psychosis 7.psy.0001 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

f you get to be 85 or older, you automatically become a member of the population group known as "the very old." New data reveal that psychotic symptoms among these seniors have been greatly underestimated, a finding with potential public health consequences.

Several population studies of elderly people with healthy brains have indicated that fewer than 3 percent of them suffer from psychotic symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions. These assessments have relied on interviews with volunteers between ages 65 and 75. So far, older individuals have rarely been studied.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .

The latest data, published in the January Archives of General Psychiatry, derive from interviews with 85-year-olds and their family members or other close acquaintances. In many cases, detailed medical records were also available.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .

This more-thorough approach found psychotic symptoms in 10 percent of a representative sample of 85-year-olds living in the Swedish city G�teborg, including those in elder-care facilities. Moreover, by age 88, the elderly volunteers with psychotic symptoms more often had developed degenerative brain disease than their counterparts had, report Svante �stling and Ingmar Skoog, both psychiatrists at G�teborg University in Sweden.

"This is a unique and important study," remarks psychiatrist Dilip V. Jeste of the University of California, San Diego. He contends that the U.S. health-care system is unprepared to deal with a rise in mental illness as the number of elderly people increases over the next 30 years (SN: 9/18/99, p.189). What's more, �stling and Skoog add, a cause for current concern is that many elderly people don't report their psychotic symptoms in psychiatric interviews and their condition thus evades detection by medical providers.

The Swedish researchers used census records in G�teborg to randomly select 347 participants, all 85 years old and free of neurological ailments, and then followed them for 3 years. A spouse, child, nurse, or friend described the emotional condition of 305 of the elderly volunteers to an interviewer. Medical records were available for 283 individuals.

The results provided reason for concern. In the year before the study, 35 individuals had experienced one or more psychotic symptoms, the scientists say. Symptoms included hallucinations such as hearing voices, delusions of being controlled by others' thoughts, and a pervasive but mistaken sense of being harassed or conspired against. Third party interviews provided the only information about psychotic symptoms in 21 cases.

Nearly half of the volunteers with psychotic symptoms developed a degenerative brain disease by age 88, compared with about 12 percent of the other volunteers, the researchers say.http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US

Along with its strengths, the new study contains two weaknesses, Jeste holds.

First, it doesn't address whether psychotic symptoms in elderly volunteers began early or late in life. Second, those with psychotic symptoms didn't receive a psychiatric diagnosis. Possible diagnoses cover a wide spectrum, from schizophrenia to less severe psychotic disorders.

Still, it's now apparent that physicians need to talk to third parties about the mental condition of elderly patients, says psychiatrist John C.S. Breitner of Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore in a comment on the new finding.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US

brain 7.bra.0002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

The most famous neuroscience patient and test subject died last week, and the researchers who worked with him say they’ll never forget the man who never remembered them. The patient known as H.M. lost the ability to form new memories after he had brain surgery at the age of 27, and studies of his behavior taught researchers basic lessons about how memory and learning work. “He was a very gracious man, very patient, always willing to try these tasks I would give him,” [said Brenda] Milner, a professor of cognitive neuroscience. “And yet every time I walked in the room, it was like we’d never met” [The New York Times]. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US




Henry Gustav Molaison, a Hartford [Connecticut] native, existed in relative obscurity. But as “H.M.,” the name used to disguise his identity, Molaison gained an anonymous sort of fame, a man who had been studied by more than 100 researchers and became a staple of psychology class lectures…. “I’ve been lecturing about him and teaching about him for years and years, decades, and I’ve never known his name” [Hartford Courant], says psychiatrist David Glahn. Molaison died at a Connecticut nursing home on Tuesday at the age of 82, of respiratory failure. http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US




Molaison began having seziures after a childhood bicycle accident, and by the age of 27 they were seriously interfering with his daily life. In 1953 surgeons removed two slices of his brain and cut into a region called the hippocampus–this stopped his seizures, but also gave Molaison a form of amnesia where he could remember events from before the surgery but couldn’t form any new long-term memories.

