November 2002

As we begin the second year of our monthly Newsletter we wish to welcome our new subscribers and thank our current subscribers.

Much has happened this past year. National and International advancements in research and technology in this field of brain research continue to increase and become published. We are finding that the results published (and then passed on to our subscribers) can only help educate all in the various techniques, treatments and modalities that are available.

On a more local front, The Crossroads Institute has also grown and improved. We are relocating The Crossroads Clinic and Lab from our rustic and desert setting of Cave Creek, Arizona to a very accessible location in the heart of Phoenix off the 101. For our local clients we feel this will help with regard to time, travel and traffic. For our national and international clients we are now 20 minutes from the airport.

With the addition of Dr. Martha Grout, M.D. we have seen improvements with our clients in diet, nutrition, allergy, pain and a return to organ balance with the use of advancements in Western medicine and the inclusion of traditional Chinese Medicine.

Dr. Grout returned in October from an extended stay in China. She is putting into practice her new knowledge learning from the Masters.

Dr. Curtis Cripe, PhD. has expanded his neurodevelopment protocols this population of special needs children, adolescents, young adults and adults. He has been on-call around the country explaining his successes as well as demonstrating his techniques.

Dr. Cripe has been invited to Russia at the end of November to study and work with Dr. Juri D. Kropotov on the latest International advancements of evoked potentials as they relate to neurodevelopment.

We believe Dr. Martha Grout's and Dr. Curtis Cripe's continued expertise in the latest advancements in this field can only benefit our clients and their families.

We hope you enjoy this month's newsletter.

-The Crossroads Staff-

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FAMILY EXPERIENCES

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We begin a new segment in this November issue on Family Experiences. We are asked quite often about family and client outcomes. So we have decided to add this section based on frequent requests for these stories. We start with Matt. His story is from his mother's perspective and two of his therapists. When he came to Crossroads Institute he was diagnosed with Autism. Mom: Matt was eight years old when we had our first appointment with Dr. Cripe in February 2000. He had been in 35-40 hours weekly ABA since January 1996. He had also received Occupational Therapy, Music Therapy, Speech Therapy, vitamin therapy from the HRI Pfeiffer group, two secretin injections and the ten day treatment of Berard method of Auditory therapy. At the time he was in the 2nd grade, regular education classroom with aide support. He was labeled Moderately Autistic, but wasn't independently functional. In essence, he was guided through life, reacting with learned rote responses. Cheryl (Therapist) : The most significant change that I remember in Matt when we started using Dr. Cripe's program, was his coordination. I still remember how he hated to hang from the monkey bars in the back yard, but he did it and he gained confidence in it. This is also when he started to play baseball, and rollerblade. And, remember how he made it to the top of the climbing wall? There was a significant change in his expressive speech. He started to talk about how he did not like certain things and how he really liked others. This is when his complaining started, however, we were all excited that he was expressing himself. I feel that his maturity level rapidly increased and he started to show the mannerisms of a 9-year-old boy. We also faded out his reward system at school. After receiving a reward each day at the end of the school day, we faded to a treat when he got home, then we started working for a reward at the end of the week. Joanne (Therapist): I think one of the biggest benefits from Matt's treatment was the overall increase in motor skills that allowed Matt to finally gain the endurance that would let him play sports and other things with the guys at school. We had a huge gain in language abilities. Because of the treatment they (gains) came sooner and we did not see that huge backslide in other skills as he gained new ones. From the auditory and visual digit span drills Matt's short term and long term memory skills, as well as auditory skills improved. While he still has several issue with auditory processing skills, I can only imagine where he would be without the extra help he got. Mom: Today Matt is 10 years old and in regular education classroom. He will work independently, knows what he needs to do, but like most children, needs encouragement. He brought home a "progress report card" with 3 A's and 2 B's. He's playing, and I say that very loosely, the trumpet in the school band and plays games and various sports with a group of boys at recess (all typical). The greatest and most significant difference we have seen with Matt since treatment at Crossroads Institute is his awareness of self. He now understands that he is an individual and that there are rewards and consequences for his actions in life. There has been a positive change in our family dynamics as well. We are able to eat in restaurants (other than fast food), have family outings such as attend a baseball game at Bank One Ballpark, go to the mall, attend festivals and weddings. I'm also getting feedback from people who don't know him, that he's such a nice, social young man! -Marina- As an aside, the latest physician to see Matt said he could not possible be Autistic as he did not exhibit those symptoms. Curtis T. Cripe, Ph.D.

