New Hampshire Health News Digest

America’s Drunk Driving Dilemma | steve-olson.com Here is the conundrum of conflicting values: People shouldn’t drink and drive because it’s public safety hazard – No argument here, except to say that the laws and methods America uses stop drunk driving are becoming increasingly draconian and it’s time we take a look at our entire value system regarding alcohol. Americans rarely drink at home because they believe only alcoholics drink at home. This is a widespread belief. When I was 17, I naively asked a guy who was sitting next to me at the bar why he paid $4.25 for a shot of Tequila when he could buy an entire liter at the store for $10.00 and drink it at home[1]. “Only alcoholics sit around the house taking shots of Tequila,” He replied. I didn’t understand the logic then and I still don’t. Many casual drinkers believe it is better to take three shots at the bar after work and drive home than it is to take three shots at home. Some of you may argue that Joe Six Pack shouldn’t drink...

HHMI News: Gene Therapy Restores Feeding Behavior to Starving Mice A research team led by Richard D. Palmiter , a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Washington, demonstrated that gene therapy restored dopamine production in specific areas of the brains of mutant mice. The mice, which were developed by Qun-Yong Zhou in Palmiter’s laboratory in the mid-1990s, lack tyrosine hydroxylase, an enzyme that is required to produce L-DOPA, a chemical precursor that is converted into the neurotransmitter dopamine. These mice lack the motivation to feed, and die of starvation a few weeks after birth, unless they are hand-fed or injected daily with L-DOPA. The gene therapy restored feeding behavior in the mice. “These dopamine-deficient mice have many other behavioral deficits,” said Palmiter. “In addition to not eating adequately, they show no preference for sweets, they fail to build nests and they lack curiosity in novel environments. They are generally hypoactive, ...

Attention Deficit Disorder ADD ADHD Article Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity (ADHD) occur as a result of neurological dysfunction in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. This is the newest part of our tri-brain system in evolutionary terms. It is the part of our brain that performs executive functions. The functions of this brain deal with 1) attention span, 2) perseverance, 3) judgment, 4) organization, 5) impulse control, 6) self-monitoring and supervision, 7) problem solving, 8) critical thinking, 9) forward thinking, 10) learning from experience, 11) ability to feel and express emotions, 12) interaction with the limbic system, and 13) empathy. Whenever there is a problem with this part of the brain, a number of skills that many human beings take for granted would not be available in any optimal way. The following are problems that develop when the prefrontal cortex is affected. 1) Short attention span, 2) distractibility, 3) lack of ...

9/11 Mastermind Confesses in Guantanamo WASHINGTON (AP) - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, confessed to that attack and a chilling string of other terror plots during a military hearing at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to a transcript released Wednesday by the Pentagon. "I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z," Mohammed said in a statement read during the session, which was held last Saturday. The transcripts also refer to a claim by Mohammed that he was tortured by the CIA, although he said he was not under duress at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo when he confessed to his role in the attacks. In a section of the statement that was blacked out, he confessed to the beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, The Associated Press has learned. Pearl was abducted in January 2002 in Pakistan while researching a story on Islamic militancy. Mohammed has long been a suspect in the killing. Using his own words, th...

Additude Magazine The time picture of workshop participant Tim Hanley* fits the typical AD/HD pattern—jumbled shapes organized in a way only he could understand. Tim's time scheme came out very different from the neat, linear-brain calendar his wife, Tammy*, described. "When I visualize the passage of time," says Tim, "I see before and after and during and everywhere in between all at once, and everything is forever changing." Tim and Tammy's approaches to planning reflect different wiring in their brains. "My wife can organize a to-do list and prioritize it and carry out each activity one at a time to completion," says Tim. "I approach a to-do list full on, with the chores or activities all needing to be done at once. I call it ‘living the matrix.' I feel I can do everything while time stands still for me." People with AD/HD describe several problem behaviors that trace their origin to the elusive nature of time and the way they perc...

What's It Like To Have ADD? Often these people are highly imaginative and intuitive. They have a "feel" for things, a way of seeing right into the heart of matters while others have to reason their way along methodically. This is the person who can't explain how he thought of the solution, or where the idea for the story came from, or why suddenly he produced such a painting, or how he knew the short cut to the answer, but all he can say is he just knew it, he could feel it. This is the man or woman who makes million dollar deals in a catnap and pulls them off the next day. This is the child who, having been reprimanded for blurting something out, is then praised for having blurted out something brilliant. These are the people who learn and know and do and go by touch and feel. These people can feel a lot. In places where most of us are blind, they can, if not see the light, at least feel the light, and they can produce answers apparently out of the dark. It is impor...

China to expand "Great Internet Firewall" Chinese government, which has long maintained strict controls over traditional media, have this year ramped up a campaign to combat the rising influence of the Internet. "Whether we can cope with the Internet is a matter that affects the development of socialist culture, the security of information and the stability of the state," Hu said in January as he called for the medium to be "purified." Aside from the new regulations, the central government also announced this month it would not allow any new Internet cafes to be registered this year. Experts say 30,000-40,000 Internet police are also employed to implement the country's extensive Internet censorship system, known as the "Great Firewall of China." Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders labels China's government an "enemy of the Internet." It said last month that 52 people were languishing in Chinese jails for online activities ...

Kuna site|Story page|Baghdad security crackdown seriously curbs killing...3/14/2007 Baghdad security crackdown seriously curbs killings of US soldiers BAGHDAD, March 14 (KUNA) -- The rate of killings of US troops in Iraq has been on the decline, down by 60 percent, since the launch of the new security measures in Baghdad, according to statistics revealed by the Multi-National Force -Iraq Combined Press Information Centre. Only 17 members of the US military in Iraq have been killed since February 14 till March 13, compared to 42 from January 13 to February 13; the rate was on the decline during the first month of the security crackdown, compared to a month before. Two of the 17 soldiers died at US Baghdad camps of non-combat causes. The remarkable decrease in killings among the US troops came at a time when more of these troops were deployed in the Iraqi capital, especially in districts previously regarded as extremely hazardous for them such as Al-Sadr City, Al-Azamiyah, and Al-Doura....

TheStar.com - artsentertainment - Sparta? No. This is madness History is altered all the time. What matters is how and why. Thus I see no reason to quibble over the absence in 300 of breastplates or modest thigh-length tunics. I can see the graphic necessity of sculpted stomachs and three hundred Spartan-sized packages bulging in spandex thongs. On the other hand, the ways in which 300 selectively idealizes Spartan society are problematic, even disturbing. We know little of King Leonidas, so creating a fictitious backstory for him is understandable. Spartan children were, indeed, taken from their mothers and given a martial education called the agoge. They were indeed toughened by beatings and dispatched into the countryside, forced to walk shoeless in winter and sleep uncovered on the ground. But future kings were exempt. And had Leonidas undergone the agoge, he would have come of age not by slaying a wolf, but by murdering unarmed helots in a rite known as the Crypteia. These helots ...

How to naturally mimic the effects of stimulants to improve concentration | smartkit Brain Enhancement News Catecholamines are a special category of brain chemicals used for neurotransmission. They include epinephrine, norepinephrine, and dopamine. Unfortunately, however, these drugs often have very harmful side effects (both long- and short-term), and taking them can sometimes result in death. What most people don’t realize is that there is a much safer, more natural way to boost brain catecholamines: Acute Bouts of Aerobic Exercise. Both stimulants and aerobic exercise exert similarly powerful effects on: norepinephrine, dopamine, and epinephrine. There is quite a bit of evidence in the scientific literature to back this up. [see References 1-6 below]. Since it is widely believed that the beneficial effects of stimulants stem from their ability to boost catecholamines in the brain, it certainly makes sense that aerobic exercise would produce these same beneficial effects (dramatic in...

Fit With Z: Effects of Exercise on Adult Cognition The positive effect of exercise on cognition of older adults appears to be more than that of younger adults. This could be due to older adults having more to gain as age-related declines become more prevalent. The meta-analysis indicated that the largest fitness-induced benefit occurred for executive-control processes. The same analysis found that exercise programs involving both aerobic exercise and strength training produced better results on cognitive abilities than either one alone. A study conducted by Etnier et al. (1997) illustrated that maintaining a high fitness level in older adulthood helps with performance on fluid intelligence tasks.

Dopamine and desire 'What's my motivation?' From the outside, it's hard to tell what most motivates an animal to seek a reward: the pleasure of the reward itself (roughly, liking), the satisfaction of getting it (wanting), or the acquired association between behavior and reward (learning). "Wanting and liking are what some philosophers of mind have called 'folk psychological' terms about how the mind is organized," explains Jon Horvitz, PhD, a neuroscientist at Boston College. Although he doubts real brains have clearly demarked scripts for "wanting" or "liking," he says it helps to draw some rough distinctions to enable research into dopamine's behavioral pathway. The Seattle researchers--graduate student Siobhan Robinson, undergraduate Suzanne Sandstrom, psychologist Victor Denenberg, PhD, and biochemist Richard Palmiter, PhD--chose a knockout approach to get a fair comparison between behavior with and without dopamine. Then,...

Do dopaminergic drugs make obsessive pleasure seekers? rescription For an Obsession? Gambling, Sex Manias Called Surprise Risks Of Parkinson's Drugs By Shankar Vedantam Washington Post Staff Writer When Wayne Kanuch received a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease in 1993, the last thing he imagined was that the drug prescribed to treat his illness would turn him into a compulsive gambler and put his libido into overdrive. Kanuch's marriage ended in divorce, partly as a result of the sexual pressures he placed on his wife, and he began losing fortunes at the racetrack. He was fired from his job at Chevron for trolling for dates on the Internet while at work, and he quickly went bankrupt. "I contemplated suicide a couple of times," he said in an interview last week. "Everyone was blaming me, and I was looking at the mirror and blaming myself and asking why I could not stop." New evidence unearthed by scientists at the Food and Drug Administration, Duke Univers...

Highly motivated hyperdopaminergic mutant mice aren't any happier What is the role of dopamine in natural rewards? A genetic mutant approach was taken to examine the consequences of elevated synaptic dopamine on (1) spontaneous food and water intake, (2) incentive motivation and learning to obtain a palatable sweet reward in a runway task, and (3) affective "liking" reactions elicited by the taste of sucrose. A dopamine transporter (DAT) knockdown mutation that preserves only 10% of normal DAT, and therefore causes mutant mice to have 70% elevated levels of synaptic dopamine, was used to identify dopamine effects on food intake and reward. We found that hyperdopaminergic DAT knockdown mutant mice have higher food and water intake. In a runway task, they demonstrated enhanced acquisition and greater incentive performance for a sweet reward. Hyperdopaminergic mutant mice leave the start box more quickly than wild-type mice, require fewer trials to learn, pause less often in...

Dopamine and reward We conclude that dopamine systems are not needed either to mediate the hedonic pleasure of reinforcers or to mediate predictive associations involved in hedonic reward learning. We conclude instead that dopamine may be more important to incentive salience attributions to the neural representations of reward-related stimuli. Incentive salience, we suggest, is a distinct component of motivation and reward. In other words, dopamine systems are necessary for 'wanting' incentives, but not for 'liking' them or for learning new 'likes' and 'dislikes'.