To the researchers surprise, however, Molaison’s short-term memory was intact and allowed him to hold a thought for about 20 seconds. Studying Molaison also proved that conscious memory is distinct from motor memory, the capacity that allows people to jump on a bike and ride after a hiatus of years. Researchers had Molaison perform a difficult drawing task repeatedly; each time it struck him as an entirely new experience. He had no memory of doing it before. Yet with practice he became proficient. “At one point he said to me, after many of these trials, ‘Huh, this was easier than I thought it would be,’ ” Dr. Milner said [The New York Times].

Even in death, Molaison will continue to help science–his brain is being preserved and shipped to the Brain Observatory at the University of California San Diego. When the famous organ arrives, researchers will undertake a complex, delicate, months-long process of sectioning it into thin slices like deli meat, simultaneously imaging the tissue with different technologies. Ultimately, researchers will be able to examine slices of Molaison’s brain at varying scales, even zooming down to the cellular level in a way similar to how Google Earth can be used [San Diego Union-Tribune]. Researchers will be able to study exactly how Molaison’s brain differed from that of a healthy person, and the public will be able to access all the images on the Brain Observatory’s Web site. http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us





The researchers who worked with Molaison say they wish they could have made him understand what the world learned from his personal tragedy. “I am very indebted to him,” Milner said. “I constantly felt like it was such a shame we couldn’t reward him” because he couldn’t remember from moment to moment. “I would’ve liked to do something for someone whose [sic] done so much” for science. http://Louis-j-sheehan.com

wines 99.win.11006 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. In Asian ladybug with an appetite for bruised grapes has been spreading throughout the United States since 1988. http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com Canadian researchers confirm that the foul-smelling chemicals that these bugs secrete can easily spoil an entire vintage. The researchers also describe a treatment that they're investigating for such ladybug-tainted wine.

Chemists had suspected that the ladybugs' recently identified stinky ingredients, called methoxypyrazines, were mingling with grape juice at harvest time, giving wine the taste and aroma of peanuts, bell peppers, and asparagus—a mixture unlikely to captivate oenophiles. Lesser quantities of the chemicals are also present in "green" wines made from immature fruit. http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com

In an upcoming Vitis, researchers at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, report finding that just 200 to 400 ladybugs (Harmonia axyridis) per metric ton of harvested grapes can foul a batch of wine. Depending on the bugs' methoxypyrazine output, an infestation of as few as two beetles per grapevine can destroy the harvest, notes team leader Gary J. Pickering.

The Ontario group has now found a protein additive that binds with methoxypyrazines to create a substance that can be removed from a wine vat. The problem, Pickering explains, is getting the system to operate efficiently in the presence of wine's alcohol and acidity—"quite an aggressive environment for a protein." An effective methoxypyrazine-removal system could, however, salvage "millions of liters of green or bad vintages" in North America each year, Pickering says.

speech 777.spe.11110 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Children whose reading and spelling problems get classified as dyslexia fail to note a critical rhythmic beat in spoken words, a new study suggests. This sound cue, which lasts for one-tenth to one-fifth of a second, marks the transition from a consonant sound to a speech segment beginning with a vowel.

Such rhythmic neglect may make it difficult to sound out words when reading, say psychologist Usha Goswami of University College London and her colleagues. In particular, problems may arise for words that are similar or that rhyme, such as seat, sweet, and street.LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.BIZ

The scientists first studied 24 children diagnosed with dyslexia and 49 others reading at an age-appropriate grade level. Kids in both groups were 9 years old. Only those with dyslexia had difficulty discerning the beat in continuous sounds containing sudden rises and falls in loudness, as in such speech transitions as sw�eet. Moreover, in a group of 11-year-olds, 14 superior readers performed much better on this task than 14 average readers, the researchers report in the August 6 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.BIZ

In the London study, children with dyslexia encountered few problems in discerning extremely short sound modulations, which correspond to individual units of speech. Other researchers suspect that dyslexia involves an inability to hear the difference between these sounds, such as p versus b. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Meat and Fish 443.mea.0001 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

“Can Meat and Fish Consumption Be Sustainable?” That’s the provocative title of a press release just sent to us by the Worldwatch Institute, a small but by now venerable think tank that focuses on natural resource issues.