NIH Opens CAM database to Public Access to reliable, medically sound information about complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) just got easier. The National Institutes of Health today announced it was putting more than 220 thousand CAM journal abstracts and full text articles dating back to 1996 in the online database free to the public. "This joint venture will offer health professionals, CAM practitioners, researchers, educators, and consumers, ready access to a comprehensive database of journal citations directly related to complementary and alternative medicine," the Director of the National Library of Medicine, Donald Lindberg, MD, is quoted as saying. Americans spend billions of dollars annually on complementary and alternative medical treatments even though "few CAM methods have been proven safe and effective," according to the NIH. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), a division of NIH, had a budget of $70 million last year to support rigorous clinical testing of CAM therapies. "It is not sufficient for 12 people to get up and say 'I feel better,'" Dr. Stephen Straus, NCCAM Director told the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy last October. Americans need reliable information about what works and what could be harmful, and their doctors need to be knowledgeable about therapies their patients may already be using."CAM on PUBMED" allows visitors to search for journal articles related to a variety of CAM therapies, approaches and systems from acupuncture to herbs to traditional Chinese medicine. The best way to access PUBMED for CAM information is to visit the NCCAM site first and link from there. PUBMED searches conducted through NCCAM automatically limit results to CAM material. WEB RESOURCES:NCCAM Web site www.nccam.nih.govNational Library of Medicine Kids Using Prescription Drugs More NEW YORK (AP) - While parents now are often nervous about medicating children, it is becoming more common. Use of prescription drugs is growing faster among children than it is among senior citizens and baby boomers, the two traditionally high consumer groups, according to a new study. Spending on prescription drugs for those under 19 grew 28 percent last year, according to the survey by Medco Health Solutions, a Franklin, N.J.-based pharmacy benefits manager. Meanwhile, spending per patient rose 23 percent for those between the ages of 35 and 49 and less than 10 percent for those above 65. Children are also spending 34 percent more time on medication than they were five years ago, the study found. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a government agency, estimates that overall spending on prescription drugs rose 16.4 percent to $142 billion last year. Among children, the most prescribed drugs were for allergies, asthma and infections. Prescriptions for Ritalin and other medicines for neurological and psychological disorders were also substantial - a finding that renewed concern among some experts who worry that such drugs may be over-prescribed for children. Some doctors also were alarmed that spending on prescription drugs to treat heartburn and other gastrointestinal disorders surged 660 percent over five years, according to the study. The jump was seen as linked to the increasing number of overweight children in the United States. Some of the findings on prescription drugs mirrored trends seen in disease patterns. For example, the incidence of asthma and allergies are generally increasing, so doctors said it wasn't surprising that children's prescriptions for such ailments would also grow. About 7 percent of children have asthma and 25 percent have allergies, approximately double the incidence 25 years ago, according to Dr. Michael Blaiss, a pediatrician who specializes in such ailments. Medicating her children has at times been a difficult process. Her daughter, when she was 9, had a severe reaction to steroid she was taking and went into shock. It took 18 months of experimenting to find a correct dosage. Even so, she's more comfortable now than she was at first with having her daughter taking drugs. ``I feel differently now because I see that she needs it and she is better because of it,'' Olson said. ``I know things have gotten better since that time, but drugs are such an important part of treatment that we need more studies,'' she said. The survey also found that spending on antibiotics among children increased 42 percent. Doctors say antibiotic resistance is a widespread problem. Spending on drugs for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder increased 122 percent over the past four years and accounted for 8 percent of the total spent on prescription drugs for children, up from 7 percent in 1997. Spending for depression medicines held steady at 5 percent of the total. Dr. Lawrence Diller, author of ``Should I Medicate My Child?'' worries that such drugs are over-prescribed. He also pointed out that, there haven't been many studies of the effects of antidepressants on children. ``The antidepressants are known to have sexual side effects. I wonder what the long-term effects of that is going to be on adolescents,'' Diller said. The vast majority of prescription drugs are developed for adults, and drug makers are not obliged to test them on children. In 1997, Congress passed legislation that gave drug companies an additional six months of market exclusivity if they tested their drugs on children. That has sparked more tests, but experts say more studies are needed. Dr. John Ring, who sits on the American Academy of Pediatrics' Committee on Drugs said most of the prescriptions written for children are still written for drugs that haven't been approved for youngsters. New Signaling Pathway Found, May Be Linked To Movement Disorders St. Louis, July 11, 2002 — Though previous evidence points to the contrary, scientists have discovered that the protein known as fibroblast growth factor 14 (FGF14) may not actually behave like a growth factor. The research suggests that FGF14 is instead involved in transmitting signals from one nerve cell to another and may help regulate walking and other movements. The protein could, therefore, be linked to movement disorders such as Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases. "We believe we have found a new signaling pathway in the brain," says study leader David M. Ornitz, M.D., Ph.D., professor of molecular biology and pharmacology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "Once we learn what FGF14 does at the molecular level, I believe we may uncover a new mechanism for regulating nerve cell function." The work is published in the July 3 issue of the journal Neuron. It is the first study to examine the role of FGF14 in living animals and could provide new targets for testing future drugs designed to treat movement disorders and seizures, says Ornitz, who also leads the cancer and developmental biology program at the Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine. Ornitz and the team of investigators developed a strain of mice lacking the gene for FGF14. They expected these mice to have brain abnormalities and to perhaps die before birth. To their surprise, however, the mice seemed physically healthy and lived relatively normal lives, though most were about 15 percent under-weight after two weeks of age. But the young mice did develop coordination problems and abnormal posture. Compared with normal mice, the genetically altered animals walked sluggishly and shuffled, and they had reduced muscle strength. They also were less sensitive to stimulants such as cocaine and amphetamines and were more prone to drug-induced seizures. The investigators also examined the animals' brains. When they disabled the gene for FGF14, the team had ensured that a fraction of the protein remained intact and replaced the rest with a protein that appears blue when exposed to certain chemicals. This marker molecule revealed that FGF14 was primarily found in three regions of the mouse nervous system: the cerebellum and basal ganglia in the brain and the motor tracts of the spinal cord. All three areas are involved in regulating movement. The basal ganglia, in particular, are affected by Parkinson's disease and other movement disorders. Also surprisingly, FGF14 fragments also showed up in the long projections—the axons—of the nerve cells. "This tells us that FGF14 recognizes the machinery that transports material down the axon to the area of the synapse, where nerve impulses jump from one neuron to the next," says Ornitz. What it does at the synapse is a question Ornitz plans to investigate next. He speculates that FGF14 could signal the formation or release of neurotransmitters, modulate electrical signals or mechanisms that transport electrical signals or regulate the transport of molecules down the axon. "Any number of things are possible," he says. One thing is certain, though. "It's pretty clear now that FGF14 is not a growth factor," he says.

Jimson Weed Extract Induces Differentiation of Glioma Cells By Stephen Pincock Reuters Health Information 2002. LONDON (Reuters Health) Sept 30 - A lectin from a highly poisonous plant known as Jimson weed could one day be the basis of a new treatment for glioma, Japanese researchers report. The lectin, Datura stramonium agglutinin, or DSA, induced differentiation of rat glioma cells in vitro into cells with astrocytic morphological characteristics, they report in the British Journal of Cancer for October. The differentiation DSA induced was irreversible, being sustained once the lectin was removed, the researchers report. "DSA controls glioma cells as a result of glial differentiation rather than actually killing cells," said lead researcher Dr. Tasuku Sasaki, from the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology. "Any drug based on this concept would help patients suffering with tumors that are difficult to remove, such as gliomas." Proliferation of four human glioma cell lines was also inhibited by the presence of DSA, Dr. Sasaki's team reports. "Taken together, these observations suggest that Datura stramonium agglutinin may be useful as a new therapy for treating glioma without side effects," they write. Professor John Double, head of the Cancer Research UK Unit at Bradford University, said the discovery was exciting, but extremely preliminary. "More needs to be done before we have enough evidence to commit to trials. Potential treatment, based on DSA, for this form of brain cancer is still a long way off." Cancer Research UK's chief executive, Sir Paul Nurse, agreed, noting "there is much work to be done on the journey from the laboratory bench to the patient's bedside." Reuters Health Information 2002. © 2002 Reuters Ltd. Association of QEEG findings with clinical characteristics of OCD: Evidence of left frontotemporal dysfunction. Tot S, Ozge A, Comelekoglu U, Yazici K, Bal N. University of Mersin School of Medicine, Mersin, Turkey. OBJECTIVE: Our objectives were 1) to determine hemispheric asymmetry and regional differences on the EEGs of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD); and 2) to investigate the effects of sex, treatment response, illness duration, and Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) scores on quantitative electroencephalographic (QEEG) measurements. METHOD: We recorded EEGs (12-channel) from 22 unmedicated patients with OCD but no depression and from 20 age- and sex-matched control subjects. All patients and control subjects underwent detailed neurological and psychiatric evaluations including the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS) and Y-BOCS. RESULTS: QEEG revealed higher frequencies of slow-wave bands and lower frequencies of alpha activity at predominantly left frontotemporal localization in patients with OCD, compared with control subjects. Analysis of variance of QEEG parameters and clinical characteristics showed that sex had a significant effect on delta and alpha frequencies of frontotemporal areas during hyperventilation (HV). Increasing total Y-BOCS score correlated positively with increased frequencies of right parietal delta activity and decreased frequencies of right frontotemporal alpha activity during HV. A significantly increased left frontal slow-wave activity and decreased beta activity during HV in treatment responders led us to consider that frontal lobe functions were better in this group of patients. Illness duration had no important effect on QEEG. CONCLUSION: Patients with OCD showed important frontotemporal dysfunction, predominantly in the left hemisphere. This was particularly evident in female subjects and in treatment responders. QEEG may be beneficial in understanding the neurobiological basis of OCD.

