https://www.sandiegohealthdirectory.com/kb en-us Barbara Sahakian, also at Cambridge, describes modafinil as the "first true smart drug". In a lab at the University of Cambridge, Danielle Turner is turning ordinary Joes into masterminds. She gets them to perform a test called the one-touch Tower of London planning task, which measures one aspect of intelligence (see Diagram). The harder the task, the more mistakes her volunteers make, but when she gives them a dose of the drug modafinil they suddenly find it easier. "You see quite a dramatic improvement in their performance, particularly when the problem gets more difficult," she says. Modafinil was not developed to make people smarter. It is sold as a prescription-only "wakefulness promoter" for people with narcolepsy and other sleep disorders, but it has a remarkable effect on normal cognition: it improves not only planning but also decision-making and verbal and visual memory. This has made it the latest drug of choice among people looking for a mental b https://www.sandiegohealthdirectory.com/kb/link.php?action=detail&id=16 Mon, 22 May 2006 14:46:48 GMT https://www.sandiegohealthdirectory.com/kb/link.php?action=detail&id=16 They're here and walking among us: people with technologically enhanced senses, superhuman bodies and artificially sharpened minds. The first humans to reach a happy, healthy 150th birthday may already have been born. And that's just the start of it. Are you ready for your upgrade, asks Graham Lawton

IT IS 2050, and Peter Schwartz is deciding what to do with the rest of his life. He has already had two successful careers and he wants another one before he dies, which he expects to happen in around 50 years. By then he'll be about 150, which isn't bad for a baby boomer, but he expects his son, now 60, to live a lot longer than that.

The world that Schwartz lives in is radically different from the one he grew up in. The industrial and information age has passed into history, overtaken by a revolution in bioscience that began around the turn of the century. Schwartz is surrounded by astonishingly healthy, happy, rich and long-lived people. Many possess biological enhancements that exceed the abilities they were born with: sharper senses, for example, or better memories and greater intelligence.

Meanwhile the ageing process has been radically slowed down; there are centenarians who pass for 50, and 60-year-olds who look 30. Some people are already living beyond 120, and longevity records keep being broken. Disease is largely a thing of the past. Designer babies are commonplace, and some babies are even being born with engineered genetic traits that they will pass onto their own children.

Schwartz isn't in the business of making idle predictions. In the real world of 2006 he is a business strategist and "scenario planner" who advises companies how to prepare for the future. While his vision sounds like a techno-utopian fantasy, as far-fetched as 1950s predictions that by now we would live in cities on the moon or swallow pills instead of food, the prospect of human enhancement is being taken increasingly seriously. The World Economic Forum discussed it at its most recent meeting in January. The US National Science Foundation and the UK's Office of Science and Technology are investigating the issues it raises. Even President Bush has been briefed about it in exhaustive detail.

Humans, of course, have always strived to tame or even transcend nature through technology, but our efforts up to now look puny and ineffectual compared with what is about to happen. "We're at an inflection point in history," says Joel Garreau, a writer with The Washington Post whose recent book, Radical Evolution, has made him something of a guru in human enhancement circles. "For hundreds of thousands of years our technologies have been aimed outward, at modifying our environment. Now we've got a suite of technologies that are aimed inward, at modifying our minds, metabolisms, personalities and children."
The coming revolution

Garreau is not the first to point this out. Back in 2002, a working group set up by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) predicted an imminent scientific and technological revolution that would enable "tremendous improvements" in human abilities. A year later the President's Council on Bioethics, set up by George W. Bush to advise him on issues such as stem cells and cloning, compiled a list of real-world technologies that could, now or in the very near future, be used to enhance normal human functioning. It identified five broad areas, ranging from genetic engineering to replacement body parts (see "We have the technology").

None of these technologies were explicitly designed to allow healthy people to transcend their limits. They were created to cure disease and disability, but what the council recognised was that all of them have potential to be used "beyond therapy" - "to alter the normal workings of the human body and psyche, to augment or improve their native capacities and performances". The council was also among the first to recognise a significant fact about such technologies: if it has enhancement potential, healthy people will start using it to give them an edge.

According to some reports, around 10 per cent of US university students regularly take Ritalin or other prescription stimulants as "smart drugs" to boost their attention and concentration. The wakefulness promoter modafinil (Provigil) is increasingly being used in a similar way (New Scientist, 18 February, p 34). "The drugs are quite primitive but people are paying $80 a pop because they're convinced that they will make all the difference," says Garreau.

Viagra, meanwhile, has become a recreational drug; cosmetic surgery, which is based on techniques originally developed to treat injuries or disfigurements, has never been more popular or socially acceptable; and performance-enhancing substances are rife in professional sport. Even reproductive technologies are being co-opted in ways that blur the boundary between therapy and enhancement: IVF parents requesting sex selection of embryos, for example, to engineer the ideal family.

