Researchers from University of California – Davis found that mothers who had fevers during their pregnancies were more than twice as likely to have a child with autism or developmental delay than were mothers who did not have a fever or who took medication to counter its effect.

“Our study provides strong evidence that controlling fevers while pregnant may be effective in modifying the risk of having a child with autism or developmental delay,” said Ousseny Zerbo, Ph.D., lead author of the study. “We recommend that pregnant women who develop fever take anti-pyretic (fever-reducing) medications and seek medical attention if their fever persists.”

The study is published online in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, and is believed to be the first to consider how fever from any cause, including the flu, and its treatment during pregnancy could affect the likelihood of having a child with autism or developmental delay.

Researchers analyzed data from a large, case-control investigation known as the Childhood Autism Risk from Genetics and the Environment (CHARGE) Study. Another recent study based on CHARGE data found that mothers who were obese or diabetic had a higher likelihood of having children with autism.

Dr. Irva Hertz-Picciotto, a professor of public health sciences at UC Davis and principal investigator of CHARGE, pointed out that fever is produced by acute inflammation — the short-term, natural immune system reaction to infection or injury — and that chronic inflammation, which no longer serves a beneficial purpose and can damage healthy tissue, may be present in mothers with metabolic abnormalities like diabetes and obesity.

“Since an inflammatory state in the body accompanies obesity and diabetes as well as fever,” said Hertz-Picciotto, “the natural question is: Could inflammatory factors play a role in autism?”

Typically, when people are infected by bacteria or viruses, the body mounts a healing response that involves the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines from white blood cells into the bloodstream. Some cytokines are able to cross the placenta, and therefore could reach the fetal central nervous system, potentially altering neurotransmitters and brain development.

“We definitely think more research is necessary to pinpoint the ways that inflammation could alter brain development,” said Hertz-Picciotto.

CHARGE includes an ethnically diverse population of children aged 2 to 5 years born in California and living in Northern California. The current study included 538 children with autism, 163 children with developmental delay but not autism, and 421 typically developing children whose mothers answered standardized questionnaires about whether they had the flu and/or fever during pregnancy and if they took medications to treat their illnesses.

Interestingly, the results showed that flu during pregnancy was not associated with greater risks of having a child with autism or developmental delay. Fever from any cause during pregnancy, however, was far more likely to be reported by mothers of children with autism (2.12 times higher odds) or developmental delay (2.5 times higher odds), as compared with mothers of children who were developing typically.

For children of mothers who took anti-fever medication, the risk of autism was not different from the risk in children whose mothers reported no fever.

According to Hertz-Picciotto, the results are noteworthy because of the study’s large population-based sample and detailed information on participants.

Prior discoveries from the CHARGE evaluations suggest that taking prenatal vitamins prior to and during the first month of pregnancy may help prevent autism and that living near a freeway or in areas with high regional air pollution is associated with higher risk of autism in children.

“CHARGE has obtained a wealth of environmental, demographic and medical information on young children and their parents and provides a solid basis for a variety of epidemiologic studies,” said Hertz-Picciotto. “Those studies are helping us find ways to protect childhood neurodevelopment.”

Source: University of California – Davis Health System

Pregnant woman photo by shutterstock.

The study also found that this rewiring involves fibers that supply input to the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that is responsible for sensory perception, motor control, and cognition.

“This study overturns decades-old beliefs that most of the brain is hard-wired before a critical period that ends when one is a young adult,” said Marcel Oberlaender, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Florida Institute (MPFI) and first author on the paper. “By changing the nature of sensory experience, we were able to demonstrate that the brain can rewire, even at an advanced age. This may suggest that if one stops learning and experiencing new things as one ages, a substantial amount of connections within the brain may be lost.”

The researchers examined the brains of older rats, focusing on an area of the brain known as the thalamus, which processes and delivers information obtained from sensory organs to the cerebral cortex. Connections between the thalamus and the cortex have been thought to stop changing by early adulthood, but this was not found to be the case in this study, according to Oberlaender.

As nocturnal animals, rats rely on their whiskers as sensory organs to explore and navigate their environment. This makes the whisker system an ideal model for studying whether the brain can be remodeled by changing sensory experiences, the researchers note. By trimming the whiskers, and preventing the rats from receiving sensory input, the scientists sought to determine whether extensive rewiring of the connections between the thalamus and cortex would occur.