It’s also the theme of a chapter in Worldwatch’s 2008 State of the World report, its 25th annual book-length analysis of resource trends and economics. Here, its analysts take on the substantial—and often hidden—costs of producing animal protein to satisfy human hunger.

In 2006, Worldwatch reports, “farmers produced an estimated 276 million tons of chicken, pork, beef, and other meat—four times as much as in 1961.” As for fish: Some 140 million tons were hauled in globally during 2005, the most recent year for which data are available. “That was eight times as much as in 1950,” note Brian Halweil and Danielle Nierenberg, the chapter’s authors.

Part of the growth in production reflects a growing demand, fueled by world population and growing wealth that allows meat consumption even within formerly impoverished nations. However, per capita consumption has also been rising. For meat, it’s doubled over the past 45 years; fish consumption quadrupled over a 55-year span.

Bottom line: “meat and seafood are the two most rapidly growing ingredients in the global diet,” Halweil and Nierenberg find, and “two of the most costly.” Demand for both are slated to go the way of oil—up, up, up, with prices following—as incomes in China, India, and hosts of developing countries rise.

Industrial meat production and fish harvests have dropped the economic cost of animal proteins in recent decades. But much of that fiscal savings has come at the expense of the environment. Wastes are not captured and destroyed or recycled. They’re allowed to run into the ground or waterways, degrading ecosystems all along the way. There are costs to this that are not captured in traditional accounting—but they’re costs nonetheless.

Anyone who has tried fishing in the Gulf of Mexico’s annual dead zone has experienced one cost of allowing livestock wastes from the upper Midwest to flow through the ground and into waters that feed the mighty Mississippi—and Gulf (See Limiting Dead Zones). Anyone who lives with the pervasive stench downwind of animal feedlots knows there’s a cost that these neighbors are being asked to subsidize with their discomfort—and perhaps health.

Fishers, in recent years, have been mining the ocean’s top and middle predators, substantially distorting the balance of ecosystems (SN: 6/4/05, p. 360). The net primary productivity of the oceans probably hasn’t changed much: that is to say, about the same mass of living cells probably inhabits it. However, instead of tuna, cod, sharks, and trout, the bulk of the mass may be shifting to alewives, smelt, jellyfish, and algae (see How Low Will We Go in Fishing for Dinner?: http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arc98/2_7_98/fob1.html). One solution, fish farming, has proven moderately successful—but can also prove enormously harmful to nonfarmed species and the environment generally.

“Part of the reason that livestock and fish farms have become ecological disasters is that they have moved away from mimicking the environment in which animals exist naturally,” the Worldwatch report maintains.

There’s another problem as well. People the world over want to eat the same few species—cows, pigs, and lambs, salmon, tuna, and trout—even if their own environment cannot support the production of these animals. Moreover, as relatively large and high-in-the-food-chain animals, these species grow at the expense of hosts of plants, animals, and other energy inputs. The land and energy needed to produce 1,000 calories of grain, legumes (like soy), or algae is a fraction of what it takes to produce 1,000 calories of beef or catfish.

Many people don’t want to eat just greens, grains, and pulses (like beans). In truth, I don’t.

However, there is another source of animal protein that may prove dramatically more sustainable than fish and hoofed livestock. Insects.

Alright, it may take a bit of work to wrap your head around the idea of this—especially if you grew up in the States. We’re talking ants, grasshoppers, and beetles.

There was a time that the arrival of hordes of locusts blackening the skies was a time for rejoicing. Hungry farmers would see this as a smorgasbord of animal protein that could be gathered by the bucketsful. Eaten raw, fried with onion and chilis, or roasted for consumption throughout the months ahead, this was nutritionally high-quality animal protein. And you didn’t have to chase it. It came to you.