Basic Response Time Tools for Studying General Processing Capacity in Attention, Perception, and Cognition. Journal of General Psychology Author: Michael J. Wenger Department of Psychology University of Notre Dame Department of Psychology Indiana University ABSTRACT. One of the more important constructs in the study of attention, perception, and cognition is that of capacity. The authors reviewed some of the common meanings of this construct and proposed a more precise treatment. They showed how the distribution of response times can be used to derive measures of process capacity and to further illustrate how these measures can be used to address important hypotheses in cognition. IMAGINE THAT YOU ARE A CLERK in a 24-hr convenience store. You work the midnight to 8:00 a.m. shift--a dangerous one, because the store has been robbed numerous times during this period. You have been trained to watch each customer very carefully for any signs of threat, such as a narrowing of the eyes, a sneer or twitch of the lips, rapid glances around the store, even combinations of these signs. And you have to watch for these signals both in the upright faces of the customers as they pass in front of the counter and in their inverted images in the store's security mirrors. The situation just described contains a number of tasks similar to those commonly used to study whole and divided attention (e.g., Lavie, 1995). In fact, various aspects of this imaginary situation correspond to commonly used experimental manipulations, including variations in the number of target locations (e.g., places in the store and in the security mirrors), variations in the number of distractors (e.g., customers who have already been deemed as unthreatening), and variations in load (e.g., looking for both narrowed eyes and a twitch of the lips as compared with narrowed eyes alone; assessing more than one new customer). Consequently, it would be meaningful to ask how much of this environmental information you, as the clerk, can process, as well as how efficiently you are processing it, in the various possible situations. Some of the most basic questions about the ability of humans to attend to and process environmental information take the form of how much and how efficiently. Certainly, some of the most well known of the earliest investigations (e.g., Sir William Hamilton's examination of the span of apprehension) concerned the first of these, though the basic questions appear to have been posed as early as Aristotle. The import of these questions and the implications of their possible answers have continued to the present day. Indeed, assumptions regarding the answers to these types of questions have formed the bedrock for numerous contemporary theories of attention, perception, and higher levels of cognition. Our goal in the present article is to illustrate how a construct fundamental to attention--capacity--can be informatively assessed by using response times (RTs). We hope to demonstrate that the functions of time that we call H(t) (the integrated hazard function) and C(t) (a capacity coefficient) can be used in a broad spectrum of psychological tasks in which RTs can be observed. In particular, divided attention (e.g., Bonnel & Hafter, 1998; Nyberg, Nilsson, Olofsson, & Baeckman, 1998), selective cuing (e.g., Cheal & Gregory, 1997; Henderson, 1996; Luck, Hillyard, Mouloua, & Hawkins, 1996; Tellinghuisen, Zimba, & Robin, 1997), and designs that vary number of items (e.g., dimensions, objects; de Haan, Lutz, & Noest, 1998; Lavie, 1995) are obvious targets for the application of these functions as are any investigations that use RT to measure or compare efficiency of processing in distinct task conditions. continued ... Mechanisms of cerebral cortical patterning in mice and humans Edwin S. Monuki1, 2, 3 & Christopher A. Walsh1   Division of Neurogenetics, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mas. Department of Pathology, Division of Neuropathology, Children's Hospital and Brigham & Women's Hospital, Boston, Mass. Present address: UC Irvine College of Medicine, Department of Pathology, Irvine, Ca All the higher mental and cognitive functions unique to humans depend on the neocortex (`new' cortex, referring to its relatively recent appearance in evolution), which is divided into discrete areas that subserve distinct functions, such as language, movement and sensation. With a few notable exceptions, all neocortical areas have six layers of neurons and a remarkably similar thickness and overall cell density, despite subtle differences in their cellular architecture. Furthermore, all neocortical areas are formed over roughly the same time period during development and provide little hint at early developmental stages of the rich functional diversity that becomes apparent as development comes to an end. How these areas are formed has long fascinated developmental neuroscientists, because the formation of new cortical areas, with the attendant appearance of new cortical functions, is what must have driven the evolution of mammalian behavior. There are two general viewpoints about how cortical areas form which can be seen as defining the ends of a mechanistic spectrum. One school of thought suggests that cortical organization reflects the afferent input received—for example, visual cortex is visual because that is where information from the eyes ends up. There is now a large body of literature supporting the importance of destination and electrical activity of afferent inputs in shaping cortical pattern and refining the cellular architecture of cortical areas. This literature has been reviewed recently and will not be further discussed here. The other school of thought suggests that a significant amount of patterning information exists in the cortex before and independent from the arrival of afferent inputs. Indeed, early experimental evidence for such `intrinsic' patterning of the cortex preceded by decades our more recent insights into how these differences might be determined. Both limbic cortex, the evolutionarily `older' neighbor of neocortex and neocortical regions have a molecular `memory' of their origin when deprived of normal afferent input in transplant or explant settings during cortical neurogenesis. More recently, a striking amount of intrinsic cortical patterning has been shown in two different mouse mutants that lack thalamocortical connections, the major afferent input into the cortex8, 9. These and other studies suggest that intrinsic cortical specification occurs by the time neurons are being generated by the dividing progenitor cells of the cortex, which lie next to the ventricles in a layer known as the ventricular zone (VZ). The possibility that positional information could be encoded by the cortical VZ progenitor cells themselves, then maintained by postmitotic cortical neurons, developed from the observation that most postmitotic neurons enter the cortex from the cortical VZ through a restricted radial migration along radially oriented glial guide fibers. There is now considerable evidence supporting the cortical VZ as a repository of positional information that is critical for cortical areal patterning. The mechanisms involved in patterning the cortical VZ are the subject of this review. Although much of our insight into these mechanisms has relied on studies in mice, humans are subject to a wide variety of naturally occurring mutations that have identified cortical patterning genes through a `forward genetics' approach. We therefore attempt to integrate mouse and human studies into a hierarchy of events that pattern the cortical VZ. more information