They found that the animals with trimmed whiskers had altered axons, fibers along which information is conveyed from one nerve cell to many others, while those whose whiskers were not trimmed had no changes.

The researchers said their findings were particularly striking as the rats were considered relatively old. This implies that rewiring can still take place at an age not previously thought possible, according to the researchers. Also notable was that the rewiring happened rapidly — in as little as a few days, the researchers add.

“We’ve shown that the structure of the rodent brain is in constant flux, and that this rewiring is shaped by sensory experience and interaction with the environment,” said Oberlaender.

“These changes seem to be life-long and may pertain to other sensory systems and species, including people. Our findings open the possibility of new avenues of research on development of the aging brain using quantitative anatomical studies combined with noninvasive imaging technologies suitable for humans, such as functional MRI (fMRI).”

The study was possible due to advances in high-resolution imaging and reconstruction techniques, developed in part by Oberlaender at MPFI. These techniques enable researchers to trace the fine and complex branching patterns of individual axons, with typical diameters less than a thousandth of a millimeter, throughout the entire brain.

The study was published in the May 24 issue of Neuron.

Source: Max Planck Florida Institute

Over the course of time, it has become widely accepted that human emotions are highly contagious. For example, seeing someone smile often triggers a corresponding emotional response in the observer.

Experts believe that this synchronization of emotional states across individuals may sustain social interaction. That is, when all group members share a common emotional state, their brains and bodies process the environment in a similar fashion.

Finnish researchers at Aalto University and Turku PET Centre believe their research shows how experiencing strong emotions puts individuals in sync.

In the study, participants’ brain activity was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they were viewing short, pleasant, neutral and unpleasant movies.

Investigators discovered that feeling strong unpleasant emotions synchronized brain’s emotion processing networks in the frontal and midline regions. However, experiencing highly arousing events synchronized activity in the networks supporting vision, attention and sense of touch.

Researchers believe this shows that sharing others’ emotional states provides individuals with a somatosensory and neural framework that helps individuals understand others. That is, the neural cues help people understand others’ intentions and actions and allow a person to “tune in” with them.

Such automatic tuning facilitates social interaction and group processes, said psychologist Dr. Lauri Nummenmaa from Aalto University.

The results have major implications for current neural models of human emotions and group behavior, but also deepen our understanding of mental disorders involving abnormal socioemotional processing, Nummenmaa said.

Source: Academy of Finland and Aalto University

Brain scans photo by shutterstock.

The UK study suggests older people with robust brain “wiring” – connections of nerve fibers from different and distinct areas of the brain – are able to process information quickly and that this makes them generally smarter. Accordingly, the research suggests joining distant parts of the brain together with better wiring improves mental performance, signifying that intelligence is not found in a single part of the brain.

Moreover, a degraded condition of this wiring or “white matter” – the billions of nerve fibers that transmit signals around the brain – can negatively affect our intelligence by altering networks and slowing down processing speed.

University of Edinburgh researchers say this demonstrates that the deterioration of white matter with age is likely to be a significant cause of age-related cognitive decline.

In the study, the research team used three different brain imaging techniques in compiling the results, including two that have never been used before in the study of intelligence. These techniques measure the amount of water in brain tissue, indicate structural loss in the brain, and show how well the nerve fibers are insulated.

The researchers examined scans and results of thinking and reaction time tests from 420 people in the Lothian Birth Cohort of 1936, a group of nearly 1,100 people whose intelligence and general health have been tracked since they were 11years of age.

Study author and psychologist Dr. Lars Penke said, “Our results suggest a first plausible way how brain structure differences lead to higher intelligence. The results are exciting for our understanding of human intelligence differences at all ages.

“They also suggest a clear target for seeking treatment for mental difficulties, be they pathological or age-related. That the brain’s nerve connections tend to stay the same throughout the brain means we can now look at factors that affect the overall condition of the brain, like its blood supply.”

As our society ages, uncovering the secrets of good thinking skills in old age is a high priority.

“The research team is now looking at what keeps the brain’s connections healthy,” Penke said. ”We value our thinking skills, and research should address how we might retain them or slow their decline with age.”

Co-author Mark Bastin, M.D., said, “These findings are exciting as they show how quantitative brain imaging can provide novel insights into the links between brain structure and cognitive ability. This is a key research area given the importance of identifying strategies for retaining good mental ability into older age.”

Such findings could have a real impact on tackling mental decline in later life, including dementia.

