Genetic research ties autism to ‘trust hormone’

February 7, 2010 in autism, brains, genetics, health, love, new research | Leave a comment

Genetic variations that tweak the brain’s release of oxytocin — a hormone involved in social bonding and establishing trust — may increase the risk of developing autism or autistic traits, according to three new studies published in the past few months.

One of the studies also finds, for the first time, that oxytocin regulation in people with autism is partly controlled by epigenetic changes, which can turn genes on or off without altering the underlying code.

Oxytocin has been linked to autism for nearly two decades, and the hormone is already being doled out in several small clinical trials to treat the disorder. But the new reports are part of a growing wave of interest in the precise nature of its involvement.

“The field is really new,” says Sue Carter, professor of psychiatry at University of Illinois at Chicago, who was not involved in either new study.

Researchers have previously found significant associations between particular oxytocin-related variants and autism, but how these variants alter the hormone’s production or interact with other genes and developmental influences is unclear, Carter says. “At this point, we’re working with fragments of knowledge, but the fragments we have are remarkably consistent.”

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Super-cool synapses

February 1, 2010 in brains, neuroscience, new research, pretty stuff, technology | Leave a comment

A chilling new technique shows the intricate and coordinated activity of previously mysterious pieces of the synapse, the all-important junction between neurons that allows cells to talk to each other.

The close-ups are so striking, they made the cover of the 11 January Journal of Cell Biology.

To capture this pretty picture, the researchers used a complex technique called electron cryotomography. They first froze rat brain cells in action at temperatures as low as -165 degrees Celsius, then looked at the cells at different angles using an electron microscope and, finally, reconstructed them in three dimensions on a computer.

There are other methods to look at synapses, but they require cells to be fixed in chemicals for a long time, which can distort the final product. Light microscopy, a much older and more popular technique, illuminates living cells, but only down to 400 nanometers.

Electron cryotomography seems to beat all of these: its flash-freezing preserves the cell’s structure, and its resolution is 5 nanometers — the size of a few dozen atoms.

The technique reveals the workings of some of the tiny protein filaments scattered across a synapse, whose role had been largely unknown before. One type of filament, dubbed ‘tethers’, anchors synaptic vesicles — the bubble-like structures that shuttle chemical messengers inside the cell — to the cell membrane. That way, when the cell receives the appropriate electric signal, the vesicles are in the right position to release the chemicals into the synapse.

Cultured rose

January 29, 2010 in art, microbiology, pretty stuff, weird | Leave a comment

This petri dish holds a plant pathogen, Cladosporium herbarum (green leaves), and a yeast, Rhodotorula (orange petals). It’s just one of many fab-u-lous images featured on the ‘Life Imitating Life’ slideshow up at Seedmagazine.com. Go check ‘em out!

First drug for autism enters final stage of testing

January 28, 2010 in autism, food, health, medicine, new york, pharma | Leave a comment

A large clinical trial to test the first drug specifically designed to treat autism is under way at 12 sites across the United States.

Curemark, a 10-person drug research company based in Rye, New York, says the drug, CM-AT, helps children with autism digest proteins. This in turn allows the children to ingest essential amino acids from the proteins, and ultimately produce key brain signaling molecules, company officials say.

For decades, gastrointestinal (GI) issues in children with autism have been a hot topic of debate. Up to 70 percent of children with autism report having GI problems such as stomach pain or constipation, and 60 percent have food selectivity, according to a 2006 study. A highly publicized report last summer, however, found that most of those issues are no more common in children with autism than in healthy children.

Because of this conflicting evidence, as well as the mystery surrounding how CM-AT works, some autism experts are skeptical of Curemark’s claims. Seven independent scientists contacted for this article declined to comment on the trial, citing the dearth of published data and the controversial nature of the therapy’s premise.

Nevertheless, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the Phase III trial, intended to show that CM-AT improves both the core features of autism — communicative problems, social deficits and repetitive behaviors — as well as less common symptoms, such as digestive problems. Phase III trials are randomized and placebo-controlled, and are the final stage in the long road to regulatory approval.

Ten of the 12 trial sites have begun recruiting 3- to 8-year-old children with autism, and the company says it plans to enroll 170 children by July.

“This is a very big deal,” says pediatric chiropractor Joan Fallon, Curemark’s founder and chief executive officer. “It’s been many, many years of preparing and preparing and preparing, and now we’re there.”

