Behavioural therapy may help reduce tics in kids with Tourette syndrome

May 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, May 19 (ANI): A new study led by a UCLA researcher has developed an effective, non-medication treatment for children and adolescents with Tourette”s and related tic disorders that has shown improvement similar to that found in recent anti-tic medication studies.

Tourette syndrome, a neurological disorder characterized by twitches like grimacing, blinking and vocalizations, is normally treated in children and teens with one of several antipsychotic medications.

But such drugs usually don”t cure tics completely, and worse, they can often have side effects, acting as sedatives, causing weight gain and impairing cognitive function.

Now, lead study author John Piacentini, a UCLA professor of psychiatry and his colleagues at seven sites around the nation found that a specialized form of behavior therapy called comprehensive behavioural intervention for tics, or CBIT, significantly reduced chronic tics and tic-related problems in children and adolescents.

Almost 53 percent of children receiving CBIT were rated as significantly improved, compared with 19 percent of those receiving a comparison treatment.

Tourette’s syndrome is often accompanied by other psychiatric problems, difficulties in school, work and social functioning.

In this new kind of therapy, children learned to recognize when a tic was about to occur and to engage in a voluntary action incompatible with the tic until the unwanted sensation passed.

Parents were also taught how to aid there children in such situations and reduce stressful conditions for their kids.

“The fact that CBIT works about as well as the standard medications for tics but without the negative side effects greatly expands the available treatment options for chronic tic disorders,” said Susanna Chang, a UCLA assistant professor of psychiatry and a study author. “Importantly, CBIT also emphasizes the development of skills that foster autonomy and empowerment, allowing for patients and their families to take a more active role in treatment than previously indicated.”

Piacentini are considering using neuroimaging and other neuroscientific techniques to examine the brain mechanisms underlying how CBIT might work.

In addition, investigators are currently working with the Tourette Syndrome Association and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to teach CBIT to clinicians who treat children with tic disorders and to develop new versions of CBIT for use with younger children and by nurses and other health care professionals.

The study appears in the May 19 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). (ANI)

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Therapy benefits even when it comes to very distressed married couples

April 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, April 20 (ANI): Therapy can help even very distressed married couples if both partners want to improve their marriage, says a new study.

The study, conducted by Andrew Christensen, a UCLA professor of psychology and lead author of the study, included 134 married couples, 71 in Los Angeles and 63 in Seattle. Most were in their 30s and 40s, and slightly more than half had children.

The couples were ”chronically, seriously distressed” and fought frequently, but they were hoping to improve their marriages.

“We didn”t want couples who would get better on their own. We wanted couples who were consistently unhappy. We excluded almost 100 couples who wanted couple therapy but who did not meet our criteria of consistent and serious distress,” Christensen said.

The couples received up to 26 therapy sessions within a year. Psychologists conducted follow-up sessions approximately every six months for five years after therapy ended.

The couples all participated in one of two kinds of therapy. The first, traditional behavioural couple therapy, focuses on making positive changes, including learning better ways of communicating, especially about problems, and better ways of working toward solutions.

The second, integrative behavioural couple therapy, uses similar strategies but focuses more on the emotional reactions and not just the actions that led to the emotional reactions. In this approach, couples work at understanding their spouse”s emotional sensitivities.

Christensen uses the integrative therapy, the second approach, which he described in his 2000 book ”Reconcilable Differences”. The couples who used this approach read the book as part of their treatment, while the couples in the traditional therapy group read a different self-help book.

When the therapy sessions were over, about two-thirds of the couples overall had shown significant clinical improvement.

“Given this population, that”s a good figure. If couples do not improve in 26 sessions, that is a bad sign. This is not psychoanalysis,” said Christensen.

The integrative therapy approach was significantly more effective than traditional therapy over the first two years of follow-up. The difference between the treatments, however, was not dramatic and did not last as the years went on.

Five years after treatment ended, about half the couples were significantly improved from where they were at the start of treatment, about a quarter were separated or divorced, and about a quarter were unchanged.

At that five-year mark, about a third of the couples were “normal, happy couples,” said Christensen.

For another 16 percent, their marriage was significantly improved and was tolerable, if not very happy.

“They”re clearly better and their marriages might last. We know from many studies that couple therapy can be beneficial to couples, although it certainly does not help all couples. We also know distressed couples tend not to get better on their own,” Christensen said.

For therapy to work, both partners have to be strongly committed to saving the marriage, and both need to be willing to do their share to work at the relationship and not just blame the other, Christensen said.

The study appears in the April issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, a publication of the American Psychological Association.