Source: University of Edinburgh

New research suggests the brain’s visual perception system automatically and unconsciously guides decision-making. The process by which the brain selects one choice over another is driven by what is known as valence perception.

Valence is the positive or negative information automatically perceived in the majority of visual information. The process integrates visual features and associations from experience with similar objects or features. In this way, it is the process that allows our brains to rapidly make choices between similar objects.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have published their findings in the journal Frontiers in Psychology and are now in the process of commercializing the findings for use by online companies.

Researchers believe the findings offer important insights into consumer behavior in ways that traditional consumer marketing focus groups cannot address. For example, asking individuals to react to package designs, ads or logos is simply ineffective.

Instead, companies can use this type of brain science to more effectively assess how unconscious visual valence perception contributes to consumer behavior.

To transfer the research’s scientific application to the online video market, the CMU research team is in the process of founding the start-up company neonlabs through the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps).

“This basic research into how visual object recognition interacts with and is influenced by affect paints a much richer picture of how we see objects,” said Michael J. Tarr, Ph.D. “What we now know is that common, household objects carry subtle positive or negative valences and that these valences have an impact on our day-to-day behavior.”

Tarr added that the NSF I-Corps program has been instrumental in helping the neonlabs’ team take this basic idea and teaching them how to turn it into a viable company. “The I-Corps program gave us unprecedented access to highly successful, experienced entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who provided incredibly valuable feedback throughout the development process,” he said.

NSF established I-Corps for the sole purpose of assessing the readiness of transitioning new scientific opportunities into valuable products through a public-private partnership. The CMU team was awarded a $50,000, six-month grant to investigate how understanding valence perception could be used to make better consumer marketing decisions.

They are launching neonlabs to apply their model of visual preference to increase click rates on online videos, by identifying the most visually appealing thumbnail from a stream of video. The web-based software product selects a thumbnail based on neuroimaging data on object perception and valence, crowd-sourced behavioral data and proprietary computational analyses of large amounts of video streams.

“Everything you see, you automatically dislike or like, prefer or don’t prefer, in part, because of valence perception,” said Sophie Lebrecht, Ph.D., lead author of the study and the entrepreneurial lead for the I-Corps grant. “Valence links what we see in the world to how we make decisions.”

Lebrecht continued, “Talking with companies such as YouTube and Hulu, we realized that they are looking for ways to keep users on their sites longer by clicking to watch more videos. Thumbnails are a huge problem for any online video publisher, and our research fits perfectly with this problem.

“Our approach streamlines the process and chooses the screenshot that is the most visually appealing based on science, which will in the end result in more user clicks.”

Source: Carnegie Mellon University

According to researchers at the Georgia Health Sciences University, amyloid is excreted by all neurons, but rates dramatically increase in Alzheimer’s. In response to the excessive amyloid, astrocytes, which deliver blood, oxygen and nutrients to neurons in addition to hauling off some of the garbage, get activated and inflamed.

In a new study, the researchers have shown astrocytes also respond by packaging the lipid ceramide with the protein PAR-4, which can do damage on their own, but together are a more “deadly duo,” said Dr. Erhard Bieberich, a biochemist at the Medical College of Georgia at the university.

“If the neuron makes something toxic and dumps it at your door, what would you do?” said Bieberich, corresponding author of the study published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. “You would probably do something to defend yourself.”

The researchers hypothesize that this lipid-coated package ultimately kills them both, which could help explain the brain-cell death and shrinkage that occurs in Alzheimer’s.

“If the astrocytes die, the neurons die,” Bieberich explained.

An avenue for future pursuit is whether a ceramide antibody could be a viable treatment for Alzheimer’s, he added.

Source: Georgia Health Sciences University 

Red and yellow cells photo by shutterstock.

A study recently published by a University of Colorado School of Medicine researcher shows that reward circuits in the brain are sensitized in anorexic women and desensitized in obese women. The findings also suggest that eating behavior is related to brain dopamine pathways involved in addictions.

Dr. Guido Frank, assistant professor director of the Developmental Brain Research Program at the CU School of Medicine, and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain activity in 63 women who were either anorexic or obese. Scientists compared their results to women considered normal weight.

According to the researchers, the women were visually conditioned to associate certain shapes with either a sweet or a non-sweet solution and then received the taste solutions expectedly or unexpectedly. This task has been associated with brain dopamine function in the past, researchers explain.