The Quivering Bundles That Let Us Hear: Signals From a Hair Cell — Jeff Goldberg     An unusual dance recital was videotaped in David Corey's lab at Massachusetts General Hospital recently. The star of the performance, magnified many times under a high-powered microscope, was a sound-receptor cell from the ear of a bullfrog, called a hair cell because of the distinctive tuft of fine bristles sprouting from its top. The music ranged from the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and Richard Strauss' "Thus Spake Zarathustra" to David Byrne and the Beatles. As the music rose and fell, an electronic amplifier translated it into vibrations of a tiny glass probe that stimulated the hair cell, mimicking its normal stimulation in the ear. The bristly bundle of "stereocilia" at the top of the cell quivered to the high-pitched tones of violins, swayed to the rumblings of kettle drums, and bowed and recoiled, like tiny trees in a hurricane, to the blasts of rock-and-roll. The dance of the hair cell's cilia plays a vital role in hearing, Corey explains. Now an HHMI investigator at MGH and Harvard Medical School, Corey was a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology when he began working with James Hudspeth, a leading authority on hair cells. Together, the two researchers have helped discover how movements of the cilia, which quiver with the mechanical vibrations of sound waves, cause the cell to produce a series of brief electrical signals that are conveyed to the brain as a burst of acoustic information. In humans and other mammals, hair cell bundles are arranged in four long, parallel columns on a gauzy strip of tissue called the basilar membrane. This membrane, just over an inch long, coils within the cochlea, a bony, snail-shaped structure about the size of a pea that is located deep inside the inner ear. Sound waves generated by mechanical forces, such as a bow being drawn across a string, water splashing on a hard surface, or air being expelled across the larynx, cause the eardrum—and, in turn, the three tiny bones of the middle ear—to vibrate. The last of these three bones (the stapes, or "stirrup") jiggles a flexible layer of tissue at the base of the cochlea. This pressure sends waves rippling along the basilar membrane, stimulating some of its hair cells. These cells then send out a rapid-fire code of electrical signals about the frequency, intensity, and duration of a sound. The messages travel through auditory nerve fibers that run from the base of the hair cells to the center of the cochlea, and from there to the brain. After several relays within the brain, the messages finally reach the auditory areas of the cerebral cortex, which process and interpret these signals as a musical phrase, a dripping faucet, a human voice, or any of the myriad sounds in the world around us at any particular moment. Auditory Cortical Responses to the Interactive Effects of Interaural Intensity Disparities and Frequency Julie R. Mendelson and Keith L. Grasse1 Department of Speech-Language Pathology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H2 and 1 Department of Psychology, Centre for Vision Research, Institute for Space & Terrestrial Science, York University, North York, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada   Under natural conditions, stimuli reaching the two ears contain multiple acoustic components. Rarely does a stimulus containing only one component (e.g. pure tone burst) exist outside the realm of the laboratory. For example, in sound localization the simultaneous presence of multiple cues (spectral content, level, phase, etc.) serves to increase the number of available cues and provide the listener with more information, thereby helping to reduce errors in locating the sound source. The present study was designed to explore the relationship between two acoustic parameters: stimulus frequency and interaural intensity disparities (IIDs). By varying both stimulus frequency and IIDs for each cell, we hoped to gain insight into how multiple cues are processed. To this end, we examined the responses of neurons in cat primary auditory cortex (AI) to determine if their sensitivity to IIDs changed as a function of stimulus frequency. IIDs ranging from +30 to –30 dB were presented at different frequencies (frequency was always the same in the two ears). We found that approximately half of the units examined exhibited responses to IIDs that varied as a function of stimulus frequency (i.e. displayed some form of IID x Freq dependency). The remaining units displayed IID responses that were not clearly related to stimulus frequency.   Studies have shown that cortical cells are sensitive to a variety of stimulus parameters such as interaural intensity, temporal and frequency when they are examined individually. Under natural conditions, these cues rarely arise in isolation. In fact, in sound localization if only one of the available cues is present, spatial ambiguity often occurs, causing the organism to mislocalize. This ambiguity stems from the fact that sounds arising from different locations may produce identical values of a given cue. Thus, the presence of additional cues (spectral, temporal, level, etc.) helps to disambiguate the location of the sound source. The goal of the present study was to further our understanding of how the auditory cortex processes the interaction of multiple acoustic parameters. To date, relatively few studies have examined the interaction of two or more parameters. In general, these studies have shown that the response of some neurons to one parameter can be modulated by the simultaneous manipulation of a second parameter. For example, Irvine et al. (1995) studied the relationship between interaural intensity and temporal differences as would be predicted by the time–intensity trading phenomenon observed in psychophysical studies. They found that for the majority of units in the inferior colliculus, the response to interaural intensity disparities (IIDs) could not be predicted from the response to interaural temporal disparities (ITDs). The effect of sound pressure level (SPL) has also been shown to modulate the response of units in the inferior colliculus and auditory cortex (Irvine et al., 1996) to IIDs. Park et al., on the other hand, have shown that stimulus duration has no effect on the IID response of lateral superior olive (LSO) neurons. Collectively, one point these studies clearly demonstrates is that the way in which neurons in the auditory system treat multiple parameters is by no means a simple matter. Two other parameters that warrant examination because of their intimate relationship are the intensity and spectral components of the signal. Recent studies have shown that IID-azimuth functions display different patterns of non-monotonicity/monotonicity at different frequencies. However, the way in which the interaction of these parameters is encoded by the auditory cortex is not well understood. Thus, in the present study we investigated the relationship between IIDs and stimulus frequency in an attempt to explore how the response of a cortical unit to one parameter can be modified by the manipulation of a second parameter. more...