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City in ruins

January 27, 2010 in architecture, art, business, city politics, economics, history, pretty stuff | 1 comment

Detroit’s “splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great civilization.”

Some amazingly beautiful, and heartbreaking, photographs of the Motor City, by Yves Marchand/Romain Meffre Photography (tons more on their site):

(Hat tip: Rand)

Storms of the brain

January 21, 2010 in brains, new research, new york, systems neuroscience | 1 comment

“Suddenly amid the sadness, spiritual darkness and depression, his brain seemed to catch fire . . . like lightning. These glimmerings were still but a premonition of that final second (never more than a second) with which the seizure itself began. That second was, of course, unbearable.”

So wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky in his 1868 novel, The Idiot, describing the seizures suffered by his protagonist. Scientists still don’t know much about what causes these debilitating storms of unchecked electrical activity in the brain. Although many childhood neurological disorders involve seizures, “we don’t have a real handle, developmentally, on models to study them,” notes Gordon Fishell, PhD, professor of cell biology.

But that could be changing. Dr. Fishell and his team have created one such childhood epilepsy model by disrupting the development of specific types of brain cells, called interneurons, in mice. Their findings could offer valuable insights for designing drugs to treat these disorders, which afflict some 123,000 children in the United States each year. “These cells restrict electrical activity in the brain, which, when unrestricted, causes seizures,” explains Dr. Fishell, whose work is funded, in part, by the Simons Foundation. “If we could develop drugs that stimulate those particular cells, we might be able to repress seizure activity.”

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Obesity: The fifth phase

January 20, 2010 in choices, food, health, history, new research | Leave a comment

The latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association holds two studies about obesity trends in the U.S. Their basic finding: the rates are slowing down a bit, bit they still ain’t good. Two-thirds of adults, and one-third of children, are overweight or obese.

Obesity, writes J. Michael Gaziano in a related commentary, constitutes the fifth phase of the epidemiologic transition. That’s a mouthful, I know, but he writes a really fascinating (and brief) history of human disease. Here’s a snippet:
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Moby Dick, in pictures

January 18, 2010 in art, books, literature, pretty stuff | Leave a comment

From the Boston Globe:

The artist Matt Kish is making his way through “Moby-Dick,” creating an original illustration for each page as he goes, at the rate of nearly a page a day. A usually fastidious artist, Kish says the project has made him looser. He uses “found paper,” so random words or diagrams become part of the piece, and his instruments are black-and-white and colored pens, pencils, or markers. He has deployed many styles, but recurring are a combination of anthropomorphic and vaguely robotic shapes: His Ahab is a richly patterned, top-heavy blob with a realistic peg leg and what looks like a submarine turret for a head.

What happens when you put a camera on an eagle?

January 18, 2010 in animal behavior, technology, videos, weird, zoology | Leave a comment

Simply amazing footage of what a Scottish eagle, Tilly, sees during flight (and an explanation of how the producers captured it):

(Hat tip: Bad Astronomy)

MEGa marker

January 14, 2010 in autism, neuroscience, new research, systems neuroscience, technology | 2 comments

Courtesy: U. of Washington Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences

In typical conversation, people speak at a rate of 250 milliseconds per syllable. So imagine how confusing it would be if you lagged behind — even if only by a fraction of a second.

That tiny delay may be what’s provoking the language problems in some children with autism.

Tim Roberts, a radiologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, has been studying the phenomenon for the last decade. He uses magnetoencephalography, or MEG, the ‘hair dryer’ brain imaging method that uses magnetic fields to detect changes in brain activity on the order of 10 milliseconds or less.

Last week, his team reported that when listening to tones of different frequencies, children with autism give brain responses in their right hemispheres about 11 milliseconds slower than healthy controls do. In other, unpublished work, Roberts found a much longer delay — about 50 milliseconds — when children with the disorder process speech sounds, such as ‘ah’ or ‘ou’.

The average age of children in the study was 10 years. If the findings are similar in babies and toddlers with autism, Roberts says this lag measurement may be a reliable marker for diagnosing the disorder, even before other symptoms appear.

MEG would be particularly useful for young children because it’s non-invasive and doesn’t require them to perform a difficult task. On the downside, a MEG scan isn’t a realistic option for the majority of children with autism — there are only about 100 machines worldwide.