"All these advances follow the same pattern," says Garreau. "They're initially aimed at people who are sick. Then they move out to the needy well. Then they move out to anyone who's looking for an advantage."

For those seeking that advantage, more opportunities are just around the corner - a lot more. Around 40 cognition-enhancing drugs are in development right now, designed to improve wakefulness, attention, memory, decision making and planning (see "Smarter minds"). Gerontologists are starting to believe we could directly intervene in the process of senescence to significantly increase the average human lifespan.

There have also been rapid advances in brain-machine interfaces, such as retinal implants, communication devices for paralysed and locked-in patients, and even memory prostheses, hinting at the possibility of neural implants that enhance normal functioning. Progress in genetic engineering and gene therapy suggests that we will soon be able to rewrite our own genetic code, and that of future generations, removing broken genes, correcting errors and even inserting new ones (See "Designer children"). To Garreau the conclusion is inescapable. "We're not talking about changing humans in some distant science-fiction future. This is happening on our watch."

"We're not talking about some distant sci-fi future. This is happening now"

According to the NSF, the technologies that make human enhancement possible are collectively known as nano-bio-info-cogno - nanoscience, biotech, IT and cognitive science. And if what they are already capable of is hard to believe, what is predicted for the next 20 or 30 years is positively mind-blowing.

When futurologists start gazing into their crystal balls the results are notoriously unreliable, but there are some things we can say with reasonable certainty. One is that if you want to predict where technology will be 20 years from now, you can't use the progress of the previous 20 as your guide. That's because most technologies are advancing not linearly, but exponentially. In other words, what they are capable of keeps on doubling every few months or years. Exponential growth initially looks like linear growth, but soon enough it starts producing spectacular gains in ever shorter periods of time. Once you factor exponential growth into the equation, the progress of the previous 20 years are, at best, a guide to the next eight.

Unprecedented growth

The most celebrated example of exponential growth in technology is Moore's law, which states that by almost any measure you choose - the number of transistors on a silicon chip, say, or the amount of memory you can buy for a dollar - the performance of computing doubles approximately every 18 months (see Graph). The computer industry has obeyed Moore's law for the past 40 years and shows no signs of losing its way. That means within living memory, computing power has increased more than 100 million-fold. You probably have more processing power in your microwave oven than was available to the entire world in 1950. That's a rate of technological growth unprecedented in human history.

Exponential growth in computing power drives similar growth in other technologies. For example, the cost of sequencing a single letter of DNA, a task requiring immense amounts of processing power, has halved every 23 months since 1990. It took 15 years to sequence the genome of HIV; SARS was done in 31 days. The resolution of brain scanners is doubling every 18 months. The number of nanotechnology patents filed in the US has doubled every two years or so since 1990. And so on. According to the NSF, nano-bio-info-cogno all have the capacity to grow exponentially for decades to come.

"No one should confidently bet against any form of scientific progress"

Mutually reinforcing growth is only half the story. The NSF says there is another important trend to take into account. This is "convergence" - the idea that as these separate technological strands develop, the boundaries between them will blur and they will eventually merge into a single, unified science "based on the unity of nature", as the NSF put it.
Life transformed

Some futurologists, notably Ray Kurzweil of Kurzweil Technologies in Wellesley, Massachusetts, argue that exponential growth and technological convergence will lead to a "singularity", a time when change becomes so rapid and pervasive that human life is irreversibly transformed (New Scientist, 24 September 2005, p 32). Even if that doesn't happen - and in Schwarz's 2050 scenario it hasn't - exponential growth still holds out the prospect of extraordinary technological progress in as little as 20 or 30 years: brain implants that allow direct mind-to-mind communication; memory chips that let you upload new knowledge directly into your brain; genetic upgrades that can be reversibly slotted into all the cells in your body; custom-made replacement body parts; and so on.

From a human perspective, that means having almost limitless power over our own biology - the power to end disease, abolish pain and suffering, endow ourselves with superhuman levels of beauty, athleticism and brains, and radically slow down or maybe even halt ageing (see "Towards immortality"). "I believe our descendants will look on our lives with pity, in the same way we look on the lives of our Pleistocene ancestors," says bioethicist James Hughes of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

For many people that future cannot come soon enough, and no wonder: human enhancement promises to fulfil some of our deepest-held desires. Suppose you were offered an extra 50 years of life, endowed with what Schwartz calls "superhealth", physical and mental capabilities that exceed the ones you were born with, not to mention the prospect of an even better life for your children. Would you turn it down?
Liberation or slavery?

Of course, "better" is always subjective. If the prospect of a world full of youthful centenarians, drugged up to the eyeballs, bristling with brain implants and possessed of the power to engineer the genetic future of our species makes you feel vaguely uneasy, you're not alone. Human enhancement might promise liberation, but it will bring its own peculiar difficulties, which is why we need to start thinking about it now.