Randomised controlled trial of community based speech and language therapy in preschool children. Author/s: Margaret Glogowska Issue: Oct 14, 2000 Abstract Objective To compare routine speech and language therapy in preschool children with delayed speech and language against 12 months of "watchful waiting." Design Pragmatic randomised controlled trial. Setting 16 community clinics in Bristol. Participants 159 preschool children with appreciable speech or language difficulties who fulfilled criteria for admission to speech and language therapy. Main outcome measures Four quantitative measures of speech and language, assessed at 6 and 12 months; a binary variable indicating improvement, by 12 months, on the trial entry criterion. Results Improvement in auditory comprehension was significant in favour of therapy (adjusted difference in means 4.1, 95% confidence interval 0.5 to 7.6; P = 0.025). No significant differences were observed for expressive language (1.4, - 2.1 to 4.8; P = 0.44); phonology error rate (- 4.4, - 12.0 to 3.3; P = 0.26); language development (0.1, - 0.4 to 0.6; P = 0.73); or improvement on entry criterion (odds ratio 1.3, 0.67 to 2.4; P = 0.46). At the end of the trial, 70% of all children still had substantial speech and language deficits. Conclusions This study provides little evidence for the effectiveness of speech and language therapy compared with watchful waiting over 12 months. Providers of speech and language therapy should reconsider the appropriateness, timing, nature, and intensity of such therapy in preschool children. Continued research into more specific provision to subgroups of children is also needed to identify better treatment methods. The lack of resolution of difficulties for most of the children suggests that further research is needed to identify effective ways of helping this population of children. Introduction Of the impairments presenting in early childhood, speech or language delay may be the most common.[1] At any one time a fifth of parents in Britain are concerned about their young child's language development.[2] Although there has been a shift to providing early intervention for these children, this has not been based on research evidence. Yet provision of therapy to children is estimated to consume 70% of the NHS budget for speech and language therapy in the United Kingdom.[2] A systematic review has shown short term efficacy of speech and language therapy for young children in an experimental environment.[3] No clear evidence exists, however, on the long term effectiveness of therapy in the context of service provision or on the natural course of early speech and language delays. In particular, the longer term course of early difficulties seems to vary for different groups of children. Some studies have suggested that 40% to 60% of children with only expressive language delay outgrow their difficulties[4 5]; others have shown that those with a range of language problems have more persistent linguistic, literacy, and social difficulties.[6-8] continued ...

How We See Things that Move: The Strange Symptoms of Blindness to Motion Howard Hughes Medical Institute The patient had great difficulty pouring coffee into a cup. She could clearly see the cup's shape, color, and position on the table, she told her doctor. She was able to pour the coffee from the pot. But the column of fluid flowing from the spout appeared frozen, like a waterfall turned to ice. She could not see its motion. So the coffee would rise in the cup and spill over the sides. More dangerous problems arose when she went outdoors. She could not cross a street, for instance, because the motion of cars was invisible to her: a car was up the street and then upon her, without ever seeming to occupy the intervening space. Even people milling through a room made her feel very uneasy, she complained to Josef Zihl, a neuropsychologist who saw her at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, Germany, in 1980, because "the people were suddenly here or there but I did not see them moving." The woman's rare motion blindness resulted from a stroke that damaged selected areas of her brain. What she lost—the ability to see objects move through space—is a key aspect of vision. In animals, this ability is crucial to survival: Both predators and their prey depend upon being able to detect motion rapidly. In fact, frogs and some other simple vertebrates may not even see an object unless it is moving. If a dead fly on a string is dangled motionlessly in front of a starving frog, the frog cannot sense this winged meal. The "bug-detecting" cells in its retina are wired to respond only to movement. The frog might starve to death, tongue firmly folded in its mouth, unaware that salvation lies suspended on a string in front of its eyes. While the retina of frogs can detect movement, the retina of humans and other primates cannot. "The dumber the animal, the smarter its retina," observes Denis Baylor of Stanford Medical School. The large, versatile brain of humans takes over the job, analyzing motion through a highly specialized pathway of neural connections. This is the pathway that was damaged in the motion-blind patient from Munich. Compared to the complex ensemble of regions in the visual cortex that are devoted to perceiving color and form, this motion-perception pathway seems relatively streamlined and simple. More than any other part of the cortex, it has yielded to efforts to unveil "the precise relationship between perception and the activity of a sensory neuron somewhere in the brain," says Anthony Movshon, an HHMI investigator at New York University. Consider what happens when we watch a movie, suggests Thomas Albright of the Salk Institute. Each of the 24 frames projected per second on the theater screen is a still photograph; nothing in a movie truly moves. The illusion of movement is created by the motion-processing system, which automatically fuses, for instance, the images of legs that shift position slightly from frame to frame into the appearance of a walking actor. The Munich patient is unable to perform this fusion. In life or in the movie theater, she sees the world as a series of stills. "The motion system must match up image elements from frame to frame, over space and time," says Albright. "It has to detect which direction a hand is moving in, for instance, and not confuse that hand with a head when it waves in front of someone's face."  A Hot Spot in the Brain's Motion Pathway — Geoffrey Montgomery   Researchers have now traced the path of neural connections that make up the motion pathway and tested the responses of cells at different steps along this path. Starting in the retina, large ganglion cells called magnocellular neurons, or M cells, are triggered into action when part of the image of a moving hand sweeps across their receptive field—the small area of the visual field to which each cell is sensitive. The M cells' impulses travel along the optic nerve to a relay station in the thalamus, near the middle of the brain, called the lateral geniculate nucleus. Then they flash to the middle layer of neurons in the primary visual cortex. There, by pooling together the inputs from many M cells, certain neurons gain a new property: they become sensitive to the direction in which the hand is moving across their window of vision. Such direction-sensitive cells were first discovered in the mammalian visual cortex by David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, who projected moving bars of light across the receptive fields of cells in the primary visual cortex of anesthetized cats and monkeys. Electrodes very close to these cells picked up their response to different moving lines, and the pattern of activity could be heard as a crackling "pop-pop-pop" when the signals were amplified and fed into a loudspeaker. The keystone of the motion pathway was discovered by Semir Zeki of University College, London, in an area of the cortex that lies just beyond the primary and secondary visual areas (V1 and V2), further from the back of the brain—a vast unexplored wilderness vaguely known as the "sensory association cortex." "It was thought that somewhere in this mishmash of association cortex visual forms were recognized and associated with information from other senses, says John Allman of the California Institute of Technology. But studies in the owl monkey by Allman and Jon Kaas (who is now at Vanderbilt) and in the rhesus monkey by Semir Zeki revealed that the area was not a mishmash at all. Instead, much of it was made up of separate visual maps, each containing a distinct representation of the visual field. In 1971, Zeki showed that one of these visual maps was remarkably specialized. Though its cells did not respond to color or form, over 90 percent of them responded to movement in a particular direction. American scientists usually call this map MT (middle temporal area), but Zeki called it V5. He also nicknamed it "the motion area." "This very striking finding of this little hot spot, this little pocket, in which almost all the cells are sensitive for the direction of movement," says New York University's Anthony Movshon, was the impetus for many vision researchers to turn their attention to motion. Nowhere else in the visual cortex was there an area that seemed so functionally specialized. The cells of this motion area, MT, are directly connected to the layer of direction-sensitive cells in the primary visual area, V1. And the two areas have a remarkably similar architecture. Hubel and Wiesel had discovered that V1 is organized into a series of columns. The cells in one column may fire only when shown lines oriented like an hour hand pointing to one o'clock, for instance, while the cells in the next column fire most readily to lines oriented at two o'clock, and so on around the dial. Amazingly, MT has the same kind of orientation system as V1, but in addition the cells in its columns respond preferentially to the direction of movement. "When you see that an area, like V1 or MT, has this highly organized columnar structure," says Wiesel, "you get a sense of uncovering something fundamental about the way the cells in the visual area work." Integrating Information About Movement — Geoffrey Montgomery     In perceiving motion, as in determining color, the brain constructs a view of the world from pieces of information that can themselves be mistaken or ambiguous. Suppose you paint an X on a piece of paper and then move that paper up and down in front of someone's eyes. Direction-selective cells in the motion-pathway layer of V1—each of which sees only a small part of the scene—will respond to the diagonal orientation of each of the lines making up the X but will not register the movement of the X as a whole. How, then, is this overall movement sensed? There must be two stages of motion analysis in the cortex, suggested Movshon and Edward Adelson, then a postdoctoral fellow at New York University (he is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). At the second stage, certain cells must integrate the signals regarding the orientation of moving lines and produce an overall signal about the motion of the whole object. When Movshon presented this idea at an annual meeting of vision researchers in 1981, he was approached by William Newsome, an HHMI investigator at Stanford University, who was then a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health. A lively three-hour dinner ensued and the two men resolved to collaborate. Together with Adelson, they would search for such cells in the motion area. The researchers soon found that one-third of MT's cells could, in fact, signal the direction in which a hand waves through space. Later on, Albright's research group showed that MT cells can detect "transparent" motion, such as a shadow sweeping across the ground. Then Allman and his colleagues discovered that many MT cells are able to integrate motion information from a large swath of the scene. "Even though an MT cell may respond directly to just one spot in the visual field," says Allman, "the cells have knowledge of what's going on in the region surrounding them." Using a computer display with a background texture that looks vaguely like a leafy forest, Allman showed that some MT cells will fire particularly furiously if the leafy background moves in a direction opposite to a moving object—the sort of visual pattern a cheetah would see when chasing an antelope along a stand of trees. If, however, the background moved in the same direction as the moving object, the cell's firing was suppressed. The cell acted as a large-scale detector of motion contrast, performing exactly the sort of operation an animal would need to sense a figure moving through the camouflage of the forest. While MT cells do not respond to static forms and colors, Albright has found that they will detect a moving object much more easily if its form or color strongly contrasts with its background. "Imagine you're looking down the concourse in Grand Central Station and you're supposed to find the woman in the red dress," says Albright. "There are hundreds of surrounding people moving in different directions. Yet there's no problem at all in detecting the woman in the red dress walking along. Your visual system uses the dress's color to filter out all the irrelevant noise around it and homes in on the moving object of interest." Suppose scientists could record from the MT cells in a laboratory monkey looking at the woman in the red dress crossing Grand Central Station. They could determine that a particular cell fired when the woman in the red dress passed through its receptive field. But how would they know that the firing of this specific MT cell—and not a network of thousands of other cells in the brain, of which this cell is only one node—actually "causes" the monkey to perceive the woman's direction of movement? How could they ever get inside the monkey's mind and determine what it perceives? Since Hubel and Wiesel's pioneering studies in the visual cortex, most visual scientists have assumed that the perception of form, color, depth, and motion corresponds to the firing of cells specialized to detect these visual qualities. In a spectacular series of experiments conducted since the mid-1980s, Newsome, who is now a professor of neurobiology at Stanford University's School of Medicine, and his colleagues at Stanford have been directly testing this link between perception and the activity of specific neurons. They use a device that was developed in Movshon's laboratory at NYU: a blizzard of white dots moving on a computer monitor. When all the white dots are moving randomly, the display looks like a TV tuned to a nonbroadcasting channel. However, the experimenters can gradually raise the percentage of dots moving in the same direction. When 10 percent of the dots move coherently together, their motion becomes apparent. By 25 percent, it is unmistakable. Movshon had found that whenever a human being could detect the dots' motion at all, he or she could also tell the direction in which the dots were moving. "This means that the part of the visual pathway carrying the information used for motion detection is also carrying a label that says what direction is being detected," says Movshon." This is precisely how one would expect MT, with its columns of direction-selective cells, to encode a moving target. Next, Newsome began to teach rhesus monkeys to "tell" him what they saw on the computer screen. When they saw dots moving downward, for instance, the monkeys were supposed to move their eyes to a downward point on the screen. Correct answers were rewarded with fruit juice. Soon the monkeys could signal with eye movements that they saw the dots move in any of six directions around the clock. And after much training on low-percentage moving dot displays, the monkeys were able to perform nearly as well as Movshon's human subjects. Everything was in place. Newsome, Movshon, and their colleagues were ready to study the relationship between the monkeys' perception of motion and the activity of cells in particular columns of MT. "We found, very much to our surprise," says Newsome, "that the average MT cell was as sensitive to the direction of motion as the monkey was." As more dots moved together and the monkey's ability to recognize their direction increased, so did the firing of the MT neuron surveying the dots. If the monkeys were actually "listening" to the cells in a single MT column as they made their decision about the direction of movement of the dots on the screen, could the decision be altered by stimulating a different MT column, the researchers wondered. So they stimulated an MT "up" column electrically while the monkeys looked at the downward-moving display. This radically changed the monkeys' reports of what they saw. "It was an unforgettable experience," remembers Newsome. "We got the first of what became known in the lab as 'Whoppers'—when the effects of microstimulation were just massive. Fifty percent of the dots would move down, and yet if we'd stimulate an 'up' column, the monkey would signal up with its eyes." The monkeys' perceptual responses no longer seemed to be driven by the direction of dots on the screen. Instead, the animals' perceptual responses were being controlled by an electric stimulus applied to specific cells in the brain by an experimenter. These experiments, says Movshon, "close a loop between what the cells are doing and what the monkey's doing." Allman calls the finding "the most direct link that's yet been established between visual perception and the behavior of neurons in the visual cortex." It is still possible, however, that when the dots are moving down and the experimenters stimulate an MT "up" column, the stimulation changes what the monkey "decides" without actually changing what it "sees." "This is a key question," says Newsome. "We now know a lot about the first and last stages of this process. But we are almost totally ignorant about the decision process out there in the middle—the mechanism that links sensory input to the appropriate motor output. How does the decision get made?" It is a burning question not only for research on the visual system, but for all of cognitive neuroscience, Newsome believes. The answer would provide a bridge from the study of the senses, where so much progress has been made, to the much more difficult study of human thought. At long last, Newsome says, "we're now poised to approach this question."

