Brain

The numbers are, well, depressing: More than 2 million people age 65 and older suffer from depression, including 50 percent of those living in nursing homes. The suicide rate among white men over 85 is the highest in the country — six times the national rate.

And we're not getting any younger. In the next 35 years, the number of Americans over 65 will double and the number of those over 85 will triple.

So the question becomes, how to help elderly depressed individuals?

(Garrison, NY) Decisions about whether and how to diagnose children with emotional and behavioral disturbances, and whether and how to treat them, are sometimes not clear-cut. When decisions lie within a "zone of ambiguity," people who emphasize different value commitments can reach different but equally respectable conclusions. We need to tolerate these reasonable disagreements, according to a special report.

Shining a laser light on cells and then clicking off the light makes the cells "breathe in" surrounding water, providing a potentially powerful delivery system for chemotherapy drugs, as well as a non-invasive way to target anti-Alzheimer's medicines to the brain. That's the conclusion of a report in ACS's The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.

Imagine a sensor implanted in your body that signals when you're getting sick — almost like the "check engine" light in a car. That scenario sounds like pure fantasy, but it may be closer to reality than many people think, according to an article in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine.

WASHINGTON — A new report from the National Research Council recommends that the U.S. intelligence community adopt methods, theories, and findings from the behavioral and social sciences as a way to improve its analyses. To that end, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) should lead a new initiative to make these approaches part of the intelligence community's analytical work, hiring and training, and collaborations.

Dr. Olivier Collignon of the University of Montreal's Saint-Justine Hospital Research Centre compared the brain activity of people who can see and people who were born blind, and discovered that the part of the brain that normally works with our eyes to process vision and space perception can actually rewire itself to process sound information instead. The research was undertaken in collaboration with Dr Franco Lepore of the Centre for Research in Neuropsychology and Cognition and was published late yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

ROCKVILLE, Md. -- Plant biologist Elizabeth Hood, PhD, testified on behalf of the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies. Hood, who is a member of ASPB's Public Affairs Committee, spoke in support of funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the $7.767 billion requested for fiscal year 2012.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Older adults may put themselves at risk by talking on cell phones while crossing the street, researchers report in a new study. The researchers found that adults aged 59 to 81 took significantly longer than college students to cross a simulated street while talking on a mobile phone, and their heightened cautiousness in initiating crossing did nothing to improve their safety. Older adults on cell phones also were more likely to fail to cross in the time allotted for the task.

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) such as Prozac are regularly used to treat severe anxiety and depression. They work by immediately increasing the amount of serotonin in the brain and by causing long term changes in brain function. However it can take weeks of treatment before a patient feels any effect and both beneficial effects and side effects can persist after treatment is stopped. New research published by BioMed Central's open access journal Molecular Brain investigates physiological changes within the brain that may be caused by SSRI treatment.

When Professor Henry Higgins instructed Eliza Doolittle that it was "Ay not I, O not Ow, Don't say 'Rine,' say 'Rain'", he was drawing on years of experience as a professor of phonetics. But research funded by the Wellcome Trust and the European Commission suggests that Higgins's ability to differentiate expertly between similar sounds may have stemmed from birth.

• The brain reward system (BRS) is involved in developing/maintaining addictive disorders, as well as relapse.
• New findings show that alcohol dependent individuals – both future abstainers and relapsers – have significantly thinner cortices in the BRS and throughout the entire brain.
• Findings support the influence of neurobiological factors on relapse.

• A new study has compared the verbal learning and memory performance of children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) with that of children with attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
• The children with PAE had initial problems with learning information, reflecting inefficient encoding of verbal material.
• The children with ADHD had difficulty retaining information over time, reflecting a deficit in retrieval of learned material.

• Naltrexone is one of the most effective pharmacological treatments for alcohol dependence.
• However, naltrexone does not work for everyone.
• A new study has found that naltrexone is effective for women, and individuals with the A118G polymorphism of the mu opioid receptor gene (OPRM1).

DETROIT — Approximately two million adults in the United States meet criteria for pathological gambling, and another four to six million are considered problem gamblers, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling. A study by researchers at Wayne State University reveals that gambling addiction treatment is not one-size-fits-all, but it is difficult to predict which style of treatment is best for the various forms of gambling addiction.

TORONTO, On — March 15, 2011 — Minor league hockey players in the Atom division are more than 10 times likely to suffer a brain injury since bodychecking was first allowed among the 9 and 10-year-olds, says a study led by St. Michael's Hospital neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Cusimano.

The findings, published online in the journal Open Medicine, add to the growing evidence that bodychecking holds greater risk than benefit for youth and support widespread calls to ban the practice.