Imagine it's 2026 and your 17-year-old daughter or granddaughter has decided she wants to go to Harvard. She works hard at school but her grades are not quite good enough. Then a technology comes along - a memory-boosting drug, say - that would significantly increase her chances of getting in. She begs you for it. She tells you all her classmates are taking it and if you say no you will be jeopardising her chances not only of getting into Harvard but of getting into higher education at all. What do you do?

Perhaps you decide that if she's going to get into Harvard, she has to do it using the brainpower she was born with. On the other hand, what's the difference between buying the drugs and paying for extra tuition? Maybe you can't afford it anyway, which is a relief as you're not convinced it's safe. If you can afford it, perhaps you worry that if she gets in off the back of a performance-enhancing drug, she won't feel an appropriate sense of achievement. And what happens when the next enhancement technology comes along? Will you have to buy that one too, just so she can keep up? Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to start a campaign to get cognitive-enhancing drugs banned in schools...

As more and more enhancement technologies become available, these dilemmas will grow increasingly familiar. Is it safe? Should it be regulated? Will it lead to an "enhancement divide" between the haves and have-nots, or even conflict between the "enhanced" and the "naturals"? Would people feel pressured or even coerced into using them simply to keep up?

"They're legitimate concerns," says Hughes, who has argued that the enhancement divide is a real enough worry that some such technologies ought to be made available through the public health system. Then again, says Hughes, they're arguably nothing new. Society already faces such problems in spades. According to bioethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, none of these issues are showstoppers for human enhancement. "They're not good arguments about why we shouldn't try to improve ourselves," he says.

Enhancement does, however, bring one new and potentially explosive question: what will it do to our sense of being human? If your daughter takes the drug and gets in to Harvard, she has arguably missed out on an essential human experience - striving for success and learning to deal with failure. Similarly, if you knew you could live to be 150, would you bother working hard on your career right now? How would you decide when it was time to settle down and have kids? If you could download knowledge onto a memory chip, why bother to learn anything, or value knowledge and experience? If life was free of pain and disease, would you have any idea what happiness is? If everyone was enhanced, would the world be a dull and homogeneous place?

These are tough questions, but they all boil down to the same thing: by enhancing ourselves would we somehow throw away our humanity? For many opponents of these technologies, the answer is an emphatic yes. To them, a world of enhanced humans would be a world that has lost all meaning. The President's Council on Bioethics likened it to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World: its technologically enhanced inhabitants live cheerfully, without disappointment or regret, the council's report points out, but lead "flat, empty lives devoid of love and longing, filled with only trivial pursuits and shallow attachments". Some opponents of enhancement argue that these dangers are so great that the only safe course of action is to put a stop to the whole enterprise. Bioethicist George Annas of Boston University, for example, has proposed a global treaty making human genetic modification a crime against humanity.

"I believe our descendants will look on our lives with pity"

Others turn the human nature question on its head. "To the extent that we are born with impulses for aggression, racism and selfishness or limits on our capacity for wisdom and compassion, we may be morally obliged to modify human nature," says Hughes. Caplan argues that all technologies are attempts to transcend human nature. "That's what agriculture is. That's what plumbing is. That's what clothes are. That's what transportation systems are. Do they make us less human? Or are they one possible contender for what it means to be human?"

Not everyone believes we will have to face these questions imminently. Alfred Nordman, a historian of science at Darmstadt Technical University in Germany, doesn't buy into the inevitability of explosive technological progress leading to a post-human future. "I don't have a sense that I'm living in an era of accelerating technological change," he says. "I think my grandparents saw more technological changes that I will." And even if technology does make radical enhancement technology such as brain implants possible, Nordman doesn't see much demand for it. "We need a reality check," he says.

Nordman, however, is in a minority. According to Schwarz, it is almost inevitable - "overdetermined", in the jargon of his profession - that the next 20 to 30 years will see the rapid progress that makes his 2050 scenario possible. "The problems are really difficult," he says. "Really controlling genetic systems, really understanding the brain. They won't be solved by 2010 or 2015. I think it will be slower than some people hope, but it's inevitable that we will make great scientific progress."

If you accept that, the big question facing us now is whether we want to go down the road towards an enhanced future. The President's Council on Bioethics is clear that this is not a debate that can be delayed. "Decisions we are making today - for instance, what to do about sex selection or genetic selection of embryos, or whether to prescribe behaviour-modifying drugs to preschoolers, or how vigorously to try to reverse the processes of senescence - will set the path 'beyond therapy' for coming generations," its report says.

Chances are, of course, that human enhancement will lead neither to utopia nor to the end of humanity. More likely each new technology will be debated, tested and, if useful and not directly harmful, eventually assimilated into everyday life. Already there are people among us who possess what once seemed like superpowers: vision more acute than anything anyone was born with thanks to laser surgery, superhuman powers of concentration or the ability to go for days without sleep thanks to psychoactive drugs, and the ability to perform astonishing feats of strength, speed and endurance thanks to steroids.

