectivity between the MPFC and striatum, an area of the brain that mediates motivated behaviors and actions. Somerville and colleagues speculate that the MPFC-striatum pathway may be a route by which social evaluative contexts influence behavior. The link may provide an initial clue as to why teens often engage in riskier behaviors when they're with their peers.

Source-Eurekalert

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Drug-Resistant Bacteria Linked With Livestock Found Among Industrial Livestock Workers

by Kathy Jones on? July 05, 2013 at 10:44 PM Environmental Health A test of nose samples among livestock workers in North Carolina by American researchers reveals the presence of drug-resistant bacteria associated with livestock among industrial workers and not in antibiotic-free workers.
The drug-resistant bacteria examined were Staphylococcus aureus, commonly known as "Staph," which include the well-known bug MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). New Staph strains are emerging in people who have close contact with livestock animals and for this reason have been given the name livestock-associated Staph. While everyone in the study had direct or indirect contact with livestock, only industrial workers carried antibiotic-resistant Staph with multiple genetic characteristics linked to livestock. The study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help, the George Washington University, and the Statens Serum Institute, published July 2 by the journal PLOS ONE, confirms earlier findings in Iowa and raises concern about antibiotics use in livestock production.

Many industrial livestock operations raise animals in large conferment buildings and use antibiotics, including non-therapeutically in animals' feed and water to promote their growth. Previous studies have detected strains of drug-resistant S. aureus from livestock, first among farm workers, and subsequently in hospital and community settings in Europe. In the United States, such strains have been detected among industrial livestock operation workers in Iowa and now North Carolina making scientists concerned that these bacteria could follow a similar trajectory into the community. North Carolina is a major livestock producer, ranking second behind Iowa in hog production in the United States.

S. aureus can cause a range of illnesses in humans, from minor to life-threatening skin, bloodstream, respiratory, urinary and surgical site infections. Like most illnesses caused by bacteria, S. aureus infections are treated with antibiotics. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some Staph cannot be killed by antibiotics, meaning they are resistant. MRSA is a strain of Staph bacteria that is resistant to methicillin and certain first-line antibiotics called beta-lactams. Infections with drug-resistant strains, like MRSA, can be particularly difficult to treat.

The study was based on interviews and nose swabs that were collected and analyzed from individuals who worked at two different types of livestock operations in North Carolina. At industrial livestock operations, animals are grown in large confinement buildings using antibiotics. At antibiotic-free livestock operations, animals are grown without the use of antibiotics, typically outdoors on pasture. Researchers tested the S. aureus isolated from nose swabs for resistance to a range of antibiotics and for genetic markers considered to indicate that the bacteria may have come from livestock.

"This study shows that these livestock-associated strains are present among workers at industrial livestock operations and that these strains are resistant not just to methicillin, but to multiple antibiotics - including antibiotics that are used to treat human infections," said Christopher Heaney, PhD, corresponding author of the study and assistant professor of Environmental Health Sciences and Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Workers were not experiencing Staph infections at the time of the study, but when antibiotic resistant bacteria do cause infections, they can be harder to treat. Researchers found that S. aureus that were multidrug-resistant were roughly twice as prevalent among individuals exposed to the industrial compared to the antibiotic-free livestock operation environment and S. aureus that were resistant to tetracycline - an antibiotic that has been used in industrial livestock production since the 1950's - were 19 times as prevalent among industrial compared to antibiotic-free livestock operation workers.

Source-Eurekalert

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Mutation in FAM190A Gene Linked With Chromosomal Instability in Cancer

by Kathy Jones on? July 05, 2013 at 11:11 PM Cancer News A gene known as FAM190A plays an important role in the regulation of the normal cell division process, known as mitosis, and mutations in the gene could be responsible for the commonly found chromosomal instability in cancer, a new study by Johns Hopkins researchers reveals.
In laboratory studies of cells, investigators found that knocking down expression of FAM190A disrupts mitosis. In three pancreatic cancer-cell lines and a standard human-cell line engineered to be deficient in FAM190A, researchers observed that cells often had difficulty separating at the end of mitosis, creating cells with two or more nuclei. The American Journal of Pathology published a description of the work online May 17, which comes nearly a century after German scientist Theodor Boveri linked abnormal mitosis to cancer. Until now, there had been no common gene alteration identified as the culprit for cancer-linked mitosis.

"These cells try to divide, and it looks like they succeed, except they wind up with a strand that connects them," explains Scott Kern, M.D., professor of oncology and pathology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and its Kimmel Cancer Center. "The next time they try to divide, all the nuclei come together, and they try to make four cells instead of two. Subsequently, they try to make eight cells, and so on." Movies of the process taken by Kern's laboratory are available on the journal Web site.

Kern's group previously reported that deletions in the FAM190A gene could be found in nearly 40 percent of human cancers. That report, published in 2011 in the journal Oncotarget, and the current one are believed to be the only published papers focused solely on FAM190A, which is frequently altered in human cancers but whose function has been unknown. Alterations in FAM190A messages may be the third most common in human cancers after those for the more well-known genes p53 and p16, Kern says.