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Obesity gene can shrink the brain

April 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, Apr 20 (ANI): The obesity gene, which is carried by over half of all people in the US with European ancestry, is also associated with a loss of brain tissue, say researchers.

The discovery by senior study author Paul Thompson, a UCLA professor of neurology, and his team puts more than a third of the U.S. population at risk for a variety of diseases, such as Alzheimer”s.

Three years ago, geneticists reported that nearly half of all people in the U.S. with European ancestry carry a variant of the fat mass and obesity associated (FTO) gene, which causes them to gain weight — from three to seven pounds, on average — but worse, puts them at risk for obesity.

Using magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers generated three-dimensional “maps” of brain volume differences in 206 healthy elderly subjects drawn from 58 sites in the U.S. as part of the Alzheimer”s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative— a large, five-year study aimed at better understanding factors that help the brain resist disease as it ages.

They found that there was consistently less tissue in the brains of those who carry the FTO allele, compared with non-carriers.

Individuals with the “bad” version of the FTO gene had an average of 8 percent less tissue in the frontal lobes, the “command center” of the brain, and 12 percent less in the occipital lobes, areas in the back of the brain responsible for vision and perception.

Further, the brain differences could not be directly attributed to other obesity-related factors such as cholesterol levels, diabetes or high blood pressure.

Thompson called the findings worrying and mysterious.

“The results are curious. If you have the bad FTO gene, your weight affects your brain adversely in terms of tissue loss. If you don”t carry FTO, higher body weight doesn”t translate into brain deficits; in fact, it has nothing to do with it. This is a very mysterious, widespread gene,” he said.

People who carry this specific DNA sequence are heavier on average, and their waist circumference is half an inch bigger.

This is a large percentage of the population, said Thompson.

“This is a shocking finding. Any loss of brain tissue puts you at greater risk for functional decline. The risk gene divides the world into two camps ? those who have the FTO allele and those who don”t,” he said.

But Thompson said that the news is not necessarily completely negative, because “carriers of the risk gene can exercise and eat healthily to resist both obesity and brain decline.”

“The gene discovery will help to develop and fine tune the anti-dementia drugs being developed to combat brain aging,” he said

The study has been published in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (ANI)

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First direct recording of mirror neurons in human brain

April 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, Apr 17 (ANI): For the first time, researchers have made a direct recording of mirror neurons in the human brain.

It is believed that mirror neurons are what make us human-they are the cells in the brain that fire not only when we perform a particular action but also when we watch someone else perform that same action.

Neuroscientists have said that this “mirroring” is the mechanism by which we can “read” the minds of others and empathize with them. It”s how we “feel” someone”s pain, how we discern a grimace from a grin, a smirk from a smile.

But, until now, there was no proof that mirror neurons existed – only suspicion and indirect evidence.

Dr. Itzhak Fried, a UCLA professor of neurosurgery and of psychiatry and biobehavioural sciences, Roy Mukamel, a postdoctoral fellow in Fried”s lab, and their colleagues have recorded both single cells and multiple-cell activity, not only in motor regions of the brain where mirror neurons were thought to exist but also in regions involved in vision and in memory.

They also showed that specific subsets of mirror cells increased their activity during the execution of an action but decreased their activity when an action was only being observed.

“We hypothesize that the decreased activity from the cells when observing an action may be to inhibit the observer from automatically performing that same action. Furthermore, this subset of mirror neurons may help us distinguish the actions of other people from our own actions,” said Mukamel.

The researchers drew their data directly from the brains of 21 patients who were being treated at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center for intractable epilepsy.

The patients had been implanted with intracranial depth electrodes to identify seizure foci for potential surgical treatment.

Electrode location was based solely on clinical criteria; the researchers, with the patients” consent, used the same electrodes to “piggyback” their research.

The researchers found that the neurons fired or showed their greatest activity both when the individual performed a task and when they observed a task.

The mirror neurons making the responses were located in the medial frontal cortex and medial temporal cortex, two neural systems where mirroring responses at the single-cell level had not been previously recorded, not even in monkeys.

This new finding demonstrates that mirror neurons are located in more areas of the human brain than previously thought.

Given that different brain areas implement different functions – in this case, the medial frontal cortex for movement selection and the medial temporal cortex for memory – the finding also suggests that mirror neurons provide a complex and rich mirroring of the actions of other people.

Because mirror neurons fire both when an individual performs an action and when one watches another individual perform that same action, it is believed that this “mirroring” is the neural mechanism by which the actions, intentions and emotions of other people can be automatically understood.

“The study suggests that the distribution of these unique cells linking the activity of the self with that of others is wider than previously believed,” said Fried.