Even technologies that seem morally questionable at first soon become socially acceptable. In 1969, a poll found that a majority of Americans believed that IVF "violated God's will"; by 1978 a majority said they would use it. In the 1960s many US states outlawed the contraceptive pill for fear that it would be too socially disruptive; few would do the same now. Most experts agree that human enhancement is coming, and that there is no off button for what we have already started. But the outcome is not predetermined. It's time to start choosing your future.

From issue 2551 of New Scientist magazine, 13 May 2006, page 32
Towards immortality

Woody Allen once said: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." It won't happen for him, nor for anyone else alive today, but many researchers believe that we are at the start of a revolution that could deliver if not immortality, then something resembling it.

A century ago, life expectancy in the developed world was around 55 years. Today it is nudging 80. "We have made tremendous advances - by accident," says Sarah Harper, director of the Oxford Institute of Ageing at the University of Oxford. "We weren't actually planning to extend lives."

That is all changing. Harper says there is now a widespread belief that we can "effect radical change, extending both maximum lifespan and normal healthy lifespan". It will be slow and painstaking, but some gerontologists are willing to bet that there are people alive today who will still be alive in 2150.

One of those is Aubrey de Grey, a theoretical gerontologist at the University of Cambridge. He will tell anyone who is prepared to listen that in 20 to 30 years it will be possible to deliver radical increases in longevity, largely by repairing cellular and molecular damage. "I think the first person to live to 1000 might be 60 already," he says.

Among gerontologists, De Grey is almost universally regarded as a maverick and a nuisance, but even some of his fiercest critics agree that it now appears possible to deliberately intervene to increase longevity. Among them is Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois in Chicago, who with three colleagues recently called on the US government to invest $3 billion a year into anti-ageing research (The Scientist, vol 20, p 28). "The time has arrived to slow ageing in humans," says Olshansky. His target: seven years.

HALVE YOUR RISK

Why seven? Olshansky says that the risk of death and age-related diseases rises exponentially throughout your lifetime, starting at puberty and with a doubling time of seven years. So if you could delay ageing by seven years, you would halve everyone's risk of dying at any given age. And when the end does come, he says, you suffer a relatively short period of ill health and die quickly, avoiding the nightmare scenario of a "nursing-home world" full of decrepit old people.

Underpinning Olshansky's plan is animal research showing that mice on severely calorie-restricted diets live around 40 per cent longer than normal. They remain vigorous, healthy and alert deep into old age, and then die quickly. According to Olshansky's colleague Richard Miller of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, we now know of 10 mutations in mice that accomplish the same effect as caloric restriction, suggesting the possibility of anti-ageing drugs that recreate these effects.

If the mouse results were translated into humans, Miller says, it would mean a healthy lifespan of 112 years. "Learning how to do this in humans would be a good idea," he says. Olshansky insists that stopping or reversing ageing is not the issue. "We're not talking about dramatic extension of life," he says. "The operative word is delay. But if you want to achieve immortality, this is a good place to start."
Designer children

In June 2003, Michelle Whitaker gave birth to a baby boy, James, in a hospital in Sheffield, UK. During the birth doctors took a sample of James's umbilical cord blood and banked it for later use. The intended recipient wasn't James: it was his older brother Charlie, who suffers from a rare form of anaemia and whose only hope of a cure was an injection of tissue-matched stem cells.

James was a "designer baby", conceived by IVF and selected from among many embryos to ensure that he would be a suitable donor for Charlie, using a technology called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. PGD involves taking a single cell while the embryo is at an early stage - just 4 to 10 cells - and scrutinising its genome. It has been used thousands of times since its first success in 1990, but the Whitakers' case broke new ground.

Until James, PGD had been almost exclusively used to reject embryos carrying undesirable genes for diseases or disabilities including Huntington's, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anaemia and even a predisposition to cancer. The Whitakers' case showed it can also be used to positively select for desirable traits. And that, some people believe, marks the beginning of a world where parents can start to choose their children's genetic make-up.

SPECIFIC TRAITS

Of course, to select desirable traits you have to know which genes you're looking for, and that is a big challenge. Even so, some geneticists think it might soon be possible to specify relatively uncomplicated traits such as height or leanness, and as our understanding of the human genome improves, the possibilities are going to expand.

Screening, however, is not the same as creating genuine designer babies. To do that you would have to genetically engineer the embryo. Some PGD researchers are already working on "embryo gene therapy" to repair defective genes at a very early stage. Once you can do that, it may be possible to alter perfectly healthy genes to boost intelligence, height or other valued traits.