Green tea may fight allergies Allergy sufferers may want to add green tea to their sniffle-fighting arsenal. New evidence suggests that drinking the popular brew may provide some relief. Researchers in Japan identified a compound in green tea that, in laboratory tests, blocks a key cell receptor involved in producing an allergic response. The compound, methylated epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), may have a similar effect in humans, they say. Their study was described in the October 9, 2002, issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Although similar compounds in green tea have previously been shown to be antiallergenic, this particular compound appears to be the most potent, the researchers said. "Green tea appears to be a promising source for effective antiallergenic agents," said Hirofumi Tachibana, the study's chief investigator and an associate professor of chemistry at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. "If you have allergies, you should consider drinking it." For years, people have been drinking tea to fight the sneezing, coughing and watery eyes that are characteristic of colds and allergies. The new study adds to a small but growing body of scientific evidence from both cell and animal studies that it may actually work, particularly green tea. No one has proved, however, that antiallergenic compounds found thus far have an actual therapeutic effect in humans who ingest green tea. If it works, the brew may be useful against a wide range of allergens, including pollen, dust, pet dander and certain chemicals, Tachibana said. Further studies are needed. EGCG is one of the most abundant and biologically active antioxidants found in tea. It is believed to be responsible for tea's beneficial health effects. The compound is found in higher concentrations in green tea, the least processed of teas, than in black and oolong varieties. Previous studies have shown that EGCG fights allergic reactions in rodents that were given the compound orally, but researchers are just beginning to understand how it might work. It now appears that the compound works by blocking the production of histamine and immunoglobulin E (IgE), two compounds in the body that are chiefly involved in triggering and sustaining allergic reactions, Tachibana said. The current study shows, for the first time, that a methylated form of EGCG can block the IgE receptor, which is a key receptor involved in an allergic response. The effect was demonstrated using human basophils, which are blood cells that release histamine. Methylated EGCG appears to elicit a stronger antiallergenic response than normal EGCG, making it the strongest antiallergen compound found in tea, the researchers say. Although promising against allergies, no one knows how much green tea is needed to have a therapeutic effect, or which green tea varieties work best, the researchers add. They are currently looking for additional antiallergenic compounds in the tea. Green tea has been called the second-most consumed beverage in the world, behind water. It is very popular in Japan, and has a growing following in the United States, where black tea is favored. Tachibana's study added to an expanding list of the potential health benefits offered by green tea. In addition to allergies, it is reported to fight cancer, cardiovascular disease, arthritis and tooth decay. Approximately 50 million people in the U.S. suffer from some type of allergy. Until studies are done to determine whether green tea is actually beneficial to humans with allergies, experts urge consumers to see their doctor for the best advise on treatment options. Among those options: minimizing or avoiding suspected allergens (i.e., dust, pollen, certain foods). Exercise and proper diets are also thought to alleviate the effect of allergies. Funding for this study was provided in part by grants from the Program for Promotion of Basic Research Activities for Innovative Biosciences (PROBRAIN). Tachibana's associates in this study were Yoshinori Fujimura and Koji Yamada of Kyushi University, Mari Maeda-Yamamoto of the National Research Institute of Vegetables and Tea Sciences, and Toshio Miyase and Mitsuaki Sano of the University of Shizuoka. This article was prepared by Immunotherapy Weekly editors from staff and other reports.

Dr. Curtis Cripe from Crossroads Institute will be traveling to St. Petersburg, RUSSIA in November to work with Dr. Juri Kropotov on his ground breaking research in (ERPs) Event Related Potentials and Event Related De-Synchronization. QEEG/ERP/ERD Based Diagnosis and Biofeedback Treatment of Executive Dysfunction Juri D. Kropotov, PhD Institute of the Human Brain of Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, RUSSIA   Introduction. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is the most common mental dysfunction in childhood, affecting three to five percent of all children. It is not a homogeneous disorder. A modern neurobiology oriented approach considers ADHD subtypes to be associated with the impairment of different neuronal circuits in the frontal lobe-basal ganglia-thalamic executive system. Method. To differentiate between impairments of different executive operations (engagement and disengagement operations, in particular) we measured event-related de-synchronization and late (in the range of 300 ms after stimulus) positive GO and NOGO components of event-related potentials (ERPs) associated with engagement and disengagement operations in a continuous performance task in normal (N=16) and ADHD (N=84) groups. Results. Our data show that the extent of event related desynchronization in alpha band, of event-related synchronization in theta band, as well as the amplitude of GO an NOGO components correlate with both age and task performance. They are smaller in young children in comparison to older ones, and in the ADHD group in comparison to the normal group. Twenty sessions of beta EEG training improved the quality of performance (decrease of omission and commission errors) and led to a significant increase of amplitude of GO and NOGO components as well as to normalization of event-related synchro/desynchronization. Conclusion. This study is the first to show that not only psychological indexes of behavior, but also ERP/ERD components are “improved” after beta training, which in turn indicates that the biofeedback training changes the brain system for executive function. Clinical, neurophysiological and immunological correlations in classical Rett syndrome Gratchev VV, Bashina VM, Klushnik TP, Ulas VU, Gorbachevskaya NL, Vorsanova SG. Mental Health Research Centre, 115522, Moscow, Russia. Rett syndrome (RTT) is neurodevelopmental disorder with the onset at critical period of postnatal ontogenesis and age dependent occurrence of clinical manifestations. The aim of the present study was to investigate possible correlations of the age of disease onset with clinical manifestations at the stage 3 of illness and neurobiological parameters. The study was carried out in 38 girls with classical RTT, aged from 3 to 7 years, and twenty and eighteen patients with the disease onset before and after the age of one year were divided into the groups 1 and 2 (Gr1 and Gr2), respectively. Quantitative EEG (QEEG) and measurement of the serum levels of autoantibodies (AAB) to nerve growth factor (NGF) were performed. Clinically, speech and motor functions were significantly more severely affected in the Gr1 than in the Gr2. In QEEG, spectral density of theta activity was significantly higher in Gr1 than in the Gr2. The titer of AAB to NGF was significantly increased in comparison with healthy controls, and the titer in Gr2 was higher than in Gr1.The data obtained suggests that patients with the classical RTT can be divided into subgroups according to the age of disease onset and genetic factors such as mosaicism of MeCP2 mutation may be associated with the heterogeneity of phenotype in RTT patients. Frontal Asymmetry Changes Reflect Brief Mood Shifts in both Normal and Depressed Subjects Elsa Baehr, PhD, J. Peter Rosenfeld, PhD, & Rufus Baehr, PhD (1) NeuroQuest, Inc., (2) Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois   e-baehr@northwestern.edu Introduction. Prior brain studies of transient sadness and happiness have used Positron Emission Tomography (PET) to observe regional blood flow during changes of mood (George et al., 1995; Lane et al, 1997). Our study of brief mood swings used an EEG brainwave biofeedback protocol to measure changes in frontal alpha asymmetry. Method. Seven depressed and seven non-depressed subjects were asked to think about a happy or sad event, and then switch their thoughts to the alternative in a period of one to two minutes. Alpha asymmetry percentage scores were obtained for each condition and then subjected to statistical analysis. Result. All but one subject demonstrated a significant shift in frontal alpha asymmetry consistent with mood. Percentage of alpha asymmetry was greater in the right frontal cortex when happy thoughts were evoked and greater in the left frontal cortex when sad thoughts emerged. Conclusion. Transient mood changes can be evoked in both depressed and non-depressed subjects. While shifts in frontal asymmetry occurred in all but one subject, there appeared to be a time lag for some individuals. Future research could explore the significance of this factor. A growing body of literature on the relationship between sub cortical structures and regional brainwave changes associated with mood may be useful in helping to understand the switching phenomena we have observed. Neurofeedback with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder D. Corydon Hammond, PhD Professor, University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, Utah   Introduction. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is often less than optimally treated using medication or behavior therapy. However, qEEG and neuroimaging research have identified brain patterns associated with OCD (Prichep et al., 1993). Method. Two patients with OCD were screened with the Padua Inventory, the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale, qEEG, and in one case, the MMPI. Each patient displayed different qEEG patterns associated with OCD. Neurofeedback individualized to qEEG findings was used. Results. At the conclusion of treatment, the two patients were again administered the Padua Inventory, and an independent colleague conducted the structured interview associated with the Yale-Brown Scale. The MMPI was also administered again. These results and follow-up questioning at four months and more than one-year post-treatment validated highly successful changes. Conclusion. EEG neurofeedback appears to hold promise for treating OCD, which has been firmly established to be associated with abnormal brain patterns.

Season with Care – Garlic needs Air. You have probably heard that garlic has been found to have anti-cancer properties, but did you know that heating garlic could diminish or destroy its benefits. Researchers at Penn State University have conducted studies that reveal microwaving or even heating garlic in a conventional oven eliminate its value as an anti-cancer agent. Don’t cut it from your diet just yet, there is a solution. If you chop or crush garlic before you cook it, it restores its protective value. To roast whole garlic, cut the top of the bulb off, or if cooking crushed garlic, allow it to stand 10 minutes before cooking. The study done at Penn State also showed that oven roasting garlic 45 minutes or microwaving just one minute, completely blocked garlic’s ability to retard the action of cancer causing agents in rats. Crushing or chopping garlic before cooking opens the cells and enables enzymes to start a reaction that produces allyl sulfer compounds. These compounds are just some of the many found garlic. Eating Green for Vision Kerstin A. Czarra Seeing green? Well, you should be. Researchers at Harvard University say that this color in your foods could reduce the risk of cataracts and keep you seeing clearly for a lifetime. New studies published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN) show that lutein and zeaxanthin, also known as carotenoid antioxidants, may help reduce cataracts. These minerals are commonly found in dark green, leafy vegetables such as spinach, kale and broccoli. More than half of people over age 65 have cataracts – a condition that causes the lens or capsule of the eye to become opaque – impairing vision and possibly causing blindness. And, cataracts are one of the leading causes of blindness in people over age 50. Part of the aging process? Older people often resign themselves to the fact that their eyes will not be as sharp as they age. But, the AJCN studies indicate that you may be able to prevent cataracts simply by adding more green to your diet. The study found that "women with the highest intake of lutein and zeaxanthin had a 22 percent reduced risk for cataracts; men had 19 percent reduced risk." The American Optometric Association (AOA) confirms that no one really knows what causes cataracts, but they do state that, "a chemical change occurs within the eye to cause the lens to become cloudy. This may be due to advancing age, heredity, or an injury or disease." Smoking, overexposure to ultraviolet radiation in sunlight and certain medications may also cause cataracts. Until this recent research, experts claimed that there was no way to prevent a cataract from forming. When someone does have cataracts, surgery is the only way to have them treated. The procedure involves removing the eye’s natural lens and replacing it with an artificial one. What’s good in the green? Popeye was definitely on to something when he guzzled "me spinach." So, just what do dark, leafy vegetables contain and what makes them so effective? Carotenoid antioxidants found in these vegetables are substances that protect against cell damage by guarding the cell from oxygen free radicals – substances that can break down strong cells and lead to cancer, heart disease and degenerative disorders like cataracts. Carotene is then converted in the body to Vitamin A, which is crucial for eye health. For patients that don’t receive enough lutein in their diets, a supplement containing 6 mg. is recommended.

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Charles Nelson Monica Luciana The publication of this handbook testifies to the rapid growth of developmental cognitive neuroscience as a distinct field. Brain imaging and recording technologies, along with well-defined behavioral tasks--the essential methodological tools of cognitive neuroscience--are now being used to study development. Whereas earlier methodologies allowed scientists to study only adult brains, recent technological advances have yielded methods that can be safely used to study structure-function relations and their development in children's brains. These new techniques combined with more refined cognitive models account for the progress and heightened activity in developmental cognitive neuroscience research. The handbook contains forty-one original contributions exploring basic aspects of neural development, sensory and sensorimotor systems, language, cognition, and emotion. Aided by recent results in neurobiology establishing that the human brain remains malleable and plastic throughout much of the lifespan, the contributors also explore the implications of lifelong neural plasticity for brain and behavioral development.

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