Brain Scans Can Read People’s Thoughts
March 12, 2010
Yahoo News
By Associated Press
A scan of brain activity can effectively read a person’s mind, researchers said Thursday.
British scientists from University College London found they could differentiate brain activity linked to different memories and thereby identify thought patterns by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
The evidence suggests researchers can tell which memory of a past event a person is recalling from the pattern of their brain activity alone.
“We’ve been able to look at brain activity for a specific episodic memory — to look at actual memory traces,” said senior author of the study, Eleanor Maguire.
“We found that our memories are definitely represented in the hippocampus. Now that we’ve seen where they are, we have an opportunity to understand how memories are stored and how they may change through time.”
The results, reported in the March 11 online edition of Current Biology, follow an earlier discovery by the same team that they could tell where a person was standing within a virtual reality room in the same way.
The researchers say the new results move this line of research along because episodic memories — recollections of everyday events — are expected to be more complex, and thus more difficult to crack than spatial memory.
In the study, Maguire and her colleagues Martin Chadwick, Demis Hassabis, and Nikolaus Weiskopf showed 10 people each three very short films before brain scanning. Each movie featured a different actress and a fairly similar everyday scenario.
The researchers scanned the participants’ brains while the participants were asked to recall each of the films. The researchers then ran the imaging data through a computer algorithm designed to identify patterns in the brain activity associated with memories for each of the films.
Finally, they showed that those patterns could be identified to accurately predict which film a given person was thinking about when he or she was scanned.
The results imply that the traces of episodic memories are found in the brain, and are identifiable, even over many re-activations, the researchers said.
The results reinforce the findings of a 2008 US study that showed similar scans can determine what images people are seeing based on brain activity.
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The Healthy Should Not Take Aspirin to Avoid Heart Attack
March 3, 2010
telegraph.co.uk
By Rebecca Smith
Millions of people take a low dose of aspirin daily, as it is known to reduce the risk of having a heart attack or stroke in people who have already had one attack.
It is seen as a ‘just in case’ measure and, because aspirin has been available for around 100 years, it is considered safe by the majority of people.
However, aspirin increases the likelihood of major bleeding, in the brain, stomach or elsewhere in the body, and experts warned that the beneficial effects must be weighed against the risk of harm.
Aspirin, which thins the blood, has been hailed as a wonder drug because it is wide range of uses including reducing the risk of a second heart attack or stroke, increasing evidence that it may prevent some cancers and may have an affect on dementia.
Research carried out in Scotland and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that aspirin taken by people who have no outward symptoms of heart disease did not reduce the risk of a heart attack when compared to those on a dummy pill.
Those on aspirin were at almost twice the risk of suffering a bleed, although the overall risk was small, the study found.
Professor Peter Weissberg, Medical Director of the British Heart Foundation, said: “We know that a small daily dose of aspirin can reduce the risk of a heart attack in people with angina and in those who’ve had a heart attack. In these cases, this potential benefit outweighs the risk of internal bleeding, which is a side effect of aspirin.
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Mad Cow Disease Able to Mutate and Evolve
March 1, 2010
Natural News
By Ethan A. Huff
The Scripps Research Institute has published a study in the journal Science alleging that prions, lifeless protein particles that are believed to cause serious brain diseases, are able to mutate and develop resistance to drugs in the same way that bacteria and other living things do.
Associated with over 20 different brain diseases, prions have typically been thought to morph only once and in the presence of living transformation agents but recent research is suggesting that these proteins can continue to mutate as they transfer from host to host, becoming more virulent each time.
In the presence of infections like mad cow disease, prions are converted from their normal state into an abnormal, malignant state. As the disease gets passed around, it often becomes more deadly due to the ever changing characteristics of the prions which develop increasingly resistant to drugs.
Charles Weissman, head of the department of infectology at Scripps in Florida, remarked that prions have similar adaptive characteristics as viruses, yet without the DNA or RNA. Interestingly, lab tests showed that prions which were removed and placed into a new environment ended up out-performing those that remained in the original host. Each time prions are moved to a new environment, those that survive and adapt do so more quickly and effectively than did the ones at the original source.
Prions are normal and likely exist throughout the body. Though excited about their findings, researchers noted that the implications of their discovery reveal much about the dangers of continually mutating disease. Their solution is to investigate new drugs that can block normal prion proteins in order to prevent them from ever adapting and causing the host to develop resistance to other drugs.
Drugs, drugs, and more drugs seem to be the answer to every medical science problem in the Western world, even when the problem in question was likely caused by drugs. Similar to “superbugs” that are emerging due to overuse of antibiotics, the emergence of mutating proteins which develop resistance to drugs cannot be remedied by more drugs.