“It”s also suspected that dysfunction of these mirror cells might be involved in disorders such as autism, where the clinical signs can include difficulties with verbal and nonverbal communication, imitation and having empathy for others. So gaining a better understanding of the mirror neuron system might help devise strategies for treatment of this disorder,” said Mukamel.

The study was published in the latest edition of the journal Current Biology. (ANI)

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‘Big Bang Machine’ may unlock secrets of the Universe

March 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, March 25 (ANI): Scientists are of the opinion that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, may unlock many secrets of the Universe.

Located at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva, the immense collider, which measures more than 16 miles in circumference, is expected to usher in a new era of particle physics research, enabling scientists to replicate conditions immediately after the Big Bang.

Scientists expect the giant machine to generate astonishing new insights into the Big Bang, the building blocks of the universe, the mysterious properties of dark matter and perhaps even extra dimensions in the universe.

To that end, on March 19, the collider fired beams of protons in both directions, clockwise and counter-clockwise, at a new world-record energy: 3.5 trillion (or tera) electron volts.

The LHC will soon collide these proton beams against each other, allowing physicists to analyze the particles produced in the collisions.

CERN eventually plans to collide proton beams at a blistering 7 tera-electron-volts in both directions.

Robert Cousins, a UCLA professor of physics who has served as a leader of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN — one of the LHC’s four main experiments — is hopeful the collider will lead to extraordinary discoveries about the nature of the universe.

“We’re going to study the Big Bang as far back as we can take it,” said Cousins, whose research group is supported by the US Department of Energy and who is principal investigator on a CMS grant funded by the National Science Foundation.

“The fundamental questions were asked by the ancient Greeks: Where did we come from, what are we made of? How did the universe evolve and what are the forces of the universe?” he said.

“We think there are undiscovered forces. Nature likely contains extra forces that we have not found yet,” Cousins said.

“Any successful attempt to unify the known forces of nature will almost certainly unify some unknown forces of nature at the same time,” he said.

“The job of experimental physicists is to go find those forces. I am most excited about finding new forces that shed light on unification. If you’re going to paint the complete picture, you need to know what the other forces are,” he added. (ANI)

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UCLA economist blames Hoover’s pro-labour policies for Great Depression

August 30, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, Aug 30 (ANI): A University of California, Los Angeles economist has blamed former US President Herbert Hoover’s pro-labour policies for Great Depression in 1929.

“These findings suggest that the recession was three times worse – at a minimum – than it would otherwise have been, because of Hoover,” said Lee E. Ohanian, a UCLA professor of economics.

The policies, which included both propping up wages and encouraging job-sharing, also accounted for more than two-thirds of the precipitous decline in hours worked in the manufacturing sector, which was much harder hit initially than the agricultural sector.

“By keeping industrial wages too high, Hoover sharply depressed employment beyond where it otherwise would have been, and that act drove down the overall gross national product,” said Ohanian.

“His policy was the single most important event in precipitating the Great Depression,” he added.

According to Ohanian, Hoover was concerned about two potential crises. He was afraid the stock market collapse of October 1929 would result in a recession with deflation, leading to dramatic wage cuts, as a period of deflation had done just a decade earlier.

And because of a series of recent legislative and court decisions that had expanded the power of organized labour, he also worried about the possibility of crippling strikes if such wage cuts were to come to pass.

“Hoover had the idea that if wages were kept high for workers and they shared jobs instead of being laid off, they would be able to buy more goods and services, which would help the economy improve,” Ohanian added.

After the crash, Hoover met with major leaders of industry and cut a deal with them to either maintain or raise wages and institute job-sharing to keep workers employed, at least to some degree. In response, General Motors, Ford, U.S. Steel, Dupont, International Harvester and many other large firms fell in line, even publicly underscoring their compliance with Hoover’s program.

Designed to placate labour and safeguard workers’ buying power, the step had an unintended effect. As deflation eventually did set in, the inflation-adjusted value of these wages rose over time, effectively giving workers a raise precisely at the time when companies were least in a position to afford such increases and precisely when productivity was beginning to fall.

“The wage freeze effectively raised the cost of labour and, by extension, production,” Ohanian said.

“If you artificially raise the price of production, your costs go way up and you pass them on to the customers, and they buy that much less,” he added.

Reluctant to lower wages due to Hoover’s entreaties, employers in the manufacturing sector responded by reducing the workweek and laying off workers. By September 1931, the manufacturing sector was already hurting: Hours clocked by workers had fallen by 20 percent and employment by 35 percent.

Overall, the economy suffered, with the GDP falling by 27 percent.

