Understanding the biology of mental illness would be a paradigm shift in our thinking about mind. It would not only inform us about some of the most devastating diseases of humankind but, because these are diseases of thought and feeling, it would also tell us more about who we are and how we function. I naively thought we were on the verge of such a paradigm change in 1983, when James Gusella and Nancy Wexler were tracking down the gene that causes Huntington’s disease. I expected that within 10 years we would have found the major genes that contribute to schizophrenia, depression, and autism. Since then, there has been a lot of enthusiasm about genes and mental illness and some false starts, but surprisingly little progress.

In the past few years, however, certain advances in genetics have given us new reasons for optimism. Now that we can look at the whole human genome, there is a logic to it that we could not appreciate when looking at genes in isolation. As a result, there is reason to believe that the next 10 to 20 years will be more fruitful than the past two decades have been. (…)

The most convincing scientific progress in psychiatry in the past decade has had little to do with genomics. It is the rigorous, scientific verification that certain forms of psychotherapy are effective. This is perhaps not surprising. One of the major insights in the modern biology of learning and memory is that education, experience, and social interactions affect the brain. When you learn something and then remember it for a long time, it’s because genes are being turned on and off in certain brain cells, leading to the growth of new synaptic contacts between the nerve cells of the brain. Insofar as psychotherapy works and produces stable, learned changes in behavior, it can cause stable anatomical changes in the brain.

{ Newsweek | Continue reading }

Have to solve a problem? Try taking a nap.

But it has to be the right kind of nap — one that includes rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep, the kind that includes dreams. (…)

A nap that included REM sleep resulted in nearly a 40 percent improvement over the pre-nap performance.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Lane Coder }

During production of the 1997 movie “Mimic,” American Humane Assn. representatives wandered through the Los Angeles set, ensuring that a herd of cockroaches was well taken care of. Licensed animal handlers were to follow state and federal anti-cruelty laws designed to protect the insects, which had been trained to swirl around actress Mira Sorvino’s feet. The roaches had to be fed at a certain time. They could only work a few hours each day. They could not be harmed.

At the same time, in studios in the San Fernando Valley, scores of other actors and actresses were working on movies. They put in long hours, commonly without meal breaks. They often worked without clean toilets, toilet paper, soap or water. More importantly, they were exposed to a host of infectious, and sometimes fatal, diseases.

These performers were making heterosexual adult films for an industry that in California is entirely legal, and utterly unregulated. Its producers take in several billion dollars annually from cable television programming, videos and Internet sites watched by a public whose appetite seems insatiable. They pay taxes, lobby in Sacramento and contribute to political campaigns.

Yet actors and actresses are discouraged from wearing prophylactics during filming because porn producers believe the public wants to see unprotected sex. So adult porn stars commonly engage in sexual acts with scores of partners, and then return each evening to their private lives–dating or having relationships with people across Southern California.

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

L.A. County health officials say at least 16 performers have been infected in addition to one reported this week. That brings the number of HIV cases in porn performers to 22 in the last five years.

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

The date of the first operation under anesthetic, Oct. 16, 1846, ranks among the most iconic in the history of medicine. It was the moment when Boston, and indeed the United States, first emerged as a world-class center of medical innovation. The room at the heart of Massachusetts General Hospital where the operation took place has been known ever since as the Ether Dome, and the word “anesthesia” itself was coined by the Boston physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes to denote the strange new state of suspended consciousness that the city’s physicians had witnessed. The news from Boston swept around the world, and it was recognized within weeks as a moment that had changed medicine forever.

But what precisely was invented that day? Not a chemical - the mysterious substance used by William Morton, the local dentist who performed the procedure, turned out to be simply ether, a volatile solvent that had been in common use for decades. And not the idea of anesthesia - ether, and the anesthetic gas nitrous oxide, had both been thoroughly inhaled and explored. As far back as 1525, the Renaissance physician Paracelsus had recorded that it made chickens “fall asleep, but wake up again after some time without any bad effect,” and that it “extinguishes pain” for the duration.

What the great moment in the Ether Dome really marked was something less tangible but far more significant: a huge cultural shift in the idea of pain. Operating under anesthetic would transform medicine, dramatically expanding the scope of what doctors were able to accomplish. What needed to change first wasn’t the technology - that was long since established - but medicine’s readiness to use it.

{ Boston Globe | Continue reading }

photo { Grant Willing }

An erotic dance craze is thought to be the cause of a recent spate of broken penises in Jamaica, and now faces a government crackdown.

“Daggering”, a lewd dance style where couples simulate dry sex in various positions to the beat of the music, is characterised by over-the-top gyrating, heavy pelvis-thrusting and daredevil leaps.

Many couples have taken the “rough” daggering dance from the club to the bedroom, with disastrous consequences.

{ News | Continue reading }

After mating, some male spiders break off the ends of their palps—the organ used to transfer sperm—inside the female.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

A new study has surveyed 17 astronauts to see what sort of headaches they experienced while on space missions. Headaches were much more frequent than on earth and didn’t fit a known type, suggesting that zero or micro gravity may be a specific trigger for a pounding head.

{ Mind Hacks | Continue reading }

illustration { This is Cap Canaveral }

Major US, Canadian and British life and health insurance companies have billions of dollars invested in tobacco companies, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine said. (…)

At least $US4.4 billion ($5.5 billion) in insurance company funds are invested in companies whose affiliates produce cigarettes, cigars and chewing tobacco. (…)

Researchers first revealed that health and life insurance companies had major investments in tobacco companies in 1995 in an article in the British medical journal Lancet.