Mad cow disease is the result of feeding cows ground cow meal and other animal byproducts. Rather than pursue yet another drug to solve the problem, perhaps the best option is to reassess what cows eat and reformulate it to what is proper and healthful. The same strategy can and should be pursued with other diseases that easily morph and become increasingly virulent.
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More Over-Radiated Cancer Patients
February 26, 2010
The New York Times
By Walt Bogdanich and Rebecca R. Ruiz
A hospital in Missouri said Wednesday that it had overradiated 76 patients, the vast majority with brain cancer, during a five-year period because powerful new radiation equipment had been set up incorrectly even with a representative of the manufacturer watching as it was done.
The hospital, CoxHealth in Springfield, said half of all patients undergoing a particular type of treatment — stereotactic radiation therapy — were overdosed by about 50 percent after an unidentified medical physicist at the hospital miscalibrated the new equipment and routine checks over the next five years failed to catch the error.
The revelation comes at a time of growing concern about safety procedures for a new generation of powerful, computer-controlled medical radiation equipment.
Stereotactic therapy delivers radiation in such high doses that usually only one treatment is required. It is commonly used to treat small tumors in the head, which must be firmly stabilized, allowing radiation to be delivered to a precise location.
The error was discovered in September 2009 only after a second physicist received training on the equipment, made by BrainLAB, and the hospital began questioning whether the machine had been installed correctly in 2004, in a process called commissioning.
The overdoses at CoxHealth occurred in a state where there is little or no government oversight of radiation therapy, a fact that Robert H. Bezanson, the hospital’s president and chief executive, chose to emphasize.
On Wednesday, he released a letter that he wrote to the Food and Drug Administration, saying that its recent decision to toughen oversight of diagnostic radiation did not go far enough.
“The initiative should be broadened to include regulation of medical radiation therapy as well,” he wrote. “We have also learned that the incident here at CoxHealth is, unfortunately, not an isolated occurrence. Rather, similar instances of medical overradiation have occurred at other hospitals throughout the country. Without increased regulation and oversight, these instances of medical overradiation will likely continue.”
The hospital promised to work with state legislators on ways to better regulate radiation therapy.
Last month, The New York Times documented the harm that can result from radiation errors when basic safety rules are not followed. It also found that in a variety of ways, the pace of technology had outpaced the ability of the medical profession and regulators to keep up.
The overdoses in Springfield echoed what occurred at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla., where a similar commissioning error resulted in 77 brain cancer patients’ receiving 50 percent more radiation than prescribed in 2004 and 2005. The failure of medical facilities to properly commission new radiological equipment was cited as a concern last November by the American Association of Physicists in Medicine.
A testing service for institutions participating in National Cancer Institute trials recommends that certain newly installed radiotherapy equipment undergo an external, independent review before patients are treated. That did not occur at either Moffitt or CoxHealth.
CoxHealth said that so far it had not found any patients who had been harmed beyond the complications of routine radiation therapy. But patients are still being contacted. Some patients, who were seriously ill, have died, and the hospital is looking into those cases.
“The review of their charts and situation is still ongoing,” said Dr. John Duff, senior vice president for hospital operations. “It would be premature to speculate whether the overexposure was a contributing factor to their death.”
Dr. Duff said he did not know why the BrainLAB employee who was present while the new equipment was being installed had not caught the mistake. He said that the hospital did not have any reports from BrainLAB indicating a problem.
The physicist who incorrectly installed the equipment no longer works at the hospital. Officials there declined to explain the circumstances of his departure.
“It’s unacceptable to us that an error like this occurred, and we are taking steps to make sure that an error like this doesn’t happen again,” Mr. Bezanson said.
The hospital said its stereotactic system “remains suspended indefinitely while we are auditing the entire program.”
Kate Franco, a spokeswoman for BrainLAB, issued a statement Wednesday that said the company had assisted CoxHealth in figuring out what went wrong. “Reviews determined that BrainLAB equipment performed as designed and did not malfunction,” the statement said.
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Many Cancer Patients Over Radiated
February 26, 2010
Natural News
By Mike Adams
One of the advantages of natural medicine is that if you make a mistake on your dosage, it’s usually no big deal because natural medicine is inherently safe. But conventional medicine, with all its toxic chemotherapy poisons and irradiation machines, can be fatal even when simple mistakes are made. Numerous patients have already been killed by miscalibrated chemotherapy pumps that drip poison in to the bodies of patients. And now there’s news from Springfield Missouri where an actively-used brain cancer irradiation machine has been miscalibrated since 2004.
Oops. Gee, didn’t anyone wonder why the burn marks were so severe and patients were losing brain function so rapidly?