"We don't think that a species can exist without FAM190, but we don't think severe defects in FAM190A readily survive among cancers," Kern says. "The mutations seen here are very special - they don't take out the whole gene but instead remove an internal portion and leave what we call the reading frame. We think we're finding a more subtle defect in human cancers, in which mitosis defects can occur episodically, and we propose it may happen in about 40 percent of human cancers."

Abnormalities in FAM190A may cause chromosomal imbalances seen so commonly in cancers, Kern says. Multipolar mitosis is one of the most common functional defects reported in human cancers, and more than 90 percent of human cancers have abnormal numbers of chromosomes.

Kern says he plans to study FAM190A further by creating lab models of the subtle defects akin to what actually is tolerated by human cancer cells.

Source-Eurekalert

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Genes Involved in Birth Defects Linked to Development of Mental Illness

Over the past several years, researchers in the laboratory of psychiatrist Benjamin Cheyette, MD, PhD, have shown that mice with mutations in a gene called Dact1 are born with a range of severe malformations, including some reminiscent of spina bifida in humans.

In a new study designed to explore whether Dact1 mutations exert more nuanced effects in the brain that may lead to mental illness, Cheyette, John Rubenstein, MD, PhD, and colleagues in UCSF's Nina Ireland Laboratory of Developmental Neurobiology used a genetic technique in mice to selectively delete the Dact1 protein only in interneurons, a group of brain cells that regulates activity in the cerebral cortex, including cognitive and sensory processes. Poor function of interneurons has been implicated in a range of psychiatric conditions.

As reported in the June 24, 2013 online issue of PLOS ONE, when the research team examined these genetically altered interneurons in adult mice, they found that the cells appeared relatively normal and had managed to find their proper position in the brain's circuitry during development. But the cells had significantly fewer synapses, the sites where communication with neighboring neurons takes place. In additional observations not included in the new paper, the team also noted that the cells' dendrites, fine extensions that normally form bushy arbors studded with synapses, were poorly developed and sparsely branched.

"When you delete this gene function after initial, early development -- just eliminating it in neurons after they've formed -- they migrate to the right place and their numbers are correct, but their morphology is a little off," Cheyette said. "And that's very much in line with the kinds of pathology that people have been able to identify in psychiatric illness. Neurological illnesses tend to be focal, with lesions that you can identify or pathology you can see on an imaging study. Psychiatric illnesses? Not so much. The differences are really subtle and hard to see."

The Dact1 protein is part of a fundamental biological system known as the Wnt (pronounced "wint") signaling pathway. Interactions among proteins in the Wnt pathway orchestrate many processes essential to life in animals as diverse as fruit flies, mice, and humans, including the proper development of the immensely complex human nervous system from a single fertilized egg cell.

One way the Wnt pathway manages this task is by maintaining the "polarity" of cells during development, said Cheyette, "a process of sequestering, increasing the concentration of one set of proteins on one side of the cell and a different set of proteins on the other side of the cell." Polarity is particularly important as precursor cells transform into nerve cells, Cheyette said, because neurons are "the most polarized cells in the body," with specialized input and output zones that must wind up in the proper spots if the cells are to function normally.

Cheyette said his group is now conducting behavioral experiments with the mice analyzed in the new PLOS ONE paper and with genetically related mouse lines to test whether these mice have behavioral abnormalities in sociability, sensory perception, anxiety, or motivation that resemble symptoms in major psychiatric disorders. He also hopes to collaborate with UCSF colleagues on follow-up experiments to determine whether the activity of neurons lacking Dact1 is impaired in addition to the structural flaws identified in the new study and prior published work from his lab.

Meanwhile, as yet unpublished findings from human genetics research conducted by Cheyette's group suggest that individuals with autism are significantly more likely than healthy comparison subjects to carry mutations in a Wnt pathway gene called WNT1.

"Just because a gene plays an important role in the embryo doesn't mean it isn't also important in the brain later, and might be involved in psychiatric pathology," said Cheyette. "When these genes are mutated, someone may look fine, develop fine, and have no obvious medical problems at birth, but they may also develop autism in childhood or have a psychotic break in adulthood and develop schizophrenia."

Rubenstein is the Nina Ireland Distinguished Professor in Child Psychiatry.

Source-Eurekalert

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Childhood Obesity Linked to Birth by C-Sections

Researchers at New York University School of Medicine observed over 10,000 infants in the UK who were born between 1991 and 1992 and found that by the time they turned 11 years old, those who were delivered through a C-section were 83 percent more likely to be obese than those delivered naturally.

The study was in line with nine other studies that had also linked C-sections with obesity.

"Being heavy as a woman is a risk factor for C-section, so that's the problem with trying to figure out whether this is real or if it's simply a matter of selection. There may be long-term consequences to children that we don't know about", lead researcher Dr Jan Blustein said.

Source-Medindia

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