Those old enough to remember shipments of food aid to starving masses in Ethiopia and Somalia during the ‘70s and ‘80s may also remember scandals describing hundreds if not thousands of tons of wheat flour that arrived at its destinations spoiled by infestations of beetles, notes Victor B. Meyer-Rochow of Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. “But that’s really nonsense,” he argues, because those beetles were nutritionally more valuable than [the grain] that people were trying to protect.” http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/

Bottom line, diets throughout the globe have been changing. And if we all want reliable access to animal protein, we may have to embrace mini-livestock—the six-legged kinds.

You’ll be able to read more about this topic—a serious one—soon in the pages of Science News and at Science News for Kids, our online sister publication. So stay tuned. http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/
And who knows, one day we may read that termites, popular for millennia in nations throughout the world, have become a growth industry for New Orleans. It’s home to permanent hordes of the Formosan variety (See Munching Along)—insects that weathered Hurricane Katrina far better than did the region’s tax payers. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Capecchi 5554r5 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. In 1996 Japan's Inamori Foundation asked Mario R. Capecchi to review his life and work in an acceptance speech for the prestigious Kyoto Prize. Capecchi dutifully described his pathbreaking research on a precision method for insertion or deletion of genes in mice. The most compelling part of the talk, however, had nothing to do with mouse chimeras or positive-negative selection. Rather Capecchi recounted memories of a childhood with the makings of a script Italian actor/director Roberto Benigni might use as an encore for his Academy Award-winning Life Is Beautiful.

Capecchi is living evidence that scientific creativity and genius can spring from the most improbable circumstances. Little more than 15 years before he began doctoral studies under Nobelist James D. Watson, an eight-year-old Capecchi was using the same intellect to avoid death on the streets of war-ravaged Italy. http://louis-j-sheehan.net

Capecchi was born on October 6, 1937, in the northern city of Verona, the offspring of a brief liaison between an Italian airman and an American poet. In 1941 the Gestapo arrested and sent his mother to the Dachau concentration camp. Hitler believed that like Jews, gypsies and homosexuals, the Bohemians, a group of artists who opposed the Nazis and Fascists, should be extirpated from society. In anticipation of being deported, Lucy Ramberg sold her possessions and gave the proceeds to a Tyrolean peasant family to care for the three-and-a-half-year-old Mario.

For a while, things went as well as they could in the middle of a war. On the farm, the boy watched the wheat harvest and would help crush wine grapes with his bare feet. One of his first direct encounters with the war came one afternoon when American airplanes strafed peasants in the field with machine-gun fire. Capecchi took a bullet in the leg, although the wound healed quickly.

After a year, his mother's money unexpectedly ran out, and the boy was put out on the street--Capecchi suspects that his father, an Italian fighter pilot, may have wrangled the remainder of the cash from his caretakers. Thus began a life-defining odyssey for the young boy, the effects of which persist to this day. The man who greets a visitor in his University of Utah office looking out onto the distant Oquirrh Mountains is five feet, four inches tall, perhaps eight inches or so shorter than he would be had he had enough to eat during those formative years.

From 1942 to 1946, Capecchi was in and out of orphanages, a hospital and the Balilla, Mussolini's youth army. These places, usually bereft of food and run by Dickensian masters, proved worse than simply fending for oneself on the street. So he spent most of his time plotting escapes. On the outside, he would live in bombed-out buildings and conspire with companions to steal bread and fruit from open-air shops. It was the best existence possible, despite having to protect himself with his fists and to witness frequent atrocities or their aftermaths, such as discovering a pile of body parts. At times he would live with his father, Luciano Capecchi, who would put up with him for a while and then throw him out. http://louis-j-sheehan.net "He was a very loose soul," as Capecchi remembers.