“The Depression was the first time in the history of the U.S. that wages did not fall during a period of significant deflation,” Ohanian said.

“In late 1931, industry finally did cut wages, but it was too late. By this point, the economy was in an unprecedented, full-blown depression,” he added.

The findings are slated to appear in the December issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Economic Theory. (ANI)

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Obese people ‘at greater Alzheimer’s risk’

August 26, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, Aug 26 (ANI): Here’s some discouraging news for obese people: a new report has found that fat people are at greater risk for developing Alzheimer’s.

In the current online edition of the journal Human Brain Mapping, Paul Thompson, senior author and a UCLA professor of neurology, and lead author Cyrus A. Raji, a medical student at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and colleagues compared the brains of people who were obese, overweight, and of normal weight, to see if they had differences in brain structure; that is, did their brains look equally healthy.

They found that obese people had 8 percent less brain tissue than people with normal weight, while overweight people had 4 percent less tissue.

“That’s a big loss of tissue and it depletes your cognitive reserves, putting you at much greater risk of Alzheimer’s and other diseases that attack the brain,” said Thompson. But you can greatly reduce your risk for Alzheimer’s, if you can eat healthily and keep your weight under control,” he added.

To reach the conclusion, researchers used brain images from an earlier study called the Cardiovascular Health Study Cognition Study. Scans were selected of 94 elderly people in their 70s who were healthy not cognitively impaired-five years after the scan was taken. To define the weight categories, they used the Body Mass Index (BMI), the most widely used measurement for obesity. Normal weight people were defined as having a BMI between 18.5-25; overweight people between 25-30, and obese people greater than 30.

The researchers then converted the scans into detailed three-dimensional images using tensor-based morphometry, a neuroimaging method that offers high resolution mapping of anatomical differences in the brain.

In looking at both grey matter and white matter of the brain, they found that the people defined as obese had lost brain tissue in the frontal and temporal lobes, areas of the brain critical for planning and memory, and in the anterior cingulate gyrus (attention and executive functions), hippocampus (long term memory) and basal ganglia (movement). Overweight people showed brain loss in the basal ganglia, the corona radiata, white matter comprised of axons, and the parietal lobe (sensory lobe).

“The brains of obese people looked 16 years older than the brains of those who were lean, and in overweight people looked eight years older,” says Thompson.

“It seems that along with increased risk for health problems such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease, obesity is bad for your brain: we have linked it to shrinkage of brain areas that are also targeted by Alzheimer’s,” said Pittsburgh’s Raji.

“But that could mean exercising, eating right and keeping weight under control can maintain brain health with aging and potentially lower the risk for Alzheimer’s and other dementias,” the expert added. (ANI)

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Now, a virtual library of medieval manuscripts at the click of a mouse

February 11, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, Feb 11 (ANI): Researchers have created a virtual library of medieval manuscripts, which anyone can access at the click of a mouse.

Somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 rare and precious medieval manuscripts have been scanned over the past decade into formats that could be studied over the Internet.

But, the only problem is that scholars don’t know the existence of the webpages where such manuscripts can be found.Searching for medieval manuscripts gets you millions of hits, most of which have nothing to do with manuscripts, and when they do, they usually feature only images of a single page rather than the entire book,” said Matthew Fisher, an assistant professor of English at UCLA (University of California Los Angeles).

“Since finding these great projects is so tough, they’re functionally invisible,” he added.

Fisher set out two years ago to remedy the situation.

With the assistance of two graduate students in English, a computer developer from UCLA’s Center for Digital Humanities and Christopher Baswell, a former UCLA professor of English, Fisher decided to collect links to every manuscript from the eighth to the 15th century that had been fully digitized by any library, archive, institute or private owner anywhere in the world.

In December 2008, the group launched the initial results.

The UCLA-based Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts now links to nearly 1,000 manuscripts by 193 authors in 20 languages from 59 libraries around the world, allowing users to flit from England to France to Switzerland to the United States – to name the locations of just a few of the featured repositories – with the click of a mouse.

“Because these manuscripts are so old and fragile, libraries are digitizing them, but you can’t find them,” Fisher said. “We’re completing the step of making them accessible to the world,” he added.

Employing a Web application designed by the Center for Digital Humanities, which promotes the use of computer technology in humanities research and instruction, the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts allows users to search for manuscripts according to their author, title, language and archiving institution.

In its first three weeks of operation, the site had almost 5,000 visitors from Australia, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Canada and all over the United States.

“We’ll never replace the joy of sitting down with an 800-year-old book, but we will bring the wonder of these manuscripts to people who might never experience them otherwise,” said Fisher. (ANI)

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