The scientists found that an unexpected sweet-tasting solution resulted in increased neural activation of reward systems in the anorexic patients and diminished activation in obese women. In rodents, food restriction and weight loss have been associated with greater dopamine-related reward responses in the brain, the researchers noted.

“It is clear that in humans the brain’s reward system helps to regulate food intake,” said Frank. “The specific role of these networks in eating disorders, such as anorexia nervosa and, conversely, obesity, remains unclear.”

The study was published in Neuropsychopharmacology.

Source: University of Colorado Denver

Although still considered an experimental therapy , direct brain stimulation (DBS) has been in practice for several years and has been tried out as a treatment for depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety.

In the new study, transcranial stimulation was able to decrease auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia, and the effects lasted for up to 12 weeks. In addition, the treatment had a marked influence on some negative symptoms.

The researchers believe that one day patients may be able to use this treatment at home.

In this small study, the brains of patients with schizophrenia were stimulated in specific areas for about 20 minutes, twice a day for five consecutive days.  After five days, there was a significant lessening of auditory verbal hallucinations. The benefits of the treatment were still present at three months.

Unfortunately, no patient had complete recovery. The treatment had no effect on other symptoms of schizophrenia such as grandiosity, excitement or disorganization.

The researchers believe that perhaps those with schizophrenia who have symptoms that do not respond to medications may be candidates for transcranial direct stimulation.

Source: American Journal of Psychiatry

But University of Iowa neuroscientist John Wemmie, M.D., Ph.D., says his work suggests that changes in acidity are important for normal brain activity as well.

“We are interested in the idea that pH might be changing in the functional brain because we’ve been hot on the trail of receptors that are activated by low pH,” says Wemmie, an associate professor of psychiatry. “The presence of these receptors implies the possibility that low pH might be playing a signaling role in normal brain function.”

He says his studies have shown that these acid-sensing proteins are required for normal fear responses and for learning and memory in mice.

In the latest study, the first task was finding a way to measure pH changes in the brain. He teamed with Vincent Magnotta, Ph.D., UI associate professor of radiology, psychiatry, and biomedical engineering. Using Magnotta’s expertise in developing MRI (magnetic resonance imaging)-based brain imaging techniques, the researchers developed a non-invasive method to detect and monitor pH changes in living brains.

The MRI-based method was able to detect global changes in brain pH in mice, according to the researchers. Breathing carbon dioxide, which lowers pH and makes the brain more acidic, increased the signal; bicarbonate injections, which increase brain pH, decreased the MRI signal.

The method also seems to detect localized brain activity. When human volunteers viewed a flashing checkerboard — a classic experiment that activates a particular brain region involved in vision — the MRI method detected a drop in pH in that region.

The study affirms the new technique’s ability to measure pH changes in the brain, Magnotta says, giving researchers another way to study brain activity.

Currently, functional MRI (fMRI) measures brain activity by detecting a signal that’s due to oxygen levels in the blood flowing to active brain regions, but does not respond to changes in pH. The new method responds to pH changes, but is not influenced by changes in blood oxygenation, he explains.

Now that the test is in place to measure pH, the researchers plan further studies to explore how pH changes are involved in certain psychiatric diseases, including anxiety and depression.

“Brain activity is likely different in people with brain disorders, such as bipolar or depression, and that might be reflected in this measure,” Wemmie says. “And, perhaps most important at the end of the day: Could this signal be abnormal or perturbed in human psychiatric disease? And if so, it might be a target for manipulation and treatment.”

The findings were published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Early Edition.

Source: University of Iowa Health Care

Researchers at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute set out to discover how people assess the credibility of others in social interactions.

“We found a strong correlation between the amygdala and a baseline level of distrust, which may be based on a person’s beliefs about the trustworthiness of other people in general, his or her emotional state, and the situation at hand,” said Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and the Computational Psychiatry Unit at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, who led the study. “What surprised us, though, is that when other people’s behavior aroused suspicion, the parahippocampal gyrus lit up, acting like an inborn lie detector.”

The scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to study the neural basis of suspicion. They asked 76 pairs of players, each with a buyer and a seller, to compete in 60 rounds of a simple bargaining game while having their brains scanned. At the beginning of each round, the buyer would learn the value of a hypothetical widget and suggest a price to the seller. The seller would then set the price. If the seller’s price fell below the widget’s given value, the trade would go through, with the seller receiving the selling price and the buyer receiving any difference between the selling price and the actual value. If the seller’s price exceeded the value, though, the trade would not execute, and neither party would receive cash.