Oh, wait. I forgot: Nobody noticed because losing cognitive function is a “normal” side effect of conventional cancer treatments. Harming patients in the cancer industry is now so routine that nobody even notices it anymore!
Nobody bothered to check the machine
The facts of this case are a bit frightening because this could happen anywhere, in any hospital: For the last five years, patients undergoing brain irradiation treatments have been over-exposed to very high levels of radiation. The radiation machine at the CoxHealth hospital in Springfield, Missouri was apparently never calibrated correctly. The incompetent technicians who set up the machine (who probably lost their own brain function as a result of being around so many miscalibrated radiation machines) apparently never bothered to configure it correctly. They just used the default setting the machine came with, which happened to be the “Fry my brain” setting.
Now here’s the really scary part: The massive radiation overdose problem was only discovered when the hospital trained a new physician on the machine. They were apparently going over all the settings and functions of the machine when the new doctor asked something like, “Hey, why is this dosage knob turned all the way up to ‘Hiroshima’?”
Hospital administrators scratched their heads (after which clumps of hair fell out) and then began to realize something was wrong. “This might explain all the severe radiation burns on patients skulls…”
Oops.
So what, exactly, do you do in a case like this? Do you call all the brain cancer patients who suffered radiation burns and a loss of cognitive function and say, “Um, we’re really sorry that we fried your brain because we were too stupid to configure the radiation machine correctly…”
Or do you just hope no one notices because cancer patients are too frightened to know the difference between “treatment” and a radiological assault?
I have a solution to this problem
This accidental irradiation overdose issue is a huge problem all across the country. Radiation machines are often miscalibrated, and there’s virtually no oversight by anyone. Hospitals can openly operate miscalibrated machines for years on end without anyone doing a single thing to stop them.
But I have a simple, highly-effective solution to this problem: Just require cancer doctors to irradiate their own brains using the machines before treating patients. If such a rule were enforced, I’ll bet you that all of a sudden those machines would be correctly calibrated.
Naturopathic physicians, by the way, aren’t afraid to take the same medicine they’re about to prescribe to patients. You need these anti-viral herbs? I’ll take some too just to show you how safe they are, see? No big deal.
But conventional cancer doctors would never inject themselves with chemotherapy or stick their heads under an operating radiotherapy machine. You know why? Because those treatments are dangerous! That’s why they’re reserved solely for patients. Only the patients get poisoned and irradiated.
Why do you think radiology technicians flee the room before they fire up their machines on patients? They flee the room because they don’t want to be anywhere near that radiation!
Cancer doctors aren’t very bright about curing cancer, but they are smart enough to figure out that radiation = cancer. Which makes it all the more hilarious that they use radiation to treat cancer, huh?
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FDA Approves New Vaccine From Fraudster Pfizer
February 26, 2010
The Wall Street Journal
The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved a new version of the widely used children’s vaccine Prevnar.
The current Prevnar vaccine is given to infants and toddlers to prevent seven strains of bacteria known as streptococcus pneumoniae that cause a range of illnesses like ear infections, pneumonia, bloodstream infections and meningitis, an infection of the covering of the brain and spinal cord.
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Naps Can Boost Brain Learning Power
February 22, 2010
BBC News
Volunteers who slept for 90 minutes during the day did better at cognitive tests than those who were kept awake.
Results of the University of California at Berkeley study involving 39 healthy adults were presented at a conference.
A UK-based sleep expert said it was hard to separate the pure “memory boosting” effects of sleep from those of simply being less tired.
The wealth of study into the science of sleep in recent years has so far failed to come up with conclusive evidence as to the value of a quick “siesta” during the day.
The latest study suggests that the brain may need sleep to process short-term memories, creating “space” for new facts to be learned.
In their experiment, 39 healthy adults were given a hard learning task in the morning – with broadly similar results, before half of them were sent for their siesta.
When the tests were repeated, the nappers outperformed those who had carried on without sleep.
Checks on brain electrical activity suggested that this process might be happening in a sleep phase between deep sleep, and dreaming sleep, called stage 2 non-rapid eye movement sleep, when fact-based memories are moved from “temporary storage” in the brain’s hippocampus to another area called the pre-frontal cortex.
Brain ‘inbox’
Dr Matthew Walker, who led the study, reported at the AAAS conference in San Diego, said: “Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness, but, at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap.
“It’s as though the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full, and, until you sleep and clear out all those fact e-mails, you’re not going to receive any more mail.
“It’s just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder.”
However, Professor Derk-Jan Dijk, the director of the Surrey Sleep Research Centre, said that there was no clear evidence that daytime napping offered a distinct advantage over sleeping just once over 24 hours.
“The sleep-wake cycle is not as rigid as we might think – we have the capability to sleep in different ways.”