No one believes that will be easy, and many scientists think it is unrealistic to expect anything like it. Traits such as intelligence result from the interaction of hundreds, possibly thousands, of genes, plus myriad environmental factors. Controlling the outcome might prove to be nigh on impossible, as well as hugely expensive. There are technical hurdles too, such as the need to create dozens of embryos to have enough to screen. But as the President's Council on Bioethics put it: "In this enormously fertile and rapidly developing field, the future is unknowable... No one should confidently bet against any form of scientific and technological progress."
Smarter minds

In a lab at the University of Cambridge, Danielle Turner is turning ordinary Joes into masterminds. She gets them to perform a test called the one-touch Tower of London planning task, which measures one aspect of intelligence (see Diagram). The harder the task, the more mistakes her volunteers make, but when she gives them a dose of the drug modafinil they suddenly find it easier. "You see quite a dramatic improvement in their performance, particularly when the problem gets more difficult," she says.

Modafinil was not developed to make people smarter. It is sold as a prescription-only "wakefulness promoter" for people with narcolepsy and other sleep disorders, but it has a remarkable effect on normal cognition: it improves not only planning but also decision-making and verbal and visual memory. This has made it the latest drug of choice among people looking for a mental boost or competitive edge.

Barbara Sahakian, also at Cambridge, describes modafinil as the "first true smart drug". It won't be the last. There are dozens more "cognition enhancers" in the pipeline. Last year an expert panel appointed by the UK government identified 15 molecular pathways in the brain that are under active investigation as targets for cognition enhancement. All are being developed to help people with cognitive impairment such as memory loss due to Alzheimer's, but many will turn out to have a positive effect on normal, healthy brains, and end up being guzzled like coffee.


]]> Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants, the widely used class of drugs that includes Celexa, Paxil, Prozac and Zoloft, causes the growth of new brain cells. https://www.sandiegohealthdirectory.com/kb/link.php?action=detail&id=15 Mon, 22 May 2006 14:32:47 GMT https://www.sandiegohealthdirectory.com/kb/link.php?action=detail&id=15
Now, researchers say they've zeroed in on just how that happens.

"It was clear that this generation of new neurons is important for the action of antidepressants," explained lead researcher Grigori Enikolopov, an associate professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.

His team report the findings in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers decided to look at how the use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants -- the widely used class of drugs that includes Celexa, Paxil, Prozac and Zoloft -- might spur brain cell growth. To do so, they tracked the way in which stem cells -- undifferentiated cells that can grow into specialized cells -- became neurons in a special mouse model given the antidepressant Prozac (fluoxetine).

"Stem cells in the brain go through several steps before they become neurons," Enikolopov said. Examining the cascade of events, his team found that "cells which are born from the stem cells, called amplifying progenitors, are the cells being targeted by Prozac," he said. According to Enikolopov, Prozac zeroes in on these amplifying progenitors and increases their numbers. Within three to four weeks, his team noticed an increased number of mature neurons.

The Cold Spring researchers noted that about four years ago, other researchers found that animals that received Prozac showed a rise in neuron growth. Then, about two years ago, other experts found that this generation of new neurons is necessary for the drug to achieve its behavioral effect of lifting depression, Enikolopov said.

He believes the latest finding is another piece to add to the puzzle of how SSRI antidepressants work. However, it does not provide the entire answer. "What happens between having more neurons and decreasing depression, the changing of mood -- that is unanswered," he said.

His team used a new mouse strain that made it easy to identify and track these early progenitor cells. The work "defines a cellular target for antidepressants," Enikolopov said. "What has been known for 20, 30 years is that Prozac increases the level of serotonin [a neurotransmitter associated with good mood.]" But what wasn't known was why Prozac takes three or four weeks to start working.

"Alcohol, Valium, they work immediately," he says. "But these selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, they need three or four weeks."

"Three to four weeks is basically comparable, in our schedule, of the 28 to 30 days it takes to go from a stem cell to a neuron," he pointed out.

Prozac first went on the market in 1987 in the United States as the first SSRI. These medications selectively target serotonin, inhibiting its reabsorption into the cell so there is more available.

Dennis Steindler, executive director of the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida, Gainesville, applauded the Cold Spring work.

"The beauty of this study is, a new model has been generated," he said.

"This study is in essence a 'readout,' a neurogenic readout, whereby using this [mouse] model, the Enikolopov group found exactly the cell that increases its rate of proliferation," he said. "That leads to generating more neurons as a result of taking this drug."

"It could have been the stem cell, progenitor or a young neuron. They found it was the progenitor cell," Steindler said.

More information

To learn more about depression, visit the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/200605...triggersnewbraincellgrowth

By Kathleen Doheny
HealthDay ReporterTue May 16, 7:09 PM ET]]> Active ingredient in broccoli, indole-3-carbinol, inhibits virus replication of HSV1 and HSV2. https://www.sandiegohealthdirectory.com/kb/link.php?action=detail&id=11 Sun, 19 Mar 2006 15:08:17 GMT https://www.sandiegohealthdirectory.com/kb/link.php?action=detail&id=11 conducted by researchers at theNortheastern Ohio
Universities College of Medicine in Rootstown,
Ohioshow that a compound found naturally in broccoli, cabbage, and brussels sprouts-- indole-3-carbinol--may be a key to inhibiting the herpes simplex virus. And it works really well. The compound blockedthe virus from reproducing by an amazing 99.9 percent -- essentially 100
percent effectiveness.

