News in Brief: Body & Brain

One defense against diarrhea and early hints of diabetes in obese children in this week’s newsWeb edition : Wednesday, August 31st, 2011

Body’s diarrhea defense
The body has a biological mechanism tailor-made to fend off infections by Clostridium difficile, a bacterium responsible for many hospital-acquired diarrheal infections. Reporting online August 21 in Nature Medicine, researchers at Case Western Reserve University and colleagues from other institutions show that a compound called S-nitrosoglutathione can bind to toxins secreted by the microbe and neutralize them before they damage cells. Increased levels of S-nitrosoglutathione in the guts of mice protected them from C. difficile, the researchers report. —Nathan Seppa

Third graders en route to adult disease
Obese but apparently healthy children 7 to 9 years old were twice as likely to be insulin resistant (a hallmark of impending diabetes) as were normal weight children their age, a team of scientists from U.S. universities finds. The scientists compared a range of features characterizing the blood, vascular health and fat-processing in 123 children. A whole host of prediabetes and pre-heart disease changes were evident in the obese youngsters. These children also were beginning to store fat outside of normal sites, the researchers report online August 25 in Obesity. The results “highlight the importance of interventions to prevent and manage obesity” very early in life. —Janet Raloff

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News in Brief: Body & Brain

Leukemia gene therapy, the brain tickle of beautiful voices and more in this week's newsWeb edition : Thursday, August 18th, 2011

Gene therapy for leukemia
Tweaking immune cells to attack cancer cells in leukemia patients can bring about remission, a small study shows. Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania genetically altered immune T cells to target malignant cells in chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients and mass produced the T cells before injecting them into three patients. The modified cells gravitated to bone marrow, where they killed malignant cells. In two of three patients tested the cancer went into remission, and a portion of the genetically modified T cells persisted, possibly as a cadre of defenders on standby. The researchers report the findings in the Aug. 10 Science Translational Medicine. —Nathan Seppa

Gout drug lessens flares
A drug approved in 2010 for treatment of gout has proved its worth, reducing symptoms over six months in many people who had failed to get relief from standard medications. The routine therapy for gout fails in about 3 percent of the 5 million to 6 million people in the United States who have it. A drug called pegloticase, which is given by intravenous infusion over two hours, gained approval last year for chronic gout. Two clinical trials in the United States, Canada and Mexico of people who had failed to improve? on standard drugs now show that of 65 of 169 patients getting pegloticase (Krystexxa) every two or four weeks for six months had reduced uric acid in the blood, a standard measure. The biweekly group had better symptom reduction. —Nathan Seppa

Live longer with exercise
Just 15 minutes of moderate daily exercise seems to extend life. A team of U.S. and Taiwanese researchers kept track of physical activity levels in more than 400,000 adults age 20 and older in Taiwan using questionnaires. Compared with sedentary people who didn’t exercise, those putting in 92 minutes a week — 15 minutes a day on average — were 14 percent less likely to die over an average follow-up period of eight years. The benefits applied to both sexes and to all age groups, the researchers report online August 16 in the Lancet.  —Nathan Seppa

Granddaddy’s stress changes grandson’s brain
What your grandfather experienced in the womb may change your brain. Grandfather mice who were stressed out in utero went on to produce grandsons with more feminine brains, a study in the Aug. 17 Journal of Neuroscience shows. In male descendents of stressed-out grandfathers, genes important for brain development switched their behavior to become more like the gene activity in female mice’s brains. These results may offer a way to link stress and neurological disorders that strike males and females differently, such as autism spectrum disorders, Christopher Morgan and Tracy Bale of the University of Pennsylvania write in the study. —Laura Sanders

Beautiful voices tickle the brain
From Laura: Attractive voices tickle the part of the brain that normally handles visual input, a new study finds. In the study, participants listened to different voices saying “had” and later rated how attractive the voices were. Voices rated more attractive were associated with greater brain activity in a region near the part of the brain that responds to faces, an international team of scientists reports in an upcoming Cerebral Cortex. That the brain detects and responds to vocal beauty suggests that people may be tuned in to hidden, nonverbal forms of communication. —Laura Sanders

Why autistic brains confuse pronouns
The brains of people with autism behave abnormally when grappling with pronouns such as “you” and “I.” While answering a question that contained the word “you,” adults with autism had a weaker connection between two key brain regions than unaffected participants, Akiko Mizuno of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and colleagues report in an upcoming Brain. This weak brain connection vanished when the question omitted pronouns and instead used people’s names. The results help explain why children with autism often have trouble with the concept of self-identity, sometimes referring to themselves as “you.” —Laura Sanders

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The brain waves make quick brake

In a fast-moving car, the brain can be faster than the rate hit the brakes. Relying on brain waves, indicating an intent to jam on the brakes, a new technology could shave critical milliseconds response time, researchers report online on July 28 in the Journal of neural Engineering.

The work adds to a growing trend in technology, which helps drivers. Although it may eventually lead to the improvement of the emergency braking signal the brain, new technology is not ready to go.

"As a study of basic sciences and was quite impressed," says cognitive neuroscientist Raja Parasuraman of George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. "I think it still requires a lot more."

Research computer scientist Stefan Haufe Berlin Institute of Technology in Germany and his colleagues measured brain wave changes, while the participants drove in car simulator.

The participants drove about 60 miles per hour, after the lead car at the hairpin road with heavy traffic oncoming. So often the lead car would slam on his brakes, so that the participant would have to do the same in either crash.

Most of the drivers of delay between the lead car, stopping and slamming the brakes themselves were around 700 milliseconds. The specific neural signatures are visible through this lag time, and may be early indicators that drivers wanted to brake.

Whether Haufe "our approach was that the driver intends to more quickly than it actually might work," he says. "That's what the neural signature is good for."

Haufe and his colleagues designed a system that detected and interpreted these neural patterns. In the simulation system, which included EMG data from the electrical activity of muscles of the legs, roughly 130 milliseconds faster than the driver for the unaided eye, the team reports. For a car travelling at 60 miles per hour, this time difference translates to about 3.7 meters to stopping distance — the length of some compact cars.

Peak performance system will incorrectly slam on the brakes nearly twice per hour, the rate of false alarms, which you will fail if the system is to be useful, Parasuraman says. "We all hate alarms that go beyond whether or not there is a risk, such as fire alarm that goes off when there is no fire," he says. "Even the rate of 1 per cent of false alarms would not be acceptable for most people."

And even if people can be convinced to wear the CAP EEG cumbersome and lets you drive, the introduction of driver assistance technology can bring a different set of problems, "says Parasuraman. People may become overly reliant on technologies and reduce their vigilance on the road.

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