He said that while the brain effect reported in the study might be spotted in a laboratory setting, the picture became more clouded in the “real world”.
“The size of these effects are much more difficult to assess – if I have to learn something, for example, it’s easier to do this when I’m feeling awake and alert than when I’m sleepy.”
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Treating Brain Injuries with Amino Acids
February 22, 2010
Natural News
By Mike Adams
Researchers from The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia have found in a lab study that amino acids are highly effective at restoring cognitive function and balancing neurochemical levels in those who have undergone brain trauma. Conducted on mice who had been inflicted with traumatic brain damage, the study holds promising potential for humans with similar injuries.
The study appeared in the online journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In it, researchers fed brain-injured mice leucine, isoleucine, and valine, three branched chain amino acids (BCAAs) that have been shown to heal severe brain injuries. The result was that the brain-injured mice demonstrated a full cognitive recovery, visibly responding the same as uninjured mice following their treatment.
The BCAAs used in the study are the precursors to two important neurotransmitters, glutamate and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) which jointly balance proper brain activity. Damage to the hippocampus, the portion of the brain that sustains memory and higher learning, is typical during a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and results in reduced BCAA levels. Supplementation with BCAAs has proven to rejuvenate the brain and restore it to normal function.
Intravenous nourishment with BCAAs has been done before, however in this study the BCAA mixture was added to the mice’s drinking water. Dr. Akiva Cohen, Ph.D. and author of the study, recommends dietary supplementation with BCAAs for human TBI treatment. He believes oral rather than intravenous supplementation is preferable because, rather than flood the brain with too high a dose intravenously, drinking BCAAs will provide a more sustained dose with increased benefits.
Comments by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
This is interesting research because it shows how dietary supplements can give the brain the raw materials it needs to heal itself. The fact that this process exists at all is considered utterly impossible by the FDA, which maintains the ridiculous position that there is no such thing as a nutritional supplement that has any therapeutic effect on the human body whatsoever.
If BCAAs actually worked, the FDA says, they would be “drugs” instead of supplements. And they would be regulated and available only by prescription. The FDA cannot tolerate the existence of a nutritional supplement that actually works to accelerate healing while being freely available to anyone who wants to buy it.
Reality, however, stands in contrast to the FDA. In the real world, nutrients do help the brain heal. In the real world, food is medicine. The FDA, to its own embarrassment, continues to deny this simple fact of human physiology.
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Taking an Afternoon Nap Makes You Smarter
February 22, 2010
All Headline News
By David Goodhue
A new study from University of California, Berkley researchers touts the mental benefits of taking a midday nap.
The researchers said in a statement that afternoon naps not only refresh the brain, but can also make a person better able to learn new information.
The researchers divided 39 healthy young adults into two groups – one that took a 90-minute nap at 2 p.m. and one that did not. Each group was given a series of tasks designed to work the brain’s hippocampus, the region that helps store fact-based memories.
The participants were given another round of tasks at 6 p.m. The researchers said that the no-nap group became worse at learning as the day progressed. The nap takers, however, actually improved their learning capacity, the researchers said.
The researchers said that they will next investigate whether the reduction in sleep experienced by people as they age impacts their ability to learn. The research, they said, could help scientists better understand neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s disease.
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BPA Causes Aggression and Hyperactivity in Toddlers
February 16th, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
Prenatal exposure to the endocrine-disrupting chemical bisphenol A (BPA) may increase aggressive behavior in toddler girls, according to a study conducted by researchers from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
Researchers measured bodily levels of BPA in 249 pregnant women, then followed their daughters for two years. Children who had been exposed to the highest levels of the chemical before the 16th week of gestation had significantly higher scores on tests for aggression than girls of the same age with less exposure.
The study is the first to examine the effect of BPA on behavior in human children. It is consistent with the results of prior animal studies, which have also found that BPA can affect the brain and reproductive system. The National Toxicology Program concluded in 2008 that there was evidence to support the chemical’s effects on human children.
Because BPA mimics the effect of estrogen, which plays a critical role in the male brain during the 11th and 12th weeks of pregnancy, researchers believe that the chemical might be “masculinizing” the female brain.
“In the developing brain, timing is everything,” said neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine, author of The Female Brain.
“I’m worried that tiny amounts of this stuff, given at just the wrong time, could partly masculinize the female brain.”
Although the study found no change in male behavior and no increase in behavioral disorders among girls, scientists noted that the population effects may be much greater than those seen in the study. Michelle Macias, spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics, noted that children in the study came from predominantly well-educated families, which tend to have lower aggression and hyperactivity rates than the average. In addition, neurologist David Bellinger noted that a population can become more aggressive as a whole without there being strong observable effects in individual children.
The researchers intend to continue studying the children until the age of five.
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