On his ninth birthday, a woman he did not recognize showed up at the hospital where he was confined in the northern Italian city of Reggio Emelia. He had been relegated there because he suffered from malnutrition, yet the hospital itself served only a bowl of chicory coffee and a crust of bread once a day. The woman looked much older than his vague memory of his mother, but Capecchi didn't care whether she was his mother or not. He only knew that she represented a ticket to freedom. Life in the hospital was marked by endless days of lying naked on a bed staring at the ceiling, wracked by famine-induced fevers. Three weeks later--a period that gave him the assurance that his orphanhood had ended--mother and son left on a boat for America

In the course of just a few weeks, Capecchi went from a collapsed civilization to the highly moralistic environment of a Quaker commune, where he and his mother settled with his uncle and aunt, 20 miles north of Philadelphia. http://louis-j-sheehan.net In contrast to the murderous rivalries that had fractured Europe, the commune harbored an ethnic melange that included Chinese, blacks and Jews. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

planes 0000190.221 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. The eureka moment for Bernie Krause, a bioacoustics expert, came when he was on the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya recording the natural ambient sounds of birds, animals, insects, reptiles and amphibians for the California Academy of Sciences. As a former player of the Moog synthesizer for George Harrison, the Doors and other 1960s rock musicians, he had made a spectrograph of a natural soundscape and realized that “it looked like a musical score,” he recalls. “Each animal had its own niche, its own acoustic territory, much like instruments in an orchestra.” http://louis-j-sheehan.net

How well these natural musicians played together, Krause concludes, says good deal about the health of the environment. He argues that many animals evolved to vocalize in available niches so they can be heard by mates and others of their kind, but noise from human activity—from airplanes flying overhead to rumbling tires on a nearby road—threatens an animal’s reproductive success.

Since the late 1960s Krause has collected over 3,500 hours of soundscapes from Africa, Central America, the Amazon and the U.S. He finds at least 40 percent of those natural symphonies have become so radically altered that many members of those orchestras must be locally extinct. “Forests and wetlands have been logged or drained, the land paved over, and human noise included, making the soundscape unrecognizable,” says Krause, who heads Wild Sanctuary in Glen Ellen, Calif., an archive of natural sounds. Lately he has traveled to Katmai National Park and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to look for unpolluted sound and still had to get away from roads to find it.

Thomas S. Schulenberg, a neotropical bird specialist at Cornell University and one of the authors of The Birds of Peru, agrees that sound is a useful tool for assessing the natural environment. Schulenberg traveled to Vilcabamba, a wilderness of wet cloud forest in eastern Peru, which Conservation International wanted to access for possible protection. Although the ornithologist carried a pair of binoculars, he showed up to their dawn chorus with a directional microphone and recorder. As Schulenberg puts it: “You can hear many times more birds than you can see.”

Schulenberg believes animals can adapt to some noise pollution, but there are limits, especially if the noise becomes a permanent feature of the environment. Writing in the Journal of Animal Ecology, biologist Henrik Brumm of the Free University of Berlin found that male territorial nightingales in Berlin had to sing five times as loud in an area of heavy traffic. “Does that have effects on the musculature they need to sing?” Schulenberg wonders. “Can they sing even louder, or are they going to eventually hit a wall and be washed out by human noise?” http://louis-j-sheehan.net

The U.S. National Park Service, under its Natural Sounds Program, wrestles with similar questions. Karen K. Trevino, the program director, cites studies showing that when exposed to the sounds of planes and helicopters, bighorn sheep forage less efficiently, mountain goats flee and caribou do not successfully reproduce as frequently. Senior acoustic specialist Kurt Fristrup of the National Park Service notes that human sounds cause problems other than acute annoyances. Namely, they can “mask some of the quieter yet important sounds of nature like footfalls and breathing—the cues that predators listen for to catch prey and that prey use to escape predators,” he says.

According to Krause, sound can also help determine how habitat destruction alters species populations. He did a 15-year study in Lincoln Meadow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, a region that was selectively logged and of which loggers insisted there would be no change. Photographs showed little change, Krause found, but audio revealed a drastic drop in species diversity and density. Says Krause: “The transformation from a robust natural symphony to almost silent was quite alarming.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire