Smoking Could Alter Teens' Brain Structure

It’s common knowledge that smoking cigarettes is bad for your health, but young people are still choosing to light up more than any other demographic in the United States. Researchers now have evidence that a specific part of the brain varies between smokers and nonsmokers. The researchers say it could be that smoking is causing these changes, even in teenagers who have smoked for a relatively short period of time.

Prior research has shown brain differences between adult smokers and nonsmokers, but few studies focused on the youngest demographic of smokers whose brains are still undergoing development. The new findings indicate that a small part of a brain region called the insula is thinner in young people who smoke.

The insula is a part of the cerebral cortex, and it is involved in shaping our consciousness and emotions. The insula also houses a high concentration of nicotine receptors and plays a critical role in generating the craving to smoke. The study’s lead researcher Edythe London said they focused on this particular part of the brain because previous studies in adults and mice showed its size and volume were affected by smoking.

To test differences in the insula of young smokers, London and her colleagues used structural MRI to compare the brains of 18 smokers and 24 nonsmokers between the ages of 16 and 21. The average age smokers started the habit was 15, and they averaged six to seven cigarettes a day.

The brain scans showed that thickness of the insula, on average, was not substantially different between the groups. However, the thickness of a smaller part of the insular region, the right insula, was negatively related to cigarette dependence. Individuals who had smoked for longer, or had stronger urges to smoke, had a thinner right insula. The team published their findings this week in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

“It looks like, even in these very young kids, there is a link between the structure of the insula and the extent to which they smoke and become dependent,” London said in a Neuropsychopharmacology podcast. “It was shocking. We are beginning to get a story of the functional neuroanatomy of smoking.”

Although the study illustrated a difference in brain structure of young smokers and nonsmokers, it did not establish whether smoking caused the variations. It could be that people with differently structured insulas are more likely to take up smoking for an unknown reason. However, the results pave the way for future studies to determine the actual cause and effect.

“Ideally one would start the study in 12-year-olds who haven’t begun to smoke; follow them out after they begin to smoke; and see if in fact the smaller insula thickness was a predictor of a predilection to become a smoker,” London explained in the podcast.

On the other hand, if London’s team finds proof that smoking causes thinning of the right insula, it would provide further evidence of the detrimental health effects of picking up the habit at a young age. 

Photo credit: Dora Zett/Shutterstock

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Baby Brain Scans Predict Later Cognitive Development?

The shape of a newborn baby’s brain can predict its later cognitive development, according to a new study from New York neuroscientists Marisa Spann and colleagues.

Here’s the paper: Morphological features of the neonatal brain support development of subsequent cognitive, language, and motor abilities

Now, while the word ‘phrenology‘ gets banded around a lot these days by people who don’t like neuroscience, this study actually sort of fits that description – except instead of ‘bumps on skulls’ it was more ‘bumps on brains’. The authors scanned 48 babies (within 6 weeks of birth) using MRI to obtain an image of brain structure; they then analyzed the shape of each brain using a deformation-based morphology approach.

This revealed areas on each brain that were bigger or smaller than the average newborn brain:

The outputs were a set of local ‘indentations’ and ‘protrusions’… or, one might say, troughs and bumps? Anyway, after being scanned, the babies were followed up for two years and tested every 6 months to measure their developmental functioning in the domains of motor, language, and cognitive skills (using the Bayley-III scale.)

There were significant correlations between brain shape and later development, however interestingly, most of these were negative correlations – that is, infants with a thinner cerebral cortex in each particular area did better:

Here for example you can see results for the cognitive domain at ages 6, 12, 18 and 24 months. There are correlations in many areas, mostly negative (purple blobs), with the exception of some positive (yellow) correlations in the occipital cortex but these areas only predicted performance at 6 months.

So it would seem that in general, ‘less is more’ for many parts of the newborn brain. Which is interesting because in a previous study, as the authors write,

At birth, head circumference as a proxy for brain volume was the strongest (positive) predictor of intelligence at 4 years (Gale et al 2006).

Spann et al don’t seem to have analyzed whole-brain volume, but why would regional cortical thickness be a negative predictor of development? They suggest that it might be a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race type deal:

Slower or more protracted maturation of the brain or brain subregions, that are otherwise growing rapidly specifically in the neonatal period, may support the development and emergence of improved motor, language, and cognitive abilities in later infancy.

However… the sample size wasn’t huge. Although they scanned 48 babies, only 37 had usable MRI data (for the other 11, quality was too poor). And of those, they were only able to get developmental assessments on n=33 at age 6 months, falling to n=18 by 24 months. A decently sized study at the outset, it had become a decidedly small one by the end.

And I do worry (as I always seem to these days) about head movement. It’s hard enough to get adults to lie still in an MRI scanner. With babies it’s all but impossible which is why the authors used the special motion-resistant T2 PROPELLER sequence. However, they still had to throw out about a quarter of their scans, perhaps for excessive motion.

Could the scans they included have been degraded by movement, perhaps correlated with baby temperament and later behaviour, and could this have confounded the deformation-based morphology? Spann et al say that “the similarity transformation of an infant brain to a template is robust to the presence of noise in the imaging data” but it would have been nice to see some quantitative checks of that assumption.

Spann, M., Bansal, R., Rosen, T., & Peterson, B. (2014). Morphological features of the neonatal brain support development of subsequent cognitive, language, and motor abilities Human Brain Mapping DOI: 10.1002/hbm.22487

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U.S. scientist operates colleague's brain from across campus

By Sharon Begley

NEW YORK | Tue Aug 27, 2013 5:26pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Scientists said Tuesday they have achieved the first human-to-human mind meld, with one researcher sending a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand motion of a colleague sitting across the Seattle campus of the University of Washington.

The feat is less a conceptual advance than another step in the years-long progress that researchers have made toward brain-computer interfaces, in which electrical signals generated from one brain are translated by a computer into commands that can move a mechanical arm or a computer cursor - or, in more and more studies, can affect another brain.

Much of the research has been aimed at helping paralyzed patients regain some power of movement, but bioethicists have raised concerns about more controversial uses.

In February, for instance, scientists led by Duke University Medical Center's Miguel Nicolelis used electronic sensors to capture the thoughts of a rat in a lab in Brazil and sent via Internet to the brain of a rat in the United States. The second rat received the thoughts of the first, mimicking its behavior. And electrical activity in the brain of a monkey at Duke, in North Carolina, was recently sent via the Internet, controlling a robot arm in Japan.

That raised dystopian visions of battalions of animal soldiers - or even human ones - whose brains are remotely controlled by others. Some of Duke's brain-computer research, though not this study, received funding from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA.

FINGERING A KEYBOARD

For the new study, funded by the U.S. Army Research Office and other non-military federal agencies, UW professor of computer science and engineering Rajesh Rao, who has studied brain-computer interfaces for more than a decade, sat in his lab on August 12 wearing a cap with electrodes hooked up to an electroencephalography machine, which reads electrical activity in the brain.

He looked at a computer screen and played a simple video game but only mentally. At one point, he imagined moving his right hand to fire a cannon, making sure not to actually move his hand.

The EEG electrodes picked up the brain signals of the "fire cannon!" thought and transmitted them to the other side of the UW campus.

There, Andrea Stocco of UW's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences was wearing a purple swim cap with a device, called a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) coil, placed directly over his left motor cortex, which controls the right hand's movement.

When the move-right-hand signal arrived from Rao, Stocco involuntarily moved his right index finger to push the space bar on the keyboard in front of him, as if firing the cannon. He said the feeling of his hand moving involuntarily was like that of a nervous tic.

"It was both exciting and eerie to watch an imagined action from my brain get translated into actual action by another brain," Rao said.

Other experts suggested the feat was not particularly impressive. It's possible to capture one of the few easy-to-recognize EEG signals and send "a simple shock ... into the other investigator's head," said Andrew Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh, who was not part of the research.

Rao agreed that what his colleague jokingly called a "Vulcan mind meld" reads only simple brain signals, not thoughts, and cannot be used on anyone unknowingly. But it might one day be harnessed to allow an airline pilot on the ground help someone land a plane whose own pilot is incapacitated.

The research has not been published in a scientific journal, something university spokeswoman Doree Armstrong admits is "a bit unusual." But she said the team knew other researchers are working on this same thing and they felt "time was of the essence."

Besides, she said, they have a video of the experiment which "they felt it could stand on its own." The video is here

The absence of a scientific publication that other researchers could scrutinize did not sit well with some of the nation's leading brain-computer-interface experts. All four of those reached by Reuters praised UW's Rao, but some were uneasy with the announcement and one called it "mostly a publicity stunt." The experiment was not independently verified.

(The story corrects funding source in fifth paragraph and eliminates reference to Skype in eighth)

(Reporting by Sharon Begley; editing by Julie Steenhuysen and Cynthia Osterman)

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The Brain Speaks

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[Errata] A Correction to the Research Article Titled: "The Identification and Characterization of Breast Cancer CTCs Competent for Brain Metastasis" by L. Zhang, L. D. Ridgway, M. D. Wetzel, J. Ngo, W. Yin, D. Kumar, J. C. Goodman, M. D. Groves, D. Marchetti

Meditation and mindfulness may give your brain a boost

They are the simplest instructions in the world: Sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes, clear your mind and try to focus on the present moment. Yet I am confident that anyone who has tried meditation will agree with me that what seems so basic and easy on paper is often incredibly challenging in real life.