The indole-3-carbinol compoundworks by interfering with factors that help cells reproduce. It inhibits the herpes simplex virus in the same way, since the virus needs those same factors as the cells to reproduce, reports WebMD and the Philadelphia Inquirer

The study: The researchers treated human and monkey cells with indole-3-carbinol. Then they infected them with one of two strains of the herpes virus: HSV-1,which can cause oral or genital herpes, and HSV-2, which causes genital herpes. The cells were also infected with a herpes virus strain that is known to be
resistant to medication.

The results: The indole-3-carbinol compound blocked the virus from reproducing by atleast 99.9 percent. Best of all, since the compound is found in food,it's safe.

Herpes differs markedly from other viruses. Once
a person contracts it, the virus lives in the body for a lifetime. The American Social Health Association estimates that as many as 80 percent of adults in the United States have oral herpes, while 20 percent have genital herpes. Fully 90 percent are unaware they havethe virus. There is no cure.

While this research news is promising, caution is
advised until further studies are done. What works in the lab doesn't always work on humans in the real world. Still, eating more broccoli is a good idea not only to prevent herpes, but also to possibly ward off cancer, cataracts, andstroke.

The research findings were presented to the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.]]> Daily use of chromium picolinate increases muscle sensitivity to insulin in overweight rats. https://www.sandiegohealthdirectory.com/kb/link.php?action=detail&id=10 Wed, 08 Feb 2006 03:54:13 GMT https://www.sandiegohealthdirectory.com/kb/link.php?action=detail&id=10 Researchers found that daily use of chromium picolinate enhanced muscle sensitivity to insulin in obese, insulin-resistant rats.

Specifically, chromium improved the ability of insulin, after attaching to muscle cells, to enhance chemical signals in the cell that promoted blood sugar uptake.

The study, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and conducted by researchers at Pennington Biomedical Research Center (PBRC), is the first published study using this animal model to demonstrate chromium's action in this way.

"Insulin resistance is a condition in which tissues such as fat and muscle in the body respond poorly to insulin, the major hormone required for glucose metabolism. This condition is present in pre-diabetic states and continues when a person develops diabetes. Previous research suggested that supplementation with chromium picolinate may help improve this condition," said Dr. William Cefalu, investigator and chief of the division of nutrition and chronic diseases at PBRC. "This animal study is significant because it suggests a more detailed mechanism of action for chromium on improving insulin sensitivity in muscle, a major insulin-sensitive tissue."

Chromium is one of the few essential trace minerals for which a specific mechanism of action had not been completely identified. This study demonstrated that chromium picolinate helps insulin receptor sites on muscle cells work more efficiently. Insulin receptors on the outer part of a cell allow the cell to bind with insulin in the blood. When the cell and insulin bind, signals within the cell activate "glucose transporters" so that the cell can then take up glucose from the blood and use it for energy. The result was a significantly improved rate at which muscles absorbed glucose from the blood and metabolized it. Impaired insulin action, in the obese rats used in this study, was partially restored with chromium supplementation. In a control group of lean, healthy rats with no abnormalities, chromium supplementation exhibited no observable additional effect on insulin receptor activity.

The study also found that obese, insulin resistant rats treated with chromium picolinate had improved triglyceride and total high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol ratios. These findings support previous research demonstrating chromium picolinate's potential benefits in reducing cardiovascular risk factors in subjects exhibiting insulin resistance.

"These results add to a growing body of evidence, but more importantly provide a cellular mechanism to explain the effects of chromium picolinate on carbohydrate metabolism," added Dr. Cefalu.

Ongoing research at PBRC is now focusing on the effect of chromium picolinate on cellular proteins associated with insulin function.

http://www.pbrc.edu/
]]> The mind can be trained to produce or inhibit certain brain waves. https://www.sandiegohealthdirectory.com/kb/link.php?action=detail&id=9 Sat, 04 Feb 2006 15:01:47 GMT https://www.sandiegohealthdirectory.com/kb/link.php?action=detail&id=9 Mental exercises with neurofeedback may ease symptoms of attention-deficit disorder, epilepsy and depression--and even boost cognition in healthy brains
By Ulrich Kraft


At first the computer game looks awfully easy for an eight-year-old--like something out of the Stone Age of arcades in the 1980s. A red triangle "arrow" appears on the monitor's blue screen, and then the nose of a cartoon airplane glides into view from the left. If the arrow points upward, Ben must make the plane climb. When he succeeds, a spiky yellow sun beams.
A second glance shows that all is not as it seems. For one thing, Ben has no joystick. Instead several electrodes glued to the boy's face and to the skin under his hair let him pilot the plane by thought alone.