The researchers found that buyers fell into three categories: 42 percent were incrementalists, who were relatively honest about the widget’s value; 37 percent were conservatives, who adopted the strategy of withholding information; and 21 percent were strategists, who were actively deceptive, mimicking incrementalist behavior by sending high suggestions during low-value trials and then reaping greater benefits by sending low suggestions during high-value trials.

The sellers had a monetary incentive to read the buyers’ strategic profiles correctly, yet they received no feedback about the accuracy of the information they were receiving, so they could not confirm any suspicions. Without feedback, the sellers were forced to decide whether they should trust the buyers based on the pricing suggestions alone.

“The more uncertain a seller was about a buyer’s credibility, the more active his or her parahippocampal gyrus became,” Montague said.

He adds that a person’s “baseline” suspicion may have important consequences for his or her financial success.

“People with a high baseline suspicion were often interacting with fairly trustworthy buyers, so in ignoring the information those buyers provided, they were giving up potential profits,” said Meghana Bhatt, the first author on the research paper. “The ability to recognize credible information in a competitive environment can be just as important as detecting untrustworthy behavior.”

The findings may also have implications for psychiatric conditions such as paranoia and anxiety disorders, added Montague.

“The fact that increased amygdala activation corresponds to an inability to detect trustworthy behavior may provide insight into the social interactions of people with anxiety disorders, who often have increased activity in this area of the brain,” he said.

The research appeared in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source: The Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and Research Institute

“In medical research, we need to dissect events in biology so we can understand the precise mechanisms that give rise to neurodevelopmental traits,” said senior author Nicholas Katsanis, Ph.D., a professor of developmental biology, pediatrics and cell biology.

Katsanis said he knew that a region on chromosome 16 was one of the largest genetic contributors to autism and schizophrenia, but a conversation at a European medical meeting pointed him to information that changes within that same region also were related to changes in a newborn’s head size.

The problem was difficult to address because the region had large deletions and duplications in DNA, which are the most common mutations in humans, he said, adding, “Interpretation is harrowingly hard.”

That’s because a duplication of DNA or missing DNA usually involves several genes.

“It is very difficult to go from ‘here is a region with many genes, sometimes over 50′ to ‘these are the genes that are driving this pathology,’” Katsanis said.

Then he had a light bulb moment. The area of the genome the researchers were exploring gave rise to opposite defects in terms of brain cell growth.

“We realized that overexpressing a gene in question might give one phenotype — a smaller head — while shutting down the same gene might yield the other, a larger head,” he said.

The researchers transplanted a common duplication area of human chromosome 16 known to contain 29 genes into zebrafish embryos and then systematically turned up the activity to find which might cause a small head (microcephaly). They then suppressed the same gene set to see whether any of them caused the reciprocal defect: larger heads (macrocephaly).

The researchers knew that deletion of the region that contained these 29 genes occurred in 1.7 percent of children with autism, he said.

It took the team a few months to dissect such a “copy number variant” — an alteration of the genome that results in an abnormal number of one or more sections of chromosomal DNA, he reported.

“Now we can go from a genetic finding that is dosage-sensitive and start asking reasonable questions about this gene as it pertains to neurocognitive traits, which is a big leap,” Katsanis said, explaining neurocognitive refers to the ability to think, concentrate, reason, remember, process information, learn, understand and speak.

Katsanis concedes there are “major limitations in studying autistic or schizophrenic behavior in zebrafish, but we can measure head size, jaw size, or facial abnormalities.”

The gene in question, KCTD13, is responsible for driving head size in zebrafish by regulating the creation and destruction of new brain cells. This discovery let the team focus on the analogous gene in humans.

“This gene contributes to autism cases, and probably is associated with schizophrenia and also childhood obesity,” Katsanis said.

Once the gene has been uncovered, researchers can examine the protein it produces. “Once you have the protein, you can start asking valuable functional questions and learning what the gene does in the animal or human,” Katsanis said.

Copy number variants, such as the ones this team found on chromosome 16, are now thought to be one of the most common sources of genetic mutations. Hundreds, if not thousands, of such chromosomal deletions and duplications have been found in patients with a broad range of clinical problems, particularly neurodevelopmental disorders, the researcher said.

“Now we may have an efficient tool for dissecting them, which gives us the ability to improve both diagnosis and understanding of disease mechanisms,” Katsanis said.