I've dabbled in mantras and mindfulness over the years but have never really been able to stick to a regular meditation practice. My mind always seems to wander from pressing concerns such as the grocery list to past blunders or lapses, then I get a backache or an itchy nose (or both) and start feeling bored, and eventually I end up so stressed out about de-stressing that I give up. But I keep coming back and trying again, every so often, because I honestly feel like a calmer, saner and more well-adjusted person when I meditate, even if it's just for a few minutes in bed at the end of the day.

Now there's even more reason to give it another go: New research from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston indicates that meditating regularly can actually change our brain structure for the better, and in just a few months.

The small study, published last month in Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, tracked 16 people who took a course on mindfulness-based stress reduction - a type of meditation that, besides focusing your attention, includes guided relaxation exercises and easy stretching - and practiced for about 30 minutes a day. After eight weeks, MRI scans showed significant gray matter density growth in areas of the brain involved in learning and memory, empathy and compassion, sense of self and emotional regulation, when compared with a control group. In addition, the researchers referred to an earlier study that found a decrease in gray matter in the amygdala, a region of the brain that affects fear and stress, which correlated with a change in self-reported stress levels.

"This is really, clearly, where we can see, for the first time, that when people say, 'Oh, I feel better, I'm not as stressed when I meditate,' they're not just saying that - that there is a biological reason why they're feeling less stress," says senior author Sara Lazar, a psychology instructor at Harvard Medical School. She notes that these findings build on prior research that has found positive brain changes in long-term meditators: "But this is proof that it's really meditation that's making the difference," as opposed to other potential factors such as diet or lifestyle, she says. "And it doesn't take long to get there."

None of this comes as a surprise to dedicated meditators or to doctors who regularly prescribe the practice.

"The study shows that meditation induces certain physiological brain changes that are consistent with many of the health benefits we see clinically," says family medicine and chronic pain specialist Gary Kaplan, director of the Kaplan Center for Integrative Medicine in McLean, who recommends meditation as part of a treatment plan for every one of his patients. He reports that patients who follow this advice typically sleep better, have less pain, less anxiety and depression, and a better general sense of well-being. Kaplan adds that this admittedly anecdotal evidence comes on top of at least a decade's worth of research showing that meditation can have a range of benefits such as reduced stress and blood pressure, migraine relief, an improved attention span and better immune function.

Given that meditation is readily accessible, cheap and portable and has few if any risks, there's really no harm in giving it a try, says Kaplan, who suggests that getting a book or CD on the topic or taking a basic class is a good way to start.

He acknowledges that the practice is far from easy, at least in part because the mind is bound to wander. "We spend a whole bunch of time time-traveling - a lot of time in the future, worrying, and a lot in the past, dwelling on regrets and grief and loss - and we spend very little time in the present, focused on what's going on at this moment," he explains. "So allowing that chatter to quiet and becoming present in the moment, while being gentle with the thoughts that come in and out of the mind and any anxiety that's there, that can be difficult."

For those who are skeptical or who continue to struggle, Hugh Byrne, a senior teacher with the Insight Mediation Community of Washington, suggests some tips for getting going - and sticking with it:

Seek the right style. There are many forms of meditation, with different objectives, and it's important to do some research and find the one that works best for you, whether it involves walking, chanting or deep-breathing exercises.

Practice, practice, practice. It's essential to cultivate a regular, daily routine to get your mind in the habit of meditating, even if it's just five or 10 minutes to start, says Byrne, who recommends slowly increasing that to 30 minutes or more every day.

Be mindful all day long. Meditation "isn't just about bringing awareness to your experience while you're sitting cross-legged with eyes closed," says Byrne. "It's also a practice that you can bring into the rest of your life: when you're eating, sitting in a traffic jam, or relating to a partner, spouse, kids or colleagues at work." He suggests finding a few minutes here and there to get centered.

Don't be discouraged by a wandering mind. It's totally normal. "The important thing is just to notice when you move into planning the future or ruminating on the past or daydreaming, just notice that and gently bring attention back to the present," says Byrne. "And come back into the body, without judgment or criticism."

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Studying Languages Can Grow the Brain

Researchers have found that people who study languages tend to show significant growth in certain areas of the brain. Christie Nicholson reports

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Learning a new language can grow one’s perspective. Now scientists find that learning languages grows parts of the brain.

Scientists studied the brains of students in the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy, who are required to learn new languages at an alarmingly fast rate. Many must become fluent in Arabic, Russian and the Persian dialect Dari in just 13 months. The researchers compared the brains of these students to the brains of medical students who also have to learn a tremendous amount in a very short period of time, but without the focus on languages.

The brains of the language learners exhibited significant new growth in the hippocampus and in parts of the cerebral cortex. The medical students’ brains showed no observed growth. The study was in the journal NeuroImage.