Such "mind reading" offers many possible applications. It has, for instance, enabled "locked-in" patients--who cannot speak or gesture--to communicate with caregivers [see "Thinking Out Loud," by Nicola Neumann and Niels Birbaumer; Scientific American Mind, Premier Issue, Vol. 14, No. 5, 2004]. By controlling their brain waves, the patients manipulate letters and words on a computer screen. Practice with neurofeedback may also benefit those who suffer from epilepsy, attention deficits, depression and other debilitating mental disorders. The experimental therapy, also called EEG biofeedback, may even help rev up healthy brains, improving cognitive performance.

From Bio to Neuro
The technique is a high-tech twist on biofeedback--a method long used to treat stress-related disorders. In biofeedback, people see or hear physiological measurements that can indicate stress, such as increases in blood pressure, heart rate or muscle tension. Receiving such information from monitoring devices makes normally undetectable body functions accessible for conscious regulation. A person can realize from listening to his racing pulse, for example, that he is under strain and then learn to bring his heart rate down purposely.



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There is no magic formula for learning how to harness one's brain waves.
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The first clues that brain waves could be altered intentionally came nearly four decades ago. In the late 1960s sleep researcher M. Barry Sterman learned something interesting while tracking the EEGs of cats. He found a previously unknown pattern of brain waves with frequencies between 12 and 15 hertz (Hz), or cycles per second, in a part of the brain called the sensorimotor cortex. Sterman, now professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, dubbed this pattern the sensorimotor rhythm, or SMR. SMR was always present, he learned, in relaxed and awake felines. When he rewarded the animals at those moments with snacks, they began to produce stronger SMRs. Through this conditioning experiment, Sterman demonstrated that it is possible to change one's own brain waves deliberately.

The researcher might well not have followed up on this discovery. But at roughly the same time, he received a request from the U.S. Air Force, which wanted him to test the potential cognitive effects of exposure to monomethylhydrazine, a substance used in some rocket fuels and known to cause seizures. Sterman injected the chemical into cats. About an hour afterward, most of them suffered a seizure. In a few of the subjects, however, the seizure's onset occurred considerably later than usual; three others escaped the convulsions entirely. Seeking an answer for the resistance, Sterman examined his experimental protocol. He observed that the resilient cats had one thing in common: they had previously been involved in his conditioning tests. Could their ability to control their SMR waves have been a factor?

Sterman pursued the question in further experiments. In the early 1970s he found indications that people with epilepsy also could reduce their risk of seizures if they learned to heighten their SMR levels. Yet the idea remained controversial for lack of thorough study.

Brain Control
More than 30 years after Sterman's initial work with SMRs, scientists are exploring how neurofeedback might be used to treat a variety of ailments. In addition to SMRs, other brain waves at different frequencies characterize certain mental states [see illustration on page 63]. In deep sleep, for example, delta waves, with frequencies of up to 4 Hz and high amplitudes, dominate. Frequencies around 10 Hz, known as alpha waves, are present in a relaxed but awake brain; they emerge, for example, when we lie back with our eyes closed. If we then begin to concentrate on something, beta waves, with frequencies greater than 13 Hz, travel across the cortex. Lower-frequency theta waves appear when the brain relaxes. Theta waves, with high amplitudes and frequencies falling between those of delta and alpha waves, normally appear in adults during light sleep and meditation.




Regardless of frequency, there is no magic formula for learning how to harness one's brain waves. "Each subject must discover his own individual strategy, by trial and error," Leins explains. To increase brain activity, which steers the video plane upward, many children in the Tuebingen experiment say they think about something exciting--like jumping off a diving board. Ben imagines that he is spending a night camping in the woods. If the directional arrow points down, the boy tries to calm his brain to make the plane dip; in his thoughts, he lies down in bed and naps.

At Tuebingen, researchers working on epilepsy therapy are looking at yet another component of the EEG, called slow cortical potential, or SCP. These brain waves can indicate activity in the cortex. Detecting them is useful, because epileptic seizures begin with overexcitement in cortical neurons, usually in a very limited area, from which brain activity spreads uncontrollably. The SCPs of patients shift in an electrically negative direction just before a seizure. Such negative slow potentials also arise normally in the brain. Therefore, the goal of neurofeedback is for patients to come to recognize this onset of electrical negativity and then to push their SCPs in the positive direction. Patients learn to limit brain activity consciously, thus suppressing an epileptic attack.

The method seems promising. In a 2001 study Niels Birbaumer and his colleagues at Tuebingen worked with epileptics who had not been helped by conventional medical therapies. On average, patients using SCP neurofeedback were able to reduce the number of seizures they suffered by a third. The positive effects lasted long after the training sessions had ended.

Mental Aerobics
Beta waves are the target of therapies for children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. "It is exactly these higher-frequency brain waves that are, in children with ADHD, weaker compared with those in healthy children," Leins states. In the U.S., more than 700 groups are using EEG biofeedback to treat ADHD, according to the Association of Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback.

Children with ADHD struggle with schoolwork and social skills because they are restless, impulsive and have difficulty concentrating. Reduced levels of the higher-frequency brain waves are especially noticeable in the prefrontal cortex, an area involved in attention control. The kids also have an increase in lower-frequency waves, especially theta waves from 4 to 7.5 Hz. With neurofeedback, Leins says, "our ADHD subjects train their brains to produce fewer theta waves and thereby more beta waves."

Today Ben makes 45 "hits"--times when he has successfully lifted or lowered his brain activity at will. He gets five points on a gift card, and then he is free to leave. His mental exercises are not over for the day, however. Ben has been told to practice brain control in his everyday life, too. Before beginning homework, for example, he is to first imagine sinking a couple of baskets. Revving up the brain in this manner seems to help kids like Ben focus. "Many children say they can concentrate better after it and complete their homework more quickly," Leins says.



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After the sessions, the subjects performed better on evaluations of their attention and intelligence.
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Children in the Tuebingen experiment train for 30 hours. The researchers measure their cognitive performance immediately before and after treatment, using standardized tests especially geared to monitor attention. Six months after the therapy, they are checked again. After the neurofeedback sessions, the subjects performed better on evaluations of their attention and intelligence. Teachers reported that they were quieter and less impulsive in class. Many parents also said that their children had fewer problems doing homework. Leins sees these results as positive, though not definitive. "What we still lack are controlled studies of many children, which would compare this technique with other therapeutic methods," the researcher says.



Balancing Act
Many mental illnesses are accompanied by unusual brain-wave patterns, a fact that offers another possible therapeutic application for neurofeedback. Whether these variations are the cause or effect of such disorders is not always clear. At the least, the presence of such uncommon patterns may hinder recovery. In the early 1990s, for example, Richard J. Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noticed unusual asymmetries in the brain-wave patterns of people with depression. Apparently the distribution of alpha activity between the anterior parts of the right and left hemispheres can be associated with mood. Among depressive subjects, the pendulum swung to the right; their left hemispheres were comparatively less active.

With that in mind, psychologist J. Peter Ros­en­feld of Northwestern University is trying to ease depression with neurofeedback. If patients could correct their own brain-wave patterns, Rosenfeld posits, they might be able to lift the gloom from their minds. So he and psychologists Elsa Baehr and Rufus Baehr of the NeuroQuest Neurofeedback Center in Evanston, Ill., developed a neurofeedback training program in the mid-1990s. Whenever the amplitude of alpha waves in the left frontal cortex rose above that in the right, the participants would hear a pleasant note played on a clarinet. During sessions lasting 15 to 30 minutes, the subjects worked to learn how to keep the tone in their ears for increasingly longer periods.

One spectacular case involved a woman who had previously been treated for recurrent bouts of depression for 12 years, without success. After just 35 hours of training, in combination with psychotherapy, her symptoms decreased drastically. In the subsequent six-year tracking period, she remained free of depression. Although the scientists can also point to successes with EEG feedback among other patients with depression, Elsa Baehr urges caution. "This is an experimental protocol," she notes. "Until there are controlled studies, we won't know how effective the therapy is."

Brain Boost?
In addition to therapies, could neurofeedback improve cognition in healthy brains? NASA, for one, has been using EEG biofeedback for years to increase concentration in its pilots.

To find out more, psychologist David Vernon, now at Canterbury Christ Church University in England, asked 40 volunteers to come to his lab. He and others wanted to find out whether deliberately influencing certain brain-wave patterns could boost working memory--which temporarily stores and manages information required to carry out complex cognitive tasks such as learning or reasoning. He first presented his subjects with a list of words. Then he gave them a category, such as "animals," and asked them to recall as many words from the list as possible that fit into that grouping.

Before training, the participants were able to remember just 71 percent of the words. In eight sessions, they learned to strengthen their SMRs--the same patterns that Sterman had worked with. After training, Vernon tested his subjects again, and this time they could remember almost 82 percent of the words. Vernon's group announced the results in January 2003. "Here we have the first evidence of a connection between neurofeedback and improvement in memory," Vernon claims.

A study published in 2003, carried out at Imperial College London, supports the notion that brain-wave training can improve cognition. Neuroscientists Tobias Egner, now at Columbia University, and John H. Gruzelier recruited test subjects at the Royal College of Music, London's elite school for promising young musicians. Some of the subjects learned, via feedback on a computer screen, how to control the slow waves in the alpha and theta ranges. After neurofeedback, the musicians' abilities had grown enormously, according to expert evaluators. The improvements came in such various areas as musical understanding, stylistic precision and imaginative interpretation. What is more, the students made significantly fewer mistakes.


If further experiments confirm such results, neurofeedback may offer a suite of applications. Gruzelier, for example, is considering how SMR reinforcement could be used to train people whose professions require exceptionally steady hands, such as eye surgeons.


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ULRICH KRAFT, a physician and regular contributor to Gehirn & Geist, is a freelance science writer in Berlin.

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