{ AFP/News | Continue reading }

Congress struck the government’s strongest anti-smoking blow in decades Thursday with a Senate vote to give regulators new power to limit nicotine in cigarettes, drastically curtail ads and ban candied tobacco products aimed at young people.

The legislation, one of the most dramatic anti-smoking initiatives since the U.S. surgeon general’s warning 45 years ago that tobacco causes lung cancer, would give the Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate the content, marketing and advertising of cigarettes and other tobacco products.

{ AP/Yahoo | Continue reading }

{ HIV-Foundation / Finnish AIDS Council | Agency: Taivas, Finland }

Australian scientists have invented a liquid which repairs damage to tooth-enamel while you sleep, according to research presented this week.

The technology should be available within five years, and will be able to fight early stage tooth-decay without the need for expensive, painful fillings, they said.

Tooth decay has plagued humanity throughout history. Our teeth are covered in a community of bacteria, which feed on carbohydrates in the mouth. They excrete acid as a waste product, wreaking havoc on tooth enamel, said Cochrane. The acid gradually erodes the enamel, showing as whitish spots on teeth. Eventually the enamel collapses in on itself, painfully exposing the sensitive inner parts of the tooth.

For over 100 years, the only treatment has involved boring into the tooth, removing the rotting material and refilling the hole with metal. Fillings, however, are prone to failure, often need replacing, look ugly and can be painful to install. To find a better solution to the early stages of tooth decay, Cochrane’s team turned to the molecules which enamel is made of.

They found that they could reverse some of the damage by immersing teeth in a solution containing calcium, phosphate and fluoride – the building blocks of tooth enamel. (…) Under the right conditions, the solution infused into the damaged enamel, repairing the crystalline structure from within.

{ Cosmos Magazine | Continue reading }

Modern medicine, which doesn’t always understand this power of the mind over the body, calls it the “placebo effect.” This refers to the cultural and relational factors that make someone who’s sick feel better when a doctor prescribes treatment, regardless of its biological impact. Nowadays, doctors think they know everything about the placebo effect. They were taught that 30 percent of sick people treated with placebos show signs of improvement. But they’re also taught that this improvement is subjective and temporary—because the illness continues to take its course.

Yet after studying the placebo effect, some scientists wonder whether it may be one of the strongest driving forces in medicine. A study published in Clinical Psychology Review in 1993 concludes that several types of placebos are effective in treating illnesses such as stomach ulcers, angina pectoris and herpes 70 percent of the time. In addition, rare but famous cases testify to the effectiveness of placebos in reducing cancerous tumors or regenerating the immune cells of AIDS sufferers. The part of our brains known as the hypothalamus directs the distribution of essential hormones and operates the diffuse network of nerves controlling the function of the internal organs. The most intriguing mechanism is that proposed by pharmacologist Candace Pert. She demonstrated that neuropeptides—molecules that help transmit messages among the brain’s neurons—affect the behavior of nearly all the body’s cells. This means what we refer to as our mind isn’t located just in the brain but throughout the body. It also implies that, driven by the comings and goings of these molecular messengers, the mind constitutes an immense communications network encompassing the functions of the organism.

{ David Servan-Schreiber/Ode | Continue reading }

related { Antonio D. Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza }

In late 1968, when I was chief resident in the Department of Pathology at the Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, the senior surgical pathologist, my teacher, who had many medical problems, rolled up his shirt sleeve and brought my finger to a firm tumor under his forearm skin, telling me his diagnosis. “When you do my autopsy,” he said, “don’t forget this.” A native of Japan who had studied in Germany, he had been at Mount Sinai for almost 40 years and was regarded, by those who knew him or of him, as one of the greatest surgical pathologists. I had the great privilege to perform the autopsy a few months later. His diagnosis, of course, was correct.

Autopsy, or postmortem examination, is generally considered emblematic of the pathologist, although surgical pathology, the study of tissue removed or sampled as surgical resections or biopsies, and its offshoot cytopathology, the sampling of individual cells for microscopic examination, most commonly as “Pap” smears, have become the dominant, and often only, activities for most pathologists.

Previously, individuals dying in hospitals in the United States usually underwent autopsy, with some centers having autopsy rates of 75% or more during the post World War II years. In 2008, autopsy was performed on fewer than 5 percent of non-forensic hospital deaths.

{ Consults/NY Times | Continue reading }

image { Amie Dicke, Isabeli, 2004 | Cutout - Ink on magazine paper }

There’s a tobacco war raging in Salem that has less to do with the reasons for past battles—raising taxes or reducing consumption—than it does with control of a rare industry bright spot: smokeless tobacco.

This legislative brawl pits the country’s two largest tobacco companies over a reformulation of the state’s tax on what’s known as “moist snuff tobacco.”

On one side is Philip Morris, which in 2008 acquired U.S. Tobacco—the maker of higher-priced brands such as Copenhagen and Skoal. On the other: lower-priced challenger R.J. Reynolds., maker of Kodiak, Grizzly, Camel Snus and a variety of candy-flavored, teen-friendly packaged products.

Both tobacco giants armed themselves for the Legislature with reams of data, persuasive studies and compelling arguments about tax fairness.

{ Willamette Week | Continue reading }

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