The study was published online in the journal Nature.

Source: Duke University Medical Center

Researchers at the Kennedy Krieger Institute suggest that a simple “pull-to-sit” task — a simple measure of posture control in infants — could be added to existing developmental screenings at pediatric well visits to improve early detection of developmental delays.

The researchers studied two groups of infants. The first consisted of 40 infants, ages 5.6 to 10 months, considered to be at high genetic risk because a sibling had autism. The research team examined the baby’s ability to maintain head alignment when being carefully, yet firmly, pulled by the arms from lying flat on his or her back to a sitting position.

Infants were scored according to whether their head maintained alignment with the spine, or was in front of the spine, during the task. Lack of this head control indicated head lag, according to Rebecca Landa, Ph.D., study author and director of the Center for Autism and Related Disorders at Kennedy Krieger Institute.

The researchers also tested the children for head lag at 14 and 24 months, as well as at 30 and 36 months, the age that a diagnosis of ASD is considered definitive.

The study found that:

• 90 percent of those diagnosed with ASD exhibited head lag as infants;
• 54 percent of children meeting criteria for social or communication delay had exhibited head lag as infants, and;
• 35 percent of children not meeting the criteria for social or communication delay or ASD exhibited head lag at 6 months.

In the second group, researchers examined 6-month-olds at a single point in time for the presence of head lag. They found that 75 percent of high-risk infants exhibited head lag, compared to 33 percent of low-risk infants.

“Our findings show that the evaluation of motor skills should be incorporated with other behavioral assessments to yield insights into the very earliest signs of autism,” said Landa.

Source: Kennedy Krieger Institute

The study involved college athletes at three Division I schools, comparing 214 athletes in contact sports to 45 athletes in non-contact sports such as track, crew, and Nordic skiing.

The contact sport athletes, who wore special helmets that recorded the acceleration speed and other data at the time of any head impact, experienced an average of 469 head impacts during the season.

All of the athletes took tests of thinking and memory skills before and after the season. Additionally, 45 contact sport athletes and 55 non-contact sport athletes also took an additional set of tests of concentration, working memory, and other skills.

“The good news is that overall there were few differences in the test results between the athletes in contact sports and the athletes in non-contact sports,” said study author Thomas W. McAllister, M.D., of The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. “But we did find that a higher percentage of the contact sport athletes had lower scores than would have been predicted after the season on a measure of new learning than the non-contact sport athletes.”

About 22 percent of the contact sport athletes performed worse than expected on the test of new learning, compared to four percent of the non-contact sport athletes.

McAllister noted that the study did not find differences in test results between the two groups at the beginning of the season, suggesting that the cumulative head impacts that had been sustained over previous seasons did not result in reduced thinking and memory skills in the overall group.

“These results are somewhat reassuring, given the recent heightened concern about the potential negative effects of these sports,” he said. “Nevertheless, the findings do suggest that repetitive head impacts may have a negative effect on some athletes.”

The research is published in the May 16, online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Source: American Academy of Neurology

Football players photo by shutterstock.

Led by scientists at Indiana University, the research team identified a group of genes most associated with schizophrenia. Using a functional genomics approach that incorporates a number of experimental techniques, the scientists were able to apply the gene test to data from other schizophrenia studies and successfully identify which patients had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, according to the study, which was published online by the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

The prototype test was able to predict whether a person was at a higher or lower risk of schizophrenia in about two-thirds of cases, researchers report.

The researchers also propose that schizophrenia is a disease emerging from a mix of genetic variations affecting brain development and neuronal connections, along with environmental factors, particularly stress.

“At its core, schizophrenia is a disease of decreased cellular connectivity in the brain, precipitated by environmental stress during brain development, among those with genetic vulnerability,” said principal investigator Alexander B. Niculescu III, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry and medical neuroscience at the IU School of Medicine and director of the Laboratory of Neurophenomics at the IU Institute of Psychiatric Research. “For the first time we have a comprehensive list of the genes that have the best evidence for involvement in schizophrenia.”

When the test estimating the risk for schizophrenia is refined, it could provide guidance to caregivers and health care professionals about young people in families with a history of the disease, prompting early intervention and treatment, Niculescu said.

He emphasized that a score indicating a higher risk of schizophrenia “doesn’t determine your destiny. It just means that your neuronal connectivity is different, which could make you more creative, or more prone to illness. It’s all on a continuum — these genetic variants are present throughout the population. If you have too many of them, in the wrong combination, in an environment where you are exposed to stress, alcohol and drugs, and so on, that can lead to the development of the clinical illness.”