Interestingly, the amount of growth in the brains of the linguists correlated with better skills—so those with better language skills also experienced more growth in the hippocampus and areas of the cerebral cortex that relate to language. For other students who had to work harder to improve their language skills, the scientists found greater growth in the motor area of the cerebral cortex. Where and how much change take place in the brain are linked to how easily one picks up a language. But it remains to be seen why this is.

—Christie Nicholson

[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]

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Memory, the adolescent brain and lying: The limits of neuroscientific evidence in the law

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Colleges say federal cuts could cause brain drain

Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering Nikolai Begg poses in an MIT workshop in Cambridge, Mass., Friday, March 15, 2013. Begg is concerned about whether government funding losses could force undergraduates who are contemplating higher degrees to enter the workforce for financial reasons, meaning a loss of American ingenuity in the end. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, faculty fret about the future of the school's Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Thirty miles (fifty kilometers) away, administrators at the state university campus in Lowell worry that research aimed at designing better body armor for soldiers could suffer.

The concerns have emerged because of automatic federal budget cuts that could reduce government funding for research done at educational institutions, spending that totaled about $33.3 billion in 2010, Department of Education statistics show. And the possible cuts raise another concern at those schools and others across the country: brain drain.

President Barack Obama and lawmakers failed to agree on a plan to reduce the nation's deficit that would have avoided the automatic spending cuts, the so-called sequester, which began to roll out this month. Included in the cuts are 5 percent of the money for programs that fund education research, a Department of Education spokesman said Friday. But because negotiations over how to balance the budget are ongoing, the timing and size of many cuts to be made by government agencies remain unclear.

"One of the questions we don't know is if agencies will elect to cut funding by not making new grants or cutting back on old grants," said Terry Hartle, a senior vice president at the American Council on Education.

In the meantime, professors are left wondering how many young scientists will become discouraged by domestic funding challenges and either leave for careers abroad or change fields.

At MIT, doctoral candidate Nikolai Begg said he's lucky the research he's working on now has corporate sponsorship.

"It's kind of scary to be hearing that a lot of that support is going away," he said of government cuts. "How do we keep America technologically relevant has been a question on everybody's mind. And the sequester only makes that harder."

The 25-year-old mechanical engineer recently won a $30,000 Lemelson-MIT award for inventions that aim to make surgical procedures less invasive. But Begg is concerned about whether government funding losses could force undergraduates who are contemplating higher degrees to enter the workforce for financial reasons, meaning a loss of American ingenuity in the end.

"I wonder if this whole issue is going to prevent people from going into more advanced research where they can really innovate ... We don't really know what it's going to do yet. There's not enough information out. You know the storm is coming."

Some university officials say a loss of federal funding from the cuts aggravates a current trend: Scientists already have less time to spend in their labs because they have to spend more time seeking grants.

"What the sequester has done is make more dramatic this trend," said Scott Zeger, Johns Hopkins University's vice provost for research. "... It means that people aren't spending quiet time thinking about how nature works."

Breast cancer researcher Dr. Debu Tripathy, a professor at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, compared a scientist who doesn't spend enough time in a lab because of grant writing to a politician who is too busy campaigning for re-election to serve constituents.

He worries the country's commitment to a war on cancer, going back to the signing of the National Cancer Act in 1971, could falter. Tripathy said a lot of good science isn't getting funded and bright minds aren't coming into the field.

"If we don't engage the brightest minds to continue the trajectory we're on, then that will affect a whole generation," the doctor said.

At Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, dean Dr. Larry Shapiro said the automatic cuts are causing anxiety among young researchers who are wondering what career options they'll have if the current economic climate becomes "the new normal."

"This is all that's being discussed in the hallways and over coffee," he said.

He said two genetics researchers recently decided to leave the university and move their labs to the United Kingdom amid the climate of funding losses.

"Scientists are passionate about their work, and they'll go where they have the best opportunity to accomplish it," Shapiro said.

Washington University School of Medicine could be looking at $30 million to $40 million in budget cuts because of cutbacks at the National Institutes of Health, and possibly having to cut 300 scientific personnel jobs, according to Shapiro. The school is part of a consortium working on new therapies for Alzheimer's disease, and he said that work would be slowed considerably because the NIH is a big funding source.

At the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, school officials are projecting that they could lose about $8 million in research money, which could affect projects including biofuels research.

But UMass-Amherst chemistry professor Paul Lahti, who is leading research on better ways to harvest solar energy, said it's the job of senior faculty members to keep students encouraged and excited about the future of discovery despite negative economic factors.

"You carry on and do the best work you can," Lahti tells them.

"The science is going to get done," the professor said. "The younger people in the end are the ones that are our most important project."

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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[Report] Transposition-Driven Genomic Heterogeneity in the Drosophila Brain

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