Scientists find blood protein link to Alzheimer's

LONDON (Reuters) - High levels of a blood protein called clusterin are linked to the development of Alzheimer's disease, scientists said on Monday -- a finding which could pave the way for doctors to detect the disease before it takes hold.

Researchers from the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London said that while doctors are around 5 years away from being able to use the discovery for a test to identify future Alzheimer's sufferers, it was a big step along the way.

This research team used a technique called proteomics, which analyses proteins, to conduct two "discovery phase" studies in 95 patients and found that clusterin appeared to be linked with the early signs of Alzheimer's. The findings were published in the Archives of General Psychiatry journal.

"We found that this clusterin protein was increased in blood as much as 10 years before people had the signs of Alzheimer's disease in their brains," said Simon Lovestone, who led the study. "And even when they had signs of disease in their brains, they still had no clinical signs of the disorder -- so this suggests that this is a really, really early change that occurs in people who are going to get the disease."

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Insufficient vitamin D tied to severe asthma attacks

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Asthmatic children with relatively low vitamin D levels in their blood may have a greater risk of suffering severe asthma attacks than those with higher levels of the vitamin, a new study suggests.

The study, which followed more than 1,000 children with asthma for four years, found those with vitamin-D "insufficiency" at the outset were more likely to have an asthma attack that required a trip to the hospital.

Over the four-year study, 38 percent of children with insufficient vitamin D levels went to the emergency room or were hospitalized for an asthma exacerbation. The same was true of 32 percent of children with sufficient levels of the vitamin.

When the researchers considered other factors -- including the severity of the children's asthma at the study's start, their weight and their family income -- vitamin D insufficiency itself was linked to a 50 percent increase in the risk of severe asthma attacks.

The full article may be viewed by clicking the link in this post's title.

Combo Vaccine Raises Risk of Fever-Related Seizures in Kids

MONDAY, June 28 (HealthDay News) -- Toddlers who receive the combination MMRV (measles, mumps, rubella and varicella) vaccine are at higher risk of having a febrile seizure a week to 10 days after receiving the shot than children who get the MMR and varicella (chicken pox) vaccines separately at the same visit, a new study confirms.

Although the combination shot doubles the risk of febrile seizure, the odds are still quite small, experts noted.

"What's important for parents to understand is that even though there's a doubling of the risk for the combination vaccine, the overall risk of seizure to any one child with any measles-containing vaccine is still less than one in 1,000 doses," said Dr. Nicola Klein, co-director of the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center in Oakland, Calif., and lead investigator of the study, published online June 28 and in the July print issue of Pediatrics.

The study, funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, involved the health records of more than 459,000 children who received their first dose of measles-containing vaccine between 2000 and 2008. The data came the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), a vaccine safety surveillance system sponsored by the CDC and comprised of health records from eight managed care organizations across the country.

The full article may be viewed by clicking the link in this post's title.

ADHD drugs have no long-term growth effects: study

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Neither attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) nor medications used to treat it have a long-term impact on kids' growth, a new study published online in The Journal of Pediatrics suggests.

Previous studies have shown that medication may make kids with ADHD eat less and grow slower than their peers without the condition - at least at first. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 10 percent of boys and 6 percent of girls have been diagnosed with ADHD.

"There have been concerns in the literature about the use of ADHD medications and their effect on growth," Dr. Stephen Faraone, a psychiatrist at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York, and one of the study's authors, told Reuters Health. "We found that that (growth) delay tends to be most prominent in the first year or so, and tends to attenuate over time."

Dr. Faraone and his colleagues measured and weighed 261 kids with and without ADHD that they had been following for at least ten years. Most of the kids with ADHD had spent at least some of that time on stimulants, such as Ritalin and Adderall.

At the end of the study, there was no difference in the height or weight of the kids - now mostly adults - who had ADHD and those that didn't. There was also no relationship between their height and weight and how long they had been on medication, if at all.

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Gene Mutations Offer Clues to Autoimmune Disorders

WEDNESDAY, June 16 (HealthDay News) -- A new study finds that rare gene variations are more common in people with disorders in which the immune system attacks the body. These autoimmune disorders include rheumatoid arthritis and type 1 diabetes.

Researchers report that the findings could lead to better treatments -- although that's not guaranteed -- and pave the way for scientists to link uncommon genetic variations to other diseases.

The research is focused on mutations in the gene coding an enzyme in charge of a crucial cell in the immune system. The enzyme, called sialic acid acetylesterase, controls the immune system's B cells -- white cells that produce antibodies to fight the foreign proteins of viruses, bacteria and other invaders. If the enzyme fails to rein in the B cells, they may attack the body's healthy cells by mistake.

To view the full article, click the link in this post's title.

Prognosis Good for Most Children With Epilepsy: Study

THURSDAY, June 17 (HealthDay News) -- Children with new-onset epilepsy of unknown origin have a much higher rate of remission than those with symptomatic epilepsy, caused by underlying brain damage or disease.

That's the finding of a new study by researchers in The Netherlands who evaluated the course and outcome of childhood epilepsy in 413 children over a 15-year period. The children were ages 1 month to 16 years (mean age at onset was 5.5 years) when they were diagnosed with epilepsy. They were followed for five years and contacted again 10 years later.

By the end of the study, 70.9 percent (293) of the participants had been in remission for at least five years, while 30 percent still had active epilepsy that became intractable in one out of 10 of them. The majority of patients in remission had been diagnosed with epilepsy of unknown origin, also known as idiopathic epilepsy.