To identify and prioritize the genes involved in schizophrenia, the researchers combined data from several types of studies, including genome-wide association studies, gene expression data derived from human tissue samples, genetic linkage studies, genetic evidence from animal models, and other work. This approach, called convergent functional genomics, has been pioneered by Niculescu and colleagues, and relies on multiple independent lines of evidence to implicate genes in clinical disorders.

The researchers noted that the results were stronger when analyses were performed using gene-level data, rather than analyses based on individual mutations — called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs — in those genes. Multiple SNPs can spark a gene’s role in the development of schizophrenia, so evidence for the genes, and the biological mechanisms in which they play a role, was much stronger from study to study than evidence for individual SNPs.

“By better understanding the genetic and biological basis of the illness, we can develop better tests for it, as well as better treatments,” he said.

Source: Indiana University School of Medicine

“Our findings illustrate that what you eat affects how you think,” said Dr. Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a professor of integrative biology and physiology in the UCLA College of Letters and Science. “Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain’s ability to learn and remember information. But adding omega-3 fatty acids to your meals can help minimize the damage.”

While earlier research revealed how fructose harms the body through its role in diabetes, obesity and fatty liver, this study uncovers how the sweetener influences the brain, according to the researchers.

The UCLA team concentrated on high-fructose corn syrup, an inexpensive liquid six times sweeter than cane sugar that is commonly added to processed foods from soft drinks to baby food. The average American consumes more than 40 pounds of high-fructose corn syrup each year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“We’re not talking about naturally occurring fructose in fruits, which also contain important antioxidants,” said Gomez-Pinilla. “We’re concerned about high-fructose corn syrup that is added to manufactured food products as a sweetener and preservative.”

Gomez-Pinilla and study co-author Rahul Agrawal, Ph.D., a UCLA visiting postdoctoral fellow from India, studied two groups of rats that each consumed a fructose solution as drinking water for six weeks. The second group also received omega-3 fatty acids in the form of flaxseed oil and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), which protects against damage to the synapses, the chemical connections between brain cells that enable memory and learning.

“DHA is essential for synaptic function — brain cells’ ability to transmit signals to one another,” he said. “This is the mechanism that makes learning and memory possible. Our bodies can’t produce enough DHA, so it must be supplemented through our diet.”

The animals were fed standard rat chow and trained on a maze twice daily for five days before starting the experimental diet. The research team tested how well the rats were able to navigate the maze, which contained numerous holes but only one exit. The scientists placed visual landmarks in the maze to help the rats learn and remember the way.

Six weeks later, the researchers tested the rats’ ability to recall the route and escape the maze.

“The second group of rats navigated the maze much faster than the rats that did not receive omega-3 fatty acids,” Gomez-Pinilla said. “The DHA-deprived animals were slower, and their brains showed a decline in synaptic activity. Their brain cells had trouble signaling each other, disrupting the rats’ ability to think clearly and recall the route they’d learned six weeks earlier.”

Those rats also developed signs of resistance to insulin, a hormone that controls blood sugar and regulates synaptic function in the brain. A closer look at the rats’ brain tissue suggested that insulin had lost much of its power to influence the brain cells.

“Because insulin can penetrate the blood-brain barrier, the hormone may signal neurons to trigger reactions that disrupt learning and cause memory loss,” Gomez-Pinilla said. “Insulin is important in the body for controlling blood sugar, but it may play a different role in the brain, where insulin appears to disturb memory and learning. Our study shows that a high-fructose diet harms the brain as well as the body. This is something new.”

Gomez-Pinilla advises people to keep fructose intake to a minimum and swap sugary treats for fresh berries and Greek yogurt. An occasional bar of dark chocolate that hasn’t been processed with a lot of extra sweetener is fine too, he said.

Still have a sweet tooth? Go ahead and indulge, but also eat foods rich in omega-3 fatty acids, like salmon, walnuts and flaxseeds, or take a daily DHA capsule, he said, recommending one gram of DHA per day.

“Our findings suggest that consuming DHA regularly protects the brain against fructose’s harmful effects,” said Gomez-Pinilla. “It’s like saving money in the bank. You want to build a reserve for your brain to tap when it requires extra fuel to fight off future diseases.”

Source: University of California-Los Angeles Health Sciences