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June 2010 Newsletter

The June 2010 newsletter is up! We had 28 checkouts this month, several new patrons, and almost 100 articles sent out, along with several exciting new additions to the library.

To view the newsletter, click the link in this post's title.

May 2010 Newsletter

The May newsletter is out! We had eleven new patrons and over thirty checkouts this month, with over 100 articles sent out to patrons!

To view the newsletter, click the link in this post's title.

Imaging Reveals How Brain Fails to Tune out Phantom Sounds of Tinnitus

ScienceDaily (June 23, 2010) — About 40 million people in the U.S. today suffer from tinnitus, an irritating and sometimes debilitating auditory disorder in which a person "hears" sounds, such as ringing, that don't actually exist. There isn't a cure for what has long been a mysterious ailment, but new research suggests there may, someday, be a way to alleviate the sensation of this sound, says a neuroscientist from Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC)

In a Perspective piece in the June 24 issue of Neuron, Josef P. Rauschecker, PhD, says that tinnitus should be thought of as a disorder akin to the "phantom pain" felt in an amputated limb.

Tinnitus starts with damage to hair cells in the cochlea of the inner ear. This damage forces neurons in the brain's auditory areas, which normally receive input from that part of the cochlea, to become overactive to fill in the missing sound, he says. That extra, unreal noise is normally inhibited -- or tuned out -- by a corrective feedback loop from the brain's limbic system to the thalamus, where all sensory information is regulated, before it reaches the cerebral cortex, where a person becomes conscious of the senses. But that doesn't happen in tinnitus patients due to compromised brain structures in the limbic system.

The full article may be viewed by clicking the link in this post's title.

The Fight Against Autism Goes High Tech

FRIDAY, June 18 (HealthDay News) -- From iPods to robots to avatars, people with autism are increasingly taking advantage of cutting-edge technologies to improve their social skills and, in the process, break the isolation of their condition.

"We use them as a bridge to develop communication skills people with autism don't have, like social referencing [for example, making eye contact]," explained Katharina Boser, president of Individual Differences in Learning of Howard County, Maryland, and co-chair of the Innovative Technology for Autism (ITA) committee at one of the nation's leading autism advocacy groups, Autism Speaks. "There are a range of devices that can support people at different levels," she said.

Several of these technologies were demonstrated recently at the International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR) in Philadelphia, which was sponsored by Autism Speaks and the International Society for Autism Research.

Among other things, the very predictability of robots, toys and computer-generated avatars are a low-threat way for autistic children to learn new skills, Boser explained.

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In South Carolina, Advocacy Overturns Governor's Library Vetoes

By Norman Oder Jun 22, 2010 (Library Journal)

In less than a week, South Carolina library advocates and their allies not only got Governor Mark Sanford's veto of state aid to libraries overturned, but did so at margins State Library Director David Goble told LJ were greater than any other override vote--thanks to legislators' recognition that library Internet access is a key to the economic recovery.

Last week, Sanford vetoed $4,653,933 in state aid to public libraries and $1,172,758 in stimulus funds to public libraries, a decision that "is immediately catastrophic to the citizens who use our public libraries," Goble warned. Librarians and advocates got on the phone and the computer, contacting their legislators via the state's version of CapWiz, an application provided by the American Library Association.

The full article may be viewed by clicking the link in this post's title.

Researchers Report New Autism Genes Discovered

University of Illinois at Chicago researchers are part of an international consortium working with Autism Speaks, the world's largest autism science and advocacy organization, which today reports new autism genetic discoveries.

The new report shows that individuals with autism tend to carry more sub-microscopic insertions and deletions called copy-number variants (CNV) in their genome than nonautistic people do. Some of these CNV appeared to be inherited, while others are considered new because they are found only in affected offspring and not in the parents. Taken together, more of the CNVs disrupt genes previously reported to be implicated in intellectual disability without autism or in autism than expected by chance.

These findings further support an emerging consensus within the scientific community that autism is caused in part by many "rare variants" or genetic changes found in less than 1 percent of the population. While each of these variants may only account for a small fraction of the cases, collectively they are starting to account for a greater percentage of individuals in the autism community, as well as providing insights into possible common pathogenic mechanisms.

The full article may be viewed by clicking the link in this post's title.

Visual System Interprets Sign Languages

ScienceDaily (June 2, 2010) — Spanish sign language is used by over 100,000 people with hearing impairments and is made up of hundreds of signs. CVC-UAB researchers Sergio Escalera, Petia Radeva and Jordi Vitrià selected over twenty of these signs to develop a new visual interpretation system which allows deaf people to carry out consultations in the language they commonly use.

Signs can vary slightly depending on each user. Project researchers took this into account during the trials carried out with different people to help the system "become familiarised" with this variability. The signs recognised by the system were programmed to allow deaf people to maintain a basic conversation, including asking for help or directions. "For them it is a non artificial way of communicating and at the same time they can engage with people who do not speak sign language since the system translates the symbols into words in real time," Sergio Escalera said.

The hardware includes a video camera which records image sequences when it detects the presence of a user wanting to make a consultation. A computer vision and automatic learning system detects face, hand and arm movements, as well as any screen scrolling, and incorporates these into a classification system which identifies each movement with the word associated with the sign.

The full article may be viewed by clicking the link in this post's title.